Chapter 24

After driving for hours in the rental Mazda, Spencer Lockwood passed the bleak, low hills rimming the Central Valley and headed east into oil country. The arrow-straight roads across the flatlands reminded him of rural farm lanes, with crops on either side and clods of mud on the pavement left behind by lumbering farm machinery. He kept the air conditioning turned up high, rolling up the windows to seal out the thick farm smells.

Spencer grabbed a fast-food hamburger in Bakersfield for a late dinner, then checked into the least expensive room he could find. He didn’t care about TV or telephones or adult movies. Without much interest, he flipped through the yellowed Gideon material in the nightstand drawer and went to bed early, stretching out on the lumpy mattress, listening to the rise and fall of traffic noises outside, and feeling tension drain from him as he let his mind wander. He had wanted the road trip to think, and so he concentrated on what next to do with his project, now that his Sandia excursion had failed miserably.

Twenty more completed solar-power smallsats sat in storage at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. Scheduling their launch aboard one of the shuttle flights had always been problematic, as was using a Delta Clipper or even one of the Pegasus rockets.

Sandia’s prototype railgun on Oscura Peak seemed a viable alternative for launching smallsats, but the rails needed to be extended so the satellite could reach a proper orbit. Unlike delicate space probes or megachannel communications satellites, the smallsats were simple energy collectors with microwave transmitters. They could withstand the huge acceleration of an electromagneti catapult. Perhaps the railgun people would be interested in teaming up for a test case, once they upgraded their equipment; but that might take years.

He finally drifted off to sleep without coming up with any new ideas.

#

Spencer woke up refreshed, though a bit stiff. Unfolding the road map of California, he saw that it wouldn’t take him much out of his way to cut through Death Valley National Monument—a place he had always wanted to see. He would never make the trip otherwise, and he’d always resent never taking the time if he skipped it now. “What the heck,” he said, “I’m doing the rest of this road trip on impulse.”

He made a quick call to Rita Fellenstein to inform her he was going to be a little later than he thought; she knew better than to bring up any business and just left him alone.

The previous night had been chilly, and the white Mazda chugged and grunted as he tried to start it. When the engine finally caught, Spencer sniffed a sulfurous odor, muttered to himself about the “Bakersfield stench,” then drove off.

He wound past grassy hummocks studded with an arsenal of oil pumps toiling away. The road plunged through Kern Canyon, sheer cliffs covered with wildflowers rising on either side. The river boiling with spring thaw and the rugged rocks made for spectacular scenery, but horrific driving conditions. Other trucks and cars took the curves wide, usually not bothering to check if someone might be in the oncoming lane. He hugged the cliff wall as he drove, sitting bolt upright.

Despite the challenging road, Spencer found his thoughts returning to his high school days when a girl named Sandy—an odd name, considering that her hair was coal black—had taken the bright nerdy kid under her wing as a social welfare project.

Sandy was the older sister of one of Spencer’s equally nerdy buddies. She talked Spencer into trading his black-rimmed glasses for hard contact lenses. She convinced him to go to a hair stylist to get his hair cut, rather than having his mother do it. She ruthlessly went through his closet like a guard weeding out prisoners; she paid no attention to his protests as she tossed out threadbare plaid shirts he had worn since junior high, corduroy pants that rode too high above his ankles, shirts with pen-stained pockets—and then she took him shopping.

Spencer rapidly developed a crush on Sandy, but she had no romantic interest in her “project”; she just wanted to see if she could turn an ugly duckling into a swan. He was content to wait, knowing that someday that special girl would come into his life. Newly charged with self-confidence, he entered college as a different person. From that point on, he had Sandy to thank for his success in life as much as his mentor Dr. Seth Mansfield. Now if he could just find the girl with the sunburned nose . . . .

After about an hour of mountain driving Spencer approached a gas station with a house trailer behind it. A sign at the side of the road announced “Dick Morgret’s LAST CHANCE Gas Station.” He glanced at his fuel gauge, surprised to see he had only about a quarter of a tank left. He had filled up in Bakersfield the night before, and he had been traveling only a few hours. “Stupid rental car!” he muttered. Or had someone siphoned his tank?

He decelerated swiftly and pulled into the station’s gravel drive. A breeze kicked up dust, obscuring a Marlboro sign rocking back and forth on metal feet. The place looked abandoned, but as soon as Spencer stopped the car, the plywood door of the house trailer creaked open, and an old man in coveralls clomped down the metal steps. The man—Morgret himself?—raised a hand in greeting, then picked up a bucket and squeegee next to the cigarette sign.

Spencer glanced at the pumps, saw no Self-Serve sign, and waited for the old man to come over. He popped the gas tank.

“Morning,” Morgret said. “Fill her up? Or are you just one of those piss-heads wanting directions?”

Spencer couldn’t stop himself from laughing. “No, give me all the gas you can fit in the tank.”

Morgret grinned again, exposing brown teeth. “For that, you get your windshield washed. You’re going to have plenty of bugs splattered across it once you get down to the desert. It’s butterfly season, and the air is full of them.”

Morgret yanked the hose from the pump and slid the metal nozzle into Spencer’s gas tank. His weathered face puckered up at the rotten smell. “What you got in there, son?”

Spencer shrugged, distracted by the surrounding mountains and the isolation. “It’s a rental car.” Horses ambled across a scrubby clearing in the distance, and he wondered if it was a wild herd. He hadn’t had a chance to look at the scenery without risking driving off a cliff. “Is this really the last gas station before you get out of the mountains?”

Morgret chuckled. “Nah, there’s another one twenty miles down the road, before you hit Highway 395. The sign makes for good business, though.”

“I bet.”

Morgret left the pump while he grabbed the dripping squeegee and slathered the windshield. “Nobody reads close enough. Sign says Dick Morgret’s Last Chance. This station is my last chance—I got nothing but this house trailer, squatter’s rights on this land, and a pretty damn shaky line of credit with the oil company. If this place goes belly up, I might as well do the same.” He finished the windshield, then went back to squirt a few more cents into the tank to round out the dollar. “Twenty one bucks.”

As Spencer paid him, Morgret said, “You get that car checked, you hear? Don’t like that funny smell. Something’s wrong with your catalytic converter, I bet.”

Spencer nodded. “I’ll report it when I turn in the car.”

As he drove off, Spencer saw the old man sniff the nozzle on his pump, then shuffle back toward his house trailer.

#

Only a few hours later, Spencer stared at the gas gauge in disbelief, then managed to wrestle the dying Mazda Protege off the road to the gravelly shoulder. For the last ten miles the rental car sounded like it was gargling gasoline. He wondered if it had a slow leak in the gas tank.

Feeling as desolate as the landscape around him, Spencer opened the car door and stepped out onto the road, shading his eyes against the afternoon sun.

It was the worst place in the world for a car to break down.

He had driven out of the Sierra Nevadas into the expanse of the Mojave Desert, past forests of gnarly Joshua trees. Some of the towns on his map were no more than rusty signs, boarded-up houses, and abandoned motels.

The car expired as he reached the intersection of Highway 136, coming from the Lone Pine Indian Reservation. The two roads met at a stop sign, but Spencer could not imagine two vehicles being on the road at the same time. He was totally alone.

He stood beside the open car door and peered into the distance. Nothing. The surrounding stillness swallowed all other background noise. He saw the volcanic Inyo Mountains in front of him, swirls of caustic white powder whipped up like dust devils from breezes over the dry lake bed to his left. He saw no blade of grass, no living thing other than a few mesquite bushes and cactus.

And he was stranded there. Spencer hoped someone would come by sooner or later. He listened to the wind. He popped the hood, listening to the faint sounds of gurgling and wheezing in the engine. The Mazda was a rental car, after all, but he could see nothing obviously wrong, no snapped belts, no loose hoses. The radiator had not overheated. The rotten-egg smell clung to everything, but he could not imagine where it came from. He sighed, feeling his stomach churn. This was supposed to be a relaxing trip, a way to get away from it all. Perhaps he had gotten too far away from it all. . . .

Ten minutes later, he was decidedly uneasy. Still no cars. Could people die out here because their cars broke down? Chances of a highway patrol cruising this section of road seemed slim. He realized with a sinking feeling that Rita Fellenstein had only a vague idea where he was. How long would it be before anybody started searching for him? Or would they?

He suddenly felt thirsty. There was no place for shade, and he did not want to leave his car. He had to stay there, just in case somebody came.

Just in case.

Fifteen minutes more. His shirt clung to him. How long would he wait? The desert silence was maddening.

Finally Spencer heard a throbbing in the air, a distant hum, and he snapped to alertness. He wondered if it might just be a plane flying overhead. He squinted down the road, watching the liquid heat make the air ripple over the blacktop like gasoline fumes rising from a tank. In the clear, empty air, Spencer heard the engine much sooner than he made out the shape of the approaching vehicle. As soon as he could discern a jeep clipping toward him at 90 miles an hour, Spencer stood in the middle of the road waving his hands.

What if the driver passed him by? Spencer didn’t usually stop to help people with car trouble. He redoubled his efforts and shouted, “Hey!”

The pitch of the oncoming engine changed as the driver downshifted. Spencer stepped back to his car, trying to figure out what to say.

His rescuer drove a black jeep jacked up for high clearance and off-road driving. The jeep slewed in a partial doughnut, spraying sand and gravel from the road shoulder as it stopped. The canvas top flapped from a loose snap, showing tools, a cooler, and rumpled clothes tossed in the back. Spencer walked toward the jeep as the driver’s door popped open.

The young man’s face was sunburned. The size of a football player, he looked clean-cut and friendly. He wore tattered jeans, a t-shirt with NAVY emblazoned on the front, and a broad grin. “Boy, lousy place for a car to break down.”

“You’re telling me!” Spencer said. “Could you lend me a hand? I think I’ve got a leak in the gas tank—I just filled up a couple hours ago, but I’m on empty already. You don’t happen to have a spare can with you, do you? A gallon or two would get me to another town where I can dump this hunk of junk.”

“Take more than a gallon to get to a town where you can trade in a rental car.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Bobby Carron. I don’t have a spare gas can, but I do have a hose. We could siphon some of my gas into your tank. That should get you to Lone Pine, about twenty miles back on 136.”

“All I need is a phone.”

“Then that’ll do ya. Ridgecrest is where I’m heading, China Lake Naval Weapons Center. A lot bigger city, but that’ll take you an hour. If you got a leaky gas tank, I wouldn’t chance it.”

Bobby Carron rummaged around in the back of his jeep, finally pulling out a length of narrow hose. “I do a lot of off-roading in this puppy. Need to be prepared for most anything.”

From the dust and caked mud on the sides of the jeep, Spencer could imagine some of the places Bobby Carron might have taken his vehicle. “Anything I can do to help?” asked Spencer.

“Yeah, pop your gas tank,” Bobby said, sliding one end of the hose into his own tank. He got down on his knees, put the end of the tube in his mouth and sucked, puckering his cheeks as he drew gasoline out of his tank.

When fuel finally gushed out, Bobby grimaced and spat, then jammed the other end of the hose into Spencer’s tank. The spoiled reek drifted out of the rental car’s gas tank. “Problems with the catalytic converter, I think,” Spencer repeated Dick Morgret’s diagnosis.

Bobby sniffed. “I smell like that myself when I’ve had too much Mexican food.”

Bobby let a few gallons flow into Spencer’s car, then pulled out the hose, letting the gas trickle back into his jeep’s tank. “That should take you far enough to get some decent help. Sorry I couldn’t do more, but I gotta get back to the base.”

“You’re a life saver, Bobby. Thanks a million!”

Bobby made a dismissive gesture. “No problem. Glad to be of service.” He rolled up the hose and tossed it in back of his jeep. “Let’s prime your carburetor so you can get going.”

Spencer let Bobby tinker under the hood for a few moments. “All right, try it!” Bobby said.

Spencer started the car, heaving a sigh of relief to hear the engine rumbling. If his tank did indeed have a leak, he would lead-foot it to the next town. He’d had enough of this supposedly relaxing side trip. It was time to call an end to this vacation, and just get himself back to White Sands.

Bobby Carron honked the jeep’s horn as he spun around, then peeled off on the desert highway toward the China Lake Naval Base.

Chapter 25

The coffee at Stanford’s Tressider Union wasn’t any better than the stuff from Iris Shikozu’s own pot—but sometimes she just had to get out of the lab, smell the morning air, and watch the other students going about their business.

When she had only light teaching duties to muddle her post-doc work, she took a break each morning to sit under one of the red-and-white umbrellas at Tressider, sipping coffee as she read the student paper. But today she took a large cup to go and tucked a copy of the paper under her arm.

A shocking picture of a scrawny, grime-smeared black man holding an oil-smothered pelican dominated the front. An old photo of herself, oversized glasses and all, appeared in the lower right-hand corner. The article said that Stanford researcher Iris Shikozu had overseen the Prometheus spraying. The reporter made Iris out to be a patsy for the big oil company, while Todd Severyn and Alex Kramer, not to mention Oilstar management, were the bad guys. Some students, irate at her involvement, had made crank phone calls to her lab, but Iris just snapped back at them.

On the kiosks she had seen flyers announcing a rally against Oilstar that morning, but the turnout of protesters was much lighter than Iris expected—only a few people waving banners and attempting to pass out leaflets to other students who had no interest. Their noise seemed insignificant in the laid-back flow of students in the mall.

Stanford hadn’t experienced a real protest in years, but she thought that frustration over the Zoroaster spill would have brought the demonstrators out screaming. Maybe everyone wanted to see if Prometheus worked before they complained—and although thick crude continued to gurgle from the sunken tanker, the spreading slick was shrinking measurably.

A few people claimed a connection between Prometheus and the rash of car breakdowns supposedly caused by a “bad batch” of gasoline from the Oilstar refinery. To disprove those rumors, Iris herself agreed to perform a quickie analysis for one of the TV stations looking for a scoop, just to prove that the two couldn’t be linked. She had even shipped blind samples via overnight mail to a few of her colleagues.

Now, as she took her styrofoam cup of coffee and made her way across campus, dodging bicyclists and skateboarders, Iris barely noticed the groups of students playing tag-football, frisbee, or just lazing in the sun. By the time she returned to her lab, the combustion-product spectrograph analysis of the bad gasoline would be complete.

The door to her lab was unlocked. Refilling her cup from the coffee pot at the table, Iris listened to the answering machine. After a message from the TV station querying about her analysis, Todd Severyn’s twangy voice came on, stuttering in an attempt to ask her to return the call. She smiled. It must have been hard for the old cowboy to ask her to do that. I wonder what he’d be like in bed . . . .

Sipping the coffee, Iris strode around the gas chromatograph hooked up to the experimental chamber, then slid into the chair and tapped on the keyboard. This would prove once and for all there was no connection between the breakdowns and Prometheus.

A long string of numbers appeared, highlighting an array of expected parameters. Frowning, Iris clicked on an additional data file and compared the two in silence. It didn’t make any sense.

She put down her cup, intently watching the screen. The jagged trace of a spectrograph jittered across the monitor, exactly matching the first.

She ran back her analysis of the Prometheus microbe eating the spilled oil and a sample she had obtained of the supposedly bad gasoline.

No difference.

The Prometheus microbe had infected the gas tanks in the cars that had broken down.

They can’t be the same! she thought. There was no vector. How did the microbe find its way into the gas tanks?

Her hands shook as she ran through her computerized rolodex to find Kramer’s number at Oilstar. First the Prometheus reaction rates were drastically different from what she had observed with her control specimen. Now, the organism seemed to have gotten into automobile gas tanks. Had it found a way to go airborne? Before giving her unofficial OK to the spraying operations, Iris had run numerous tests on the control sample—none of this should have been possible.

Unless Kramer had used two different microbes: one for her initial tests, and a more voracious one to be sprayed onto the Bay . . . where it would cause all sorts of havoc.

After six rings, a computerized voice instructed her to leave a voicemail message for Dr. Kramer. She hung up and tried again. Who could she call if Alex wasn’t around? She tried to remember—there was that jerk at the party . . . what was his name, Mitchell Stone? She dialed again, asking the Oilstar operator to connect her. Iris waited impatiently for him to answer, then finally slammed the phone down.

Damn! She brushed her black hair with a quick swipe and reached for her coffee. Draining the dregs, she paced, thinking of Mitch Stone, then Kramer’s party . . . then Todd Severyn.

It would be an excuse to call him. Otherwise, that Wyoming cowboy would keep bugging her until she went out with him, saying “ma’am” and “aww, shucks” every chance he got. Normally, she wouldn’t allow herself to be distracted by personal affairs, but there was something about him . . . was it his honesty that attracted her to him, or his naiveté?

She decided to wait before calling Todd to see if he knew how to reach Alex Kramer. She would recheck her work. First order of business. Drawing in a breath, she turned back to the spectrometer. She vowed to watch over every incubation period, recheck every procedure until things turned out right.

#

Things didn’t turn out right.

Iris watched the screen, at a loss for words. Being overly meticulous, she had taken three hours to go through the two-hour checklist. In the meantime she placed cautious calls to the labs where she had Fed-Expressed blind samples the day before. Her colleagues confirmed her analysis, but she gave them no details.

Kramer’s microbes were breaking down the oil spill, and now they were in the gas tanks. Eating gasoline.

Another quick call to Oilstar confirmed that Kramer was still out. Frustrated, she hung up the phone just in time to have it ring again, startling her. She grabbed the receiver, but it was only the TV news crew bugging her about the analysis. She put them off by using multisyllable technical jargon and saying she needed to recalibrate her results. If she talked now, she would send them into a panic!

Her mind started to reel with the implications of what she had discovered.

No use putting it off anymore; Todd might know how to reach Kramer. Plus, he probably had more common sense than most Oilstar people. Or anyone else, for that matter. She tapped the black lab table for a moment, then returned to the phone.

Rewinding her answering machine, she listened to the message again and dialed Todd’s number.

Chapter 26

Just off the exit ramp Connor Brooks could see the colored lights of BP, Union 76, Shell, Chevron, Texaco, and Oilstar gas stations. If Connor was going to rip anybody off, he decided it should be Oilstar. No question about it. They had already done enough to him.

He had hiked in the breakdown lane from the dead hulk of the lavender Gremlin as traffic whooshed past. Though it was ten o’clock at night, cars pulled in and out of the gas stations clustered in the exit-ramp oasis in a steady stream.

He glanced at the cars at the pumps, but did not see what he was looking for, nothing he could use. The tile-roofed station looked too quaint to be real. He went inside the Star-Shoppe convenience store and, using some of the money Dave Hensch had given him, bought one of the three-foot-long ropes of jalapeno beef jerky. The overweight clod running the cash register looked about as interested in his job as an Army doctor checking a thousand new recruits for hernias. All the better, Connor thought. Then he went out to stand at the pay phone.

Connor chewed on his beef jerky, picked up the phone and pretended to talk into it as he watched the cars come and go.

A mustard-yellow Volkswagen bus, a silver Honda, a red Nissan pickup, a Chevy, another Honda, a Toyota, a big black Caddy, a rusty pickup piled high with old furniture and cardboard boxes, a low-rider El Camino, three Winnebago campers in a convoy. He saw college students in the cars, families with kids, grandma and grandpa with a poodle barking behind a rolled-up window, a group of college girls coming back from a skiing trip.

But Connor saw no opportunities. Still, shit would happen, if he waited long enough.

He hung up the phone, walked around the building, then went back to his vigil. He had eaten all but four inches of his beef jerky by the time he made his move.

An old station wagon with fake wood sidewalls pulled up; it had only one man inside. The driver opened the door and clambered out, dressed in old jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, needing a shave, and stumbling as if he had been driving for the last four years without a break. Like a horse with blinders on, the gangly man headed for the rest room. He left the station wagon’s lights on, the engine running. Perfect.

