Take Gabe Sanchez, for instance. He looked more sorrowful still. “Tell me about it. I’m smoking, like, half as much as I used to. That means I always need the next one twice as bad.” His laugh was singularly-almost plurally-devoid of humor. “The weenies who get on your back for liking the shit at all say you’ll live longer if you smoke less. It sure as hell seems longer-I’ll tell you that.”
“Ready to earn your next pack?” Colin asked, stepping toward the door.
“Way prices are now, that’s about two weeks of work.” Gabe exaggerated, but less than he would have a year earlier, and a lot less than he would have before the eruption. He followed Colin into the station.
Before long, Colin wasn’t so warm as he had been right after he chained his bike to the rack. You couldn’t crank up the heat the way you had in the old days. You also couldn’t roll the AC like nobody’s business on a scorching summer day. That turned out not to be such an enormous issue. The next scorching summer day here after the eruption would be the first.
Supervolcano or no supervolcano, people still robbed banks and liquor stores and even a laundromat. That one croggled Colin. The perp had escaped with over a hundred pounds of quarters in four large sacks.
“What the hell’s he gonna do with all of ’em?” he asked, not at all rhetorically. “You can’t spend ’em more than maybe five bucks at a time. Take your girlfriend out to a fancy restaurant and pay in rolls of quarters, people will talk.”
“Watch out for some dude buying everybody games at the arcade,” Rodney Ellis suggested. The black detective mimed working a joystick.
“There you go,” Colin said. “Makes more sense than anything I thought of.”
“Perp was in his forties, the crime report says,” Gabe pointed out. “So that’s kinda less likely, know what I mean?”
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Rodney answered. “But what did that guy say? You’re only young once, but you can be immature forever.”
Colin thought of Louise, and of her adventures and misadventures with her younger man. But if he told her anything like that, she’d go off the way the hot spot under Yellowstone had. Except in the line of duty, he tried not to talk to her these days.
Back to business. “What are we going to do about this asshole?” he said. “It’s not what you’d call a good description.”
“Wait till he hits the next Stop-and-Rob,” Rodney said. “And if he gets away with quarters again, right after that he’ll show up at the San Atanasio Memorial ER with a double hernia.”
“Everybody’s a comedian,” Colin said, but he and Gabe were both laughing.
It had started raining by the time they went out to lunch in Gabe’s car. The Honda stank of cigarette smoke, but that was better than getting drenched. “You’re gonna have fun riding home tonight,” Gabe remarked.
“Tell me about it,” Colin said gloomily. Poncho or not, he’d get wet. Sighing, he went on, “Once upon a time, it didn’t rain this time of year.”
“Yeah, I know.” Gabe nodded. “We’ll keep saying that till they shovel dirt over us. All the kids too young to remember what it was like back then will think we’re a pathetic bunch of old farts for all the pissing and moaning about the good old days we do.”
“Yup.” Colin contented himself with the one word. The prediction sounded altogether too likely.
“Your wife knows about this shit, right?” Gabe said. “So, how long is the weather supposed to stay fucked up?”
Colin only shrugged. “From what she tells me, nobody can say for sure. Twenty years? fifty? A couple of hundred? A couple of thousand? We all get to find out.” He didn’t say that Kelly feared things would stay bad for the long end of the guesses-estimates, if you wanted the more scientific term. She didn’t think a short cold snap would have put Homo sapiens through such a wringer 75,000 years ago, after Mount Toba went kablooie.
No point passing that on to Gabe. Kelly admitted it was nothing but speculation. If Gabe wanted to think his kids would see the good old climate again, he could. Nobody could prove he was wrong for thinking so. And optimism, like so many other things, came where you found it.
The rain had grown more serious, more sure of itself, while they were eating. They ran to Gabe Sanchez’s car. “Boy, this is fun,” Sanchez said. He pulled out a pack of Camels from his inside jacket pocket and held it up. “You mind?”
“You think I’m gonna tell you what to do here?” Colin said. “I’m rude, but I ain’t that rude, dude.” Gabe lit up and started the car. Colin knew secondhand smoke from one cigarette wouldn’t give him lung cancer. He also knew it would make his clothes-and his skin, too-smell like burnt tobacco. Kelly would wrinkle her nose when he came home tonight. Maybe if he got there ahead of her, showered, and changed into something else. .
“One thing,” Gabe said as he pulled out of the parking lot and onto the street. “South Bay Strangler’s been quiet lately.”
“Probably had to pull overtime at his day job,” Colin answered. For all he knew, it was the exact and literal truth. If he’d known more. . If he’d known more, he would have dropped on the son of a bitch a long time ago.
* * *
The sign was dusty. It could have used a fresh coat of paint. But it was still easy enough to read. KEEP OUT! it said in big red and blue letters on a white background. THIS MEANS YOU! Below that was a line of slightly smaller words: TRESPASSERS WILL BE VIOLATED!
Vanessa Ferguson eyed the sign with something less than enthusiasm. “Nice friendly asshole, wasn’t he?” she remarked.
“Or maybe, isn’t he?” Merv Saunders pointed to the farmhouse in the middle distance. “Somebody might still be holed up in there.”
“I don’t think so!” Vanessa wasn’t shy about talking back to the scavenging crew’s boss. Vanessa had never been shy about talking back to anybody. She’d had a checkered work life and a checkered love life because of it, but she was one of those people who counted costs afterwards, if they counted them at all.
“Do we want to find out?” Ashley Pagliarulo pointed to another sign, maybe fifty feet closer to the farmhouse.
That one showed a black skull and crossbones, with a blunt warning in red below it: ACHTUNG! MINEN! Not DANGER! MINES! No, not that, but auf Deutsch. Vanessa’s lip curled in disgusted scorn. “Neo-Nazi shithead,” she said. “I hope he did cough his worthless lungs out. He deserved it.”
“It’s likely just bullshit,” Saunders said, but he made no move to approach the farmhouse. “And if people are alive in there, we’re supposed to make contact with them no matter what kind of dumbass politics they’ve got.”
No one was supposed to be living in this part of Kansas. The mandatory evacuation order had gone out soon after the supervolcano erupted. Vanessa had been stripping farms and little towns of whatever might prove useful to survivors for months now, her team steadily working its way deeper into the ruined state. She’d helped bury more bodies than she cared to remember. That was one reason her palms were hard with callus. As for livestock carcasses. . No point even trying to count those. The scavengers didn’t try to put them underground.
She did wonder what the country could do for meat with so many of its cows and sheep and pigs and chickens as one with the extinct animals that had died in earlier eruptions and fossilized. One of these millions of years, funny-looking archaeologists digging up ash-covered cattle ranches might write learned papers about what they found.
In the meantime. . “I’d just as soon go on to the next place down the road,” Vanessa said. “I don’t care if we are supposed to make contact with people. If they don’t want to make contact with us, the hell with ’em.”
Several of her comrades in vulturing nodded. Saunders frowned, though. “We are supposed to get in touch with them, assuming they’re alive.”
“Harder if they’re not,” Vanessa agreed sweetly.
He gave her a dirty look. “I don’t think it’s real likely that they are, though,” he said, as if she hadn’t opened her mouth. “I think the chances are that that sign is a bluff, too, or was a bluff when there were people here.”