For the next hour, Leonard had to relive a painful root canal from his late fifties. The dentist had been brusque, rough, and unsympathetic. The anesthesia hadn’t seemed to work well. Leonard’s lifelong fear of choking had added to the pain and anxiety. His pain and fear then added to his pain and fear now reliving the hour. But there was no turning back with flashback, he knew. Once started, the vial amount of a relived experience would not be changed, escaped, or denied.
It serves me right, he thought as the hour of horror moved slowly, glacially, through the night. It’s my own fault. I deserve this punishment for stealing the boy’s flashback and for trying to escape reality by communing with my dead. We should respect our dead through memory, not through pharmaceuticals. I deserve this.
Yes, thought Leonard with a wincing smile, he felt very much the Jew this night.
DROPPED OFF A LITTLE before 11 a.m. near Union Station just off I-25 in the LoDo section of Denver, Val and Leonard began walking. They had spent only eight days with the caravan, but it had felt like much longer to Leonard and it felt strange to him now not to be continuing on with the truckers. He felt somewhat abandoned and he imagined Val did as well.
Both of them were tired and grumpy but his grandson’s usual surliness seemed to be tempered by excitement. Before the boy remembered that he didn’t communicate important things to his grandfather, he’d blurted out Henry Big Horse Begay’s promise to take Val with him if the boy had acquired a counterfeit NICC by the time Begay was scheduled to return on October 27. Val showed Leonard the slip of paper with the Denver card counterfeiter’s name, address, and phone number. There was a second man’s name and number and a street address scrawled beneath the first one.
“That’s the best NICC guy that Begay knows, period, supposedly does cards that no one can tell from the real things, but he’s not even in the country. He lives in Austin or someplace like that in Texas, so I don’t know why he gave me that name. I need to find two hundred old bucks and see this guy on South Broadway here in Denver.” Val hurried to take the folded card back.
Leonard didn’t have to point out that the old-dollar equivalent of $300,000 in new bucks was as far away as the pale scythe of moon that still hung above the mountains in the blue sky.
The day was warm for late September, almost summer-like, and the blue sky was cloudless. The leaves on the few trees along the streets in this old section of town looked as tired and dusty as the two pedestrians, but hadn’t yet begun to change color. Leonard remembered autumn days like this when he’d lived in nearby Boulder, the aspen leaves getting brittle enough to rattle in the breezes, the blue skies darkening toward that unmatchable blue of a Colorado October, and the thin air free from even the slightest hint of the humidity that so often hung over Los Angeles.
The two plodded to Blake Street and then turned right and walked three short blocks to Speer Boulevard. They argued about what to do next. Val wanted to see his old house and neighborhood near Cheesman Park, but that was miles east of here and certainly a dead end. Nick had sold that house and moved out just after he’d sent Val to Los Angeles more than five years ago. Even the neighbors Val had known as a boy were probably gone… either gone, Leonard pointed out, or already alerted by the FBI or Homeland Security to be on the lookout for Val.
“We should walk to the Cherry Creek Mall Condos, where your father lives,” said Leonard as they turned left onto the so-called Cherry Creek Trail.
“The FBI will be watching there too,” said Val.
“Yes,” said Leonard. “But with luck your father will shelter us from them.”
The old man and boy walked southeast a couple of blocks to a point just beyond Larimer Street where the pedestrian walkway ducked under North Speer Boulevard and ran along the banks of Cherry Creek to a point at which the river meandered between the lanes of the busy divided boulevard.
It was about four miles to his son-in-law’s condominium complex and after the first mile or so, Leonard wasn’t sure he was going to make it. He collapsed onto a bench by the walkway and Val fidgeted nearby.
