Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano - All Fall Down

“Oh, man!” Justin waved in frustration at the trees on the far bank of the Piscataquis. The ones that weren’t pines were mostly bare-branched. All the late frosts and snowfalls had screwed their leaf-growing to the wall. Rob wondered if they’d die. This was a town park, so nobody’d chopped them down over the winter. But if they were nothing but firewood waiting to happen. . Justin went on, “This is Nowhere with a capital N.”

“Uh-huh.” Rob admitted what he couldn’t very well deny. But he also said, “I kinda like it, y’know?”

The look Justin gave him had Et tu, Brute? written all over it. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said.

“Nope.” Rob shook his head. “Right after we got stranded, I would’ve kissed a pig for a plane ticket to, well, anywhere. But it grows on me, honest to God it does.”

“Like a wart.” Justin was not a happy camper.

“Look, dude, if you just gotta go, then you gotta go, and that’s all there is to it,” Rob said. “We’ll be sorry and we’ll miss you and all that good shit, but we won’t hate you or anything. The band’s not worth squat if the only reason you’re in it is you think you have to stay in it. If you leave, well, hell, we had a better run than most outfits do. We even made a living at it for a while.”

“Up from obscurity,” Justin muttered.

“Most outfits never make it that far,” Rob said. “They don’t call ’em garage bands by accident. The drummer’s loud and crappy and annoys the neighbors, and the guys say fuck it and get on with their lives. Coming as far as we have, we beat the odds.”

“We got all the way up to cult band,” Justin said.

He didn’t mean it in any good way, but Rob nodded even so. “We sure did, and it paid the bills. What’s wrong with that? I mean, would you rather play gigs or sit in a cubicle next to Dilbert and stare at a monitor all day?”

Justin flinched. He might have been stuck in a lab, not a cubicle-he was an escaped biologist. But one of the reasons you got into a band was so you wouldn’t get trapped in a nine-to-five. Of course, you could get trapped in a band, too. “Up from obscurity,” he repeated. “And then down to obscurity again.”

That was how it went. It wasn’t so exact as calculating where a missile that went up on this course at that angle with the other velocity would come down, but it came close. Nobody’d ever heard of you. Then people did hear about you, and you were as hot as you ever got. Then they started forgetting about you and looking for something new. But if enough people got to like you while you were It, you could still make a living on the afterglow.

Like really powerful missiles, a few bands went into orbit and never did come back to earth. Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles never would have been one of those; it was too quirky, and probably too smart for its own good. As long as everybody in the band accepted that, they could have fun anyhow.

Justin sighed now. “I know what it is. That Farrell guy’s got a mojo on you.”

“Oh, give me a break!” Rob said. “Everything around here would have gone to hell if he hadn’t pitched in.” Jim Farrell was a retired history prof; Dick Barber had helped run his failed campaign for Congress in the last election. The successful Democrat stayed in Washington. He showed no interest in sharing his constituents’ frigid fate. Farrell was still here, and better adapted to the new reality than most younger people. He also had a buglelike baritone that made people-people on this side of I-95, anyhow-take notice of him.

“He’s, uh, kind of out there.” By the way Justin said it, he was giving Farrell the benefit of the doubt.

Rob only laughed. “And we’re not?”

“Not that way.” A big, wet snowflake landed on the end of Justin’s nose. His eyes crossed, trying to focus on it. Then it melted, and they uncrossed again. He let out another sigh. “I guess I’m not going anywhere-for now.”

“Okay,” Rob said. If Justin waited much longer, winter would clamp down hard on Guilford once more-and on big stretches of the rest of the country, too. Snow in L.A. twice in one season? How crazy was that?

Crazy as a supervolcano eruption. You never thought it could happen. Then it did, and you had to live with the aftermath. . if you could.

Vanessa Ferguson checked the time on her cell phone. A quarter past three. She let out a sigh full of theatrical disgust. Part of that was because she had to meet Micah at four. The other part was because, although Camp Constitution had been up and running for almost a year, only little gadgets like cell phones had power here. And sometimes you stood in line for a couple of hours before you got to use the charging station, too.

She didn’t know how many refugee centers there were, set up just past the edges of the ashfall from the supervolcano. She did know they stretched from Iowa to Louisiana on this side of the eruption, and from Washington State down into California in the west. They all had patriotic-sounding names: Camp Constitution, Camp Independence, Camp Federalist, Camp Liberation, and on and on. Some FEMA flunky back in D.C. probably got a bonus for every fancy moniker he thought up.

She didn’t think anybody knew how many people remained stuck in these miserable camps. As with deaths from the eruption, she didn’t think anybody could guess to the nearest hundred thousand. Till she ended up here, she’d never imagined there was this much tent canvas in the whole U.S. of A. And if she never saw another MRE for the rest of her life. . it would mean they were finally running out of them, and then all the refugees would really be in trouble.

The roof over her head right now was olive-drab canvas. She sprawled on a bunk-next to the top in a stack of five. She had a two-inch-thick foam-rubber pad over the plywood bottom of the bunk. In Camp Constitution, that was luxury.

And this was a pretty quiet tent. That was luxury, too. The three little brats in the first tent where she’d washed up. . They couldn’t watch TV. They couldn’t play video games. They couldn’t get on Facebook. So they drove everybody nuts instead. Vanessa’d wanted to rip their little heads off. She didn’t suffer fools or pests gladly. But what you wanted to do and what you could get away with were two different critters, dammit.

Micah had got her out of there. Of course, everything came with a price. Pretty soon, she’d deliver another payment. Not long after she’d come to this tent, she’d figured she didn’t need to deliver any more. That only proved she’d been naive. Once you let somebody know what bugged you, you left yourself vulnerable to him.

Who would have dreamt Micah could find kids even more horrible than the ones she’d left behind? Well, he did it, damn him. These were boys, not girls, which only made them wilder. And there were four of them, not three. Their mother had long since given up trying to keep them under control. They had no father in evidence.

Just to make matters worse, they were African-American. If Vanessa complained about them through regular channels, she’d look like a racist.

So, irregularly, she went back to Micah. He raised an eyebrow. He looked surprised. “Is that so?” he said, and he sounded surprised, too, damn him. He was such a dweeb. “How unfortunate for you. I was not aware of the situation.” Another government agency called that kind of thing plausible deniability. Vanessa called it horseshit. She was learning.

“What can you do about it?” she asked him.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “If they were properly transferred into that residence area, I may not be able to do much at all.” Only a bureaucrat who didn’t have to live in one would call a surplus gynormous Army tent a residence area. And only someone who knew damn well he could take care of things if he decided to would deny it that way.