Petroplague by Amy Rogers

Author:Amy Rogers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: thriller, suspense, terrorism, science, los angeles, ecology, conservation, global warming, transportation, oil, environmental, fossil fuels, biology, ecothriller, environmentalism, survivalist, renewable energy, ucla, green movement, contamination, bioenergy, eco awareness
Publisher: Diversion Books

CHAPTER 42

The screeching of the building’s alarm rang in Christina’s ears long after she was past the range of actually hearing it. The pavement under her bicycle tires was sticky from the heat. Distant objects shimmered in the haze of the intense midday summer sun, as if being consumed by the pale flames of burning alcohol. She tried to block the grotesque image of Dr. Chen’s corpse from her thoughts.

After being holed up in the lab for several days, she noticed a significant decline in civic order. The streets were still clogged with abandoned cars; most of the cars had now been vandalized, with smashed windows and spray-painted doors. So had many of the shops she passed, except for one supermarket that had a highly visible patrol of armed guards out front. A line of more than a hundred people stood near the entrance. She wondered what they were waiting for, what they had been promised. The city’s food supply had to be running critically low by now.

She kept to major thoroughfares and rode her bike down the yellow center line whenever possible, avoiding piles of broken windshield glass as best she could. As she rode, she reconstructed a likely sequence of events in the tragedy at the lab. The natural gas leak started the fire and ignited the absorbent paper that lined the countertop. The fire reached the ethanol and the bottles exploded. The heat from the combusting ethanol warmed the ultra-cold storage tanks and boiled the liquid nitrogen into gas. Tremendous pressure built up and caused the tanks to explode. Finally the nitrogen itself extinguished the fires.

Dr. Chen was caught in the middle of it all. She squeezed the handlebars and choked back tears.

What the…

Her handlebars wobbled, the bicycle careened left, and she nearly crashed. She struggled to straighten her path, but she felt drunken, motion sick, as if the world were a rough sea pitching beneath her. She stopped to pull herself together, but the rolling motion continued.

Another earthquake!

Window panes on the upper floors of nearby buildings cracked and popped from their frames, fell to the sidewalk, and splintered. Flying shards of glass drove her to a vacant spot in the middle of the street. She knelt with her head down and fingers interlaced on top, the way the airlines suggest in preparation for a crash. This quake was bigger, much bigger, than the earlier ones. And it showed no sign of stopping.

Palm trees, adapted to hurricane-prone climates, swayed crazily, taking the movement in stride. An old hardwood tree nearby proved less flexible. A thick branch at least eight feet long dropped to the ground, the report of its fracture breaking the air like the sound of a lightning strike. She hugged her nose closer to her navel.

The sounds of destruction diminished as the earth waves gradually tapered off. Though her stomach still churned from fright and dizziness, she rose to her feet. Human cries rang anonymously from inside buildings, and car alarms went off in the distance.

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