Los Angeles Mayor Felipe Ramirez noticed his chief of staff’s disheveled appearance and wondered how bad he looked himself. He was avoiding mirrors like a vampire. The one good thing about the whole situation was the absence of camera crews at City Hall. Ramirez wasn’t vain—he’d looked a lot worse in his Army days—but he was a politician in one of the most image-conscious cities on earth.
In fact, the whole crew assembled around the mayor’s oak conference table looked like hung-over revelers awakened before noon on New Year’s Day. Ramirez and most of his staff were sleeping in their offices. They ate whatever the National Guard brought in. They were exhausted and stretched thin. They desperately needed his leadership.
Especially with the news he just got from the U.S. Geological Survey.
“Mr. Molton, capsule reports please,” Ramirez said. “Number one on our agenda: containment. What’s the latest?”
“Our concentric ring strategy is working, sir,” replied the mayor’s chief of staff. “We’ve had no reports of successful blockade runners on land, sea or air. The Navy sank a vessel at sea when the captain failed to heed warnings to return to shore. There was no loss of life, all three people on board were picked up. However, a private single-engine aircraft was shot down after illegally taking off from Chino Airport in San Bernardino County.”
Ramirez shook his head. “Damn fool. Did he think nobody would notice?”
“Might’ve been a kind of suicide by cop,” Molton said.
“That idiot put a lot of people at risk,” Ramirez said. “Any sign of the bacteria getting out?”
“None. Internal combustion engines just beyond our outer checkpoints seem to be working fine.”
“Thank God. How are our emergency workers getting around the city?”
“Approximately forty miles of freeway have been manually cleared for one lane of traffic. These routes are being used by electric, fuel cell, and compressed natural gas vehicles either owned or confiscated by the city, county, state and federal governments. Some LACMTA buses, and the red and purple line subways, are operational. We’ve got shipments of bicycles and Segways arriving at containment border sites today.”
“Segways?” Ramirez said skeptically. “Those goofy stand-up transports the mall cops use?”
“They work,” Molton replied.
Imagining an LAPD SWAT team traveling on glorified toys unexpectedly filled Ramirez’s eyes with tears. He laughed uncomfortably and wondered, what the hell are we doing? This is a losing battle.
He allowed himself a moment to regain his composure. Then he spoke to his people.
“Gentlemen, ladies, we’re running out of time.”
They looked at him expectantly.
“We’ve got to face the facts. Much of our effort is going to maintain the blockade, but the blockade doesn’t do anything to fix our real problem. L.A. is paralyzed, suffocating, whatever you want to call it. We can keep the lights on and the water flowing, but without gasoline this place is going to die.”
“Felipe, we all know the difficulty,” Molton said softly.
“But there’s more. I just talked to the local director of the U.S. Geological Survey. They’re measuring increased subsurface pressures and tilt along the Santa Monica fault. The tremors of the last few days didn’t relieve the stress, and the readings are still rising. They’re predicting more quakes. Bigger ones.”
“We’re in no position to handle a major quake,” Molton said. “Not now.”
“Obviously. But God didn’t call this morning and ask my permission. Whether we get hit with a big shaker or not, L.A. is on a one-way road to hell. We can’t ‘recover’ from this petroplague the way we’d recover from an earthquake or fire. There’s nothing to rebuild. We can clear the roads but that won’t restore our transportation system. Cars and trucks, ships and airplanes are the life of this city, and they’ll never run again.”
Ramirez stared into the grim faces around him and offered hope.
“Only something radical, something totally outside the box, can help us. That something may be achievable.”
“What is it?” “A local biotechnology company is on the verge of producing a new transportation fuel, one that isn’t affected by the plague. Better still, the stuff is renewable. It doesn’t come out of the ground. It’s made by bacteria turning sunlight into energy.”
“They can do that?” Molton said.
“The company rep told me they made a breakthrough recently and it won’t be long. I promised him our complete support. Whatever they need, if we can give it to them, we will.”
“This could be our salvation,” one of the counselors said.
“Not only could it save us,” Ramirez said, “it could change the world.”