“We’ll try,” Marshall said. “What else can we do?”
* * *
Louise Ferguson fidgeted while she waited for the bus. It was—surprise!—late again. When cities had trouble getting enough fuel for public transit and police cars, you knew the world was going to hell in a handbasket. It wouldn’t be going to hell in anything requiring gasoline, that was for sure.
Like most cars, hers sat in the garage under her condo almost all the time, a monument to the way things had been before the supervolcano erupted. She hoped Mr. Nobashi would understand. He still drove in to the ramen works two or three times a week. But then, he was a fancy executive, not an administrative assistant. And he got his pay straight from the home office in Hiroshima. With the way the dollar had nosedived against the yen since the eruption, that made his salary go a lot further, too.
Here came the bus at last. It left a black plume of diesel fumes behind it as it rumbled north on Sword Beach. It wasn’t supposed to do that. It was supposed to be clean, and not stinky. God only knew the last time anyone’d serviced that overworked engine.
Before the eruption, even people who didn’t think of themselves as green would have had conniptions about that smoke-belching bus. Not today, Josephine! Anything that dumped CO2 into the air and helped fight the supervolcano’s big chill was wonderful, even if it smelled nasty.
The bus stopped. Louise handed the driver a buck and a half. Like a lot of SoCal towns, San Atanasio had stopped using computerized bus passes. When the computers didn’t run all the time, you couldn’t rely on them the way people had for so long. You had to make do with simpler things.
Mr. Nobashi, for instance, had brought an abacus into the ramen works. It wasn’t just for show, either. The way his fingers flicked the beads was a sight to behold; Patty from the Farm Belt called it a caution. He was about as fast and accurate with the abacus as Louise was with a calculator. Next thing you knew, he’d dredge up a slide rule from somewhere.
Only a few cars shared Sword Beach with the bus. Most of the traffic was bicycles, with occasional full-sized trikes and skateboards. From what the papers said, random street crime (except for bike thefts) was way down. Getting away was harder than it had been, and people were more willing to chase you. The world was less impersonal, less withdrawn, then it had been when the automobile was king.
The bus stopped at Sword Beach and Braxton Bragg Boulevard. Louise got out there, because it turned the wrong way on Braxton Bragg. Back in the day, she would’ve grumbled at walking a couple of blocks from the bus stop to her workplace. When everybody did it, it was no big deal.
No big deal when it wasn’t raining, anyhow. Right this minute, it wasn’t. The spring sun, the sun that the supervolcano eruption had turned pale and watery, was shining as brightly as it ever did these days. Louise had stuck an umbrella in her purse just the same. No guarantee it wouldn’t be raining when she came out this afternoon. And wasn’t that a hell of a thing? If you couldn’t trust SoCal weather, what could you trust?
Nothing. Nothing and nobody. Louise’s mouth thinned to a bloodless line. She made herself relax, because otherwise she’d screw up the lipstick she’d so carefully applied before she left. But if having James Henry hadn’t taught her that lesson once and for all, she couldn’t imagine what would do the trick.
Here was Ramen Central. The sliding security gate was open: the only connection between the property and the outside world. Steel fencing topped by razor wire protected the rest of the perimeter (for that matter, razor wire topped the gate, too). Despite fence and wire, they’d still had stuff disappear from parked cars. That was why they had a full-time armed security guard.
He touched the brim of his drill-sergeant hat in what was almost but not quite a salute. “Mornin’, Mrs. Ferguson,” he said.
“Good morning, Steve,” she said. She’d given up trying to get the big Hispanic guy to call her Louise. He’d served a long hitch in the Army, he’d fought in Afghanistan, and he had a strong sense of rank and hierarchy. Sometimes all you could do was roll with things.
She remembered having that thought before she went into the building. The power was on, which made everything seem almost the way it was before the supervolcano threw things for a loop. Almost, but, as with Steve’s touch of the hat brim, not quite. Before the supervolcano, she wouldn’t have heard anybody here burst into tears.
Which she did, right as the door closed behind her. It wasn’t just anybody, either. It was Patty, who’d been here since dirt and who, as far as Louise could tell, had a soul machined from the kind of steel that went into armor plate for tanks. These weren’t little sniffly tears, either. She was weeping and wailing as if she’d just found out her oldest son had been eaten by bears.