Slow Apocalypse (13 page)

“The only way this fire is going to be stopped is to deprive it of fuel. This is done all the time in forest and brush fires, but to my knowledge, it has not been done in a city since the great earthquake and fire of 1906 in San Francisco. There, firemen dynamited whole blocks, turned them into rubble. It was the only way to stop the flames from consuming the whole city, and it worked.

“But try telling that to a homeowner whose house has been selected as one of those to be destroyed so that his neighbors downwind can be saved. I’ve witnessed heartbreaking situations. I’ve witnessed dangerous situations, too. Some few owners have refused to leave, even though it’s obvious that if they stay, they will perish in their own homes. These homes are doomed, from either fire or explosion, but some are reluctant to admit that.”

The scene switched to recorded video of a man standing on a lawn, cradling a shotgun in his arms. Police bullhorns told him to drop his weapon. He gave them the finger. He looked like just an ordinary guy, dressed in a golf shirt and khaki shorts, but he was making his stand. Dave’s heart went out to him, though he knew the man was impeding the firefighters, and he hoped it didn’t end badly. He looked over at Addison, who was transfixed by the sight. He went to her and hugged her, and tried to hug her face to him, but she was reluctant to look away; she kept peeking with one eye.

“This is your last warning. Put down the weapon or we will be forced to remove you.” The guy looked a little uncertain for a moment, but then shook his head. Dave thought he was about to raise his weapon, which would have been certain suicide. There was a series of loud popping noises and the man
jerked a few times and landed on his back. He could feel the dampness of Addison’s tears on his shirt.

But the guy was sitting up. He didn’t reach for his shotgun, lying beside him.

“Rubber bullets,” Dennis said.

“Beanbags. I think the LAPD uses beanbags. He was too far away for a Taser.”

“It’s okay, Addison,” Dave said. “He’s okay.”

“That’s going to hurt like the devil for a few days,” Jenna said. The police hadn’t bothered to handcuff him, they were in too much of a hurry. Two cops simply grabbed him by each arm and pulled him to his feet and dragged him away.

The view switched back to the live camera, and the reporter. He was moving furtively through a hedge. Reporters can sometimes have an inflated sense of their own drama, but Dave had to admit that it was possible the guy would not be welcome where he was going, that stealth might be necessary. Such stealth as could be achieved with bright camera lights shining in his face.

The picture was very jerky as the reporter pushed his way through some dense shrubbery. He fell down once, but scrambled quickly to his feet.

“I’ve been ordered out of this area,” he was whispering. Call it a stage whisper. “But I think you are entitled to see what’s going on, even if it’s not good for the city’s public relations. We’re going to kill the lights here…” The picture got a lot darker.

“We’re switching to night vision now. I don’t know if you can see it, the row of houses across the street from me. From where I’m standing, the fire is behind me, no more than ten or fifteen minutes away at the rate it’s been traveling.”

The picture was now various shades of green, the sort of picture you sometimes saw from reporters embedded in combat units. The houses looked very different, as they were now seeing by infrared light. Dave could see no movement.

There was a distant shout. The entire row of houses exploded in brilliant flashes. Dave could see debris arc into the air and land in the small front yards and the streets.

The wind blowing toward the firestorm quickly swept the dust away, and figures in protective gear ran into the picture. There was the noise of a loud
engine, then another. Moving into the picture from the right were two huge bulldozers. They began to push the rubble away from the street. Streams of water arced into the picture.

“I don’t know if this will do any good,” the reporter was saying. “But the ’dozers seem to be pretty efficient, they’re already moving the stuff into piles of—”

There was a shout, and two police officers hurried up to the camera, which suddenly became very jerky.

“Hey, get your hands off my camera! You can’t do that!”

But they were doing it. Dave didn’t hear anything about them being under arrest, but it was clear the cops meant business. The cameraman stabilized his picture and turned around just in time to capture a nightstick swinging at the lens. The picture went black.

Back in the studio, the anchors were momentarily speechless.

“Well, you saw it yourselves, ladies and gentlemen,” said the female part of the team, Amber Goldman. “Tempers are running high in the danger area ahead of the fire. We’ll try to reestablish contact with our on-the-scene reporter, Arnold Tyler.”

“Guy’s asking for another one of those ‘technical problems,’ ” Dennis said.

“Do you think it will stop the fire, Daddy?”

“Let’s hope they know what they’re doing, honey.”

“All those homes. People’s houses. Where are all those people going to go? I’ll bet there’s hundreds of families that are homeless now.”

More like thousands, Dave figured, but why bring that up?

“I know the city has shelters,” he said.

“If they don’t have enough shelters, maybe we could take in a homeless family. For a while. You know?”

“We’ll see, Addie. Some of those folks will have friends or relatives they would prefer to stay with. I’m sure the Red Cross and the Salvation Army will be there soon.”

“I just want to help.”

“We’ll do what we can.”

Around midnight they all admitted that they were hungry. They had emptied a bowl of trail mix and several cans of soda pop and beer, but they needed
something more substantial. Addison and Dave went into the kitchen to put something together.

Normally he would have fired up the grill and put on some steaks or chicken, but that didn’t feel right to him. A cookout was a festive occasion, and how could they be festive with such a horror just outside the windows? He suggested they keep it simple, and Addison agreed.

That idea happened to jibe well with his current mission of cleaning out the freezer. The power might not be reliable soon. There were about a dozen frozen Costco entrees left. He picked a penne pasta and a kung pao pork and popped them into the microwave.

