Houston, 2030: The Year Zero

by Mike McKay

  Chapter 12

  Mark pulled out his telephone and located the right contact. They agreed to meet in fifteen minutes: Mr. Stolz and his family lived three houses down the same cul-de-sac.

  The guests sat at the front deck, around an old glass-top table. The owner quickly went into the house and reappeared with a jug of local beer and four beer mugs. His elder son, seventeen-year-old Arnold, soon joined them at the deck.

  “I guess, we will not be waiting for your twenty-first birthday, boys,” Frederick joked without smile. “Old enough to go to the Army, probably old enough to drink beer.”

  Arnold took the glass and made a tiny sip. Mark always liked this boy. He was serious and reserved, and spent most of his free time reading technical books and inventing various useful contraptions. Mike and Arnold started working at the 'Fill the same year, after Frederick decided to expand his synthetic gasoline plant. Mike often described at home how Arnold solved all these little technical problems around their chemical reactors (or ‘bombs’ as they called them.)

  “Mike told me he got the draft orders too!” Frederick sipped his beer. “What a heck am I going to do now without my Chief Technologist and my Process Engineer? We built this shop from scratch – three of us here. I surely can go to the Day-Pay and hire few new hands, but with the casual labor the things will start falling apart real soon. Our bombs are too tricky to operate and maintain. Without Mike and Arne, I can't look after every roughneck at the plant.”

  Arnold lifted his fingers asking permission to speak. Mark liked this habit too, – Mike never asked prior to offloading his valued opinions on any unsuspecting listener. Arnold's fingertips were black from touching chemicals or metal – the same as Fred's and Mike's. “Marty can be your Process Engineer, Dad. He has been around and understands how the stuff works. Tomorrow, I'll check what he has missed and fill the gaps.” Martin was Fred's second son, studying in the same class as Mark's daughter Pamela.

  “I don't think it's a workable idea, Arne,” Frederick disagreed. “He's only twelve. Helping out on Sundays is one thing, but quitting the school and working full-time? Remember, you started at the age of fifteen. Besides, it's illegal. What we do – hardly qualifies as a safe occupation.”

  “Illegal? Who on our shit-pile ever cares about the laws, Mister Stolz?” Mike said.

  Mark raised his hand: “Don't interject, Mike. Mister Stolz is completely right. Martin needs at least another two-three years of school.”

  He turned to Frederick and continued: “this is exactly what we wanted to talk about, Fred. My Samantha is fourteen, so she can work… legally.” Mark felt like a traitor. He was about to lose his job and was in-hurry to send his daughter to work at the 'Fill. “Certainly, it's a shame she quits the school, but considering… She can study little-by-little in the evening. Arnold and Michael did.”

  Mike nodded, “Sammy can be your Chief Technologist, Mister Stolz. She is pretty good in Chemistry, at least as far as the school Chemistry goes. Arne and I – we leave her good notes. You will teach her the rest in no time.” Unlike Arnold, Mike almost finished his beer.

  “Oh, I didn't even consider this option. Samantha for a Chief Technologist? Great idea! Really! OK, I wouldn't rush the decision. What if Mike takes Samantha to the plant tomorrow? We can see if she likes the equipment, and the equipment likes her. She can work for a week or two before making a full commitment with the school.”

  “Decided, then,” Mark nodded. It went way easier than he imagined.

  “I had a chat with an AFCO officer,” Frederick said. “She leaked they had started a database for the girls. Not your usual volunteers, but for conscription. All the females from fourteen to twenty, she told me: a mandatory registration.”

  “To be expected,” Mark nodded. The rumors had been circulating for over a year that the Pentagon wanted to institute a limited female draft. He thought of the legless Kate Bowen. She had bad luck in the Navy, but at least it had been her own decision to go and serve. It turned out his own daughters would not even have a choice, would they? “Our freaking generals run out of the cannon feed. We're sending our boys all over the world and getting back – cripples. Now – our girls. What kind of strategy is it?”

  “Strategy, you said?” Frederick lifted his mug, “Simple enough: landing the USA in the Year Zero. Remember the book I gave you?”

