Slashed (Oil Apocalypse Book 1) Read online

  Slashed

  Oil Apocalypse 1

  Lou Cadle

  Copyright © 2017 by Cadle-Sparks Books

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 1

  In the not too distant future…

  Devlin Quinn was thinking about two things: his upcoming sixteenth birthday, and the possibility that his neighbor Sierra might turn over without remembering to tie her halter top so that he could catch a glimpse of her breasts.

  She was sunning herself on the platform next to her family’s cistern, dressed in cut-offs and an untied halter top, lying on her belly with her eyes closed and her face turned this way. Beyond her was the trio of wind turbines that powered the Crocker place, white blades flashing in the sun. One was shut off and the other two were spinning in the light breeze.

  One time last year, when he had only been paying half-attention, Sierra had been up there and had flipped over before tying her top. He hadn’t had the binoculars then. Since the beginning of spring, he had kept them in the shed, close at hand. His father always said that preparation paid off in the end.

  Damn if he hadn’t been right for once. Now Dev was ready, his neighbor’s body framed in the binocular field, and if she did it again, he’d get a glimpse of—

  “Devlin!” His father’s voice registered just before the smack of his finger, flicked against Dev’s temple. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing?” Dev said, dropping the binoculars so they swung down on their strap and hit him in the stomach.

  “Nothing.” His father made it sound as appealing as stepping in dog-do. “Is ‘nothing’ what you’re supposed to be doing? Didn’t I tell you to get up there and clean the solar panels?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Give me those.”

  “These?” Dev said, pointing at the binoculars.

  “Those.” His hand was out, palm up, and the fingers waggled to emphasize the point.

  Dev stifled a sigh and pulled the binocular strap over his head, handing over the offending instrument.

  “For the first thing.” His father shook his head. “No. The first thing is you have work to do. Bad times might be coming, and we don’t know when. But whenever it is, we have to be ready for them. Part of being ready is keeping up with the normal chores. You know that. I’ve taught you that. For the second thing, you shouldn’t spy on people. And for the third thing, there are better girls for you to think about than that one.”

  “I’ll get the ladder,” Dev said, not wanting to hear a longer lecture. He didn’t want his father to get going on the coming end times. He could go on for hours and hours once he got started.

  “Maybe your mother’s right,” his father said. “We need to get you into town more. Church activities. Or amateur rodeo or something. 4-H. Let you meet more girls. The right kind of girls.”

  As far as Dev was concerned, almost any girl would be the right kind of girl if she were still breathing. But Sierra had much better than that minimum requirement. She was pretty, with thick, long blonde hair, and she had a great body, and she was right there, not two minutes away. But she went to regular school and had a lot of friends.

  And worse, she was seventeen. He might not know everything about how high school worked in town, but he was pretty sure that seventeen-year-old girls didn’t go out with fifteen-year-old guys. Maybe when he was sixteen he’d have a chance of her noticing him. Just a few more days.

  “I’ll get right to work,” he said to his father.

  “Do that little thing,” his father said. He was looking back over toward the Crocker place, frowning. “With this damned war, we might not have much time.”

  *

  Sierra Ash, nee Crocker, was aware of Arch Quinn’s gaze, as she had been aware of Dev’s. Men looked at her, and they had been looking for a couple years. She wasn’t sure whether she entirely liked that or not. Sometimes it was irritating. Sometimes she thought about getting clear glasses at the thrift store, cutting all her hair off, and dressing in her dad’s biggest flannel shirts, making herself plain-looking and hiding her body to shut off all the looking.

  If only there was a way to choose who looked and how. Not that Mr. Quinn was a problem. He didn’t look at her that way, just as if he was irritated all the time by her very existence. Dev wasn’t a big deal. He did look at her that way, but he was just a shy kid. They’d played together when they were small, but these days he had a hard time talking to her.

  The worst among the staring guys was Mark Vaughn in math class. His looks were definitely those sorts, and something about them was creepy. She could feel him looking even if he was directly behind her, and it made her skin crawl.

  Terrance Hardy? He could look all he wanted. Or Rudy Doyle, if he wasn’t already taken by Mia. And that guy at the hardware store, the one with the gold tooth, which was hotter-looking than she ever guessed a gold tooth could be. Too old for her, her father would say. But Sierra thought it would be cool to go out with someone in his twenties.

  Her phone pinged with a text. She said, “Phone, read text.”

  “Message from Lisette. I’m about to leave.” The phone spoke in a mechanical version of Lisette’s voice.

  Her dad’s girlfriend, texting from the house. Like she couldn’t walk out here and talk without making Sierra move.

  Sierra tied her top before sitting up, pocketed her phone, and climbed down from the cistern.

  Lisette was waiting for her in the kitchen. “I have to go,” she said.

  “I know. You said at breakfast that you’ll be gone more than a week.”