Connor strode toward the car. Hesitation only wasted time.

By the time the driver had slipped through the battered gray door of the men’s room, Connor reached the station wagon. Not the type of vehicle he would have preferred, but he wasn’t picky.

He opened the driver’s door and slid inside. Connor’s heart pounded. No one had seen anything yet. Maybe this would teach the jerk to be more careful next time.

The seats were worn, and the interior smelled like burned garbage. The ash tray overflowed with crushed-out cigarillo tips. Connor scowled. Slob! But he didn’t care, as long as the car could take him to Flagstaff, Arizona. He adjusted the seat, gunned the engine, then put the station wagon into gear. “Ready or not, here I come!”

Just as the station wagon started moving, the gangly driver suddenly walked out of the rest room. He stopped for a moment, as if astonished to see someone stealing his car. Then he jumped in front of the station wagon, waving his hands for Connor to stop.

What? Does he think I’m stupid?

Connor jammed the gear shift into reverse and lurched away from the driver. The man had stringy black hair, dripping wet, as if he had just gone in to splash cold water on his face. His flannel shirt hung unbuttoned over a grimy t-shirt, flapping like wings as he flailed his arms.

Before Connor could put the car into gear again and drive the other direction, the driver snatched at the door handle. “Asshole! Get outta my car!”

Connor used his elbow to shove down the door lock, then reached behind him to lock the back and the passenger side doors. The driver shouted, pounding on the windows, yelling for help.

Connor gunned the engine again and began to move. People turned and stared at the scene. For God’s sake, Connor thought, did the whole world get extra points for causing him trouble?

The driver threw himself in front of the car, hammering his fists on the hood. Connor tried to swerve, but in a split instant he realized that even if he did get away, the driver would call the police, give the license number of his car, a description of the thief—and the highway patrol would be crawling all over the interstate looking for him in no time. Christ, what a mess!

It would be better if this guy couldn’t say anything coherent for a little while, Connor thought. Just a little while.

Without spending a lot of time checking it out with his conscience, Connor yanked the steering wheel to the side and brought the station wagon around into the shouting driver. Beside the gas pumps stood a black oil drum with a plastic liner. Connor swerved to knock the man into the trash barrel.

He didn’t notice the concrete support pillars holding the barrel in place. The station wagon crushed the driver into the barrel and then the reinforced concrete pillar. Instead of toppling the trash can out of the way, the car smashed the man with a loud, sickening crunch. The front bumper of the station wagon struck him at the hips, ramming into the unyielding cement. The oil drum buckled.

A flower of blood burst out of the driver’s mouth, accompanied by a scream that Connor barely heard. He pulled the shift into reverse, backing the car away.

The man fell to the pavement. The crumpled oil drum rolled on top of him. Other gas station customers began shouting, running toward him.

“Oh, shit!” Connor said. “Why didn’t you get out of the way?” If he stopped to help the crazy bastard, he’d be caught red-handed stealing the car. When the cops ran his ID check, they would find the outstanding Zoroaster charges. All because this jerk felt his crappy old station wagon was worth dying for? Of all the stupid things! No thanks.

The car’s owner lay bunched against the gas pumps as two people bent over him. Blood streamed from his mouth and nose. The fat kid swaggered out of the Star-Shoppe to see what the fuss was about, then turned so pale his pimples faded.

“Forget this!” Connor said, then stomped on the accelerator pedal, spinning tires and squealing out of the parking lot.

He could get back on the Interstate, hook east on the 210, then north on I-5 to I-40, which would take him to Flagstaff. If he didn’t stop, he could make it in six or seven hours.

It would take the cops an hour to figure out what had gone down at the gas station, even longer if the driver wasn’t in any condition to talk. Connor could sail right past them. And the highway patrol would expect him to try to vanish into the sprawl of Los Angeles, not head east to the state line.

Besides, it wasn’t his fault.

Connor roared up the entrance ramp, flowing into the relentless stream of traffic. Behind him, the lights of the gas station oasis dwindled in the distance.

Now he was home free.

Chapter 27

In her small cubicle, surrounded by identical cubicles in the offices of Surety Insurance, Heather Dixon wondered why the receptionist kept forwarding calls to her. She stared at the pile of insurance claims on her desk. Even though she had worked one claim after another without taking a break all day, the stack of papers waiting to be processed grew two inches every hour.

She was working harder than an administrator. Funny they weren’t willing to pay her for it.

She punched a button on the phone to pick up the call, then held the receiver between her shoulder and ear as she filed proof-of-loss forms. “Surety Insurance Company, may I help you?”

“I hope so,” said the thin male voice on the line, “you’re the eighth person I’ve been transferred to.”

“Sorry, sir. We’ve been unusually busy, and—”

“I understand,” the man said at the ragged end of patience, “and I’m normally a laid-back person. But if you will just take my information and promise it’ll be straightened out, we can both be done in a flash. Deal?” He had a no-nonsense voice that might have been pleasant if he hadn’t been pushed to the edge.

“Yes, sir. Let’s see what we can do.”

“I’ve given my name a dozen times. Could you please punch it up on your computer? I’m Spencer Lockwood, spelled just like it sounds. I was driving my rental car, a Mazda Protege, and it broke down near Death Valley, California.” He rattled off the words as if he had memorized them. “I couldn’t get a replacement from the rental car company, so I was forced to rent another one on my own. Now that I’m back in New Mexico, I’m calling to ask if the emergency road service on my own policy will cover the new rental, because the rental company refuses to pay.”

“How can they turn down a request like that?” she asked, scowling. “Did they give you any reason?”

Lockwood said, “They told me I should have just waited a day or so—by the side of the road, presumably—and they would have had a new car delivered to me. Since I refused to wait for them, they claim they’re not obligated.”

Heather sighed, then yanked reddish-brown hair back behind her ears. It was one of her most unflattering ways of wearing it, but she was too harried to notice. The young college students manning the receptionist desks refused to deal with anything out of the ordinary, especially on a horrendously busy day like this. They input only the routine claims and let the computers bump the questionable ones higher in the system.

“You really should discuss this with your own agent,” said Heather.

“My agent’s been gone for a week, and I’d just as soon get this taken care of. I don’t have time to chase down errors once they get lodged in your computer’s brain.”

Heather took down the pertinent data on a form. Lockwood was trying admirably to be nice, so she made an effort on his behalf. “All right, Mr. Lockwood. I’ll do what I can. It’ll take a week or so before you get confirmation of our discussion and Surety’s decision, but I won’t let it get lost in the shuffle. Promise.”

“Thank you,” Spencer said. “You deserve a promotion for this!” He laughed.

“Yes I do,” she agreed, but she wasn’t laughing.

She held onto Lockwood’s form for a few moments, pondering where in the pile it should go. Suddenly, Albert “You can call me Al!” Sysco was there, rapping his palms on her desktop.

“So this is where the holdup is! Paperwork’s piled on your desk, and you’re sitting around daydreaming. Shake it, Heather!”

She wanted to take a baseball bat and “shake it” on his head. But she went back to work without voicing any of the retorts that popped into her head.

She sorted through the stack of papers. They would all need to be keyed into the computers before the claims could be processed, and Lockwood’s form would have to be vetted by someone in authority, someone like Al Sysco. Heather glared at him as he stormed away, then she stamped APPROVED on Lockwood’s claim.

Smiling, she filed it in the box of completed forms.

Chapter 28

When Todd reached Alex Kramer’s office in Oilstar’s bioremediation facility, he found the door locked. Yellow phone-message slips were taped to his door, one on top of another until they made a stack. Todd flipped through them. A note from Iris was on top; the bottom one was dated three days earlier. Two days after the victory party. He frowned.

Most of the other offices seemed empty as well, as if Oilstar had declared an employee holiday. Mitch Stone’s office also stood closed; a handwritten note was stuck with a red push-pin into the wall above his name plaque. “WORKING AT HOME. CAR TROUBLE.”

Around the Bay Area, cars were breaking down right and left—the “bad gasoline” from the Oilstar refinery had hit far too many vehicles, and now fingers were pointing at other area refineries, as well. A few people suspected deliberate sabotage of the gasoline output.

Frustrated, Todd got the division secretary to waddle down the hall and open Alex’s office for him. Todd followed her, as if he could herd her into greater speed. “He called in sick a few days ago,” she said. “Haven’t seen him since.”

Todd stared into a dark empty room. Concern gnawed at him. What if some radical protester like that Torgens guy decided to go after the scientist responsible for the Prometheus microbe?

Inside, the desk was neat, all the papers filed, as if Alex knew he wasn’t coming back. A part of him expected to see sheets draped over the furniture. “You haven’t heard from him since, when, Tuesday?”

The secretary shrugged. “I don’t know, Mr. Severyn—we’ve got so many people out with the traffic snarls and breakdowns that I can’t keep track. I’m not their mother, you know.”

“Never mind.” He opened his wallet and dug out Alex’s unlisted phone number as he walked into the office. Picking up the desk phone, he asked out of the corner of his mouth, “What number do I use to dial out? Seven?”

“Eight.”

He punched the number while the secretary watched him suspiciously.

Alex’s phone rang, but no one answered; even the answering machine was disconnected. That was odd. Alex had not looked well after their wild horse ride. What if he was alone at home, too sick to answer the phone?

“You’re sure he didn’t call? Wouldn’t somebody call in sick if they weren’t going to come in for work?”

She sighed, poking her lower lip out at him. A thin smear of lipstick had deposited itself on her teeth. “Usually, but a lot of these scientists live in a different universe. We had one guy who never managed to button his shirts right, and another one who had to be reminded to take lunch every day. They’re on flex time. They work late into the night sometimes, and other times they don’t come in at all. Especially with Dr. Kramer’s . . . uh, personal problems, we don’t see a lot of him.”

Todd listened to ten hollow rings before hanging up. Remembering the victory celebration, he recalled the closed room filled with treasured pictures of lost family members. Alex Kramer lived alone. No one else would worry about him if Todd didn’t check. Besides, he’d promised Iris to see what he could find out. “I think I’m going to drive over there.”

Grabbing his cowboy hat, he clomped out of the office, leaving the secretary to lock up behind him.

#

Out in the parking lot, his own truck started right up. He breathed a sigh of relief, then wound his way out of the cluttered, narrow roads inside the refinery, out the gates past the usual batch of yelling protesters, then headed for the San Rafael bridge that would take him to Marin county.

Todd had no problem until he got on the freeway. Weaving past stalled vehicles—more than he had ever seen before—he found that the far left lane was open. Traffic crawled along, but at least it moved. He felt his stomach rumble with anxiety and impatience, worried about Alex but also growing more dismayed as he passed a van hauling a motorboat stalled off to the side of the road, then a motorcycle, then a Toyota, finally a tow-truck itself abandoned in the breakdown lane. He turned his head, suddenly filled with confused fear.

#

When Todd finally made his way through the hilly backroads, he was relieved to see Alex’s four-wheel drive pickup in the gravel drive. The brown Chevy sat parked next to Alex’s ranch house, which looked closed-up and abandoned. Alex must be home—but why hadn’t he answered the phone? Could he be out riding one of the horses?

Todd’s truck bounced in the driveway as he pulled up. Swinging down from the cab, he ambled to the door, trying to look calm but growing more uneasy with each step. He rang the doorbell. Nothing. He rang again and shouted, “Hey, Alex, you in there?” Impatient, he tried the doorknob, then pounded on the door—still no answer. The grassy hills and nearby forest smothered all sound.

Muttering, he walked around back, his boots crunching in the dry grass. He heard neighing as he approached and smelled the bright, fresh odor of the stables. The two horses trotted to the fence as he approached. Todd held out a hand as the palomino, Ren, nuzzled him, looking for a sugar cube or a carrot. He noticed that the back corral gate was wide open, but the horses had remained next to the stable.

Todd scanned the back yard, then went to close the gate. The horses followed him like lonely puppies. “Hey, Alex!”

When no one answered, he ran a hand along Ren’s neck. The crisp animal smell made him long for Wyoming. “Sorry, buddy. I’ll get you some sugar later.” He swung over the wooden fence and walked across the corral. The horses followed, even to the point of nudging Todd with wet noses. He half expected to see Alex come out of the stable, but the place was vacant. Worse yet, the feeding trough was empty. Ren whinnied.

“Hold on,” said Todd. He slipped into the barn and returned with a rustling armload of hay, which he dumped into the trough. The dry, weedy scent clung to his shirt. Todd found the smell pleasant. The horses pushed toward the food and ignored him. As they munched, Todd rubbed the sweaty back of his neck.

Obviously the horses had not been fed for a day or two. No one had seen Alex since the party. Something terrible must have happened to make him neglect his horses. From what Todd had noticed on their ride, Alex doted on the animals.

Something must have happened to him.

Despite their empty smiles and bubbly “Have a nice day!” comments, Todd thought Californians were particularly callous to their neighbors. They never checked on each other or watched each other’s homes, barely managing to wave when they went to get the mail. If some tragedy had happened to Alex, the other residents would turn a blind eye until somebody else took care of the problem.

Well, Todd wasn’t from California, and in Wyoming people watched out for each other.

Todd strode to the rear of the house, around flower beds gone to weeds. A picnic table out back sat streaked with caked dust, and the blue-and-white overhead umbrella had been rolled down for some time. At the back door, he pulled open the screen and rattled the knob on the white-painted door, but the back door was locked solid with a deadbolt.

He didn’t give much thought to calling for help. Who was Todd to file a missing persons report anyway? He had spoken to Alex after the celebration, gone on a brief horse ride with him, but he could not claim to be a long-time friend. Did Alex have any long-time friends? The police would tell Todd to wait a few days, check back, maybe something would turn up.

But Todd kept imagining Alex unconscious or dead on the floor inside his house. He would rather pay for some broken glass than leave the microbiologist inside.

Besides, he could always apologize later.

Todd spotted the smallest window he could crawl through, the laundry room by the mud room in the rear hall. He jiggled the window frame. It was locked, but loose.

He jogged back to his truck for the tool kit, rummaging and clanking around until he found a large wooden-handled screwdriver. Returning to the back window, working quickly but carefully, he jimmied the frame open without breaking the pane. He supposed that living in the country gave Alex a sense of security, enough that he wouldn’t have sophisticated locks. On their ranch in Wyoming, Todd’s parents rarely bothered to lock their doors.

Crawling through the window, he found himself in the clean hall back by a washer and dryer; he smelled the old perfume of laundry detergent, but saw no clothes in the plastic baskets piled on top of the dryer.

“Alex?” He hurried through the house, looking from side to side. All the lights were off, the curtains drawn, leaving the place in gloom. He kept expecting to find Alex crumpled on the floor, perhaps bleeding. Moving from room to room, he hastened his search. Nothing.

Alex’s truck was here, the doors were locked, the horses had been left unfed for days, but they were both here . . . . Alex did not seem the type just to wander off.

Todd stood in the large living room next to the wet bar and looked out the bay windows in back. He debated saddling up one of the horses to go search the riding paths. What if Alex had gone out after dark, after Todd left, troubled by the horse ride and the conversation, the resurrected memories? In the dimness, Alex could have stumbled and broken his neck, or fallen into a ravine, or had a heart attack.

But the house seemed to be holding secrets, shadows hiding around corners. The air felt cool and sluggish around him, as if it had not been disturbed for some time.

A faint, gritty odor made him look at the fireplace, to see a rumpled pile of papers and ashes, a solid stack of lab notebooks with burned edges. The crisped, bubbled outline of a blue-and-gold Oilstar logo adorned one of the cardboard covers. He brushed aside the black metal mesh screen. Black flakes of ash curled up from the consumed papers.

A gnawing sensation grew at the pit of his stomach. On the phone Iris had told him she suspected something terribly wrong with the spread of Prometheus, but she wanted to talk to Alex before she raised any alarm. Why would Alex burn a pile of old notebooks, when he could just throw them away?

Unless he didn’t want anybody to find them.

“Alex?” Todd called again, then swallowed a lump in his throat. His stomach fluttered, then sank as he grew more certain he would not find the microbiologist. At least not alive.

He walked down the narrow hall to the bedrooms, past the bathroom which smelled mildewy from old soap and clean guest towels. The floorboards creaked under his cowboy boots as he continued to the back rooms. The bed in the master bedroom was made, but the bedspread rumpled and the pillow cocked sideways, as if Alex had lain on it for a while before getting up and going somewhere else.

On the nightstand, next to a clear glass half full of water, lay a bulky old Smith & Wesson double-action revolver. Todd recognized it as one of the older models, 1930 or 1940, but it had been recently cleaned. He could smell the cold, hard metallic aroma of the firearm.

Todd went cautiously to the bedside and picked up the weapon, wrapping his palm around the handle-grip. The Smith & Wesson felt slick, but Todd realized it was his own sweat. He sniffed the barrel, but smelled no acrid gunpowder that would tell him it had been fired recently. He couldn’t understand why Alex had taken the gun out, then left it lying around the house. Had he lost his nerve over something? Todd wet his lips.

When he turned back to the hall, Todd saw that the door to the other bedroom stood shut, as if closed against prying eyes. Todd gripped the cold doorknob and hesitated.

“Alex? Are you in there?” he said, then knocked lightly.

After a moment of silence, Todd took a deep breath, then pushed the door open slowly, expecting it to creak, afraid something might jump out at him.

The miniblinds had been drawn, leaving the muffled room awash in watery gray light. Before Todd’s eyes could adjust, he smelled a dry, sour smell of wrongness, the lingering pit-of-the-stomach twist of death, the stench of dried flesh.

Alex sat on a padded kitchen chair in the middle of the room, slumped and motionless, as if gravity had slowly sagged him.

“Alex!” Todd said, then snapped out of his sluggish shock. He slapped the wall twice before he found the light switch. Sharp yellow illumination sent the shadows and murkiness fleeing. “Awww, jeez, Alex!”

Todd took two steps forward and stopped. Alex Kramer rested in a rubbery position, as if his joints had turned liquid for a moment, then frozen into place with rigor mortis. His skin had the grayish, mottled appearance of someone who had been dead for a day or so.

His head had cocked forward on his neck, resting his chin and his neat peppery-gray beard against the base of his throat. His eyes were squeezed shut, surrounded with the cobwebs of wrinkles.

He wore comfortable clothes, faded jeans, a work shirt, no shoes and grayish-white socks. In his lap he clutched his eyeglasses folded in one hand. The other hand gripped a picture frame, turned face down against his jeans.

Todd stepped forward, clumsy like an intruder, but driven. He reached out for the picture frame, but then the pointed toe of his boot kicked something that rattled hollowly on the floor under the chair.

He bent over and picked up three dark-orange prescription pill bottles. Todd didn’t recognize the names of the drugs, but they sounded like high-strength pain killers. Under a strip of bright cellophane tape, the date on one prescription label had expired five years before.

The pieces fell into place, rattling like bones in an empty cup. Todd pictured Alex taking out the revolver in the master bedroom, lying restless on the bed, agonizing over his decision to kill himself, and then eventually choosing another way, a method that was not so violent. But ultimately just as effective.

Todd stood on creaking knees, blinked his stinging eyes several times, and touched the picture frame in Alex’s lap. He lifted, then pried the photograph free of the dead man’s grip. It showed a handsome woman, classy-looking, with short hair and subtle, careful makeup. She wore a secret smile that seemed to slide right past Todd, as if she had directed it at someone else.

“Why the heck did you have to do this, Alex?” Todd whispered, squeezing the brim of his cowboy hat in his left hand. “Nothing could have been that bad.”