  “The Year Zero? Like – in Cambodia?” Sure, Mark remembered: a book about the Cambodian revolution. Not a best-seller by any rank. An average American would never touch such a book before the Meltdown. Too gruesome, and no Hollywood happy-end. As for the few documentary-reading intellectuals, such stories would surely raise your hair and make you so happy Marxism was dead.

  Comrade Pol Pot, educated in the Sorbonne, – strangely enough, – as a radio engineer, a lunatic communist. He gave his revolution a catchy name: the Year Zero. No more cities, shops, roads, no more money, no more electricity, computers, or telephones. Even shoes and eyeglasses were declared capitalists' inventions and were banned. The middle-class was to be destroyed. To keep you is no gain, to destroy you is no loss, how Pol Pot put it… The end of Civilization.

  “Exactly like in Cambodia,” Frederick said. “Only, as every political radical, Pol Pot was a fool. He wanted to change everything at once. The Washington approach is way smarter. They want to land America into the Year Zero slowly. Gently. Destroy the American middle class without fuss and unrest.”

  “Nonsense,” Mark said, “Nobody wants to destroy our middle class. Yes, we're facing temporary economic problems, because of the Meltdown…”

  “For the temporary problems, Mark, situation is way too advanced. Look around! Fifteen years ago, our kids wore Nikes and design clothes. Ten years ago, – no-brand jeans from the flea market. Five years ago, – everybody switched to second-hand military uniforms. Now – our kids are barefoot!”

  “It depends on the neighborhood, Fred,” Mark disagreed. What the neighbor was saying was probably applicable to the northern slums, but not in here. “Our kids are not barefoot…”

  With the corner of his eye, he mentioned how Mike quietly moved his unshod feet under the chair. “I admit, the culture is different now, and our kids go with no shoes. Infrequently…”

  OK, ‘infrequently,’ applied only to Mike, William, and Clarice. The post-Meltdown generation – went with no shoes on every occasion. Of course, they did it by choice, not because they were poor! A crazy school fashion, or peer pressure, or ‘No show-offs’ rule, whatever. But all his children had a pair of sandals, and hey, Mary and Mark kept telling the kids to put the bloody sandals on before going out!

  “Tell me, Mark, what physical thing in our life has improved in the last ten years? Honestly?”

  “The inflation!”

  “OK, presumably, twenty-two percent don't look as bad as seventy-eight percent per year right after the Meltdown. But remember, Mark: the inflation isn't ‘physical’, it's a mere mathematical function. A rate of change, or derivative, calculated by some accounting genius. The physical thing, the US Dollar, is getting worse. Lighter and lighter, every month, every day. The inflation rate just says the current decline is not as fast as it used to be. It's like you go skydiving, jump off the plane, and your parachute doesn't open. After a while, you tell yourself: excellent! My speed has stabilized! But in reality, you keep falling. Does it matter, if you hit the ground at one hundred and ten miles per hour or at one hundred and eleven?”

  “The TV surely got better, Mister Stolz,” Mike inserted his valued opinion, as usual, without asking any permission, “I remember, there were one hundred and something channels, and nothing to watch. And now in Houston we have only three channels left, and all three – awesome! The GalvesTube is for the music clips. The inter-state and international news – on the CNN. The SRTV – I personally like the most. They have all the best movie re-runs, with zero commercial
s! You can watch the entire movie like from a DVD, – without being interrupted every five minutes.”

  “OK, I take it, Mike,” Frederick smiled. “Lucky you don't remember our TV before the Meltdown!”

  “On the SRTV news yesterday,” Mark said: “sixty more physicians will be licensed to Harris County this year. Which is twice as many as in 2027. The cancer rates decreased by three percent. You are too bloody pessimistic, Fred: something is improving!”

  “And again, you miss the point, Mark. They tell how many physicians will be added, but do you know how many are retiring this year?”

  “No.”

  “Three hundred and sixty! Mark, you should start doing your reality check. They are telling you: sixty physicians are added. Well. You open the window and look around. We had a GP office at the corner, remember? Two doctors, three nurses.”

  “Right. Now it's closed.”

