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Authors: Harry Turtledove

Supervolcano: Eruption (36 page)

BOOK: Supervolcano: Eruption
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English as she is spoke
, Colin thought. The Filipina used the twelve-letter endearment as if it meant
guy
. For all he knew, she thought it did. One of these years, maybe it would. He’d heard plenty of other people use it the same way.
“Do you have surveillance video?” he asked her.
“What you say?” she returned: English as it wasn’t spoke.
Colin tried again. “A camera,” he said patiently. “A TV camera.” Was there anybody in the world who didn’t savvy
TV
? Maybe a few luckless natives stuck in the bad reception of the Papua New Guinea mountains. Everyone else bowed down before the great god of the modern age and his holy name.
“Oh. TV!” Yes, the Filipina got that. She pointed up and behind her, to a brushed-aluminum box with a lens at the business end. “Right there.”
“We’ll check that out, ma’am,” Gabe said. “Was the robber wearing a mask?” He had to do a show-and-tell to get across what a mask was. When the clerk understood, she shook her head.
“Something, anyway,” Colin remarked. “Have to find out what the footage looks like. If it shows the perp’s face, and if he’s nasty with that shotgun, maybe we can get one of the TV stations to run it. That’ll help if somebody makes him.” He might—he did—despise TV news, but he wasn’t too proud to use it.
“There you go,” Gabe said. “Maybe it’s the same jerk who blasted that other clerk a while ago.”
“Maybe it is,” Colin agreed. “That’d be good. Well, we’ll see.”
“That motherfucker shoot somebody?” The clerk’s voice rose in understandable horror.
“We’re not sure if it’s the same guy yet,” Colin said.
“You catch him! You put him in jail! You keep him in jail!” she said shrilly. “This not first time we get robbed. Nobody never get caught. What kind stupid motherfuckers work for police, huh?”
Colin would have got pissed off if he hadn’t already figured out she didn’t mean much by the word. Sighing, he answered, “Ma’am, there are smart cops and dumb cops, same as there are at any other kind of work.”
She eyed him. “You smart cop or dumb cop?”
“Probably,” he said. Let her make whatever she wanted of that. Back to business: “Let’s see what the camera picked up.”
After some fiddling with the controls, they played it back and watched it on the monitor next to the now-gutted cash register. It was in color and highly detailed. Colin remembered the black-and-white blurs you got from early-model surveillance cameras. No more. This was plenty good enough to ID the perp—and his shotgun—in court.
He was about eighteen, African American, in a cheap knit watchcap, a hoodie, and jeans. He had earrings and a tattoo on the left side of his neck, just below his ear.
“Damned if I don’t think that’s the same guy,” Gabe said.
“It’s been a while,” Colin answered, but he suspected the sergeant was right.
Whoever he was, the way the robber yelled and waved the shotgun around ought to be plenty to rouse a TV anchorman’s righteous indignation. Colin knew the numbers to call.
Channel 7 sent a gal out to look at the video. “Oh, yes, we can use this,” she said, beaming at Colin and showing off teeth undoubtedly capped. “Do you have a hotline number where people can call if they know something?”
“Sure do.” He wrote it down on the back of one of his cards. Under it, he printed SAN ATANASIO PD HOTLINE. She might not think to turn the card over and remind herself where she’d got it. She didn’t especially look like a dummy, but you never could tell.
“Thanks.” She stuck it in her purse. “Now, what was the name of the liquor store? Where exactly is it? When did the robbery take place? The clerk was a woman?” She could see that on the video, but he didn’t mind if she made sure. By the time she left, they were both pretty well pleased with themselves.
The only trouble was, the footage didn’t run. The big headline on the evening news was that the governor had ordered mandatory statewide rolling blackouts. “We have to conserve energy because less is reaching us due to the impactful nature of the supervolcano eruption,” he declared earnestly.
Just because he’d ordered blackouts and power cutoffs didn’t mean he’d get them right away. Half a dozen different groups—right, left, and center—converged on his mansion, waving picket signs and demanding that he change his mind this instant, if not sooner. A judge way the hell up in Siskiyou County had already issued a preliminary injunction against the blackouts. Colin felt a certain amount of sympathy for him. Siskiyou County was cold and mountainous. Without electricity for several hours a day, it would be colder yet.
And there was a car chase on the Long Beach Freeway. The station had to cover that live—or thought it did, anyway. So the people out there in TVland never got a glimpse of the robber with that shotgun and the tat.
It turned out not to matter. One of the San Atanasio cops took a look at the video and said, “Fuck me if I don’t know that asshole. That’s JerWilliam Ellis. I busted his sorry butt for armed robbery year before last. I didn’t know he was outa juvie.”
“JerWilliam?” Colin said.
“That’s his name. One word, capital
J
, capital
W
,” the cop said. “Don’t ask me why. I just work here. Ask his mama.”
“O-kay.” Colin shrugged. It wasn’t his business. He’d seen plenty of names stranger than that. “Know where he lives?”
“Last I heard, in the projects on Imperial.”
That was north and east of San Atanasio. The big housing projects there had gone up after the 1965 Watts riots, a monument to LBJ’s Great Society. They’d been breeding gangbangers ever since. As projects went, there were plenty of grimmer examples back East. That didn’t make the Imperial Gardens a garden spot.
“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!”
“
Sí
, 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 Orlandoh. 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.
BOOK: Supervolcano: Eruption
11.18Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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