Flashback

2.03 I-70 West of Denver—Friday, Sept. 24

Val felt that he was being held high on some invisible cable, dangling between Heaven and Hell. Sometimes he rose until he could see light. More often, he dropped precipitously until the loose cable snagged on something and brought him up just short of black crags, sulfurous pits. But, dangled there in darkness, he never reached either place. Val had come to welcome either destination just so long as he could arrive. This Friday night, he was near Heaven.

The irony, of course, amusing only to himself, was that Val Bottom didn’t believe in either Heaven or Hell and never had.

Utah was a sort of Heaven. It was one of the few states left in what was laughably still called the Union that actually repaired and policed its highways, even the Interstates that had once been under federal control and maintenance. Once the twenty-nine-mile gauntlet of the Virgin River Diagonal was successfully run—bandits had fired on them from the cliffs for two-thirds of the way, but their security SUVs had returned fire until the convoy could pass with no real casualties—the drive north in Utah on I-15 and then east on I-70 toward Colorado was more like an easy, high-speed excursion from the days of the Old Man’s childhood than anything Val had ever experienced.

Eastern Utah from the tiny town of Richfield not far past the junction of I-15 and I-70 for the two hundred miles or so to the Colorado state line was the most magnificently empty upthrust of ancient mountains, sandstone ridges, and high plateaus that Val had ever seen. He’d never even imagined such a place.

For the last two days, Val had spent most of his days and nights riding in the cabs with two of the solo drivers—the black man Gauge Devereaux and the Navajo Henry Big Horse Begay.

The previous night, driving down from the Utah high country, Devereaux had seen the bulge in Val’s jacket where he kept the Beretta tucked in his belt behind his back and had asked to see the gun. Discombobulated, Val had finally pulled the weapon from his belt, slid the magazine out, and handed the semiautomatic to the driver.

“You left one in the spout,” said Devereaux. Taking his left hand from the steering wheel for a moment, the big man ratcheted the slide, caught the cartridge in midair, and handed it to the boy. Val thumbed it into the magazine.

Devereaux sniffed the muzzle and breach. Val knew that even after several days, the stink of cordite was in the weapon.

“Been shooting somebody?” said the driver.

Val remembered Billy grunting “Ugh” and the blotching red circle expanding above Vladimir Putin’s face on the T-shirt. He remembered the sound of Coyne’s front teeth hitting the concrete after the second, killing shot, and flinched despite himself.

“Target practice,” he said.

Devereaux nodded. “Nice gun. You need to keep it clean.”

They rode in silence for a while. I-Seventy had been dropping out of the mountains since sunset back near Richfield an hour or two earlier, and as they approached the exit to the abandoned city of Green River, starlight and moonlight now painted more high desert than the tortured sandstone and granite they’d been descending through.

Val tried not to think of Billy Coyne. It had been with him constantly, mostly at night, when it kept him awake, and much of the emotion had been encysted in the single thought—I’ve killed a human being. The thought and images made him almost sick at times, especially toward dawn, but there was also something darkly exciting—almost ecstatic—in the memories of those minutes in the tunnel. Part of Val wished he could go back and live it again just to feel the sense of power and release that had flowed through him when he’d put those two bullets into Billy Coyne’s chest and throat.

But so far, Val hadn’t used one of his vials of flashback to relive it. Doing that seemed… dirty… for some reason.

He was watching the convoy lights and highway stripes ahead of them and drifting into sleep when Devereaux’s voice startled him awake.

“You really thinking of trying to be an independent trucker?”

“Yeah,” said Val. “I mean, I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Yeah, that’s the way I was when I was thinking about it. But it’s doable, if you decide to try. About one fucking kid in a thousand who says he can be an independent driver actually makes it. But it’ll take some money up front.”

Here it comes, thought Val. Somehow Devereaux was going to offer him some lameshit path to trucking, if he handed x amount of cash over to Gauge Devereaux. The world’s bullshit just keeps on coming.

But no, the driver was talking about something else.

“I’m not talking about the fortune it takes to buy your own rig. That comes years later.”

