Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano - All Fall Down

“Here we are again,” he said as he took McCann’s place at the pulpit. “Here we are again, all right, in this, the second winter of our discontent. The first one was pretty easy, as these things go. We chopped down the trees that stood closest, and we shot the nearest and stupidest moose.”

People chuckled. It wasn’t that Farrell was saying anything that wasn’t so. They’d done exactly that the winter before. They’d got by with it, too, until things thawed out enough to remind the wider world for a little while that they were there.

“I’m serious,” Farrell insisted, “or as serious as I’m likely to get, anyhow. I’m serious, and the situation is liable to turn critical. If we don’t want to end up burning down our houses to keep warm and eating long pig so we don’t starve, we’d better do some planning first.”

Rob wondered how many of the men and women in the crowd understood what long pig was. Sitting next to him, Justin quirked an eyebrow, so he got it. Well, Justin knew all kinds of weird things. Knowing weird things was his specialty, maybe even more than playing guitar. And Dick Barber also grinned out of one side of his mouth. But he too was a man of parts, even if not all of them worked all the time. And he would have heard more from Farrell than anybody. For most of these folks, though, long pig would be caviar to the general. Then Rob wondered how many people here knew about caviar to the general. And then he quit worrying about crap like that and listened to Farrell some more.

“-got to organize and share what we can gather,” the retired history prof was saying. “If we don’t hang together, you can be sure we will hang separately.”

That was Ben Franklin. Before Rob could even start to wonder how many people in the church knew that much, somebody called, “I thought you were a Republican, not a goddamn Commie!”

Farrell beamed. He loved hecklers, mostly because he loved demolishing them. Before Mayor McCann could gavel the loudmouth out of order, Farrell waved for him not to bother. “Right this minute, I think Moscow and Beijing and Pyongyang are a little too cold themselves to worry about Maine north of the Interstate.” He got his laugh. Having got it, he went on, “At least, I don’t think North Korea has a rocket that will reach all the way to such a dangerous place as Guilford.”

That won him another one. “Washington doesn’t worry about us, either. We’ve seen that. And I am a Republican, so I say that’s a good thing more often than not. I don’t want Big Brother watching me. But I also don’t want my friends and neighbors squabbling like the Kilkenny Cats, and I don’t want them starving or freezing, either. If we can take care of ourselves, we won’t need to cry because Big Brother’s falling down on the job. All politics is local, but some is more local than others. For about nine months out of the year, maybe more, ours looks as though it’s going to be about as local as it gets.”

He went on to talk about schemes for using the gasoline and fuel oil they did have, and about organizing hunts and woodcutting parties. He talked about parsnips and mangel-wurzels and Andean potatoes that ripened faster than the varieties of spuds Maine had been famous for.

“What the hell is a mangel-wurzel?” Rob whispered to Justin.

“You grab a wurzel and you hurt it real bad,” Justin explained, so he had no clue, either.

“None of this will be exciting,” Farrell finished. “But we’re not talking about excitement now. Excitement is for good times. It’s a luxury. We’re talking about survival. Survival is what we’ll be talking for the rest of my life, for the rest of your lives, and probably for the rest of your children’s and grandchildren’s lives. I don’t think Washington has figured that out yet, but it looks pretty obvious here, doesn’t it?”

Nobody, not even the guy who’d yelled at him, tried to tell him he was wrong. No one applauded when Farrell stepped away from the pulpit- the bully pulpit, Rob thought-either. The thoughtful silence he got seemed higher praise than any mere handclapping could have been. And the agenda items following his talk seemed even duller than they might have otherwise.

After the town meeting adjourned, Rob waded through the crowd around Jim Farrell and waited his turn to talk. When it finally came, he asked, “Why aren’t the Feds paying more attention to us? We’re hit harder than any place that didn’t get covered in ash.”

“Well, for one thing, a lot of places did get covered in ash,” Farrell replied, and Rob nodded. The older man continued, “And Washington is out for what it can get, much more than it is for what it can give. From us, that means it’s out for nothing. You can’t get blood from a turnip, or from a mangel-wurzel. So Washington shines the light of its countenance on the places that are still warm, or at least warmer.”

That made more sense than Rob wished it did. He was less convinced than Farrell that being forgotten about by Washington was a good thing. But he wasn’t nearly so sure it was a bad thing as he had been when Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles first got stuck in Guilford. He let someone else talk to Farrell and walked out into the sharp-toothed cold outside.

It was dark outside the church, too-no working streetlamps. Rob stepped on somebody’s foot before he’d gone very far. “Sorry,” he said, wondering who his victim was.

“No damage,” came the reply: a woman’s voice. She couldn’t see him, either, because she asked, “Who are you?”

“Rob. I’m one of the fellows staying at the Mansion Inn.”

“Oh, from the band!” she said. “You guys are good, even acoustic. I like it when you play in the park by the river. I go whenever I can.”

“Cool,” Rob replied. A fan-he recognized enthusiasm when he heard it. But which fan? “Um, who’m I talking to?”

“Oh. I’m Lindsey Kincaid. I teach chemistry at Piscataquis Community Secondary School,” she answered. That was the high school not far from the inn.

Rob sortakinda knew who she was, the way he sortakinda knew an awful lot of people here. About his age, halfway between blonde and brunette. . not half bad, all thing considered. How much considering did he feel like? “Where do you live?” he asked. “Can I walk you back there, wherever it is?”

If she said no, he wouldn’t get shot down too badly. But she said, “Okay,” and sounded pleased saying it. So maybe he’d find out how much considering he felt like.

* * *

“Attention! Attention! May I have your attention, please!”

When a man with a bullhorn shouted for your attention, you gave it to him whether you wanted to or not. He didn’t even have to say please . Vanessa Ferguson wondered why he bothered. Vestigial politeness, was her guess. Like the human tailbone, it was shrunken and useless, but the FEMA guy out there still had that little bit.

He blared away: “Camp Constitution is being adversely impacted by the flood-type conditions currently obtaining in this geographical location.”

That was so bad, Vanessa almost liked it. She couldn’t imagine a more bureaucratic way to say The flood here is screwing Camp Constitution to the wall .

Things had been bad the spring before. Ash and dust covered the basins of the rivers that flowed into the Mississippi from the west. She still remembered what a pool-service guy had told her mother when she was a kid: “Your pool is the lowest part of your yard, lady. Anything that can get into it goddamn well will.” He’d had a cigarette twitching in the corner of his mouth, and he was tanned as Cordoban leather. These days, he was probably dead of melanoma or lung cancer.