So how would those people react when buses dumped loads of new homesteaders on their doorsteps? You could recognize people just out of camps from a mile away. They were the ones with the worst clothes in the world. Polyester? In colors that would gag a K-Mart buyer? A little too big? A little too small? Somebody’d felt good about him- or herself by donating it to help the supervolcano refugees. And the poor, damned refugees had to wear it or go naked. Late-night talk-show hosts had been getting laughs from them for years.
One of these homesteaders, for instance, had on a sweater that looked as if it were made up of ragged vertical stripes of vomit in assorted colors. Once upon a time, someone had designed it. Factories had turned out the style by the thousands, in assorted sizes. Some tasteless fool had bought this one and given it to a friend—or possibly to an enemy. And the recipient had sent it to a camp, where this poor fellow got stuck with wearing it.
The truly scary thing was, he might have pulled something even worse out of a bin.
Two Hispanic kids, a boy maybe four and his sister half his age, stared at everything in Wayne with wide-eyed wonder. They clung to their mother the way a limpet clings to a rock. They’d been born in a refugee camp, Bryce realized. Till the bus ride that brought them here, they’d never known anything else. The outside world was an idea they’d have to get used to a little at a time.
Quietly, Susan said, “Watch what happens. The first time anybody who’s lived here a while has anything stolen, he’ll blame the homesteaders.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Bryce agreed, also quietly. But he also wouldn’t be surprised if the homesteaders did some boosting to get things they didn’t have. The camps were full of that kind of petty—sometimes not so petty—crime. No surprise that they should be; there just wasn’t enough stuff in them to go around.
And he’d spent a lot more time listening to Colin Ferguson tell stories than Susan had. Maybe that had rubbed off on him more than he’d thought while he was doing the listening. Or maybe his wife made a better liberal than he did. It wasn’t against the law to be a conservative in a college town, as long as you did it discreetly and washed your hands afterwards.
But he wasn’t really a conservative, either, at least not one of the Know-Nothing variety that trumpeted out of the elephant’s trunk these days. He was just a cynic. Could you be a cynical liberal? It wasn’t easy.
A man in a nice wool topcoat—plainly not someone newly escaped from a camp—called, “Attention, homesteaders! Attention, homesteaders! Please form a line and follow me to the Wayne city hall. You will receive your homesteading allotments there.”
They queued up with a speed and smoothness that would have impressed Brits, let alone a watching American like Bryce. That, by God, they knew how to do—they had it down solid, in fact. How many times a day for how many years had they lined up for food, for clothes, for complaints, for the chance to charge their cell phones, for everything under the watery sun? Often enough to get really, really good at it: that was plain.
The homesteaders tramped off toward City Hall. Bryce and Susan rode back to their apartment building. The mail was junk—well, junk and a utility bill. The bill would be horrendous, or whatever was worse than horrendous. As soon as they got inside, Bryce locked the dead bolt. He didn’t always bother, but he did it often enough so Susan didn’t call him on it this time. Have to get better about remembering, he told himself. That was definitely cynical. He intended to do it anyhow.
Vanessa Ferguson remembered the days when the post office on Reynoso Drive wasn’t fortified like something in Baghdad’s Green Zone. The post office had been that way for a while now: since long before the supervolcano blew. That she could recall how it had been in less paranoid times only proved she wasn’t getting any younger.
She made sure she did a proper job of chaining her bike to the steel rack outside the building. Then she took the manila envelope from the carrying basket and went into the post office.
Her heart pounded as hard as it had when she discovered Bronislav had ripped her off. It might even be pounding harder now. But this wasn’t rage—it was fear. It wasn’t far from panic.
If this worked, it was also her revenge on the tattooed Serb pig. She had no idea—none!—what she’d ever seen in him. She must have been crazy to let him into her heart, and into her bed. She always felt like that about her ex-boyfriends. She had an extra-strength dose of it this time around.
She had such a dose of it, in fact, that she’d finally finished the story he said he’d been reading when he was really plundering passwords from her laptop. Not only had she finished it, she was going to stick it in the mail. That was why she was here. She’d mail it off. She’d sell it—first try, of course, because it was great. And, when she cashed the check, she’d do a fuck-you dance on the miserable, rotten memory of Bronislav Nedic.
God, this was scary, though! She didn’t think Bronislav could have been more frightened when he fought the Croats and the Bosnians. (She also didn’t think the Croats were Nazis and the Bosnians were al-Qaida clones any more. If Bronislav had thought so, the truth had to be something different.) Yes, part of her was sure the story would sell first time out. But she was… submitting… to… an… editor? What if he was jackass enough not to like it? He’d send it back. She didn’t think she could stand that.
She hoped the line would be short. Hell, she hoped there’d be no line. Then she could get in and get out without spending time worrying about what she was doing. Yes, other people’s bikes were already in the rack, but maybe those belonged to post office employees.
Forlorn hope. It was Saturday morning, the only time she could get here while the post office was open. Saturday morning was the only time most folks could get here. Seven or eight people stood in front of her. Only two windows were open. She’d be here a while.
And she was. When she got to a window at last, she started to explain about the return envelope inside the envelope, and how it would need postage, too. She’d worried about that along with everything else, and hoped the clerk wouldn’t be too big a moron. But the woman smiled and nodded. “Oh, you must be a writer, too,” she said. “A young man who writes comes in here all the time. He sold a story to Playboy not too long ago. Playboy! Isn’t that something?”
“Right.” Vanessa fought the urge to grind her teeth. The damned woman was talking about her own brother. The unfairness of Marshall’s selling stories while she had to nerve herself to finish one and nerve herself all over again to put it in the mail gnawed at her.
She paid for the postage and stuffed the receipt into her purse. When the story sold, she told herself, she could write that little bit off her taxes. Then she almost ran out of there. She didn’t want anything more to do with the perky clerk.
The post office was her last stop for the morning. She could have dropped in at her dad’s house—it was only a few blocks away. She went straight home instead. She didn’t like Kelly, and Kelly didn’t like her, and that was the way that worked. Dad always sided with his new wife, too, which also struck Vanessa as totally unfair. After all, she was his flesh and blood.
And she didn’t see much in Dad’s new flesh and blood, either. Why he wanted another kid when he was as old as he was… Vanessa didn’t get it, not when he already had three. At least Mom’s little boy was an oops. Not Deborah. They’d gone and had her on purpose.