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Erin Neal has been living a secluded life in the Arizona desert since the death of his girlfriend and he isn't happy when an oil company executive appears on his doorstep. A number of important Saudi oil wells have stopped producing and Erin is the world's foremost expert in analyzing and preventing oil field disasters.
As far as he's concerned, though, he left that world behind long ago–not his problem. Unfortunately, Homeland Security sees things differently. Erin quickly finds himself stuck in the Saudi desert studying a new bacteria with a voracious appetite for oil and an uncanny ability to corrode drilling equipment. Worst of all is its ability to spread.
It soon becomes clear that if this contagion isn't stopped, it will infiltrate the planet's petroleum reserves and cut the industrial world off from the energy that provides the heat, food, and transportation necessary for survival. As the scale of the coming disaster continues to grow, Erin realizes that there's something eerily familiar about this bacteria. And that it couldn't possibly have evolved on its own…
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The concept for this book–the destruction of the world’s oil supply–actually started out as a component of my previous book, The Second Horseman. The idea was that someone was trying to force peace on the Middle East by destroying Israel and cutting off the flood of money derived from the sale of petroleum.
As I worked through the outline, though, it seemed like one idea too many. Instead of enhancing the story, it kind of muddled it and was leading me into an 800-page epic that I didn’t want to write and you probably wouldn’t want to read. In the end, I decided the Israel angle was enough. My scheme to wipe out the Middle East’s oil went into the dreaded ‘deleted’ folder, never to be seen again.
Or so I thought. I just couldn’t completely shake the idea and the more it festered in the back of my mind, the more entrenched it became.
The ramifications of America’s dependence on oil are so much more dire than you’d realize from casual thought. When I first considered the scenario, I figured a serious drop in oil availability would be a nightmare, but a more or less manageable one. Deeper thought brought up some disturbing questions. How would I feed myself? I’m not a farmer–I rely entirely on the trucks that stock our local grocery store. What if the shelves of that store were suddenly empty? The obvious answer is that I’d drive to a more distant store. But what if there was no gas to fill my tank? The more I thought about it, the easier it became to picture a cascade effect that would descend the country into violence and anarchy.
Initially, the problem with the idea was that I didn’t think there was anything that could cause this kind of a sudden, catastrophic shortage. Oil is pretty resilient and the supply is reasonably diversified.
Enter bacterial contamination.
I had never really heard of hydrocarbon-eating bacteria before I started my research, but not only do they exist, they’re actually pretty common and pose a constant threat to drilling operations. Quickly the scenario went from ridiculously implausible to frighteningly simple…
"Stupid piece of crap!" Erin Neal shouted, throwing his screwdriver and rolling out from underneath his perpetually jammed solar array. He gave it a hard kick before remembering he was wearing sandals, then limped off across the dusty wasteland that passed for his yard.
He’d spent the last three days using everything short of a cutting torch to get the panel tracking again, but it had been a complete waste of time. So now he was living his life at the evil whims of a glitchy solar panel and a windmill that sat dead in the still air. Building his house ten miles from the nearest paved road—too far to practically connect to the grid—didn’t seem quite so smart now. At the rate his batteries were draining, his freezer would soon be dead and he would lose the elk he’d bagged that fall.
He stepped up onto the wide porch that wrapped around his house, escaping the Arizona sun that was doing nothing for him but deepening the red of his back, and slammed through his front door. It was time either to break down and call a professional or to go buy the diesel back-up generator he’d been resisting for so long.
The water in the sink was lukewarm, but he scooped some on the back of his neck anyway. Not as satisfying as a handful of ice, but since he couldn’t open his goddamn freezer, it was the best he was going to get.
Erin grabbed a dirty drinking glass from the counter and spun, throwing it through the kitchen door and hitting the fireplace that dominated his small living room. It shattered spectacularly, and watching the shards scatter across the floor made him feel a little better. It always did.
The house wasn’t large—an open living area built around the glass-strewn fireplace that supported a spiral staircase leading up to a loft and down to a basement, and a narrow hallway that led to a bathroom and an unused office. He’d built the structure himself out of old tires packed with sand and then covered it with white adobe. The materials not only created elegant curved lines that he probably wouldn’t have thought of on his own but had the added benefit of covering up his mediocre carpentry skills. Despite a few things he wished he’d done differently, and the fact that he was starting to suspect that his solar panel was possessed, he couldn’t really complain about how it had turned out. The orientation was perfect for passive heating and cooling and, with the exception of the last few days, the electrical system he’d designed kept him in the twenty-first century.
Erin splashed some more water on his neck and grabbed a dustpan from beneath the counter. The broken glass would at least force him to pick up a bit. By necessity, he didn’t have many possessions, but somehow they always seemed to scatter themselves across the floor when he wasn’t looking.
The ring of the cell phone startled him—not only because of the self-imposed silence around him but because no one really ever called him. Sometimes he wondered why he even had it.
The sound was slightly muffled, suggesting the phone had worked its way between his sofa cushions again and he dug around until he came up with it.
"Hello?"
"Erin?"
"Who wants to know?"
"Ah, I see you haven’t changed. It’s Rick Castelli. How you doin’, man?"
Erin flopped down on the couch and propped his feet on a table he’d artistically welded together out of pieces of an old pickup.
"Rick? It’s been a long time. Since that oil spill off the coast of California, right?"
"Yeah, we appreciated all your hard work on that cleanup, Erin. If I hadn’t put you in charge of that thing we’d still be out there scrubbing rocks."
"So you’re still at Exxon?"
