When Sato was done with his flight-attendant spiel and Nick paused in his squirming—using the relief tube did help—he paid a little attention to the large monitors that took the place of the broad windshield. Back when travel was easier and New Mexico and Texas were still states, Nick and Dara had come this way over Raton Pass to points south, and it had been one of their favorite state borders. New Mexico had looked different once they’d driven across the state line up on the pass and descended: the high prairie here looked different than its counterpart in southern Colorado, the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range to the west had looked different, and especially the buttes and mesas and extinct volcanoes visible to the southeast said “American Southwest!” more clearly than any landscape in their home state of Colorado.
It all still did, although now there were distinct smoke plumes rising to the south and southwest that gave the sense that not all those cones of former volcanoes ahead of them were quiescent. But Nick could see from the smaller look-down displays that it was burning tanks, vehicles, and abandoned towns or fortifications causing the smoke, not volcanoes.
“If Major Malcolm and the U.S. Army—or the Texas Republic and reconquistas, for that matter—can’t keep a recon drone in the sky down here,” said Nick, “how do you do it? Most of these are drone images, not sat, right?”
“Hai,” grunted the red-armored samurai mass that was Sato. “Our miniature unmanned aerial vehicles are much more… miniature… than any available to Major Malcolm.”
“Like the tiny drones that were hovering around videoing me before I got up the hill to Mr. Nakamura’s house,” said Nick, still angry at how they’d recorded him nodding to a ten-minute flashback fix.
Sato said nothing.
Nick watched the landscape passing by on 3DHD monitors so clear that he forgot they weren’t windshields and windows, wriggled to get comfortable, and found himself wondering if the relief tube valve might have leaked down his leg a little. The trip to Santa Fe was projected to take about eight hours—mostly because of the poor state of the highways and occasional missing bridges and overpasses—and Nick couldn’t wait to be there and out of all this stupid armor and restraints.
About forty miles from Raton, at exit 419, they passed a former gas station on their left. The closest tiny town, Springer, was still miles ahead and this gas station used to stand alone here, its light a beacon for night travelers. Nick remembered the place from his vacations with Dara: it had showers and bootlegged DVDs for truckers, a fancy soda fountain, and a display of classic cars from the 1950s and ’60s. The wind used to blow hard here, coming down cold from the distant Sangre de Cristos, and it still did, but now the gas station was a burned-out husk, even the asphalt and concrete blasted apart where the storage tanks had erupted.
A few miles farther, between the empty houses of Springer and the equally abandoned little town of Wagon Mound, they came across the twelve-truck convoy that Major Malcolm had talked about.
Sato radioed to the truck behind them—Willy driving, Toby riding shotgun, and Bill in the top-gunner’s position—and drove slowly off the highway and through the tumbled fence to bypass the smoking mess on the pavement.
Still warned not to touch anything, Nick did zoom his side-camera view to get a better look at the ambushed caravan of fifteen vehicles—the twelve trucks and three armed escort SUVs—as they passed.
It was pretty bad. Nick winced at the burned-out vehicles with the crispy-critter remains visible through the windows—more bodies reduced to ash and miniature carbon-armature versions of human beings, many of the arms raised in the “boxing” position common to burn victims when ligaments and tendons charred. The trucks not burned to the ground had been looted. There seemed to be a lot of skulls lying around, white in the midday New Mexico September sun. There was no sign of any survivors.
Heavy tread tracks—armored vehicles for sure, some probably full-fledged battle tanks—came from the west, went past or through the burned-out convoy and shell-shattered fighting SUVs which never had a chance, then moved on toward the eastern horizon.
“Texan?” asked Nick. “Or reconquista?”
Sato tried to shrug in his thick, red samurai armor. “Impossible to tell. The bandits here—Mexican or Russian mafia or both—also have armored vehicles. But they probably would have taken hostages.”
Nick looked at the still-smoking wreckage disappearing behind them and thought that he’d rather be almost anything than a trucker.
