“Suits me fine, Harley. We don’t want chicken-shits along. We need real tough dudes, not hot air and stuffed jackets.”
Harley bristled. “Who you talking about? I’m guarding my turf!”
“Look at yourself, man. There ain’t gonna be any of your turf left in a month, and we’re going to be sitting warm and happy out by the windmills.” He made a gesture of dismissal at the young man and turned away. “Anybody too stupid to see the change coming is bound to get stomped on.”
Harris had managed to get the kid to come help them on Angel Island, putting him to work on the charcoal grills cooking hot dogs and hamburgers. Before that, Harley had complained about a “stupid road trip” to Yosemite National Park, which Harris and Daphne and the Reverend Rudge had also staged—but the kid had spent most of the day staring slack-jawed at the towering granite rock walls and the gushing waterfalls.
Now their eyes met, and Harris smiled at him. He knew Harley wouldn’t survive another week as the turmoil exploded in Oakland and all around the Bay Area.
“And what would I want with you boyscouts, huh?” Harley sneered. “Go out and mow some cracker’s lawn?”
“No,” Harris shook his head, grinning. “They got cows for that. Think you wanna be a cowboy?”
“Bullshit!”
“Yeah, and cow shit. Probably horse shit, too. We got it all. But it’s gonna be hard work, not for dumb fucks. You better stay here, Harley.” He walked back to the bus. “Go ahead and guard your turf.”
The young man postured and scowled at Harris. “I know what you’re trying to do, man! You’re crazy!”
Harris shrugged. “I been called crazy by white people before—but I usually pull it off anyway. Just remember that.”
He brought the last box of supplies, a grease-stained, ragged cardboard box, and climbed aboard the bus. Daphne gave him a quick kiss, then yanked the bus door shut, as if this would be another one of their day-trips to a state park. Harris looked out the broken side window to see Harley standing by the chain-link fence, a troubled expression on his face.
Then the bus shuddered and died.
The people on the bus gave a simultaneous groan, and Daphne struck the horn with her fist in frustration. It peeped weakly. Reverend Rudge stood at the door of his church, hanging his head. He kneaded his thin hands in front of his waist. Lindie, the woman with five kids, said, “We can’t walk all that way!”
Harris stood up. “Hey, let’s try the last bus before we all start bitching! And if it starts, you need to haul ass and get the supplies transferred. We could have gone five miles in the last few minutes we sat here in the parking lot.”
Daphne opened the bus door and swung down, keys in hand. She did not look optimistic about the third vehicle, which sagged on weak suspension. Bullet holes scarred its olive-painted sides, and a great spiderweb crack blazed across the windshield. It had only one wiper blade—in front of the driver’s seat, luckily—but the other had been snapped off.
Bumping each other, the passengers piled out, kids laughing or crying or punching each other. The grown-ups carried grocery bags, boxes, blankets, pillows. Harris grabbed a second load, setting up a fire-brigade line from one bus to the other. He looked up and paused. Harley had left his heckler’s spot at the fence and began to help.
“Holy shit, look who’s got a brain after all,” Harris said.
“Fuck you, man.”
When Daphne turned the key in the ignition, the engine chugged, then miraculously caught; it sounded as if it had a few more miles left in it. “Come on!” Daphne shouted. She hauled back on the lever that swung the door shut even before Harris had climbed the steps. She jammed her foot on the clutch and fought with the stick, ramming it into first gear. The bus lurched forward.
Harris held onto the bar, expecting to hear the bus stall out, but the engine kept up its chugging, indigestion sound. Harris and Daphne both waved at the Reverend Rudge through the cracked windshield.
* * *
The bus crawled out onto the city streets, avoiding stalled cars and walking people. Two dark-skinned businessmen thumped on the side of the bus as it rolled by. A Volkswagen beetle putted across an intersection ahead of them. Traffic was sporadic enough that Daphne ignored the streetlights, afraid to risk idling the bus’s engine.
