Tequila Jack stuck his thumb out pointing east on Highway 58. Manley lay patiently at his side, no longer wasting energy on playful detours. He fondly rubbed the dog’s back. They’d covered the twenty-two miles from Maricopa to McKittrick in a single day. Drivers outside the plague zone were being generous to the refugees and it was easy to hitch a ride.
Too bad it takes a crisis to get people to work together, he thought. They’d have to do a lot more of it in the months and years to come if they were to survive the collapse.
He’d infected five pumpjacks over three separate oil fields on this side of the valley. Next stop was Bakersfield, where he would divvy up the petroplague-contaminated gasoline into vials and mail them to his survivalist allies. Early on the appointed day—eleven days from now—the recipients would fill their own gas tanks with clean fuel for the last time. Then at precisely 4 PM Greenwich Mean Time, they would begin contaminating as much of their local petroleum infrastructure as possible. The conspirators lived in eighteen states, Canada, Great Britain, and Italy. Jack wished he had contacts in Africa and Asia, too, but it didn’t matter. The genie would be out of the bottle. No quarantine could prevent the petroplague from sweeping the globe.
A silver pickup slowed and pulled over. The driver, a Latino man in overalls and a baseball cap, gestured to the open bed of the truck and asked in accent-free English, “Where you headed?”
“Bakersfield.”
“I’ll stop to let you off.”
“Thanks.”
With only the slightest encouragement, Manley vaulted into the back of the truck. Jack followed and got the dog to sit with him near the cab. He gave the last of his water to Manley, who slurped it eagerly with his long pink tongue. The truck rattled down the highway.
#
Four people slouched ahead of Jack in line at the post office just before the 5 PM closing. While waiting, he made sure he’d written the same false return address on all the padded envelopes. He counted his money. Paying for postage would take most of his remaining cash but that was okay. After the collapse, the only thing paper currency would be good for was starting a fire.
“Anything liquid, fragile, perishable, or potentially hazardous?” the postal worker asked in a monotone while she glanced at the clock.
“No.”
“Insurance?”
“No thanks.”
One by one the fateful packages were metered and dropped carelessly into a postal bin.
“Will these go out today?” Jack asked.
“Yes,” she replied.
Manley’s entire body wagged when Tequila Jack returned to liberate the dog from the bike rack where he was tied.
“We did it, boy,” Jack said. Manley licked his face in approval.