Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano - All Fall Down

Then Colin walked in.

Louise knew she looked like hell. She felt like hell, too. And she wasn’t only sore and beat. All her hormones were working on emergency overdrive. It wasn’t the ideal moment for a visit from an ex-husband, in other words.

“Come to gloat, did you?” she snapped.

His face never showed much. That was a useful attribute for a cop, but it had always irked her. His mouth did tighten a little; she’d managed to piss him off. “Well, I can always leave if you want me to,” he said. “I heard you’d had the baby, and I wanted to see how you were doing.”

“I’m trampled, that’s how,” Louise replied.

“I remember,” he said. “But you’re okay, and the kid is, too?” He waited for her to nod, then did the same himself. “Good. That’s the only thing that really matters.”

“Does Kelly know you’re here?” Louise asked, a touch of acid in her voice.

“Uh-huh.” Colin nodded again. “She gets that I wasn’t rolled up in bubble wrap before we ran into each other. There’s still stuff in my life from days gone by.”

“Like the Strangler,” Louise said.

His mouth didn’t just tighten this time. It twisted. “Yeah. Like him.”

“I’m sorry,” Louise said. The rational part of her, what there was of it right this minute, knew she’d hit too hard. He’d done more for her after she got knocked up by the other man than an ex had to, more than most exes would have. The checks he’d sent really had helped her out.

“One of these days, I will catch him. I’ll see they stick a needle in his arm, too,” Colin said.

“I hope you do.” Louise meant that.

“Marshall says maybe he’ll come tomorrow.” Colin shifted gears. “He was working on something now, typing away pretty fast.”

“Okay.” If Marshall wanted thing one to do with her, that would be an improvement. If he could be persuaded to help take care of the baby when she had to go back to work. . She had hopes. “Will he really make a writer?”

“Believe it or not, I think stranger things have happened. Who woulda thunk it?” Colin awkwardly dipped his head. “Listen, I better get home. I did want to check on you, though. Take care of yourself, Louise.” He lumbered out of the room.

Now, when she most wanted to sleep, Louise found she couldn’t. The Korean couple on the other side of the curtain didn’t bother her. They wouldn’t have bothered her if they were speaking English. Memory had more weight. She was still wide awake when the Filipina nurse brought in James Henry. Louise set the baby on her breast. He rooted, then settled down and started to nurse.

* * *

Rank, they said (whoever the hell they were), had its privileges. Vanessa Ferguson thought blowing the FEMA dweeb was odds-on the rankest thing she’d ever done, but that also had its privileges. Every once in a while, for instance, Micah Husak let her use his computer. In Camp Constitution, with next to no electricity, that was more precious than rubies.

Or it would have been, had it done her any good. Before she moved to Denver, she’d banked with Wells Fargo. Had she kept her money there, she could have got at it here. She could have got the hell out of here, in fact. Even Fort Smith looked like heaven next to this.

But she’d gone native. She’d put her money into the Rocky Mountains Savings Bank. It paid higher interest. You could deal with human beings who actually seemed to care about what you wanted. It was local.

Yes, it was local. And there, as Hamlet said, was the rub. Wells Fargo had servers all over the country-all over the world, as far as Vanessa knew. The Rocky Mountains Savings Bank had servers in, well, Denver. Whoever’d set up their data system hadn’t anticipated a supervolcano eruption burying the place in several feet of ash and dust.

And so, whenever Vanessa accessed their Web site, all she got was a ’90s GIF of a couple of sawhorses and some yellow-and-black tape, with the all-caps legend UNDER CONSTRUCTION below it.

“Shit!” she snarled when she saw it yet again. By all the signs, that site would stay under construction till the day after doomsday. Her bank account was as one with Nineveh and Tyre. . and Denver.

Micah had himself wiped off and his trousers (as opposed to his cock) up again. He looked over her shoulder. “How unfortunate for you,” he said.

She glared at him. “Yeah, you really think so, don’t you? If I had the money to bail, you think I’d stick around here to get your rocks off?” She did what he wanted. She didn’t have to waste time being polite about it.

Neither did he. “There are others,” he answered, shrugging. And there were bound to be. Men wanted the pleasure women could give them. Some women would always give that pleasure in exchange for what they could get from the men they did it for. If that made them want to break every mirror they owned afterwards, hey, it was a rough old world.

There was a word for women who gave in exchange for what they could get. No cash changed hands in these transactions. Vanessa knew the word stuck to her all the same.

“You must have relatives you could get a loan from,” Micah said.

She’d chewed on that before. Her father probably would front her the money to get back to California, or at least out of the camp. She’d had too much pride to ask him. She’d made her own way since she dropped out of college to try the real world instead. Asking him for anything would seem like failure.

So what exactly do you call sucking this guy’s joint in exchange for a better tent and a chance to use the Net once in a while? she asked herself. But this was-or she’d always figured this was-temporary. Once she got the hell out of here, she could always pretend Micah Husak had never been born. Taking money from her old man was different. She wouldn’t forget it. Neither would he.

“I don’t want to do that,” she said after a short pause.

“Evidently not.” His smile showed off that half-missing front tooth. “Well, I can’t say I’m sorry you don’t.”

It was a peculiar kind of smile, but she needed only a moment to recognize it. He didn’t just get off on having her go down on him. Anybody could do that. He got off on having her go down on him even though-or rather, especially because-she hated it. She was acquainted with those complicated pleasures, too. They turned out to be less enjoyable when you were on the wrong end.

“I think I’d better go,” she said, her voice thick with not-quite-suppressed fury. It was a good thing for the dweeb that they made you check your firearms before you walked into the FEMA building. Otherwise, he would have been lying on the floor with that nasty smile still on his face and with the back of his head blown out.

“Er-yes,” he said. If her rage didn’t give him pause, he was even dumber than she thought-and that was saying something. But he had, or figured he had, the whip hand, because he added, “I’ll see you again before too long.”

Vanessa grunted and got out of there as fast as she could. Doing what she wanted to do would make her happy now, but she’d be sorry for a long time later. No, she wouldn’t be sorry. Nothing that happened to Micah Husak could make her sorry. But she didn’t want to spend umpty-ump years in jail, either.

No? What do you call this place? Even jail food might be better than MREs. She tried not to think like that as she stormed down the corridor to the back door. Thinking like that would leave the dweeb dead and bleeding.

The big black guy who stood guard there studied her thoughtfully. “You sure I ought to give you back your piece right now?” he asked, doubt all over his voice and on his face. “Maybe everybody’d do better if you came back for it later.”