Throwing her arms and shoulder into the effort, Daphne wrestled with the steering wheel, fluttering her foot on the gas pedal, trying to keep the vehicle moving by sheer willpower. They crawled out of downtown Oakland and onto the freeway network, easing through intersections and not daring to stop at corners. Occasionally a stalled car blocked one of the lanes. The shoulder looked like a parking lot with abandoned automobiles.
She turned her head to watch them as the bus moved by; she wished she could offer them a hand, but it would be impossible to help all the crowds, all the lives affected by the spreading disaster. She and Jackson couldn’t do everything.
The bus engine popped, as if it had begun missing on one or more cylinders, but Daphne kept driving eastward, away from the city. She squeezed the gip of the steering wheel, adding her own willpower to the engine. Every mile brought them closer.
In a weak attempt to dilute the anxiety and tension, Jackson and the other passengers broke into a few verses of “99 Bottles of Beer,” which degenerated into silliness and nervous laughter. But even the songs faded into a subdued quiet.
Daphne looked up in the bus mirror, seeing two dozen glistening or averted eyes, passengers biting their lips, making fists in their laps, gripping the seat backs. They could not pretend this would be another exhilarating day trip. They were leaving their lives and everything they knew behind.
* * *
About forty miles and two hours later, the battered church bus passed Livermore and exited the freeway onto a narrow road that led into the rural Altamont hills. Daphne expected the bus to die at any moment, but they had escaped from the city. Before long, Oakland would probably burn to the ground in an unchecked firestorm much worse than the fire that had leveled the hilly, rich part of the city a few years earlier.
Their group would be safe out among the windmills.
Daphne coaxed the bus past ugly, out-of-the-way auto wrecking yards and gravel supply lots alongside railroad tracks, which reminded her of the more desolate sections of downtown Oakland. She also saw a sign for the Sandia and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, government research centers that sat quietly near the foothills. With all the funding they stole from human works projects, Daphne hoped they could come up with a solution to this petroplague crisis.
By now, the engine gasped and burbled, as if every minute would be its last. The passengers had started talking to each other again with relief and excitement. Some of the kids kept their faces plastered to the windows, though the grassy, hilly landscape offered nothing particularly exciting to look at.
Jackson sat up front next to her, staring out the windshield. “It’s gonna be okay, Daph,” he said. It sounded like a mantra. He rubbed her shoulder. “We can walk from here if we got to.”
“I know it.”
The bus toiled up the narrow, winding road, filling most of the width of the pavement. Steep dropoffs fell away to her right; the road had no guard rail, only a line of drooping barbed wire partway down the slope to fence grazing cattle. They saw few houses.
Daphne turned her entire body at the steering wheel to wrench the bus around a sharp curve. The engine belched and stalled out, but she was able to flutter her foot on the gas pedal, coaxing it back to life for just a few feet more.
Up ahead, a sign said ROAD NARROWS. “Great,” she muttered.
At the crest of the hills, the engine died for good. Momentum carried them forward a few feet more, and Daphne jammed the gear shift into neutral. The bus kept rolling until finally gravity helped them along.
“We can coast downhill for a while,” she said.
Jackson was grinning. He squeezed her shoulder. “We’ve only got another mile or s
o anyway. We made it!” He shouted, and the others joined him in the cheer.
As they came out of the shadow of the hills around a corner, the panorama of the Altamont range spread out. The passengers leaned to the left side of the bus, talking among themselves.
The rolling, grass-covered hills seemed to go on forever. Covering the range were thousands and thousands of windmills like a mechanical army, their blades turning in the clean breeze.
Chapter 35
MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT
FROM: ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT FOR SCIENCE, SPACE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY
SUBJECT: MATERIAL AFFECTED BY “PETROPLAGUE”
The following list of items has been compiled to help assess the scope of the spreading “petroplague.” Because of the uncertain nature of the microorganism and the varying compositions of many plastic formulations, all or some of these items may be compromised by an attack from the plague.
