Susan made a face at him. “You sound like Colin Ferguson, you know? We’ve got to try to put the country back together again.”
“We’ve got to try, sure,” Bryce said. “I think it’s gonna be a while longer before the trying gets anywhere, though.”
“You do talk like Colin Ferguson.” Susan didn’t sound as if she were paying him a compliment.
How much has Vanessa’s old man rubbed off on me? Bryce wondered. It wasn’t that they shared political opinions, because they didn’t. But a cynical view of mankind and its follies… That, yes.
“Well, it doesn’t make me a bad person,” he said after a beat.
“Not too bad a person… I guess.” There, Susan seemed to be giving him as much benefit of the doubt as she could.
The impeccably dressed, impeccably groomed talking head on CNN said, “It is hoped that the passage of the New Homestead Act will assist in the revitalization of eruption-ravaged states such as the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma.”
He didn’t say anything about Colorado or Idaho or Utah, and he really didn’t say anything about Wyoming or Montana. The first three states were years away from being resettled. The western fringe of Montana remained more or less habitable. Nobody would be moving into the rest of it, or into any of Wyoming, for decades if not centuries to come. Big chunks of both those states, along with some of Idaho, had gone off the map in the most literal sense of the words.
“It would be nice to have people in those little towns and on some of the farms,” Susan said.
“Yeah. It would.” Bryce nodded. Things here were just bad. They weren’t terrible—well, except for the weather. Of course, this was the eastern part of the ashfall zone, close to 750 miles from what had been Yellowstone. When you went farther west, things got worse and worse and worse again.
IX
Dr. Stan Birnbaum paused before plunging the novocaine-filled hypodermic into Colin Ferguson’s gum. Kelly’s father was in his mid-sixties, with gray hair, thick glasses, and a scraggly white mustache. He was heading for retirement, but he hadn’t got there yet.
“Don’t worry about a thing,” he said reassuringly. “The building has a backup generator and a very smooth switching system. Even if the power in town goes out in the middle of things, the drill won’t slow down even a little bit.”
Colin cocked an eyebrow at his father-in-law. He very nearly cocked a snook at him, too. “Stan,” he said, “I’d be happier if the drill weren’t going at all. Then I wouldn’t be getting this blinking root canal.” He would have expressed himself in stronger terms, but Stan’s assistant, a pretty young Asian woman, was in the room with them.
“Not going is good. Going fast is good—it doesn’t hurt so much,” the dentist told him. “Going not so fast… Going not so fast is why root canals used to have such a nasty reputation. Now open wide.” With no great enthusiasm, Colin did. He clutched at the arms of the reclining chair as the hypodermic went home. Withdrawing it at last, Stan Birnbaum said, “That wasn’t too bad, was it?”
“Depends which end of the needle you’re on,” Colin answered. His father-in-law chuckled. After a moment, Colin added, “I’ve had worse—I’ll say that.”
“Well, good. I’m a painless dentist—it didn’t hurt me a bit,” Stan said. Colin winced worse than he had when he got the shot. But he’d asked for it with his own crack. The dentist continued, “We’ll give you a little while to get numb now. Come on, Ruby. Let’s see how Mrs. Diaz is doing in room three.”
“Okay, Dr. Stan,” the assistant said. Out they went, leaving Colin alone with his thoughts and with a tongue that seemed more like a bolt of flannel with every passing second.
In due course, Stan Birnbaum reappeared. Dentistry resembled the Navy in its hurry-up-and-wait rhythms. Dr. Birnbaum poked Colin’s gum with a sharp instrument. “Feel anything?” he asked.
“Only pressure—no pain,” Colin answered—he knew the ropes. He’d been on antibiotics long enough that the sore tooth wasn’t so bad, either.
“Let’s get to work, then,” the dentist said. In spite of all the modern technology, it wasn’t what anyone this side of a dedicated masochist would have called fun. Still, Colin had been through plenty of bumpier rides in that chair. Stan Birnbaum knew his business, all right. Colin wouldn’t have expected anything else from Kelly’s father.
When the ordeal was over, Birnbaum gave him his marching orders: chew on the other side, and no strenuous exercise for a day. He also gave him a prescription for more Cleocin and one for Vicodin. “Drugging a cop, are you?” Colin said—thickly, because the left side of his tongue was still disconnected from his brain.
Dr. Birnbaum shrugged. “You don’t have to take them. I’ve known macho guys and recovering addicts who got by on aspirin or ibuprofen. But these are better for pain, and they don’t leave most people too blurry. The way things are nowadays, you’re not likely to go driving while you’re loaded, are you?”
“Nope,” Colin said. Gas was around twenty-five bucks a gallon. The auto industry and all the ones related to it still hadn’t started to recover from the eruption. Their collapse meant more hundreds of thousands out of work—and unable to afford even a motor scooter, never mind the tiny cars Detroit was still haplessly trying to sell. The only person Colin knew of who’d bought new wheels after the supervolcano blew was Vanessa’s boss. The only reason he knew about Nick Gorczany was that Vanessa cussed him every chance she got. It sounded more like After the revolution, we deal with swine like him each time he heard it.
“All right, then. I’ll call you tonight to see how you’re doing.” Stan didn’t do that just because Colin had married Kelly. It was SOP for him. He was a damn good dentist, even if he did say so himself.
The building with the backup generator had a pharmacy on the ground floor. Colin filled both prescriptions there. He washed down one pill from each with a large apple juice. They told you to drink plenty of fluids (what else would you drink? rocks?) when you took Cleocin, and they meant it; the stuff would leave you nauseated for hours if it landed on an empty stomach.
That done, he walked to the bus stop to wait for the ride back to San Atanasio. Dr. Birnbaum’s office was in Torrance, the biggest South Bay city. Kelly had grown up there. Torrance was… less strapped than San Atanasio, anyhow. It boasted the Del Amo mall, which it claimed was the second biggest in the country, after only the Mall of America. Since the Mall of America lay right outside subarctic Minneapolis, odds were pretty good the Del Amo mall was busier these days. Busier didn’t mean busy enough, though.
He waited long enough that the Vicodin had kicked in before the northbound bus showed up. The bus ran late. Once he felt the pill, he cared less than he would have before. It distanced him from annoyance almost as much as it would distance him from pain once the novocaine wore off.
When the bus finally did show up, he climbed aboard and gave the driver six dollars—more thievery. He saw a Torrance police car and two civilian autos on the way back to San Atanasio. A few motor scooters, a Harley, bikes, trikes, pedicabs, skateboards, an honest-to-Pete horsedrawn buggy, Rollerblades… The streets were full of wheels, but they weren’t full of engines. The pace of living had slowed down since the eruption. No one had wanted it to, but it had anyway.
He had to walk several blocks from the closest stop to the police station. Walk he did, hoping it wouldn’t count as strenuous exercise. When he came in, Malik Williams was talking with the desk sergeant. The chief turned toward him and nodded, asking, “How’d it go?”