Slow Apocalypse

by John Varley

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

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

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER FOUR

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

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

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

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

  “Not a series idea,” he said.

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

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

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

  “It’s not a comedy,” he said.

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

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

  “Area 51,” Bob suggested.

  “Let’s call it Area 52.”

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

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

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

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

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Jenna said. “Oil wells are burning all through the Middle East and Russia.”

  “Which will make it all seem even more plausible,” he said, plunging ahead. “The colonel tells the writer that the business of the fires being started by terrorists is a cover story. Meanwhile, rumors start to surface. Lots of chatter on the Internet, lots of theories, most of them bogus. The stock market, the futures markets, they all start to fluctuate wildly as the big investors try to get good information.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Dennis said, for once seeming to be frozen in position with none of his nervous tics.

  “I’m serious as cancer,” he said, abandoning the fiction once and for all.

  There was a long silence around the table as they all shifted mental gears.

  “You’re saying all this happened,” said Roger. “It happened to you.”

  “I’m saying the parts about the colonel and the writer happened. I am the writer. The colonel was Lionel Warner.”

  “Is this on the news?”

  “No, which is scary in itself. But I was there, and I saw him shot, and fall eleven stories to his death.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I wouldn’t do that to you.”

  “What about all that other stuff? The Area 52, and the crazy scientist?”

  “I can’t vouch for that. I’m not even sure if Colonel Warner was certain of the details. But I can tell you what I saw. There were way too many oil wells burning for it to have been a terrorist act.”

  Dennis seemed to want to reject the whole thing. Bob was frowning. Jenna kept her own counsel, and Roger was inscrutable. But he had a question.

  “So why are you sharing all this with us?” Roger asked.

  “Because I had to talk to somebody about it, and you guys are the only people I could trust not to reject all of this out of hand.”

  “What about Karen?” Jenna wanted to know.

  “I wanted to run it all past you guys first.”

  “Well,” said Dennis, standing and stretching and walking toward the glass wall that framed his million-dollar view, “I think that old man pulled a fast one on you.”

  “Then why did they kill him?” Jenna asked.

  “That part I don’t know,” Dennis admitted, “but I don’t think it had anything to do with some crazy superbug that eats crude oil.”

  There was a short silence. Dave certainly wasn’t going to ask for a vote on the matter, but he hoped the others would weigh in.

  “I’m reserving judgement,” Roger said. “I’m not saying it’s impossible, and I’m having a tough time figuring out any other reason these storm troopers you speak of would kill the man…but this is the real world, Fearless Leader.”

  “I’ve had the same problem,” Dave admitted.

  Bob had a suggestion.

  “How about this?” he said. “Let’s take it all as a starting point for a story, instead of as a story in and of itself. Let’s bat it around a bit, like a story conference.”

  “I don’t get it,” Dennis said. “How does that help anything?”

  “How does it hurt?” Bob countered. “Let’s just say, for the purposes of developing this story, that it’s all real. That people in Washington and other capitals around the world are doing their best to cover it all up because they don’t have a clue about what to do next. Let’s postulate that, very soon, this whole country is literally going to run out of gas. So…number one, what happens next? And number two, what would a prudent individual do to prepare for it?”

  Dave could
see the interest growing as Bob spoke. They were story people, they were used to taking a situation and running with it.

  “Here’s a bit of data for you,” he said. “Los Angeles gets enough rainfall every year to support about 5 percent of our current population.”

  “You’ve been researching this,” Bob said.

  “I have. Where do you think we get our electricity? Half of it comes from coal-burning plants in Utah. But the coal is brought in by diesel-powered trains. They won’t be running if this scenario is correct.”

  Dave let them ponder that for a while. Jenna spoke up.

  “Food, water, power,” she said. “We take all that for granted, but we shouldn’t. Los Angeles is a desert. It’s only transportation and water that’s made it possible to live here. Without that, we all dry up and blow away. How long do you think the food in stores and warehouses would last, if no more was coming in?”

