Ill Wind (29 page)

#

The bus crawled out onto the city streets, avoiding stalled cars and walking people. Two dark-skinned businessmen thumped on the side of the bus as it rolled by. A Volkswagen beetle putted across an intersection ahead of them. Traffic was sporadic enough that Daphne ignored the streetlights, afraid to risk idling the bus’s engine.

Throwing her arms and shoulder into the effort, Daphne wrestled with the steering wheel, fluttering her foot on the gas pedal, trying to keep the vehicle moving by sheer willpower. They crawled out of downtown Oakland and onto the freeway network, easing through intersections and not daring to stop at corners. Occasionally a stalled car blocked one of the lanes. The shoulder looked like a parking lot with abandoned automobiles.

She turned her head to watch them as the bus moved by; she wished she could offer them a hand, but it would be impossible to help all the crowds, all the lives affected by the spreading disaster. She and Jackson couldn’t do everything.

The bus engine popped, as if it had begun missing on one or more cylinders, but Daphne kept driving eastward, away from the city. She squeezed the gip of the steering wheel, adding her own willpower to the engine. Every mile brought them closer.

In a weak attempt to dilute the anxiety and tension, Jackson and the other passengers broke into a few verses of “99 Bottles of Beer,” which degenerated into silliness and nervous laughter. But even the songs faded into a subdued quiet.

Daphne looked up in the bus mirror, seeing
two dozen
glistening or averted eyes, passengers biting their lips, making fists in their laps, gripping the seat backs. They could not pretend this would be another exhilarating day trip. They were leaving their lives and everything they knew behind.

#

About forty miles and two hours later, the battered church bus passed Livermore and exited the freeway onto a narrow road that led into the rural Altamont hills. Daphne expected the bus to die at any moment, but they had escaped from the city. Before long, Oakland would probably burn to the ground in an unchecked firestorm much worse than the fire that had leveled the hilly, rich part of the city a few years earlier.

Their group would be safe out among the windmills.

Daphne coaxed the bus past ugly, out-of-the-way auto wrecking yards and gravel supply lots alongside railroad tracks, which reminded her of the more desolate sections of downtown Oakland. She also saw a sign for the Sandia and Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratories,
government research centers that sat quietly near the foothills. With all the funding they stole from human works projects, Daphne hoped they could come up with a solution to this petroplague crisis.

By now, the engine gasped and burbled, as if every minute would be its last. The passengers had started talking to each other again with relief and excitement. Some of the kids kept their faces plastered to the windows, though the grassy, hilly landscape offered nothing particularly exciting to look at.

Jackson sat up front next to her, staring out the windshield. “It’s
gonna
be okay, Daph,” he said. It sounded like a mantra. He rubbed her shoulder. “We can walk from here if we got to.”

“I know it.”

The bus toiled up the narrow, winding road, filling most of the width of the pavement. Steep dropoffs fell away to her right; the road had no
guard rail
, only a line of drooping barbed wire partway down the slope to fence grazing cattle. They saw few houses.

Daphne turned her entire body at the steering wheel to wrench the bus around a sharp curve. The engine belched and stalled out, but she was able to flutter her foot on the gas pedal, coaxing it back to life for just a few feet more.

Up ahead, a sign said ROAD NARROWS. “Great,” she muttered.

At the crest of the hills, the engine died for good. Momentum carried them forward a few feet more, and Daphne jammed the
gear shift
into neutral. The bus kept rolling until finally gravity helped them along.

 
“We can coast downhill for a while,” she said.

Jackson was grinning. He squeezed her shoulder. “We’ve only got another mile or so anyway. We made it!” He shouted, and the others joined him in the cheer.

As they came out of the shadow of the hills around a corner, the panorama of the Altamont range spread out. The passengers leaned to the left side of the bus, talking among themselves.

The rolling, grass-covered hills seemed to go on forever. Covering the range were thousands and thousands of windmills like a mechanical army, their blades turning in the clean breeze.

Chapter 35

MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT

FROM
:ASSISTANT
TO THE PRESIDENT

FOR SCIENCE, SPACE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY

SUBJECT
:MATERIAL
AFFECTED BY “PETROPLAGUE”

The following list of items has been compiled to help assess the scope of the spreading “petroplague.” Because of the uncertain nature of the microorganism and the varying compositions of many plastic formulations, all or some of these items may be compromised by an attack from the plague.

For a complete discussion of the suspected chemistry and decomposition analysis for 72 representative petroleum-based polymers, please see Appendix F (attached).

Styrofoam cups and packing materials

Food packaging

Vinyl car seats

Shampoo and toiletry bottles

Electrical wire insulation (NOTE: natural rubber seems to be excluded)

Shoe components/soles

Shoelace tips

Automobile gaskets

Plastic plants

Soda straws

Balloons

Pens

Acrylic display cases

Linoleum

Carpet fibers

Polyester clothing

Acrylic coatings

Weather stripping

Magnetic tape substrates

Compact disc substrates

Circuit boards

Some paints and sealants

Computer monitors

Certain components of furniture

Telephone handsets

Medical hypodermic syringes

Eyeglass frames

Soft contact lenses

Chapter 36

Up in the mountains, the house trailer’s old kerosene heater had stopped working. Fumbling in the dimness, Dick Morgret tried a fourth time to light it, without success. He kicked the piece of junk with a rattling metallic clatter,
then
tossed the wooden match stub on the floor. Groggy with sleep, Morgret stumbled around the cramped trailer, trying to remember where he kept the extra blankets.