“How’d you get the money for this cab?” asked Val.

“Luck,” said Devereaux, shifting the toothpick that he was always chewing on from one side of his mouth to the other. “And with the way the price of rigs is going up, you’ll need even more luck… and balls… than I had. But I’m just talking about getting started. You know, riding shotgun as relief driver for a good solo long-distance guy those first few years. That’s possible… if…”

Here it comes, thought Val.

“If what?” he said.

“If you got a decent fake National Identity and Credit Card with a passable name and background and a decent fake Teamsters Union holo in it,” said Devereaux. The black man shot a glance sideways at Val. “My guess is that you wouldn’t want to use your own card for personal reasons… right?”

Val hesitated, then nodded.

“So you’ll need the best sort of fake card… the kind that can get you through all the various highway patrol and weigh station and militia roadblocks. But it’ll cost you about two hundred bucks… old bucks.”

“Let me guess,” Val said tiredly. “You can get one for me.”

Devereaux took his eyes off the road for a long moment as he glared at Val. “Fuck you, kid. I’m not saying I can get you shit and it’s not like you have two hundred old bucks. You or that loony professor of a granddad you got riding back there with Perdita and Julio. I’m not offering nothing but advice, and it was going to be for free. But fuck you.”

“I’m sorry,” said Val. And he meant it. “I’m… tired. Sorta worn out. I haven’t been sleeping and… I mean, yeah, I’d love to get a new NICC. But how? Where?”

Devereaux drove in silence for several minutes. Finally, shifting down to get up a rare rising grade in the long descent to flatness, he growled, “There’s a guy in Denver. A lot of new solos use him to get their Teamsters NICC. The last I heard, he charged two hundred old bucks. It’s probably gone up.”

“You’re right,” said Val. “I don’t have the money. Neither does Leonard.”

Devereaux shrugged. “Then it doesn’t matter, does it?”

“But I’d still like his name,” said Val, sitting up straight and rubbing his face to wake up more. “If I got a Teamsters NICC, could I ride shotgun with you?”

“I’m a real solo,” grunted Devereaux. “I don’t haul no snot-nosed apprentices with me. But there’s a lot of guys who do.”

“Like who?”

“Like Henry Big Horse Begay. He’s got a kid riding and learning from him about half the time. Doesn’t charge them much, either.” Devereaux shot Val another glance. “Henry’s not queer, either. He likes teenage girls and younger, but none of them seem to want to be solo long-distance truckers. So old Begay takes punks like you under his wing.”

“How much of a charge would ‘not much’ be?” asked Val.

Devereaux shrugged again. “Beer money for the old fart. But in terms of learning trucking, riding a few months or a year with Henry Big Horse Begay is like going to Harvard or Princeton or one of those schools for… you know… someone like a young version of your granddad.”

Val licked his chapped, broken lips. “Do you think he’d let me hook up with him east out of Denver?”

The driver shook his head. “This convoy is getting into Denver tomorrow and laying over there about twelve hours, kid. Long enough to deliver our Denver shit, get a new trailer filled with shit headed east, get some sleep, and then we’ll be rolling toward Kansas City on I-Seventy by two a.m. Sunday. That wouldn’t give you enough time to find this fucking guy who does the NICCs. And it takes a while for those cards to get made up—usually about two weeks. That’s assuming you got the cash to pay this guy with up front.”

Fuck, thought Val.

“But I’ll give you the guy’s name and the last address in Denver I had for him,” said Devereaux. “There’s a piss stop coming up in about ten miles. Go ride with Henry for the rest of the night and talk to him about this apprentice shit. He’ll explain to you why it ain’t easy—why so few punks like you actually learn how to become long-distance drivers—but at least you’ll keep the old redskin awake during our drive through the Colorado Rockies ’til dawn.”

“Thanks” was all that Val could manage. His chest hurt for some reason.

Devereaux said nothing for the rest of the ride.

The former interstate rest stop was on a high ridge overlooking a desert valley ten or twelve miles across. Beyond that point I-70 rose into low, rocky mountains again, but Devereaux had shown Val on the truck’s GPS altimeter that it was essentially all downhill into Colorado after this final climb.

