Slow Apocalypse (14 page)

But by the third day, hardly anyone was listening to the government at all, only to its representatives in uniforms, and then only at the point of a rifle.

Dave didn’t really pay a lot of attention to the economic news. He had nothing in the bank and no investments. He had a mountain of debt that no one was trying to collect. He had spent most of his small hoard of paper money when it began to go south. Technically, he didn’t own the house, but no one seemed likely to come around seeking back payments, and no sheriff was likely to show up to evict them. He owned two worthless vehicles. Other than that, all his wealth was now squirreled away in the basement in the form of food, gas, water, and equipment that he hoped would be useful for survival in hard times.

Because hard times were surely coming.

Soon, the only source of news from abroad was the Internet. And it wasn’t the Internet they were used to. There were gaping holes in it. Some countries took total control of cyberspace and imposed a blackout. Web sites vanished, never to return. A lot of what was left was obviously managed. But the Internet
remained too anarchic for any institution to totally control, and bits and pieces of information that hadn’t been vetted by some government agency intent on preventing panic sometimes filtered out.

There was news of revolutions, violent demonstrations, and widespread panic in the streets of foreign cities. There were bits of video here and there, mostly taken with inconspicuous cell phones and uploaded to transient sites that popped up as quickly as the authorities shut them down.

In many of the former oil-producing countries, anarchy reigned. In countries that imported a large part of their food, hunger was beginning to be felt. Dave saw video of soldiers firing into crowds, of large parts of cities burning, from Cairo to Calcutta.

There was saber rattling in Russia. The new Russian president blamed the West for sabotaging oil fields, and spoke openly of declaring war.

By the end of the first week, it became so hard to get any reliable news from overseas that Dave was unable to confirm reports of a nuclear exchange in the Middle East. Some Web sites said Tehran and Tel Aviv had been bombed, and he saw video of widespread devastation that could easily have been the result of a nuclear weapon. But Israel and Iran both denied it, and showed footage from those cities proving that they still existed. Who could tell if it was old footage? Dave assumed that the people in power, in Washington and London and Tokyo and other world capitals, knew the truth, but they weren’t saying much, and even if they had, no one was believing much.

As predicted, the oil fields in Texas and Oklahoma and Canada and many other places blew up in a string of catastrophes that hopscotched across the continent. Now that there was some forewarning, few of them were as deadly as the one in Los Angeles. Geologists knew where the oil was, and they knew where the people were, so over the next several days there were mass evacuations, sometimes just ahead of the explosions.

What most people hadn’t known was just how much oil there still was underground in the United States and Canada, and in just how many places. Because they had long been importing foreign oil most people had assumed that America had pumped its own resources dry. That was very seldom the case. There was still oil beneath the surface at Titusville, Pennsylvania, where the first American oil well was drilled. Not a lot of it, compared to other places, but enough to come bursting to the surface and make a huge mess.

The worst loss of life was in and around the Midland-Odessa region, the “oil patch” in Texas. The evacuations were in progress when the still-vast deposits of crude beneath the Texas plains erupted to the surface. Fires ignited, many times larger than the Doheny field. Many people were caught on the jammed highways.

Some became so heavily mired in the sticky goo that shot into the air and rained down on them that they couldn’t move their cars, and when they got out, they found they couldn’t even walk. Last time Dave heard of it, the authorities in Texas were still trying to rescue thousands of people stranded in cars that looked like they had been dipped in a tar pit. Then the news reports from Texas and Oklahoma dried up.

Before Texas became a news black hole the towns of Winnie and Freeport blew up. These were the communities that sat over the Big Hill and Bryan Mound salt domes, respectively, two of the repositories of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Both domes were down to about one-quarter of their capacity, but that was enough, when the bug got to them, to create a massive explosion that wiped out the towns. The good news was that both places had been evacuated the day before. Similar explosions happened in the Bayou Choctaw dome below Baton Rouge and West Hackberry under Lake Charles, Louisiana, and the Spindletop area in Beaumont, Texas.

