“You got that right, Doc,” Pitcavage said. “I just hope the stink comes out of my suit.” Colin hadn’t worried about that. Like most people, he wore more wool than he had before the eruption. It was warmer than the synthetics. But the chief, also in wool, remembered that it also trapped odors better.
Albert stuck his head into the bedroom. “Sorry to bother you, sir,” he said, addressing his words to Chief Pitcavage, “but the first news truck just pulled up.”
Oh, well. The vultures hadn’t taken much longer than usual to start spiraling down to a story. Colin wasn’t sorry the chief had come. Otherwise, he would have had the dubious privilege of enlightening the men and women of the Fourth Estate.
Then Pitcavage said, “I think I’ll duck out the back door. Colin, you can handle the ghouls today.” Colin’s face might have been something-all the cops, Lucy, and even the staid Dr. Ishikawa started laughing. The chief thumped him on the shoulder. “I’m kidding. I really am.”
“You’d better be.” By the way Colin said it, everybody else thought the joke was a hell of a lot funnier than he did. He said it that way because that was how he felt.
“I am. I’m here. I’m stuck with it. I’ll deal with them.” Pitcavage walked out to face the reporters. Christians might have gone to face lions with that same exalted determination. But dealing with the media was more like getting trampled by a herd with mad cow disease. Colin thought so, anyhow. Suddenly, calling the next of kin didn’t seem half bad.
* * *
Oklahoma City reminded Vanessa Ferguson of Schrodinger’s cat. Even the locals seemed unsure about whether their town was dead or alive.
Denver, now, Denver was definitively deceased. Same with Salt Lake City. But both those places were only a few hundred miles from what had been Yellowstone National Park in happier times and was currently the world’s biggest red-hot hole in the ground.
There were something like 1,200 miles between the supervolcano caldera and Oklahoma City. That didn’t mean ashfall hadn’t reached the city. Oh, no. Oklahoma City, in fact, had taken a bigger hit than places like Los Angeles, if not so bad as the towns and farms up in Kansas where Vanessa had been excavating. As with the Kansas prairies, prevailing winds had dumped lots of ash and dust on Oklahoma City’s head.
The eruption had been a while ago. To Vanessa’s way of thinking, Oklahoma City should have picked itself up, dusted itself off-literally and metaphorically-and got on with its life. Maybe it should have, but it hadn’t. Little by little, she started to see why. The countryside was in worse shape than the town.
None of that was her worry, though. She’d made it to Oklahoma City. She’d escaped from the grave-robbing crew that was picking through the mortal remains of Kansas. She’s had as much of that as she could take, and more besides. She wasn’t supposed to be in Oklahoma City right now. She was supposed to be back with the crew. Had she been in the Army, they would have called it going AWOL. She wasn’t in the Army, no matter how hard they tried to make her feel as if she were. As far as she was concerned, she’d informally resigned.
She had cash in the pockets of her jeans, too. Some of it came from what they’d paid her to make like a ghoul. That was a startling wad, at least by pre-eruption standards. It wasn’t as if she’d had anything to spend it on while she was scavenging. Too damn bad the galloping inflation made it worth so much less than it would have been before things hit the fan.
The same sadly held true for the greenbacks she’d come by in unofficial ways. She felt guilty about that private grave-robbing, but not very guilty. It wasn’t as if she were the only one. Oh, no-not even close. Some of the card games the scavengers got into. . That much cash wouldn’t have paid off the national debt, but it sure would have made some Vegas blackjack dealers raise an eyebrow.
So here she was. She could eat for a while. She could stay at a Super 8 motel that seemed pathetically eager to get her business. And she could shop for a clunker at used-car lots whose salesmen made the Super 8 desk clerks seemed stoic by comparison.
“Yes, ma’am, I would be dee-lighted to sell you a vee — hick-le,” said one fellow whose plaid jacket was plainly made from the skin of a particularly gaudy 1970s sofa. And he explained why he would be so dee-lighted, too: “Business ain’t been what you’d call brisk lately.”
“I believe that.” Vanessa tried to sound as cutting as she could-which was saying a good deal. She assumed any and all used-car salesmen were there to shaft her. She waved at the lot. “Your cars are sitting there gathering dust.”
That was the exact truth. Red cars, blue cars, green cars, black cars, white cars? No-they were all grayish brown cars. Some of them showed hints of their original color. None showed more than hints.
“You know how it is, ma’am.” The salesman spread his hands in resigned embarrassment. “We clean ’em off, an’ then we get more wind outa the north or the west. Still an awful lot of that horrible dust.”
He wasn’t wrong. Having spent so long closer to the eruption site than this, Vanessa knew as much. She was damned if she’d admit it, though. Give a salesman an inch and he’d take your wallet. Her mouth twisted into a sneer. “Chances are you don’t clean them because this way you can hide a lot of what’s wrong with them.”
He clasped both hands over his heart, as if he’d just taken a mortal wound. “Now, ma’am, that just ain’t fair. Not even slightly, it ain’t. Let me show you this here Ford. Honest to Pete, it’s as good as the day it was made, or even better.”
“How many recalls has that model been through?” Vanessa retorted, and the salesman looked wounded again.
He tried for a comeback: “That particular vee-hick-le, I happen to know, has been supervolcano-ized.”
Vanessa had never quite made up her mind whether she hated the language of hucksterism worse than the language of bureaucracy or the other way round. She withered the man in the bad jacket with a glance. “Oh, cut the crap, why don’t you? If it’s got a heavy-duty air filter, just say so, for Christ’s sake.”
“I don’t speak of our Lord and Savior that way,” he said stiffly.
“I told you to cut the crap,” Vanessa said. “You need me worse than I need you, but you won’t get me.” She walked off that lot.
Two days later, she found a Toyota a few years newer than the one that had perished in her escape from Denver. The salesman there didn’t speak of Jesus at all. He wore a corduroy coat that hadn’t been stylish for a long time but wasn’t aggressively ugly. The Toyota was more expensive than she liked, but not impossibly so.
“I think we’ve got a deal,” he said at last. “I’ll need to see some ID before we finish the formalities.”
“Here you go.” She showed him her license from Colorado.
He looked at it. “Miz Ferguson, this expired three months ago.”
“Well, so what?” Vanessa said. “If you expect me to go back to Denver and renew it, you’re out of luck.” She didn’t say shit out of luck, and patted herself on the back for her restraint.
He sighed. He might have been showing restraint, too. “I can’t sell a car to anybody with an expired license. The second you drive it onto the street, you’re in violation of the law.” He spread his hands. “You see my problem?”
“I see it, all right. What the hell am I supposed to do about it?” Vanessa’s tone took on a certain edge. She’d traded favors for favors before. She hated herself every time she did it-how could you not? But she wanted wheels. She needed wheels. If she had to do it one more time, maybe she could turn off her mind and not think about it while it was going on. She’d sure tried to do that with Micah Husak. Afterwards? She could worry about that, well, afterwards.
Instead of pulling down the Venetian blinds in his miserable little office, the salesman said, “You wait right here. I’ve got to go talk to my manager.”