Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano - All Fall Down

She remembered how to ride herd on Mr. Nobashi, too. He’d changed even less than the inventories. He still spent a lot of the time on the phone, spewing impassioned Japanese laced with English profanity. Louise presumed he was talking to the home office in Hiroshima, but for all she could prove he might have been getting bets down with his bookie. She knew a few Japanese words and phrases-anybody who’d lived in San Atanasio for a while picked them up, the same way Southern Californians generally had fragments of Spanish even if their folks came from Denmark-but she didn’t speak the language.

Mr. Nobashi was just hanging up when she brought him coffee a few minutes before quitting time. “Thank you,” he said, which, along with his bad language, proved he was getting Americanized. A boss in Japan, from everything Louise had heard, would take getting waited on for granted.

“You’re welcome,” Louise said to encourage him.

He gulped sugary caffeine and smacked his thin lips. “I talk with Hiroshima,” he said. “Very bad weather, Hiroshima. Cold like nobody remember.”

“Here, too,” Louise agreed. “Snow!” Like any good Angeleno, she said it as if it were a word for people in other, less lucky, parts of the world. And so it had been, till the supervolcano went off. “Not just snow, either. Rain all year long! It’s ridiculous!”

“Snow in Hiroshima, too,” Mr. Nobashi said. “Snow now. Crops in Japan very bad this year.”

“Crops everywhere are bad this year,” Louise said. In most of the American Midwest, there were no crops. Dust and ash buried much of what had been the world’s breadbasket. Even where it didn’t, the horrible weather the supervolcano had caused screwed up crops and shortened growing seasons.

“Hai,” Mr. Nobashi said. “Not much wheat-and cost so much! Oh, Jesus Christ! Company have trouble afford.”

It sounded as if the price of ramen would go up. The price of everything had gone up as if inflated with helium. College students would particularly mourn this bump, though.

Mr. Nobashi eyed the clock on his wall. “You go home,” he told Louise, even if it was early. “You got to be tired.”

“Thank you, Mr. Nobashi!” She bailed out before he had the chance to change his mind.

Marshall was changing James Henry’s diaper when Louise walked into the condo. “Good job,” she said, to encourage him. “You’re doing super with him. No diaper rash or anything.”

“Yeah, well, when he’s wet or stinky I deal with it,” he answered, and she could hear the shrug in his voice. He washed his hands, grabbed his laptop, and headed for the door. “See you in the morning.”

“Marshall-” Louise began. He paused, but his face didn’t open. She swallowed a sigh. “Never mind. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Out he went, not quite slamming the door behind him. No, he hadn’t forgiven her for leaving Colin. Odds were he never would. She’d tried to explain how stifled she’d felt while she was married to his father. She’d tried, and heard herself failing. He didn’t understand, or want to.

Louise sighed. Yes, she’d lost the children, and she couldn’t do a damn thing about it. She’d hoped Vanessa would get it, but Vanessa’s own troubles were the only ones that were real to her. James Henry made a baby noise, halfway between a gurgle and a burp. Louise picked him up and cuddled him. He couldn’t even smile yet, but she didn’t care. He’d love her no matter what.

For a while, anyhow.

“I’ve got a job for you, Colin,” Mike Pitcavage said. He didn’t look like a police chief. He looked like a national news anchor, or maybe a Senator who was thinking about running for President. He was tall and fit and tan, with a full head of iron-gray hair. He wore custom-made Italian suits, not the off-the-rack stuff most cops-Colin included-put on every day.

Colin didn’t even particularly resent him for winning the chief’s job, though he’d put in for it himself. Pitcavage could make nice, a talent Colin knew he lacked. You could get by as a lieutenant if people saw what you really thought of them. When you had to deal with the mayor and the city council all the damn time, that didn’t fly any more.

“What’s up?” he asked, looking across the desk at Pitcavage.

The desk was about the size of an aircraft-carrier flight deck. It was almost entirely bare. The only things on it were two framed photographs, one of Pitcavage’s wife, the other of his son. Caroline was a nice gal. She wasn’t a trophy wife or anything; they’d been married a long time. Colin’s opinion of Darren Pitcavage was rather lower. If he weren’t a prominent cop’s kid. .

But he was, so the drunk-driving charge quietly got reduced to speeding. That fight in the bar? People said the other guy threw the first punch. There’d been something that had to do with vandalism, too, but that also didn’t stick. Darren was even better-looking than his old man, but his eyes didn’t seem to want to meet the camera.

Mike Pitcavage opened a desk drawer, took out a piece of paper, and slid it across the desk at Colin. “We’ve got a big oil tanker coming into San Pedro next week,” he said. “The crude will go to the refineries in El Segundo. All the impacted departments will participate in security arrangements. I want you to take leadership in San Atanasio.”

Before Colin said anything, he took a long look at the paper. Then he clicked his tongue between his teeth. “So this oil is for South Bay police departments? How’d we manage that?”

“We managed, with some help from the politicians. Trust me-you don’t want to know the gory details,” Pitcavage answered.

Colin believed him. The world seemed to get dog-eat-doggier every day. With more and more people grabbing for less and less, where was the surprise in that? “San Pedro’s part of Los Angeles. I don’t see the LAPD mentioned here anywhere.”

“No, and you won’t, either.” The San Atanasio police chief looked sly.

“Huh,” Colin said. A narrow strip of territory-part of it ran just east of San Atanasio-connected San Pedro to the rest of L.A. The port helped make Los Angeles a great city; it had for more than a hundred years. “So, are we going to have to protect this crude from the L.A. cops, then?”

“They aren’t supposed to know about the tanker,” Pitcavage said.

“And then you wake up!” Colin exclaimed. The chief looked blank. Colin put it in words of one syllable: “What are the odds of that?”

“We’ve made the necessary arrangements,” Pitcavage insisted. How many bureaucrats had been persuaded to look the other way and keep their mouths shut? How much had it cost?

“If LAPD does find out, we’re liable to have a war on our hands.” Colin meant it literally. The To protect and to serve boys were as hard up for gasoline as anybody else. If they found out this big shipment was coming into their port, under their noses, and all earmarked for other people, there’d be stereophonic hell to pay.

“Well, that’s one of the reasons I want you in charge of our part of the security,” Chief Pitcavage answered. “You’ve got the military experience we need.”

To Colin’s way of thinking, a hitch in the Navy didn’t exactly equate him to General Patton (although one might work wonders for Darren Pitcavage). He could see that saying so would do him less than no good, though. Swallowing a sigh, he asked, “This takes priority over. .?”

“Everything,” Pitcavage said flatly.

“Including the Strangler case?”

“Everything includes everything,” the chief said. “If we don’t get our hands on this gas, pretty soon we’ll we chasing the damn Strangler on skateboards and scooters.”