Below in the starlit and moonlit valley, a dirt road ran twenty or so miles from the south, passed under the Interstate overpass built just for it, and ended at a scorched area that had once been an Indian-run general store, gas station, and a few huddled houses and trailers. Those were gone now, even the windbreak of trees north of the absent structures burned away.

Also gone were the restroom facilities at this high ridgetop turnout. Someone had blown them up more than a decade ago, although why someone would come way out here in the middle of nowhere and waste ammunition or C4 or dynamite on blowing up a restroom, Val had no idea. That’s just the way things were everywhere. Once vandalism turns into wholesale destruction, his grandfather was always pointing out—a society tearing itself apart from the inside, as it were—it was hard to stop the dynamic. There were now trucker-dug slit trenches in the shrubs where the men could shit, slit trenches in the higher junipers on the south side of the turnout for women, and rocks overhanging the cliff face where the men pissed.

Val found his grandfather standing back from the edge, shifting from foot to foot in the chilly pre-winter night wind. Val knew that Leonard wouldn’t join the drivers and other men in pissing over the edge. Leonard was shy that way. Val knew that the old man would hold it in all the way to Denver if he had to.

“I’ll be riding with Henry Big Horse Begay the rest of the night and into Denver,” he told Leonard.

His grandfather hesitated as if deciding whether to permit it, realized that Val hadn’t asked for permission, and nodded. With his skinny silhouette, his hands tucked in the pockets of the inadequate windbreaker, and his long white hair blowing in the cold wind, Leonard looked old to Val—really old, aged during this trip, King Lear old.

Val, who’d already pissed alongside Gauge Devereaux and the other men—enjoying watching his stream of urine joining the others arcing out in the moonlight, brighter ribbons against the dark, desert-varnished cliff face beneath them—spent another minute standing alongside his visibly tired, cold, and unhappy grandfather.

“Val, have you been watching satellite-TV news coverage of the fighting in Los Angeles?” his grandfather asked, voice dropping as if the topic were toxic.

“No. Devereaux doesn’t even have a TV in his cab. Still bad?”

“Worse. The city seems to be coming apart for good.”

Good, thought Val. He’d hated L.A. every day of the five years and eleven days he’d spent in it. His hope had been that a new Big One would swallow it completely, but this scorched-earth fighting would suffice.

“The governor has declared martial law and is asking Washington for help,” continued his grandfather. “But there just aren’t any resources to commit to the fight.”

Good, Val thought again. He said, “So your pal, Emilio whatshisname, and the reconquistas aren’t taking over like they thought they would, huh?”

“Evidently not,” said Leonard, glancing at the clumps of drivers smoking and talking and showing no eagerness to get back into their heated cabs. “It’s a good thing we both got out when we did, Val.”

Tell me something new, Leonard. Val nodded and zipped up his old leather jacket. Julio had given him an old indie-trucker ball cap and he wore that now constantly, even when he slept, pulled low. “Have you given any more thought to what Mom’s password might’ve been, Grandpa?”

He saw Leonard hesitate and wasn’t sure what it meant. He’d told the old man about the encrypted material deliberately, of course, figuring that Leonard—who was great at crossword puzzles and basic cryptography in the first place—might have a clue as to some word that would have been important to his daughter. But it wasn’t necessary for Val to have that huge clump of text, or text and images, or video, or whatever the hell it was, decrypted.

Val already had enough proof that his father had somehow conspired to murder his mother and must pay the penalty for that.

He reached back and felt the Beretta snug in his belt against his back.

“I have given it some thought,” said Leonard. “I may have some suggestions when we’re together next. This is our last night before we reach Denver—if all goes well in the Colorado mountains—so are you sure you want to ride with this Mr. Begay?”

“Yeah,” said Val. Then, almost without volition, he asked, “Grandpa, do we have two hundred bucks left?”

“Yes… yes, we have more… wait, Val, do you mean new dollars or old dollars?”

