Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano - All Fall Down

Standing quietly beside Rob, out of the shot, Dick Barber grinned. That mention of the Trebor Mansion Inn would have been worth a lot to him back when there were summer people. Now it was no more than a might-have-been.

“I’ve heard it said that you are the big boss in this part of the country,” Marie Fabianski tried again. “Is that true or isn’t it?”

Rob expected Farrell to come back with something like I’ve heard it said that CNN hires lady reporters because of how pretty they are. Is that true or isn’t it? Instead, the old man complained, “A minute ago, you said I was a dictator. Now I’m only a big boss? Make up your mind, please!”

“Well, are you a dictator?” She sounded flustered. Things weren’t going the way she’d expected. She’d never tried dealing with Jim Farrell before, which had to explain a good deal.

He beamed at her like your kindly grandfather, if your kindly grandfather happened to be a retired history prof and a political gadfly. “Do I look like a dictator?”

“Dictators can look like-”

He overrode her: “Do I sound like a dictator? More to the point, do I act like a dictator? If I am a dictator, where’s my army? Where’s my harem? Most important of all, where are my tax collectors? Hard to be a dictator without what I believe the heathens term a revenue stream.”

“If you’re not a dictator, what would you call yourself?” Out of her depth, Marie Fabianski did her best to swim. She was game, anyhow.

“Someone who knows a little something about how to live without the so-called modern conveniences,” Farrell answered. “Someone who didn’t go to Washington and hole up there, unlike a certain Congresscritter I could mention. Someone the people around here trust. And I’m entertaining. We mostly can’t watch CNN and the other comedy channels any more. The poor, benighted citizenry has to content itself with me.”

She gaped. She gestured to the cameraman. He killed the bright lights and the video camera. Sighing, she said, “I don’t think we’ve got much of a story here.”

“I don’t think you want your network to look like a pack of fools,” Dick Barber said.

“Of course she doesn’t, Dick,” Farrell said. “They’re trying to get by as best they can, just like us. We don’t want to get to the point where we start eating each other, and they don’t want to lose ratings. No matter where you are in the world, it’s not easy. It never was, even before the eruption.”

Before the eruption. Rob wondered how many times he’d said that and thought that in the days since. He was starting to take the new, harder, life for granted, but he still remembered the old one. He remembered the difference. He knew how big it was. Things wouldn’t be the same again, probably not till long after he was dead.

If they ever were. That they looked bigger every day.

* * *

A Hawthorne cop had got killed in a shootout with a bank robber. The robber was also deceased, which didn’t surprise Colin Ferguson a bit. The police tended not to take prisoners in those situations.

When the coroner finally released the robber’s corpse, a few grieving relatives and friends might lay him to rest. Funerals for officers slain in the line of duty were much bigger affairs. Cops and politicians from all the surrounding towns came to pay their respects. Fallen soldiers often didn’t get such a fancy sendoff.

Colin hadn’t known the dead policeman. He was here at Chief Pitcavage’s behest, as the official representative of the San Atanasio PD. He hadn’t worn his uniform for a while. It felt scratchy. The navy blue cap with the shiny brim was an unfamiliar weight on his head.

The casket was closed, so he didn’t have to go through the macabre ritual of filing past the body. From what he’d heard, the poor bastard in there had stopped a charge of double-aught buck with his face. The undertakers couldn’t make him look even half-way presentable.

And so Colin sat on the uncomfortable wooden pew while the minister told the audience and the TV cameras from several local stations what a fine fellow the late Office McClintock had been. McClintock left behind a wife and two boys who were too little to understand what was going on. Their mother did; she sobbed quietly through the eulogy.

Of course the minister did his best to dance around the question of why God had let Officer McClintock stop a shotgun blast with his face if he was such a fine fellow. What could you do but dance around that question? It had no answer, or none Colin could see.

But if it had no answer, what was the point of the church? Maybe the ceremony made the widow feel a little better. Maybe it just made her remember more and hurt worse. He had no answers to that one, either.

He listened to the pious phrases and kept his trap shut. More often than not, that was the best thing you could do. He wasn’t here to argue religious questions. He was here to show the San Atanasio Police Department’s flag, or he would have been if only the San Atanasio PD had a flag.

After the eulogy ended, he did have to go up and murmur words of condolence to Mrs. McClintock. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorrier than I know how to tell you.”

She nodded jerkily. Behind a black veil, her face was paper-white. “Thank you for coming,” she whispered. Her boys stared up at her. The older one might have been three. He knew something wasn’t right. What it was hadn’t sunk in yet.

Not for him it hadn’t, anyway. He didn’t know how lucky he was to be so little.

The cops milled around, talking to people they knew in other departments. It was a bad scene. They all knew they might have drawn the short straw the same way. Police work wasn’t soldiering, but it came as close as anything inside the USA.

A lean LAPD sergeant came up to Colin and said, “You’re that Ferguson guy, right? From San Atanasio?”

Colin nodded. “Guilty. Um, do I know you?” The other guy’s face didn’t look familiar.

But the sergeant answered, “Oh, we’ve met, all right. You bet your sweet ass we have.” He did lower his voice to make sure the widow couldn’t hear that.

“Tell me where?” Colin said. He was usually good at placing people. This time, though, he drew a blank.

With a sour chuckle, the guy from LAPD said, “At the Braxton Bragg offramp to the 110. You were gonna have your troops machine-gun me if I didn’t get the fuck out of the way.”

“Oh.” Colin chuckled, too, in mild-but only mild-embarrassment. “We really needed that oil.”

“I guess!” the LAPD sergeant exclaimed. “I promised myself I’d punch you in the nose if I ever ran into you again.”

“Well, you can try.” Colin unobtrusively shifted his weight. He hadn’t been in a fistfight since his patrol-car days, but if this guy wanted to work out his grudge. .

He didn’t, or not enough to start something here. “Nah,” he said. “You were doing what you thought you had to do. I’ll tell you, though-it rubbed me the wrong way when you made me back down.”

“You’re LAPD. You’re used to telling the little departments what to do,” Colin said. “Gotta feel funny when the shoe’s on your foot and not the other fellow’s.”

“It’d look that way to you, wouldn’t it?” the LAPD sergeant said. “I’m not talking about how the San Atanasio PD made my department back down. I don’t want to slug the San Atanasio PD. You made me back down. But hell, you were just doing your job, same as poor damn McClintock was doing his. Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug, that’s all.”

“Mm.” Colin would rather it were department to department, not man to man. “I don’t know your name,” he said. Knowing it-and remembering it-might prove worthwhile.