Slow Apocalypse (6 page)

When he picked up Addison she looked in back. She raised one eyebrow at him.

“Doing a little shopping?”

“No, I found all this sitting by the side of the road.”

“Neat. Spam?”

“Never know when a case of Spam might come in handy.”

“I’ve never actually eaten Spam.”

“And you probably won’t, unless we have a big earthquake.”

“Ah. Earthquake supplies.” That was really all the explanation needed for a girl who grew up in Southern California.

He spent that evening and into the night surfing the Net.

First he looked for stories about the murder of Colonel Warner. There was nothing. Not in the
Times
, not on CNN, not anywhere. It was such a blank that he began to worry if merely searching for his name might alert someone in a secret government agency. He quickly deleted his search from memory.

It wasn’t hard to find other stories. The oil-well explosions and fires at Ghawar, and in Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Russia was the big story of the day, though it was being reported as if it had just happened. Coordinated terrorist attacks on the oil fields, most likely by Al Qaeda, though Hamas and Hezbollah were suspected, too. The National Guard was on alert, patrolling the oil and natural-gas fields in Texas and Louisiana, and the wells and pipelines in Alaska. The Coast Guard was protecting the offshore platforms in the Gulf of
Mexico. The Royal Navy and the Norwegian Navy were on duty in the North Sea. Firefighting crews from Texas were on their way to or already in place in Saudi and Kuwait.

The stock market had taken its worst three-day beating since 9/11.

There was a story about oil tankers that had gone missing in the Indian Ocean. Some of them had been seen to explode, some of them had simply fallen off the radar. Somali pirates were being blamed, though no one had said how they would make a profit sinking tankers.

The most interesting stuff was on the blogosphere. The online population was confused, suspicious, and angry. As usual.

The same people who figured Arabs weren’t smart enough to fly airplanes into skyscrapers, that the Twin Towers had been brought down by charges placed inside them by their government, naturally thought these oil-well fires were a conspiracy. Who was behind the conspiracy was a matter of some debate, but that it
was
a conspiracy was a given. Ironically, Dave thought, they might not be far from the truth this time.

Other, more rational voices seemed mostly frustrated. They agreed that the terrorism angle was probably a lie, but that left the question of who benefited from this whole business? The obvious suspects—big business, big oil—seemed to be panicking, and hemorrhaging money, from all anyone could tell from the outside.

The insider blogs, opinion pieces from people who might be in a position to know, sounded flat-out frightened. These were government insiders, reporters, policy makers. No one was telling them anything. Whatever was going on, real knowledge of it was the most closely held secret anyone could remember. The top presidential advisors, cabinet secretaries, congressmen heading key committees and their staffs looked like they weren’t getting a lot of sleep. A few had even disappeared and couldn’t be found.

The next morning he opened Quicken and scanned through his financial data. It hadn’t magically improved since the last time he checked. If they were going to have to hunker down, he would want to lay in even more supplies. If they were going to move, he’d want to be as liquid as possible.

There was no point in trying to sell their cars, with gas prices the way they
were. Selling the house in the current market would be a disaster, and it might not move at all, but he could possibly get a loan on it.

The best news was that his family had not yet reached the point where they had maxed out their credit cards. He still had a few thousand of what was to have been their savings in the bank. He had cashed in all their investments to make ends meet, so it was all in low-interest checking. That would come in handy. And the balances on their four platinum cards were low. None of them had a credit limit. He could buy pretty much whatever he thought they might need, and worry about paying for it all later.

An army surplus store in the Valley sold olive drab five-gallon metal jerry cans that might have been left over from World War Two for all he could tell. There was a lot of empty shelf space around the ones they had left, which was eight. He bought them all and earned a dirty look from a guy who came in the store as he was paying for them.

The Target store at Santa Monica and La Brea had sold all their plastic gas containers. He called around to some other stores and found they were out, too. But at another surplus store on Hollywood Boulevard he found another dozen metal containers. He bought them all. Then he found a Shell station on Sunset and got in a line with six cars ahead of him. He killed the engine and waited.

When he got to the pumps he first filled the Escalade. Then he opened the back and started in on the gas cans. As he topped off the third one an attendant approached him. He had bought gas there before and never seen the attendant leave his post behind the counter.

He said, “Sir, we’re asking customers to only fill two containers, plus their gas tank.”

“Why is that? It just makes it inconvenient for me, I’ll have to find another station and wait in line again.”

“I don’t really give a damn.” He looked hassled and frustrated. “It was up to me, I’d sell you all the gas you wanted. But I got a call from the distributor, and he said that’s what we gotta do.” He shrugged. “It won’t matter pretty soon, anyway. I’m gonna be dry in about another hour, and the tanker don’t come by till day after tomorrow.”

“Just one more can?”

“You already done three.”

He was right. Dave could see the people behind him were impatient, so he closed the rear gate and set off in search of more of the precious fluid that he’d taken for granted all his life.

He found a station with only two cars in line and managed to fill the rest of his cans. On the way home he passed a station with a sign out front that said
NO GAS
.

He unloaded the full gas cans and stored them away in the basement.

On the way back to the Valley he did something he had thought about all day. He called up the members of his posse and invited them over for a friendly game of poker.

He didn’t remember who first started using “the posse” when referring to his writing team on
Ants!
It wasn’t all that original, but they all liked it better than “the team,” or “the group.” Who wouldn’t? There were five of them, all but one of them first-timers at working together as a comedy-writing team.