On the walls in the memorial bedroom, the other photographs, certificates, documents, seemed to hum with background noise, ghosts and memories, frozen moments that Alex had trapped in this room and had refused to set free. And now he had burned all his notes on Prometheus, then gone to join his family.

Todd stood up, his head spinning but his body unable to move. Finally, with one last glance at Alex, he went to find a phone so he could call the police, Oilstar, and Iris Shikozu.

Chapter 29

Iris Shikozu felt like she was stuck on the Titanic, knowing it was doomed to sink but unable to do anything.

Aside from the muted chugging of the vacuum pumps and the air conditioner in her lab, she heard no students out in the hall, no clicking of shoes as people walked by, not even the distant sound of a professor droning on in a lecture room. She hadn’t even bothered to turn on the stereo not since Todd had told her that he was going to Alex Kramer’s house. She wished he would call, if for no other reason than to confirm what she had uncovered about Prometheus and the transportation breakdowns.

Genetic assays had proved that Prometheus was destroying gasoline as well as devouring the Zoroaster spill. And the actual microbe Alex Kramer had provided for the spraying operations was very different from the innocuous control sample he had given Iris for initial testing and verification.

Through Francis Plerry at Environmental Policy and Inspection, Iris had urged a drastic crackdown on gasoline sales and transportation beyond the Bay Area, at least until they could determine the spread of the Prometheus organism. But the governor had refused to take an action that might cause a panic.

Iris spread the word anyway, hoping someone would refute her results; but every one of her colleagues came up with the same answer. Several of the other researchers immediately saw the implications, and everyone started making phone calls.

Random samples of gasoline were infected with Prometheus hybrids. Unexplained breakdowns were reported across the state, and the contamination was spreading exponentially from gas tank to gas tank, filling station to filling station. On the news last night, Iris had seen a story about rashes of mechanical failures popping up in Chicago, Denver, and Dallas. It was a plague, plain and simple. A petroleum plague.

In a fit of panic, she went to the small lab sink next to the coffee pot and scrubbed her hands three times with a bar of harsh pumice soap. If this microbe metabolized octane so voraciously, it might eat the shorter-chain hydrocarbons in her own body. She looked over the instruments she had touched. The organism might start breaking down other polymers.

She grabbed her old styrofoam cup and poured herself more steaming coffee, sipping it black as she fought to keep her hands from trembling.

The phone shrilled at her. Nearly spilling her coffee, she wove her way around the cluttered equipment and grabbed the phone on the third ring, breathless. “Hello?”

“Iris, this is Todd.” He sounded too serious.

“Can I talk to Dr. Kramer? This is really important!”

“He’s dead.”

“Dead?” She stopped, unsure of what to say. “How can he just drop dead and leave us with this mess?” Iris set her small mouth, then sat down in a creaking old office chair behind her desk. She knocked papers aside to clear a spot to rest her elbow. “Todd, you have no idea how serious this is! Kramer did something to his Prometheus—”

“I know. Alex burned his notes at home, then he killed himself. You should see all the cars breaking down on the roads. Whatever he did, it’s spreading like crazy! I thought he promised it couldn’t become airborne.”

“Right now,” Iris said, a thick lump of panic rising in her throat, “I don’t believe much of anything Dr. Kramer promised.” Trying to remain calm, Iris picked up a pen and tapped it nervously on the surface of her government-surplus desk. “I’m pretty sure Prometheus is being spread from gas station to gas station. As a contaminated car fills up, it leaves some of the microbes on the nozzle. Everyone else who gets gas there picks up the infection.”

“So what do you suggest we do?”

“Right now we need to quarantine the area, the whole state of California if necessary. And the faster we act, the sooner we can stop it from spreading. Cars can’t run very long if their gas is infected, so that puts an upper limit on how far they can transport it. If we can get the police to close down the state borders—”

“What about airplanes, or ships?”

“Prometheus is fairly specific in attacking octane only,” said Iris. “I’ve got to go, there’s too much to do, too many people to contact. This is going to be rough.”

Todd was silent for a moment. “I’m at Alex’s place, and I’ve got to wait for the police and the coroner. I think . . . I think he’s been planning this. He asked me to take care of his horses a few days ago.” He hesitated. “How else do you need me to help?”

Her mind raced ahead, prioritizing which agencies to contact. She found her hands shaking—with excitement, or fear? She had too many things to do. “Uh, I have to get through to Oilstar management. There’s really no one I can depend on . . . .”

“Do you need me down in Stanford?”

“Yeah, sure.” Her answer came too fast, and she realized that she did want him there, if nothing more than to provide comfort while she was trying to sort through this emergency. If only she had more time!

Then she focused on what he was saying and interrupted him. “No, wait, no telling how long any of our vehicles is going to last. You might have a hard time getting all the way down here.”

“You just start coordinating how we can go after this thing. I’ll worry about me,” Todd said. “And hey, if you need a contact at Oilstar, I’ll march right into Emma Branson’s office even if I have to knock over the receptionist. Don’t you take any grief from anyone either.”

“Do I usually?”

A pause, then a chuckle. “No, I don’t think so.”

As she hung up Iris was already going over the details of what had to be done. If this was truly a plague, there had to be contingency plans at the Centers for Disease Control, the National Military Command Center, the Federal Emergency Management Agency—dozens of places that should be able to offer her guidance.

Francis Plerry. She had to go through him again. He wouldn’t be much help, but he could set a few wheels in motion. At the very least he should have access to the governor in Sacramento. Iris looked for her rolodex, found it behind her mammoth-sized CRC Handbook of chemical data, and fumbled though the white cards until she pulled out Plerry’s number. The first time she dialed she got a busy signal. Damn!

Picking up her cup of coffee, she took a big gulp that stung her tongue and dialed again. The ringing seemed to go on forever before a brusque female voice answered and put her on hold.

She reached for her coffee again. Seconds ticked away. How long would it take for the governor to impose a vehicle quarantine that would make the Med-fly incident look like a joke?

“Hello?”

“Mr. Plerry? This is Iris Shikozu, from Stanford—”

As she started to speak, the white styrofoam of her coffee cup turned spongy, as if melting. Then it sloughed over her fingers. Warm liquid splashed down her blouse. Iris jumped back, shaking her hand and staring at the cup.

The coffee wasn’t that hot. What could make the cup break down like that? Something that broke down styrofoam . . . hydrocarbon polymers . . . .

She felt her knees turn watery.

Plerry’s voice came from the phone, now on the floor. “Hello, Dr. Shikozu? Are you all right?”

Iris stood transfixed, staring as the cup turned into a frothy white foam with a faint, muffled crackling sound in the puddle of coffee on the floor. She slid off the chair and fell to her knees. “Oh, no.”

“Dr. Shikozu?”

Iris dipped her fingers in the gooey remains of the cup and plucked at the white, fizzing strands. The Prometheus vector was no longer confined to direct physical contact.

The microbe now attacked petroleum plastics as well as gasoline.

And it was airborne.

PART II:

BREAKDOWN

Chapter 30

Navy Lieutenant Bobby Carron stepped out of the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters and craned his neck, looking into the crisp, cloudless sky. A perfect day for flying. In a few hours, he and his partner would be strapped into their identical A/F 18 fighters, blasting off from the China Lake Naval Weapons Center in the bleak California desert, and roaring across the country.

In the early morning light, Bobby stretched his arms to toss off the last remnants of sleep. The flat military base opened up to a panoramic view of the cracked, dry lake bed—”beautiful downtown China Lake”—that spread out undisturbed for miles, white and dazzling. Chemical plants around nearby Trona scooped and processed the powdery wastes, but the U.S. Navy had claimed a chunk of the desolate landscape for its own use.

Bobby felt rested and ready for the cross-country mission. He had a few hours until “wheels up,” but he had errands to run before his week-long absence from the base. The scheduled time was the latest they could leave and still be cleared all the way to Corpus Christie, Texas. If they took off early, so much the better—more time for beach, surf, and babes.

Overhead, an experimental aircraft lit up its engines to break the 6 A.M. silence; flames shot out 20 feet behind the distant jet’s engines as afterburners kicked on.

A door opened down the hall. Bobby saw a head crowned with a shock of red hair. Bobby grinned. For once he wasn’t going to have trouble getting his buddy Ralph “Barfman” Petronfi out of bed. Ever since they had been roommates at the Naval Academy, Petronfi could sleep through anything—except on a flying day.

Bobby whistled. “Hey, Barfman.” Petronfi’s propensity for tossing his cookies while flying was legendary.

Barfman turned sleepy eyes to Bobby. “Hi, Rhino. Ready for the beach?”

“Soon as I clean up my jeep. Gotta grab some breakfast.”

“I’ll file a flight plan. Want to leave early?” Barfman said.

“If I can get everything done.”

“I’ll preflight us at the squadron.”

“That’s a rog.” Bobby ducked back into his quarters to pull on his gray flightsuit from the narrow closet, patting down his many pockets to check that each held its appropriate map, keys, wallet, pen, chewing gum. Bobby went out again, hiking to the Officer’s Club to gulp down a breakfast of eggs, warmed-over steak, and powdered orange drink—a breakfast high in protein so he wouldn’t need to take a crap during the day’s flight alone in a cramped cockpit. Barfman usually fasted before a long flight, which kept him from puking into his oxygen mask if they encountered any clear-air turbulence.

Bobby grabbed his nylon flight bag on the way to the mud-spattered jeep. He had packed the night before—swim trunks and two changes of jeans and cotton shirts. The Naval training base near the Texas beach was a favorite roost for cross-country crews, complete with surf and bikinis. Bobby had a nice life, flying every day, living on flight pay, no kids, no alimony. Once in a while he missed playing football, but flying made up for it.

Parked in the weedy gravel lot, his black jeep was plastered with muck from a weekend of four-wheeling around dry Owens Lake. He loved doing doughnuts out in the brackish standing water and spraying salt and powder in a rooster-tail behind him. He didn’t want to waste time washing the jeep right now, but he knew how much damage the alkali mud could do to his paint job. With a little time until the preflight briefing, Bobby decided to use the base’s self-service wash three blocks down the street.

Bouncing into the driver’s seat, he poked his keys into the ignition and tried to start the jeep. The engine barely turned over, and when it caught, the jeep rattled as if it were running low on gasoline. The gas tank read full; he had filled it up after returning late last night. Bobby frowned. He smelled a faint odor of rotten eggs.

Bobby nursed the chugging jeep along the street lined with old barracks buildings and a small BX. He parked in the service station lot crowded with the hodgepodge of other vehicles. He swung out of the jeep and jogged inside the station. A female captain and two men out of uniform stood in line at the service desk; another two women—wives of enlisted men—sat in chairs in the waiting area.

Bobby listened to the mechanic taking information from the first customer. The phone rang, but the attendant ignored it. Bobby glanced at his watch. The two women sitting in the plastic chairs looked impatient and surly, as if they had been here a long time. He sighed. He would have to leave the jeep here and walk the couple blocks to base operations for the flight. He regretted not being able to wash the mud off, but it was only a jeep, not a Jag. Jeeps were supposed to get dirty.

The service attendant looked harried. “Got five people ahead of you, Lieutenant,” he said with surprising courtesy. “Don’t know if we can get to it this morning.”

“Can I leave it? I’m gone for the week.”

The attendant shoved a triplicate repair sheet across the desk. “Sure. Fill it out on top and sign here.”

Bobby scribbled his name and details about the jeep. “Looks like you’re pretty busy. What’s up—two-for-one special?”

“You tell me. Started this morning. If I didn’t know better I’d think we got some of that bad batch of gasoline, but our gas comes from Bakersfield, not the San Francisco refineries.”

Bobby dug into his flight suit for the keys. He tossed them across the counter. “I’ll be back on the 9th.”

Outside, he retrieved his flight bag from the driver’s seat, pulled the canvas cover over the top of the jeep, and started walking down the street. The way his luck was going, Corpus Christi would probably be hit with a hurricane when he was halfway there, and he’d have to divert to Del Rio instead. . . .

Squadron headquarters was a long one-story building painted white to reflect the sun. The squadron mascot, a Tasmanian Devil with an arrow through its head, was painted on the cinder-block outside walls. Inside, photos of old F 4s taking off from a wooden-decked aircraft carrier, a lumbering P 3 flying patrol over the ocean, a pair of F 14 Tomcats launching missiles hung on the walls. At the end of the hall a set of doors led to the ready room, weather unit, orderly room, and the CO’s office.

Entering the preflight area, he saw Barfman in a gray flight suit hunched over a chest-high table, drawing with a red magic marker. Maps, computer listings, and Notes-To-Airmen covered the bulletin boards.

“Just finishing off the flight plan, Rhino,” Barfman said. “I want to go before the hunger pains start. Ready to head out?”

“Yeah,” said Bobby. “My jeep conked out on me, had to leave it at the service station.”

“From what I heard in the ready room, you’re lucky they even put your name on the waiting list. Base motorpool is backed up, and they’re refusing to take any more vehicles.”

The memory of that guy running out of gas in the Death Valley desert raced through Bobby’s head. “Is there some sabotage going on around here or what?”

“Yeah, it’s some new Commie secret weapon. Magically exchanges the engines of American-made cars with top-of-the-line North Korean jobs. That’s why everything’s breaking down.”

Bobby swung his flight bag to the foot of the table. “Thank you for explaining. Now let’s book out of here before they cancel our flight.”

“Hey, I’ve waited three months for this cross country. No way am I going to let a bad batch of gasoline put a hold on my vacation.” Barfman pushed a sheaf of lined papers over to Bobby, folding open to the right page. “Log in the flight plan and I’ll check with Weather.”

Bobby looked over the route Barfman had outlined in marker. They were set to make the trip with an intermediate stop at Nellis AFB in Nevada, just outside of Las Vegas. They probably could have stretched the hop to El Paso, but if they broke down, spending time in Las Vegas was preferable to the Texas border town any day. . . .

#

“Ah, Rhino, got a little problem here.” The sound of Barfman’s voice crackled through the white-noise roar of the jets.

It took Bobby a second to snap away from a daydream of sea breezes, warm sand, and a Gulf shrimp dinner. They were no more than an hour out of Las Vegas, heading across the blistered barren desert of central New Mexico. Cramped in the cockpit of his one-man fighter jet, Bobby bent to pick up the handset. He clicked the radio, using the frequency he and Barfman had agreed on.

“What’s up, Barfman?” He spotted his partner’s A/F 18 Hornet two miles ahead of him. Frosty white contrails streamed from the engine in the cold thin air.

“I show a faulty pump indicator. Doesn’t look good.”

“Try Emergency Repair Procedure number 1,” Bobby said.

“I already tapped the damned dial. It’s not a faulty reading.”

“How’s your flow rate?”

“Next to nothing. I got a sluggish response on the controls. Something’s not hooked up the way it should be.”

Bobby scanned his own instruments in the cockpit. Everything looked fine. “What do you think?”

“Well, I’d say I was running out of fuel—but we just tanked up at Nellis. Can you zoom up here and give me a once over? Is one of my tanks leaking?”

Bobby squeezed his transmitter twice to click off an acknowledgment, then pushed the throttles. He felt an immediate surge as the engines gulped more kerosene-based JP 4 fuel. Pulling back, he slowed to match Barfman’s velocity and inched toward the A/F 18. He circled the fighter, craning his neck to inspect it. “Negatory, Barfman. Can’t see anything wrong.” He started to move behind his partner’s aircraft when he glanced at the altimeter. “Hey, watch your altitude.”

“I’m losing airspeed,” said Barfman, his voice grim.

“You ready to declare an emergency?”

He waited, listening to the static. “Ah . . . not yet,” Barfman said at last. “But we’d better find someplace flat to put this baby down.”

“Rog,” said Bobby, feeling a mixture of relief and deeper concern. “You keep her flying, I’ll check things out.” He eased back on the throttles.

Bobby reached into the leg pocket on his flightsuit and pulled out an airfield map of the southwestern states, unfolding it against the cramped front panel of the cockpit. Smoothing the map, he scanned it for the nearest runway, but saw nothing close. He clicked the radio. “Doesn’t look good, Barfman. I’m calling the cavalry.” Bobby glanced at his INS—the Inertial Navigation System—before calling. On their routine flight path, they had been handed over to the Albuquerque regional FAA control center some minutes before.

Barfman acknowledged only with two clicks on the radio, no words at all. Bobby swallowed. Barfman must be having a much harder time than he realized.

Bobby changed the frequency to pick up the FAA control center, keeping his voice calm and firm as he called in. “Albuquerque control, this is Navy Zero Six out of China Lake. We’re approximately a hundred thirty miles southeast of Four Corners. Request immediate location of the nearest airfield.”

“Navy 6, this is Albuquerque. Do you have an emergency?”

The option raced through Bobby’s mind. It was one thing for Barfman to try an bring the fighter in all by himself—if nothing was really wrong with the jet, they’d just refuel, hop back in and zoom to the beach. No problem, no worry, no messy paperwork. But if they declared an emergency, then all hell would break loose—at the very least they’d have to appear before an inquiry board.

Bobby wet his lips; the high-altitude air was bone dry. “Ah, Albuquerque, we’ve run into some difficulty but are not ready at this time to declare an emergency. Please advise ASAP on the location of the nearest airfield.”

“Roger, Navy Zero Sixer. You may divert to Santa Fe or Los Alamos to the north or keep coming in for three airfields in the Albuquerque area. Please inform of your situation.”

Barfman’s jet continued descending. Barfman’s voice came over the speaker, clipped with tension. “Getting kind of hard to handle, old buddy. Not sure I want to try to bring her down in the mountains around Los Alamos—”

Suddenly, large gaps appeared in Barfman’s contrails, as if the jet engines had been turned on and off in quick succession. Bobby gripped the control stick with his sweaty hand as icepicks of cold sweat stabbed up and down his back.

“Barfman, you all right?”

His partner’s voice sounded tight, under control. “I’m fighting engine-out, Rhino. This thing wants to shut down. Do you think somebody watered the fuel at Nellis? That damned Air Force JP-4—” Barfman’s voice cut off entirely and white noise filled the airwaves.

“Barfman, do you read?” Bobby waited a second, hoping and praying that something would improve. It didn’t. When Barfman didn’t answer, Bobby pushed his throttles to the max; the fighter leaped through the air. Barfman’s jet dropped like a rock. Bobby clicked his mike. He felt helpless, unable to do anything but watch. “Barfman, do you copy?”

Bobby nosed his craft over to follow Barfman’s descent. He peered through the scratched transparent canopy of his fighter. The contrails had vanished from Barfman’s jet; there was no flame in the engine—he must have had a complete power failure. But what about the backup? That should have kicked in. Without power, the electrical system would not work, making the radio inoperable. The rudders and stabilizers could be moved through hydraulics, so Barfman had some control; but with no thrust, the fighter would fall one foot for every ten it moved forward. Barfman didn’t have much time to eject.

Bobby clicked to the emergency guard frequency. “Mayday, mayday. Navy Zero Sixer calling for help, southeast of Four Corners. We have a flame-out and are rapidly descending. Request emergency equipment immediately.”

He skinned close to Barfman’s jet, almost wingtip to wingtip. He breathed sharp cold air in staccato gasps. Bobby could see his friend’s helmet through the cockpit, his head down as he wrestled in vain with the unwieldy hydraulic controls.

Bobby knew of no way to stretch out the inevitable crash—at this rate, Barfman would impact the ground at five hundred miles an hour. Bobby glanced at his altimeter; they were passing through fifteen thousand feet and still accelerating downward.

Albuquerque control came over the radio. “We’ve lost your squawk, Navy 6. Do you copy?”

“Come on, Barfman—punch out!” Bobby slid the jet off to the side to give the other pilot room to eject—but nothing happened. The altimeter continued to run down. “Come on!”