“Old dollars.”

Leonard looked shocked. “No, of course not. I spent almost everything I had—that we had—to get us on this convoy, Val. You know that. For what, may I ask, do you need two hundred old dollars, almost three hundred thousand new bucks?”

Val almost smiled at the old man’s determination not to let a preposition dangle. Or was that a participle that dangled? Fuck it.

“Something really important,” he said. “Something that might let me be a trucker.”

“Well, that might be a laudable goal someday, Val. Although I’d hoped that, with your intelligence and general acumen, college might be…”

“I don’t want it someday, Leonard,” he said, letting his disgust at the old man’s slowness be heard. “I want to leave Denver with this convoy on Sunday. But I’d need two hundred old bucks to make it happen. Maybe a little more.” Never mind that Devereaux said that it’d take weeks or a month to get the fake Teamster-approved NICC anyway. It’s the principle of the thing with Leonard that’s important.

His grandfather merely shook his head. “I don’t have it, Val. Not close. Not nearly close. We barely have enough to get by for a day or two once we get to Denver. I only hope your father is there and reachable.”

“Why wouldn’t he be?” said Val, thrusting his own balled-up fists deep in the pockets of his leather jacket. “He’s a fucking flash addict. He’ll be there, all right. He just won’t be awake or able to talk or remember who the fuck we are. Oh, yeah, it’s gonna be a great reunion. Just don’t have your hopes up that Nick Bottom’s gonna feed us and give us shelter and pay our way, Leonard. He’s a flash-junkie fuck-up and has been for years.”

Realizing that part of his anger came from flashback withdrawal that was hitting him as well—he was sure he had a one-hour vial left, but the empty vial suggested that someone else must have found and used it, so Val hadn’t flashed for almost forty-eight hours now—Val turned his back on his grandfather and walked toward the huddle of truckdrivers, hunting for the tall, old Indian.

They crossed the Colorado state line around midnight.

Bandits were not a problem in Colorado for a convoy this large and security-protected and the reconquista armies only conducted nuisance raids this far north, but all but fifty or so miles of I-70 across half the broad state before Denver were through serious mountains, and lack of federal and state maintenance had turned the highway into its own obstacle. Twenty-five years earlier, Begay told him, a convoy of heavy trucks would have covered the 243 miles between Grand Junction in the west of the state to Denver in four hours—less if there were no Smokies waiting to pounce.

Now the trip took twelve hours. On a good day or night.

This was a good night, Begay grunted. The weather was holding. Pretty soon snowstorms would close Loveland Pass for the winter, and that was the end of the relatively easy I-70 access from Utah to Denver. After Loveland Pass closed, said Begay, truckers would have to take the northern route to Salt Lake City and then take I-80 across Wyoming to Cheyenne and then south to Denver, adding hundreds of miles to the trip.

“Can’t they keep the pass plowed?” asked Val. “Just keep it open during the winter?”

Begay barked his Navajo laugh. “Who’s to pay for the plows and workers, kid? The state of Colorado? It’s been bankrupt longer than the federal government of the United Fucking States of Fucking America. Besides—there are other passes between here and there, including Vail Pass, that’ll be closed for good after the first couple of serious snowfalls.”

“Wasn’t there a tunnel?” asked Val, remembering something his old man or grandfather had said.

Begay nodded, his face all sharp, chiseled edges and points in the amber light from the dash instruments. He usually wore a black cowboy hat, but tonight it was just a band to hold his long hair back. “Yeah, the Eisenhower Tunnel at about eleven thousand feet. It went under the Continental Divide about sixty miles west of Denver. Two tunnels—one eastbound, one westbound. They were about a mile and a half long but they saved that last miserable fucking climb up Highway Six over Loveland Pass. I think the summit of the pass we’ll go over tonight is… I don’t know, around twelve thousand feet.”

“What happened to the tunnels?” asked Val and immediately wished he hadn’t. The lack of sleep and flashback withdrawal were making him stupid.

