Alex Cave is leisurely cruising his sailboat in
Puget Sound when a hysterical voice on an oil tanker begs for help on the
radio. He sees the behemoth ship through his binoculars an instant before it is
engulfed in a brilliant flash of white light. He responds to the mayday and
arrives before the coast Guard, and discovers the crew and 80,000 tons of crude
oil have mysteriously vanished without a trace.
Alex Cave is just a geophysics teacher for a
university in the town of Bozeman, Montana, USA, but he is also ex-CIA. The
Director of National Security, Martin Donner, is his friend, and asks him to
help the coast guard in solving what starts out as a small problem of stolen
crude oil.
Initial thoughts are of a major oil leak, but none
is found. When the bodies of the crew are found frozen to death on a
mountain top one-hundred and fifty miles away, Alex realizes there is more
going on than just stealing oil.
Things go from bad to worse as more tankers are
attacked and their crews killed. The few witnesses all claim to see a bright
light and a rainbow effect surrounding the tankers, but don't know how it
happened. The Alaska pipeline and west coast refineries are suddenly empty, and
Transportation of basic necessities cannot reach the cities. Chaos reigns and
common citizens turn to primal instincts to survive. Panic grips the nation as
more oil disappears.
Alex teams up with the supervisor for the All
Alaska oil Company in Valdez Alaska, a man affectionately known as Bull by his
crew, and Christa Avery, a physicist working with oil samples from the Alaska
pipeline. Together they try to discover why all the oil is disappearing, and
the mastermind behind the theft and murders. The only clue the trio has is a
strange crystal that was found in the hold of one of the empty oil tankers.
Under closer inspection, it seems the crystal is alive.
Meanwhile, people in the northwestern states are
trying to survive, which has now become the one rule. The AOS, Army
of Survival, initially recruits people who wish to learn the skill of
survival. Now that skill is becoming a fact of life, and the
army starts keeping people against their wills, and training them to
become soldiers. John Everex, the new leader, is a man on a mission. He
rules without compassion and kills without Mercy. As one would expect, Everex
and Alex’s paths cross, with dire consequences for one of them.
Harold Woolley is a meek man, with a demanding wife
and two teen age children. He becomes caught up in the struggle to
survive, and mistakenly ends up at the AOS camp. When his lack of courage
threatens his family, he tries to become the brave man needed to get
them out of their desperate situation, but after being a coward his entire
life, he doesn’t think he can change.
Dead Energy has many different characters, and
many different parts of the basic story, which all come together in the
conclusion.
Each episode has one common thread tying each story
into a series, but each episode is a new story, and can stand alone.