"Nah. I hung out my own shingle a while ago. Mostly doing government consulting work now."
"Cushy," Erin said.
"Yeah, it’s not bad…" His voice trailed off.
"So what do you want, Rick? I assume you’re not calling to catch up."
"Not entirely. See, it’s like this. The Saudis are having some production problems and I think it’s something you’d be interested in."
Erin crossed his eyes and watched a bead of sweat slide down his nose. "I can guarantee you that I won’t be."
"I haven’t even told you anything yet."
"I’m retired."
"You’re fucking thirty-seven years old."
"So?"
"Are you telling me you’ve got something better to do?"
"Than go to Saudi Arabia? Are you kidding me? Shit’s blowing up over there and I hear they get double points for Americans."
"That’s just media hype."
"Media hype," Erin repeated skeptically. "What, five bombs in the last two weeks? And how many people dead? From what I hear, the royals are working on an exit strategy."
"You know the fucking towel heads," Castelli said. "All we ask them to do is stand there while we pump cold, hard cash down their throats, and they can’t even handle that."
"You’re still full of shit, aren’t you, Rick?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Could it be that while we jump up and down squealing about democracy we’re supporting a bunch of kleptomaniacal monarchs who use all that money to buy Rolls-Royces while their citizens starve?"
"Jesus Christ, I forgot what a self-righteous prick you—"
"So do we have anything else to talk about?" Erin said, cutting him off.
"Come on, man. Quit breaking my balls. I’ve got a guy here who’s supposed to be an expert, but he’s not you, you know? Besides, since when did you become a nervous Nellie?"
"Why don’t you—"
"I’ll send a plane, okay? Hell, I’ll send a jet with a vibrating bed, a hot stewardess, and some hundred-year-old scotch. Then we’ll stick Uncle Sam for the entire bill, plus our fee. It’ll be fun."
"No."
"Goddamnit, Erin! Quit being such a jackass. Do it for an old friend."
"I never liked you."
That wasn’t really true. In his own obnoxious way, Rick was an okay guy. But there were so many reasons not to get involved in the oil business again that he’d need a calculator to count them. Those years didn’t even seem real to him anymore. Just another one of the past lives he was collecting.
"My ass," Castelli said and then his voice softened. "Hey, I know I should have called. I was real sorry when I heard about your girlfriend. What was her name?"
Erin felt a familiar tightness in his chest. It was hard to breathe for a few seconds, but only a few seconds. That was an improvement wasn’t it?
"Jenna."
"Yeah, that’s it. Jenna Kalin. I hear she was a nice girl. Kind of a tree hugger, though, wasn’t she?"
Erin let out a breath that almost could have passed for a laugh. "I see you’re still the picture of sensitivity."
"Jesus, Erin. That was what, two years ago?"
"A year and a half." Actually, nineteen months, four days, and an odd number of hours depending on how you treated the time zones. "It was just a few days after Christmas…"
"Well, nothing like a free trip to sunny Saudi Arabia to take your mind off it," Castelli interrupted, obviously not looking to dig too deeply into the subject. "And how ‘bout I guarantee you’ll get lucky with that stewardess—"
The phone went silent and Erin looked down at it. Dead battery. He stuffed it back into the cushions and reached for a framed photo propped on the table next to his feet.
It had been taken in better times. The beach he and Jenna were standing on was black from a tanker spill and she was holding an oil-soaked bird in her arms. The lines of her body were obscured by heavy overalls and a grimy, oversized sweater, leaving only her tan face and thick brown hair visible. Why had that always been his favorite photo of them? Was it the way she was looking at that stupid bird? Was it the memory of letting himself put his natural cynicism aside and get caught up in her moral certainty?
He remembered how the oil had caused her to break out and how she’d blamed each zit on a specific energy company, as though there was a massive corporate conspiracy focused on nothing but screwing up her complexion.
God, he wanted a beer. Even a warm one.
But he didn’t drink anymore, and that was because of Jenna, too. She’d been the only person with the guts to correctly point out that he was a psychotic drunk. So now that she was dead, why hadn’t he started again? Sure, booze brought out the worst in him, but sometimes the anger was easier to deal with than everything else.
Erin set the picture aside and sunk a little farther into the sofa, staring at the empty wall across from him. Everything had seemed so clear after he’d gotten his PhD. He was going to be a new kind of environmentalist. Instead of waving signs and trying to convince everyone that the sky was falling, he’d bring sanity to the debate by taking into account that no one was ever going to do anything for the earth unless there was something concrete in it for them. Preferably money.
On the surface, it had been a great idea—a revolution he’d told himself. But there had been too many compromises. The truth was that the environment had become more of an emotional problem than a scientific one. No one wanted to look at his equations or listen to his carefully laid-out arguments. They just wanted to believe.
He’d laughed off the initial attacks, deconstructing his detractor’s arguments and ramming them back down their throats. And he’d been thoroughly entertained by the occasional death threats, putting up a bulletin board shaped like a tombstone to hang them on. Things had become more difficult when his friends started walking away, but it was bearable. When Jenna had turned her back, though, he’d been completely lost.
Predictably, it hadn’t taken long for his confusion and despair to turn to anger, which landed him with a job in the oil industry. He’d show them.
But what had he shown them? That he could become a fabulously wealthy and incredibly lonely thirty-seven-year-old, sitting around a dark house, surrounded by the ghost of a woman who had hated him before she died?
He wondered if that was what made it so hard. If they’d been on better terms when she’d…
"Then you’d probably be even more fucked up than you are now," he said aloud, forcing himself off the couch to sweep up the broken glass.
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