As if to prove as much, he took a few steps past the KEEP OUT! sign, toward the one that warned of the mines. He hadn’t gone far before something in or near the farmhouse opened up with a stuttering roar. Tracers zipped past overhead, but not too far overhead.
The machine-gun fire stopped. “Get the fuck off my land, bastard!” an amplified voice bellowed. “I won’t shoot to miss next time.”
Maybe he had a generator in or near the farmhouse, even if Vanessa couldn’t hear one chugging. Maybe he just had a battery-powered bullhorn, though batteries were drawing ever closer to their shelf life. Whatever else he had, he had the goddamn machine gun. Vanessa had used firearms often enough. Having the bullets coming in instead of going out was a whole different feeling, though. Fear tasted like a copper penny under her tongue. She didn’t piss herself, but she had to clamp down hard to keep from having that accident.
Merv Saunders didn’t argue with the survivalist or whatever the hell he was. Whatever he was, he had survived. Was he living on stashed food? Did he go out to do some freelance scavenging of his own? Had he somehow kept his livestock alive along with himself and whoever else he had in there?
At the moment, all that was academic. The government-sanctioned scavengers retreated with more speed than dignity. Saunders got on the radio to points farther east. Except for the satellite variety, cell phones didn’t work in these parts. Power remained out through most of the country’s midsection. When it would come back, nobody could even begin to guess.
“Can you call in helicopter gunships?” Vanessa asked eagerly. “Or at least soldiers with mortars and grenades and things?”
The crew boss looked at her. “Have you been eating raw meat again?”
Her ears burned. “We ought to kill that son of a bitch!” she said.
“Go ahead,” Saunders answered. “You first.”
That made her ears flame hotter. Her pistol seemed mighty small potatoes when you set it against the concentrated essence of infantry a machine gun represented. “They can get him on a weapons rap.” Machine guns weren’t legal anywhere that she knew of. Then real inspiration struck: “Or for taxes! I bet he hasn’t paid a dime since the supervolcano went off.”
“And you have?” Saunders inquired.
He was being as difficult as he could. It sure felt that way to Vanessa, anyhow. “No, but I haven’t had any money, either,” she said, which wasn’t provably false. What followed was actually true: “My stupid little credit union’s servers are back in Denver, and they’re dead as King Tut.”
“Denver. That’s right.” He nodded, as if reminding himself. “Not many got out from that far west.”
“Tell me about it.” Vanessa knew how lucky she was to have fled far enough and fast enough. She was as stubborn as she was lucky, too: “Taxes work. That’s what they finally hung on Al Capone, remember.”
“The guy probably figured we were bandits, not I’m-from-the-government-and-I’m-here-to-help-you,” Saunders said. Vanessa inhaled sharply. The gang boss must have psyched out what she was going to say, because he beat her to the punch by continuing, “But if it makes you happy, I’ll pass the suggestion along. Maybe someone in authority will do something about it.”
Fuck off. Get out of my hair. That was what he meant. If she pissed him off badly enough, he could send her back to whatever had replaced the soggy Camp Constitution. If that wasn’t a fate worse than death, you could sure see one from there. She would have done almost anything to keep from ending up in a refugee camp again.
Her mouth twisted. Micah Husak had given her a most unwelcome education about what doing almost anything to get out of something else really meant. If Saunders made it plain her choice was between coming across and going back to a camp. . She’d already had to make that kind of choice twice now. She’d yielded both times, and loathed herself whenever she had to remember. She also would have loathed herself had she chosen the other way; she knew that only too well.
Sometimes you couldn’t win.
Sometimes you couldn’t even play. The scavengers’ boss had shown exactly zero interest in her fair white body. That irked her, too. There weren’t a whole lot of things that didn’t irk Vanessa.
For now, though, unless she really wanted to piss Saunders off, she needed to leave him alone. She could see that. She didn’t like it for hell, but she could see it. With poor grace, she walked away. Dust and volcanic ash that would be dirt one of these years scuffed up under her feet.
IX
A bus up from downtown. The subway out to North Hollywood, which was on the fringes of the Valley. An express bus out to the heart of darkness (actually, in Los Angeles, the Valley was the heart of whiteness). Bryce Miller wondered if he should have taken his car, expensive though that was. Getting out here this way was a royal pain.
He could have used the car this once, yeah. If he had to do it every day. . He shook his head. Not a chance. From San Atanasio to here and back again was about seventy-five miles. Multiply that by Monday through Friday by gas at prices that would have made a European blanch before the eruption by the fact that half the time you couldn’t buy gas at any price at all, and what you got was Not a chance one more time.
If he did end up doing this, he’d have to move to the Valley. He couldn’t afford or manage to drive. For the third time, Not a chance. And this was a Saturday, and he’d left his apartment almost two hours ago, and he still wasn’t where he needed to be. Add four hours of daily commuting to a job and you’d be nutso in nothing flat.
Before the supervolcano went off, he wouldn’t have moved to the Valley on a bet. When you lived in the South Bay, the sea breeze spoiled you. It wasn’t quite perfect Santa Barbara, but it rarely got too hot or too cold. No sea breeze in the Valley; the Santa Monica Mountains blocked it off. Hard freezes during the winter? Temps that went up past 110 in the summertime? If you were a South Bay guy, you didn’t want thing one to do with any of that crap.
But that was before the supervolcano went off. The South Bay hadn’t just got hard freezes; it had got snow. So had the rest of the L.A. basin. And no way in hell any part of the basin would see 110 again any year soon. Hard to imagine you could get nostalgic for sweat, but human nature argued you could miss anything you didn’t have any more.
Christ, there were times he still missed Vanessa. It wasn’t that he wasn’t happier with Susan. In all the time they’d been together, he’d quarreled with her less than he had with Vanessa in a bad month-and they’d had several bad months in a row before she invited him to get lost.
And once in a while he missed her anyway. Part of it, he supposed, was that he hated getting anything wrong. Part of it was that she was the first one he’d fallen for hook, line, and sinker. And she’d fallen for him the same way.
When it was your first time, of course you thought it would last till the end of time. They’d gone to a wedding not long after they got together: a couple of her friends were tying the knot. A high school English teacher of hers who was there had asked them what they were going to do. Bryce remembered that very clearly.
He remembered what he’d answered, too: “We’ll live happily ever after.” And he remembered how that English teacher had laughed her ass off. He’d been pissed. Vanessa had been furious-almost furious enough to make a scene at Jack and Katarina’s reception.
Well, prune-faced Miz What’s-her-name got the last laugh. Happily ever after Bryce and Vanessa did not live. As for Jack and Katarina, they broke up before Vanessa showed Bryce the door. Shit happened. Boy, didn’t it just?
The bus stopped, liberating Bryce from his gloomy maunderings. The doors hissed open. He got off and looked around. If the guy wasn’t here. . Well, that was why God made cell phones-when the power let them work, anyhow. Today, it was on.