  “I think this show will make me some decent cash.”

  Sierra nodded, not really caring one way or the other.

  “Your father is in the garden.”

  Sierra had seen him there from the cistern perch.

  “Bodhi is with him.” Bodhi was their ten-year-old dog, a Shetland Sheepdog mix.

  “Okay,” Sierra said, hoping to hurry her along to her point. If there was a point.

  “You’ll have to take care of him while I’m gone. The dog, I mean. Your father can take care of himself.”

  “I’ve been taking care of Bodhi since I found him on the highway, skinny and limping and half-grown.”

  “I’ve been doing the feeding lately. For months. I know you’ve been busy with school, so I’m not complaining. I just meant, you’ll have to take that over again.”

  “Of course I’ll feed him. I love him.” She winced when she heard herself. She hadn’t meant to emphasize the “him” quite so much. It conveyed the message that she didn’t love Lisette. And she didn’t, but she didn’t hate her either. Lisette was fine. There was no reason to be rude.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’ll feed him and water him and put his poop in the compost. All that.”

  “Good,” said Lisette. She rubbed her hands together as if they ached, a nervous gesture she’d been resorting to a lot lately. Probably nervous about the craft show thing, or flea market, or whatever it was. “I guess that’s it.”

  “Do you need help carrying your stuff out to your car?” Sierra wanted to make up for the rudeness.

  A wan smile. “No, it’s loaded. Well.” Lisette looked around the kitchen. Her gaze drifted over the cabinets, the shelves filled with glass jars of staples, the hand mill for grain, and then it landed again on Sierra. “Good luck with your finals.”

  “Thanks.” Sierra didn’t point out they were still three weeks away.

  “So. I guess I’ll be going.”

  “Hope you sell a lot of rugs and things,” Sierra said.

  “I’ll try.” She leaned forward and gave Sierra one of her brief, tense hugs. “Be nice to your father.”

  Weird thing to say. She and Pilar got along fine—better than a lot of her friends and their parents. “Sure,” she said.

  And with that, Lisette was out the door.

  Sierra had never had any arguments with Lisette, except right after she had moved in, when it was hard to adjust to having a third person in the house again, after so long with it being just her and Pilar. And Bodhi, of course. Lisette had been underfoot, and sometimes Sierra had snapped at her. But they had all adjusted, and they’d all become busy again with their own interests, and they had learned to live together. For over a year, they’d been settled into that new arrangement. Sierra was happy her dad had someone—a woman—again.

  Lisette’s absence for over a week did mean Sierra would need to clean house once. She wasn’t very good as a cook, but her father was, and Lisette had been almost that good. If he’d be cooking all the meals, it wouldn’t be fair to make her father clean too. Sierra checked Bodhi’s water bowl, saw it was full, and decided she wanted a shower.

  On the deck, she pulled one of the plastic solar shower bags out of the hinged box where they were stored, filled it, and hung it in the sun. It was a warm spring day with not a cloud in the sky. The water would be hot in forty-five minutes. She’d finish writing her history paper while she was waiting. The history of Russia in the Middle East. Boring. Her teacher said it was important to know the context of the current war, but Sierra wasn’t sure why. The war was thousands of miles away. What did some argument between Saudi Arabia and Iran have to do with her? It’s not like she was going to be taking up a gun and fighting in it.

  Chapter 2

  Pilar Crocker, Sierra’s father, was also thinking about the war. He had on earphones and was catching up on a political e-cast he liked, one with in-depth analysis of the context and meaning of world events. The Iran-Saudi war had been the topic for weeks now, as posturing turned to yelling, and yelling erupted into skirmishes. Now it was an all-out war, with bombers and drones and missiles and cyberattacks.

  And Russia and the U.S. were doing their own posturing as a result. Russia was on the side of Iran, and the U.S. was of course backing the Saudis, their main source of oil ever since Venezuela had signed their exclusive deal with China. If the flow of oil from the Saudis was shut off, that would be bad. America’s Alaska pipeline was down to a trickle, so Saudi Arabia and Nigeria were their only sources, with Nigeria providing only a quarter of the total imports. The war had already resulted in gas prices going up. Eighteen dollars per gallon at the pump. It’d be twenty before too long.

  “It’s inevitable that oil production will be affected,” said the guest on the podcast. “The world your listeners have known is about to change. Drastically.”

  Pilar moved from the broccoli row to the squash row. Pattypan, yellow, Mexican gray, acorn, delicata, spaghetti, small pumpkins, and at the end gourds, not to eat, but for containers. He hadn’t planned to plant the gourds, but when the war looked unavoidable, his thinking changed and he ordered seeds. Imagine no more paper bags, the last of the plastic containers wearing out or being melted accidentally, their lids no longer fitting. What if all the glass jars were broken in an earthquake? Rare in central Arizona, but not impossible. So: gourds in his garden, another miniscule side effect of the war. He had plenty of barn space to dry and store hundreds. They might be useful as trade goods at some point in the future, if and when the world fell back to a barter economy.

