Ill Wind

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Francis Plerry, her contact at EPI, answered the phone; Iris launched into her rehearsed speech before he could hang up on her.

  “I’ve been waiting for you to return my calls, Mr. Plerry. I called five times yesterday. I have some information regarding the spread of the Prometheus plague and how it is attacking plastics.” She sat down on her double bed, pulling the phone after her, calmed now that she could finally speak to someone. “I need to be put in touch with the other research teams addressing the issue. Have you even established other teams?”

  “Miss Shikozu,” Plerry said, “I received your messages, and I’m sorry I haven’t gotten back to you. This place has been a zoo since rumors of the plague started. Er… I’m sure you understand that a lot of these people don’t want to talk to you.”

  Iris felt like he had slapped her in the face. “No, I don’t understand that at all. Why wouldn’t they want to talk to me?”

  “Well…” Plerry sounded flustered. “You were the one who inspected the Prometheus microorganism and deemed it safe. Obviously, few people are interested in your theories after you so grossly misinterpreted the data.”

  “That’s bullshit, Plerry! Dr. Kramer gave me a bogus control sample to analyze, then sprayed something completely different on the oil spill—”

  Plerry kept right on talking. “—there may actually be certain charges of criminal negligence and endangerment of public health when all this blows over.”

  Iris rolled her eyes. When all this blows over? Right! Todd Severyn had Plerry pegged from his first impression: this guy is out of touch with reality.

  “Yeah, Plerry, we’ll talk about that later. For now I’ve got some information for the other teams. The Centers for Disease Control, the NIH, the Department of Defense, and the petroleum industry all better throw their research muscle into this.”

  Plerry hesitated on the other end of the line, and she could picture his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “I assure you, Miss Shikozu—”

  “That’s Dr. Shikozu, and I’m damned tired of you ‘assuring’ me!” she said. “Listen to me. Most of the equipment in my lab is already shot, so I can’t run any analyses, but I have been able to piece together some of my own results. I know why Prometheus is going after plastics.

  “The microorganism primarily dissociates the octane molecule, which is made up of eight carbons in a chain, surrounded by hydrogen atoms. Most petroleum plastics are just longer polymers made up of shorter hydrocarbons, interlinked. Kramer engineered the new strain of Prometheus to break out eight-carbon chains from longer polymers, as well as some ring hydrocarbons. It can reach into heavy petroleum molecules and snip out bite-sized molecules. That’s how it breaks down plastics! Any plastic that doesn’t have eight-carbon segments should still be safe—”

  Plerry cut her off. “Thank you, Dr. Shikozu. The working teams have already come up with that independently. But it’s not always true. We have not been able to come up with a simple explanation for why Prometheus attacks certain plastics and leaves others alone. Nylon seems to resist the plague, and so does polyvinyl chloride, PVC—which should be one of the most easily affected plastics. But even that may change, as the microorganism adapts to new food sources. We just don’t know, but we are working round the clock to look for answers.”

  “Have you gotten in touch with Kramer’s assistant Mitch Stone?” Iris persisted. No one had ever given her such a cold brush-off before. She’d earned a little more respect and consideration. “He might know something.”

  “The research teams have already commandeered Dr. Stone and his expertise. He is working with Oilstar to interpret Dr. Kramer’s notes right now.”

  Iris felt exasperated. She was never good at sitting still, and she couldn’t just wait for somebody else to work on the problem. She wanted to be involved. She wanted to be somewhere she could put her hands on the problem. She stood up again and brushed her hand across the bedspread to smooth the wrinkles. “Maybe I could assist them.”

  Plerry’s voice was as smooth as hemorrhoid ointment. “Thank you for your interest, Dr. Shikozu. I’ll take that under advisement and pass it along to the appropriate people. We’ll get back to you if anything turns up.” He hung up on her.

  Iris stared at the phone. “Good thing the petroplague doesn’t eat pure slime, Plerry.” She slammed the receiver back in the cradle. She paced her apartment, desperate for something to do. This was worse than being forced to go on vacation.