Wagon Mound, the little town consisting of sixty or seventy charred ex-homes and a flattened old downtown that had been half a block long, was named after the saggy-centered butte or hill that rose immediately east of the former water stop along the former train lines. Nick thought that it did sort of look like an old Conestoga wagon.
“How do you feel about it?” Sato asked suddenly.
Nick, who’d been thinking about the scorched bodies and vehicles back at the ambushed convoy site, was actively startled by the question. It wasn’t the kind of open-ended question the security chief was likely to ask.
“How do I feel about what?” asked Nick. The Oshkosh M-ATV’s air system had filtered out all the stench from the burned bodies and melted tires of the convoy, but Nick had mentally smelled it all. It was just odd that Sato should be asking about feelings.
“How do you feel about all of this?” came Sato’s voice through Nick’s earphones. Arr of this. “About your nation coming apart like this.”
What the fuck? was Nick’s immediate thought. Was Sato writing up a psych report for Nakamura?
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Nick said cautiously.
“Bottom-san,” said Sato, “you are old enough to remember when the United States of America was rich, strong, powerful, complete. Fifty states strong. Now it has… how many?”
You know how many, ass-wipe, thought Nick.
“Forty-four and a half,” said Nick.
“Ah, yes,” grunted Sato. “That ‘half’ would be California, I presume.”
Nick didn’t have to answer that, so he didn’t.
“I was curious if it bothered you, Bottom-san. This step down from being a great world power to being an impoverished nation, in debt to yourselves and to everyone else. This breaking-apart of the nation you knew as a child and grown man.”
Is he trying to provoke me? wondered Nick. If he was, it was a good time for it. Nick was so armored and strapped in and otherwise restrained that he couldn’t even get to the duffel bag of guns under his legs without going through half a dozen emergency escape procedures that Sato had lectured him on twice.
“We’re not the only country that’s had everything hit the fan in the past decade or two,” Nick said at last.
“Ahh, true. True.” Sato’s voice was all satisfied growl. “But surely no others have fallen so far so fast.”
Nick tried to shrug. “When I was a kid, my old man had a friend—I don’t know where they met, police academy, maybe—who’d been born in the Soviet Union and who watched that country implode and disappear in a few months. New flag. New anthem. Captured republics all escaped. Lenin’s embalmed corpse still in the tomb or mausoleum or whatever you call it in Red Square, but communism itself as dead and useless as Lenin’s waxy nuts.”
“Lenin’s waxy nuts,” repeated Sato as if in admiration of the phrase.
“So if the Russians could get through it without major trauma, why can’t we?” finished Nick.
“The Russians staged a… what do you call it, Bottom-san? A comeback. Of sorts.”
“Yeah, sure,” said Nick. “With new dictators like Putin running things, they were bound to try that energy blackmail of Western Europe and the military moved back into Georgia or wherever it was. But demographics were against them in the long run. Birthrate down. Alcoholism rampant. Their economy totally dependent on oil and gas.”
“But they had much oil and gas,” said Sato.
“So what?” said Nick. “They couldn’t beat t
he numbers… in the end. Just like we couldn’t beat the numbers here.”
“You are talking about the economy, Bottom-san? The entitlement programs that destroyed the dollar? Or immigration numbers? Or personal habits of no thrift?”
What the fuck is this, a seminar? wondered Nick. He also wondered if there was a recording device in this overpriced truck. But why would Mr. Nakamura be interested in the opinion of one of his hired hands? It’d be like recording the opinions of one of the gai-jin gardeners Nakamura hired to do the mowing at his estate. (He’d never allow Americans to work on his private gardens.)
Finally Nick said tiredly, “All the numbers. You have to understand, Sato, that I was born into a nation and society that had only known greater wealth, greater prosperity, and all sorts of what we thought of as progress in the life of every citizen except the oldest farts who remembered the first Great Depression. My old man’s generation couldn’t even imagine things getting worse. So when they—and we—had the money, we spent it. And after we didn’t have the money any longer, we still spent it.”
“Do you speak of individuals, Bottom-san? Or your government?”