When Leonard had lived in Colorado a couple of decades earlier, the area along Cherry Creek had been known for its homeless—at least one bearded man per intersection holding up a cardboard sign—and the less visible homeless sleeping under the many overpasses along the sunken pedestrian walkway. Now, he realized, there were thousands of homeless—entire families—permanently living along the banks of this small river. They didn’t seem threatening because the walkways on both sides of the river were a constant stream of bicycle traffic heading toward and away from Denver’s downtown. Businessmen and -women in expensive suits pedaled by, their briefcases in baskets attached to the handlebars.
But now that they’d stopped for a moment, the homeless men along the banks and in the shadows of the overpass they’d just walked under began taking notice of them.
“We’d better get going,” whispered Val.
Leonard nodded but didn’t rise immediately. He was very tired. And all during their walk so far, he’d kept raising his hands to feel his teeth through his cheeks, as if his flashback root-canal torture the night before had been real. “My bag is heavy,” he said at last, hating the hint of a whine he heard.
“Leave it,” said Val, tugging at his grandfather’s arm. Four men were ambling over from the shadows.
“I can’t leave it,” said Professor Emeritus George Leonard Fox, sounding shocked. “My pajamas are in it.”
Val got his grandfather to his feet and moving again and the four homeless men lost interest and went back to their bedrolls in the shade. Val said, “One of the motherfuckers in the convoy broke into my bag sometime last night and stole one of my last vials of flash. Can you believe it, Grandpa?”
“That’s terrible,” said Leonard.
They continued south along the river walk. The homeless men in the shadows under the overpasses backed away from Val in a way that made Leonard realize that his grandson was becoming a man.
“If we had a usable phone,” said Leonard, “we could call your father. He could come pick us up.”
“We don’t have a phone,” said Val.
“If there were still public phones, we have enough on my NICC to make a local call.”
“There aren’t any public phones, Grandpa. And you have to remember that we can’t use our cards.”
“I’m just saying that if they had phones and if those phones took change—if we still used coins—then we could phone and save ourselves this walk.”
“If we had some ham, we could have a ham and cheese sandwich,” said Val. “If we had some cheese.”
Leonard blinked. It was the first sign of humor, however sarcastic, that he’d heard from his grandson in a long time. He realized that something Begay had promised the boy—a chance, however remote, of joining the free truckers’ convoy—had brought Val out of the darkness. At least partway.
“If buses still ran, we could take a bus,” said Leonard. “Four miles is a perfect distance for a city bus.”
Val said nothing to that. Suicide bombers loved American buses in the same way that Palestinian terrorists had loved buses in Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities decades ago. Subways and elevated trains still ran in major American cities because people and packages could be screened—with a fair degree of efficiency, even given the bad news of one or more explosions a month around the country—but buses were not defensible. Leonard thought that it had been a major retreat from civilization when American cities had given up on their bus systems.
Val’s small duffel bag had a strap on it and the boy put the strap over his shoulder, turned around, and took the heavier duffel from his grandfather. He didn’t say a word. They walked on with Val just a step ahead, but Leonard noticed that the boy kept his right hand free. The pistol was in his belt on the left side under his jacket.
Leonard found himself wishing that he’d fled his home and Los Angeles while wearing his sneakers rather than these dress shoes. His fee
t were already swollen to the point that it hurt to walk. Leonard had thought that his half-mile walk to Echo Park every day had kept him in shape, but obviously not.
The last news about Los Angeles he’d heard in Julio and Perdita’s truck that morning had said that the worst of the fighting in the city and suburbs was over and that the reconquista military forces were falling back along I-5 toward San Diego. The California National Guard and various anglo paramilitary groups had reestablished control of I-5 and the coastal corridor all the way from Long Beach to Encinitas. It was being announced as a major defeat for Nuevo Mexico expansion.
Leonard had mixed feelings about all this. As an amateur historian as well as classicist, he knew the injustice of southwestern states being taken from Mexico in the 1840s. But he was also one of the few people he knew who were old enough to remember the 1992 L.A. riots after the police who’d beaten a man named Rodney King were acquitted. In less than a week of rioting, thousands of fires were set—many of the burned-out areas still had not been rebuilt, forty years later—and more than fifty people had died with a couple of thousand injured.