Begay just laughed. “One of the first things the motherfuckers blew up when things got weird after the Day It All Hit The Fan. Took the state and feds a year and a half to repair just one of the tunnels, get traffic flowing across the nation again in winter… three weeks later, they blew it up again. Pretty soon, like everything else in this fucking country gone down the drain, they just quit trying.”

Val nodded, trying to stay awake. “If the pass is just a thousand feet higher,” he said, voice thick with fatigue, “it shouldn’t make that much difference. Should it?”

Begay barked his laugh again. “You’ll see, kid. You’ll see.”

The highway was all but empty except for their convoy and a rare convoy headed westward. The quarter-moon and stars seemed very bright against the permanent snowfields that soon showed up on the peaks to either side.

Begay didn’t have a TV in the cab either but he kept his pirate radio blaring through the night. Val was used to the officially sanctioned sat radio stations—NPR, CNR, MSBR, VOA—but what Begay called his pirate radio pulled in a lot of unlicensed, fuzzy AM and FM pirate stations that blasted away through the night.

Most of them were right-wing talk radio, outlawed for years, and old Begay seemed to drink the crap up.

Val half dozed to the singsong revival-preacher-sounding right-wing polemics being shouted out by the all-night talk-jockeys, interrupted only by weird call-in programs where the people calling in were crazier and more right-wing than the radio announcers.

“The radio stations and announcers and engineers and shit have to keep moving,” Begay said at one point. “Stay one step ahead of DHS and the other feds.”

Val woke up for a few minutes at that but then started dozing to the rhythms of the radio gabble again.

“… no, we weren’t always like this, friends. Thirty years ago… twenty-five years ago, even… we were still a great nation. A united nation. Fifty full states, fifty stars on the flag. We chose decline, my friends. We chose national bankruptcy and the bankruptcy of forty-seven states to keep the government’s entitlement programs going… seventy-three percent of the population pays no taxes at all, my friends, but still expects cradle-to-grave health care, cradle-to-grave guaranteed employment with a minimum wage of four hundred and eighty dollars an hour, thirty-hour workweeks—when anyone chooses to work in this great, lost, botched, ruined nation of ours… and retirement at age fifty-eight with full Social Security benefits, even though there are now eighteen nonworking retirees in this country—including the eleven million illegal immigrants who’ve just received the most recent amnesty and citizenship—yes, eighteen nonworking retirees for every working American in this country that’s forgotten what hard work really is…”

The voices droned on. Val half slept.

Just a few hours beyond Grand Junction, they ran into one of the reasons that it took twelve hours rather than four to get from Grand Junction to Denver.

Just past an abandoned husk of a mountain town called Glenwood Springs—with food distribution all but broken down except for major cities, little towns across the nation had just dried up, but especially impossible-to-get-to-in-winter mountain towns—there was a twelve-mile stretch of canyon, Begay said, that had been one of the most spectacular dozen or so miles in the entire continental U.S.’s grid of Interstate highways.

No more.

What had been double ribbons of elevated two-lane highways, the westbound lanes rising forty feet above the eastbound lanes for miles and miles, punctuated with lighted and well-ventilated tunnels through stubborn outcroppings of the sheer cliffs that rose more than a thousand feet on either side, slicing the sky into a thin sliver of stars, was now a narrow two-lane gravel road, filled with potholes and hard curves around fallen boulders and tumbled sections of the Interstate itself, where the convoy crept and bounced and jounced along in low gear beside the churning, dam-broke, no-longer-harnessed Colorado River.

But after ninety minutes or so to get through those twelve miles, they were back on battered but serviceable concrete and asphalt again and Begay was shifting up through the gears.

“God, I’d love to learn how to do that,” said Val.

Henry Big Horse Begay looked at him and then back at the road and taillights ahead of them. “What? Shift gears? There’s sixteen forward gears on this lovely baby. Four back. That’s what you want to learn? How to shift and split gears on a big rig?”

“Just how to drive a truck,” said Val. The fatigue and withdrawal were working on him like sodium pentothal. Or just turning him into a baby again, he thought.

