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.