Leonard had thought of those riots that morning when he’d heard details of how an entire company of reconquista infantry in armored personnel carriers had been pulled from their vehicles and beaten and killed by a mob at the same place in South Central L.A.—the intersection of Florence and South Normandie avenues—where truck drivers and other innocents had been pulled from their vehicles and attacked in 1992. In this case, according to NPR, more than two hundred reconquista fighters were dead and the black rioters had moved into East L.A., burning everything they came across in the wake of the Nuevo Mexican forces’ retreat.
This upset Leonard. He wondered how his friend Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa and Emilio’s son Eduardo were. He wished them well. There was no doubt in George Leonard Fox’s mind that even though he’d demanded payment, Emilio had saved Val’s life—and perhaps Leonard’s as well—by getting them out of Los Angeles nine days ago.
Leonard noticed that Val had led them up a flight of steps out of the sunken Cherry Creek walkway and onto the street-level sidewalk that ran alongside Speer Boulevard. There were fewer bicyclists on the pathway below, Leonard saw, and many more homeless filling the path and riverside banks.
He’d just been thinking about the Alamo—he’d once proofread a friend’s essay about Texas’s Alamo and the fighting of February–March 1836, where Travis, Crockett, Bowie, and the others had died at the hands of General Santa Anna, the essay focusing on the failure in leadership of Sam Houston, Austin, and the other self-named Texians—so he was surprised to see the greensward of Denver’s Alamo Placita Park across the street to the north. On the south side of the boulevard was the smaller Hungarian Freedom Park.
There were hundreds of hovels and tattered tents in both parks, but especially in the Hungarian Freedom Park just to their right, and many more hundreds of the homeless, mostly men, milling around.
Val dropped back next to Leonard. “Stay close to me, Grandpa.”
A group of the lean, angry-looking men, perhaps twenty-five or so, crossed the busy street to the median sidewalk and began following them.
Speer Boulevard turned into East First Avenue here and ran due east and west. To their right now was a high fence shutting off access to what had once been the Denver Country Club with its extensive grounds. Cherry Creek disappeared into that forbidden area.
Across the street to the north was one of the oldest wealthy areas of Denver with shaded streets and what had once been multimillion-old-dollar homes, small estates, really, set back on deep lawns. Now those houses were in ruins, many burned down, others occupied by street people or turned into low-quality flashcaves.
The group of men behind them rushed to cross South Downing Street and catch up to them.
Val dropped Leonard’s duffel bag, turned around, and removed the Beretta pistol from his belt.
The group of men stopped about thirty feet away. They launched curses and one threw a small rock from the street, but—still cursing and flashing obscene gestures—they turned around and headed back toward the Hungarian Freedom Park.
Leonard found that he was having some trouble breathing as Val tucked the pistol back into his belt, picked up his grandfather’s duffel bag, and, gripping Leonard’s elbow firmly, moved him more quickly down the sidewalk outside the country club barriers.
“I’m surprised they didn’t have guns themselves,” managed Leonard when he could talk. He kept glancing back over his shoulder.
“If they had guns,” said Val, “they wouldn’t be homeless. And we’d be dead. Let’s keep moving.”
Passing the entrance to the country club, Leonard’s heart pounding from the exertion and adrenaline in his system, he looked into the grounds and saw blue tents pitched everywhere on what had been the tennis courts and an eighteen-hole golf course behind the large main buildings. In the few clear areas, those large swivel-wing planes the military called VTOLs or… what was it?… Ospreys were lined up, their engines and propellers aimed skyward.
“I wonder what…,” he began.
“Keep walking, Grandpa. We’re almost there.”
LEONARD’S SON-IN-LAW’S SHOPPING-MALL-TURNED-CUBIES TOOK up a very long and wide city block, with the river at its backside. High fences and razor wire between the former mall’s parking garage and the river kept squatters from taking up residence along the banks. Across Cherry Creek to the south, Leonard and Val could see more expensive condominium complexes guarded by more razor wire, gun positions, gates, and private security guards. This side of the river was more problematic.
