It died for good, and Trev actually held his breath as his car coasted the final few feet, teetered, and then slowed on the slight level stretch before the downhill slope.
He unbuckled his seatbelt and leapt out of the vehicle before it could come to a complete stop, throwing his shoulder against the doorframe and pushing with all his strength. His car kept moving, helped by his effort and its last bit of momentum, and Trev did his best to keep it going. The long downhill slope felt like it was far, far away, but somehow he managed to push the distance to it and threw himself back behind the wheel, panting, as the car began to pick up speed again.
After a moment he yanked the door shut and focused on navigating the curving road that hugged the gently curving downward slope to a saddle below before the road began going uphill again through the steepest and most mountainous part of the drive. With the engine dead he’d lost power steering and brakes, which was the last thing he wanted while going downhill on these roads, so even though he knew it was horrible for the brakes he rode them constantly to keep to a reasonable speed, putting his whole body behind his foot to push the stiff pedal. He also moved over to the left lane as far as possible from the dropoff beyond the road’s shoulder.
The steering was a bit more hair raising without power, especially since even though the road wasn’t too bad the edge was a steep slope dropping hundreds of feet to level ground below that would be almost as bad as a cliff. Using his own muscles he had to yank the wheel hard around even these wide corners to avoid that fate. The entire time, as he felt his speed increasing in spite of his efforts to brake and his car veered dangerously close to the edge at every turn, he couldn’t help but think of some of the horror stories he’d heard growing up of accidents on these winding roads. He eventually put down the emergency brake partway, which mostly solved the problem, although he had to endure the stink of brake pads burning the rest of the way down.
Finally after over a mile of downhill driving he reached the bottom and released the e-brake, coasting towards the uphill stretch farther along. After letting momentum take him as far as it could he finally pulled onto a wide shoulder well off the side of the road and stopped the car. Once there he took a few moments to settle his rattled nerves, then punched the steering wheel.
He’d had more than enough gas in the tank to make the drive, he was sure of it! There was no way the driving he’d done this morning, even with idling at stop lights in traffic, had used up so much that he only had enough in the tank to go 25 miles. Either the gauge was off or his tank had a small leak or he’d overestimated how far he could go with the gauge at that point or something. Maybe all the extra weight of supplies in his car had eaten up more fuel than he’d expected?
But like it or not here he was, out of gas in a world where gas was near impossible to get. With that in mind, not long after he’d reached the bottom of the hill he’d had a momentary temptation to abandon all common sense and yank the wheel sideways. The wild maneuver would’ve sent his car veering off the road and onto a short but steep downhill slope to the valley below, bumping and jouncing its way towards a copse of trees at the bottom. With some luck he might’ve survived the wild descent and managed to roll behind their modest cover where the vehicle couldn’t be seen from the road.
He’d opted to park right here on the side of the road instead. It wasn’t that he was hoping to be seen and hopefully rescued, since he had a feeling no vehicles would be coming by any time soon. And even if they did they probably wouldn’t stop, while if they stopped he could almost guarantee they wouldn’t loan him any gas. He wouldn’t be able to hitch a ride to the nearest station to fill up a tank, either.
If he’d been truly on his own he probably would’ve made that decision to give his car up as lost and try to hide it and its precious contents from potential thieves, but thankfully even if he was a screwup who misjudged what he could manage in an emergency Lewis wasn’t. Thanks to his cousin at least it wasn’t the end of the world.
Well it was, but he wasn’t exactly out of options thanks to Lewis’s foresight and preparedness. He pulled out his phone. “Hey man,” he said when his cousin answered. “I’m out of gas about 25 miles southeast of Orem.”
“That’s it?” Lewis demanded. “I thought you were keeping enough in the tank to make the drive down here if you needed to.”
“Enough plus a bit extra,” Trev agreed, trying to keep his voice calm as his anger at the situation flared up again. “I had less than I’d expected, or maybe I wasted more than I thought this morning trying to fill the tank before fuel vanished entirely.”
“Yeah you were talking about that before that guy tried to mug you. Were the gas stations all tapped out?”
“Nah, it was the President’s speech. Someone in the government had already gotten to all of them and purchased everything in their tanks for emergency purposes.”
There was a long pause. “Well at least the fire departments and police stations will be able to get their vehicles where they’re needed in the face of the inevitable coming riots.”
Something in his cousin’s tone let Trev know Lewis had one of his unorthodox opinions on the matter. “You don’t think it was a good idea to get control of the fuel supply in the hands of the people who could do the most good with it?”
He could almost sense Lewis’s shrug. “Good for the government’s continued operation, sure. But depriving citizens of the chance to buy fuel, and doing it everywhere all across the nation, will have ramifications of its own. For one thing it’s going to stall the economy, and I mean shifting to reverse while going 75 miles per hour and dropping the transmission stall it, to the point that it would take a miracle for it to get going again.
“One unintended consequence of the government snatching up all the fuel is that almost immediately all the trucks scheduled to deliver necessary shipments won’t be able to refuel. None of the cities will care about that, and in fact they’ll probably be happy that trucks full of food and other useful things are stranded there where they can make use of them. But it means that every place food is produced is instantly cut off from every place where food is consumed, which means for perishables you’re going to see most of the nation starving while a comparatively small part of the population is sitting on food going bad faster than they can eat it. To say nothing of the huge stockpiles of nonperishables like grain and corn, where a few people will have it but they can’t ship it where it’s needed. Which is great for them but sucks for literally everyone else.”
“Yeah, that’s a bit more of a problem,” Trev agreed. “And like you said the cities with those massive stockpiles are going to be even more eager to hold shipments and keep the food and the fuel for themselves.”
“There’s also the fact that without fuel almost none of the nation’s crops are going to get harvested this fall. That means even if we could manage to find fuel somewhere we’re looking at major food shortages next year and probably farther down the line as well. And that’s just commercially. On the private side of things not having access to fuel is going to strand everyone who’s currently traveling wherever they were after the President’s speech, or the next place they try to gas up afterwards. That includes all the planes that have been grounded to save fuel for emergency flights.”
“Well that certainly applies to me,” Trev said, slapping the steering wheel.