Barfman didn’t have a chance in hell to land, even if he regained total control. Bobby glanced out his cockpit; rugged brown terrain swooped up to meet them.

“Navy Zero Sixer, do you read?”

Ignoring the ground controller, Bobby jerked his stick to the right, rolling until he was beneath Barfman’s jet, accelerating down faster than the A/F 18 fell. He had to get Barfman’s head up out of the controls! Holding his breath, Bobby shoved the throttles forward; when he was under Barfman, he kicked in the afterburners with a sound like a bomb blast. The sudden acceleration shoved Bobby back in his seat.

Barfman appeared to be struggling with his ejection handles. Bobby cut off the afterburners and pulled back on the stick. He felt the gees build up and squash him into his seat.

Pulling his jet into a loop, Bobby searched for Barfman’s fighter. The sky wheeled around him, the desert looked like brown scabs below him with baking sands and lumpy weathered lava outcroppings. “Barfman, where are you!”

A moment later, he saw a flash of light. A massive brown cloud rose from the desert floor as Barfman’s fighter slammed into the ground. Bobby winced for just a second, but he could not let himself believe his buddy had been trapped in the cockpit. Making an animal sound through his teeth, he wrenched the control stick to pull his fighter over. He scanned the sky for a parachute, an eject seat. “Come on, come on!”

Then he felt a shudder run through his own plane.

He found the fuel indicator—his pump appeared to be malfunctioning. The flow rate from the tank to the engine started dropping. Something had blown, just like in Barfman’s jet. “Oh, shit,” he said.

The speakers crackled to life. “Navy Zero Sixer, we have lost your squawk. We are standing by. Please engage your transponder. Estimate has you northwest of Double Eagle airport in Albuquerque. Do you copy?”

Bobby shook his head to clear the shock that gripped him. Adrenaline flushed his system of cobwebs, making him sharp. His altimeter showed that he had climbed back up to twelve thousand feet, and aside from the faulty reading on the pump flow indicator, there was nothing to show he was in any trouble. Not yet. He knew he should be doing something: trying to land his craft so he wouldn’t be taken by surprise like his friend. He still saw no sign of Barfman’s parachute.

Life or death. He squelched the fear, the helplessness. No time for that now. Bobby shoved the throttles to full, kicking in the afterburners. As the surge of acceleration hit him, he realized he might have only minutes to find a place to land, especially if the sudden plague of breakdowns hit his own A/F 18.

He keyed his transponder and spoke into the mike. “Mayday, mayday, Albuquerque control. Navy Zero Six declaring an emergency. Attempting to reach Double Eagle airport. One plane in our flight is down, approximately thirty miles behind me. My flow pump reads faulty, and if I lose engine power I will not be able to transmit. Request immediate emergency assistance, foam and emergency vehicles—”

“We have you fifteen miles out, Navy Zero Sixer. Please be advised there is no emergency equipment at Double Eagle. I say again, no emergency equipment available.”

“Great,” muttered Bobby. From what he had seen on the map, he’d have to fly over the city of Albuquerque to reach the municipal airport, which meant putting thousands of people at risk if he couldn’t nurse his plane all the way to the runway.

He pushed the aircraft as fast as he dared, hoping to reach the Double Eagle airport before everything crapped out on him. He tried to keep a balance between altitude and speed, knowing that he could trade off one for the other; but he also didn’t want to fall into the same trap as Barfman, and lose stability while wrestling with the hydraulic controls.

The humped line of the Sandia mountains loomed in the distance. Below him the ground smoothed out, leaving the rugged terrain behind. He might make it.

“Navy Zero Six, please be advised—” The speaker went dead and the cockpit sounded weirdly silent except for the rushing wind. At the same instant he felt a gigantic sagging as the engines died, the A/F-18’s electrical systems shut down. What the hell happened to the backup? The system was isolated from the main engine—this couldn’t happen!

Adrenalin and split-second fear switched off the questions in his mind. Deal with them later. Bobby immediately pushed as hard as he could to lower all flaps to extend the camber in an attempt to increase his lift.

He spotted Double Eagle airport off to the left; he had vectored in too far south. Cursing under his breath, he inched the fighter’s nose to the left, trying not to do anything that would send the already precarious craft out of control. He had to punch out—no way could he bring this fighter in. No way.

But what had gone wrong with Barfman? Had he tried to eject, only to fail for some unknown reason? Or had Barfman simply waited too long, kept his head buried in the controls?

He saw a long stretch of green in front of him—the Rio Grande river. What a place to run out of gas! He frantically tried to turn the craft, but felt a growing wobble.

The craft would lose it any second now. Slamming his helmeted head against the back of his seat, he reached down and grasped the ejection handles. He’d crash through the canopy if it didn’t blow open, but better that than staying with the jet and digging a crater in the desert. He looked straight ahead, closed his eyes, and pulled up as hard as he could.

An instant later he felt the shock of cold air, a sound that overwhelmed him—wind, crashing, tearing. His right leg and mouth felt torn apart. He was thrown from the seat, twisting. Attached to the parachute a line in front of him snaked out, ripped into the howling wind.

He felt himself tumbling. The parachute started to open. He had to clamp his mouth shut to keep from vomiting.

It was going to be one mother of a hard landing. Bobby gritted his teeth and tried to keep conscious. The parachute tugged him upward in an effort to slow his plunge.

Below him, he watched his jet explode into the desert floor.

Chapter 31

Iris Shikozu’s portable phone no longer worked, but the clunky old model in the bedroom of her apartment still functioned. Different plastics broke down at different rates. The plague was spreading like a flood, wiping out the entire city.

She carefully pushed buttons, hoping the equipment wouldn’t fall to pieces as she dialed. She had to talk to somebody. The world seemed to close around her as everything broke down. On her bedroom wall, posters of middle-aged rock groups stared down at her, offering silent sympathy for her predicament.

In only a day the news had become intermittent . The plague had been spreading quietly since the Prometheus spraying, infecting numerous items, metabolizing gasoline first and then attacking other polymers, until components began to break down all at once. All at the same time.

The radio news told stories of riots in South Africa, a major stock exchange crash in Tokyo, communications blackouts from various parts of the world. The President himself was stranded out of the country, and now the Vice President had been stuck in Chicago when all aircraft were grounded. Everything was happening too fast.

She listened to the buzzing ring against her ear as she waited for someone to answer. More often than not, the phones had been out of order. She suspected that plastics in the various telephone substations had dissolved, but the phone company had managed to reroute most of the calls. So far.

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 file 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.

When he had called the ambulance to report Alex’s suicide, it had taken them five hours to reach the home out in the Marin hills. Todd had yelled at the harried-looking blond man in grimy blue-and-white paramedic uniform, but the man snapped back that only one of their vehicles worked, and that they had answered dozens of calls. The paramedics covered Alex’s body and carried it out to the ambulance, slamming the back doors. The driver pulled out, spraying gravel from the rear tires as Todd stood speechless on the porch.

With nothing else to wait for, Todd had left Alex’s house, locking the front door behind him. But when he had tried to drive to Stanford to meet Iris, his Ford pickup broke down after only five miles. He had stared at the ticking, motionless hulk parked on the side of the road, tires wrenched in a sharp angle. He had shaken his head, turned his back, and started the hike back, angry, confused, and afraid. His cowboy boots crunched on the road’s soft shoulder, and not many cars passed him.

What a day!

Letting himself back in through the jimmied laundry-room window, Todd had gone to Alex’s phone and called fifteen emergency road service numbers, finally getting one that told him to wait.

He paced through the house again. He found a set of keys on the dresser in Alex’s bedroom, and with a bright but uncertain thread of hope, he jogged out to the front driveway and climbed into Alex’s pickup. He fiddled with the keys until he found one that fit in the ignition. The starter cranked, but the engine just made grinding, chugging noises.

Todd scowled, but really wasn’t surprised.

Unless he took the horses, he was stuck here, unable to get down to Stanford. Iris needed to see whatever was left in Alex’s notes—but riding down to Stanford? Even he wasn’t that crazy.

He slept restlessly on Alex’s sofa in the family room, stripping down to his underwear and wrapped in a blanket he found in one of the closets.

The next morning, when he picked up the phone to call Oilstar, to yell at the tow service, to talk to Iris, the line was dead. “What the heck?” He slammed the telephone down.

He had promised Iris he would come down to see her as soon as possible, and he always kept his promises. Besides, she had to have those notes. He stewed in the living room, muttering to himself, looking through the glass patio doors, still trying to figure out what to do.

He wondered if Iris was worried about him. Her personality made him think of an injured bobcat, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that she was testing him, toying with him. Todd knew he was hardheaded, too, so he might be attracted to her because of her spunk—a challenge?

There were two types of women in the world—those that stood steadfast, and those that jumped from bed to bed. Iris seemed the steadfast type, but if something ever did happen between them, he wasn’t sure if he could put up with the rest of her ways. He sighed. He must be awfully bored to let his mind wander like that!

By midmorning, the power flickered and went out, leaving the house dark, cool, and stuffy. He caught a whiff of stale beer and cheese he had missed before, probably left over from the party. He stepped into the family room and scanned the carpet, but he saw no sign where Iris had spilled her wine.

He looked at a stack of plastic wine glasses on the corner of the bar, saw them sagging under their own weight. Todd touched them with his fingertip, saw his nail make a crescent-shaped indentation. When he lifted his elbow from the padded edge of the bar, the indentation remained smashed, stretched out of shape. The air carried a volatile, oily smell of dissolving plastic.

He stepped away from the bar and turned to go down the hall, stopping in front of the closed door of the “memorial” bedroom where Alex had died. Braving the chill inside himself, Todd opened the door and stepped in. Daylight slanted through the half-opened blinds, glinting on the framed photos of Alex’s family. One of the frames had fallen apart as some sort of plastic binder gave way, and an army photo of Jay lay on the floor among large pieces of broken glass.

Todd scanned the memorabilia again. After the suicide, all the faces seemed more intense now, more sharply defined. A certificate and medal bearing the name Jay Kramer. A snapshot of the young girl, Erin, standing by a pony. Todd had fed her horse Stimpy, ridden the trail that she had loved to explore. He felt he had gotten to know her somehow.

Alex had left the ranch, his life’s work with Prometheus, and now there were only pictures, ribbons, and cold medals—artifacts meaningless to anyone who did not know Alex Kramer.

Todd backed out of the room.

Alex had been a family man, something Todd himself didn’t relate to. Consulting in the oil business, Todd couldn’t afford to put down roots. The women he met expressed no desire to follow him around, to pick up everything on a moment’s notice and move across the world . . . not that he was ready for that baggage yet.

Todd remained close to his parents, and he visited their ranch as often as possible. Ranch hands came and went, but the family would always be there. He wondered how his mom and dad were doing with the spread of the petroplague, but they were basically self-sufficient out on the Wyoming plains.

In the dark refrigerator Todd found leftover party hors d’oeuvres, cheese, stale rabbit-food vegetables, beer, and some open bottles of wine. Some of the plastic wrappers looked wet and runny. He didn’t touch them.

He grabbed some cheese and scraped the rest of the old food into the garbage. He took a can of Coors and drank it down fast, then selected another one for sipping.

Okay. What the heck was he supposed to do now? What was he even doing here?

Part of him wanted to get roaring drunk, to sit on the sofa and listen to some C&W songs on the stereo. But the power was out, and Alex’s music library didn’t have much besides classical stuff anyway. Several radio stations had already dropped off the air, including the one that allegedly played country-western music but spent most of the time yakking instead.

Wiping his hands on his jeans and taking the beer with him, Todd stepped through the sliding patio door and surveyed the backyard. The horses wandered around the corral. Ren whinnied and stepped up to the fence.

Todd didn’t like impossible situations, never had, never would. He’d discovered early on that the quicker he figured out a plan of action, the less he’d worry. He ran over his options, and he kept coming up with the same answer

“Time to get the hell out of Dodge,” he muttered.

He tried the phone one last time, and to his astonishment found a static-filled dial tone. He dialed Iris’s number, praying for the phone service to last long enough for her to answer. The phone rang, then rang again. He suddenly realized he didn’t know what to say to her. When Iris answered on the fourth ring, the connection was scratchy, intermittent. Her voice had a strange echoing quality.

“Tex! Where are you? I didn’t know the phones were still working. Have you seen what’s happening all around the city?”

“Iris!” he shouted into the phone. “Are you all right?”

“Me?” She seemed shocked that he would ask. “When I go outside I can see smoke in most directions, like fires burning out of control. It’s hard to tell what’s going on. I thought I could just hole up at home, but things are getting worse by the hour. I . . . I need to get out of here. Head east toward the central valley, I think, where there’s a better chance to survive.”

Todd felt another gush of urgency. He had been cut off here at Alex’s, relatively safe, while Iris was in the middle of a potential bonfire. “Can you stay safe for another day?” he interrupted. “I’m at Alex’s house now, but I’m going to ride out on his horses. I’ll come get you. We can travel cross-country together.”

It took a moment, but she answered slowly, with an uncertain humor, “Are you asking me out, Tex?”

“Pick you up at eight,” he said, then paused, “or as soon as I get there.”

Her voice grew more serious. “I’ll believe that when I see it. Security is getting pretty grim about who they let on campus. People are starting to realize how tight the food situation is. Just stay where you are, Todd.”

“People have called me bone-headed before and just plain stubborn. I’ll make my way to Stanford. I promise.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Probably. Just wait for me.”

“Todd!”

He hung up before she could say anything else. Even if he could get Iris to come along with him, he didn’t have a clue where they might go. But he knew it was insane to remain in the city.

Moving with a new sense of determination, glad to have a goal again at last, he rummaged through the house, gathering supplies: first-aid kit, dusty sleeping bags, camping utensils, and dry food from Alex’s cupboard. The last item he packed was the old Smith & Wesson he had found on Alex’s nightstand. In a drawer he found four boxes of ammunition.

He considered waiting until morning and getting off to a fresh start. But that didn’t feel right—he could travel through the afternoon, into the night, keep away from people or traffic.

Besides, he had always wanted to ride off into the sunset.

Chapter 34

Jackson Harris sat across from his wife Daphne at an old Formica dinette table in the kitchen, trying to digest the phone conversation he’d just had. Sure, it would be easy to just pack up a few things and run out to Altamont and stay with Doog—but then what would they do? Harris and his wife had obligations to their group of people, the kids they had taken to state parks, the volunteer army that had worked so hard on Angel Island, Daphne’s church group, his own inner-city cleanup work. He couldn’t just abandon all that.

Running away didn’t seem feasible. He looked at Daphne. She had pulled her frizzy hair back with a blue hairband, and her strain-tightened face looked more angular in the uncertain light.

He could still taste the onions and spices from the quick meal of canned vegetarian chili he had warmed in an old pan on the gas stove. They had about a week’s worth of canned soup, beans, and vegetables in the pantry. Many of the grocery stores had already been looted.

“We can’t stay here, Daph,” he mumbled. “No way.” Overhead, the lights flickered, then stayed on.

“All right,” said Daphne, straightening up and managing the no-nonsense expression she did so well. “But how we gonna keep ourselves afloat and help as many folks as we can?”

All afternoon, he and Daphne had taken turns attempting to make calls from the phone hanging on the kitchen wall, begging favors, trying to borrow supplies, but panic and confusion had spread faster than the plague. Phone service was intermittent, and it probably wouldn’t last much longer. The city of Oakland had started to break down, not just automobiles, but random items made of plastic. Though the plastic-eating phase had not yet struck their home, the Harris’s own battered Pinto had not coughed to life for days, and their neighbors were similarly trapped.

It could only get worse.

The BART trains had stopped running, and the bus system ground to a halt. Traffic on the streets was less than a third of what he was used to seeingl; a few vehicles still managed to chug along, but they would probably succumb to the petroplague before long. Police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks couldn’t respond to emergency calls.

Harris rapped an old pencil on the side of the table in a nervous, sporadic drumbeat. “We can round up some people and head out to the Altamont commune. Doog won’t mind so long as we work.”

Daphne snorted. “Doog and work don’t belong in the same sentence!” She had no quarrel with Doog’s politics, but Daphne resented him for not sticking with the battle in the inner city.

Doog and a group of aging hippies had fled into the isolated hills between Livermore and Tracy years ago when they saw their John-Lennon world fading into yuppie-dom. When “liberal” became a dirty word, Doog had just shaken his head at Harris. “Man,” he said, “has the world gone off the deep end, or what?”

Harris flipped the pencil down on the table and met Daphne’s gaze. “Doog is doing just fine out there, Daph. He’s only 40 miles away. He’s got the aqueduct for water and windmills for power. They grow most of their own food. They’ve been living off the land for years. You got a better place in mind?”

Daphne shrugged. Sweat glistened on her cheeks. She had not put on makeup that morning, but Harris didn’t think she had ever looked more beautiful. “Okay, it’s a good enough spot to hide out for a while. I got no desire to be here to defend our home when the mob comes through.”

Harris grabbed her hand and squeezed. “This is going to be a hell of a lot worse than the Rodney King riots. It’s not just a public temper tantrum. People are going to be starving before long, and they won’t have soup kitchens. Come winter, they’ll chop up anything that burns just to stay warm. If we want to save any of our people, we got to go someplace else, and soon.”

“Rats leaving a sinking ship,” Daphne muttered.

“Pilgrims heading for the promised land,” he corrected.

#

Three buses sat in different states of decrepitude in the parking lot of the Holy Grace Baptist Church. Rusted cans and junk-food wrappers littered the chain-link fence against the red-brick church building. Two basketball hoops sat unused on either end of the lot; it had been years since a chain-net had graced either hoop, and the painted court lines had long since worn off the pavement. Despite the security fence, gang graffiti was spray-painted in black and bright blue on the sides of the buses.

The Reverend Timothy Rudge handed Daphne Harris the keys to the vehicles. He was a stocky man with strange spindly arms and legs, dressed in worn jeans and a maroon sweatshirt. He pursed his full lips. “I haven’t gone anywhere for days. They might not work, you know.”

“They probably won’t,” Daphne said, clutching the keys. “But one of them just might, and we only need one. That plague is spreading, but it can’t eat everything at once. We might get lucky.” She paused and looked at his face, weatherbeaten from years of preaching on the streets. “Sure you won’t come along?”

He shook his head. “Somebody has to stay behind. Might as well be me. You and Jackson been working with these people on your wilderness experience programs. You know what they can do if they let themselves believe in it. They deserve a chance.”

Reverend Rudge turned wearily and watched Jackson sweating as he pulled another load of blankets and supplies from the church shelter. Daphne rattled the keys in her hand. “What about you, Reverend? If things get bad—”

“When things get bad around here, we’ll call the congregation to the church. Make a stand.”

“You’ll never be able to protect yourselves,” Daphne said, a lump in her throat.

“We can try. We just may be able to keep an island of stability here downtown. Have faith.”

“I hope so,” she said, knowing as she spoke that her words were false. From the reverend’s fatalistic expression, she knew he understood it too. She turned away, unable to look at him any longer.

She went to the newest of the three buses and climbed into the bucket seat. Daphne had driven this bus often when they took their volunteer groups. She tensed in a combination of hope and dread as she jingled through the key ring to find the proper key. Her fingers were slick with sweat as she jammed the key into the ignition and twisted hard, as if to show the vehicle who was boss.

But the engine refused to turn over. She tried four times, without success. Jackson stood in the parking lot, watching her. He shrugged and pointed to the next vehicle. Sighing, Daphne climbed out and went to the second bus, an older model with two broken windows.

