Kevin Anderson - Ill Wind

Years spent outdoors had given Bettario’s skin the look and feel of well-worn leather. He tied his long, pepper-colored hair in a ponytail that hung behind a flat-brimmed Clint Eastwood hat.

They nodded nonchalantly at each other. “Howdy, Carlos,” said Morgret. He looked at the stallion, then at his gas pump. “Fill ‘er up?”

The other two riders, ranch hands he supposed, chuckled. Bettario patted the stallion’s muscular neck, and said without the slightest trace of an accent, “No thank you, sir, I think this one still has a full tank.”

“Just another piss-head who doesn’t want any gas! What brings you down from the dude ranch, Carlos? Inviting me to a church social?”

Bettario owned and operated Rancho Inyo, a popular tourist ranch near Lake Isabella, where the idiot vacationers could pretend to be cowboys. It had made Bettario a rich man.

“Hell, if you had any gasoline, I’d buy every drop. But I don’t expect you’re better than anybody else in the country.” Bettario laughed. “No, I came to rescue you, my friend.”

Morgret scowled at him and sat back down in his creaking chair. How had Bettario known the gas pumps had gone bad? “Rescue me? What are you talking about, Carlos?”

“From the plague, man. What’re you going to do with yourself now? Your station was barely surviving before.” With a gesture of his chin, Bettario indicated the dilapidated house trailer, the sign that still said LAST CHANCE.

Morgret narrowed his eyes. “What plague?”

The ranch hands exchanged glances. Bettario took off his hat. “Man, you must be kidding me! Don’t you watch the news?”

“Gee, Carlos, I must not have paid my cable TV bill for the month. I’ve been thinking about getting one of those two-thousand-dollar satellite antennas—but it wouldn’t do me much good, since I don’t even own a damned television! I ain’t got a newspaper that’s less than a month old.”

Bettario shook his head. “Man, a plague is wiping out all the gas, and now plastic too. People are going nuts. We’re lucky we live up here away from the chaos.” The stallion snorted, as if he disagreed with Bettario’s opinion of ‘lucky.’ “Me, I’m smart enough to realize that we’re going to have to pull together and work our cojones off to make it through the first year.”

Morgret squinted at him, but Bettario wasn’t the type to play practical jokes. And it did explain the bad gas, the total lack of traffic, the week-late gas tanker. “So, you’re coming to rescue me, huh?”

The stallion nosed around for something to nibble on. Bettario jerked the reins to raise the horse’s head. “We got rid of the tourists at Rancho Inyo, and I have room for a few people who know what they’re doing. You’ve been around a long time, Dick. You’re full of bullshit, but you’ve also got a lot of common sense, and you know how to work. I need men to help keep the larders stocked, which means hunting and fishing and working with the livestock. We’re going to round up the wild horses, because without automobiles, horses will be worth more than gold.

“You also know how to fix things,” Carlos continued. “Rancho Inyo gets its power from the hydroelectric plant by the reservoir. Even without oil to burn, I suppose a dam and a waterwheel can keep working—if we figure out a way to keep them lubricated.”

Bettario smiled down at Morgret standing in his coveralls. “Come with me back to the ranch, Dick. My boys here will help you pack up whatever you want to take along.”

Morgret raised his eyebrows, then gestured expansively toward the leaking trailer, the fouled-up gas pumps, the empty highway. “Let me get this straight, Carlos. You want me to leave all this just so I can hunt and fish the whole day long? Round up some horses, chop some wood, for free room and board at a place where the city slickers pay a hundred dollars a night?”

“A hundred fifty, last year.” Bettario nodded. “Yeah, sums it up pretty well.”

“Sounds better than getting jabbed in the eye with a sharp stick.” Morgret glanced around the small patch of land he owned by virtue of squatter’s rights. He had grown roots here, but somehow it didn’t feel like he was leaving anything behind.

“Carlos, get your boys to help me take down this LAST CHANCE sign, then I’ll be ready to go.”

A pounding on the door pierced through the layers of fog that enveloped Jeffrey Mayeaux’s mind, waking him out of a blissful few hours of sleep. He hated the constant interruptions that came with being an “important man.” Well, in another year he could forget all that bilgewater.

Mayeaux woke up, smelling the disorienting strangeness of new sheets. Pieces fell into place. Two-story resort apartment in Ocean City, a getaway Weathersee had arranged for him a month ago. And nobody was supposed to know where he was. Pickled crawfish! Weathersee must have blabbed.

The pounding returned from somewhere outside the darkened bedroom… the front door. It was too damn early for a person to think. Besides, this was what, Sunday?

He started to roll over and get off the bed when the woman beside him moaned softly in her sleep; her head rested on his arm. Mayeaux could still smell sweat on the sheets. She was in her early twenties, large breasts, small ass, long blond hair. She brayed like a mule when she came, but it had turned him on a little. Too bad she had the face like a mule, too, but who cared?

As memories of last night came back to him, he felt another erection stirring. Weathersee had arranged for the babe to be waiting for him at the condo. Mayeaux never knew whether his Chief of Staff actually paid for these women, or if he enticed them in some other way. Good old Weathersee.

Mayeaux’s wife knew the locations of his “love nests,” and she even called him once in a while when she needed his help with one of the houses or some other emergency. But no one was supposed to know about the Ocean City place.

The door would probably splinter soon under the relentless pounding. The sheer monotonous nature told him it was probably some security goons. Anybody with half a brain would have figured out by now that Mayeaux didn’t want to talk to anybody. What a great way to wake up and start the day.

Mayeaux somehow managed to slide off the side of the bed and pick up his robe without waking the babe.

He could hear a muffled voice yelling his name as he closed the bedroom door behind him and padded down the stairs. “Hold on, Boog, for gawd’s sake,” he said.

The saeside apartment smelled of stale wine and ripe cheese. Sunlight streamed across the foyer where he had forgotten to close the curtains the night before. How he wished he could find someplace in the D.C. area that served decent cafe au lait and beignets for breakfast.

With the spreading panic and the mechanical breakdowns caused by the gasoline plague sweeping across the country, Mayeaux should have realized he couldn’t get away for a day. Just one fucking day, and it had been planned for months. Granted, he could recognize the magnitude of the growing crisis—but he wasn’t in charge. Other people could take care of things for a few hours, couldn’t they?

By Friday night only a few outbreaks had been reported in Maryland and a few in Virginia, but the news got more frantic hour after hour. California had closed its borders, far too late to stop the spread of the plague, and information from the west coast was sporadic.

Vice President Wolani had been stuck in Chicago on a speaking tour when the FAA ordered an immediate shutdown of the entire commercial airline industry in the wake of a dozen major crashes that had been blamed on disintegrating plastic components.