Oil Apocalypse Collection

by Lou Cadle

  “Some.”

  “Do you want to hear it again? From me?”

  “Not particularly,” she said. She saw one little bit of rust and scrubbed at it until it was gone, leaving bare metal in its place. He’d be out here tomorrow painting over it. “I mean, if you want to. But at least tell me something they didn’t tell me in school. Don’t bore me with the same old shhhh—stuff.”

  “Hmm. Okay, has anybody ever told you about the lies some countries told about oil reserves?”

  “No. But how could anyone lie about that? Wasn’t there technology that told everyone where the oil was? Satellites that can detect how much there is?”

  “It’s not that easy, no. You know what OPEC was, right?”

  “The oil-producing countries. Like a club of them that disbanded a few years ago.” That much she knew from her history textbook.

  “Right. So back before you were born, they set this rule. None of them could sell more than a certain percent of what they still had in the ground. Their reserves, as they were called. Ten percent or something like that.”

  “So it was like a law?”

  “No, not that strong, and some countries cheated sometimes without getting into trouble with the other OPEC countries. But largely, they held to it. But then very quickly after agreeing to that in the first place, they all did the same thing, and all within a few years of each other.”

  “Which was?” Sierra got up, brushed off her knees, and moved around to the next guy wire, starting her inspection at just above eye level.

  “They lied.”

  “About which part?”

  “How much they had remaining. Or, they’d lie about how much they sold too, but a year later, that lie would be clear from the records. How much still in the ground was their secret, so they could lie without being detected. After they agreed to that rule, at least three countries’ oil reserves doubled overnight. But the figures weren’t real. It was totally made up. So the whole world, whenever oil was discussed, thought that there was more still to be pumped than there was. Everyone was off by a factor of twenty percent or so because of the lies.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. I mean, if you and I know we’re running low on flour, we go buy more, right? If I rig the flour canister so you think there’s some when there isn’t, like put a false bottom into it, then one day you’ll go to make some bread and can’t.”

  Pilar said, “A good analogy. You’re a smart kid. I ever mention that?”

  “A couple times.” She liked hearing the compliment anyway. “So why lie?”

  “So they could make more money in the short-term. If the limit was ten percent, and you lie and double your reserves, you can pump twenty percent that year instead.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “It’s a kind of stupid people are, almost always. Especially where profit is concerned. We think in the short-term, not in the long-term.”

  “You don’t.” She dropped to her knees to check the lower part of the guy wire. “Like this, what you’re doing there. What I’m doing. Nothing is broken, but you do chores today so that nothing will break tomorrow. If you let rust get worse without taking care of it, you said a turbine would fall one day. Maybe hit you on the head.”

  “I hope not. That’d do more than hurt.” He sat back on his heels. “I guess I’m not that particular sort of stupid. Other kinds, you could accuse me of, but not when it comes to long-term thinking. And with our property, making sure you and me are warm or cool enough or have good drinking water pumped up from the ground, that we save rain water for the garden, making sure that the car is fueled up enough to run us into Phoenix if we get seriously injured and need emergency surgery: that’s not about profit. That’s about surviving. And love. I love you, so I take care of you. Taking care of the turbine is really about taking care of you. When you scrub off that rust, it’s an act of love too.”

  That was a strange way to think of it. It didn’t feel like love but like another tedious chore among the dozens she had to do every week—more now that Lisette was away. “So, wait. People didn’t love enough back then, right? Before I was born, they didn’t love their kids or grandkids, so they didn’t care that we would be living in a world with so little oil, and everything expensive and wars and stuff?”

  “I guess they didn’t. Selfish, short-sighted, a little stupid, preferred wishful thinking to making uncomfortable choices, preferred short-term profit and spending it on silly crap to careful management. And on top of that, the people were being lied to, like I said, by OPEC countries. Even by our own politicians. ‘Everything is fine,’ they said. ‘We have plenty of gasoline. Our economy is healthy. Don’t you worry your little heads over it.’”

  “I don’t really get economics.” She’d had a six-week unit on it, but it was complicated and freaky to think about. Her own economics—how much money she had in her pocket and what to spend it on—that was clear. Up at the level of countries, or when thinking about dollar bills having value when they were just paper or chips or pixels on the phone screen—that was confusing. “So I’m still not seeing it. Did it really help those countries to lie? I mean, when they run out of oil, do they have other products to export to make up for it?”

  “No. And that’s part of why there’s a war right now. Without oil, Iran and Saudi Arabia starve. It’s really that simple. They both have little enough left now, they think they need the other guy’s to stay alive.”

  “Why don’t they do what we do, and the Quinns, and grow their own food?”

  “A lot of those places are like Phoenix: desert, very little rainfall, and what they have is seasonal. Not a lot of people have access to birth control, so there are too many children. Certainly there’s not enough water to irrigate crops to feed all their population. They have to import food. Oil pays for that food. And for mansions and so on for some of their leaders.”

  “So the thing that happened. That attack you were worried about this week on the news?”

  “The Ras Tanura attack. At the port where they load all the oil.”

  “That means children in Saudi Arabia will be starving soon?”