Jackson continued to haul supplies for the trip. Volunteers from the Harris’s recent crusades gathered in the church, people who were willing to work for a cause, people who didn’t have anything else to lose in their daily lives. Of course, if none of the buses started, the whole expedition would never happen. Daphne couldn’t allow herself to admit that possibility.

The second bus protested, but Daphne gritted her teeth and kept grinding the starter. The engine finally coughed to life and rumbled like a tiger with a stomach ache. Blue-black diesel exhaust, already smelling foul from the first attacks of the petroplague, spat out the rear. She raised her fist in the air, and Jackson set down his paper grocery bags on the pavement and mirrored the gesture.

#

“Okay, everybody! Get the stuff on board the bus,” Jackson Harris shouted. “We got to drive out past Livermore, and we don’t know if this bus is gonna last. I hope you’re all wearing walking shoes.”

“Yeah, right, Jackson!” said Lindie, a whip-thin single mother with five children. “We bought two hundred-dollar Nikes with the leftovers from my check this month!” Harris felt abashed, knowing she’d probably had enough trouble just finding shoelaces for all her kids.

A young couple walked to the bus: the large-eyed boy sixteen years old, the tired-looking girl no more than fifteen and very pregnant. They had been sticking together, trying to scrape together enough money to eat. The offer of leaving downtown Oakland to live out in the country seemed like paradise to them.

Denyse, a pouty thirteen-year-old girl, boarded alone, mastering a haughty expression. Harris had a high opinion of her; she was intelligent and headstrong—but her mother was a hooker, and Denyse would probably end up on the same dead-end path unless someone rescued her.

The group of refugees included two vacant-eyed homeless men, Clint and Albert, who had given up on a system that had no interest in giving them another chance; now they looked on Jackson Harris as if he just might be as good as his word.

A short fourteen-year-old boy hung on the other side of the chainlink fence and snickered, as if trying to look bigger. “Hey, fuck this boyscout trip!”

Harris crossed his arms over his chest and walked up against the fence, staring the kid down. Harley acted as if he’d always wanted to be in a gang, but had never actually joined. Instead, he tried to look tough, making loudmouthed comments but backing off whenever he was challenged. Harris had seen it happen a dozen times before.

“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 so 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?”

“A hundred fifty, last year.” Bettario nodded. “Yeah, sums it up pretty well.”

“Sounds better than getting jabbed in the eye with a sharp stick.” Morgret glanced around the small patch of land he owned by virtue of squatter’s rights. He had grown roots here, but somehow it didn’t feel like he was leaving anything behind.

“Carlos, get your boys to help me take down this LAST CHANCE sign, then I’ll be ready to go.”

Chapter 37

A pounding on the door pierced through the layers of fog that enveloped Jeffrey Mayeaux’s mind, waking him out of a blissful few hours of sleep. He hated the constant interruptions that came with being an “important man.” Well, in another year he could forget all that bilgewater.

Mayeaux woke up, smelling the disorienting strangeness of new sheets. Pieces fell into place. Two-story resort apartment in Ocean City, a getaway Weathersee had arranged for him a month ago. And nobody was supposed to know where he was. Pickled crawfish! Weathersee must have blabbed.

The pounding returned from somewhere outside the darkened bedroom . . . the front door. It was too damn early for a person to think. Besides, this was what, Sunday?

He started to roll over and get off the bed when the woman beside him moaned softly in her sleep; her head rested on his arm. Mayeaux could still smell sweat on the sheets. She was in her early twenties, large breasts, small ass, long blond hair. She brayed like a mule when she came, but it had turned him on a little. Too bad she had the face like a mule, too, but who cared?

As memories of last night came back to him, he felt another erection stirring. Weathersee had arranged for the babe to be waiting for him at the condo. Mayeaux never knew whether his Chief of Staff actually paid for these women, or if he enticed them in some other way. Good old Weathersee.

Mayeaux’s wife knew the locations of his “love nests,” and she even called him once in a while when she needed his help with one of the houses or some other emergency. But no one was supposed to know about the Ocean City place.

The door would probably splinter soon under the relentless pounding. The sheer monotonous nature told him it was probably some security goons. Anybody with half a brain would have figured out by now that Mayeaux didn’t want to talk to anybody. What a great way to wake up and start the day.

Mayeaux somehow managed to slide off the side of the bed and pick up his robe without waking the babe.

He could hear a muffled voice yelling his name as he closed the bedroom door behind him and padded down the stairs. “Hold on, Boog, for gawd’s sake,” he said.

The saeside apartment smelled of stale wine and ripe cheese. Sunlight streamed across the foyer where he had forgotten to close the curtains the night before. How he wished he could find someplace in the D.C. area that served decent cafe au lait and beignets for breakfast.

With the spreading panic and the mechanical breakdowns caused by the gasoline plague sweeping across the country, Mayeaux should have realized he couldn’t get away for a day. Just one fucking day, and it had been planned for months. Granted, he could recognize the magnitude of the growing crisis—but he wasn’t in charge. Other people could take care of things for a few hours, couldn’t they?

By Friday night only a few outbreaks had been reported in Maryland and a few in Virginia, but the news got more frantic hour after hour. California had closed its borders, far too late to stop the spread of the plague, and information from the west coast was sporadic.

Vice President Wolani had been stuck in Chicago on a speaking tour when the FAA ordered an immediate shutdown of the entire commercial airline industry in the wake of a dozen major crashes that had been blamed on disintegrating plastic components.

Mayeaux had chuckled upon learning that President Holback was stranded in the Middle East on his widely publicized diplomatic tour to Qatar, or one of those countries, when Air Force One itself was found to be infected with the petroplague . . . and now the petroleum-eating microorganisms were ravaging some of the largest Arabian oil fields. He wouldn’t want to be in Holback’s shoes at the moment.

“Mr. Speaker? Are you in there?” The voice from outside sounded loud and firm enough to pierce the solid door.

Mayeaux peered through the peephole. Two men in dark suits stood on his porch, wires running from their collars to earplugs. He could see three other men standing out in the sand. Secret Service? Jeez, couldn’t they be a bit more subtle? They stood out like a day-glow billboard in this beach town.

A chill raced down his back. Damn, what could they want? Was this a sting? His initial fear that he was in trouble left him quickly—someone in authority would be present, an official from Justice, if he had done anything wrong. And Mayeaux had never made any secret about his affairs.

But Secret Service, here? If it was so damned important to wake him up on a Sunday morning, Weathersee should have telephoned him. Then he remembered having his calls forwarded to the office; he’d unplugged the phones here since his wife and kids were staying with friends.

The Secret Service man seemed to sense him standing on the other side of the door. “Mr. Speaker—it’s important, sir. We have to speak with you.”

Mayeaux peered beyond the man in the peephole. The beach had been cordoned. The place was surrounded by plain-clothes officers.

“Yes?” Oh, shit. Mayeaux’s mind whirled. For the first time in years, he found it difficult to keep his political mask in place.

“It’s urgent, sir.”

As Mayeaux unbolted the door, the Secret Service man pushed his way in. The other, as big as a professional linebacker, motioned to the rest of the team. Mayeaux smelled the wash of cool, damp air from the ocean.

The first Secret Service officer seemed relieved to see him. “Mr. Speaker, thank God we found you.” But he didn’t look Mayeaux in the eye as he spoke—instead, his eyes darted around the apartment, checking, verifying. He wasn’t sweating, or ruffled in the least from all his pounding on the door.

Mayeaux sputtered. “What are you talking about?”

Another agent pushed into the townhouse. He spoke to the first man. “Satchmo’s secure?”

“Right,” said the first agent, who relayed the information through a walkie-talkie.

Mayeaux drew his bathrobe around him, and suddenly froze. Satchmo? The Secret Service used code names for the president, the vice president, and their immediate families . . . .

He’d had enough of this crap. “All right, what’s going on? Did Holback send you here to harass me?”

The first agent stopped, his face suddenly screwed into a hard look. His blue eyes continued to flick back and forth. “No, sir. We have to inform you that Vice President Harald Wolani was killed last night in an elevator accident in the Sears Tower in Chicago. The plague has spread there, sir, somewhat more extensively than expected.”

“Wolani’s dead?” Mayeaux stepped back, bumping into the pale blue sofa. He automatically started to sit down, but he locked his knees and stood up again.

Mayeaux wanted a Bloody Mary—hell, make it a George Dickel, neat!—but he couldn’t get up the nerve to walk to the wet bar.

“We have also lost contact with the president, sir,” the first agent said. “There’s a great deal of turmoil in Qatar, and the last communication we had from the ambassador was that the Qatar government is refusing to guarantee the president’s safety. We have been unable to reestablish communication.”

“Jeffrey, what’s going on? Should I come down?” A sleepy voice drifted from the bedroom upstairs.

“No!” Mayeaux shouted. He didn’t have the slightest idea what the bitch’s name was.

An agent ran up the stairs. “I’ll check it out.”

“You know what this means, sir—” the first agent continued, finally halting his roving gaze and meeting Mayeaux’s eyes.

“Of course I know!” he said. Then he finally allowed himself to slump onto the sofa. “I’m acting as president until you can reestablish contact with Holback.”

“If we can reestablish contact, sir. President Holback is a prime target for retribution.”

“You damn well better reestablich contact!” Mayeaux climbed to his feet again, feeling his legs shake. “Get me some coffee.” Turning his back on the Secret Service agent, he walked slowly and carefully toward the kitchenette.

The agent continued, as if he had been wound up and needed to finish his routine. “The beach area is secure, sir. We need to get you back to DC. To swear you in.”

Mayeaux drew a breath and felt his head hammer with panic. Everything was happening too fast. He had expected to retire after this term, and settle back in New Orleans. He had arranged everything for a quiet and lucrative lobbying career. Everything had been arranged. Mayeaux flopped out a hand to steady himself.

Strangers shoved into the apartment; loud voices and activity swirled around him. Everything seemed unreal. Outside, the Secret Service people checked the convoy. An army gasoline truck pulled up, ready to follow the limousines. It was only a three-hour drive back to the White House. Even if some of the vehicles broke down en route, at least one would make it all the way.

And Mayeaux would be sworn in.

He stood blinking in surprise.

He didn’t want to be president in the middle of what looked like the gravest crisis since World War II. If not worse.

Chapter 38

The world around Albuquerque broke into smaller and smaller pieces, and General Bayclock knew survival might depend on the Air Force Base’s stockpile of emergency supplies. In the late afternoon, he stepped out of the dim Base HQ building and looked around at the streets of Kirtland, appalled at the rapid change.

The silence was deafening, where once the roar of airplanes landing and taking off from the flight line had soothed Bayclock all day long. No flights had come into the airport in two days, now that all air traffic had been frozen.

Relying only on scrambled, broken communications that did more to cause panic than convey information, Bayclock had placed Kirtland Air Force Base on DEFCON 3 status, pulling all essential personnel onto the base and increasing guards at each of the gates. Within hours of the first evidence of the plague’s effects, he had ordered the commissary and BX on strict rationing.

Now, the once-chaotic streets were empty of traffic. Under Bayclock’s orders, the base quickly adapted to the new routine. A few airmen and civilian workers walked down the sidewalk across the street, past a parking lot full of cars, vans, and government vehicles that would probably never start again. One rider puttered down the empty lanes on a moped that ran on alcohol. It wouldn’t be long before its plastic components gave out and caused the vehicle to break down like its gas-burning counterparts.

Having dismissed his aide, Bayclock set off on foot toward the base exchange to take care of his own needs. Food. Canned goods. Bottled water. His personal quota should be there waiting for him. He wondered if he needed to place an extra set of armed guards at the BX doors.

He trusted his people, and he knew they would follow orders. They’d had the chain-of-command drilled into them since Basic Training, but Bayclock felt uneasy about his tenuous grip on civilization. He felt out of touch, forced to make decisions with too little information. He was reluctant to risk overreacting in the face of the plague, but now it appeared that the germ was even more voracious than his worst fears. In mere days, Albuquerque had become a shambles.

Bayclock crossed the avenue in front of the HQ, habitually looking both ways before stepping into the crosswalk, then headed down the block. He saw no lights on in any of the barracks-style buildings, though some of the base personnel had opened windows to let the breeze in.

As he walked through the eerie, stifled silence, he thought about the death of Vice President Wolani two days earlier. It had shocked him deeply, but even with the President out of the country, Bayclock had solid faith in the chain of command.

The base exchange annex looked too crowded as he approached. Bayclock straightened his cap and walked briskly forward, squinting in the low-slanted sunlight. Hand-painted sandwich board signs stood propped by the BX gas pumps. CONTAMINATED FUEL. As if anybody could drive there to fill up their tanks!

A handful of people in and out of uniform milled around the BX. A ripple passed through the crowd as a tall captain noticed Bayclock and gave a salute. Bayclock returned the salute and walked through the open glass doors.

He set about gathering up anything he might need for the next few days, focusing his attention with relentless determination. The shelves looked half empty, well picked-over. Up at the cash register, the middle-aged male checker argued with an enlisted man over how many boxes of dried milk he could take. Bayclock felt like he was in combat again as he took the two remaining cans of soup—tomato and split pea, which he didn’t even like—and some bags of Cracklin’ Hot pork rinds.

As he picked up the pork rinds, though, his fingers slipped through the plastic package as if it were a half-cooked egg white. The thin film broken, air seeped out of the package, and the bag collapsed into a mucous-like slime. He stared in disgust and shock, then shook his hand to fling away the goop.

Down another aisle, plastic bottles of soda wept droplets of moisture. One bottle of Nehi grape split and collapsed, spurting purple liquid over the floor. From the sticky mess on the floor, he could tell that random bottles had been doing that all day long as different types of plastic succumbed to the microbe.

One of the BX employees, a youngish black woman with her hair trimmed as bristly short as Bayclock’s, see-sawed with a mop, frantically trying to clean up foul-smelling chlorine bleach that dribbled over the shelves into boxes of other detergents. Bayclock stiffened as he thought of the nearby plastic bottles of ammonia. If all the chemicals spilled together, they might mix to form a cloud of deadly chlorine gas.

“You! Move those bottles of ammonia!” he snapped. The woman jumped, looking at him. She dropped the mop handle. It clacked against the metal shelves as it fell. Bayclock raised his voice, annoyed at her hesitation. “Do it now.”

Without watching to see if she followed his order, Bayclock collected his rations and took his place in line at the cash register. The woman in front of him held a plastic gallon container of milk; as Bayclock watched, the handle stretched and snapped off. Milk poured down the woman’s leg and gurgled onto the floor. She dropped the container, staring stupidly at it as if her pet dog had just bitten her. Milk splashed on Bayclock’s clean trouser leg.

He stepped back, frowning at the mess she had made of his uniform. The floor felt tacky, as if from many spilled substances—but then he noticed that the linoleum itself had begun to soften.

He grabbed his supply of canned food, glanced at it, and tossed a twenty-dollar bill at the middle-aged cashier. “Keep it,” he growled. “That’s more than enough.”

Bayclock left the store at a brisk walk. He wanted to get back to the office, where he felt in control of things. It was time to establish more stringent control of the whole rationing process. Time to crack down on a lot of things.

Chapter 39

Heather Dixon wasn’t the only one who had realized the world was going to hell. Not by a long shot.

She fought with the crowds in the camping-supply store, smelling the sweat of other people. It would take little to turn the rest of the shoppers into a mob.

Heather began to panic, moving quickly and breathing hard, afraid she wouldn’t get the equipment she needed to survive the coming months. She pushed past a tall, rail-thin woman in dissolving polyester slacks, banged into a half-empty set of metal shelves, and made her way toward the back of the store.

Two truck-driver types—one bearded, one balding—came to blows over nylon sleeping bags; Heather wondered if the nylon would last after the petroplague swept through.

At the front counter, the owner of the store—a dumpy man who looked as if he had never been camping in his life—rang up purchase after purchase with a glazed look in his eyes. He couldn’t seem to believe his luck.

Heather made her way down the aisles, clutching a sweat-wrinkled piece of paper on which she had jotted down her list of essentials. She felt sick when she saw that all of the large aluminum-framed backpacks were gone. Why had she wasted time writing out the damned list? She should have run the half mile to the store to fight for the items she had to have. Obtaining the right equipment could mean the difference between life and death, and people—a growing number of them—were just beginning to realize the scope of the breakdown.

She pushed to the backpack section, saw labels and crumpled tissue packing material scattered across the floor—and a single remaining backpack frame on the bottom shelf. One of the aluminum support bars was twisted, as if someone had tripped over it; the neon-pink fabric was garish, but what did that matter? She hoped the fabric wouldn’t dissolve, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it.

As she hurried to the last pack, a man wearing jeans and a Bugs Bunny t-shirt sprinted for it. Heather hesitated, then decided to race him. She’d had enough of being stepped on, and things were damn well going to change!

Bugs Bunny had tucked three bottles of propane for a gas cooking stove under his arm, which gave him trouble running. Heather grabbed the bent strut of the backpack, and the man pulled on the opposite side.

“I got it—” the man said.

Heather answered by jamming an elbow in his gut. With a surprised “oof!” Bugs dropped his three metal bottles of propane. They clanged and bounced on the floor, and Bugs released his hold to scramble for them.

Heather yanked the neon-pink backpack free and clutched it to her chest. “It isn’t your color anyway,” she said, then stalked down another aisle. The incident sparked her mood. It was time to stop accepting everybody’s leftovers.

Heather stood taller than most of the other women in the store and a good many of the men. She quit excusing herself every time she bumped into another shopper. They could damned well get out of her way. She recalled the advice given in the self-defense seminars Surety Insurance required their employees to take. “Don’t look like a victim.” She tried to appear stern, imagining Al Sysco standing in front of her. The thought brought a flash of cold-metal anger, and she could feel her face tighten.

People moved out of the way. She shoved aside the ones who didn’t.

She stuffed the backpack with dehydrated food in foil packages. Staring at a tiny gas-burner backpacking stove, she decided that she could cook over a campfire. She opted for a large hunting knife, some fishing equipment, and a mummy sleeping bag rated to 20 below zero.

Heather glared around the store, rejecting most of the items. A tent would be too bulky to carry all the way home. Some compact pots and pans would be nice, but unnecessary—she could adapt her own utensils. She took matches, a snakebite kit, a solar still for purifying water.

Heather felt supercharged. On a normal day, she would have been at the office processing forms, answering telephone calls, gritting her teeth against Sysco’s treatment of her. But not today, honey, she told herself. Not anymore.

Then, realizing that she wouldn’t have a car, or even a bicycle unless she could find one without a plastic-based inner tube, Heather remembered the most important piece of her ensemble—sturdy hiking boots, made of leather with genuine rubber soles. She had to avoid anything with plastic stitching, vinyl sides, synthetic rubber soles. Just in case.

Guarding her stuffed neon-pink backpack, she searched through the ransacked boxes of hiking boots. Other people had the same idea, but this caused her less concern. Heather had big feet, and shoes her size wouldn’t fit many other women.

Finally, dangling a pair of black hiking boots with sparkly purple laces, she waited in line. She had little cash in her savings, and she no longer had a job—but the man at the cashier counter was accepting credit cards. Credit cards! As if they were going to be worth anything!

Heather smiled smugly. Unclear on the concept, she thought. She just hoped she would reach the counter before the plastic cards dissolved in her purse.

#

The power went out for the second time that day, and Heather had no real expectation it would ever come on again. She sat in her living room with the drapes open and the windows cracked to let in a breeze. While she still had enough light, she wanted to sort her new equipment. From now on, she had to plan with a whole new mindset.

She lived in the suburbs of Flagstaff in a two-bedroom house with a small backyard and a carport instead of a garage. Aluminum awnings thrust out above every window. The place had been built in the fifties, with the stomach-turning decor of the times: yellow siding, olive-green carpeting, speckled Formica countertops. Heather had rented it for four years now, always intending to move to something better, but never able to. She suspected she would be leaving the city soon, though.