At one point a television station showed a satellite picture of North America taken the day before. Much of the continent appeared to be on fire. That station experienced “technical difficulties” shortly after that, but the image had been captured on thousands of computers and quickly went viral.

The mayor worked with the Red Cross and the Salvation Army in helping find temporary homes for the thousands of displaced. When Addison heard about that, on the fourth day after the fire, it led to their first expedition down off the hill.

Dave debated going on bicycles, but they planned to cover quite a bit of ground and he figured that, while Addison might be able to handle it, he needed a little more exercise before he was ready to ride a bike all day. So they got out the twin Vespas, the white one for him and the pink one for Addison, and he checked her out on hers.

“We’ll go down slowly,” he told her. “You don’t want to ride the brakes, but you have to be careful not to get going too fast.”

“I’ll be careful, Dad.”

They made it down to Sunset without incident.

“This is spooky,” Addison said.

He had to agree with her. That part of Sunset, the strip, was crowded, often jammed, all day long. It was even worse at night, when the trendy clubs came alive with the beautiful people and wannabes. The cars were often bumper-to-bumper, and barely moving.

Today there was nothing. Literally no traffic, not a single automobile to be seen, either being driven or parked at the curb.

But it was not a ghost town. There were people walking. There were far more people on bicycles. They saw one fat, bearded guy in dirty denim with some kind of gang colors on his back, riding a big Harley.

But it continued to be spooky. They drove up to Hollywood Boulevard. Things looked even stranger there. There was not a tourist in sight, and very few people at all. There were no costumed performers in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, whose marquee was dark. Farther down the street, very few shops were open. Nobody seemed interested in going to Ripley’s or the Wax Museum. Frederick’s of Hollywood and all the other stores selling platform boots and outrageous lingerie were all closed.

“Nobody shopping at Whores R Us,” Addison said. “I guess there’s not a lot of pole dancing going on these days.”

Back on Sunset they heard a siren. They saw a gasoline tanker truck approaching. Dave signaled to Addison to pull over to the curb, and they sat there as three vehicles went by. The first was an LAPD motorcycle cop. There was a shotgun lying across his lap. Then came the tanker with a nervous-looking driver. Behind him was a military Hummer carrying five or six National Guardsmen. One stood behind a .50-caliber machine gun. Other weapons were sticking out the windows. They looked ready to shoot at anything. There had been attacks on gas stations.

It was the same story in the Silver Lake neighborhood, a few people walking the streets, some bicycle riders. The streets had become broad pedestrian promenades.

Next was Echo Park, and that was a little different. Echo Park was one of
the older Los Angeles neighborhoods, an easy walk from downtown. At its center was a long lake surrounded by a narrow ring of parkland, a block from Sunset. It used to be almost exclusively Hispanic. There had been a lot of gentrification recently, but there were still plenty of brown faces around. Before the crisis, you would hear a lot of Spanish spoken, and there were tiny carts selling bacon-wrapped hot dogs with sautéed onions and jalapeños, and others with stacks of peeled fruit on ice.

There were no hot-dog vendors that day, but a farmer’s market had been set up in the parking lot of the Walgreens on Sunset.

“Let’s go look, Daddy,” Addison said. They parked and locked their scooters and chained them to a tree.

Dave had no idea where the produce came from, but a lot of it was the sort any self-respecting greengrocer would have tossed in the trash. There was lettuce with brown leaves, apples with blemishes that might or might not have contained worms, sickly-looking onions and squash. The only things that seemed plentiful were oranges, lemons, grapefruit, and limes.

There were a dozen horse-drawn carts that looked like they had been hastily slapped together from cut-down trailers, some of them still painted in U-Haul or Ryder colors. Others were even more primitive, just some plywood nailed together, chicken wire stretched from posts, and automobile wheels welded to axles and bolted to the bottoms.

That market was where they saw their first wood-burning truck. It put all the other improvisations to shame.

It was drawing a crowd. The owner, a small Hispanic man, looked to be in his fifties. He was explaining how it worked, but it was in Spanish.