  “They already were, and for years now they’ve been closing down schools because they can’t pay for them, but yes. It means more starving will happen.”

  “That’s way worse than me not being able to fill up the gas tank here and go back into town tomorrow to see my friends.”

  He was silent for long enough that she thought maybe he’d forgotten about her. When she looked up, though, he was smiling at her. But it was a sad smile.

  “What?” she said.

  “You’re a good kid.” But he sounded so sad.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, honey. How’s that wire?”

  “There’s a little patch of rust here right at the ground where it connects that I’m having a hard time getting to. Want to look at it?”

  “Sure.” He put his tools away carefully, even though he’d probably be taking them out again in five minutes. He was like that: meticulous. When he came to kneel beside her, she leaned over and kissed his cheek.

  “That was nice,” he said. “What’s the occasion?”

  “Just a thank-you for bothering to explain things to me.” It was more than that, but she always felt uncomfortable talking about love and gratitude and stuff like that. It was a lot easier to joke about such things. She might only have one real parent, but he was never mean to her, almost never yelled, and he treated her like an intelligent person. She knew people who had awful parents, parents who were drunk or mean or just didn’t care or had left or who wanted their kids to be ten years old forever. Even Arch Quinn next door yelled at Dev loudly enough sometimes that she could hear him like he was five feet away. She was lucky that Pilar was her dad.

  Only late that night, in bed, it dawned on her to worry if Lisette would be able to make it back any time soon. She was all the way over in Prescott. There was a lot of up and down driving between ther
e and here. She might have to wait for a gas station to get a delivery.

  Chapter 6

  As soon as he heard the Quinn household stirring the next morning, Pilar walked over to tell Quinn about the gas shortage in town. He might know, but it was the neighborly thing to do, and Pilar felt an obligation to be neighborly. He might not be the best at forgiving and forgetting, but he was working on himself, always trying to be a better man. Quinn’s rudeness the other day was something he was big enough to overlook.

  And anyway, it was just Quinn being Quinn. Mules had nothing on the man in the stubbornness department.

  Quinn might have forty pounds on him—and two inches on each bicep—but Pilar could afford to be the bigger man in this way.

  Devlin was opening up the chicken coop, letting the birds out to peck in their fenced yard. Pilar had already done that at home. With Bodhi watching them, he could afford to let his own chickens run free outside of a fence. No coyote or stray dog would get near them with Bodhi protecting them. If the attacker was too big for Bodhi, he’d raise enough of a ruckus that Pilar or Sierra could have shotgun in hand, ready to scare off any predators with the noise of a shotgun blast, or shoot them if necessary. Quinn had fencing all around the chicken coop but limited his chickens to a quarter of the space until they’d cleared it. Then he’d move a section of temporary fencing to divert them to a fresh patch and let the bare patch recover. Quinn’s method required more supplemental feed.

  “Hey, Dev,” Pilar called. “How’s school?”

  “Good.”

  “Your Ma keeping you on your toes?”

  “Always,” he said.

  Pilar didn’t approve of home-schooling—thought it wasn’t good for rural kids in particular—but it wasn’t his business. Sierra would be out on the main road catching the bus into school in a half hour, and he was happy she was, happy to know she had time with friends her own age, and kids of all sorts: richer, poorer, all religions and none, Indian, white, Mexican, and the kids of the Turkish family that had moved here back in 2016 to flee the political turmoil in their country. There weren’t any black families at all in town, which was regrettable, but in order to buy the acreage he had wanted back when, and within reasonable distance of a town, this had been his best choice for the money he had on hand. Can’t have everything.

  He knocked on the back door. “It’s Pilar Crocker,” he said.

  Kelly Quinn called, “Come on in. Hope you want coffee. It’s part real.”

  “Wasted on me,” he said, pushing inside. “I’ve gotten so used to home-grown herb teas, my body wouldn’t know how to handle actual coffee.”

  “We cleared the shelves in town of it,” said Quinn, who was sitting at the table.

  “It’s too much. And it cost dearly,” Kelly said.

  “One day, it’ll trade higher than what we just paid,” Quinn said.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Pilar said, not wanting to let the man drift into his end-of-world monologue right now. “I came here to talk about that, at least in part.”

  “About coffee?” Kelley was smiling as she gestured for him to take a seat.

  “The coming crunch. Coming soon, I think.”

  Her smile faded. “What do you know that I don’t?”

  “They’re out of gas in Payson.”

  “Entirely out?” Quinn said. “Diesel too?”

  “I don’t know about diesel, sorry. I sent Sierra in yesterday to fill up and grab some groceries, and she said both stations had signs up. Out of gas.”

  “This is it, then,” Quinn said with inexplicable satisfaction. “The beginning of the end.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Pilar said. “But I think we have cause to worry about supplies. While we can, we should stock up. I bet you got your coffee just in time, Quinn. There might not be any coming up here for a few months. Maybe a year, depending on how long this damned war lasts and when they can get that port working again.”

  “Maybe this is it. Maybe we’re out of gas forever,” Quinn said.

  “I think we’ll recover some. Eventually.”

