Slow Apocalypse

by John Varley

  Normally he would have fired up the grill and put on some steaks or chicken, but that didn’t feel right to him. A cookout was a festive occasion, and how could they be festive with such a horror just outside the windows? He suggested they keep it simple, and Addison agreed.

  That idea happened to jibe well with his current mission of cleaning out the freezer. The power might not be reliable soon. There were about a dozen frozen Costco entrees left. He picked a penne pasta and a kung pao pork and popped them into the microwave.

  Addison busied herself with making a salad from the last of their lettuce and tomatoes. There was nothing else to put it in but some seasoned croutons. Fresh produce was getting hard to come by.

  Jenna left about two in the morning. Dylan had sacked out on the couch right after dinner. Dave invited Dennis and Ellen to spend the night in the guest room, and they agreed. Addison hurried upstairs to see to fresh towels and toothbrushes. Dave was happy to see her so busy.

  Dennis put his wife and child to bed, then came down and joined Dave. Earlier they had listened to the rest of what the president had to say. None of it was good.

  The bottom line was, the country was running on fumes, and they should not expect more deliveries of crude oil. Not from other countries, not from Alaska, not from Texas. No more crude, period.

  “Ships carrying crude oil to our shores have either gone missing, or are known to have exploded. The bacterium causes the crude oil to expand as it solidifies, and we must assume that the missing tankers split open and went to the bottom of the sea.

  “For some time now, we have been pumping oil from our own wells and refining it into gasoline and diesel fuel as quickly as we can. The bacterium does not attack refined petroleum products, only crude oil.

  “We have also been tapping into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in Texas and Louisiana and refining that, too.”

  “What’s the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?” Dennis wanted to know.

  Dave paused the TiVo. He had learned about the SPR during his research on America’s energy resources and consumption.

  “They store petroleum in salt domes underground. They hollow the domes out with water, pump out the salty water, and pump in crude. It’s all along the Gulf Coast, at Baton Rouge and Lake Charles in Louisiana and two little towns in Texas.”

  Dave switched the president back on.

  “It is that fuel that the nation has been running on for the last few months. There is still some oil in the reserve, but we fear the bacterium will get to it, too. For this reason, I now have to announce even more stringent rationing measures than those the nation is currently struggling under.”

  There would be no more gasoline sales to private parties. All gasoline not already in the tanks of private cars was now nationalized. The president then called on the governors of all fifty states to mobilize the National Guard to protect the gas in underground tanks at service stations.

  Police were urged to park their cruisers and take up foot and bicycle patrols.

  Emergency responders were told to limit vehicle response to the direst emergencies. Again, paramedics were to use bicycles whenever possible, and deliver treatment at the scene.

  “That’s gonna ruffle some feathers,” Dennis said.

  “No kidding.” It didn’t sound like a good time to have a heart attack.

  “What about the fire department?” Dennis gestured to the fire outside. “How many engines you figure are down there working that fire? What happens when they run out of gas?”

  Dave looked out once more at the fire. The center, the oil field, was no longer the realm of towering orange flames. Everything flammable in there had burned. But now there were hundreds of pale blue jets shooting into the sky, like the flames of monstrous acetylene torches. At the ends of these jets were billows of white, painted orange by the flames beneath: the liberated hydrogen from down below combining with oxygen in the air to produce water.

  It was hard to be sure, but he thought the structure fires hadn’t spread much more to the east in the last few hours. Maybe the fire department was getting a handle on it all, maybe they had managed to establish a perimeter.

  But how would they fight future fires without gas for their trucks?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  For the next three days they mostly lived in front of the television set. Aside from one trip down the hill, and what he could see from his backyard, Dave’s only information about the world came from the TV and the Internet.

  Things were happening almost too fast for anyone to keep up with it all, and stories that might have grabbed headlines in previous months were relegated to one-minute summaries. The regular networks ceased all entertainment programming and went to twenty-four/seven news coverage.

