“For a gunshot wound, it is very minimal,” Dr. Bhattacharya agreed.
“For a gunshot wound,” Lindsey said. “Not for any other kind of wound.” The doctor didn’t tell her she was wrong.
“Would you break trail for me while I go back to the Inn?” Rob asked her. “That’d help.”
“Come to my place instead,” she said. “It’s closer, and you won’t have to climb stairs and a ladder to get to your room.”
“I’ll do that,” he said. “You bet I will. I should get shot more often.” She snorted and held the clinic door open for him.
* * *
Bryce Miller’s alarm clock went off like a bomb. It was a windup Timex of uncertain but ancient vintage. Its ticking was loud enough to be annoying when he noticed it. It kept rotten time. He’d bought it for two bucks at a Goodwill store right after he landed the job at Junipero High.
That was six months ago now. These days, one like it would cost at least ten times as much, likely more. Six months ago, power in L.A. had been pretty reliable. Now . . . Now all the supervolcano sludge in the Columbia had screwed the fancy turbines up there but good. The grid had other problems, too, but that was the juicy one.
So L.A. had power a few hours a day, a few days a week. Bryce vaguely remembered reading Bucharest had been like that, back when the Communist dictator, old nutty What’s-his-name, ran Romania. The Cold War was only history to him, and seemed almost as far removed from the here and now as his pet Hellenistic poets.
The Cold War here and now was the war against real, physical cold. The world’s politics were still screwed up, but not that particular way. Los Angeles remained lucky. It might get chilly here, but chilly wasn’t arctic.
And Bryce was awake. Once that alarm started clattering, he would have had a hard time staying dead. With a rented truck, he’d spent a small fortune moving up to what they called West Hills. He was only a couple of miles from Junipero High here. These days, that was walking distance.
He had a gas stove. He could light a burner with a match when the electric flame-starter didn’t work. That let him boil water to make coffee to go with his bagel. He liked real cream in his coffee, but he used Coffeemate with sugar. Coffeemate kept basically forever. Cream didn’t keep at all without refrigeration. The apartment had a refrigerator. It made a fair icebox when he could get ice, which wasn’t often enough.
Out he went, carrying a briefcase and an umbrella. It wasn’t raining right this minute, but you couldn’t trust it even in summer after the eruption, let alone in winter. He’d work up a sweat by the time he got to school, but he didn’t worry about it. He wouldn’t be the only one.
When he got to the campus, the first thing he did was check his box. With e-mail scarce and unreliable, paper was making a comeback. A typewriter—an ancient manual, dredged up God knew where—clacked on a secretary’s desk. When you lacked what you’d had before, you did the best you could with what you could find. Or, welcome back to the turn of the twentieth century.
Bulletins and orders might be typewritten, but they got Xeroxed when the power did come on. Junipero dished out less bullshit than he’d heard public schools had to endure. All the same, the administration had some pretty good fascists in training—or would they be inquisitors here?
Bryce taught Latin, world history, and U.S. history (in the latter, he was indeed staying a chapter ahead of the kids). Maybe next year, if the world hadn’t ended by then, the powers that be honest to God would let him take a swing at Greek. Or maybe they wouldn’t. And if they didn’t, maybe he wouldn’t be so very upset. Seeing what tough sledding the students made of Latin, they might not grok Greek at all.
U.S. history first period. In he walked, to go over the causes of the Civil War one more time before the kids showed up. By Junipero standards, it was a big class: twenty-three students. No, public school wasn’t like this.
The kids were totally SoCal, which was to say, almost everything under the sun. Hispanics. Irish. A very bright Jewish kid named Perry Ginsberg, who seemed to be stoned most of the time. A dark, pretty girl named Singh, which probably meant she was a Sikh. A Vietnamese kid. A Korean.
No African-Americans, though. There weren’t many at Junipero—fewer, Bryce thought, than there were Jews. It would have been funny if it weren’t sad. Fewer black parents than Jewish ones trusted a Catholic school not to mess up their children.
He covered the points he needed to cover. “Slavery,” he said. “That’s the biggest cause. All the talk about states’ rights and other stuff, it’s just a smokescreen for slavery. The South wanted to keep it and make it grow. The North wanted to stop it and eventually roll it back.”