Ill Wind (27 page)

She wanted to watch Sysco’s expression turn splotched and livid as she strode to the stairwell, but she did not dare turn around. Her legs shook as she hurried down the echoing concrete steps. Her shoes felt strange, as if they no longer fit right. Great! Her heels would probably dissolve before long.

She left the Surety Insurance headquarters building, doubting she would ever set foot inside again.

Out in the parking lot, she marched onto the hot pavement, forcing herself not to run, ignoring the ache in her calves, giving no thought to the long walk facing her before she reached the safety of home. The world might be falling apart, all right, but she didn’t feel any particular attachment to the old order of things. She could leave it behind with no regrets. Screw them all. It was time to take care of
herself
.

Sitting in the reserved parking space, Al Sysco’s silver Porsche gleamed in the sun. He had owned it less than three months, and he still washed and waxed it every weekend. He had bought it to celebrate stealing her promotion, and she knew it.

She stared at the Porsche. It looked like a snarling metallic insect. Insects were for squashing, weren’t they?

Heather opened her canvas purse and pulled out the nearly full bottle of pastel-pink nail polish. She hated the color, hated nail polish in the first place; she wore it only as part of professional dress in the insurance company. Now she had a better use for it, if the plague didn’t somehow dissolve the enamel first. She twisted off the softening cap and dribbled the enamel in swirls over the driver’s side windshield. Once the nail polish baked a few hours in the hot Arizona sun, Albert “You can call me Al!” Sysco would need an ice pick to get it off.

“You can call me
vindicated
, Al,” she said,
then
set off for home, on foot.

#

Al Sysco fled the Surety Insurance headquarters at seven o’clock that evening. Everyone else had left hours before, but he was in charge. He was the responsible man on the job. The entire day had been hell. The California gasoline plague kept getting worse, showing up in all parts of the world, according to the reports. Industry was in a panic, big cities were in turmoil—and it seemed as if every human being on planet Earth wanted to take it out on him.

Dusk had fallen, and the streetlights stood dark and dead. The power had flickered on and off all afternoon, and Sysco wondered if dissolving electrical insulation would end up starting fires. One more thing for the insurance company to worry about!

Heather Dixon had walked out in the middle of the day, and Al vowed to see her fired as soon as all this was over with—but right now he prayed she would come back.

Stacie was a slow and plodding worker, and Candace was just a trainee. They couldn’t do anything right, and Candace had spent half the day in tears. He had physically shaken her by the shoulders, yelling that they were in a crisis situation, dammit! It didn’t do any good. He could not survive another day like this one. He wished somebody would start solving this plague problem.

He stopped in front of his Porsche, and his mouth dropped open. In the dim light, it looked like a gigantic glob of birdshit had splattered his windshield. He looked closer. “Nail polish! Sweet as an armpit! Gawd!” He tapped it with his nails, but the opaque pink coating could have been electroplated on.

Sick to his stomach, he climbed behind the steering wheel. He just wanted to go home and work his way through every beer in the refrigerator, then start on whatever else he could find in the liquor cabinet.

But when he turned the key in the ignition, his car refused to start.

Chapter 33

Todd moved through Alex Kramer’s empty house, not quite sure what he should do now. He had been here for days, flustered to be in a situation where the plan of action was not obvious, and the most sensible thing seemed to be just sitting tight. He wanted to get off his butt and do something.

Bending down in front of the cold fireplace, Todd riffled through the ashes, pulling out the scorched chunks of Alex’s Prometheus notes. A handful of pages were intact.

Todd paced the floor. It was deceptively calm and peaceful here, but he knew the chaos was growing in the cities, on the clogged freeways.

When he had called the ambulance to report Alex’s suicide, it had taken them five hours to reach the home out in the Marin hills. Todd had yelled at the harried-looking blond man in grimy blue-and-white paramedic uniform, but the man snapped back that only one of their vehicles worked, and that they had answered dozens of calls. The paramedics covered Alex’s body and carried it out to the ambulance, slamming the back doors. The driver pulled out, spraying gravel from the rear
tires
as Todd stood speechless on the porch.

With nothing else to wait for, Todd had left Alex’s house, locking the front door behind him. But when he had tried to drive to Stanford to meet Iris, his Ford pickup broke down after only five miles. He had stared at the ticking, motionless hulk parked on the side of the road, tires wrenched in a sharp angle. He had shaken his head, turned his back, and started the hike back, angry, confused, and afraid. His cowboy boots crunched on the road’s soft shoulder, and not many cars passed him.

What a day!

Letting himself back in through the jimmied laundry-room window, Todd had gone to Alex’s phone and called fifteen emergency road service numbers, finally getting one that told him to wait.

He paced through the house again. He found a set of keys on the dresser in Alex’s bedroom, and with a bright but uncertain thread of hope, he jogged out to the front driveway and climbed into Alex’s pickup. He fiddled with the keys until he found one that fit in the ignition. The starter cranked, but the engine just made grinding, chugging noises.

Todd scowled, but really wasn’t surprised.

Unless he took the horses, he was stuck here, unable to get down to Stanford.
Iris needed to see whatever was left in Alex’s notes—but
riding
down to Stanford?
Even he wasn’t that crazy.

He slept restlessly on Alex’s sofa in the family room, stripping down to his underwear and wrapped in a blanket he found in one of the closets.

 
The next morning, when he picked up the phone to call Oilstar, to yell at the tow service, to talk to Iris, the line was dead. “What the heck?” He slammed the telephone down.

He had promised Iris he would come down to see her as soon as possible, and he always kept his promises. Besides, she had to have those notes. He stewed in the living room, muttering to himself, looking through the glass patio doors,
still
trying to figure out what to do.