  “I have no idea,” Dave said. “I wasn’t able to find any data on that. Maybe nobody’s even considered it.”

  “What about the people who plan for the Big One?” That was Roger. “Surely they must have an estimate of food resources when transportation is disrupted.”

  “They probably do,” Bob said, “but remember, all their planning is assuming one thing we can no longer assume. They figure that, no matter how big the Big One is, we won’t be on our own. Help will come from outside. The Red Cross, the National Guard. But the thing about this disaster is, no help will be coming. Everybody will be without fuel. No rescue helicopters, no truckloads of supplies. Nothing.”

  “So what would our prudent, forewarned writer need to do to provide for his family for an unknown time?” Roger asked.

  “Lay in supplies, obviously,” Jenna said.

  “I’ve done that.”

  “Bulk staples. Flour, cornmeal, rice, sugar…”

  “Coffee,” Dennis suggested. Dave doubted Dennis could survive very long without coffee.

  “Lots of booze,” Bob said, to general laughter.

  “See?” Dave said. “I’m glad I brought you here. I’ve bought a lot of stuff like canned meat and tuna. I didn’t think of flour, because I’m not a baker.”

  “You’d have to learn to be one,” Jenna said. “Buy a lot of carbs, that’s my suggestion. It’ll last longer. I’d be buying twenty-pound sacks of rice by the carload. It’s cheaper than canned food, too.”

  “I’d be cleaning my weapons,” Roger said. That was greeted by another silence.

  “I don’t have any weapons,” Dennis said.

  “Neither do I,” Dave said.

  Jenna said she had a pistol that she’d never used. Bob had quite a collection of rifles and shotguns.

  “How long does it take to buy a gun in California?” Dennis wondered.

  “Too long,” Bob said, dryly. “There will be civil unrest. Can you envision how bad it could get when parents see their children starving?”

  “Starving? Isn’t that a little extreme?”

  Bob shook his head.

  “Follow this scenario out to its end, and it gets really frightening. The gasoline and diesel is running out. The store shelves are empty. Nothing is coming into the city. There isn’t room or time to grow anything here. Where do you go to put food on your table? The central valley? Sure, but you’ll have to walk, and it’s a long ways, and there isn’t much water along the way. And one other thing. What makes you think we’d be welcomed in the valley? I suspect they’d be inclined to save the food they’re growing for their own children.”

  They batted it around a little longer, and came to an unpleasant conclusion. The best course of action was to get out of town, right now. Head for someplace in the country where food was grown and stored. Head for a place that got most of its electricity from hydro plants.

  When they were gone Dave sat at his desk, looking out over the city, brooding. Tomorrow would be a busy day.

  “Daddy?”

  He jumped, and turned around. Addison had come into the office.

  “What is it, honey?”

  “Were you just making all that up? Is it all a joke, or is it true?”

  “How did you hear that?”

  She came down and walked over to one of his cluttered bookshelves. She moved a pencil cup to one side and revealed something that he didn’t recognize at first.

  “You rascal! How dare you! You’ve been spying on me!”

  She looked frightened for a moment, then realized he was kidding.

  “It’s that old baby monitor. We brought everything along from the old house when we moved, and me and my friends used to use it when we played. Then I used to put it in here sometimes when your writing group was here because I liked to listen to you guys when you’re making up stories.

  “When I heard you calling Mr. Winston I brought it back in here and hid it on that shelf. Because…well, Daddy, you’ve been acting kind of strange.”

  Dave got up and took her hand and led her over to the couch. They sat side by side and he put his arm over her shoulder. She snuggled up against him.

  “Addie…It’s not a joke. I don’t know how much of what you heard is true, but at least some of it is.”

  “You really saw that man get shot and fall out of that building?”

  “I really did.”

  “That sounds awful.”