  Iris padded over to the stereo. She didn’t know how much longer she’d have electricity, so she might as well do something constructive. The power had flickered out earlier in the day, as she sat at the kitchen table, trying to go over chemical equations without the aid of her computer. She figured all the wiring in her apartment; the electrical substations must be insulated with plastic, though natural rubber seemed to resist the plague, but the generating stations would fail before long.

  She flicked on the amplifier, cranked the volume knob, and went to select a CD. Tom Petty? Talking Heads? Yeah, “Burning Down the House” sounded particularly appropriate.

  She plucked out the jewel box, but it had a cloudy, frosted appearance. When she lifted the compact disk, it sagged in her hand, the plastic substrate gone limp like a floppy computer diskette.

  “Oh, dammit!” Iris said, tossing the CD and jewel box across the room. The same Talking Heads album that featured the song “Making Flippy Floppy.” Appropriate.

  “This is really getting annoying. The fall of civilization is bad enough, but do I have to do it without my music?”

  Chapter 32

  The moment Heather Dixon dragged herself into the offices of Surety Insurance, her supervisor shouted at her. “Where the hell have you been, Heather? Damn it all, this place is going crazy! Boston’s been calling since six o’clock this morning.”

  She blinked at Albert “You Can Call Me Al!” Sysco, already exhausted from her ordeal of just getting to work. After her car wouldn’t start, she had to walk nearly two miles in her high heels, red plaid business skirt, and itchy panty hose.

  Al Sysco, the water-cooler Napoleon, lorded over the women in the office as if it were his due, breathing down their necks until they couldn’t do their jobs—and then he reprimanded them when productivity dropped. Heather decided it was because he had a tiny penis, but she had no intention of finding out for sure.

  She wanted to tell him that Headquarters knew full well there was a two-hour time difference between Boston and Arizona. She wanted to tell him that her calves were sore from walking in clothes that were meant to be admired, not exercised in. She wanted to know what in the world Sysco had been doing in the office at 6 A.M. anyway.

  Most of all, she wanted to go to the coffee maker, yank out the filter basket, and stuff a steaming wad of coffee grounds down the front of Al Sysco’s pants.

  Instead, she went to her desk. “My car wouldn’t start, and the streets are a zoo.” The city seemed much worse than the local radio news described it, though for two days the broadcasts had been growing more panicked as reporters tracked the progress of the “petroplague.”

  “You’ve got a hundred forms to process already. I’ve made some follow-up phone calls, but you’ll have to do the rest of them. I’m going nuts! The phone connections break off half the time anyway. Keep trying until you get through.”

  Sysco wiped his palm across the sweat in his porcupine hair. In the background, a few telephones continued to ring. The air smelled stuffy, with an aftertaste of turpentine.

  Two women bustled down the hall, arguing about something, then split down two separate paths among the cubicles, still shouting over the metal-rimmed cloth barriers. Heather noticed that half of the office cubicles were empty. Pale green ferns poked over the top of the nearest barrier. Her own wood-grain desk was strewn with pencils, cute post-it notes, two coffee cups, and clippings from the comic strip Cathy.

  Before Heather could get to her desk and slip her canvas purse into the bottom f
ile drawer, Sysco came with a six-inch stack of paperwork. Heather ignored him as she turned to switch on her terminal.

  “Don’t bother,” said Sysco. “They’re falling apart from that gasoline plague. What a mess. I can’t get Surety to give me a decision on how we’re going to cover all this. Use the telephone, but for God’s sake don’t tell anybody the computers are down! We’re, uh, ‘unable to access that information at this time’ or some such nonsense.”

  Heather blinked. If Surety’s networked computers were down, they were in big trouble. If plastic components were falling apart across the country, then why the hell had she come to work at all? People resisted changing their momentum, moving from their daily routine. Tabloids had screamed about the end of the world for so long that everyone seemed numb to the possibility. But maybe…

  “Stacie has an old Selectric typewriter under her desk,” said Sysco. “You’ll have to type things by hand.”