  “We knew the end of oil was coming,” said the podcast guest. “We knew it in 1970. We had all these decades to prepare, which is what we should have done, starting back then, and we haven’t. What comes next is our own damned fault.”

  “But we have prepared,” said the host, an optimist like Pilar. “We’ve subsidized electric cars, and we’ve built more nuclear power plants, and half of Americans—anyone who can afford to—has alternate power sources at home. They’ve become more and more affordable. Congress finally found the will to make it a national law last year that power companies can no longer bribe local politicians to pass laws limiting home energy production. The right to make our own electricity is finally the law of the land. We’ve done the preparation.”

  “Not nearly enough, and not nearly soon enough. We’re also beyond peak uranium, as I’m sure your well-informed listeners know. And how do new nuke plants get built? With oil. How do trucks deliver the parts for them? With oil. What do the trucks move along on? Tires still mostly made with oil rolling on roads made with oil. Concrete needs oil to get it made, not to mention mixed and poured in the amounts a nuke plant requires. How do people get goods shipped to their local stores? With oil. How does agriculture get done? With oil. Roads fixed? Oil. Oil is at the heart of every industrial process we rely on, transportation and agriculture being perhaps most crucial. Home power is only a fraction of the issue here.”

  “A lot of biodiesel is being used in tractors now.”

  “That’s true. A quarter of the land that had been used to grow soybeans and corn for human and animal consumption is now being used to grow plants for diesel. And prices on meat have skyrocketed as a result. Red meat has been a luxury item since I left university, and chicken has increased two hundred fifty percent in price in the last year alone, as my wife keeps reminding me.”

  “A lot of municipalities now allow backyard chickens. Chicago just passed a law.”

  “Not enough do. And even if people break those anti-chicken laws that remain by having laying hens anyway, those living in apartments can’t possibly have enough chickens or garden acreage to survive. Not if every roof in every American city is nothing but veggie gardens. When the real oil crunch comes, and trucks of produce aren’t crossing the country anymore, you don’t want to live somewhere like New York or Chicago, believe you me.”

  Pilar paused the podcast. Some insect had been at the pumpkin plants. It was odd how a pest would pick a single plant, a single variety, and go for it. Why the two pumpkin plants but not the spaghetti squash right next to it? One of nature’s many mysteries. He turned over the broad leaves one by one until he found three snails. He tucked them into a woven hemp sack he kept tied to his belt loop. He’d toss them to the chickens when he was done.

  He told his gadget to play again and the e-cast went on, with speculations on how far both Russia and the U.S. would go in the war. They both had military advisors there. Would it come to committing drones? Bombers? Troops? With the U.S. debt already pushing a hundred trillion, would they spend billions more on this war? Could they? What were the economic implications of increasing the deficit? To the value of the dollar? To inflation? With oil as the prize in the war, and the tantalizing possibility of gaining control of Iran’s oil too, did they have any real choice to stay out of it?

  Gardening usually soothed him, but listening to the e-cast was definitely not soothing. Pilar said, “Stop playback and archive.” He stood and stretched. His knees popped, and he felt a sharp twinge in his back when he stretched.

  “I’m getting
older, Bodhi, old boy.”

  Bodhi was lying in the shade of the green bean bushes, a spot where he could keep an eye on the hens. His tail wagged, the long coarse hair of it brushing along the ground.

  “I wish I could figure out a way to tie a garden fork to that tail. We could teach you how to weed.”

  The dog lifted his head and cocked it, ready to do whatever Pilar suggested. He was a smart dog. And willing—even anxious—to work. He would weed the garden if only Pilar were smart enough to show him how.

  “You’re a good boy.”

  Bodhi set his head back on his paws, understanding the conversation was over. He wasn’t as young as he used to be either. Pilar worried that he’d be losing Sierra and Bodhi around the same time, Bodhi to the inevitable passing that was in store for all living creatures, and Sierra to a man and a home of her own.

  Lisette’s face came to mind, her expression exasperated.

  He pushed the thought of her from his mind and returned to his weekly hands-and-knees work on his garden, taking comfort in the cool rich soil, its healthy smell, and the repetitive work. When his mind tried to make him worry, he quieted it with rote words: What will be, will be. He chanted it to himself over and over as he worked the garden.

  *

  “Arch, sit down. You’re driving me batty,” Kelly Quinn said to her husband.

  Quinn couldn’t help the glare he turned on her. “I’m worried. Didn’t you hear what they just said on the news?”

  “And pacing is going to change that? Have a cup of coffee.” She turned off the radio.

  “It’s not real coffee.”