The Day It Ran Out

July 17th, 2146, 2:31 PM.  That was when all hell broke loose, and the ration and reason were thrown out the window.  Val remembered she had been sitting in her air conditioned house, playing with her younger brother at the time.  The TV was blaring a children’s cartoon in the background, and Val’s mom was making sandwiches for the kids in the kitchen.  It was one month into summer, but Val wished it could last forever.  School SUCKED.

“Sandwiches are ready,” Val’s mom called cheerfully as she entered the room.

Suddenly, an ear-splitting wail rang around the house, coming from the TV.  The laughter from the cartoon cut off, and the screen turned black.  Val waited a second, holding her breath, then a dull man’s started to speak.

“Attention.  Attention.  A crisis is occurring worldwide, and nations all over the globe are alerting their citizens as I speak.  Fossil fuel supplies are depleted, all over the world.  For centuries, we as a species have drilled far and deep into our planet, looking for oil.  ‘Black gold’ as some call it, it powered our daily lives.  We could not sustain it.  We are a growing population, and we needed more.  As of three years now, no more can be find.  We took it all, and we used it unsparingly.  Now, after three years, all our reserves are gone.  There is no more oil.”  The man’s voice cut off.

CRASH!  Val turned around.  Her mother stood there, trembling.  Broken shards of ceramic and two sandwiches lay at her feet.

“Not even a ‘Do not panic’ at the end,” she whispered.

Val was only barely into her teenage years, but she knew the current situation was bad.  No oil meant no gasoline, no electricity, no heat.  No gasoline meant nobody could drive anywhere to get to their work, school, or residence.  No electricity, well, Val knew how terrible that would be.

She had heard rumors of a big government cover up, and seen headlines from shady magazines hidden in the depths of the internet.  She knew for the past twenty years or so gasoline prices were skyrocketing to new highs every year.  She knew the governments of the world had fallen into sluggishness, satisfied by the luxuries of the world and their lucrative positions, and utterly incapable of admitting err on their side.  She knew many people high up, including presidents of the United States, wouldn’t want to admit that oil, the building block of humanity, was running low.  Rich and powerful minds worked like that.  Ignore a problem, and it will go away.

Alarmed by increasing energy bills, the world saw a surge in alternative fuel sources.  More households started adding solar panels, more farms installed windmills. Of course, the greedy CEOs of these alternative fuel companies saw profit, and so they raised the prices to heights only rich corporations could afford.  For the average middle class citizen, installing solar panels became even less likely than pigs flying.

Val’s little brother, Zack, let out a cry, and Val snapped back to reality.  Val’s mother clutched him tight and began to sing a lullaby.  Okay, so there was a problem.  A big one.  Well, she learned in third grade that all problems had a solution.  Val thought for a hard minute, and concluded that this was an exception.  School taught you how to solve problems for x, problems that involved squaring the sides of a right triangle.  She knew oil runs out was equal to big disaster, but she wasn’t sure she could solve that out algebraically.

“Mom, what are we going to do?” Val asked, a slight tremble in her words.  Adults always knew best.

“We wait for your father to come home from work, then we go.  I’m not sure where, sweetheart, but it will be far away,” Val’s mother said, still cradling Zack’s small, fragile body.

15 minutes later, Val’s father returned home from work with the family car.  A half hour after that Val was all packed up, prepared to say goodbye to the home she had known her entire life.

The roads away from the city were not easy ones.  It was as if the second the emergency broadcast stopped, your average Joe turned into a mindless, thoughtless, animal, engulfed by the hysteria.  As Val and her family drove away, crackpots and drunkards infested the highways around them.  They would jump in front of cars, trying to slow them down, while others would bang on the doors and windows once the car had came to a halt.

Val had never seen her dad drive so fast before.  It was like a fever dream, but without the waking up part.  At one point a man jumped on top of the windshield, but quickly fell off.  Val’s dad kept driving.  Val’s mother sat in the backseat trying to comfort a screaming Zach.  Val could only imagine how horrible and strange this whole ordeal would appear to the toddler.

Eventually, Val’s dad exited the freeway onto a dismal cobble road.  She remembered this exit, as she had gone camping here with her family many years ago, before Zach was born.  It led up into a vast, hilly, forest.

The car rattled and shook as the tires drove over the unpaved roads.  After about thirty minutes along this road, Val’s dad brought the car to a halt behind a copse of trees.  The family emerged from the car, with tired and shaky legs.  They had passed the campsite twenty minutes ago, and were now in the middle of nowhere.

They trudged through the heavy forest for about fifteen minutes, before they came to a clearing.  Val’s dad designated this spot as their campsite, then left to retrieve the last of the luggage from the car.  Val went with him.

“How long do you think we’ll have to be out here?” Val asked him.

“I don’t know, my love.  I imagine it will be a very long time.” Val’s dad sounded sad, but there was a slight trace of determination in his voice.  A father’s will to defend his family.

They made it back to the car, and retrieved the last of the stuff from the trunk.  “I don’t suppose we’ll need this anymore,” Val’s dad said, and kicked the old vehicle.

When they made it back to their makeshift campsite, it was turning dark.  Val helped her parents set up a tent, then they placed down the sleeping bags and tucked in.

Val wasn’t sure if she had ever fallen asleep, or if she had just been lost in her thoughts for the past who-knows-how-long.  Either way, she was snapped back to reality by her mother’s sobs.

“I-I’m not sure how we’re going to do this, Mark,” she sniffled.

Val’s father replied, “I don’t know either, Tracy.  We have to stay brave for the kids, though.  They’re relying on us to be strong for them.”

Eventually, the crying stopped.  It was just Val awake.  She figured she was the only person awake within a twenty mile radius.  It was kind of peaceful, she supposed.  Crickets chirped outside.  Above, an owl hooted, too old and wise to be bothered by the troubles of humanity.

Two months had gone by since Val had first arrived to the forest.  She felt that she was already a completely different person.  She was getting used to the peaceful setting, the hawks circling in the air and the snakes slithering on the ground.  She felt one with nature.  

There were some downsides, such as lack of toilet paper or delicious processed foods, but there were always ways around that.  Val’s father had taught her how to catch and skin a rabbit, how tell between toxic and edible berries.  It wasn’t perfect, but it was survivable.

One day, Val was bathing in the nearby river when she heard rustling in a nearby bush.  A deer’s snout poked through, and soon after a beautiful doe and her fawn followed.  Val gasped.  She had seen deer before in the past couple months, but never this close.

She felt a little bad seeing this majestic creatures, because she knew had eaten one of them for dinner a week ago. Her dad had hunted it down, and prepared it for the family.  He didn’t have the heart to tell Val where the meat came from, but she could piece two and two together.

She reached out to stroke the doe’s muzzle, and the creature complied.  As Val pet the deer, she thought to herself, maybe I get used to living out here in the forest.

She knew she would eventually have to go back and brave whatever was left of civilization some day, but that’s a different story.