End Times (20 page)

Daphne sat back, stunned, as Floyd placed an urgent hand on hers. “We needed you here, Daphne. And you came to us just when we needed you the most.”

Conflicting emotions struggled for purchase in her mind. She didn’t believe that stabbing a dipstick into the earth in a fit of anger made her blessed, and she still couldn’t understand why Uncle Floyd thought it did. He’d always been so rational, so down-to-earth, that it was hard to understand how he saw divine intervention in a fact as physical as the oil.

But the urgency in his eyes and the weight of his hand made her reconsider. For the first time in her life, she wasn’t a burden: Instead of enduring her mother’s hateful looks and Jim’s sneers, she was being thanked. She was needed. Floyd had said so himself. And as odd as it felt, it also filled her with warmth.

“I guess you’re welcome,” she whispered.

Floyd patted her hand. Sunrise had begun to streak the sky outside the window, striping the horizon with shades of peach marmalade.

“I hope you remember that when we start pumping today—and not just today, but always. This is all here because of you, Daphne. You’re more special than you realize.”

• • •

THE rest of the morning was a flurry of activity as they prepared to start extracting. By the time Daphne joined the rig crew in front of the derrick, her T-shirt was caked in grease and her hair was a damp and tangled mess under her hard hat.

All their hard work over the past few weeks had paid off. The derrick was up, a webbed steel monolith rising ten stories into the sky, with thick pipes running up its center and a flare stack to burn off the excess gases at the very top. It sat atop a squat concrete building that housed the bulk of the machinery, the engines that powered the drilling mechanism and the pumps and flow lines that pushed drilling mud down and brought oil to the surface. Around the rig, a flat square of earth had been stripped of grass and trees, so that the area looked like a baking patch of death against the towering green of the mountain range.

Uncle Floyd stood before the crew, looking solemn. He’d changed out of his usual flannel shirt and Carhartts and donned a suit and bow tie for the occasion, and the Northwestern VP of Global Oil stood mopping his brow next to him.

“I just wanted to say a few words to you all before we start her up,” Uncle Floyd said to the assembled crew. “This is like a dream come true. I’m”—he paused and fumbled in his breast pocket, producing a well-creased sheet of notebook paper—“I’m humbled to help bring such blessings to Carbon County,” he read. “And I wanted to thank all of you so much for busting your tails to make this happen. I want to thank Global Oil and all the good people who work for them, particularly Dale for hiring such a wonderful crew. And I want to thank my niece Daphne for not only being one of the hardest-working members of our team, but for having faith in my crazy notion that there might be oil in this here ground—and for leading our community to this gift like Moses leading the people out of Egypt.”

Daphne felt her coworkers’ eyes on her, and her face went hot.

“But most of all, I want to thank the Lord,” Floyd said. “When we first saw that oil bubbling out of the ground, I knew He had a plan for us. It made me believe—well, even harder than I’ve ever believed before.

“We’re gonna start extracting in just a few minutes, and it’s going to change this town forever. I believe it’s going to make our lives a whole lot better. But I hope one thing about this town never changes: our faith. I know this ain’t common in situations like this, but I hope you’ll pray with me for just a moment here. Let’s all thank God for his blessings, okay?”

He closed his eyes and bent his head, and Daphne followed suit. She listened to the rare silence around the rig, wondering what it felt like to really pray. It seemed to bring the Peytons so much comfort, but to her it seemed as useless as screaming into the sky.

“Thank you,” Uncle Floyd said finally, quietly. The crew shifted and breathed. “And now let’s fire this baby up!”

Dale barked a quick series of orders, and the crew scattered like ants, scurrying around the base of the derrick and positioning themselves to start turning the huge metal wheel that would activate the drilling. Daphne stood with Owen and the rest of the roustabouts near the equipment sheds, ready to grab whatever the floorhands and engineers needed. Excitement swelled in her chest. She’d gotten to know the rig intimately while they were building it, to understand the vast network of pipes and valves and gears that would keep it pumping day and night, but she had still never seen it in action. The rig would usher in a whole new era of prosperity for a town that had desperately needed it—and maybe, in some small way, she was responsible.

