Supervolcano All Fall Down(119)
Rob was now. No cars on the roads, that was for sure. Route 6 to the north and Route 23 to the east (to say nothing of Route 150 to the west, which was exactly what Route 150 deserved to have said of it) were covered with as much snow as the rest of the landscape. If you had to travel these days, you went by snowshoes or skis or horse-drawn sleigh—or, in a desperate emergency, by snowmobile. Those beasts murdered the silence for miles around.
Off in the distance, coming up from the southeast, something moved. Rob was immediately alert. It might be a moose. He didn’t think that was likely: there were more towns, with more hunters, down in the direction of I-95. Moose had been scarcer in those parts before the eruption, too. But, while it was unlikely, it wasn’t impossible.
He stood very still. Moose didn’t see in color, so if this was one it wouldn’t be able to tell how hideous his DayGlo vest was. It might mistake him for a Christmas tree or something, even if he wasn’t loaded down with tinsel and tacky ornaments.
He needed no more than a few seconds to realize that whatever was coming his way wasn’t a moose. He needed a little more time, but not a lot, to figure out what it was: a dogsled, straight out of the Yukon. A slow grin spread across his face. That was another way to get around in this frozen part of the world, at least if you had enough moose meat or kibbles or whatever the hell to keep your huskies happy.
Right behind the first sled came another one. Rob could pick out the exact moment when the passengers saw him—the dogs of the lead sled swerved in his direction. More slowly than he might have, he realized he didn’t have to keep standing there as if frozen by the weather. He waved, feeling stupid.
The people in the dogsleds waved back. As the sleds neared, Rob decided he was glad he had the rifle. The huskies seemed no more than a step removed from wolves, and a small step at that. If they hadn’t been hitched to the sleds, they might have decided to hunt him.
When the sleds stopped, one of the passengers pushed back the hood of his—no, her—furry, Eskimo-style parka. To Rob’s amazement, styled blond hair cascaded out. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Marie Fabianski, from CNN. Can we interview you?”
She spoke slowly, with spaces between her words. She might have been going into a foreign country where the natives couldn’t be expected to speak or understand English very well. A cameraman in the second sled aimed his weapon at Rob’s bearded, none-too-clean face.
“Um, okay,” Rob mumbled. He wasn’t usually thrown for such a loss, but he’d been away from anything wider than small-town gossip since not long after the supervolcano blew.
“Terrific!” Marie Fabianski smiled a multikilowatt smile. She had dazzlingly perfect teeth, whether on her own or thanks to a talented dentist Rob couldn’t even begin to guess. “We’re here to do a feature to show the rest of the country—to show the rest of the whole wide world—how the people in these parts are getting along. Isn’t that exciting?”
Sure as hell, she was treating him like a native, and a dimwitted native at that. “What if we’d rather be left alone?” Rob said. There wasn’t much point to staying on the wrong side of the Interstate if you wouldn’t rather be left alone.
So it seemed to Rob, anyhow. Marie Fabianski’s smile never wavered. “The public has the right to be informed!” she said in ringing tones. “It wants to know what’s going on in these forgotten corners of the country.”
“Oh, horseshit,” Rob said. With luck, that would spoil some of the footage the cameraman was getting, though they might just bleep over it. He went on, “The American public doesn’t give a rat’s ass about us up here. It’s proved that ever since the supervolcano went off. And you know what else? We have the right to remain silent.”
He might as well have saved his breath. She sure kept on with her spiel as if he hadn’t spoken: “Do you know, uh . . . ?” Then she did pause. She had to look down for a second to check her notes. Nodding to herself, she started over: “Do you know Professor James Farrell, former unsuccessful Republican candidate for the House?”
“Yeah, I know Jim,” Rob answered.
“He is virtually the tsar of this new Siberia, isn’t he?” Marie Fabianski rolled on. She had all her preconceptions neatly lined up in a row. If only they were ducks!
“Now that you mention it,” Rob said, “no.”
“Do you know where in this frozen wilderness Professor Farrell is currently residing?” she asked him. “We’d like to get to the bottom of his extraconstitutional authority.”