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Supervolcano All Fall Down(122)

By:Harry Turtledove


He listened to the pious phrases and kept his trap shut. More often than not, that was the best thing you could do. He wasn’t here to argue religious questions. He was here to show the San Atanasio Police Department’s flag, or he would have been if only the San Atanasio PD had a flag.

After the eulogy ended, he did have to go up and murmur words of condolence to Mrs. McClintock. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorrier than I know how to tell you.”

She nodded jerkily. Behind a black veil, her face was paper-white. “Thank you for coming,” she whispered. Her boys stared up at her. The older one might have been three. He knew something wasn’t right. What it was hadn’t sunk in yet.

Not for him it hadn’t, anyway. He didn’t know how lucky he was to be so little.

The cops milled around, talking to people they knew in other departments. It was a bad scene. They all knew they might have drawn the short straw the same way. Police work wasn’t soldiering, but it came as close as anything inside the USA.

A lean LAPD sergeant came up to Colin and said, “You’re that Ferguson guy, right? From San Atanasio?”

Colin nodded. “Guilty. Um, do I know you?” The other guy’s face didn’t look familiar.

But the sergeant answered, “Oh, we’ve met, all right. You bet your sweet ass we have.” He did lower his voice to make sure the widow couldn’t hear that.

“Tell me where?” Colin said. He was usually good at placing people. This time, though, he drew a blank.

With a sour chuckle, the guy from LAPD said, “At the Braxton Bragg offramp to the 110. You were gonna have your troops machine-gun me if I didn’t get the fuck out of the way.”

“Oh.” Colin chuckled, too, in mild—but only mild—embarrassment. “We really needed that oil.”

“I guess!” the LAPD sergeant exclaimed. “I promised myself I’d punch you in the nose if I ever ran into you again.”

“Well, you can try.” Colin unobtrusively shifted his weight. He hadn’t been in a fistfight since his patrol-car days, but if this guy wanted to work out his grudge . . .

He didn’t, or not enough to start something here. “Nah,” he said. “You were doing what you thought you had to do. I’ll tell you, though—it rubbed me the wrong way when you made me back down.”

“You’re LAPD. You’re used to telling the little departments what to do,” Colin said. “Gotta feel funny when the shoe’s on your foot and not the other fellow’s.”

“It’d look that way to you, wouldn’t it?” the LAPD sergeant said. “I’m not talking about how the San Atanasio PD made my department back down. I don’t want to slug the San Atanasio PD. You made me back down. But hell, you were just doing your job, same as poor damn McClintock was doing his. Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug, that’s all.”

“Mm.” Colin would rather it were department to department, not man to man. “I don’t know your name,” he said. Knowing it—and remembering it—might prove worthwhile.

“I’m Jack Winters.”

“Good to meet you, Jack. For whatever it’s worth to you, it wasn’t personal.” Colin held out his hand. After a moment, Winters took it. He squeezed with brief, controlled strength, then let go. Colin decided he might have been lucky the LAPD man didn’t feel like brawling.

“Take care,” Winters said, and walked away. Before long, he was lost in the throng of dark blue uniforms.

His duty and the department’s done, Colin drove back to the station. He had to go slowly, because bicyclists made up almost all of the traffic. They gave him curious looks as he went past them—not, he judged, because he was in uniform in an unmarked car, but because he had a working automobile. He saw only a couple of others on the twenty-minute trip. There were many more people on skateboards on the sidewalk than drivers.

Nobody was buying new cars, either. Not only was nobody buying them; hardly anyone was making them. GM had declared bankruptcy again. Ford had tossed in the sponge. Toyota and Hyundai were shuttering American plants. The massive layoffs in the auto business after the eruption only planted another lily on the economy’s chest.

When Colin got back, he walked into Mike Pitcavage’s office. “How was it?” the chief asked.

“About as gruesome as you’d expect,” Colin answered. Both men grimaced, almost identically. Colin went on, “The widow’s . . . stunned. That’s the only word that fits. Never gonna be the same for her and those kids.”