“Ready?” Floyd asked Dale.

“Ready!” he shouted.

“Okay.” Floyd addressed the roustabouts. “I want you all to count down from three with me. Are you ready?”

“Ready!” They called. Daphne looked around at their faces, hungry with an emotion she couldn’t quite name. It seemed to swallow the air and charge it with desire, to send waves of commingled hopes and dreams and lusts and needs radiating out into the sky, where they coalesced on a single, massive object: the rig.

Floyd held up three fingers. “Three!” he chanted along with them.

He raised his hand high into the heavens, so it was silhouetted against the brilliant blue sky. He dropped one finger, making a momentary peace sign.

“Two!”

The crew roiled with energy, and Daphne felt their frenzy. This was it—Carbon County was about to change forever.

“One!”
They all screamed together.

For a moment, there was absolute silence. A bird chirped, and then there was a great mechanical clanging and a rush of motors starting up loud as jet engines.

The floorhands scrambled over and around the rig, pulling levers and hoisting pipes and frantically screwing and unscrewing gaskets, and deep in the pit of the rig the machinery began to pump rhythmically, dipping into the ground and emerging with a brief shuddering eruption before plunging back in again.

The roustabouts cheered, and Daphne joined them. The rig was working: drilling deep into the earth and bringing up barrels and barrels worth of rich, black oil. She felt her own face stretch into a smile, her hands come together in applause.

She looked over at Uncle Floyd, but he was staring up at the flare stack, the worry lines between his bushy eyebrows as deep as tire tracks on a muddy road. Why wasn’t he smiling like everyone else?

As she followed his gaze, a sound like a stampede of wild horses ripped through the flare stack, exploding from the top in a fireball of sudden, blistering heat and blinding light.

Plumes of flame erupted from the flare tower, shooting molten fire into the sky and sending a deluge of red-burning natural gas plummeting toward the rig. Uncle Floyd’s face was frozen in horror as thick black smoke swirled through the rain of flames, and Daphne realized with a sick shock what was happening: The pressure of the excess gas was too great for the narrow pipes in the flare stack. All of the gas was trying to shoot up from underground at once, turning what was supposed to be a controlled burn into an unbridled blaze.

Floorhands dropped to the ground at their feet like bombs, racing from the rig one after another, the skin on their faces and arms already blistering from the heat. They crawled away, choking on smoke and gasping for air.

Daphne turned and saw Owen standing openmouthed and enraptured, his eyes glazed over as if the billowing flames had him in a trance. “Come on!” she screamed, taking his hand and dragging him back. He shook his head quickly, seeming to register her for the first time.

“Fire . . .” he said slowly.

“We need to put it out!” she rushed through the knot of roustabouts, grabbing whomever she could. “Purple K’s in the safety shed—let’s go.”

The safety shed was the closest to the derrick, a fire hose thick and heavy as an anaconda coiled on its wall. She grabbed the end, grunting under its weight, and began lugging it toward the blaze. A moment later, she felt the pressure on her shoulders slacken as Owen and the other roustabouts fell into line behind her, grabbing sections of the hose.

Pointing the hose’s tip at the roiling spumes of flame still tumbling from the stack, Daphne released a blast of Purple K, a chemical fire suppressant that filled the air with what looked like a massive cloud of violet cotton candy.

The flames met the Purple K with a hiss and sizzle like a dragon dying. Violet smoke choked the air, and Daphne had to close her eyes against the sudden sting. When she opened them, Owen was dousing the last of the mutant fireball with a final blast of chemicals. Floorhands raced into the rig’s guts, struggling three at a time to turn the huge wheel that would lock the valve into place, choking off the extra output of gas until the flame atop the flare stack burned even and controlled.

Her heart pattered erratically as they began coiling the hose.

“Thanks for saving my ass back there,” Owen murmured, his breath feathering against Daphne’s ear. “I don’t know what came over me, looking into those flames.”