  Stock trading had been halted on the day of the presidential assassination attempt. The market had already lost 75 percent of its value by then.

  Inflation was a matter not of monthly price increases, but daily. Everyone was trying as hard as they could to rid themselves of paper money, which was rapidly becoming worthless, but few were accepting it. The nation had moved to a barter economy in only a few days. Gold and precious stones were accepted in trade. Food was even better. Water was getting expensive. Gasoline could be had on the black market. Payment in gold, thank you, none of those worthless greenbacks.

  The great American economic engine—still the biggest in the world—was shuddering to a stop. All around the country people were finding it difficult to get to work, though there were some surprises. People who had a twenty-mile commute each way often found they could cover that distance on a bicycle in roughly the same time it used to take them in their car, on freeways suddenly almost free of vehicular traffic.

  A lot of people found that a twenty-mile bike ride when you are not accustomed to it, even on level ground, was not to be taken lightly. There were heart attacks, and emergency response time was averaging two hours. Morgues became crowded with the bodies of overweight businessmen picked up at the side of the road.

  But if you survived the bike ride to your job downtown, you often would find that’s where your troubles really began. The chances were about fifty-fifty that your job was no longer there. Many professions had become useless, including Dave’s own. There was precious little demand for comedy writers.

  Millions of Americans were discovering that what they did for a living was no longer something anyone would pay them to do. Stockbrokers were the obvious example. Bankers came to work, but were told they would have to work without salary until the crisis was over. Many other professions were told the same.

  Basically, the entire economic house of paper and electronic impulses in computers came to a standstill while everyone waited to see if the government could somehow prop up the currency.

  The insurance industry collapsed overnight. Some of them tried to use almost valueless dollars to pay out on policies covering the neighborhoods from Culver City to Crenshaw, where the fire was finally brought to a halt. The government nationalized the banks, then the insurance industry, and froze all transactions. From day to day announcements came from the Treasury and Commerce Departments, from the Federal Reserve, from the Federal Trade Commission, from any and all agencies charged with keeping the economy rolling. They all added up to very little. We have a plan. We’ll announce details tomorrow.

  But by the third day, hardly anyone was listening to the government at all, only to its representatives in uniforms, and then only at the point of a rifle.

  Dave didn’t really pay a lot of attention to the economic news. He had nothing in the bank and no investments. He had a mountain of debt that no one was trying to collect. He had spent most of his small hoard of paper money when it began to go south. Technically, he didn’t own the house, but no one seemed likely to come around seeking back payments, and no sheriff was likely to show up to evict them. He owned two worthless vehicles. Other than that, all his wealth was now squirreled away in the basement in the form of food, gas, water, and
equipment that he hoped would be useful for survival in hard times.

  Because hard times were surely coming.

  Soon, the only source of news from abroad was the Internet. And it wasn’t the Internet they were used to. There were gaping holes in it. Some countries took total control of cyberspace and imposed a blackout. Web sites vanished, never to return. A lot of what was left was obviously managed. But the Internet remained too anarchic for any institution to totally control, and bits and pieces of information that hadn’t been vetted by some government agency intent on preventing panic sometimes filtered out.

  There was news of revolutions, violent demonstrations, and widespread panic in the streets of foreign cities. There were bits of video here and there, mostly taken with inconspicuous cell phones and uploaded to transient sites that popped up as quickly as the authorities shut them down.

  In many of the former oil-producing countries, anarchy reigned. In countries that imported a large part of their food, hunger was beginning to be felt. Dave saw video of soldiers firing into crowds, of large parts of cities burning, from Cairo to Calcutta.

  There was saber rattling in Russia. The new Russian president blamed the West for sabotaging oil fields, and spoke openly of declaring war.