The exception was the oldest, Bob Winston, who had worked on three successful shows before Dave’s, and became a sort of mentor to the rest of them. The sad fact was that Bob was a bit of a burned-out case. He had lost what the rest of them called his comedy mojo, though they would never say it to his face. They respected him, he knew the ropes, how to handle the fickle and demanding higher-ups. Though Dave was the titular leader of the posse, Bob was the father figure, and naturally the one he turned to that day.

It took a little convincing, but Bob agreed to contact the others when Dave told him how important it was. Naturally, Bob assumed it would be about a new project, which he wasn’t all that interested in, being pretty much retired and well-set for life with residuals coming in steadily. He had invested well when he was one of the hottest writers in town. He had a big house in Holmby Hills that backed up on the Los Angeles Country Club, in the same neighborhood as the Playboy Mansion and the Spelling estate.

“Can you give me some notion of what your idea is?” Bob asked.

“It’s not really…” Dave decided it might be easier to assemble everyone if they did think it was a story idea.

“It’s not a comedy,” he said. “More of a continuing drama.”

“Give me a hint. Are we talking
The Sopranos
?
Law and Order
? Or more in the neighborhood of
Lost
?”

“Stranger than that,” Dave said.

Bob promised he’d do his best to get everyone together, Dave’s place, seven o’clock until whenever. Dave hung up and pulled to the curb outside Valley Scooters, which he’d found after a brief Internet search.

He walked down a line of scooters parked on the sidewalk. They were bright and shiny as new pennies, and as colorful as a basket of Easter eggs. A salesman approached him.

“Get ’em while you can,” he said. He was a young, thin guy with tattoos around his neck and a ring in his left eyebrow.

“Selling a lot of these things?”

“I wish I could get two or three hundred more of them every month. But the factories can’t turn them out fast enough. You checked the prices at the pump these days?”

Dave admitted that he had.

“Up another five cents for premium this morning. This one gets eighty miles to the gallon.”

Dave knew he shouldn’t look like he was too eager to buy, but the fact was he’d already decided he was going home with one. Possibly two.

“I live on a hill. Would that be a problem?”

“I wouldn’t recommend this one for climbing hills. Motor’s too small. I’d recommend you move a step or two up in horsepower.” He patted the black vinyl seat of a machine that looked a little heftier. “You don’t take these things on the freeway. Fifty is about right for a top speed, cruising around the city. Take a look at this one over here.”

He took a ride on a white 150cc Vespa LXV 150, and he liked it. He put it on his credit card and then stowed the scooter in the back of the Escalade, where it fit easily.

He went home and did a search on Craigslist, and got lucky. He found another Vespa, this one 90cc, with an asking price of $1,900, just down the hill in West Hollywood. The man he talked to on the phone said it belonged to his partner, who had a new job that was too far away to commute by scooter. Dave told him he’d be there in an hour, stopped by the bank and took a large cash advance on another credit card, pulled into the driveway of a nice little bungalow on Laurel Avenue and quickly concluded the deal. The scooter was a bright pink, and the seller tossed in two deep purple helmets.

The posse gathered in the office for poker that evening. As they got started, most of the chatter was about the sad state of the industry. He knew they all needed work except Bob, and felt a bit guilty knowing that they expected that he would be outlining a new writing project.

They didn’t play for pennies, but it was not a high-stakes game. It cost five dollars to get in, then raises were limited to ten dollars. They had never had a single pot over three hundred dollars. Dave was down about thirty dollars and Bob was the big winner when somebody called for a break.

“You know, Fearless Leader, the poker is fun and all, but we all know you brought us here to talk about a new show. So how about it?”

That was Jenna Donovan, five foot two, flaming red hair she could never keep under control, about a billion freckles. She was the youngest of them, twentysomething moving in on thirty, and she had the most twisted sense of humor of any of them.

“Not a series idea,” he said.

Dennis Rossi frowned at him. “Bob said that’s what was happening.”

“I said I thought so,” Bob said. “Dave didn’t actually say that.” He was the gray eminence, hair gone completely white, a face carved out of reddish granite, chewing on his empty pipe. Dennis was curly-haired and hyperactive. He often went for broke in the poker games, and usually proved just what that expression meant.

Dave decided to treat it like a pitch meeting. They all had plenty of experience with those, trying to sell an idea to executives at a studio. It would start them off on familiar ground, then maybe he could ease them into the notion that it was much more than a story idea.

“It’s not a comedy,” he said.

“Not a problem with me.” That was Roger Weinburger. Where Dennis was always on the verge of an explosion, hurling ideas left and right as he paced and sweated, Roger was calm and quiet. He listened to the rest of them and waited
until they wound down, then tossed out a line that had them all hysterical, a line that almost always ended up in the final, shooting script.

“Say there’s this top secret government laboratory out in the desert somewhere,” he began. “Say…I don’t know, say, Nevada.”

“Area 51,” Bob suggested.

“Let’s call it Area 52.”

He took them through the story as the colonel had told it to him. Then he brought in two new characters: a writer in Hollywood and a former military technical advisor he was working with, hoping to develop a story.

“The writer is dubious about all this,” he said. “But he thinks it’s a good story idea, and when he tells the colonel this the colonel realizes that he’s said too much.”

Confusion on the faces around the table now, but he had their interest.

“The colonel takes the writer to his apartment. Say, it’s in the W on Hollywood and Vine. He uses his computer to access some real-time spy satellites that the public never gets to see, but the colonel is still able to access. He shows the writer that oil wells all over the Middle East and in Russia are burning.”