  “Damned Iranis. And Russians. They had to be behind it.”

  Pilar said, “Poor guys working in that port. Last I heard the death toll was up over a thousand.”

  Kelly put a glass of water in front of him, sat at the table, and said, “They may never know those numbers exactly.”

  Quinn said, “We need to prepare. To dig in and get ready.”

  “Quinn, you’re the most prepared guy I know,” Pilar said. “You’re prepared for World War III, for nukes, for the end of life as we know it, blizzards and heat waves both.”

  “We need to prepare for people.”

  “People? What do you mean, people?”

  “People coming up here and trying to take what’s ours.”

  Pilar had a strange image of people with empty coffee mugs, wandering up the hill from Payson, banging on the door with zombie-like expressions, demanding their fix of caffeine. “Look, it might not be that bad. They may well have gasoline again on Thursday, which is what the sign said, and nothing much will happen but the prices will shoot up. Maybe the war will be over in six months, and we’ll see something near to the old normal by the start of next year.”

  Kelly said, “Gas prices going up means all prices will shoot up. How often when prices shoot up do they ever come back down? Maybe we should have bought more rice when we were in town, Arch.”

  Pilar said, “It might be best if I do the shopping for all three households—or four, rather—this week. And for as long as my gas tank holds out.”

  Kelly said, “The truck carries more. And we have some diesel stored.”

  Pilar caught the look Quinn gave her. Was he thinking that was some big secret? Years ago, Pilar had gotten the tour of the Doomsday preparations here. He had a pretty good idea of the level of preparation they’d done. Extensive. Over the top.

  Quinn slammed a fist down on the table, making water jump out of Pilar’s glass. “Don’t you get it? This is it!”

  Pilar didn’t think so. But he said, “Maybe so,” to be agreeable. “It wouldn’t hurt to buy more staples in town, in case deliveries are cut off for a while.”

  “Maybe you should put in some feed corn in your garden,” Kelly said, “so you have some grain of your own. I have some seed, if you—”

  “Goddamnit, don’t you two get it?” Quinn said. “This is the end of the civilized world. There are more important things to worry about than rice and corn.”

  “Okay,” said Pilar, soothingly. “What?”

  “Defense,” said Quinn. “We have to make sure we’re ready well ahead of time.”

  “I’m sure you have ammunition enough to invade New Mexico,” Pilar said.

  “I’m just as sure you don’t. And you don’t train like we train. You should. It might be too late already, but you should start now.”

  Pilar had more rounds socked away than Quinn might guess, but he didn’t want to discuss it. “Let me put it this way: I’m comfortable with what’s on hand.”

  “I won’t defend your house when it comes right down to it,” Quinn said.

  “I wouldn’t ask you to,” Pilar said.

  At the same time Kelly said, “Of course we would. You don’t have to worry about Sierra or yourself, Pilar. Not ever.”

  Quinn said, “So what about that training? You, your daughter, us, we work on some likely scenarios. We get some target shooting in. Night training. Communication training.”

  “Sierra and I both know how to use a shotgun and a rifle,” Pilar said. “And there’s Bodhi to help. I think I have it covered.”

  Quinn and Kelly exchanged a glance.

  Quinn said, “I think you’re wrong to refuse the offer, but it’s your choice. Can I suggest something that will help keep you safer from the start? Without firing a shot.”

  He liked the idea of not firing a shot. “How’s that?”

  “I have equipment in the shed to reinforce
the gate. We need to build a better gate, and keep it locked, and mine the woods to either side.”

  “Whoa. Mine?” Pilar knew the guy was a little crazy, but this was extra crazy, even for Quinn.

  “Not actual mines. Booby traps. I have some stuff.”

  Pilar had no doubt he did. “I don’t want wildlife to get hurt. Nothing like razor wire. No mines.”

  Quinn’s face reddened. “I can put whatever I want on my own property.”

  “Arch,” Kelly said, putting a calming hand over his arm.

  Quinn was having none of it. He shook her hand off. “And I will. But it’d be better if we all worked putting up that fence, and right quick. Before anything has a chance to get going.”

  “Look, you have to know we’re here to know it. The gate isn’t obvious from the main road, not if you’re driving fast. And from there, our road looks like a national park road, just missing the little brown sign.”

  “Your tallest turbine is visible from the gate,” Quinn said. “I told you to paint them green.”

  “Even then, I’m sure people would notice spinning green against a blue sky. Or worse, against white clouds.”

  “You’ll live to regret not doing it. Mark my words.”

  Pilar was fighting the urge to roll his eyes. “We can’t change the gate anyway. It’s against county regulations. The fire trucks have to—”

  “Don’t you get it?” Quinn burst out, jumping to his feet. “There won’t be fire trucks. They won’t have gas either.”

  “No. That’s just wrong, Quinn. There are strategic stockpiles of oil for municipal use. Police, fire, sheriff, rangers—they’ll all have gas even if we can’t buy any.”

  “And if you’re a fireman living in Payson, and the choice is between coming out here to put out a fire or saving the gas to put out your own house fire when that happens? What do you do?”

  “In that situation, I’d do my job and respond to the fire.”