Since he couldn’t, he had this day job. The DWP was the kind of place where you could look up after a quarter of a century and wonder where the hell the best years of your life had gone. Jay hadn’t been here that long, but he was starting to get those moments.
Bryce hoped he wouldn’t stick around long enough to have them. You’d never go toe-to-toe with the Donald or Bill Gates on what they paid you, but you could live and even raise a family on it. Medical, dental, vision, retirement plan . . . When you got all that good stuff, would you really worry about where the time was going and why you were bored out of your skull?
A lot of people wouldn’t. Hell, a lot of people didn’t. They put in their hours and used the company Xerox to copy their own stuff and stole paper and pens and anything else that wasn’t nailed down and did what was required of them and not a speck more. Bryce sometimes found himself slipping into that easygoing slothfulness. He wondered how different it really was from going nuts in a quiet, polite way.
After lunch, someone put an RFP on his desk with a Post-it note: What do you think our chances are for getting ahold of some of this grant money? Evaluating an RFP, especially one from the Federal Department of Energy, was a little more fun than passing a kidney stone, but only a little.
Could I do this for twenty-five years? he wondered as he scribbled notes. Would anything be left of me if I did?
* * *
Somewhere in Kansas. That was as much as Vanessa Ferguson knew about where she was. Probably somewhere in eastern Kansas. The dust and ash got thicker as you moved toward the Colorado border. That meant things got more screwed up. She didn’t think anybody had actually gone back into Colorado yet. There was plenty of disaster to go around here closer to the edges of the ashfall.
She didn’t care. She’d escaped Camp Constitution, and escaped whatever sorry-ass place the suckers flooded out of Camp Constitution had gone to instead. She would never see Micah Husak again. If by some misfortune she did, she could kick him in the nuts or plug him instead of sucking him off.
And all her freedom had cost her was one more quickie blow job on that nameless National Guardsman. Her self-respect? As a matter of fact, no. You did what you had to do and you counted up the tab later on. Or else you didn’t worry about it at all. Most of the time, she didn’t.
Some stretches of ground in these parts were free of volcanic crud. Rain and wind had blown it away or washed it into rivers—which was why the floods were so horrendous. But there was genuine, no-shit green in those places. Robins hopped around, probing the ground for worms. Every so often, they even found some. Worms had to be tougher than Vanessa had imagined.
But where the ash and dust had drifted . . . In the lee of houses and fences, in places where the wind didn’t reach, in hollows without streams running through them . . . In spots like that, the ground was as gray and lifeless as it had been right after the eruption, going on two years ago now.
No people had been found alive. Not everybody had fled to the camps, maybe, but the people who hadn’t fled hadn’t made it. Lung diseases brought on by inhaling all the abrasive ultramicroscopic crud in the air did them in. It wasn’t quite as if they’d smoked twenty packs a day for fifty years, but it might as well have been.
Cows? Sheep? Pigs? Chickens? Horses? Gone, gone, gone, gone, and gone, for the same reason. Those worm-hunting robins must have flown here from somewhere else. Livestock couldn’t fly away like that.
No crops in the ground the past two years, either. Where anything grew up in the fields, it was weeds pushing up through dead cornstalks. No trace at all was left of year before last’s wheat. It was only a memory. This country was importing as much grain as it could these days, along with oil and so much else. The dollar was sinking like a stone. It would have sunk even faster if Europe and Japan and China weren’t hurting, too.
Except for the ruined farmlands all around her, Vanessa didn’t have time to think much about the battered economy. Washington talked about sending work crews into ashfall country to reclaim it. Washington, though, was a thousand miles away. Nothing would reclaim this country except time.
“So what are we doing here, then?” she asked the boss to whose crew she’d been assigned.
Merv Saunders looked like something out of a Grant Wood painting. He was tall and thin and bald, with wire-framed glasses and a long face made up of vertical and horizontal lines of disapproval. “Scavenging,” he answered matter-of-factly. “Lots of stuff got left behind when people had to run. Quite a bit of it’ll still work—or we can make it work with a little cleaning and tinkering. There’s an awful mob of folks out in the camps who need anything we can get our hands on.”