Daphne opened her mouth to respond, to say that he’d looked like he was in a trance, but before the words were out of her mouth Dale was upon them like a hurricane, his hard hat pulled low over his trademark scowl.

“That never should have happened,” he muttered, head close to Floyd’s. “We calculated everything—the velocity, the pressure. There must be way more oil under there than we realized.”

He turned quickly to Daphne, clapping a hand on her shoulder. “Way to save the day, though, kid,” he said. “Today I’m thinking you’re just about the best hire I ever made.”

“Thanks,” she murmured, still not quite processing what had happened. There had been fire, and she’d known what to do, had remembered from their safety training and been the first to act. She’d been able to stop chaos in its tracks.

Floyd joined them, draping an arm over her shoulders. “Well, that was some way to get ’er going, wasn’t it?” His voice was hearty, though the back of his suit was drenched with sweat.

“You can darn well say that again.” Dale shook his head, squinting up at the flickering flame. “I’m just glad nobody was hurt.”

“Well, if you ask me, it’s a good sign—maybe even an omen from God.” Floyd stared wonderingly into the rig’s machinery, a slow smile spreading across his face. “Judging from that little blast, there’s enough oil in this ground to make that flame up there burn for all eternity.”

A gleeful hoot came from the back of the crowd. Someone else took it up, and soon the entire crew was cheering, waving their hands in the air and giving shrill, two-fingered whistles.

Her face black with soot and eyes still stinging from smoke, Daphne joined them.

“WILL that be all, miss?”

Janie looked down at her shopping cart, which was piled high with infant clothes and stuffed animals, soft toys and the most adorable little terrycloth bath hoods shaped like monkeys and frogs.

“I guess so.” She smiled her sunniest smile as the Babies “R” Us cashier began to swipe her items, the numbers on the register going up and up. It was okay for her to keep smiling, she told herself as the numbers went past a hundred, then 130. She had her dad’s credit card, the new gold one that had come in the mail just the other day, and her mom had said to put as much on there as she wanted. Things were different now. They were rich.

The cashier lifted an infant car seat out of the shopping cart, and the number on the register soared to 225. Janie’s smile faltered, then dropped entirely. She loved shopping almost as much as she loved Jesus, but she could swear on His cross she’d never spent that much in one go in her life. It felt wrong to just waltz into the mall and pick up whatever her heart desired, without going around to every dollar store and looking online for a deal first.

But things were changing, just like Pastor Ted said, and her son wouldn’t have to grow up wearing off-brand labels. She put her hand on her belly and felt the warmth of the tiny life growing inside of her, the miniature person she already loved more than anyone else in the world.

“When are you due?” the cashier asked.

“September sixth.” Janie reluctantly looked up from her belly. “Gosh, it’s so soon!”

The cashier smiled sympathetically. “Don’t worry—you’ll be ready.” She nodded at the overflowing bags in Janie’s cart. “And if not, you can always come back.”

“I guess so—it’s a trip, though!”

“You’re not from Cheyenne?” The cashier gently arranged a diaper pail and baby monitor in one of the bags.

“Nope.” Janie shook her head. “I’m, like, three hours away, in Carbon County.”

The cashier froze. “Where they found the oil?”

“Uh-huh—right in our backyard!”

“Oh.” Something cooled in the cashier’s smile, which had been wide as a summer sky just moments before. “That must be nice.” She dropped her eyes and busied herself bagging the final items. “That’ll be four hundred seventy-three forty-nine, please,” she said briskly, not meeting Janie’s eyes.

For a second, Janie thought she’d have to pick her jaw up from the floor. It was more money than she’d ever spent on anything in her life, almost more than she’d even thought it was possible to spend. Her fingers trembled as she reached for the new gold credit card, and she suddenly felt like one of those spoiled, snobby girls on the reality shows, the ones who went throwing Daddy’s money around like it grew on trees and then had tantrums when they didn’t get the car they wanted for their sixteenth birthday.