An early-summer rainstorm swept over the California
mountains,
drenching the Last Chance gas station out in the middle of nowhere. Morgret had awakened shivering on his cot. He listened to raindrops hammering on the metal roof; trickles of water leaked inside, soaking his possessions. He grumbled, but didn’t waste breath on any of his really good obscenities, since no one else was there to hear him.

He yanked one of the ratty quilts from the storage cubicle under the dinette table. The heavy cloth smelled of mildew, but the rest of the trailer had plenty of strong odors to mask it.

As he lay back on the cot, waiting for his body heat to warm the blankets, water dripped through new leaks in the walls. Every inch of insulation had turned to toothpaste, letting water seep in from all corners. Earlier that evening he had tried stuffing rags into the cracks, but then gave up and just draped canvas tarps over the furniture. The whole friggin trailer was falling apart, just like his life. What else was new?

His bed remained cold, as if his body couldn’t spare any heat for the blankets. He’d slept alone for close to sixteen years now. He had buried three wives already and had no interest in making it four. All of them had been beefy and bossy—but sometimes he missed the simple pleasure of someone else making noise in the house, or keeping the bed warm. Now, the only sound he heard as he finally drifted off to sleep was the patter of rain leaking through the widening cracks in his home.

#

By morning the air had cleared. Morgret glanced out the window. The creek winding down from the mountains had swelled from the rainstorm. In the distance, he could see a few wild horses trotting around in the meadows.

He got up, stepped in a puddle of cold water, and sat down on a card-table chair to peel off his soggy, threadbare socks. After using the crapper out back, he shuffled to the two gasoline pumps under the rickety aluminum awning. He had nothing better to do than spend the day waiting for customers who would never come.

Highway 178 wound through the mountains, descending into the great desert basin of dry
lake beds
, military testing ranges, and Death Valley. Morgret hadn’t seen any traffic on the road for two days, and the last car had not stopped by. No traffic, no customers. No customers, no income. No income, nothing to pay off the creditors.

The gas—both regular and unleaded—smelled awful even to him, and worse yet, it wouldn’t burn. Some environmental shit, probably, and that frightened him. If the government found out, he’d probably have to rip out his buried tanks and install new liners. In that case, Morgret would just up and abandon the gas station, leaving it for the crows.

The Oilstar tanker truck had not come up from Bakersfield with his delivery this week—but Morgret had no money to pay the driver anyway, and his credit was as good as wet toilet paper. Morgret wondered if he was liable to the oil company for contaminated gas.

He laid an old newspaper on the seat of his lawn chair to keep his pants from getting wet. The morning remained cool, but he sat in the shade because the air was bound to get warmer and he wouldn’t feel much like moving in an hour or so. Morgret lounged back to watch the world go by.

Except the world wasn’t going by. No traffic. Nothing.

#

Toward midmorning he heard a hollow, clopping sound coming down the road; it took him a moment to recognize the sound of shod horses, not the roaming wild herd. In a moment, three riders came around the curve. They wore canvas panchos dotted with dark splotches from leftover raindrops. All three had long hair; the smallest, youngest-looking man had a thin moustache, but the other two were cleanshaven. Morgret recognized the broad-shouldered Hispanic man on the black stallion at once. Morgret struggled to get up from his folding lawn chair by the time Carlos Bettario rode up to the gas pump.

Years spent outdoors had given Bettario’s skin the look and feel of well-worn leather. He tied his long, pepper-colored hair in a ponytail that hung behind a flat-brimmed Clint Eastwood hat.

They nodded nonchalantly at each other. “Howdy, Carlos,” said Morgret. He looked at the stallion, then at his gas pump. “Fill ‘er up?”

The other two riders, ranch hands he supposed, chuckled. Bettario patted the stallion’s muscular neck, and said without the slightest trace of an accent, “No thank you, sir, I think this one still has a full tank.”

“Just another piss-head who doesn’t want any gas! What brings you down from the dude ranch, Carlos? Inviting me to a church social?”

Bettario owned and operated Rancho Inyo, a popular tourist ranch near Lake Isabella, where the idiot vacationers could pretend to be cowboys. It had made Bettario a rich man.

“Hell, if you had any gasoline, I’d buy every drop. But I don’t expect you’re better than anybody else in the country.” Bettario laughed. “No, I came to rescue you, my friend.”

Morgret scowled at him and sat back down in his creaking chair. How had Bettario known the gas pumps had gone bad? “Rescue me? What are you talking about, Carlos?”

“From the plague, man. What’re you going to do with yourself now? Your station was barely surviving before.” With a gesture of his chin, Bettario indicated the dilapidated house trailer, the sign that still said LAST CHANCE.

Morgret narrowed his eyes. “What plague?”

The ranch hands exchanged glances. Bettario took off his hat. “Man, you must be kidding me! Don’t you watch the news?”

“Gee, Carlos, I must not have paid my cable TV bill for the month. I’ve been thinking about getting one of those two-thousand-dollar satellite antennas—but it wouldn’t do me much good, since I don’t even own a damned television! I ain’t got a newspaper that’s less than a month old.”

Bettario shook his head. “Man, a plague is wiping out all the gas, and now plastic too. People are going nuts. We’re lucky we live up here away from the chaos.” The stallion snorted, as if he disagreed with Bettario’s opinion of ‘lucky.’ “Me, I’m smart enough to realize that we’re going to have to pull together and work our
cojones
off to make it through the first year.”

Morgret squinted at him, but Bettario wasn’t the type to play practical jokes. And it did explain the bad gas, the total lack of traffic, the week-late gas tanker. “So, you’re coming to rescue me, huh?”