Supervolcano All Fall Down(53)

“I dunno,” Rob answered. “Next town meeting, maybe, if they want us to.” That was a week away.

When you were eleven or twelve, a week was as good—no, as bad—as forever. “Wish you’d play here in the park again, sooner than that,” the boy said.

“In the daytime,” one of his friends added.

There was a lot of daytime at this season of the year, just as nights here stretched like Silly Putty during wintertime. More than just the weather told you Maine lay a lot farther north than L.A. or Santa Barbara, which were Rob’s standards of comparison.

“Well, we’ll see,” he said.

“Puhleeze!” Three of them squealed it at the same time.

Hearing them, he realized how starved for entertainment they were. They’d grown up with TV and the Net and PlayStations and Wiis and Xboxes. All of that stuff took electricity, though. Guilford had power for three or four hours a day during the summer. During the winter . . . Well, people tried—you had to give them that. But it was mostly no go, and no juice.

If they wanted to listen to a band they’d surely never heard of before it washed up on their frozen shore—and wanted to badly enough to beg for music—they really had it bad. If Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles could tour the local towns, towns that hadn’t had an almost–rock band get stuck in them, it might clean up. It might clean up as much as anybody in this part of Maine could right now, anyhow.

“We’ll see,” Rob repeated, but in a different tone of voice this time. Biff wouldn’t mind that kind of tour. Rob wouldn’t mind it himself. It might work. It was definitely worth talking about.

The kids caught the difference. “Yeah!” they said, or rather, “Ayuh!” It was Maine, all right. One of them waved for another to go out on a pass pattern. The ball spiraled after him. The boys raced away.

But when Rob looked out the windows of his tower garret in the Trebor Mansion Inn the next morning, the sky had gone gray and gloomy and dark. Snow swirled through the air. It wasn’t a blizzard, but it also wasn’t the kind of weather that would let the band draw a crowd, even from the hardy folk who’d stayed in Guilford. He still intended to talk about playing, but this wasn’t the day for it.

* * *

Colin Ferguson looked wistfully at the Taurus in his driveway. It still ran. He fired it up every now and then and took it around the block to keep the battery alive and to make sure the tires stayed round. He’d drive it if he went out to dinner with Kelly, especially when it was raining. And these days it rained more often in the L.A. basin than he’d ever dreamt it could.

But he didn’t go to work in the Taurus every day any more, even though it wasn’t far. Gas was too hard to come by, and too expensive for anyone on a civil-service salary to use very much. A San Atanasio police lieutenant made a pretty good civil-service salary. What Kelly brought in from Cal State Dominguez didn’t hurt, either. All the same . . .

All the same, he put his briefcase in his bike’s cargo basket, climbed aboard, and pedaled away. He hadn’t ridden a bicycle very often between the time when he was fifteen or sixteen and the day the supervolcano erupted. They said you never forgot how. Like a lot of things they said, that had holes that would have sunk it if it were a boat. He’d wobbled all over the place when he started riding again. He’d had a good fall, too. Luckily, he’d blown the knees out of an old pair of sweats, not the pants from any of his suits. Even more luckily, though he’d pedaled home scraped up and bruised, he hadn’t broken anything.

It did come back in a hurry. The mysterious they were right about that much. Colin had got to the point where he enjoyed the wind in his face as he rode. (The rain was a different story. He’d quickly bought a plastic slicker that covered him from head to foot, and a broad-brimmed hat to keep most of the raindrops off his bifocals. Bicycling with an umbrella, he’d rapidly discovered, was an invitation to suicide.)

He wasn’t the only two-wheeled commuter. Oh, no—not even close. Bikes, and especially bikes with adults in business attire on them, had been uncommon sights on L.A.–area streets before the eruption. No more. As gas prices zoomed up like a Trident missile, more and more people said to hell with their cars and started doing without infernal combustion.

Colin had dropped five pounds since he started biking more than he drove. His wind was better than it had been. That was the good news. The bad news was the San Atanasio PD’s Robbery Division was trying to deal with an explosion of bicycle thefts. So was every other police department in Southern California—and in a lot of other places, too.