Heather tied her hair back in a pony tail, then squatted on the floor to organize the dried food and read the instructions on the camping gear. She had gone backpacking in the Grand Canyon with her last boyfriend, Derek, a fellow employee of Surety Insurance. He had eventually dumped her when he took a promotion at a competitor’s company in Tucson. Nothing much about the relationship had been memorable, but she had enjoyed the camping, and she missed the sex. The Grand Canyon was only an hour and a half drive north of Flagstaff, but for some reason Heather had never considered going back there alone.

Why the hell not? she asked herself. Stop being a puppy-dog trying to please everyone but you!

The phone rang twice, then fell silent before Heather could reach it. She stared at it. The phone lines had been dead four of the five times she had tried to dial out, and the one time she heard a dial tone she hesitated and then hung up again.

Her family would be trying to call her from Phoenix, but she had no interest in contacting them. They would want her to come back home so they could weather the tragedy together. And that was definitely not in Heather Dixon’s new agenda.

Her family lived three hours’ drive away. She had two sisters and three brothers, with Heather right in the middle, the “undistinguished child.” Growing up, she’d had to put up with sisters’ boyfriends, brothers’ softball games, without finding her own niche.

The University at Flagstaff was far enough away that she could find independence, but her interest faded quickly. She quit school after a year and took a job at Surety Insurance. She never admitted that she had missed her home—but every conversation with her parents made it clear that they knew so. It was time to get away and go someplace safe.

She thought of Al Sysco weaseling into the promotion that should have been hers; she thought of Derek, using her as a springboard for jumping to another insurance company.

Well, what goes around comes around. Sysco was probably still waiting for a phone call from the Boston office, telling him the crisis was over. Heather tried to imagine him fighting to survive, hunting his own food; she started to snicker. Then she realized that Sysco probably couldn’t conceive of clunky, unassuming Heather Dixon doing that either. She had not found the nerve to make her escape until the petroplague struck.

Kneeling on the threadbare olive carpet, Heather unfolded her AAA maps of northern Arizona. There were trails, and she had supplies; she saw no reason why she couldn’t hike from one end of the Grand Canyon to the other. Where else could she find somewhere as safe to go?

She had just begun taking inventory of her dried food when a knock came at the door, putting her on guard. Once the stores ran out of food, looters would go door to door, breaking in and raiding pantries. But they certainly wouldn’t politely knock, would they?

Heather debated not answering, but her drapes were open and she sat in plain view. She couldn’t pretend she wasn’t home. Taking a deep breath, wishing she had a gun, she strode to the front door. She was tired of turning her back and hiding.

She twisted the deadbolt locks with a sliding click, then yanked open the door with more force than she intended. “What?”

The man waiting on her front porch gaped at her in sudden surprise. He looked flustered. He was in his early thirties, with a large and muscular build; his face was sunburned and framed by lanky blond hair. He looked like an out-of-luck surfer. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

Heather started to slam the door in his face; but something new inside her found the man’s blustering question amusing. “Well who the hell are you? I’m Heather Dixon. Pleased to meet you. And why are you standing on my front porch?”

The man took a full step backward. “Where are my parents?”

The question threw her. “Who?”

“Jan and Howard Brooks. I’m Connor Brooks, their son. They live here.”

Now Heather began to understand, and her initial anger gave way to a little pity. “Sorry, but they moved. I’ve rented this place for four years now. I used to get junk mail addressed to Brooks, but that was a long time ago.”

Standing on the porch, Connor Brooks shook his head in amazement. “They moved? They didn’t even tell me!”

Heather stayed quiet; it sounded like a bad joke.

Connor thought it over. “I don’t suppose they left a forwarding address?” His eyes were wide and blue and hopeful. Heather sized him up and for some reason liked what she saw.

“Afraid not. The landlord might know, but he lives down in Sedona, and the phones are out. I don’t expect you’ve got a car?”

Connor grasped the porch railing as if to prevent himself from falling. “If I had a car that worked it wouldn’t have taken me a week to get here. I can’t believe it! After all I’ve been through—and they moved!” He ran his hands through his hair in apparent anguish, but Heather got the distinct impression it was just an act. He tried to peer inside the house. “Hey, could you spare anything to eat? I’m starved.”

She thought for a moment. Did she really want this guy around? Everything he said sounded reasonable. Still . . .

She said, “Power’s gone out, but there’s some leftovers in the fridge. Wait here.” She bolted the door after she stepped back inside.

She watched him for a minute from the corner window. He stepped off the porch and looked up and down the street. Jamming his hands in his pockets, he rocked back and forth on his heels, waiting for her to return.

Heather grabbed some stale bread and cheese from the refrigerator; before opening the front door, she returned to the kitchen and took out two beers.

Connor turned when she came outside. “Not much of this looks familiar to me. My parents moved here after I left home, and I . . . I haven’t been back to visit too often.”

She raised her eyebrows. “No kidding.” She handed him the food. “Here.”

His eyes widened at the beer. “Thanks!”

As they spoke she could not say why she found him intriguing, but Connor Brooks gave the impression of being a survivor. He had no connection to her old life. She began to calculate whether it might be worthwhile having him around.

He seemed to read her thoughts. “Do you think I could impose a little more? I’d really like a shower. It’s been a rough couple of days, and I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck.”

She thought it over; the suggestion sounded so preposterous that it made her pause. Funny what a difference a few hours can make. The old Heather would have been flustered, even terrified—and that was enough to make her change her mind. “You do smell like you could use a bit of freshening up. The water will probably be cold, but I’ve got a hose out back you can use.”

“Out . . . back?”

“Consider yourself lucky,” Heather smiled. “Times are changing. Besides, I’ll bring you a towel.”

Chapter 40

Alex Kramer’s two horses were excited to be taken out. Todd ran his calloused right palm along the hot, soft neck of Ren, the palomino, patting gently; he stepped into the stirrup, hauling his leg over the horse’s back.

He reached back to gather the reins from Stimpy’s bridle, looping them around the saddle horn. The corral gate stood open, and Todd squeezed Ren with his knees, nudging the horse toward the open road. “Let’s head ‘em out!” he said.

Todd reveled in the warm redolence of the horses. The thick scent brought back fond memories of his younger days, as did the hollow clatter of hooves on the hard road surface. It had been in a long time since he’d taken a horse and slept under the Wyoming stars. Of course, it would be different riding through downtown San Francisco, and a heck of a lot more dangerous. He kept Alex’s old Smith & Wesson loaded and at his side.

Whispering to the horses, Todd guided them alongside the paved road. The hills were quiet and still. It was time to move on, to stop waiting for the world to fix itself. Besides, he had to go rescue Iris, whether she wanted it or not. Staying in the city would be plain stupid. If the downtown areas weren’t already burning, the mobs would ge out of hand before long.

Todd kept his eyes forward, Alex’s abandoned house at his back. On the winding road, he passed mailboxes, driveways, but the houses sat quiet, deceptively peaceful. Blue-gray wood smoke curled from one chimney. He came across a man walking his German shepherd, as if it were a normal afternoon; Todd and the man nodded to each other, and the dog barked, but the horses continued down the road.

It seemed unreal to him. Elsewhere in the world, planes were crashing, buildings falling apart, communications severed. The last he had heard, the president was stuck out of the country. The C&W radio station had mentioned something about the Vice President being killed in an elevator accident, but they had not been able to confirm the rumors . . . and then the radio station blinked out, replaced by static. Todd couldn’t get any other stations on the radio either. When he pried it open, he discovered the plastic circuit board had melted.

Only a week ago he’d been flying in the Oilstar helicopter, spraying the Prometheus microbe. At the time, Todd had considered the Zoroaster spill a terrible disaster. Now his entire definition of disaster had changed.

After an hour he reached U.S. highway 101, which stretched down the Marin peninsula, across the Golden Gate Bridge to San Francisco and then the south bay. Todd took the two horses at a rapid trot down the middle lane. The hard road would not be good for the horses’ hooves, and he moved over to the grassy median whenever he had a chance. He wondered if the asphalt itself would turn soft and spongy once the petroplague got hungry. The microbe’s appetite for plastics seemed random and unpredictable.

He felt idiotically out of place on horseback in the middle of a six-lane highway that should have been filled with vehicles zooming by at 70 miles an hour. He felt like a ranger in the wilderness.

Groups of scavengers moved among the dead cars littering the highway, smashing into locked cars or just pushing windshields through the soft insulation holding the glass in place. One tall man without a shirt tucked a set of hubcaps between his elbow and his ribs, leaving a serrated smudge of grease and dirt along his side. A middle-aged woman in a red canvas jacket carried a paper grocery bag stuffed with loose cables and metal housings of car stereo boxes. A blond-haired teenaged boy slashed out seatbelts with a long knife, draping a long tangle of them over one shoulder. Todd couldn’t imagine what the kid would want them for. As Todd approached, the boy jerked his head out of a Volvo and flashed a broad grin.

At a fast trot, the horses made good time on the empty highway. Before long, Todd reached the cavernous tunnel that cut through a ridge. The horses trotted into the tunnel, their hooves booming inside the enclosed space.

Cars had stalled there, smashed into a tangled mass. Both lanes had been cut off, and no traffic had been able to pass this way for days. The ceiling lights had gone out, but enough daylight streamed in from both ends to let him ride close to the cold tile wall. The horses moved nervously from the close shadows. The empty metal hulks made ticking sounds. Ren and Stimpy began to trot, startled by the reverberating explosions of sound made by their own hoofbeats.

Finally bursting out to the sunlight, Todd took a deep breath of the cool ocean-tainted breeze and stared ahead at the Golden Gate Bridge, and beyond that at the San Francisco skyline.

Not long ago, Todd had been below on the heaving deck of the Zoroaster, trying to offload as much of the crude as possible before the tanker plunged into the channel. There had been helicopters, news crews, boats, rubberneckers . . . .

Now, as he guided Ren and Stimpy onto the bridge, he heard only the whistling sounds of the wind. The foghorns no longer sent forlorn tones out to warn ships. The water, far below, made hushing sounds against the support piers. In addition to the sea dampness, the air carried a sulfurous stench. Leaking crude oil from the sunken Zoroaster continued oozing to the surface, and Prometheus thrived.

Puffing and red-faced, a sweat-suited jogger ran by, intent on the sidewalk in front of his feet. Todd shook his head—people were crazy! How could anybody go through a daily routine in the middle of a crisis? He seated his cowboy hat more firmly; no matter how much the world changed, he thought, some rituals remained the same.

The bridge cables high overhead thrummed in the breeze. The lowering sun dazzled on the water far out to sea. He saw no Navy ships or freighters or fishing trawlers. A shiver went up his spine as he realized just how deeply the plague had separated the world into thousands of tiny pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

Grim-faced backpackers headed along the walkway, moving briskly in a forced march. A gaunt man with red-rimmed eyes, gray stubble on his face, and a SURF! t-shirt, called to Todd, “Hey, you’re going the wrong way, man!”

“I know,” Todd said.

A young couple with three children—the oldest no more than eight, and crying—carried lumpy packs on their shoulders as they hiked toward the Marin peninsula, in the opposite direction Todd was going. The little four-year-old girl carried a cloth doll with yarn hair; dark indentations marked where plastic button eyes had dissolved.

Within ten minutes the two horses approached the southern end of the bridge. Waves crashed against the rugged shore of Fort Point. The deep-green cypress trees and red-roofed military housing of the Presidio shone with brilliant color, as if someone had twisted up the contrast knob. At the end of the bridge, an unlit sign demanded STOP! PAY TOLL. Todd directed Ren and Stimpy through the empty toll booths. He smiled ironically to himself as they passed through the unused “carpool” lane.

On horseback, he entered San Francisco.

#

Todd avoided the densest part of the city, planning to ride full-tilt through Golden Gate Park, keeping his head low and a firm grip on Stimpy’s reins. His horses were among the most valuable possessions in the world right now. He kept the pistol within easy reach and urged Ren and Stimpy to a fast trot.

Reaching the large forested area of the park, the small lakes, and the wide grassy clearings made him forget he was in the middle of a city, for a short while. In the grassy expanse, Ren tried to stop and graze, but Todd wouldn’t let him, jabbing with his boot heels to keep up the pace. He saw no kids tossing baseballs or frisbees, no fun and games.

A cluster of men and women worked by the trees with hand saws and axes taken from downtown hardware stores. Not one of the people looked accustomed to manual labor, and they took frequent rests. With a scurry, they fled to one side as a eucalyptus came crashing down, then they set to work chopping it into smaller pieces. A mound of firewood sat stacked to one side. Teenagers took turns with sledge hammer and wedges to split the chunks. Two older women with new rifles stood guard over their wood.

Todd urged Ren and Stimpy eastward out of the park and into more dangerous crowds, following the Panhandle under large oak trees. Old Victorian houses towered over the boulevards on either side of the narrow strip of park, but Todd kept the horses on the grass as long as he could, until he was finally forced to return to the city streets in Haight-Ashbury. It did not surprise him to see various apocalyptic street preachers hawking recipes for salvation to the wandering crowds. Every time someone looked at Todd too closely, he conspicuously pulled out the pistol.

In front of a row of dark coffee shops, Chinese street vendors had set up food kiosks with sidewalk barbecues, burning sticks of what appeared to be broken crates and pieces of furniture. They cooked on Weber kettle grills and cast-iron woks over open fires. Looking at the exotic food as he rode by, Todd had a sudden craving for a decent steak. He wondered how hard it was going to be to find food from now on.

A lump caught in his throat, claustrophobia from the jammed, breaking-down buildings, the sounds of breaking glass, shouts from the sidewalks, he realized he had lost his way. “Calm down,” he said to himself, “calm down.” Breathing deeply, trying to quell his panic, he reined the horses to a stop and unfastened his saddle bags to take out a map. He unfolded it and tried to get his bearings, figuring out the best way to return to Highway 101. He felt absurd sitting on horseback in the middle of a deserted intersection, staring at a street map like some lost tourist.

He had just decided which way to turn when a series of popcorn noises came from a rooftop a block away. It took him a moment to identify them as gunshots. Across the street, Todd saw a flash of stone dust and heard the spang as a bullet ricocheted from the wall of a building. “Jeez!” he cried and yanked out the pistol again, waving it in the air. Another gunshot struck nearby. Todd fired off a round in the direction of the sounds, but knew he had no chance of hitting anything.

“Yah!” he shouted at the horses. Both Ren and Stimpy galloped away from the sniper, down Van Ness toward the highway leading out of the city.

#

With the horses hidden in a cluster of live oaks on the ridgecrest, Todd prepared to spend the night in the highlands of the Peninsula, west of the freeway. By nightfall, he had traveled south, through the hills rimming Daly City and San Bruno. He could see the San Francisco International Airport, deserted, like a vast parking lot.

The gunshots and the turmoil made him want to avoid contact with people. He followed fire roads up into the rugged hills, heading in the right general direction.

He kept thinking about Iris, knowing he needed to hurry, to get her out of a dark, dangerous apartment in Stanford. Heck, she probably wouldn’t wait for him anyway. But on the slim chance that she would, he had to get his backside there as soon as he possibly could.

He decided to rest for a few hours, start out again before dawn, and make a good distance by daylight. He built a campfire in a clearing and heated a can of chili, eating it with a spoon he had taken from Alex’s kitchen. If he had been able to forget about the rest of the world, he might have enjoyed the evening.

The countryside seemed too quiet, wrongly so. Out in Wyoming the silence had never bothered him because he did not expect to hear bustling noises. But the San Francisco peninsula was supposed to be a Christmas-tree network of lights, moving traffic, busy lives. From his high vantage point, he could see only a few glimmering signs of life below—bonfires, Coleman lanterns, battery lamps, flashlights.

Todd fell asleep huddled in two blankets.

#

Before setting out in the early morning darkness, Todd munched dry frosted flakes from a single-serving box he had found in Alex’s pantry. The cereal tasted stale. Todd wondered how long it had been there.

This time he mounted Stimpy. They followed the ridge line, then descended to the freeway again in the stillness of the rising sun. Birds began to sing to the morning, unaffected by the crumbling of the cities.

The rest of the ride to Stanford seemed like a repeat of the previous afternoon, passing through suburbs and South Bay carbon-copy cities with different names. It seemed as if every person had decided to wander the streets, either defending their homes or looting somebody else’s. He found an isolated, tree-shaded park in Palo Alto and studied the map again, then headed toward the Stanford University campus.

In one city block, a loud crashing sound startled the horses. As he rode closer, Todd saw that crude barricades had blocked off a 12-story office building. Every few minutes, one of the glass window panes would pop free of its dissolving plastic housing and tumble to the ground, reflecting the sun like a strobelight until it exploded on the pavement. Students gathered across the street, drinking beer from bottles and applauding each new fall of glass.

Todd shook his head and rode on, close now.

When he finally tracked down Iris’s street address, he waited outside her three-story apartment building, having no idea what to do with Ren and Stimpy. He couldn’t just padlock the horses to a bike rack, and he didn’t want to leave them tied out front. He considered his options outside the complex, baffled, until he finally decided to take the horses in with him. Why the heck not?

Ren and Stimpy dug in their hooves, reluctant to go through the narrow glass door. Finally, he coaxed them into the sparsely furnished lobby, where he tied them to the wrought-iron stair railing; at least they were hidden from outside view. Standing beside a tattered sofa and an old end-table, the two horses looked at Todd as if he were crazy. He tipped his cowboy hat at them, then bounded up the stairs, his boots echoing on the hard surface.

After turning down the wrong hall, he followed the numbers, to Iris’s door. He took off his hat, then rapped on the wood. He waited. His stomach knotted. She probably wasn’t home. Iris was a smart lady, and she should have had the good sense to pack up and leave already.

Even if she was home, Todd had no idea what to say to her.

The door finally opened on its flimsy security chain, and Iris peeped outside. When she saw him, her face lit up in surprise.

“So you made it,” she said, regaining her composure. She removed the security chain and opened the door wider. “How was the ride? I’m all packed, so we can get out of here.”

Wringing the cowboy hat in his big hands, Todd said his line. “I don’t usually have to go to such lengths for a date!”

Iris raised her eyebrows, but he could see amusement behind her eyes. “Oh? Then how come you forgot to bring flowers?”

Chapter 41

A dozen saddled horses grazed on sparse vegetation outside the fence that separated the desert from the White Sands missile range. The baked ground was scabbed with alkali, but showed none of the glittering gypsum sand that made other areas look like a snowfield. To Spencer Lockwood the expedition looked more like a western cattle drive than a convoy setting out for the microwave antenna farm.

Spencer tugged on the knots securing the bedrolls, canned food, water, tool boxes, rope, wire, and first-aid kit in the old wagon hitched behind two of the horses. He looked over the ragtag collection of five scientists and three young ranch hands hunched around the back of the wagon. Several of the Alamogordo ranchers worked on the axle.

He wiped dirt from his hands and squatted next to the ranchers. He felt silly wearing a floppy cowboy hat, but even Lance Nedermyer, who had found himself stuck at White Sands with no possible transportation back to his family in Washington, D.C. had doffed his dark suit and now wore jeans and a straw hat. “Is it going to work?” Spencer asked.

“The wheel is sticking, Doc, but it’ll get you out to your site,” said one of the ranchers, applying a handful of goop to the axle. Being called “Doc” made Spencer feel like he was in an old western movie. “Never thought I’d have to use lard for axle grease!” The rancher spun the wooden wheel.

