“Excuse me for a minute, please. I don’t use these very often. I have to pull them from that file back there.”
As the banker walked over to the file cabinet, Vanessa realized that, if Bronislav had been planning for a while to steal from her, he might have been lying when he said he liked her story. Somehow, absurdly, that seemed a worse betrayal than all the money he’d siphoned from the B of A.
A few minutes before the bus was supposed to pick up Louise Ferguson and take her to the stop across the street from the Van Slyke Pharmacy, three eighteen-wheelers came down the street. Because their motors were the only ones she could hear, they seemed ridiculously loud. She knew she and everybody else had taken them for granted before the supervolcano blew up, but she couldn’t imagine how. Hadn’t the growling, clanking, stinking monsters driven all the people within half a mile squirrely?
As each truck passed—slowly, to keep from mashing bike-riders and what have you—she peered into its cab. She didn’t think Bronislav Nedic would come back to L.A. any time soon, but you never could tell. She wasn’t all that sure she would recognize him in a truck, either, but, again, you never could tell. So she looked.
Vanessa had dumped a string of boyfriends in her time. She’d never been dumped by one till now. She’d never had her bank account cleaned out by one, either. She’d made more money than Bryce Miller had, but that wasn’t the same thing.
Now she knows how it feels, Louise thought. She’d dumped Colin, but then Teo’d dumped her. Having it done to you left a different feeling from doing it yourself. When you did it, you did it because you were—or at least you hoped you were—heading for a better place. When you were on the receiving end, it felt more as if an earthquake knocked your life higgledy-piggledy.
Louise looked down the street. Where was the damn bus? Her boss would understand if she got in late; Jared mostly rode a bus to the pharmacy himself. But Louise didn’t like it. Living with Colin all those years had left her compulsively punctual. She hated running late, and she hated when anything in her life didn’t run on time.
Which didn’t mean she could do squat about it. Schedule or no schedule, the bus would come when it felt like coming, not when she wanted it to come or expected it to come. Fuel shortages, the breakdowns of an aging fleet, spare-parts shortages, the problems drivers had getting to work on time… Oh, the Retarded Transit District had all kinds of good reasons its buses didn’t always show up when it claimed they would. Louise hated every one of those reasons. That didn’t help, either, of course.
Half an hour late, the bus at last deigned to make an appearance. Instead of hissing open, the door wheezed and creaked. Motors and transmissions weren’t the only parts showing the strain of too much use over too many years.
As she paid her fare, she asked the driver, “What will you guys do when the buses start dying and you can’t fix them any more?”
The Hispanic man looked at her. “Maybe we get stagecoaches—you know, with horses. Or maybe we just pack it in on account of it’s too expensive. Then everybody climbs on a bicycle, hey?”
He was only a driver. He didn’t make transit policy. Louise had to remind herself of that as she sat down. The vinyl or whatever it was that covered the seats was wearing out, too. You could see bits of yellowish foam rubber sticking up through holes and cracks and tears.
The whole damn country was wearing out the same way, with things breaking down and falling apart faster than people could run around and fix them. There’d been worried talk about that even before the supervolcano erupted. Back then, though, the fixer-uppers had just about managed to stay even with the breakdowns. So it had seemed to her, anyway.
Now… The supervolcano had broken so many things and made so many others fall apart, the whole damn human race was scrambling to try to fix things up in its aftermath. And, for all its frantic scrambling, humankind seemed to lose ground every day.
Such cheery thoughts occupied her till the bus shuddered to a stop at the corner of Van Slyke and Reynoso Drive. The pharmacy was already open. Jared’s bus must have shown up closer to the promised time than hers had.
Her boss greeted her with, “Morning, Louise. Have you heard the latest?”
“Nooo,” she said slowly, wondering whether the latest revolved around soccer, Broadway, or some incestuous combination of the two.
It turned out to be none of the above. “The Russians have invaded Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” he said.
“Good God!” Louise said. “Why?”
“Well, I was listening to Radio Moscow on the shortwave this morning”—yes, Jared was the kind of man who would listen to Radio Moscow on the shortwave—“and they said it was to consolidate the historic unity of the region. I’m quoting, you understand.”
“Uh, right,” Louise answered. “What does that really mean? Does it really mean anything at all?”
“I think it means the cold has hit Russia so hard, nothing’s growing there at all,” Jared said. “Ukraine and Kazakhstan are a little better off, so the Russians are grabbing with both hands.”
“That will make everybody love them,” Louise said. She’d grown up loving the Russians that way; like the pharmacist, she was old enough to remember the Cold War. To her grown children, it was as one with World War II and the Battle of Hastings and the Pyramids: something they had to learn about in school that didn’t mean anything in their own lives. Thinking back to Cold War fears, Louise found a brand-new question: “Are they using nukes?”
“They haven’t yet, or nobody’s said they have,” Jared answered. Louise nodded in relief. With several—no one seemed sure just how many—nuclear bombs tossed around in the Mideast, that genie was out of the bottle, dammit. Her boss went on, “But Ukraine and Kazakhstan are both screaming for NATO help.”
NATO, Louise remembered from somewhere, stood for North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Kazakhstan was one hell of a long way from the North Atlantic. Well, so was Ukraine, but it did touch the Black Sea, which was connected to the Mediterranean, which was connected to the North Atlantic.
And the ankle bone’s connected to the leg bone, and the leg bone’s connected to the hip bone, and the hip bone’s connected to the backbone… Louise wasn’t even close to sure she had the old song straight. She also wasn’t even close to sure she had all her marbles right now.
Then something else occurred to her, something that had to do with connections and that made her pretty sure she did. “When they’re yelling for NATO help, that means they’re yelling for American help. What are we doing about it?”
“Last I heard, the Secretary of State told the Russians that attacking independent countries was a big no-no,” Jared answered, which surprised a laugh from Louise. He continued, “The Russians have told the Secretary of State that Washington needs to mind its own business.”
Trying to picture a map in her mind, Louise said, “I wouldn’t want to have to send soldiers to Kazakhstan.”
“Neither would anyone else with all his brains,” Jared said. Louise laughed again—he was on a roll. Then he added, “Some of the commentators are saying they don’t want soldiers. They want us to tell the Russians we’ll shoot missiles at them if they don’t go home and play nice.”
“Urk,” Louise said. If the USA shot missiles at Russia, it wasn’t like shooting at Iran or North Korea. The Russians could shoot back. Oh, could they ever! That was why the Cold War had stayed cold. Both sides could shoot back much too well to take suicidal chances.