  “See? It used to be two point four active physicians per every thousand population in Texas. Now it's zero point four-oh-five. The reality check! I keep doing it myself, all the time. The cancer decreased three percent, they say? Sure. If you die from a sniper bullet in Mexico, or from avian flu in Houston, cancer is the least of your worries.”

  “The economy will eventually recover, Mister Stolz,” Mike said, “every economy crisis ends some day.”

  “Not this one. Another beer?”

  “OK, explain.” Mark pushed his nearly-empty mug towards Frederick. Mike made the same motion, but Mark gave his son a stare, and the mug quietly retreated.

  “Mark, do you remember the Cold War?”

  “Vaguely. I was still in my elementary school.”

  “Back then, the strategy was much easier. Here is America, and here is Russia. That is, not Russia, the Soviets. Call it whatever you want, it's all the same. Both countries had plenty of natural resources and made nukes. If you make a lot, your potential enemy shits his pants and spends more money on his own weapons. Bang! In the nineties, the Soviets bit the dust, and we won. What's next? Out of the blue sky, a bunch of terrorists drives airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, so the USA finds itself at war once again.”

  “Are you talking the War on Terror?”

  “The War on Terror! The Nine-Eleven was a set-up! A freaking set-up from the CIA!”

  “This is a bit overboard, Fred. A conspiracy theory, first-class! Do you have any facts?”

  “No facts,” Frederick admitted, “I'm not about the Nine-Eleven itself. Look at the big picture. Remember, what happened after the Nine-Eleven? We immediately went into Afghanistan, but just for a show. The real target – Iraq! Do you remember the Iraq War?”

  “I think so.” Mark was eighteen back then, just started his University, and the war on the other side of the world was not on the list of his worries… He recalled the recent old man, that veteran in the slum… “Was it the Desert Storm?”

  “Storm, my ass! That, Mark, was the first war, when Iraq messed with Kuwait. I'm talking the second, the real war. We wasted there many thousands of our men, and about five to ten times – the locals.”

  “Ah, getting that bin Laden asshole.”

  “And again you missed! In Iraq, they had Saddam Hussein. If Afghanistan had little to do with Osama bin Laden, Iraq – had nothing in common! For your information, bin Laden was popped dead by our Navy SEALs, and not in Iraq, but in Pakistan! Thirty Marines, all it took. Not a war, but a special operation! Thirty men! Just thirty. Can you possibly call this a ‘war’?”

  “I had a different view on the War on Terror.” Mark remembered vaguely all these anti-terrorism briefings regularly conducted within the FBI prior to the Meltdown. After the crisis, the radical Islamic terrorism in the USA disappeared by itself. One could not hijack a passenger plane, – the commercial airlines simply did not fly anymore. Blowing up a skyscraper would not make much news. Strips blew empty buildings every week – all by the plan.

  “Do you want to know why we really got involved in Iraq?”

  “Simple. To help some nice guys, like Dick Cheney, to make their fat retirement packages, that's why.”

  “Oh! That's too! The real reason: our civilization arrived to the Peak Oil. It's not like the oil disappeared overnight, but Saudi Arabia and Russia were unable to increase production. The North Sea, Mexico, Venezuela, and other places – started a natural decline. Iraq, Libya, and Iran – pretty much all the US could get the extra oil from.”

  “I have heard it before. All about oil. I think: just the opposite. We don't have enough oil because of the crisis. The economy recovers, and the oil companies drill more wells.”

  Fred bang his hand on the table. “The economists always say: drill more wells, get more oil! If it was so simple, Mark! How many government energy and resources initiatives can you recall? For example, after you graduated from the Uni?”

  “Let see. First, hydrogen cars. Then, the Program of the Energy Independence and Security came out, even before the GFC. Then, there were ones on the bio-diesel, on the solar energy, on the horticulture. After the Meltdown, – we had a new Presidential program every year. Only they all don't work! Only the Bicycle-2020 was useful.”

  “Yep! You buy a new bike, and the government gives you a discount on taxes, – equal to the price of the bell and the headlight! We would shift to bicycles without any freaking programs. Did we have a choice not to? Right after the Energy Independence came out, everybody-and-his-dog rushed to drill for the shale gas – remember?”