For a complete discussion of the suspected chemistry and decomposition analysis for 72 representative petroleum-based polymers, please see Appendix F (attached).
Styrofoam cups and packing materials
Food packaging
Vinyl car seats
Shampoo and toiletry bottles
Electrical wire insulation (NOTE: natural rubber seems to be excluded)
Shoe components/soles
Shoelace tips
Automobile gaskets
Plastic plants
Soda straws
Balloons
Pens
Acrylic display cases
Linoleum
Carpet fibers
Polyester clothing
Acrylic coatings
Weather stripping
Magnetic tape substrates
Compact disc substrates
Circuit boards
Some paints and sealants
Computer monitors
Certain components of furniture
Telephone handsets
Medical hypodermic syringes
Eyeglass frames
Soft contact lenses
Chapter 36
Up in the mountains, the house trailer’s old kerosene heater had stopped working. Fumbling in the dimness, Dick Morgret tried a fourth time to light it, without success. He kicked the piece of junk with a rattling metallic clatter, then tossed the wooden match stub on the floor. Groggy with sleep, Morgret stumbled around the cramped trailer, trying to remember where he kept the extra blankets.
An early-summer rainstorm swept over the California mountains, drenching the Last Chance gas station out in the middle of nowhere. Morgret had awakened shivering on his cot. He listened to raindrops hammering on the metal roof; trickles of water leaked inside, soaking his possessions. He grumbled, but didn’t waste breath on any of his really good obscenities, since no one else was there to hear him.
He yanked one of the ratty quilts from the storage cubicle under the dinette table. The heavy cloth smelled of mildew, but the rest of the trailer had plenty of strong odors to mask it.
As he lay back on the cot, waiting for his body heat to warm the blankets, water dripped through new leaks in the walls. Every inch of insulation had turned to toothpaste, letting water seep in from all corners. Earlier that evening he had tried stuffing rags into the cracks, but then gave up and just draped canvas tarps over the furniture. The whole friggin trailer was falling apart, just like his life. What else was new?
His bed remained cold, as if his body couldn’t spare any heat for the blankets. He’d slept alone for close to sixteen years now. He had buried three wives already and had no interest in making it four. All of them had been beefy and bossy—but sometimes he missed the simple pleasure of someone else making noise in the house, or keeping the bed warm. Now, the only sound he heard as he finally drifted off to sleep was the patter of rain leaking through the widening cracks in his home.
* * *
By morning the air had cleared. Morgret glanced out the window. The creek winding down from the mountains had swelled from the rainstorm. In the distance, he could see a few wild horses trotting around in the meadows.
He got up, stepped in a puddle of cold water, and sat down on a card-table chair to peel off his soggy, threadbare socks. After using the crapper out back, he shuffled to the two gasoline pumps under the rickety aluminum awning. He had nothing better to do than spend the day waiting for customers who would never come.
Highway 178 wound through the mountains, descending into the great desert basin of dry lake beds, military testing ranges, and Death Valley. Morgret hadn’t seen any traffic on the road for two days, and the last car had not stopped by. No traffic, no customers. No customers, no income. No income, nothing to pay off the creditors.
The gas—both regular and unleaded—smelled awful even to him, and worse yet, it wouldn’t burn. Some environmental shit, probably, and that frightened him. If the government found out, he’d probably have to rip out his buried tanks and install new liners. In that case, Morgret would just up and abandon the gas station, leaving it for the crows.
The Oilstar tanker truck had not come up from Bakersfield with his delivery this week—but Morgret had no money to pay the driver anyway, and his credit was as good as wet toilet paper. Morgret wondered if he was liable to the oil company for contaminated gas.
He laid an old newspaper on the seat of his lawn chair to keep his pants from getting wet. The morning remained cool, but he sat in the shade because the air was bound to get warmer and he wouldn’t feel much like moving in an hour or so. Morgret lounged back to watch the world go by.
Except the world wasn’t going by. No traffic. Nothing.