  “It was. It was about the worst thing I’ve ever seen. And the fact that he was accessing classified information that it seems the government didn’t want him to see, and the fact that they did kill him…all that makes me think what he said was true.”

  “But what does it all mean? You were talking about getting guns and stuff.”

  “Well, some of them were. They think it might get violent.”

  “Will it?”

  “I honestly don’t know. I can see how it could. I’m just glad we’ve got a little advance warning. For most people, what’s coming is going to be a big surprise.”

  She was quiet for a while.

  “What you said…if people can’t buy food for their children…they probably won’t just sit around quietly, will they?”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “What would you do?”

  “Addie, let’s not get into that. That’s a problem for another day.”

  She wasn’t having any of that.

  “Are you going to buy a gun?”

  “I don’t know. I might.”

  “If you do, will you teach me to shoot it?”

  Dave began to wonder if, in some ways, Addie might be well ahead of him in thinking about this. He kissed her on the top of the head, and she looked up at him with a shy smile. He knew at that moment that he’d do pretty much anything to see she was safe and fed.

  They got up and went to the window.

  “I wish you had told me when you learned about this,” she said. “I may not be an adult yet, but I’m not really a child, either.”

  “No, you’re not. I’m sorry, and I won’t do it again.”

  “So…when are you going to tell Mom?”

  “She’s due back day after tomorrow. I’ll tell her then.”

  Addison sighed deeply.

  “That’s going to be interesting.”

  The next day was a busy one.

  Addison was helping him gather information, and the more they learned, the more they were sure they were in for hard times ahead.

  The president of the United States appeared at a press conference. He still wasn’t admitting anything beyond the fact that there were going to be shortages of gasoline, diesel, and home-heating oil. He advised people in cold climates to look into converting to electric, natural gas, or even coal, and he proposed a tax credit for those who did, and urged Congress to pass the bill quickly.

  Then, to no one’s surprise, he announced a national program of gasoline rationing. Details were still being worked out, but it was to begin in a week. All Americans would be getting ration books or cards or stamps, just like in World War Two. And just like then, n
ot all of them would be getting the same allotment.

  “Police, firefighters, doctors, and other emergency workers will have first priority,” the president said. “Farmers will get more than factory workers. Citizens of rural areas will get more than urban dwellers. We will endeavor to make the distribution of gasoline as equitable as possible, but it will inevitably entail hardships for many of us. We will take any measures necessary to get us through the coming winter and into next year, when we feel confident that this crisis will have passed. Luckily, it’s still summer, and we have some months to prepare.”

  He then announced a long list of conservation measures. Car pooling would no longer be an option, it would now be mandatory. Every seat in every vehicle would have to be occupied during morning and evening rush hours, or you would not be allowed on the freeways. This, too, was to begin in one week, so people had time to organize it as best they could. States and cities were instructed to set up connection boards on the Internet. For those who didn’t find some neighbors willing to share a ride, their only option would be to drive to a freeway entrance, leave their car there, and get a ride with someone who needed another passenger to fill an empty seat. Walking or riding a bicycle to a freeway entrance was an even better idea.

  The president took a few questions, but refused to address the increasing rumors that all was not what it seemed. Which only fueled more rumors.

  While Addison continued gathering information on her computer, Dave started calling around. It didn’t take long to find what he was looking for.

  The doorbell rang a few hours later. Dave hurried outside and around the house and through the door in the privacy wall. Waiting outside was the dealer.

  His name was Marcus. He was a grip at one of the studios. Dave didn’t know him well, but knew Marcus was the go-to guy if you needed something in a hurry and maybe not strictly legal. He didn’t look like a drug dealer. He was in his thirties and dressed in chinos and a polo shirt, with a good tan and wild blond hair. They got into his black van with the darkened windows. It was all tricked out like a traveling Nevada whorehouse, with shag carpet, mirrors, a small bar, and a red velvet bed that took up half of the back.