It was a flatbed, stake-sided Ford. It had led a hard life. The paint was deeply oxidized, and there were dozens of dents in the fenders. There were no bumpers. It looked as if it had sat out under a tree on flat tires for quite a while. It had only one door, on the driver’s side.

On the other side was a thing about the size of a home water heater, welded to the frame of the truck. The bottom was a fifty-five-gallon oil drum. Clamped to the top of that was an inverted aluminum trash can. The bottom of the can had been cut away and replaced with the lid, which was hinged so it could be swung open. Closed, it left a gap of a few inches all around. Near the top of the oil barrel a pipe about four inches wide was welded to a hole in the barrel’s side. Silver galvanized ducting lead away from that hole and made a couple of bends before entering another fifty-five-gallon drum from the top. A similar pipe
emerged from the other side and went to the engine, which had some plumbing that led right into the carburetor.

Most of the welds were sloppy, there were dents here and there where things had obviously been bashed with a hammer until they fit, and there was duct tape all over it. The man who was talking about this was as proud as Henry Ford himself, pleased at the attention, and eager to show off his secrets.

He removed the trash can from the top of the assembly and set it on the ground. He removed the lid, and they could all see it was about half-full of wood chips. It was easy to see that gravity would feed the chips down into a smaller chamber in the oil drum beneath. He called it a
despida la camera
, or something like that, which Dave translated as fire chamber. Suspended beneath the fire chamber was an ordinary, large, stainless-steel mixing bowl with a lot of holes punched in it. On the side of the drum was a crank that, when the man turned it, clanked against the bowl and shook it.

“Para las cenizas,”
the guy said, with a smile.

“Ashes,” Addison said. “I think he said that bowl is for the ashes.”

Dave had forgotten that Addison’s Spanish was much better than his, both from two years of classes and from having a few Hispanic friends in school. And it did look like ashes were falling through the holes in the bowl.

The guy opened the second drum, which was divided into two chambers, both of them filled with wood chips that were rather darker than the chips in the trash can. Addison was concentrating on what he had to say.

“Something like, the gas comes through the pipe and into the filter,” she said. “It…cleans the impurities so it won’t clog the…something.”

He could see that the hot gas produced by burning the wood chips would be forced down through the wood chips on one side, then back up though the other.

“Can you really run a truck on wood?” Addison asked.

“Looks like it.”

In response to urging from the crowd, the man reassembled the contraption. He stuffed a wad of newspaper into a hole, and lit it. In a few minutes wisps of smoke curled out of the top of the trash can. The man turned a crank that seemed to get a flow of air entering the fire chamber, running some kind of blower, but he didn’t keep at it long. It seemed that, once you got it going, it would be self-sustaining. Wood chips would fall from the hopper into the fire chamber on their own.

A second man, much younger, inserted a crank into a slot that hadn’t been
on the truck when it left the Ford factory. The truck was old enough that there were no electronics under the hood.

The younger man turned the crank and the engine coughed, and didn’t catch. With a second crank it coughed again, made a wheezing sound, and then began to turn over smoothly. The whole Rube Goldberg assembly clattered like bedsprings in an earthquake, but it was definitely running.

Everyone around burst into applause.

It wasn’t until he got back home and logged onto the Internet and did a search that Dave fully understood the wood-burning truck.

He hadn’t known that, during World War Two, when gasoline was scarce to unobtainable, over a million vehicles in Europe were powered by wood-burning engines. They were bulky and balky, but they worked. In Denmark, 95 percent of trucks, boats, tractors, and electrical generators were powered that way.

The process was called gasification, and it worked with wood or coal, peat, lignite, or charcoal. Gasoline first has to be turned into a vapor in an engine. An engine will burn coal gas or wood gas as readily as gasoline.

For once, it seemed that FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had been on the ball. They published a sixty-six-page booklet, available for free online, that detailed how to make a gasifier from parts you might find lying around your garage. If not, any hardware store could supply you with what you needed.