  By the end of the first week, it became so hard to get any reliable news from overseas that Dave was unable to confirm reports of a nuclear exchange in the Middle East. Some Web sites said Tehran and Tel Aviv had been bombed, and he saw video of widespread devastation that could easily have been the result of a nuclear weapon. But Israel and Iran both denied it, and showed footage from those cities proving that they still existed. Who could tell if it was old footage? Dave assumed that the people in power, in Washington and London and Tokyo and other world capitals, knew the truth, but they weren’t saying much, and even if they had, no one was believing much.

  As predicted, the oil fields in Texas and Oklahoma and Canada and many other places blew up in a string of catastrophes that hopscotched across the continent. Now that there was some forewarning, few of them were as deadly as the one in Los Angeles. Geologists knew where the oil was, and they knew where the people were, so over the next several days there were mass evacuations, sometimes just ahead of the explosions.

  What most people hadn’t known was just how much oil there still was underground in the United States and Canada, and in just how many places. Because they had long been importing foreign oil most people had assumed that America had pumped its own resources dry. That was very seldom the case. There was still oil beneath the surface at Titusville, Pennsylvania, where the first American oil well was drilled. Not a lot of it, compared to other places, but enough to come bursting to the surface and make a huge mess.

  The worst loss of life was in and around the Midland-Odessa region, the “oil patch” in Texas. The evacuations were in progress when the still-vast deposits of crude beneath the Texas plains erupted to the surface. Fires ignited, many times larger than the Doheny field. Many people were caught on the jammed highways.

  Some became so heavily mired in the sticky goo that shot into the air and rained down on them that they couldn’t move their cars, and when they got out, they found they couldn’t even walk. Last time Dave heard of it, the authorities in Texas were still trying to rescue thousands of people stranded in cars that looked like they had been dipped in a tar pit. Then the news reports from Texas and Oklahoma dried up.

  Before Texas became a news black hole the towns of Winnie and Freeport blew up. These were the communities that sat over the Big Hill and Bryan Mound salt domes, respectively, two of the repositories of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Both domes were down to about one-quarter of their capacity, but that was enough, when the bug got to them, to create a massive explosion that wiped out the towns. The good news was that both places had been evacuated the day before. Similar explosions happened in the Bayou Choctaw dome below Baton Rouge and West Hackberry under Lake Charles, Louisiana, and the Spindletop area in Beaumont, Texas.

  At one point a television station showed a satellite picture of North America taken the day before. Much of the continent appeared to be on fire. That station experienced “technical difficulties” shortly after that, but the image had been captured on thousands of computers and quickly went viral.

  The mayor worked with the Red Cross and the Salvation Army in helping find temporary homes for the thousands of displaced. When Addison heard about that, on the fourth day after the fire, it led to their first expedition down off the hill.

  Dave debated going on bicycles, but they planned to cover quite a bit of ground and he figured that, while Addison might be able to handle it, he needed a little more exercise before he was ready to ride a bike all day. So they got out the twin Vespas, the white one for him and the pink one for Addison, and he checked her out on hers.

  “We’ll go down slowly,” he told her. “You don’t want to ride the brakes, but you have to be careful not to get going too fast.”

  “I’ll be careful, Dad.”

  They made it down to Sunset without incident.

  “This is spooky,” Addison said.

  He had to agree with her. That part of Sunset, the strip, was crowded, often jammed, all day long. It was even worse at night, when the trendy clubs came alive with the beautiful people and wannabes. The cars were often bumper-to-bumper, and barely moving.

  Today there was nothing. Literally no traffic, not a single automobile to be seen, either being driven or parked at the curb.

  But it was not a ghost town. There were people walking. There were far more people on bicycles. They saw one fat, bearded guy in dirty denim with some kind of gang colors on his back, riding a big Harley.

  But it continued to be spooky. They drove up to Hollywood Boulevard. Things looked even stranger there. There was not a tourist in sight, and very few people at all. There were no costumed performers in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, whose marquee was dark. Farther down the street, very few shops were open. Nobody seemed interested in going to Ripley’s or the Wax Museum. Frederick’s of Hollywood and all the other stores selling platform boots and outrageous lingerie were all closed.

