Supervolcano All Fall Down(48)

Vanessa had had to turn her cat loose before they let her into a refugee center. She’d hoped for the best, too, but . . . Poor Pickles! Tears stung her eyes. She blinked them back. Crying inside a gas mask was a bad idea, because tears had nowhere to go and fogged up your lenses like nobody’s business.

But the barn did have those sacks of feed—some made from plastic-impregnated paper; others, sure as hell, of good, old-fashioned burlap. And feed, even feed that was past its sell-by date, was precious. The Midwest’s endless abundance was dead, smothered in supervolcano ash and dust. Those sacks of corn and soybeans and whatever wouldn’t be coming out of America’s breadbasket by the millions any more, not for God only knew how many years. Animals that had survived elsewhere in the country still needed to eat. If the food was stale, well, stale feed was a hell of a lot better than no feed. People weren’t so fussy now as they had been when times were flush.

The crew lugged the feed sacks to their truck. It wore the mechanical equivalent of a gas mask. It sported an enormous, heavy-duty air filter that sure as hell wasn’t part of its original equipment. The engine compartment and transmission were much better sealed off than was necessary in most of the country, to keep grit from getting into the moving parts.

Vanessa remembered how her own Toyota had crapped out on the road while she was trying to get away from the eruption. She just thanked heaven she’d got her hands on some surgical masks before then. Otherwise, she’d be coughing her lungs out now, if breathing in that garbage hadn’t made her kick the bucket.

Then she thought of Pickles again. She’d had to turn him loose to die. This time, she wasn’t fighting tears but killing rage. If she ever ran into the prune-faced bitch who’d made her get rid of the cat . . . That gal wouldn’t last fifteen seconds, and there was the long and short of it.

And here she was, straining her back to lug feed sacks over to a truck kitted out like something from a Mad Max movie. And she was glad to be doing it, too, because all her other choices looked worse. If that wasn’t a bastard and a half, she was damned if she knew what would be.

When they’d emptied out the barn, Merv Saunders checked a printout he’d got before they started this grave-robbing expedition. “Way to go, people,” he said. “Our next stop is Arma, Kansas.”

“Arma virumque cano,” Vanessa said. It was a leftover from Bryce, and damn near the only bit of Latin she knew.

Everybody else in the crew looked at her. Saunders rolled his eyes.

“It’s from Vergil,” she said. “Means ‘Of arms and the man I sing.’”

They didn’t care. Their stares, some black and others suspicious (as well as she could guess by reading expressions through gas masks), showed that only too clearly. She wished she could have done three or four more lines, but that probably would have just made matters worse. She spread her work-gloved hands.

“Our next stop is Arma,” Saunders repeated, every line of his body saying Wanna make something out of it? Vanessa gave up and stood there, waiting. The crew boss went on, “It’s a decent-sized town—more than fifteen hundred people, when it had people. It’s got a gas station. If the underground tanks are anywhere close to full, that’s even more important than bringing back feed.”

The crew nodded. Vanessa found her own head going up and down. Any gasoline or diesel fuel that you could get your hands on was more precious than rubies these days. The dollar was hurting. Countries that hadn’t been trashed could afford oil imports better than the USA could. Not that the oil business was in great shape itself. The sputtering wars in the Middle East made sure of that.

So . . . grave-robbing. And it was important enough that even Vanessa couldn’t get—too—cynical about it.

* * *

Louise Ferguson pulled into her parking space in the condominium complex. She wondered how much longer she’d be able to keep driving to the ramen headquarters on Braxton Bragg Boulevard. It wasn’t all that far from here, and she didn’t use very much gas going back and forth. But the stuff was ridiculously expensive—when the stations had any, which they did less and less often. Back before the supervolcano erupted, Europeans would have rebelled at paying prices like these. They were paying even more than she was now, not that that made her happy. Misery, here, didn’t love company. Misery was just miserable.

She walked to the mailboxes at the front of the complex. A cable bill. A catalogue from a clothing company—NEW FASHIONS FOR COOLER CLIMES! the cover said, sounding more cheerful than it had any business being. A notice from the electric company, warning that reduced generating capacity might mean intermittent service. That translated into English as rolling blackouts. The governor threatened them before. Now they’re here, she thought as she went back toward the condo that had been Teo’s and was now hers.