Spencer and his crew out at the antenna farm had always kept a stockpile of supplies, MREs surplused from closed-down Holloman Air Force Base, and pioneer-style accomodations. After his cross-country drive through Death Valley, he had been back home for less than three days before everything else started going apeshit around the missile base.

Thinking ahead, Spencer had gone to some of the small ranches in the lush hills, the ranchers who had bought into his power experiment as a way to get cheap rural power. Their own power had gone off days before, the first expendable victims of a decaying electrical grid. Spencer gave them a talk with more fervor than he had been able to manage for any of the Sandia scientists, acknowledging the riskiness of his venture, but vowing that he could get power up and running again with his smallsats and his microwave receiving farm. Some of the ranchers had run him off their land. But a few offered to help, donating enough supplies to keep Spencer and his crew working out at the blockhouse.

Lance Nedermyer looked exhausted. He had been even crabbier than usual from worrying about being out of touch with his wife and daughters. Back east, in the thick metropolitan areas, conditions were bound to be far worse than they were here in the rural, self-sufficient southwest.

Nedermyer scowled at the wagon train. “I still think it’s better to forget about your whole microwave site, Spencer. We’ve completed the evacuation plan at Alamogordo, and we’ll need your horses for the trip up to Cloudcroft.”

Spencer sighed. They had argued about it the night before. “You’re welcome to go with us and see for yourself, Lance. I’m betting we can switch out and replace most of those components with fiberglass or ceramic in the shops. It’s a simple system, and we can’t give up without trying our alternatives.”

The bureaucrat shook his head, hiding his personal worries behind wire-rimmed sunglasses. “Just be forewarned that if the mayor decides to head everyone up to the mountains, we’re not going to wait around for you.”

“They can go if they want.” An awkward silence fell as they both shuffled their boots in the dust.

Now that the solar power project was isolated from the rest of the world, political games were a thing of the past, and Spencer knew of no quantitative unit small enough to measure how little he cared. But he tried to remember that Lance Nedermyer had once been a talented researcher. If only Lance could remember that himself, he might provide valuable help.

A bearlike rancher in a red cotton shirt turned to the side and spat chewing tobacco. He nodded at Nedermyer. “If this plague keeps getting worse, Doc Lockwood is the only one offering electricity at all. What’ve we got to lose?”

Spencer ducked his head to hide a grin in the shadow of his floppy hat. “Even if it works it’ll only give you power for a few hours a day.”

“Better’n nothing.” The rancher still eyed Nedermyer.

Gangly Rita Fellenstein tightened her Australian bush hat and swung up on a sturdy brown-and-white horse. The mount pulled back, but Rita snapped the reins to bring it under control. The stirrups had been adjusted for her long spindly legs. She looked quite at home in her western gear. “Hey, Spence, it’s not gonna get any cooler today. Get your butt in gear.”

“That’s right!” The bearlike rancher stopped by a speckled gray horse and handed the reins to Spencer. He lowered his voice, speaking seriously. “We all know it’ll be a lot easier if we head up to Cloudcroft. They got plenty of water, firewood, and game. But we’ve lived here too long just to give up and leave. People still remember what it was like when the Air Force pulled out of Alamogordo—damned near shut down the whole town. We didn’t abandon it then, and we sure as hell won’t now.”

Nedermyer scowled, and Spencer felt embarrassed. He swung up onto the horse, feeling off balance. “Ready, Rita?”

Rita leaned over her horse’s neck and spoke with two of the cowboys accompanying them. They seemed to be flirting with her. She grinned at Spencer. “You gonna be able to handle that horse, or do you want to ride in the wagon with the supplies?”

“Madam, I am a physicist,” he said with mock indignation. “I can handle anything!”

#

Out at the site without air conditioning, it was over a hundred degrees. Rita brushed sweat away from her high forehead as she tinkered by candlelight in the dim blockhouse, looking like a female scarecrow. Juan Romero, the radio man, tugged on his huge black mustache and watched, offering suggestions.

Spencer stood behind them both. He scratched at the beard stubble on his face. He’d given up shaving. “You know, Rita, the real reason I keep you slaving away is so you can get the jukebox working again.”

“Take another look, Spence. The 45s have already dissolved.” She sighed. “Now, will you leave me alone? I’m trying to concentrate.”

He remembered the celebration with champagne and reporters as the smallsats beamed down power for the first time. About a million years ago.

Rita held up a thin wire. “All right. Marconi would have been proud. One short-wave radio, ready to go, built with stone knives and bear skins. Got anymore of that dry lubricant?”

“Yeah.” Romero scrounged behind him and held open a jar of graphite powder made from finely ground pencil leads. Short and swarthy, Romero had the largest smile and the biggest mustache Spencer had ever seen. Through his ability to band-aid together gadgetry from spare parts, the smallsat project had managed to move ahead even on a bare-bones budget.

Rita poked the wire in the jar, stirred it around, then removed it to make a final connection. “Okay, bwana. All the plastic in this unit has been replaced by ceramic chunks from the maintenance shop with a little cannibalized fiberglass thrown in.”

Spencer crossed his arms over his chest and looked down at Rita. “So let’s connect it to the battery and turn it on.”

“Roger dodger.” She made a contact with one of the batteries originally charged by the orbiting solar satellites. Static erupted from the speaker.

Spencer placed a hand on the back of their communications expert. “Okay, Romero, get on this thing and see who’s out there listening. Try to get hold of JPL.”

“Okay,” Romero said, shaking his long black hair behind him. Rita stood up, arching and rubbing her lower back to work out a cramp, then Romero slid into the chair and began working with the short-wave radio. “You sure anybody at JPL is listening?”

“Won’t know unless we try. If there’s anybody in the U.S. still broadcasting, those people will be.”

The wooden floor creaked as Spencer went to the open aluminum door of the blockhouse. He stood on the steel-grid of the porch, trying to enjoy the hot breeze. The air smelled baked and dry.

Spencer narrowed his eyes against the bright sunlight searing off the white gypsum sands. He had to keep his group going, work with them to find a new way out of this mess. Everyone in the country was in the same boat, isolated, focused on survival and local concerns, rather than global decisions made by people a thousand miles away.

Rita stepped outside the dull concrete blockhouse and lounged next to him against the shade wall. She fished a pouch from her pocket and placed a pinch of chaw in her mouth. “Why on Earth are you trying to contact JPL? That’s news to me. Why not DOE or some emergency headquarters?”

He ignored her question. “When did you start chewing tobacco?”

“When did you start being my mother?”

Spencer lifted a brow and tried to keep an amused look from crossing his face. Ever since interacting with the local ranchers, Rita had become touchy. But she seemed to be enjoying all the new attention.

“Sorry,” she said after a moment. “Tommy, the blond-haired guy, is trying to give it up, and he’s got a couple month’s supply. So he gave it to me. The ranchers think it’s hilarious to see a woman chew.” She spat. “It’s worth putting up with this awful taste just to see the expressions on their faces.” She took another mouthful. “But you do get used to it.”

Spencer touched the hot door jamb and quickly pulled his fingers away. Three others besides Romero and Rita worked in the trailer inspecting the satellite equipment. The rest of the group, as well as their two ranch guides, stayed outside in the shade of useless vehicles or in the maintenance shed, resting through the heat of the day.

Rita wiped her mouth. “We can swap out the less-sophisticated equipment with stuff that isn’t oil-based, but do you really think we can replace enough to tap the satellites?”

He pondered before answering. “Seems kind of crazy, doesn’t it? Forget the delicate computer diagnostics, the mainframes, the precision switching—that’s a lost cause. We’ll just keep the beam on all the time. But we know the Seven Dwarfs are still up there, coming overhead every day, unaffected by what’s going on down here. We can probably refit the receiving system. Not much of the other equipment relies on petroleum seals or lubricants anyway. That’s the beauty of having very few moving parts.”

She grunted, unconvinced. “How long do you think it’ll take?”

Spencer met her gaze. “Does it matter? I’d rather be trying to get this damn thing working again than high-tailing it up to the mountains like Nedermyer wants to.”

He stood, feeling antsy. Rita’s questions brought out his own doubts about getting the microwave farm working. Maybe he should examine the antennas one more time. “I’ll be back. Call me if Romero finds anything.”

“Going to check out the antenna farm?”

He tried to look surprised. “Naw—just going for a walk.”

“Yeah, right.”

#

He returned to the cluster of trailers and buildings two hours later. The sun lowered toward the mountains in the west, diminishing its intensity. Rita stepped out of the doorway, waving her arms for him to hurry.

“Hey Spence! We’ve got something.”

He jogged the rest of the way, feeling his throat dry and clogged from the dust. Inside the stuffy, dark blockhouse, Romero gestured from the gray-painted metal workbench next to the jury-rigged radio. Spencer leaned close to the hissing speaker. “What you got?” He wiped sweat from his face.

Before Romero could open his mouth, a static-filled voice burst into the room. “—Institute of Technology, radio free Caltech, under operation by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. We can barely hear you.”

Spencer pulled a seat next to the cluttered workbench; Romero pushed the microphone to him. “This is Dr. Spencer Lockwood, calling from White Sands, New Mexico. We need to get in touch with the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. Can you help us out?”

“If you’ve just picked us up and have not yet registered, we need to get some information from you.” The voice on the radio paused, then sounded indignant. “FEMA guidance is that airwaves are currently for emergencies only and not for personal calls.”

Spencer scratched his rough beard and spoke into the mike, excited and annoyed at the same time. “Okay, but right now I need to speak with someone from the solar satellite division at JPL. We are a federal installation and this is important business.”

The radio fell silent for several minutes. Spencer hoped the battery wouldn’t die before the FEMA people got back to him. He tapped his fingers on the metal bench, waiting, waiting. Romero looked at him and shrugged. Finally, the woman’s voice returned. “Hello, White Sands? Part of JPL was hit by the rioting. We should be able to get someone back to you shortly, if you’re still on the air. Can we get some information from you for our files?”

Spencer pushed the microphone over to Romero. “Go ahead and help them out,” he said.

As Romero grinned and started to answer their questions, Rita raised an eyebrow at Spencer. She cocked back her hat and let her braided hair fall down. “You’ve got more up your sleeve than just getting this microwave farm back on line.”

Spencer tried not to smile as he ducked outside to scan the desert restlessly. “If we can get this receiving station back up again, wouldn’t it be nice to increase the amount of power we beam down? Keep us on line for hours at a time. Just think of those twenty satellites sitting at JPL, all finished and waiting to be sent into orbit. If Nedermyer hadn’t deep-sixed the acquisition process, they’d be here already . . . or maybe even up there.”

Rita spat a wad of tobacco off to the side. She seemed to be aiming at a small lizard, but the glob struck a rock instead. The lizard scurried away.

“Now I know you’ve flipped a byte,” she said. “Say those satellites still work—they’ve been in a clean room and they’re vacuum sealed, so I can buy that—and just suppose we could somehow get them a thousand miles from LA to New Mexico. Then what do we do with them? We still need to get them into orbit. Are there some rocket launchers left here at White Sands that I don’t know about?”

She trailed off as Spencer looked toward the north, toward Oscura Peak. A long thin housing for the five-mile-long electromagnetic launcher ran up the side of the mountain.

She started laughing as it hit her. “I don’t believe it. You’re crazy! Absolutely nuts! It’s one thing to change parts in a simple AM radio and make it work. It’s a thousand times harder to change out every single seal and joint in our microwave farm. But to bring those satellites cross country and use a launcher that’s only worked once? They need to finish that thing before it can launch our satellites into a high enough orbit! And how the hell do you think we’re going to get those satellites out here—by wagon train?”

Spencer stopped humming to himself. He was disappointed she had guessed it so easily. “How did you know?”

Chapter 42

Clear blue but smudged with clouds, the Napa Valley sky hung over the tourist train station. But, son of a brick, the tourist trade had sure gone belly up.

Rex O’Keefe didn’t really miss the crowds, the automobiles, or the fat self-styled wine conoisseurs who hopped from one winery to the next, gulping the free samples and rolling the fancy names on their tongues. Rex liked the world better this way. Peaceful, uncomplicated, giving him a chance to kick back and relax. When the food ran out, he’d probably be all uptight again, but he tried not to think about that just yet.

Leaning back on the old wooden bench, Rex took a sip of red table wine—Gamay Beaujolais 1991, liberated from the Sandstone Crest winery, best served at room temperature (which was about all he could get these days, now that refrigeration was out of the question). He rolled the wine on his tongue, swallowed slowly to feel the warm bite, to taste the oak.

In front of him, bright in the morning sunshine, the refurbished old steam locomotive sat in front of him on the tracks. Steam Roller. He admired the train, wishing the day would go on forever. And because of the petroplague, it just might. Nothing much would change around here for a long time.

For the moment at least, Rex had everything he could want—plenty of wine, the run of the tourist train station, and no one to bother him now that the weekend crowds fought for survival in the big cities rather than taking a leisurely ride through wine country on an authentic turn-of-the-century steam train.

He had pulled all the dried food and snacks from the refreshment stand, adding to his own stockpile in the small home behind the station. He figured he’d stashed enough food to get by for half a year. The eating would get dull, imported water crackers and some cheese, canned vegetables to supplement whatever he could scrounge from his garden, bottled mineral water. But there was plenty of wine. He would survive.

At forty-five and without a family, Rex O’Keefe’s world extended little beyond the railroad tracks and the train station, even now after the petroplague had caused the old Steam Roller to gasp her last breath, unless he could find some other lubricants and gaskets.

He hadn’t cared much for the people when they came around anyway. What was the point being boot-licking and nice to strangers who would never come by again? The locals themselves never bothered to ride Rex’s train; they had their own tourist industry to watch over.

Rex was content to be alone with his memories. From the time he’d been old enough to own an electric Lionel until he got his first job at 14 stoking wood on the refurbished Steam Roller, Rex had lived for the day when he could work on the trains.

But now the damn locomotive just sat there, unable to move, stalled in place.

Rex stood on tired legs and sauntered out to the behemoth that sat frozen on the tracks. Painted a deep black, the Steam Roller burned wood in her furnace, heating water in the boiler to drive one of the last locomotives that had not transferred over to coal or diesel. He could smell the creosote from the railroad ties, the old deteriorating oils on the driving wheels, the caked soot from the furnace.

Even motionless, Steam Roller was a sight too pretty just to look at. Rex pulled a red bandanna out of his blue-and-white railroad overalls—the clichéd outfit the tourists expected him to wear—and began to polish the brass pistons.

He ran his hand along the metal siding, then boosted himself up to the engineer’s cab where he tried to work the controls. For a moment he imagined himself riding the tracks as the train chugged through the valleys, a throbbing rhythmic rattle as the wheels passed over crossings. The lush green vineyards extended on either side of the cab, pale vines stretched out along wires in flickering razor-straight rows that looked like optical illusions stretched out to the hills.

Blinking his eyes, Rex reached up to grab the steam release, when a low voice came from behind the cab, startling him. “Shame to let a beauty like this rust away.”

Rex whirled, opening and closing his mouth as if he expected the right words to fall automatically out. He took a second to focus on the stranger: a bearlike man, built short and stocky, with blotchy dark skin and not a hair on his head. The stranger’s scalp had been freshly shaved; even the eyebrows were gone.

Rex felt the sour taste of wine claw up his throat. He said hoarsely, “Yeah, she’s my train. What do you want?”

The bald man said nothing, only turned to look over the train, admiring it. Rex wanted to leave, to go back into the station, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t leave the locomotive unguarded. What if the strange man was a vandal or something? The bad taste in his mouth wouldn’t go away.

Rex hadn’t had much trouble in the week or so since the plague struck the wine country north of San Francisco. The train station was away from most of the town buildings, and he didn’t have anything marauders would want.

Rex waved an arm, shooing the man away. “You shouldn’t be here. This place is closed.”

The bald man hauled himself up into the engineer’s cab beside Rex and ran his hand along the wooden console, the controls. “How long since you fired her up?” His voice was confident, as if accustomed to taking charge of such a vessel.

“Uh?” Rex stopped at the question. “Started the train? Are you crazy? Nothing runs anymore.”

“Well, I probably am crazy. But this train was built long before we started using petroleum products for everything. It was designed for other alternatives, no matter what you’ve been using lately,” said the man. “With a few people to help, we could get this train running again.”

“We? Whose train do you think this is?” Rex cocked his head to one side. “You are a crazy man!”

The squat stranger raised the folds that used to be his eyebrows, wrinkling the shaved skin on his forehead. “You got any other plans for it?”

#

Two days later, when Rex believed the stranger meant what he said, he persuaded the Gambotti brothers and Frank Haverson and Jerry Miles to leave their vineyards and spend a few hours in the afternoon joining in the effort.

They took apart the Steam Roller’s gear box, the piston shaft, the axle, and the controls. Forced by a long screwdriver and steady pressure, each item reluctantly opened up. Smelly lard and gobs of fat, skimmed off the surface of a boiling pot brought in from the Gambotti vineyards yielded enough lubricant for the first round.

The bald, dark stranger spoke little, sweating and working harder than two of them combined. Rex tried to keep up. The stranger became obsessed with getting the train working again.

Rex couldn’t pinpoint when the stranger took control of the effort, nor did he care. They worked from the first light of dawn until they could no longer see in the dark. The stranger ate his water crackers and vegetables in silence. Given the choice, he drank mineral water instead of wine.

Rex O’Keefe took a long gulp from his cup—Gewürtztraminer, this time, a bit young but bright and fruity—and watched the swarthy man with the shaved head. The man put down his empty plate, lit a candle, and went back outside to work.

Rex wondered what burden the stranger bore that drove him to work so hard.

Chapter 43

Armed guards, once discreetly hidden behind banks of high-tech observation equipment, now openly patrolled the White House complex. Barricades cut off foot traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue to the north and E Street to the south. The Old Executive Office Building and the Treasury Building served as heavily fortified buffers to the west and east.

Hunching down, Jeffrey Mayeaux walked in the middle of his team of escorts through the wrought-iron gate. Leather patches on the hinges served as makeshift lubrication for the gates. More sophisticated artificial lubricants could have been shipped in from the Department of Commerce’s NIST laboratory in Gaithersburg, Maryland, but those were being stockpiled for emergency use.

Mayeaux thought of the briefing given to him while he was driven back to Washington with a military guard. Four of the convoy trucks had succumbed to the petroplague during the three-hour drive.

As of an hour ago, President Holback was officially declared dead. Short-wave radio transmissions stated that some sort of mob action in Qatar had killed the president and his escorts, then burned the American embassy in retaliation for the petroplague ravaging the Middle East oil fields.

With the breakdown in communications, none of this could be incontrovertibly confirmed, Mayeaux knew. But none of that would let him off the hook. He was going to be sworn in as the actual president, not just the acting Commander-in-Chief. No pomp, no ceremony—just an emergency action. The world was turning into one giant dog turd, and it was being plopped right in his lap.

Even under normal conditions, he’d never felt comfortable coming into the White House’s snobbery—a Southern boy, he didn’t have the right background, attend the right schools, or come up through the political system in the right way. The White House staff had treated him with disdain only a few days ago—now Mayeaux looked forward to putting them in their places. From now on, he was going to have to take his pleasures wherever he could. He wondered how the kitchen would react to a request to serve Creole red beans and rice every Monday, as was traditional.

A maintenance woman unrolled heavy-gauge emergency telephone wire across the top of the West Wing; flanked by MPs, Navy personnel lugged baskets of food across West Executive Avenue to the White House Mess.

“This way, Mr. Speaker.” The Secret Service escort motioned him toward the heavily guarded side door. Any other time, the President-to-be would have been received at the front of the White House like a conquering hero, chauffeured through the yawning gates to where the Marine guard stood stiffly at the front. The side entrance was reserved for lowly political appointees. But with the turmoil in the city and rumors of snipers, Mayeaux wanted to make himself as small a target as possible. He didn’t need all the fuss. Hell, he didn’t even want the job.