“Yeah,” said Nick. “Both. Remember, I was just coming of age when we had the first sort of financial meltdown and unemployment mini-quakes—we thought it was the Big One, having no clue that the problems were just early tremors of something much worse—and the president we elected right then made it all worse… no, we all did… by passing those staggering entitlement programs that he knew, we all knew in our guts, that we couldn’t begin to pay for.”
“But Europe had such entitlement programs for generations,” said Sato. Entirermehn. Except for the pronunciation, Nick thought, the massive security chief was beginning to sound like a college prof trying to keep a dull conversation going with even duller students.
Nick laughed. “Yeah, and look where that got them!”
“Do you think much of European countries, Bottom-san?”
“Every goddamn hour and minute of my life, Hideki-san,” Nick said emphatically.
After a few minutes of silence, perhaps feeling sorry for the obviousness of his sarcasm, Nick added, “No. I don’t think hardly any of us Americans think about the Germans or French or those other poor fucks these days. They invited the tens of millions of Muslims into their house. They made the laws and sharia exceptions to their laws that ended up with them turning their cultures over to the Global Caliphate. Fuck ’em. Our attitude—my attitude—is the old saying, You buttered your bread, now sleep in it.”
“Buttered… your bread…,” Sato began hesitantly. Nick looked at the cabin monitor and could see the security chief’s large dark eyes shifting his way like beetles within the eye openings of the red samurai mask.
“Sorry,” said Nick. “Old joke that my wife and I used to make. It’s a dumb take on the saying You’ve made your bed, now sleep in it.”
“Ahhh,” said Sato but the syllable did not suggest real enlightenment.
Finally… “But how do you feel about all this change, Bottom-san?”
Nick sighed. For whatever reason—and perhaps it was Mr. Nakamura’s curiosity—Sato really wanted to know his fucking feelings. If he hadn’t been strapped and clamped and armored in place, Nick might have left the room then, but the room was moving at forty-eight miles per hour at the moment. Their next town, he saw by the GPS display, would be Las Vegas… Las Vegas, New Mexico, not the Nevada gambling town.
“I feel like almost the full second half of my life has been a goddamned nightmare,” said Nick. “I expect to wake up any day and find out it has all been a fucking nightmare… that Hawaii didn’t secede and you Japs didn’t take it over after them being a monarchy again for six lousy years. That Dara and I could honeymoon there again if we wanted to. That Santa Fe was just a quaint town in a neighboring state with good food and some good art, rather than being a place run by bandits where someone stuck a six-inch blade in my bowels.
“I expect to wake up and see that I live in a country that projects power in the world for good reasons—to find justice there—rather than watch us send our children, my kid next year, Sato, to battlefields we can’t pronounce where they die fighting battles for you Japs… and not even for your goddamned country, but for your zaibatsu or keiretsu or whatever you call those damned teams of corporations that really run Japan these days.
“I expect to wake up and be able to walk down the street of my own city in my own country without being afraid that some goddamned jihadist kid is going to explode a suicide vest on me for no sane reason and where I can go to a Rockies game on a summer evening without worrying about bombers and snipers. I expect to wake up and find that the money I saved could actually buy something—like a plane trip somewhere, or a driving vacation—and that my wife is still alive to go with me.
“But the nightmare’s real. The bad dream is the reality, and everything good that we dreamed about—Dara and me, my whole fucking country—that’s gone, history, a fading dream.”
Nick was breathing hard when he finally fell silent. His cheeks were wet with what he hoped to Christ was sweat.
“This is why you take flashback, Bottom-san?” Sato said softly.
“You bet your ass it’s why I take flashback, Hideki-san,” answered Nick. “And it’s why half the cops I used to know have swallowed their guns.”
“Swallowed their… ahh, yes,” said Sato.
Nick shook his head as much as he could within his helmet and armor mask. Sato asks him three or four obvious, stupid questions and has former homicide detective Nick Bottom blubbering—or at least sweating—like a little girl. It was pathetic. It made Nick realize—or at least be reminded of—what a wreck he was. All he wanted to do right now was to get back to his cubie in the corner of the old Baby Gap, lock his door, and settle into several hours of flash.