  Heather glared at him as he turned back to his own work area. His shoulders hunched with spring-wound tension. Sysco was such a little man, harried and suffering. At the moment, she didn’t particularly envy him the promotion.

  She walked over to Stacie’s desk and stooped to find the old gray-brown Selectric underneath the desk. The thing felt like an anchor as she slid it out along the worn carpet. Tiny broken carpet fibers sprayed out as the nap crumbled. Her left foot snagged on a burr, and the panty hose ran from ankle to knee. “Shit,” she mumbled, then hefted the typewriter, waddling with it back to her own desk.

  She kicked off her heels and wiggled her toes on the hard plastic chair mat to get the circulation back. The mat felt tacky against her feet.

  Not even 9:30 in the morning, and she already felt sweaty and uncomfortable. Why had she worn one of her nicest business suits today? Why did she keep playing the game?

  Claims poured in by the thousands as panic spread. She shuffled through the paperwork, seeing a marked change from simple car breakdowns to damage caused by disintegrating plastic components in machinery.

  She swallowed, overwhelmed but still unwilling to believe the magnitude of the disaster. Such things couldn’t really happen. Someone would figure out how to stop it soon, and then they could pick up the pieces, pay off the claims, and get back to normal.

  But all this was too much, getting worse every hour. She had seen the changes in Flagstaff just in the last couple of days, when the first breakdowns occurred. It reminded her of weather in the mountains, when a bright day could knot with ugly thunderheads within an hour. Maybe an even worse storm gathered right now, and she had come to work like an idiot instead of running for shelter.

  Not concentrating, Heather let her fingers tangle on the Selectric’s keys—it had been years since she had used a typewriter, and she found herself backspacing and using the correction key every other word. The keys stuck repeatedly, and the machine made odd clunking noises when she typed; Heather supposed there were just as many small plastic parts in an electric typewriter as there were in the computers. For the time being, the carbons would be screwed up, and she would have to use white-out. Then somebody would have to rekey everything into the database whenever the computers got up and running again. If they ever got running.

  “What are you doing, Heather?” Sysco said. “Don’t bother with the typing now, for chrissake! You can stay late to catch up on that. Pick up the phone and get these people off my ass! I think the lines are up now.”

  She stared at the typewriter. “You told me to type these, Al.”

  He rolled his eyes and sighed at her. His face reminded her of a llama’s. “You’re doing it again, Heather: thinking. Just do what I tell you to do. You don’t need to think.”

  She was thinking all right, thinking about jamming a metal wastebasket on Al Sysco’s head and doing a tap dance on his temples.

  Stacie finally staggered into the office a little after noon. She had ridden her bicycle on the rims of two flat tires. “Crazy people out in the streets. Nobody knows what to do!” Heather took no consolation in listening to Al yell at Stacie.

  When she pulled out her lunch sack to unwrap a tuna sandwich, the plastic bag had turned into goo, seeping into her bread. Heather stared at it. The plague was working its way through the office, floating through the air, attacking anything it could eat.

  She looked at the fake wood-grain coating on her metal desk, at the plastic pens in her cup, at the plastic knobs on her office chair, at the plastic buttons on her clothes. What next? At any moment, some key support component in the Surety building itself might fall apart, causing the walls and ceiling to crash in.

  She did not want to stay here another minute.

  She picked up the phone in a reflex action as Sysco charged back to her desk. “Heather, take over my station. I have to meet with the crisis team. Might take me an hour.”

  Heather straightened in her seat, still clutching the phone. As her anger grew, her pastel-pink fingernails made deep indentations into the softening plastic of the telephone handset.

  “Sorry, Al, but I’m not qualified to do that kind of work. I might botch it up. I don’t dare touch it.” She stood up, cold and calm inside. The eye of the storm.

