“Dick!” Rob called. “You there, Dick?”
The others going through the narrow strip of trees with him also took up the call. “You there, Dick?” they chorused. If he hadn’t known what he was doing, they might not find him till the snow melted, if it ever did.
No sooner had that thought crossed Rob’s mind than he saw a boiling and heaving in the drift not ten feet ahead of him. Dick Barber stood up, so covered in white that he made a distinctly snowy abominable man.
“It’s alive!” Rob shouted, as if a Hollywood Tesla coil had just activated a monster. Then, while the others rushed toward him, he asked Dick the obvious question: “How the hell are you?”
“Cold. Hungry,” Barber answered. “I don’t think I’m frostbitten anywhere, though. It wasn’t much fun, and I hardly got any sleep. Hey, Dave!”
“Ayuh?” the junk-shop man said in an unwontedly small voice.
“Fuck you.”
“And your granny,” Dave replied, but his heart didn’t seem in it.
“Now I’m going across to Caleb’s Kitchen for some ham and eggs and hot tea,” Barber said. The tea would be nasty; it was brewed from burnt grain and local leaves. But it would be hot. Anyone who’d just spent a night out in the snow was entitled to something hot, by God.
And, by God, Barber had proved his point. The luckless family that froze hadn’t known what to do. No good deed would go unpunished, of course. Since Barber did know how to survive in horrible conditions, he’d have to show other people the tricks. Rob hoped they wouldn’t test their new knowledge the same way he had.
The Great Plains ran a long way west from Wayne, Nebraska. They ran a long way north, too. Bryce Miller was convinced that, with nothing in the way to slow it down, the wind doing its goddamnedest to blow straight through him had got its running start right at Santa Claus’ house.
It wasn’t snowing just this minute, only blowing. He cast a curious eye heavenward, wondering whether he’d see any elves tumbling by up there. But no. Santa must have put rocks in their pockets or something. Nice to know good Saint Nick was up for emergencies.
Nice to know the wind is making your brain freeze up, Bryce thought. Along with half a dozen other shivering people, he waited for the bus to come and take them back to town from the Wayne State campus. The sun shone pale. Even though it shone, the sky was closer to gray than to blue. How many years would it be before real blue skies came back?
However many years that would be, Bryce sure hoped it wouldn’t be too many more before the bus showed up. Otherwise, he would turn into a Brycicle. To his relief, the bus kept its schedule. His breath still smoked inside, but that wasn’t too bad. Compared to what he’d just escaped, it felt like Havana in there.
As he walked from the closest bus stop in Wayne to his apartment building, he did some muttering he couldn’t do once he got there. Susan wasn’t happy, and he didn’t see what to do about it. If she hadn’t been happy with him, he might have figured out some way to make things better. But that wasn’t the problem—not yet, anyhow.
The problem was, no college or university felt itself in dire need of an expert on Frederick II Hohenstaufen and the Holy Roman Empire in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Susan had taught a couple of adjunct courses at Wayne State. She’d taught a little online. She’d written three articles, expanding on chunks of her dissertation. Two had already come out, and the third was in the pipeline.
But she spent too much time staring at the computer monitor and the TV and the apartment walls. Wayne wasn’t like Los Angeles; it didn’t give you piles of things to do when you weren’t productive or just needed to get away from the monitor and the TV and the walls for a little while.
Bryce had got a job. That was why they were here in Wayne. Susan had been so sure she could land one, too. She’d hoped she could land one someplace with a climate better than this one. There weren’t a whole bunch of places with worse ones. There was Maine north of the Interstate, where Rob Ferguson had inexplicably washed up. And there was Minnesota. Shivering, Bryce tried not to think about Minnesota.
He clumped up the stairs to the apartment. If it looked as if he’d stay here a long time, he wanted to buy a house. They were ridiculously cheap by California standards. Well, more people lived, and wanted to live, in California than in Wayne, Nebraska. And the ashfall around here had been worse than in most of California, which didn’t do real-estate prices any favors. Saving on an assistant professor’s pay wasn’t easy, but the only real vice he and Susan had was books. There were plenty of more expensive ones.
“Hey,” Susan said when he walked in.
He went over and gave her a kiss. She squeezed him. No, nothing was wrong between them… yet. She slapped his hand away when he tried to reach under her sweatshirt, but she was smiling when she did it. “What’s new?” he asked.
Too often, she said Nothing in a hopeless way that denied anything in Wayne, Nebraska, could possibly be new—and denied that anyone outside of Wayne, Nebraska, could possibly want a medievalist who’d specialized in the Holy Roman Empire. Today, though, she waved at the TV, which was on CNN. “They’ve finally passed the New Homestead Act,” she said.
“Have they?” Bryce said. “Well, it’s about time, don’t you think?”
“Years past time,” Susan replied. “But it’s Congress and the President, so what can you do?”
“Nothing. Less than nothing.” Politics had been dysfunctional at least as long as Bryce had been alive. It would have taken more than a supervolcano to change that. The President came from one party, but Congress belonged to the other. Whatever the President wanted, Congress hated. Whatever Congress wanted, the President was ready—eager—to veto.
When people proposed marching on Washington and impartially burning down the White House and the Capitol, they sounded less and less as if they were kidding. After a while, even That Yahoo in the White House and the Congresscritters took the hint. The New Homestead Act was some of the result.
That wasn’t its real name, of course. The short version of its real name was “An Act to Facilitate the Resettlement of Lands Adversely Impacted by the Recent Supervolcano Eruption.” The full version of its real name ran for a fat paragraph and had not a punctuation mark anywhere in sight. But the New Homestead Act pretty much described it. It let people gain title to property abandoned after the eruption by settling on it and improving it. That was the gist. The details had caused almost endless wrangling and produced a bill with the heft of a Tom Clancy novel.
“Do you really think it’ll get people out of refugee camps?” Susan asked. Getting people out of camps was touted as the bill’s main benefit. Millions—no one seemed sure just how many millions—of people had been stuck in camps since the supervolcano blew.
Before long, it became obvious that the refugee camps were doing for—or to—the United States what the gulags had done to Stalin’s Soviet Union. They spread the pathologies of the prison system into the wider society. Maybe getting people out of them and onto the land would help turn back the clock. Maybe.
Bryce shrugged. “Mm… some people, I guess,” he said judiciously. “But if you lived in a city or a town before the eruption, how much will you want forty acres and a mule?”
“It’s supposed to help small towns, too,” Susan said. “Those towns we biked through on the way to Ashfall State Park sure could use some help.”
“Yeah. They could.” Bryce couldn’t very well quarrel with that. No one in his right mind could. But… “Those towns were dying on the vine before the eruption. Who knows whether anything will help them? And who knows whether people who’ve been in the camps for years will be good for anything once they get out and have to do stuff on their own again?”