A crowd of politicians stood just inside the door. A slight smile came to Mayeaux as he recognized the former President’s Chief of Staff, the Science Advisor, the Budget Director. He had seen the others before, but they were too far down the food chain to elicit acknowledgment.

The Chief of Staff steered him past the Situation Room and up the stairs. “Mr. Speaker, we’re required to swear you in before updating you on the status of the current emergency. Things have deteriorated and require some drastic decisions.” The Chief of Staff had too much of a “trust me” tone. Mayeaux would see to it that good old Weathersee took his place, pronto!

“We’ve already frozen our borders,” Mayeaux said. “I was told that the National Security Council is recommending martial law across the entire country, confiscating all untainted oil.”

The Science Advisor nodded grimly. “Yes, but it might get tougher still. This is the moral equivalent of fighting a war. Our nation is on the verge of collapse.”

Mayeaux paused and studied their grave expressions. What the hell was he supposed to do with an attitude like that? “Gentlemen, I have absolutely no intention of letting the United States break apart, if it is within my power to stop it.” He extended his palm, indicating for them to lead the way and get a move on.

They took Mayeaux through the Roosevelt Room to the Oval Office, past military campaign streamers, polished wood, fine art, and a Nobel Peace Prize on display. A lanky man with long sideburns stood by the Secret Service agent outside the door. He carried a Bible and seemed nervous; he must be one of the lower officials in the Justice Department dug up to administer the oath of office. Figures, they wouldn’t get the Chief Justice for him.

The group moved into the Oval Office, filling the room. A row of bushes blooming with flowers outlined the Rose Garden just outside the window. Mayeaux could see the jogging track that encircled the south lawn; a walkway led to the outdoor swimming pool. It seemed too perfect, too good to be true.

He didn’t want to be here.

The lanky man with the Bible cleared his throat. “Please raise your hand and swear on the Bible, Mr. Mayeaux.”

“Right.”

Jeffrey Mayeaux repeated the man’s charge, mouthing the oath as it was said to him. The words meant nothing; they were just another set of guidelines to follow, just as his Congressional oath or marriage vows. It wasn’t the words that mattered, it was the position, and what he could do with it. He mumbled “So help me God,” and felt no different. With the minor scandals dogging him throughout his past two terms, he had never dreamed he would keep his Congressional office, let alone fall face-first into the presidency! He wasn’t ready for this.

As others in the room shook his hand before leading him to the situation room, the Science Advisor’s comment stuck with him. This crisis was like fighting a war.

Well, in war, the Commander-in-Chief needed to be obeyed. Mayeaux couldn’t afford to have his staff second-guess him. The first thing he would do was fire these throwbacks from Holback’s administration and surround himself with people he trusted. Finding a good Vice President was high on the list.

“Mr. Speaker—I mean, Mr. President,” the Chief of Staff corrected himself, “we need to get to the Situation Room.” He moved to the door.

“In a minute,” Mayeaux said. “I have a few things I want to discuss first. A few changes.”

Chapter 44

MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT

FROM:ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT

FOR SCIENCE, SPACE AND TECHNOLOGY

SUBJECT:PETROPLAGUE-AFFECTED MATERIAL

ADDENDUM 3, CONTINUED

We have again revised our list to include the following items:

Toys

Sixpack beverage can rings

Photocopy machine bodies

Tupperware

Polyethylene food wrap

Handles/knobs/buttons

Toothbrushes

Hair dryers

Garment buttons

Hair brushes

Coffee makers

Watch faces

Most clocks

Videotapes

Movie film

Photographs

Floppy diskettes

Adhesives

Faucet gaskets

Electrical switchplates

Laminate films

Orange highway cones

Plastic buckets

Shower curtains

Plastic tarpaulins

Varnish coatings

Marquee lettering

Driver’s licenses, laminated IDs

Petroleum jelly

Credit cards

Lighting fixtures

Athletic balls

Wastebaskets

Disposable diapers

Adhesive tape

Plastic utensils

Garment buttons

Chapter 45

On horseback, Todd led Iris quickly away from Stanford, out of the city of Palo Alto, and across the South Bay flatlands. Although he wasn’t certain where he wanted to end up, he knew they had to head east, away from the Bay area cities.

The mud flats smelled rancid in the low tide, with spoiled garbage and iridescent scum drying under the sunlight. Gnats buzzed around his face, and the horses’ tails whisked like scratchy brooms to drive the pests away. When they finally rode north, reaching solid ground, the tall grass whispered and shushed beneath the horses’ legs, the only sound except for the wind and a few circling birds over the empty network of highways.

Iris rode beside him, jarring him into conversation. Although he felt confident on the horse, he didn’t know what to say—he had spent so much time riding down to Stanford to pick her up, he couldn’t for the life of him think up any small talk. He had much bigger things to think about—like their survival. But he was content just to be with her, and she seemed not unwilling to stay with him a while.

The sun beat down on his cowboy hat and his calloused, tanned hands gripping the reins. He could smell the horses and his own sweat, which made him wonder if Iris liked cologne. Probably not.

“So,” Iris said, jet black hair blowing around her face, “you haven’t actually agreed yet. Do you think it’s a good idea to make our way to the Altamont and the community up there?”

Todd nodded, but he had been avoiding the question. He was still surprised that Iris had come along with him. “Sounds like a good idea, especially if they’ve got access to food from the Central Valley, even better if they’ve managed to rig power from the windmills.” He tugged his hat down tighter as a Bay breeze gusted past him. “I’m just a little uncomfortable about living with a bunch of hippies.”

“What’s the problem? They’ve been living off the land there for years.”

Todd was quiet for a moment. “What if they’re growing drugs or something?”

Iris laughed at him. “I’m sure they’d let you have some, if you asked nicely.”

Todd felt his skin prickle. “That’s not what I meant—”

“I know, I know. I’m sure they’ll be a lot more concerned now with planting vegetables. Don’t worry about it, Tex.”

“Stop calling me that,” he growled. “I’m from Wyoming.”

“Would you rather I called you Wye?”

Todd kept looking ahead, squinting into the sunlight. “I’d rather you just called me Todd.” Then he added defensively, “Okay, Professor? Or should I say, Little Miss Rock Star?”

She started to retort, but chuckled instead. “Okay, you made your point.”

They left the water behind as they headed between grassy hills crowned with dark green live oaks. Iris urged Ren ahead a few steps to parallel Todd. “We should avoid Hayward, Newark, and Fremont as much as possible,” she said, pointing to the wrinkled, flapping map spread on the saddle in front of her. “No telling how bad those cities have gotten. If we keep away from the Interstate, there are plenty of hills, ranches, and grazing land between here and the Altamont. Think we can make it there by nightfall?”

Todd laughed. “We didn’t leave Stanford until after lunch. Maybe by tomorrow afternoon.”

Iris looked down at the map again. Her dark eyes flicked back and forth, as if checking directions and distances. “I can drive it in an hour.”

“You really are an academic type, aren’t you? Horses don’t go quite as fast as cars. And they’re not nearly as comfortable.” Todd finally felt reassured to be talking about a subject he knew. “Anyway, after about twenty miles or so, your butt is going to feel sore enough to fall off. I’d just as soon keep that from happening.” Todd suddenly realized what he had said and he clamped his lips down hard together. His ears burned.

“Gee, thanks,” Iris said. “Are you willing to give me a massage if I ache too much?”

It was Todd’s turn to snort; but inwardly, he wondered if she really meant it.

#

That night they sat around a small campfire. The only thing missing was a pair of wailing coyotes in the hills. He heard a few distant gunshots after dusk, but that wasn’t quite the same.

Iris removed a can of peaches “in their own natural juice” she had taken from her pantry and opened it with a hand can opener. “Too bad we don’t have any beans for dinner,” she said, scooping the mess into their traveling bowls. “Then we could recreate that scene from Blazing Saddles.”

Todd laughed. “You think all cowboys are like that?”

“Aren’t they?”

“Right. Just like all professors are rock & roll addicts.” Todd ducked when Iris threw a clod of dirt at him. Afterwards, they managed to have a decent conversation over dinner.

Todd finally began to relax with the fact that he was riding alone across country with a beautiful woman who confused and excited him. It had taken him hours, but he could finally start talking to her without being so self-conscious.

Darkness spread across the sky. Iris stood up and went to the pile of saddles and blankets they had removed from the horses. Ren and Stimpy blew and whickered from where they were tied under the trees. Todd poked around, securing the campsite.

Iris returned to the level ground near the dying fire and tossed down both sleeping bags. Todd picked up his bedroll. “You can sleep by the fire. I’ll stand watch over here.”

“Wait. You want to help me zip these together?” she asked. “You promised me a massage, remember?”

Todd hesitated, not sure what to say. This didn’t make sense. He turned away, feeling his face flushing bright red.

Iris giggled at his reaction. “You’re cute, Todd.” She grabbed his bedroll and started unrolling both bags, searching for the zippers. “I can’t tell how much of this Big Lunk routine of yours is an act and how much is real.”

“What Big Lunk routine?” he asked, genuinely baffled.

“Oh shut up and get inside the sleeping bag,” Iris said. Her smile seemed to sparkle in the smoky light. “Would it help if I sang Country & Western?” She crooned in a warbling drawl, “Aaahm so lonesome Aaah could craaah!”

Todd stared doggedly. “You’re teasing me, aren’t you?”

“Me?” Iris looked shocked. “I’m dead serious about that massage. My butt feels just as sore as you said it would.”

Confused, Todd snatched his bedroll away from her. “Either that’s the first thing you’ve said that isn’t sarcastic, or I’m missing something. Good night, Professor. We’ve got a long ride tomorrow.” He stomped off without waiting for her reaction.

Minutes later, as he spread his sleeping bag out across the dry grass, he debated going back to her. He couldn’t figure Iris out. One minute she’d lash out at him, the next she wanted to jump in the sack. Weird.

He listened for any sound that she might still be up, maybe even waiting for him. But besides the fire crackling and one of the horses snorting, he didn’t hear a thing.

Chapter 46

On the equipment table at the microwave farm, Spencer glanced over the components they had outfitted with fiberglass and ceramic: diagnostic sensors, a switching cable, and fiber-optic relays. In the oppressive heat, useless computer monitors stared like lifeless eyes; the hard plastic housings had sloughed aside, leaving heavy glass cathode-ray tubes canted among wires and the debris of circuits.

At the rate they were going, his small team would have the entire microwave farm fully converted within the next two weeks.

“Supply wagon’s coming!” Rita Fellenstein shouted from the doorway. She sprinted out into the desert sunlight.

Spencer watched with amusement as Rita hurried to the wagon, her braided hair dangling beneath her Australian hat. By now her infatuation with the pair of ranch hands was common knowledge.

He tugged on his own floppy hat and followed her out of the blockhouse. He squinted in the glaring brightness of the desert, but without air conditioning inside the building, the temperature differential wasn’t much of a shock.

The two young ranch hands guided the horses that pulled the old wooden-bed wagon. From the short-wave radio, Spencer knew that some of the ranches around Alamogordo had donated barrels of water and boxes of MRE rations from storehouses they had looted from mothballed Holloman AFB. Wiry Juan Romero, sweat dripping down his back, started unloading, stashing boxes of dried beef and aluminum containers in the shade beneath the blockhouse.

A small Hispanic man with short salt-and-pepper hair and a narrow chin rode in the back of the supply wagon. Spencer didn’t recognize him. “A visitor?” he asked Rita.

Rita flipped her braids over her shoulder and pushed her lips together like a small wad of paper. “Not sure.”

Spencer kept his expression neutral as he walked to where the short stranger was getting off the wagon. The man held out a small, narrow hand to him. “Are you Spencer Lockwood?” he said in a way that showed he was accustomed to taking control. “I’m Gilbert Hertoya. Lance Nedermyer insisted that I come see you.”

Spencer shook the man’s hand, feeling a surprisingly rough and leathery grip, and suppressed a scowl, wishing he could just turn the wagon around and send the man back home. He carried himself with the air of an executive with nothing left to manage. “Yeah, Lance is always looking after our best interests—according to him. How can I help you?”

Hertoya smiled, apparently without malice. “Actually, I think I can help you.”

“Oh?” He waited for Hertoya to spring the bad news on him. “I need all the help I can get. I hope you came to lend a hand.”

“Well, I got tired of sitting on my butt in Alamogordo. I left my family there for now so I could get to work. You know we’ve got the potential here to—” Hertoya hesitated, then raised his dark eyebrows. “I guess I shouldn’t blame you for not recognizing me. I’m from the Sandia Lab in Albuquerque. I head up, or headed up, the electromagnetic launcher up on Oscura Peak.” He let that sink in.

“The satellite launcher? Now that’s interesting.” Spencer broke into a wide grin. If this guy knew how to run the EM launcher, he might be useful after all.

“Hey, Rita and Juan!” he called, “you guys finish unloading the wagon—we’ll need it for a trip to Oscura Peak.”

#

Spencer watched eagerly as Gilbert Hertoya opened the door to the stuffy bowels of the railgun controls. Sunlight pouring through the ceiling windows left pale patches of illumination in the control area. Dust motes settled through the air.

Spencer looked along the railgun corridor. Parallel steel beams extended to a vanishing point in the distance up the slope of Oscura Peak. He lost all sense of perspective. On either side, blue-painted boxes containing high-energy-density capacitors crowded the rails. Their footsteps echoed on the concrete floor.

“The EM launcher was a smaller project even than your antenna farm,” Hertoya said. “At least you started out with serious funding—we got zip from DOE, a little from NASA. To keep going we had to beg money from Sandia’s in-house research fund, mostly because we had our roots in the weapons community.”

“Well, we had to pinch a few pennies ourselves,” Spencer said, trying not to sound defensive. With the world irreparably changed around them, he noted with annoyance that he was still falling into old political patterns.

Rita squeezed next to him looking down the long rails. “Wow.” She coughed in the dusty air, but didn’t say another word.

Gilbert ushered them along the corridor. “You can only see the first two miles of the launcher. It extends another three miles up the foothills—for peak performance we need to install another mile and a half of railing. We can launch small payloads to low-Earth orbit with what we have; we need the additional mile and a half to get us up to the higher, useful orbits.

“My team has been steadily putting this together for the past six years. Before the petroplague, that is. We used mostly grad student labor from New Mexico State—cheap and enthusiastic.” He shook his head sadly. “We’ve got piles of railing and capacitors stored near the top of the peak, more than enough to finish putting it together. If we were funded like other Sandia projects, we could have become a real launch facility years ago.”

Hertoya stepped under the twin rails and pointed to the first bank of capacitors. Spencer ran a hand along the rail. The steel felt cold and slick. The wheels in his mind spun furiously, trying to figure how they could get the launcher up and running.

“We place the payload on these rails in a conducting shell called a sabot. We charge the capacitors and fire them off, one after another in a sophisticated timing operation. Each one adds to the total magnetic field that pushes the sabot up the launcher, nudge after nudge after nudge. By the time the payload reaches the end of the rails, it’s traveling over ten klicks a second—more than enough to reach low-Earth orbit.”

Spencer nodded with continued interest. “The payload weighs what, a couple hundred kilograms, if I remember right?”

“The entire package can weigh a thousand kilograms. Three hundred of that is pure payload. Most of the rest is the guidance system and a small rocket to insert the payload into orbit.”

Spencer looked at the blue capacitor boxes, then suddenly felt a sinking at the pit of his stomach. Well, that’s that, he thought. The entire setup was as worthless as a Detroit auto factory now. They had been so close.

“I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.” Spencer started to turn away. “Capacitors have oil dielectrics. They’re useless.”

“Oil?” Gilbert made a dismissive gesture. “No, we decided against an oil dielectric in favor of some new insulating technology. These just use distilled water.”

Spencer froze. “Water-based capacitors?”

Rita laughed. “Where you been, Spence, on Mars?”

“If we could use this launcher to get the rest of our satellite constellation in orbit, we’d have practically a continuous ring of smallsats. It would be easy to add other antenna farms on the ground.”

“Spencer, we have to figure out how to survive the winter!” Rita interrupted. “Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself? It needs another one and a half miles of railing. It’s taken them six years to get this far.” Rita smiled apologetically at Gilbert. “Spencer gets this way sometimes.”

“There are plenty of people back in Alamogordo who’d break their backs to get this thing working, because it’s one of the only chances we have for the future,” Spencer insisted, “even if it does take several years.”

As he spoke, he grew more passionate. “They’ve got nothing to do, and they want to help get the world back on its feet. You saw the response we got from the ranchers.”

“That was for horses and food, Spence, not for . . . for working on the railroad!” Rita said, exasperated.

Spencer slung an arm over Hertoya’s shoulder. “Rita can handle the supply details if you oversee finishing the railgun project. The microwave farm doesn’t need any more people for the conversion process—”

He grew more animated with every step. “We could have limitless energy from the satellites. White Sands can be a new Atlantis, the only place left with the comforts of 20th century life!”

As they stepped into the sunshine, Rita shook her head. “Sometimes I think his brain is just going to explode.”

Chapter 47

The Sandia mountains east of Albuquerque turned a deep pinkish red as light from the setting sun struck them. Desert sunsets were stark and pure, filled with a silent rawness that always reminded him of his days in Gulf combat.

And that reminded him of the thirty thousand lives under his charge at Kirtland Air Force Base. Thirty thousand souls, he thought. All in his hands, at this time of crisis.

The first directive from newly sworn president Jeffrey Mayeaux had come down like a hammer on an anvil. All military commanders were to bring cities under strict martial law. They were to enforce curfews, stockpile supplies for orderly distribution among the populace, and enforce a rule of order at all costs. Via shortwave radio the president had ordered local commanders to call up nearby contingents of the National Guard.

With the radical changes forced by the petroleum plague, society would be like a wild horse trying to throw the reins of law and civilization. Bayclock had to ride hard and not let his determination falter for an instant.

When he had visited Kirtland AFB, Mayeaux had told Bayclock they could work well together whatever might come up—and now Mayeaux was his Commander in Chief. In the petroplague crisis, Mayeaux was shouldering a burden vastly more difficult than Bayclock’s own, and Bayclock vowed to give the new president his fullest support.

He breathed deeply, scanning the Sandia peaks before turning back to Mayor David Reinski. A squad of fifteen security policemen, all beefy young men over six feet tall, protected them against the anarchistic elements that had already caused so much damage. The MPs faced outward, holding their automatic weapons loosely, ready to snatch them in a second. Bayclock had refused the protection of the few civil police officers still on duty.

They stood in the center of City Plaza, an island of enforced sanity amidst the turmoil. Shattering glass and sporadic screams peppered the dusk; fires burned from several buildings. Hiding behind a dark window, someone shouted taunts across the plaza.

In front of the adobe Spanish mission, Bayclock’s horses were tied together and guarded by another group. The scene could have been part of a Mexican showdown in an old Western movie. The citizens would writhe at the enforced discipline—at least at first, but they would get used to it. And one day they would thank him for saving them all.

Mayor Reinski fidgeted; he looked from side to side, as if uncertain that Bayclock’s MPs could offer sufficient protection. Bayclock let the mayor squirm for a moment before speaking. “Seen enough? Tell me how you could possibly handle this yourself.”

“I—I don’t know how much longer we’ll be safe out here.”

Bayclock snorted. “You think we’re safe now? Look up there.” He nodded to the building behind them. “The only reason we haven’t been attacked is because of my snipers stationed on the rooftop. They’ve already shot two would-be assassins.”

Reinski looked around. “Okay, you’ve proved your point.”