What really pissed her off wasn’t that he didn’t have a clue. What really pissed her off was that he didn’t want a clue. He wasn’t just a yahoo. He was proud to be a yahoo. He was the kind of yahoo who didn’t know what a yahoo actually was, too. If he didn’t know about Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and hapless Margaret Dumont, he for sure wouldn’t know about Lemuel Gulliver’s last voyage.
Winter in Fredonia wouldn’t have been a picnic before the eruption. Winter in Fredonia since the eruption reminded Vanessa of what she’d heard about Fargo, or maybe Winnipeg. Sometimes it got up into the twenties. Sometimes it warmed up to zero. And sometimes it didn’t.
Fredonia hadn’t had a whole lot of trees when the supervolcano was biding its time. This was Kansas, for crying out loud. Just about all the trees it had had were dead now. If the ashfall hadn’t done for them, those upgraded winters bloody well had.
So they were bare-branched and graying. They reminded Vanessa of human corpses—you could tell right away that they wouldn’t spring back to life when (or, nowadays, if) spring came around again. And their gray starkness, and that of the rest of the local landscape, just made the cell phone relay towers all the more obvious—and obtrusive.
The towers here, like the ones in L.A. and Denver, had been disguised as trees, with brown plastic trunks and green plastic leaves. They hadn’t made what you’d call convincing trees: neither colors nor shapes were spot-on. But they looked better than bare aluminum scaffolding and wires and whatever would have.
Because they were only approximations of trees, Vanessa and her family and friends had noticed them every so often, mostly when out driving. Somebody (as a matter of fact, it was Bryce, which Vanessa had deleted from her internal hard drive) tagged them alien listening devices. The name stuck in her little crowd.
Here in drab, abandoned Fredonia, Kansas, the relay points honest to God did look alien. Their plastic leaves were still green (snow-speckled green right now), their plastic trunks still brown. Sooner or later, the sun would fade them. With the sun so feeble nowadays, it was likely to be later.
No matter how out of place they seemed, their wiring and electronics remained valuable. The salvage team methodically cut them down and cut them up. “We’d better be careful,” Vanessa said. “We don’t want the aliens to find out we’re messing with their stuff.”
She meant it for a joke. She was going to explain how her friends had called the relays alien listening devices. Had the rest of the team liked her better, she would have got a laugh.
But the others disassembling the relay only scowled. “Aliens! Give me a fucking break!” one of them said.
“Bite me,” Vanessa answered sweetly.
“Knock if off, both of you.” Saunders sounded weary. One of his jobs, along with this government-sponsored graverobbing, was putting out little fires in his crew before they turned into big ones. Nobody’d murdered anybody yet, or even assaulted with intent to maim, which proved he was good at what he did.
Vanessa wanted to yell He started it! How many times had she done that back home, with one brother or the other? Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, but it was always worth a try. Not here. Merv Saunders didn’t care who’d started it. He just wanted it to stop.
And he had the power to bind and to loose. He could kick somebody off the team. If you got kicked off, you went out of the devastated zone on the next truck that came in to pick up salvageables. You didn’t get to go off on your own once you left the devastated zone, either. Oh, no. The powers that be were crueler than that. If you got kicked out, you went straight back into a refugee camp.
Staying in a camp was punitive. The authorities could see that (so could anybody who’d ever been in one). But millions of people remained stuck in them. The authorities couldn’t see how to put them anywhere else.
Not enough houses. Not enough money to build them. Not enough money for anyone to afford them even if they got built, either. The economy had been rotten before the supervolcano went off. With the Midwest essentially gone, it wasn’t just rotten any more. The vultures had eaten the meat off its bones. And the rest of the poor, chilly world wasn’t much better off. The USA had been the engine that pulled the train. Well, the engine had gone off the rails.
They slept in the best quarters Fredonia offered. It wasn’t a Motel 6, but it might as well have been. A motel with no electricity and no running water. Happy fucking day! The bed was more comfortable than a sleeping bag. The windows in Vanessa’s room weren’t broken, either, so they shielded her from the freezing wind. And that was about as much good as she could find to say about the place.