Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

“Oh.” Dad chewed on that for a little while. “They do say you’re supposed to write about things you know, don’t they?”

“Yeah, they say that. They say the opposite, too. The way it looks tme is, you can get away with anything when you’re writing, as long as you do it well enough.”

“Huh.” That didn’t sit well with Dad. Marshall had known it wouldn’t. Dad believed in Rules with a capital R. He wasn’t a cop by accident. As if to prove as much, he went on, “Just remember it doesn’t work that way in real life.”

“If I can get them to keep paying me, maybe writing will turn into real life,” Marshall said.

“Maybe it will.” His father sounded surprised at the idea. But getting paid resonated with him. “Here’s hoping-and congratulations again. Sorry, but I’ve got to get back to it.”

“I know you’re working. I did want to call and tell you, though.”

Marshall checked his e-mail. He had an answer from Bolger. WTG! the message said. I hoped somebody in the class would make a sale. Now you’ve given the others something to shoot for.

“Yeah,” Marshall said. How jealous would the rest of the class be? Bigtime jealous, that was how. They’d have to compete against a real, live published (well, to be published) author. And the girls in there would think anyone who could sell was freaking awesome. He could hope they would, anyhow.

In the meantime… In the meantime, Marshall rolled himself a doobie about the size of Pittsburgh. Even triumph went better with weed. He was happily wasted when the sun went down towards another ridiculous, gaudy, over-the-top beautiful sunset. Did dope improve that, too? He smoked some more to find out.

Camp Constitution. Vanessa wondered what dumbshit adman or bureaucrat got himself a bonus for coming up with the name. Whoever the bastard was, she would have bet her life he not only didn’t live here but had never got within a thousand miles of the place. Camp Hole in the Ground would have come a lot closer to the truth.

Truth? You can’t handle the truth! What movie was that from? She couldn’t remember. Back a long time ago-she couldn’t think of exactly when, either-swarms of people trying to get away from the Dust Bowl packed up whatever they had and headed for California. Some places in the state, being of Okie blood still mattered.

Well, the supervolcano had made a bigger, more horrible Dust Bowl now. The only reason even more people hadn’t washed up in these camps was that a hell of a lot of would-be refugees ended up corpses instead. As things were, tens of thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people from at least half a dozen states wound up in Camp Constitution and others like it on the eastern fringe of the supervolcano eruption, and more streamed in every day.

And there were more refugee centers in the West. The biggest-imaginatively tagged Camp Independence-was somewhere near Pasco, Washington. People who’d gone west, young man, instead of east to flee the ash and dust wound up in them. Again, those camps would have been larger if a lot of the folks who tried to get away from the supervolcano hadn’t gone west for good. Fewer refugees squatted in the western camps, because the population in those parts hadn’t been much to begin with.

Vanessa wondered if they could possibly be anywhere near as fucked up as Camp Constitution and the others around here. The FEMA functionaries and National Guard officers with the power to bind and loose in these parts swore they were doing their level best. The really ry thing was, Vanessa believed them.

A Welsh corgi that ran yapping at a rhinoceros was doing its level best, too. That wouldn’t stop it from winding up smeary goop on the bottom of the rhino’s big foot, though. The federal government and the sovereign states of Oklahoma and Arkansas and Texas and Missouri were fighting just as much out of their weight.

No one had looked for cities to spring up out of nowhere around here. There wasn’t enough of, well, anything to take care of the swarms who’d got out of the ash clouds the supervolcano dropped all up and down the USA’s midsection (and Canada’s, too). FEMA had caught and deserved holy hell for the shitty job the organization did when Katrina drowned New Orleans. Next to this, New Orleans looked like a stroll through the park.

Most of the evacuees there had had homes to go back to. Those homes were wrecked, yes, and needed repair and rebuilding. But what were you supposed to do when whole states were wrecked? It wasn’t a question of when people could start rebuilding in Wyoming. The question at the moment was, did anything bigger than a microbe or possibly a windblown bug or two survive in Wyoming? Vanessa had no idea how many people from the Denver metropolitan area had died (neither did anyone else, not to the nearest hundred thousand). She did know she was damn lucky not to be one of them.

FEMA had housed some of the people who’d lived through Katrina in trailers that stank of formaldehyde and had swarms of other things wrong with them, too. Some of those trailers-or some kind of trailers, anyway: trailers that looked old enough and ratty enough to have gone through the aftermath of Katrina-were here at Camp Constitution. Vanessa had seen them.

She didn’t get to stay in one. They counted for luxury housing in these parts. There weren’t enough to go around. (There wasn’t enough of anything to go around.) To rate a trailer, you had to be a family with a bunch of little kids, and there weren’t enough for all of them, either.

Instead, she was under canvas. Back in the day, she’d gone camping a few times. She’d done all the dumb things you do: looked for moss on the north side of a tree, toasted marshmallows over an open fire, slept in a sleeping bag in a day-glo nylon tent that would have horrified every claustrophobe ever hatched.

This wasn’t like that. Vanessa hadn’t dreamt even the circus had tents the size of the one she lived in. Hell, didn’t the circus mostly play in the same arenas that hosted basketball teams and jowly metal bands these days? She thought so, but, since her interest in the circus was only slightly higher than her interest in suicide, she wasn’t sure.

Somebody had run up four-decker bunks inside the tent. Probably somebody from the National Guard: her respect for the competence of the guys in the camo unis had gone up by leaps and bounds since she landed here. FEMA people seemed more interested in explaining why you couldn’t have what you wanted. The Guard got it for you if they possibly could.

She had two inches of foam rubber over a sheet of plywood for a mattress. She bitched about that, but not for long. If she had no shoes, the refugees who came in after her had no feet. Try as the Guardsmen would, they didn’t have enough tents for everyone. They couldn’t build bunks fast enough. They ran out of the mattress pads even sooner than they ran low on tents.

Yes, the mantra of FEMA and the Guard was “We’re doing the best we can.” The Guard meant it. FEMA went through the motions.

Morton mined salt. Somewhere far undrground ran endless tunnels and columns that glistened white when electric light shone on them and were altogether black when it didn’t. (Wasn’t that in Kansas? If it was, the salt biz had as much trouble as everybody else.)

Vanessa had started to suspect that they mined MREs the same way. People swapped them around, trying to get the varieties they found least obnoxious. Vanessa played the game, but more to make the time go by than because she really cared about the relative demerits of MREs.

Making time go by was as big a challenge here as it had been back at good old Garden City High, and for the same reason: no electricity. There were charging stations for cell phones, powered by chugging generators. The line for them was never shorter than two hours, 24/7. Vanessa braved it anyhow.