Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

“Have to talk with LAPD,” Colin said unenthusiastically. The projects were in the Big City’s jurisdiction. Sometimes LAPD cooperated well. Sometimes the Big City cops treated their small-town cousins like a bunch of scrounging hicks. You never could tell till you tried.

“Better call quick,” the cop said. “Way things are going, they’ll start canceling phones pretty soon, too.”

“Heh,” Colin said, for all the world as if it were a joke.

Louise Ferguson grabbed a shopping cart and headed into Vons. The supermarket on Reynoso Drive had been there for as long as she could remember, and for longer than that, too. Some of the regulars who’d come in when she was just getting started were still regulars now: regulars whose hair had gone white or light blue or pink, regulars with wrinkles and bent backs and polyester tops. Microfiber, my ass, Louise thought. I say it’s polyester, and I say the hell with it.

Was that how it ended up? Was that how she’d look twenty-five years from now? Would that cheery newlywed going up the produce aisle see her a lot further through the century and shiver as if a goose had walked over her grave? Probably. You couldn’t win. The only way you could get out of the game was by walking in front of a truck or something. Louise didn’t want to do that.

But she didn’t want to get old, either. She especially didn’t want to get old with a lover so much younger than she was. Men turned distinguished as they aged. You respected their experience. Women went invisible or grew hideous, one. Who gave a flying fuck, or any other kind, about some old broad’s experience?

Did you come to the store to piss and moan, or are you going to shop some, too? Louise asked herself. She chuckled wryly. She had the cart. She had her list-she was an organized shopper. Might as well drop some cash.

As usual, she headed for the produce first. The newlywed looking unhappy now, not cheery, had her reasons. Not much filled the bins. Most of what was there didn’t look very good. The prices were through the roof. A sign above a bare bin that should have held potatoes said

SORRY! WE’RE DOING THE BEST WE CAN!

The scary part was, Louise believed it. Nobody who could get his hands on higher-quality veggies would have put these sorry specimens on display.

“Sucks, doesn’t it?” the newlywed said.

“I couldn’t have put it better myself,” Louise answered. They smiled at each other and rolled their eyes. At least for a moment, misery loved company.

Things got no better in the rest of the market. The shelves had lots of odd, spotty gaps. Louise had noticed a few of them the week before. Now they came right out and poked her in the eye. She didn’t need long to see what the pattern was. You could still buy local stuff. Anything that came from back East was in short supply.

She got what she could. Some of what she couldn’t get, she could work around. No tissues in sight, but they had plenty of TP for some reason. If you had to, you could use it on your nose as well as your rear end. And rice could substitute for potatoes: oh, not exactly, but close enough. Where there’s a will, there’s a lawyer, she thought. Then she tightened her lips so her mouth turned into a thin, bloodless line. That had been-and no doubt still was-one of Colin’s jokes.

Well, what’s-her-name-Kelly-was listening to them now. She hadn’t heard all of them a million times yet. Only a few hundred, say. If she stuck with him as long as Louise had… He’d be pretty ancient by then, and Kelly would be no spring chicken herself.

People said you were crazy for two years after your marriage sank. Much of what people said was bullshit, nothing else but. That, though, seemed pretty much true. Louise felt a lot more stable, a lot more grounded, than she had when she walked out the old front door for the last time.

Grounded or not, she couldn’t get away from what had been so familiar for so long. Would Colin and the things he’d done and said keep bubbling up inside her for the rest of her life? It sure looked that way. On the outside, the break was clean. On the inside… She could still hear him, dammit.

She steered the cart to a checkout stand. As she displayed her Vons Club card for the discounts, the Hispanic kid bagging groceries said, “Hope you don’t mind plastic bags. They’re the only ones we were able to get.”

“That’s okay,” Louise said. They were supposed to be phasing out plastic. No, they were supposed to have phased it out. Maybe they’d won some kind of dispensation on account of the supervolcano.

The Pope gives dispensations. You mean an exemption. Damn straight she could still hear Colin in her head. Oh, Vanessa would have said the same thing, but not in the same tone of voice. And she hadn’t heard one damn thing from Vanessa since Yellowstone fell in on itself.

Reminding herself of that made her miss whatever the bagger said next. “I’m sorry?” She tried to look interested and attentive.

“I said, if you’ve got some of those cloth totes with the handles, it might be a good idea to bring them the next time you come in. Who knows how much longer we’ll be able to get any bags at all?”

“Okay. I’ll do that.” Louise had several of them in a drawer. Who didn’t? Some people were bound not to. And they’d be the ones who raised a stink when the market didn’t-couldn’t-help them corral their groceries.

Louise stowed the Vons Club card and took out her trusty Visa. She was signing the store copy of the register printout when the checkout gal remarked, “Maybe you’re lucky to get plastic bags today. It’s coming down in buckets out there.”

“It is?” Louise hadn’t paid any attention to what the weather was doing. Now she looked out through the big plate-glass windows. “It is!” she agreed in dismay. It hadn’t been when she got there. “Can I run back and buy an umbrella?” That would make the two women behind her in line love her to death.

The checker turned to the bagger. “Run get Mrs. Ferguson an umbrella, Orlando. Hustle!”

“ Si, Virginia,” Orlando said, and he was off like a shot. He came back with an umbrella-an umbrella with a tacky floral pattern, but what could you do? — a lot faster than Louise could have got it for herself. She paid cash; it was quicker than plastic, and she did care what people thought, even if they weren’t people she knew.

Buckets was barely the word for the way it was pouring. L.A. didn’t usually get deluges like this. The umbrella kept her top half dry. From the waist down, she was soaked anyhow; it was blowing almost horizontally out of the northwest. The plastic grocery bags were a blessing. Brown paper would have disintegrated in rain like this. Louise threw the sacks into the trunk and waded around to the driver’s door.

Getting in, wrestling the umbrella shut, tossing it down in front of the passenger seat, and slamming the car door took only a few seconds. All the same, Louise let in enough water to fill a hazard on the golf course down the street. Quite a bit came down on her in the process, too. “Yuck!” she said. That wasn’t nearly good out throh. She tried again: “Shit!”

Better. Definitely better. She’d given up trying to understand why people told you not to swear. It didn’t help the human condition as much as getting drunk or screwing, but it made a pretty fair Band-Aid.

Then she said “Shit!” again. Getting in, letting in all that water and wet air, and having the gall to go on breathing had steamed up the inside of the car windows. For all the seeing out she could do, she might as well have been in the middle of her own private fog bank.

She turned on the motor and hit both front and rear defrost. Blowing warm air across the inside of the windshield made things worse before it improved them. She’d known it would, so she didn’t bother cursing. Weren’t a couple of old paper towels hiding under the passenger seat?