Addison busied herself with making a salad from the last of their lettuce and tomatoes. There was nothing else to put it in but some seasoned croutons. Fresh produce was getting hard to come by.

Jenna left about two in the morning. Dylan had sacked out on the couch right after dinner. Dave invited Dennis and Ellen to spend the night in the guest room, and they agreed. Addison hurried upstairs to see to fresh towels and toothbrushes. Dave was happy to see her so busy.

Dennis put his wife and child to bed, then came down and joined Dave. Earlier they had listened to the rest of what the president had to say. None of it was good.

The bottom line was, the country was running on fumes, and they should not expect more deliveries of crude oil. Not from other countries, not from Alaska, not from Texas. No more crude, period.

“Ships carrying crude oil to our shores have either gone missing, or are known to have exploded. The bacterium causes the crude oil to expand as it solidifies, and we must assume that the missing tankers split open and went to the bottom of the sea.

“For some time now, we have been pumping oil from our own wells and refining it into gasoline and diesel fuel as quickly as we can. The bacterium does not attack refined petroleum products, only crude oil.

“We have also been tapping into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in Texas and Louisiana and refining that, too.”

“What’s the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?” Dennis wanted to know.

Dave paused the TiVo. He had learned about the SPR during his research on America’s energy resources and consumption.

“They store petroleum in salt domes underground. They hollow the domes
out with water, pump out the salty water, and pump in crude. It’s all along the Gulf Coast, at Baton Rouge and Lake Charles in Louisiana and two little towns in Texas.”

Dave switched the president back on.

“It is that fuel that the nation has been running on for the last few months. There is still some oil in the reserve, but we fear the bacterium will get to it, too. For this reason, I now have to announce even more stringent rationing measures than those the nation is currently struggling under.”

There would be no more gasoline sales to private parties. All gasoline not already in the tanks of private cars was now nationalized. The president then called on the governors of all fifty states to mobilize the National Guard to protect the gas in underground tanks at service stations.

Police were urged to park their cruisers and take up foot and bicycle patrols.

Emergency responders were told to limit vehicle response to the direst emergencies. Again, paramedics were to use bicycles whenever possible, and deliver treatment at the scene.

“That’s gonna ruffle some feathers,” Dennis said.

“No kidding.” It didn’t sound like a good time to have a heart attack.

“What about the fire department?” Dennis gestured to the fire outside. “How many engines you figure are down there working that fire? What happens when they run out of gas?”

Dave looked out once more at the fire. The center, the oil field, was no longer the realm of towering orange flames. Everything flammable in there had burned. But now there were hundreds of pale blue jets shooting into the sky, like the flames of monstrous acetylene torches. At the ends of these jets were billows of white, painted orange by the flames beneath: the liberated hydrogen from down below combining with oxygen in the air to produce water.

It was hard to be sure, but he thought the structure fires hadn’t spread much more to the east in the last few hours. Maybe the fire department was getting a handle on it all, maybe they had managed to establish a perimeter.

But how would they fight future fires without gas for their trucks?

For the next three days they mostly lived in front of the television set. Aside from one trip down the hill, and what he could see from his backyard, Dave’s only information about the world came from the TV and the Internet.

Things were happening almost too fast for anyone to keep up with it all, and stories that might have grabbed headlines in previous months were relegated to one-minute summaries. The regular networks ceased all entertainment programming and went to twenty-four/seven news coverage.

Stock trading had been halted on the day of the presidential assassination attempt. The market had already lost 75 percent of its value by then.

Inflation was a matter not of monthly price increases, but daily. Everyone was trying as hard as they could to rid themselves of paper money, which was rapidly becoming worthless, but few were accepting it. The nation had moved to a barter economy in only a few days. Gold and precious stones were accepted in trade. Food was even better. Water was getting expensive. Gasoline could be had on the black market. Payment in gold, thank you, none of those worthless greenbacks.

The great American economic engine—still the biggest in the world—was shuddering to a stop. All around the country people were finding it difficult to get to work, though there were some surprises. People who had a twenty-mile commute each way often found they could cover that distance on a bicycle in roughly the same time it used to take them in their car, on freeways suddenly almost free of vehicular traffic.

A lot of people found that a twenty-mile bike ride when you are not accustomed to it, even on level ground, was not to be taken lightly. There were heart attacks, and emergency response time was averaging two hours. Morgues became crowded with the bodies of overweight businessmen picked up at the side of the road.

But if you survived the bike ride to your job downtown, you often would find that’s where your troubles really began. The chances were about fifty-fifty
that your job was no longer there. Many professions had become useless, including Dave’s own. There was precious little demand for comedy writers.

Millions of Americans were discovering that what they did for a living was no longer something anyone would pay them to do. Stockbrokers were the obvious example. Bankers came to work, but were told they would have to work without salary until the crisis was over. Many other professions were told the same.

Basically, the entire economic house of paper and electronic impulses in computers came to a standstill while everyone waited to see if the government could somehow prop up the currency.

The insurance industry collapsed overnight. Some of them tried to use almost valueless dollars to pay out on policies covering the neighborhoods from Culver City to Crenshaw, where the fire was finally brought to a halt. The government nationalized the banks, then the insurance industry, and froze all transactions. From day to day announcements came from the Treasury and Commerce Departments, from the Federal Reserve, from the Federal Trade Commission, from any and all agencies charged with keeping the economy rolling. They all added up to very little. We have a plan. We’ll announce details tomorrow.