He said to Sato, “But Japan has changed, too, hasn’t it?”
“Ah, yes, Bottom-san,” said Sato. “In the past years of upheaval everywhere, Nippon has shrugged off this shell of culture and government forced on it by MacArthur and the occupying Americans after the lost war and has returned to its natural form of hierarchy and government.”
“Which is what?” asked Nick. “Rule by the family and strongman who wins the constant battle between the zaibatsu or keiretsu teams of companies we were talking about?”
“Hai,” grunted Sato. “Yes, Bottom-san. More or less. In that sense, Nippon has thrown off the uncomfortable pretense of democracy forced upon us—a cultural form that never fit us—and returned to something like the bakufu or tent-office or Shogunate, the seii taishgun form of strong military-industrial leader that ruled Nippon for so many generations.”
“During your Middle Ages,” said Nick, not completely hiding the sneer in his tone.
“Yes, Bottom-san. Our Middle Ages which continued until you Americans forced our island and culture to open to the world, almost to the twentieth century. But be cautious in your contempt, Bottom-san. Seii taishgun means ‘great general who subdues eastern barbarians.’ ”
“That’s us,” said Nick. “The gai-jin. The foreign devils.”
“Hai. Foreign but not devils. That is the way the Chinese think and speak. They, the Chinese, are the greatest racists in the world. Not the Nipponese. Gai-jin may translate best simply to ‘the outside persons.’ ”
“Meanwhile, your boss, Mr. Nakamura, wants to be a modern Shogun.”
“Of course. As do the heads of the Munetaka, Morikune, Toyoda, Omura, Yoritsugo, Yamahsita, and Yoshiake keiretsu.”
“There’s an Omura as Advisor in California and a Yoritsugo Advisor in the Midwest somewhere—Indiana and Illinois?”
“Hai, Bottom-san. And Ohio.”
“So being a Federal Advisor here in the States is a big step toward seizing the Shogunate in Japan?”
“It can be, yes. Depending upon whether the Advisor and head of the keiretsu clan succeeds or fails here. Whether he gains honor or loses it. For you s
ee, this is another thing that has returned in recent decades—the ancient and long-forgotten but deeply embedded centrality of honor and courage and sacrifice. The bushido, the way of the warrior that demands honor unto death, reigns once again in the thoughts and actions of many Nipponese.”
“Including whaddyoucallit, seppuku—ritual suicide—if you fail.”
“Oh, yes.”
“But what’s the point?” said Nick.
“The point, Bottom-san?”
“I’m talking about your Japan being a victim of the same demographics that killed Greece and Italy and Holland and Russia and those other countries we were talking about—declining birthrate. Greeks have all but disappeared. Half the European countries have seen their native populations mostly replaced by Muslim immigrants…”
“Yes, Bottom-san, but Nippon does not allow such immigration, Muslim or Korean or any other sort.”
“Yeah, but that’s not my point, Sato-san. Your birthrate is still declining. Your population was what—around a hundred and twenty-seven million or something when I was about twenty. Now, just twenty-some years later, it’s… what?… ninety million or something?”
“Closer to eighty-seven million, yes,” said Sato.
“And declining rapidly,” said Nick. “Almost forty percent of your population is sixty-five or older. That’s old, man. No more little Nipponese running around on the tatami mats to fill your jobs, man your factories, and enlist in your armies. What will it profit Nakamura—or any of the other keiretsu billionaire big shots—to become Shogun in a country where no one’s left but a few old farts?”
“Exactly,” said Sato. Ezacry. Nick was beginning to understand the fat sonofabitch without straining to. “This is why we must conquer China, Bottom-san.”
“Conquer China?” repeated Nick, his jaw sagging as far as it could in the helmet with its tight chin-strap. “I thought our guys were being paid to fight there for you as part of your contribution to the UN effort to help stop the Chinese civil wars.”