Supervolcano All Fall Down(90)

“Louise Ferguson.” She gave him her Social Security number, too.

He entered them on his computer keyboard. Next to it sat a mechanical gadget that let him issue checks even when the power went out. It had to date from the seventies, maybe earlier. It must have gone into a box as soon as the EDD computerized. That nobody’d thrown away the box, and that someone had known where to find it again, impressed and horrified Louise at the same time.

“All right, Ms. Ferguson, now I need to see the evidence that you’ve been actively seeking employment during the past fortnightly period,” the clerk said. Could anyone who didn’t work for the EDD bring out things like actively seeking employment or fortnightly period as if they actually belonged to the English language? Louise wouldn’t have bet six inches of used dental floss on it.

None of which had anything to do with the price of beer (high, like the price of everything else). Louise pulled out application letters from her purse and shoved them at the clerk. They were genuine, all right. She would have done anything short of turning tricks to escape the EDD’s clutches. Christ on a crutch, who wouldn’t? The only trouble was, nobody wanted to hire her . . . or, by appearances, anyone else.

He shuffled through them and noted them in her computer file. Then he did the same thing on her file card (more boxes that must have been exhumed from storage). Grudgingly, he said, “This appears satisfactory.”

“Good,” answered Louise, who would have hit the ceiling in seventeen different places if he’d tried telling her anything else.

He poked one more key. The printer on a shelf by his monitor hummed and spat out a check that would let her eat—not well, but eat—and pay some of what she owed on the condo. Some of what she owed would come out of what she’d saved while she worked at Ramen Central. Sooner or later, her savings would run dry. What she’d do then—she didn’t want to think about now.

She put her applications and the check into the purse. Then she got out of there as fast as she could. Who hung around the EDD one second longer than they had to? Nobody, that was who.

It was still raining. It was raining harder than it had when she got there, in fact. Up went the umbrella. She splashed toward the bus stop. It was nothing but a bench—no roof or anything. Not many SoCal bus stops boasted roofs. How often did you need to keep off the rain here?

Often . . . now. The Retarded Transit District needed to improve the stops like this one. And where would the money for that come from? Local government agencies needed to do a million other things even more. They didn’t have the money for those, either. Back in the day, they might have got it from Sacramento or Washington. But Sacramento had been broke before the eruption, and Washington was even broker than Sacramento. If that wasn’t a measure of how screwed Washington was, nothing ever could be.

A Hispanic woman came up to stand beside Louise. She had an umbrella, too. Pretty soon, they’d both be soaking wet from midthigh down. Bumbershoots helped only so much. “I wonder how late the goddamn bus is gonna be,” the Hispanic gal said.

“Late.” Louise heard the doleful certainty in her own voice. If some modern Mussolini promised to make the buses run on time, he’d get elected in a landslide. And then he’d break his promise, sure as hell. Money was scarce. Fuel was scarcer. Spare parts were damn near extinct, and nobody seemed to be making or buying more.

“You got that right.” The other woman took a pack of cigarettes out of her purse, extracted a cigarette from the pack, and lit it, all without getting wetter than she was already. Louise admired the dexterity as much as she wished she weren’t getting the secondhand smoke.

The cigarette did do one thing, though: it made the bus come. The Hispanic woman had to drop it, only half done, on the sidewalk to board. Serious fines backed up the rules against smoking on public transportation.

Far more bicycles than cars used the streets. Some pedalers wore raincoats that reached down to their ankles. Some—the dumb ones, as far as Louise was concerned—tried to manage umbrellas. Some just said the devil with it and got wet. The bus had to go slowly to keep from mashing them.

Every so often, the driver honked his horn to remind the people on bikes that he was there—and to make them clear out in front of him. He didn’t have much luck with that. The pedalers not only didn’t clear out; they slowed down to piss him off. Some of them flipped the bus the bird.

If Louise had sat behind the big steering wheel, she knew she would have wanted to run over two or three of them to encourage the others to get some sense. The driver clutched the wheel tight enough to make his knuckles whiten, so maybe he was fighting the same temptation.