  “Nobody shopping at Whores R Us,” Addison said. “I guess there’s not a lot of pole dancing going on these days.”

  Back on Sunset they heard a siren. They saw a gasoline tanker truck approaching. Dave signaled to Addison to pull over to the curb, and they sat there as three vehicles went by. The first was an LAPD motorcycle cop. There was a shotgun lying across his lap. Then came the tanker with a nervous-looking driver. Behind him was a military Hummer carrying five or six National Guardsmen. One stood behind a .50-caliber machine gun. Other weapons were sticking out the windows. They looked ready to shoot at anything. There had been attacks on gas stations.

  It was the same story in the Silver Lake neighborhood, a few people walking the streets, some bicycle riders. The streets had become broad pedestrian promenades.

  Next was Echo Park, and that was a little different. Echo Park was one of the older Los Angeles neighborhoods, an easy walk from downtown. At its center was a long lake surrounded by a narrow ring of parkland, a block from Sunset. It used to be almost exclusively Hispanic. There had been a lot of gentrification recently, but there were still plenty of brown faces around. Before the crisis, you would hear a lot of Spanish spoken, and there were tiny carts selling bacon-wrapped hot dogs with sautéed onions and jalapeños, and others with stacks of peeled fruit on ice.

  There were no hot-dog vendors that day, but a farmer’s market had been set up in the parking lot of the Walgreens on Sunset.

  “Let’s go look, Daddy,” Addison said. They parked and locked their scooters and chained them to a tree.

  Dave had no idea where the produce came from, but a lot of it was the sort any self-respecting greengrocer would have tossed in the trash. There was lettuce with brown leaves, apples with blemishes that might or might not have contained worms, sickly-looking onions and squash. The only thin
gs that seemed plentiful were oranges, lemons, grapefruit, and limes.

  There were a dozen horse-drawn carts that looked like they had been hastily slapped together from cut-down trailers, some of them still painted in U-Haul or Ryder colors. Others were even more primitive, just some plywood nailed together, chicken wire stretched from posts, and automobile wheels welded to axles and bolted to the bottoms.

  That market was where they saw their first wood-burning truck. It put all the other improvisations to shame.

  It was drawing a crowd. The owner, a small Hispanic man, looked to be in his fifties. He was explaining how it worked, but it was in Spanish.

  It was a flatbed, stake-sided Ford. It had led a hard life. The paint was deeply oxidized, and there were dozens of dents in the fenders. There were no bumpers. It looked as if it had sat out under a tree on flat tires for quite a while. It had only one door, on the driver’s side.

  On the other side was a thing about the size of a home water heater, welded to the frame of the truck. The bottom was a fifty-five-gallon oil drum. Clamped to the top of that was an inverted aluminum trash can. The bottom of the can had been cut away and replaced with the lid, which was hinged so it could be swung open. Closed, it left a gap of a few inches all around. Near the top of the oil barrel a pipe about four inches wide was welded to a hole in the barrel’s side. Silver galvanized ducting lead away from that hole and made a couple of bends before entering another fifty-five-gallon drum from the top. A similar pipe emerged from the other side and went to the engine, which had some plumbing that led right into the carburetor.

  Most of the welds were sloppy, there were dents here and there where things had obviously been bashed with a hammer until they fit, and there was duct tape all over it. The man who was talking about this was as proud as Henry Ford himself, pleased at the attention, and eager to show off his secrets.

  He removed the trash can from the top of the assembly and set it on the ground. He removed the lid, and they could all see it was about half-full of wood chips. It was easy to see that gravity would feed the chips down into a smaller chamber in the oil drum beneath. He called it a despida la camera, or something like that, which Dave translated as fire chamber. Suspended beneath the fire chamber was an ordinary, large, stainless-steel mixing bowl with a lot of holes punched in it. On the side of the drum was a crank that, when the man turned it, clanked against the bowl and shook it.