Harry Turtledove: Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart

“Isn’t that something about the chief of police?” he said now. “Who could have thought such a thing? Terrible—just terrible. I met him a few times. I never had the faintest idea. Who would?”

“I knew him, too,” she said tightly. She’d admired Mike Pitcavage. He had ambition, drive, call it whatever you want. He had style, too. Next to him, Colin was a lump of a man, somebody who’d stay a police lieutenant forever.

But, whatever you said about Colin, he’d never killed any old ladies. Praising with faint damn, maybe, but praising even so.

Jared must not have noticed the edge in her voice, because he went on, “And the fellow who arrested his son, who touched off the whole thing, he was smart and lucky both.”

“That was my ex.” Louise bit off the words one by one.

“Oh!” The pharmacist blinked. Louise could watch every eyelash move. Jared Watt continued, “His name is Ferguson, isn’t it? I’m sorry—I didn’t put two and two together.”

“You didn’t know. It’s not exactly a rare name.” Louise was trying to convince herself at least as much as her boss.

The landline rang. The interruption relieved them both. Louise answered it. Someone asked for a refill on a prescription. She took the prescription number, then checked a card file. The information was on a database, too, but with the power off a computer was just something to gather dust.

“It’s Peter Aiso and his blood-pressure prescription,” she told Jared. “He had three refills left on it—now he’s down to two.” She made a notation on the three-by-five. She’d do it on the computer, too, if and when the electricity came back on.

“He gets Aldovil 15/25 twice a day, right?” he said. It was a question, and then again it wasn’t.

“That’s right.” Louise nodded. From everything she’d seen, Jared Watt barely needed the database or the card file. He almost always knew what his customers’ meds were. Now he frowned. “We don’t have any of that. I don’t know when we’ll get more, either. When some more comes into town. Whenever that is.”

“What will you do, then?” Louise asked.

“I’ll see what we do have. Then I’ll call his doctor, and we’ll work out something or other.” He paused. “You ever see the Charles Addams cartoon with two witches over the cauldron? One of ’em’s saying to the other, ‘We’re all out of dwarf’s hair, dearie. Can we substitute?’”

Louise laughed. “No, I hadn’t seen that one.” She knew Charles Addams from the old TV show and the movies, not from the cartoons themselves.

“Well, that’s where we are right now. That’s where the whole country is these days, seems like,” Jared Watt said. “We’re all out of dwarf’s hair, dearie, and we’re doing our best to substitute.”

“Only trouble is, our best mostly isn’t good enough,” Louise said.

“Welcome to the world,” the pharmacist said. Louise looked at him in surprise. Colin might have come out with the same thing, and he would have used the same intonation if he had.

A little old Hispanic man walked in. He wore glasses almost as thick as Jared’s. He peered through them at the shelves of old paperbacks. After due deliberation, he pulled out something called Count Belisarius and carried it to the counter. Louise looked at the price penciled on the first leaf inside the cover. “That’ll be two dollars and fifty cents—two-seventy-five with the tax.”

“Taxes,” the man muttered, as if it were a swear word. “They’ve gone through the roof, too, since that stupid supervolcano blew up.” He made it sound as if the eruption shot taxes into the stratosphere along with God only knew how many cubic miles of dust and sulfur dioxide and other climate-screwing crud. By the way he handed over a five, it was the last one he ever expected to see.

Louise gave him his change. “Even with the tax, the book’s cheaper than bus fare,” Jared Watt said. “That’s a good one, too. You’ll find out more about the sixth century than you thought anybody could know.”

“It’s fat,” the Hispanic man said. “It’ll kill time while the power don’t work.” He shuffled out of the pharmacy, tucking the book under his windbreaker. It was starting to rain for real, all right.

“How many of the books over there have you read?” Louise pointed to the shelves.

“Quite a few, anyway,” Jared answered. “Reading kills time for me, too.”

Colin read all the time. That prejudiced Louise against it. But she did some anyway. Batteries kept a Kindle going, even if you couldn’t always download new stuff. And she read to James Henry. When the TV didn’t run, stories entertained him.

We were so wired, so connected , she thought. We were, and now we aren’t any more. It’s a different world . A moment later, another thought occurred: Christ, I wish we still were!

Bryce Miller had known what post-supervolcano life in Nebraska was like before he took the assistant professor job at Wayne State. He’d known, that is, the way he’d known about girls before Brianna Davidson finally let him get lucky his senior year of high school. In the one as in the other, the difference between knowledge and experience was all the difference in the world.

People who’d grown up here had a tough time dealing with the new dispensation. They said average winter days now were as horrible as anything they’d ever known before the eruption. And the bad blizzards now, if you listened to them, had never been seen this side of the Great Slave Lake—or, if they were feeling charitable, this side of Saskatoon.

Bryce had little choice but to listen to them. He’d grown up in San Atanasio and lived his whole life till now in Southern California. His wife Susan was a SoCal girl, too. The depth of Midwest winter shocked and awed her as much as it did him.

So did the length of Midwest winter. Snow fell all the way through Memorial Day. Right after the supervolcano went off, people had talked and talked about the Year Without a Summer, after Mt. Tambora erupted two centuries earlier. Now that they were looking down the barrel of a Decade Without a Summer, or maybe of a Century Without a Summer, Mt. Tambora suddenly seemed like mighty small potatoes.

Potatoes were a big deal at the local supermarket, though. Susan lugged a cloth tote full of oddly shaped, brightly colored tubers back to their apartment. “Gaah! Mutants!” Bryce exclaimed. “Do we eat them or exorcise them?” He made the sign of the cross with his forefingers.

“Fat lot of good that’ll do when you’re Jewish,” Susan said with exaggerated patience.

“Maybe the spuds won’t know. I don’t look it,” Bryce said. And he didn’t. He was tall and skinny and very fair, with curly dark red hair and a lighter red beard that still wasn’t so thick as he would have liked even though he’d slid to the tired side of thirty.

“You,” Susan said, not for the first time, “are absurd.”

“Thank you.” He bowed.

“Anyway, these potatoes come from stock that’s raised way the hell up high in the Andes, where potatoes started out from and where the growing season’s always been about twenty minutes long,” Susan told him. “The prices were pretty bad, but not terrible, and the produce guy says they’ll be coming down because these’ll grow in a lot of places where the kinds we used to plant just can’t hack the weather any more.”

“They’ll still taste like potatoes, though,” Bryce predicted gloomily.

“Hey, they’re food.” Except for being in the final throes of finishing a dissertation on Frederick II Hohenstaufen, Susan was a very practical person.

Since Bryce’s thesis had been on the leading Hellenistic poets, and since his hobby was writing pastorals in the style of Theocritus, even Susan’s field of interest seemed practical by comparison. Frederick was fifteen hundred years more recent and a hell of a lot more relevant to the modern world than Theocritus or Callimachus or any of the rest of the boys who’d done their damnedest to con lunch money out of one Ptolemy or another.