  “Yes. I also remember politicians kept saying America had now secured its gas supply for one hundred years.”

  “Yeah, right! For one hundred years! Yet all professional geologists counted from ten to twenty years – max! We had to drill every seven hundred feet and frac.”

  “Frac?”

  “Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, – is like pumping a mixture of sand and water into a well. Under high pressure. I had just got my Ph.D. and worked for 'Burton – on this very hydraulic fracturing technology thingy. The technical details do not matter, we are talking a big picture here. By 2012, we'd drilled so many wells, the price of gas in the continental US had fallen to almost zero. Two or three dollars per thousand feet. Another beer?”

  Mark waved his hand above the mug refusing the offer. “You can't count like this, Fred. The dollar in 2012 was much stronger than it's now.”

  “If you want to split hairs, multiply by the twenty-years inflation factor. In today's dollars, it's three to five hundred bucks per thousand feet. Ignore the small details, Mark. I'm talking the big picture here, and you keep talking basic math. To make it short, the gas was cheap, and the oil industry collapsed. By 2015, they fired everybody.”

  “That's how the Meltdown began.”

  “Not so! Exactly as the geologists predicted, the shale gas lasted for twenty years. Have you heard about the gas slums?”

  “Those shanty towns around the abandoned gas wells? It was on SRTV last year. Big fire, and many dead.”

  “Exactly. The shale gas well works fine for three or four years, and – the end! Finito! Granted, some residual gas is still bubbling from the ground for many years. In the gas slums, they use what's left. Around their shacks – grow veggies. The only problem, they have no clean water. All the water was spent on the stupid hydraulic fracs and contaminated with nasty chemicals.”

  “Do you say the US Energy Independence and Security had blooped?”

  “Nearly so. The same as any other such ‘programs,’ that rely on rhetoric and not on physics. The tar sands in Canada. Entire Alberta – wasted! Even worse than in our gas slums, Mark! The ethanol! Do you remember how Bush-junior approved the bloody ethanol in 2007?”

  “To mix it with the gas? Sorry: gasoline?”

  “Right! So we ended up planting millions of acres of corn and converting it all into bloody ethanol. Wasted a lot of good land. As if
the scientists and engineers didn't tell everybody the tar sands and the corn ethanol are not natural fuels. They're a mere amplifier!”

  “An amplifier? In what sense?”

  “Simple. You take a barrel of natural oil and convert it into gasoline. Or diesel, does not matter. Plow the land, plant the seeds, and so on. Then, you take six thousand feet of natural gas, and turn them into fertilizer. You need fertilizers, don't you? Collect the corn. Produce two point three barrels of ethanol. What have you done?”

  “What?”

  “You've amplified one barrel of oil and six thousand feet of gas, – which is the same as another barrel of oil, if you consider the energy. From two barrels of oil you made two point three barrels of ethanol. Your gain – fifteen percent! Not counting your hard labor and all the environmental damage you created by your tractor. Fifteen percent, Mark! In exchange for these fifteen percent, you are slowly wasting the land. With the tar sands – the same story. You invest one barrel of real natural oil and one barrel-equivalent of natural gas, and get out three and a half barrels of nasty, heavy, alkaline shite. You can call it ‘oil’ all you want, but it's not what we used to call ‘oil’ here in Texas. For a bonus, you also get a moon landscape instead of the forest.”

  “So, if I got it right, you need to put the oil in before little more stuff comes out?”

  “Exactly! Like in the basic Chemistry. You can't defeat the Mass Preservation Law! After the Meltdown, some farmers tried to save money on fertilizers. Started wasting land – much faster. You know what happened.”

  “The Wasted Patch of Iowa?”

  “Yep. And few, smaller ones, – in the other states.”

  “So you believe the US never recovers after the Meltdown.”

  “Precisely, Mark. It started much earlier: in the nineties! Flint, Michigan. The birthplace of the General Motors. That was the first place, which started its landing into the Year Zero. The automotive industry pulled out, and the city of one hundred and twenty thousand was put on an autopilot. Then: Detroit. The same thing. And all these godforsaken places in the Rust Belt… Or take the hurricane Katrina, in 2005. New Orleans was never fully re-built. Meanwhile, as the US economy crumbled, the Government had no choice, but to tell everybody the situation was improving. They sent our troops to fight for the remaining oil, all over the world. Do you want an example? Only, don't get mad at me for this one: it's a bit personal.”