  “What did you say? I don’t have time for this, Heather!” Sysco’s eyes looked as if they might pop right out of their sockets. “This is important—”

  Heather snatched her lunch sack and handed it to him. The dissolving plastic had made a creeping stain on the brown paper bag. “Here, Al—have a tuna sandwich.” She turned to Stacie. “I wouldn’t put up with this creep any longer than you have to, Stacie. See ya.”

  She wanted to watch Sysco’s expression turn splotched and livid as she strode to the stairwell, but she did not dare turn around. Her legs shook as she hurried down the echoing concrete steps. Her shoes felt strange, as if they no longer fit right. Great! Her heels would probably dissolve before long.

  She left the Surety Insurance headquarters building, doubting she would ever set foot inside again.

  Out in the parking lot, she marched onto the hot pavement, forcing herself not to run, ignoring the ache in her calves, giving no thought to the long walk facing her before she reached the safety of home. The world might be falling apart, all right, but she didn’t feel any particular attachment to the old order of things. She could leave it behind with no regrets. Screw them all. It was time to take care of herself.

  Sitting in the reserved parking space, Al Sysco’s silver Porsche gleamed in the sun. He had owned it less than three months, and he still washed and waxed it every weekend. He had bought it to celebrate stealing her promotion, and she knew it.

  She stared at the Porsche. It looked like a snarling metallic insect. Insects were for squashing, weren’t they?

  Heather opened her canvas purse and pulled out the nearly full bottle of pastel-pink nail polish. She hated the color, hated nail polish in the first place; she wore it only as part of professional dress in the insurance company. Now she had a better use for it, if the plague didn’t somehow dissolve the enamel first. She twisted off the softening cap and dribbled the enamel in swirls over the driver’s side windshield. Once the nail polish baked a few hours in the hot Arizona sun, Albert “You can call me Al!” Sysco would need an ice pick to get it off.

  “You can call me vindicated, Al,” she said, then set off for home, on foot.

  * * *

  Al Sysco fled the Surety Insurance headquarters at seven o’clock that evening. Everyone else had left hours before, but he was in charge. He was the responsible man on the job. The entire day had been hell. The California gasoline plague kept getting worse, showing up in all parts of the world, according to the reports. Industry was in a panic, big cities were in turmoil—and it seemed as if every human being on planet Earth wanted to take it out on him.

  Dusk had fallen, and the streetlights stood dark and dead. The power had flickered on and off all afternoon, and Sysco wondered if dissolving electrical insulation would end up starting fires.
One more thing for the insurance company to worry about!

  Heather Dixon had walked out in the middle of the day, and Al vowed to see her fired as soon as all this was over with—but right now he prayed she would come back.

  Stacie was a slow and plodding worker, and Candace was just a trainee. They couldn’t do anything right, and Candace had spent half the day in tears. He had physically shaken her by the shoulders, yelling that they were in a crisis situation, dammit! It didn’t do any good. He could not survive another day like this one. He wished somebody would start solving this plague problem.

  He stopped in front of his Porsche, and his mouth dropped open. In the dim light, it looked like a gigantic glob of birdshit had splattered his windshield. He looked closer. “Nail polish! Sweet as an armpit! Gawd!” He tapped it with his nails, but the opaque pink coating could have been electroplated on.

  Sick to his stomach, he climbed behind the steering wheel. He just wanted to go home and work his way through every beer in the refrigerator, then start on whatever else he could find in the liquor cabinet.

  But when he turned the key in the ignition, his car refused to start.

  Chapter 33

  Todd moved through Alex Kramer’s empty house, not quite sure what he should do now. He had been here for days, flustered to be in a situation where the plan of action was not obvious, and the most sensible thing seemed to be just sitting tight. He wanted to get off his butt and do something.

  Bending down in front of the cold fireplace, Todd riffled through the ashes, pulling out the scorched chunks of Alex’s Prometheus notes. A handful of pages were intact.

  Todd paced the floor. It was deceptively calm and peaceful here, but he knew the chaos was growing in the cities, on the clogged freeways.