* * *
Toward midmorning he heard a hollow, clopping sound coming down the road; it took him a moment to recognize the sound of shod horses, not the roaming wild herd. In a moment, three riders came around the curve. They wore canvas panchos dotted with dark splotches from leftover raindrops. All three had long hair; the smallest, youngest-looking man had a thin moustache, but the other two were cleanshaven. Morgret recognized the broad-shouldered Hispanic man on the black stallion at once. Morgret struggled to get up from his folding lawn chair by the time Carlos Bettario rode up to the gas pump.
Years spent outdoors had given Bettario’s skin the look and feel of well-worn leather. He tied his long, pepper-colored hair in a ponytail that hung behind a flat-brimmed Clint Eastwood hat.
They nodded nonchalantly at each other. “Howdy, Carlos,” said Morgret. He looked at the stallion, then at his gas pump. “Fill ‘er up?”
The other two riders, ranch hands he supposed, chuckled. Bettario patted the stallion’s muscular neck, and said without the slightest trace of an accent, “No thank you, sir, I think this one still has a full tank.”
“Just another piss-head who doesn’t want any gas! What brings you down from the dude ranch, Carlos? Inviting me to a church social?”
Bettario owned and operated Rancho Inyo, a popular tourist ranch near Lake Isabella, where the idiot vacationers could pretend to be cowboys. It had made Bettario a rich man.
“Hell, if you had any gasoline, I’d buy every drop. But I don’t expect you’re better than anybody else in the country.” Bettario laughed. “No, I came to rescue you, my friend.”
Morgret scowled at him and sat back down in his creaking chair. How had Bettario known the gas pumps had gone bad? “Rescue me? What are you talking about, Carlos?”
“From the plague, man. What’re you going to do with yourself now? Your station was barely surviving before.” With a gesture of his chin, Bettario indicated the dilapidated house trailer, the sign that still said LAST CHANCE.
Morgret narrowed his eyes. “What plague?”
The ranch hands exchanged glances. Bettario took off his hat. “Man, you must be kidding me! Don’t you watch the news?”
“Gee, Carlos, I must not have paid my cable TV bill for the month. I’ve been thinking about getting one of those two-thousand-dollar satellite antennas�
��but it wouldn’t do me much good, since I don’t even own a damned television! I ain’t got a newspaper that’s less than a month old.”
Bettario shook his head. “Man, a plague is wiping out all the gas, and now plastic too. People are going nuts. We’re lucky we live up here away from the chaos.” The stallion snorted, as if he disagreed with Bettario’s opinion of ‘lucky.’ “Me, I’m smart enough to realize that we’re going to have to pull together and work our cojones off to make it through the first year.”
Morgret squinted at him, but Bettario wasn’t the type to play practical jokes. And it did explain the bad gas, the total lack of traffic, the week-late gas tanker. “So, you’re coming to rescue me, huh?”
The stallion nosed around for something to nibble on. Bettario jerked the reins to raise the horse’s head. “We got rid of the tourists at Rancho Inyo, and I have room for a few people who know what they’re doing. You’ve been around a long time, Dick. You’re full of bullshit, but you’ve also got a lot of common sense, and you know how to work. I need men to help keep the larders stocked, which means hunting and fishing and working with the livestock. We’re going to round up the wild horses, because without automobiles, horses will be worth more than gold.
“You also know how to fix things,” Carlos continued. “Rancho Inyo gets its power from the hydroelectric plant by the reservoir. Even without oil to burn, I suppose a dam and a waterwheel can keep working—if we figure out a way to keep them lubricated.”
Bettario smiled down at Morgret standing in his coveralls. “Come with me back to the ranch, Dick. My boys here will help you pack up whatever you want to take along.”
Morgret raised his eyebrows, then gestured expansively toward the leaking trailer, the fouled-up gas pumps, the empty highway. “Let me get this straight, Carlos. You want me to leave all this just so I can hunt and fish the whole day long? Round up some horses, chop some wood, for free room and board at a place where the city slickers pay a hundred dollars a night?”
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