Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano - All Fall Down

No crops in the ground the past two years, either. Where anything grew up in the fields, it was weeds pushing up through dead cornstalks. No trace at all was left of year before last’s wheat. It was only a memory. This country was importing as much grain as it could these days, along with oil and so much else. The dollar was sinking like a stone. It would have sunk even faster if Europe and Japan and China weren’t hurting, too.

Except for the ruined farmlands all around her, Vanessa didn’t have time to think much about the battered economy. Washington talked about sending work crews into ashfall country to reclaim it. Washington, though, was a thousand miles away. Nothing would reclaim this country except time.

“So what are we doing here, then?” she asked the boss to whose crew she’d been assigned.

Merv Saunders looked like something out of a Grant Wood painting. He was tall and thin and bald, with wire-framed glasses and a long face made up of vertical and horizontal lines of disapproval. “Scavenging,” he answered matter-of-factly. “Lots of stuff got left behind when people had to run. Quite a bit of it’ll still work-or we can make it work with a little cleaning and tinkering. There’s an awful mob of folks out in the camps who need anything we can get our hands on.”

Ashley Pagliarulo let you know at any excuse or none that she had a law degree. That didn’t mean she wasn’t wearing somebody else’s old clothes like the rest of the work crew, or that she didn’t need a shower as much as her comrades. But it did give her an attitude. Now she said, “Under most circumstances, this would be theft.” By the way she said it, she expected cop cars to roar up with sirens blaring any second now.

It wasn’t gonna happen. If there were any cop cars within a hundred miles, Vanessa would have been amazed. And Merv Saunders sounded as calm as Valium as he answered, “The Abandoned Property Act makes it legal, as you know perfectly well.”

Ashley only sniffed. Either Pagliarulo was her married name or her ancestors came from some part of Italy that produced petite blondes. “The Abandoned Property Act will never stand up under judicial review,” she predicted.

Saunders shrugged. “If you feel that way about it, how come you’re here?”

“Because I was gonna go bonkers if I stayed in that lousy camp another minute,” the attorney snarled, a sentiment Vanessa completely understood.

“Well, okay.” Saunders got it, too. “But we honest to God are doing something useful for the country here. A lot of the stuff that we’re getting out won’t be worth having if we leave it here for another few years. And most of the people we’re taking it from are dead.”

“Some aren’t. Some wound up in camps the same way we did.” Ashley was always ready to argue. Any time, any place. She was a lawyer, all right. She went on, “And even the dead people have heirs. We’re plundering their estates.”

The crew boss looked at her. “You can always go back to a camp, you know.” He didn’t say whether you want to or not, but anybody with two brain cells to rub together would hear it in his voice. Vanessa sure did. She’d given him some static, too. Now she decided keeping her mouth shut for a while might be a pretty fair plan. Going back to a camp was the very last thing she wanted to do.

Ashley Pagliarulo also got the message loud and clear. She said not another word. She looked miffed. Hell, she looked righteously pissed off. But she was plainly of the same opinion as Vanessa: that going to a camp was like going to jail, only with worse food and accommodations.

Not that being in the middle of ruined Kansas was any bargain. Whenever the wind blew out of the west, as it did a lot of the time, it picked up dust from the thicker layers in those parts and did its best to re-cover what time and rain had started to clear.

They all had pig-snouted gas masks. When the wind blew from the west, they wore them, too. Hundreds of thousands of people had already died from HPO and other lung ailments brought on by breathing that crap. Nobody could guess how many more would prematurely follow them into the grave. And, as Vanessa knew from the dreadful days right after the eruption, being out and about with the dust blowing around was like trying to carry on after you’d had a handful of grit thrown in your eyes. Wearing a gas mask was a metaphorical pain. Doing without one was a literal pain. Reality trumped metaphor every goddamn time.

Here was another farmhouse with the front door standing open. Maybe the people who’d lived here hadn’t bothered closing it when they got the hell out. Maybe looters had hit the place after the owners bailed. If they had, Vanessa hoped the time they’d wasted plundering meant they came down with one of the zillion lung diseases the dust could give you. As far as she was concerned, looters deserved all the bad things that happened to them and a few more besides. Her father, no doubt, would have sympathized with the attitude.

Looters had hit the place. The TV was gone. There was no computer anywhere. Pulled-open drawers, everything in them now gray with dust, said there wouldn’t be any jewelry, either.

But there were shoes in the bedrooms and clothes in the closets. Before long, some refugees would be wearing these people’s castoffs. Vanessa was in clothes like that herself. So were her colleagues. Demand still exceeded supply. Like her, plenty of people in the camps had no money to buy anything new. They depended on charity-and on the fruits of the Abandoned Property Act.

The wearables went into black trash bags. Vanessa wondered out loud what people had done before they had plastic bags to stash stuff in.

She didn’t particularly expect an answer, but she got one. “Burlap,” Merv Saunders said. “It was cheap, and there was lots of it. They still use it for sandbags because of that. Feed sacks, too.”

They found feed sacks out in the barn. No livestock remained in there. These people must either have taken their animals with them or, if they couldn’t do that, turned them loose and hoped for the best. Those hopes were doomed to disappointment, but they couldn’t have known ahead of time.

Vanessa had had to turn her cat loose before they let her into a refugee center. She’d hoped for the best, too, but. . Poor Pickles! Tears stung her eyes. She blinked them back. Crying inside a gas mask was a bad idea, because tears had nowhere to go and fogged up your lenses like nobody’s business.

But the barn did have those sacks of feed-some made from plastic-impregnated paper; others, sure as hell, of good, old-fashioned burlap. And feed, even feed that was past its sell-by date, was precious. The Midwest’s endless abundance was dead, smothered in supervolcano ash and dust. Those sacks of corn and soybeans and whatever wouldn’t be coming out of America’s breadbasket by the millions any more, not for God only knew how many years. Animals that had survived elsewhere in the country still needed to eat. If the food was stale, well, stale feed was a hell of a lot better than no feed. People weren’t so fussy now as they had been when times were flush.

The crew lugged the feed sacks to their truck. It wore the mechanical equivalent of a gas mask. It sported an enormous, heavy-duty air filter that sure as hell wasn’t part of its original equipment. The engine compartment and transmission were much better sealed off than was necessary in most of the country, to keep grit from getting into the moving parts.

Vanessa remembered how her own Toyota had crapped out on the road while she was trying to get away from the eruption. She just thanked heaven she’d got her hands on some surgical masks before then. Otherwise, she’d be coughing her lungs out now, if breathing in that garbage hadn’t made her kick the bucket.