Leonard remembered Cherry Creek as one of the most upscale shopping districts in Colorado. Now the two-to four-story buildings across First Avenue from Nick Bottom’s mall-condo complex were a maze of stall shops and burned-out structures left over from old rioting or turf wars. None of the high-end shops had made it through the last decade.
So much depends upon maintenance, Leonard was thinking. Decades ago, before the Day It All Hit The Fan, there’d been a book and TV series about what the world would be like if human beings suddenly disappeared; not died off, just… disappeared. It had fascinated Leonard, who’d still been teaching his Shakespeare and Chaucer then.
What he hadn’t really understood until that TV program—he never did read the book it was based on—was that the physical web of modern life was so dependent upon almost constant maintenance. Leonard had always imagined, in the few apocalyptic visions he’d had, that cities would stay pretty much the way they were for years, decades, a century perhaps, until weeds, grass, trees, and wild animals began to intrude upon the urban landscape. But no, that turned out not to be the case. The program had shown how service tunnels, subways, and the rest of the subterranean parts of a major city like New York would be underwater within a day without human intervention and maintenance. The flooding alone would soon result in high-pressure explosions of pipelines, basements of tall buildings submerged, foundations undercut, and an amazingly rapid dissolution of the urban grid.
Humans weren’t gone in the United States—far from it—but the national sense of having given up, linked to the ubiquitous use of flashback to the point that very few people were actually doing their jobs at any given moment, had created a similar breakdown of infrastructure.
Leonard’s son-in-law’s cubie was in a huge fortified, windowless concrete mass. It was on the wrong side of the tracks—or in this case, the wrong side of the river—and it hulked there like a sightless Fort Apache deep in Indian territory. During the day, Leonard saw, people lived and shopped for basic items and moved through the ruined blocks of what had been the North Cherry Creek shopping area across the broad street, but at night it must be a nightmare for unarmed civilians.
On the river side of the building, the gaps in the once-open parking garage had been covered with electrified fencing. The fenced-off, grassless, muddy riverbanks were under video surveillance from
the condo complex. The west end of the building was bordered by the private drive to the parking garage. Any car approaching that parking garage had to pass through automated gates, a bang box—a concrete structure designed to search automobiles and contain the explosions if they were rigged with bombs—and then through another inner gate and only then up the ramp into the garage.
The north-facing front of the Cherry Creek Mall Condominiums had main doors of windowless steel. Surveillance video-cam bubbles looked down from above those impenetrable doors.
Leonard and Val had crossed First Avenue and paced back and forth for the two blocks facing the mass of the mall.
“If we could just phone,” Leonard said. He had to sit down.
“Be quiet, Grandpa,” snapped Val. They’d been staying in the shadows, hiding their faces from the higher-surveillance video-camera bubbles hung like cheap jewelry along the front of the mall. “You’re going to have to go in and see if the Old Man is home.”
“Me?” said Leonard. “Alone? Aren’t you coming?”
“The Denver cops are looking for me. We heard on the truck radio all the names of the guys I hung around with, so there has to be some sort of bulletin out on me. Probably FBI and DHS looking for me too. They figure the first place I’d come is here… and here I am. But they might not be looking for you, Leonard.”
He’d never liked it when Val called him by his first name. “They might be looking for me as well.”
Val shrugged. “But Nick Bottom’s still our best chance. He’s a stinking flash addict, but he may still have some contacts with the Denver PD. Or at least know how to get us out of town. Building security probably won’t let you past the lobby or security airlock or whatever they have in there, but if they don’t detain you and call the cops right away, they’ll probably let you phone up to the Old Man’s cubie in there. If they do grab you, just tell them that you got out of L.A. but haven’t seen me.”
“They’d never believe that I left Los Angeles without you,” said Leonard.