He wondered if Iris was worried about him. Her personality made him think of an injured bobcat, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that she was testing him, toying with him. Todd knew he was hardheaded, too, so he might be attracted to her because of her spunk—a challenge?

There were two types of women in the world—those that stood steadfast, and those that jumped from bed to bed. Iris seemed the steadfast type, but if something ever did happen between them, he wasn’t sure if he could put up with the rest of her ways. He sighed. He must be awfully bored to let his mind wander like that!

By midmorning, the power flickered and went out, leaving the house dark, cool, and stuffy. He caught a whiff of stale beer and cheese he had missed before, probably left over from the party. He stepped into the family room and scanned the carpet, but he saw no sign where Iris had spilled her wine.

He looked at a stack of plastic wine glasses on the corner of the bar, saw them sagging under their own weight. Todd touched them with his fingertip, saw his nail make a crescent-shaped indentation. When he lifted his elbow from the padded edge of the bar, the indentation remained smashed, stretched out of shape. The air carried a volatile, oily smell of dissolving plastic.

He stepped away from the bar and turned to go down the hall, stopping in front of the closed door of the “memorial” bedroom where Alex had died. Braving the chill inside himself, Todd opened the door and stepped in. Daylight slanted through the half-opened blinds, glinting on the framed photos of Alex’s family. One of the frames had fallen apart as some sort of plastic binder gave way, and an army photo of Jay lay on the floor among large pieces of broken glass.

Todd scanned the memorabilia again. After the suicide, all the faces seemed more intense now, more sharply defined.
A certificate and medal bearing the name Jay Kramer.
A snapshot of the young girl, Erin, standing by a pony.
Todd had fed her horse Stimpy, ridden the trail that she had loved to explore. He felt he had gotten to know her somehow.

Alex had left the ranch, his life’s work with Prometheus, and now there were only pictures, ribbons, and cold medals—artifacts meaningless to anyone who did not know Alex Kramer.

Todd backed out of the room.

Alex had been a family man, something Todd himself didn’t relate to. Consulting in the oil business, Todd couldn’t afford to put down roots. The women he met expressed no desire to follow him around, to pick up everything on a moment’s notice and move across the world . . . not that he was ready for that baggage yet.

Todd remained close to his parents, and he visited their ranch as often as possible. Ranch hands came and went, but the family would always be there. He wondered how his mom and dad were doing with the spread of the petroplague, but they were basically self-sufficient out on the Wyoming plains.

In the dark refrigerator Todd found leftover party hors d’oeuvres, cheese, stale rabbit-food vegetables, beer, and some open bottles of wine. Some of the plastic wrappers looked wet and runny. He didn’t touch them.

He grabbed some cheese and scraped the rest of the old food into the garbage. He took a can of Coors and drank it down fast, then selected another one for sipping.

Okay. What the heck was he supposed to do now? What was he even doing here?

Part of him wanted to get roaring drunk, to sit on the sofa and listen to some C&W songs on the stereo. But the power was out, and Alex’s music library didn’t have much besides classical stuff anyway. Several radio stations had already dropped off the air, including the one that allegedly played country-western music but spent most of the time yakking instead.

Wiping his hands on his jeans and taking the beer with him, Todd stepped through the sliding patio door and surveyed the backyard. The horses wandered around the corral. Ren whinnied and stepped up to the fence.

Todd didn’t like impossible situations, never had,
never
would. He’d discovered early on that the quicker he figured out a plan of action, the less he’d worry. He ran over his options, and he kept coming up with the same answer

“Time to get the hell out of Dodge,” he muttered.

He tried the phone one last time, and to his astonishment found a static-filled dial tone. He dialed Iris’s number, praying for the phone service to last long enough for her to answer. The phone rang,
then
rang again. He suddenly realized he didn’t know what to say to her. When Iris answered on the fourth ring, the connection was scratchy, intermittent. Her voice had a strange echoing quality.

“Tex! Where are you? I didn’t know the phones were still working. Have you seen what’s happening all around the city?”

“Iris!” he shouted into the phone. “Are you all right?”

“Me?” She seemed shocked that he would ask. “When I go outside I can see smoke in most directions, like fires burning out of control. It’s hard to tell what’s going on. I thought I could just hole up at home, but things are getting worse by the hour. I . . . I need to get out of here. Head east toward the central valley, I think, where there’s a better chance to survive.”

Todd felt another gush of urgency. He had been cut off here at Alex’s, relatively safe, while Iris was in the middle of a potential bonfire. “Can you stay safe for another day?” he interrupted. “I’m at Alex’s house now, but I’m going to ride out on his horses. I’ll come get you. We can travel cross-country together.”

It took a moment, but she answered slowly, with an uncertain humor, “Are you asking me out, Tex?”

“Pick you up at eight,” he said, then paused, “or as soon as I get there.”

Her voice grew more serious. “I’ll believe that when I see it. Security is getting pretty grim about who they let on campus. People are starting to realize how tight the food situation is. Just stay where you are, Todd.”

“People have called me bone-headed before and just plain stubborn. I’ll make my way to Stanford. I promise.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Probably. Just wait for me.”

“Todd!”

He hung up before she could say anything else. Even if he could get Iris to come along with him, he didn’t have a clue where they might go. But he knew it was insane to remain in the city.

Moving with a new sense of determination, glad to have a goal again at last, he rummaged through the house, gathering supplies: first-aid kit, dusty sleeping bags, camping utensils, and dry food from Alex’s cupboard. The last item he packed was the old Smith & Wesson he had found on Alex’s nightstand. In a drawer he found four boxes of ammunition.