  “OK, fire away. I have enough beer in me not to be mad at anything.”

  “In Venezuela, some little oil left. The US President finds an excuse and sends there your Billy…”

  “William.”

  “Sorry: your William. To defend our freedom and democracy. Your son honestly exchanges both his arms for few hundred barrels of oil, that's all. Before the Army, did he plan to study medicine?”

  “He did,” Mark nodded, a bit upset. It was the subject he and Mary preferred to avoid in conversations. “Not everything in life can happen as planned…”

  “That's why we have plenty of Salvation Way collectors, but fewer and fewer physicians… OK, back to our oil barrels… Alas, we have to face the reality: William has paid with his injury for mere few hundred barrels of oil. We bring this oil to the United States and make gasoline. Few percent will go to your Police, Fire Departments, and so on. The President's Air Force One needs to refuel once in a while. What about the rest of these barrels? That's right: your Mike and my Arne will fill the tank of their armored vehicle and go fight for our freedom and democracy in some other place that has little oil left. A merry-go-round of sorts: a war for the ability to make war for the ability to make war. Ad infinitum… But: do we have an alternative?”

  “Do we?”

  “The alternative: we can bring all our soldiers home. Stop the wars. Lock the borders. No damn good! In such case, the USA Year Zero will happen not slowly and gently, but rather quickly. Instead of killing people in faraway lands, and bringing their resources into the US, we will start killing each other. We will be at each others' throat – for the last remaining barrel of oil…”

  “We got your point, Fred,” Mark said. “Perhaps, you're right. But enough politics, we got to go. Shall we throw a party for the boys tomorrow?”

  “You bet. And thanks again for my new Chief Technologist…”

  As they returned home, Mike stack his head into the stairs and yelled: “Sammy, what a hell are you up to?”

  “Shut up, Mickey,” Samantha shouted back from upstairs, “we're trying to study in here.” After David-senior and Clarice moved in, both Mark's daughters shared the same bedroom, while Mike and Patrick were in the other. On Saturdays before dinner, the three younger kids had the time officially allocated for their homework.

  “Get down, Sammy, we have news for you,” Mike shouted again.

  “Later, Mickey. I have an assignment for SnE. Due on Monday!”

  “An assignment? For Science and Engineering? Then, you surely must hear this! No jokes, get down at once!”

  A thump of bare feet on the stairs, and Samantha appeared in the living room. “What is it?” She still half-suspected it was a kind of prank Mike loved to play once in a while.

  “Your assignment for SnE has been upgraded to a practical! We've sold you to the 'Fill!”

  Sold you to the 'Fill. How did Mike guess I was so desperate to send Samantha to work?

  “What?” Samantha responded.

  “You will be coming with me tomorrow. I show you how to calculate the chemicals and how to run our bombs. Today – I give you my notes to read. Plenty of Science and tons of Engineering, don't worry.”

  No, it was just paranoia. His son did not suspect anything. “I will write an excuse for the school office, – Pamela can drop it on Monday morning,” Mark said.

  “What? You have decided without me!” Mary screamed from the kitchen, “as I told ya'll: over my cold, dead body!”

  “Nothing has been decided yet,” Mark tried to discharge the situation. “Fred needs somebody to give him a hand through the difficult period. Samantha will work at the 'Fill just for a week or two. Will see how it goes.”

  Yes, will see how it goes. In a week or two, the Butcher kills again. The FBI kicks Mark out, and Samantha – becomes the sole breadwinner in the entire family, not counting William with the red bucket and his freaking Social Optimum.

  “I still don't like the idea,” Mary said, entering the room and waving a serving spoon like a weapon.

  “Calm down, honey,” Mark said. “We've talked it over. It's not unreasonable, under circumstances.” Under circumstances. The brass in Pentagon and goddamn FBI bosses in Washington made these circumstances happen, not him!