There was even electricity. Sometimes. After a fashion. The Energizer Bunny’s proud products were among the most important goods that trickled into Maine north and west of the Interstate during the short summer season when most of the snow melted off most of the roads and the voice of the eighteen-wheeler was heard in the land.
Batteries powered flashlights and lamps. The most popular ones in these parts used LEDs and drew very little power. That stretched the batteries’ effective lives. Batteries also powered music players. Rob was far from the only person who put miles and miles on a bicycle to nowhere to keep an iPod charged. Listening to music from before the eruption reminded him the wider world was still out there. Listening to a shortwave radio did the same thing.
So did the occasional click from the Geiger counter Dick Barber had found wherever the hell Dick came up with such things. Sometimes, when the wind blew from the northwest, the clicks sounded less occasional. The Russians hadn’t used atomic weapons in their war against Kazakhstan and Ukraine. But Kazakh special forces squadrons—Kazakh terrorists, Radio Moscow called them—had infiltrated into Russia and blown up two nuclear power plants. It wasn’t a new Chernobyl (or if it was, the Russians wouldn’t admit it). It did raise the background radiation level.
It also raised Barber’s amusement level. “Of course the Kazakhs will know where the Russians have security problems,” he said. “Their higher-ups went to the university with the Russians’ higher-ups back in the days when the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic were both parts of the same workers’ paradise.”
“Er—right,” Rob said. People like Dick Barber and Rob’s father could talk that way with a straight face. They remembered the Cold War from when they were young. And people like Jim Farrell, most of a generation older still, could talk that way and sound as if it were the most important thing in the world. For much of their lives, the Cold War, who would win it, whether anyone could win it, and the terrible fear it would turn hot, had been the most important thing in the world.
“Want some more cider, Dick?” Lindsey asked. She didn’t fancy Barber’s politics, but she did think he was interesting. And he was her husband’s friend. That tipped the scales toward politeness for her.
“Much obliged,” Barber said. Lindsey poured some for him and some for Rob. The cider was also an import from the south, from a land where the growing season stayed long enough for apples. Barley sometimes grew here, so local beer remained possible.
“You’re not drinking any yourself, babe,” Rob said.
“Don’t feel like it,” Lindsey answered. Rob let an eyebrow climb toward his hairline. Lindsey liked cider fine, thank you very much. But something in her voice warned him not to push it right then. It wasn’t something Dick Barber would have noticed. Rob sure did, though. If you were going to make this husband-and-wife business work, you needed to pick up on stuff like that.
After more gloating about the Russians’ embarrassment and distress, Barber went on his way. Rob turned to Lindsey and asked, “How come you didn’t feel like cider?”
“It’s not a good plan when you’re going to have a baby,” she told him.
He got up and hugged her. Even with the potbellied stove in the apartment, it wasn’t warm. They both wore too many layers to make the hug as enjoyable as it might have been.
“That’s wonderful,” Rob said into her ear. He wasn’t altogether caught by surprise. Any tolerably alert husband notices more about his wife than subtle shifts in her tone of voice. He knows how her calendar runs and when she’s due. He also knows when she’s late, even if he doesn’t say anything about it till she brings it up herself.
This time, she squeezed him. “Now we have to decide where we’re going to move after the kid comes out,” she said.
His jaw dropped. “Oh, yeah? I like it here. If you don’t, you sure did a good job on the coverup. Richard Nixon would be proud.” Nixon was even more before his time than the end of the Cold War, but he prided himself on coming out with weird things every now and then.
To his annoyance, Lindsey barely noticed. “I like it here fine—for us,” she said. “But I want my son or daughter to have some possibilities in life. Possibilities that go further than moose hunter or fur trapper or beer brewer or scavenger.”
“Ooh.” Rob’s mouth twisted. That hit close to home, all right—too close. Lives here, including his own, were catch-as-catch-can. He did whatever he could to help put food on the table. Whenever Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles had a gig, he played. He gave guitar lessons. He hunted. He fished. He’d never ice-fished till he came to Maine, but he sure had now. He chopped wood. He swapped this for that and that for the other thing, hoping he came out ahead more often than not.
As a teacher, Lindsey had more order in her life. What she didn’t have was more money. Maine’s state government ignored the great expanse north and west of the Interstate almost as thoroughly as the Feds did. It concentrated its attention on the part of the state that had some small chance of paying bills rather than just running them up.
With the collapse of cash in this stretch of the country, the local school district had given up trying to collect taxes. Families with kids in school helped keep teachers in food and fuel, and did other things they needed. If they couldn’t or wouldn’t, their kids stopped going, as they would have in the nineteenth century. Even Jim Farrell called the system ugly, but it worked most of the time. The locals had taken care of themselves and helped their neighbors before the eruption. They were more used to it than people in some other places would have been.
One of those other places was the Southern California where Rob Ferguson had grown up. He pointed that out to Lindsey, saying, “Are you sure you want to move? People who live here really belong. It’s not like that in most of the country—I mean, totally not like that.”
His wife stuck out her chin and looked stubborn. “Suppose the baby gets sick or gets hurt. Or you do, or I do. We’re living on borrowed time here. People die every year because they run out of it.”
She wasn’t wrong. In the Guilford clinic, Dr. Bhattacharya did what he could with what he had. He didn’t have much, and seemed to have less every year. The closest hospital was in Dover-Foxcroft, more than ten miles east along the Piscataquis. An ambulance did run during the brief summer. A snowmobile or two were kept alive for the rest of the year. But, for anything this side of the worst emergencies, the hospital was at least two hours away. And it hadn’t been much of a hospital before the supervolcano. Like Dr. Bhattacharya here, its staff did what they could. They couldn’t do enough.
“It’s funny,” Rob said. “For years before the band washed up here, I never had a home. Nothing close to a home except maybe our SUVs. We were on the road all the time. We’d play somewhere, overnight in some cheap motel, and then hop in the Explorers and play somewhere else—two states away, half the time. So I wondered if I’d go stir-crazy when we got stuck in Guilford.” He broke into ersatz Dylan: “Oh, Lord, stuck in Guilford/With the SoCal blues again!”
“Oh, Lord!” Lindsey agreed. Rob winced. She went on, “If you didn’t get stuck here, we wouldn’t’ve met.”
“I know. That’s what I’m saying,” Rob answered. “This is a good place even if it’s the boonies—maybe especially because it’s the boonies. Please, Mr. Custer, I don’t wanna go.”
“But we’re on the ragged edge of civilization two or three months a year,” Lindsey said. “The rest of the time, we’ve fallen over the edge.”
“I know,” Rob said. That he admitted it seemed to surprise her. He continued, “Is that a bug or a feature, though? As long as the rest of the world leaves us alone, aren’t we better off?”