Begay nodded. “Yeah, Gauge said that you was going to ask me that. The answer’s yes… maybe. I’ll give you a week or two’s tryout, riding shotgun. Learning the gears. You can pay me as we go. Providing you got the NICC, of course.”

“I don’t,” said Val. He was very close to tears. If he started blubbering like a baby here, he thought he might throw himself out the door toward the white-watered Colorado churning by to their right. “I won’t have one,” he managed. “No fucking money to buy one with. And no fucking time.”

“Time?” said Begay.

“Devereaux says it takes weeks… sometimes a month… to get the NIC Card, even when you can pay for it. You guys are leaving… when? Sunday morning in the middle of the night sometime?”

“For Chrissakes, kid. I wasn’t talking about this weekend. I’m coming back through Denver in late October, right before Halloween. You got the NICC then, I’ll give you a week or two probation. No promises, though. You fuck up the way I think you probably will, I’ll leave you by the side of the goddamned road. That’s a damn promise.”

Val could only stare and keep himself from bawling after all.

Begay turned the radio up.

“… that president pursued a policy that flattered and encouraged our enemies, alienated our allies, and abandoned Israel to be destroyed by a country that had nuclear weapons that we could have prevented, my friends! The United States could have prevented the Islamic Republic of Iran… the heart of the current Global Caliphate… from ever having those weapons! Now that country… and that Caliphate… have thousands of atom bombs and this country, after our big deal with the Russians five years before that country went belly up, has, by the final START treaty, twenty-six bombs. Twenty-six! And no way to deliver ’em and no will to deliver ’em and…”

Val dozed off.

They came out of the mountains above Denver at about ten o’clock in the morning. The roar of gears and engine had wakened Val during the climb over Loveland Pass and it would always remain one of the most terrifying things he’d ever experienced.

The long 6 percent and steeper grade of the last dozen miles or so out of the mountains toward Denver, the high-rises gleaming in the midmorning light ahead, was all lower-gear, high-revving engines braking by compression, and the stink of overheated brakes. Two of the trucks in the convoy had to use runaway truck ramps.

And then they were down. Val could see other cars on I-70 and the adjoining roads and highways. It was the first real traffic they’d seen for hours. It made him dizzy.

“One thing I gotta ask you before we seal this maybe deal,” said Henry Big Horse Begay, switching off the radio. This close to a major city, it was NPR and the other official stations.

“What’s that?” asked Val. He was terrified that the Indian was going to renege on his offer. With a month to get the $200 old bucks—maybe steal it from the Old Man before shooting the bastard, although Val doubted that the old flashback addict would have that much anywhere—and then to get the NICC, he might just be ready for Begay.

“That piece you had in your belt in the back and been shiftin’ around, furtive-like, all night so it wouldn’t dig into your back or side or gut. You ever shoot it?”

Val hesitated. Finally, not knowing what the right answer was, he said, “Yeah.”

“Not at a goddamned target or rabbit or some such, I mean,” said Begay, taking his full attention off the road ahead and laying it on Val. “I mean at a living person. A man.”

“Yeah,” breathed Val.

“Hit him?”

“Yeah.”

“Kill him?” Begay’s eyes were flinty lie detectors.

Val tried to swallow. Couldn’t.

“Yeah.”

They were approaching the interchange with I-25, but the old one had been blown up. There was a temporary gravel ramp. The convoy was shifting down, bouncing down the grade in unison.

“Did he deserve it?” asked Henry Big Horse Begay.

Val started to answer with the same syllable he’d been using and then stopped. This question had been most of what had kept him awake at night the last week. He cleared his throat.

“I don’t know,” said Val. “Probably not. But I think it was either him or me. I chose me.”

Begay drove south on I-25 in silence for several minutes.

“All right,” he said at last. “I’m gonna be coming back through here—Ăttsé Hashké permitting—around October twenty-seven. Supposed to be at the big loading docks at the South Broadway GOVCO Center all that afternoon. I’ll look for you. Schedule now says the convoy leaves at eight p.m. You ain’t there, I won’t ever look for you again.”

“I’ll be there,” said Val.