She thanked the God in Whom she didn’t particularly believe they’d given her a room on the sixth floor. When day gave light, she could use stairs to get up and down. If she were on the twenty-sixth, she might go down once but she wouldn’t want to come back up again.
And if she were in an elevator on the way up to or down from the twenty-sixth floor when the lights went out… she’d probably still be in that elevator now. Did the cars have battery-powered emergency lights? She sure hoped so. How long would the lights last? What kind of arrangements were there for evacuating passengers in a power outage? She was glad she could wonder about such fascinating questions in a nice, comfy bed.
How long would the room stay comfy? It was eerily quiet—the fan and the heat were out. Pretty soon, the chill outside would start leaking in; lows for this weekend were expected to be right around zero. Kelly used the light in her phone to go to the closet and grab the spare blankets off the shelf. She piled them on the bed. They weren’t spare any more.
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper. She’d read the poem in some lit course. Well, the bang had already come. It didn’t end the world, but the whimpering aftermath wasn’t much fun. And either her imagination was working overtime or it had already started getting colder in here.
XVI
“Thanks, Marshall,” Colin said to his younger son. He added a one-word editoriaclass="underline" “Adventures.”
“Yeah, well…” Marshall gestured vaguely. “I’m glad for you and Deborah she’s finally getting back. I’m kinda sorry for me, on account of I’ll miss the paydays I’ve got from you.”
“Nice to be loved for myself alone,” Colin said. Marshall laughed. Colin stepped out into the night. Marshall had it easy tonight—Deborah was already asleep. With any luck at all, Marshall could do as he pleased and get paid for it.
Colin tried to remember if he’d driven at night since he’d taken Kelly to the hospital to give birth. A few times in the line of duty, yeah. He’d driven to the station in the wee small hours when Mike Pitcavage killed himself. They’d already had Deborah then. And some other times on police affairs. Not many, though.
He’d have to be extra careful tonight. Too many people forgot any cars remained on the roads. They didn’t bother with lights for their bikes or trikes. If a car encountered one of them before it could stop, he or she would be sorry… but not for long.
He picked his way east along Braxton Bragg Boulevard, heading toward the Harbor Freeway (though more people called it the 110 these days). He hit no stupid cyclists, though he had one near miss. When he got to the onramp, he smiled to himself. He’d faced down the LAPD over a big petroleum shipment right there. But the smile quickly vanished. He’d led San Atanasio’s finest in that caper at Chief Pitcavage’s orders.
He wouldn’t have had to think about any of that if Kelly were flying back to LAX. But the delays for flights were even longer than the ones for train travel. O’Hare had limited flights and limited hours. If it hadn’t been the busiest airport in the country before the grid went down, it wouldn’t be operating at all. Midway wasn’t, along with plenty of other airports back East.
So… Union Station instead of LAX. San Atanasio was only fifteen or twenty minutes from downtown L.A. by car. Amazing how little downtown impinged on the suburb, though. Most of the time, Colin had neither need nor desire to go there. He and Kelly had spent their wedding night at the Bonaventure Hotel. That was the night snow came back to L.A. Since then, he’d been there only a handful of times.
Braxton Bragg ran above the freeway. He sped down the onramp and onto the 110. Before the eruption, you could have found a traffic jam here at any hour of the day or night. You probably wouldn’t have after nine at night, but you could. Now the freeway was nearly empty. Most of the traffic on it was eighteen-wheelers. They hauled supplies from the port at San Pedro to the rest of the Los Angeles area.
Colin wondered whether Bronislav Nedic was making a go of his restaurant in Mobile. If he wasn’t, he might be behind the wheel of one of those growling monsters. That would serve him right.
Once Colin got downtown, he pulled off the 110 and groped his way to the train station. This wasn’t like LAX; he didn’t come here often enough to do things on automatic pilot. That was how he thought of it, anyhow. Bryce would have said you had to be familiar with the rituals. The rituals Bryce was familiar with predated Christianity, but he would claim the principle didn’t change. He might be right, too.
No trouble finding a parking space. The attendant who gave Colin his ticket didn’t seemed surprised to see him; it wasn’t so bad as that. But, as with LAX, it wasn’t what it had been in pre-eruption days, either. In the old days, he thought. One of the divides of the coming world would be the chasm between people who remembered life before the supervolcano blew and those who didn’t. He was and always would be on the wrong side of that divide.
Finding his way around the station didn’t turn out to be too bad. Signs guided him where he needed to go. And it was laid out in a familiar way, with track numbers taking the place of gate numbers at an airport. No, the other way round, he realized. Airports must have learned a lot of their licks from the way train stations worked.
He got to where he was supposed to be twenty minutes before the train was due. He’d built in both travel time and fumbling time. The Navy and the police had taught him not to be late no matter what. Early was acceptable.
Early, here, meant buying a cup of coffee and the skinny little sheet the Los Angeles Times had become and standing around waiting. So he did that. He hoped Marshall was using time back at the house better than he could himself.
He gave the cup back to the guy behind the counter and got his five-dollar deposit refunded. Washing china cost less energy than going through waxed cardboard or styrofoam, and saved the expense of hauling in all those disposable cups. You put out some money to make sure you wouldn’t walk away with the one they gave you, then got it back once you returned the artifact.
There was no deposit for newspapers, but there was a recycling bin right next to the newsstand. The less pulp the Times had to bring in, the better off it was. Colin had just chucked his paper into the bin when the PA announced that Kelly’s train was arriving.
She got off two cars back from where he was standing. When she saw him, she waved and ran and hugged him. “Take me home!” she said. “I am so grubby and so sick of wearing the same clothes! Oh, my God! I mean, I got some new stuff, but still… .”
“On our way,” he said. “We’ll wake Deborah up. When’s Mommy coming home? It’s worse than Are we there yet?—I swear it is.”
“Let me take a shower first. Is there hot water?”
“Yup.” If the power were out here, Colin would have produced hot water for her even if he’d had to chop down one of the trees in the back yard. But the electric lights showed he didn’t need to do that.
“Everybody on the train cheered when we got to country that had more than emergency generators going,” Kelly said. “They cheered like their team just won the Super Bowl. It was bad back there—I mean, bad. They aren’t used to outages the way we are, and it was cold like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Well, you’re finally back, and Deborah’s not the only one who’s glad to see you.” Colin squeezed her hand.
They went outside. It was in the forties, and probably fixing to rain, though it hadn’t started yet. Kelly did a couple of dance steps. “This is wonderful!”