Flashback

1.21 San Antonio, Republic of Texas—Saturday, Feb. 26

Nick awoke gasping and sweating from his nightmare.

It was the old nightmare. The recurring nightmare. The NCAR nightmare.

He got out of his barracks bed, peeled off his sweat-soaked T-shirt, and flung it across the bedroom. He went into the tiny bathroom wearing only his boxer shorts, splashed water on his face and neck, and toweled himself off.

He walked into his kitchen and looked out the window as the sun was rising. Nick was on the tenth floor of the Texas Rangers barracks in San Antonio, formerly the Menger Hotel on East Crockett Street, and he didn’t like it that the Alamo was right across the street in the plaza named after it, the resurrected old mission visible in all its stony reality. He didn’t like it because he’d dreamt about it once—the Camaro dream—and Nick Bottom no longer trusted dreams.

He watched the sun touch the curved-bedstead gray-stone top of the Alamo.

His T-shirt off, Nick looked down at his body. It carried its scars: the wounds in his belly from the knifing in Santa Fe years ago; the scars on his leg from when they’d set the broken bone there five months ago in Texline; the lesser scars on his face and hands and back.

But it was the tiny spiderweb of scars on his deeply tanned left forearm that drew Nick’s attention now.

He went back to the bedroom and came back into the kitchen with the switchblade knife that was part of his Ranger kit. Many of the men carried huge knives—some actual Bowie knives—but Nick carried only this city switchblade, as sharp as a scalpel. He’d brought iodine and rubbing alcohol from the bathroom.

The phone-computer screen was on and winking. There was a new message from Val. Nick set the iodine and alcohol bottles and knife on the counter and tapped open the message.

It was as brief as all Val’s e-mails were. He was coming back from Boston with a southwest-bound convoy in March and would like to see the Old Man if he was still going to be at the San Antonio Rangers Company D barracks. If not, next time through. How was Leonard doing?

Leonard was doing pretty damned good, thought Nick, thanks to an aortic valve surgery that would cost Nick almost thirty thousand dollars. Texas dollars. He was paying the bill a little each month out of his lieutenant-detective Ranger salary. There were a few years of installments still ahead.

It was worth it.

An e-mail from the poet Danny Oz was waiting. Oz was going back to Israel—that radioactive wasteland that used to be Israel—in the Big Push in May. The Japanese and Republic of Texas forces were bringing 1,100,000 Jews—some expatriates, many from America and other countries—back to the Mideast this summer.

The beachhead had been cleared by American and Japanese conventional forces, but the returning Jews would have to hold it. And expand it. Oz wrote that his cancer was in remission and even if it were not, he’d be returning with the Big Push and let cancer and the Caliphate do their worst.

Nick was sure the Caliphate would.

But their worst might not be as bad as it would have been a few months earlier. The new Shogun of Nippon had warned the core Islamic states of the Caliphate that any use of nuclear weapons on the Caliphate’s part would be met by an instantaneous gee-bear and nuclear retaliation, but not, at least initially, on their crowded cities. The Shogun had specified that the seven holiest Islamic shrines would be destroyed—each after twenty-four hours’ evacuation warning—should the jihadist forces ever use weapons of mass destruction against anyone again. To show his new allies’ earnestness in this promise, the Shogun had given twenty-four hours’ warning and used fifty gee-bears to vaporize a minor Shi’ite shrine in Basra as an example.

If Al Jazeera coverage was to be believed, more than a billion citizens of the Caliphate literally went into convulsions and foamed at the mouth at this sacrilege. More than fifty thousand people died in urban riots.

But no weapons of mass destruction had been used by the Global Caliphate against the beachhead near where Haifa used to be.

Next year in Jerusalem! Oz had written at the end of his note. Nick knew that it was a serious invitation.

Well, why not? Professor Emeritus Dr. George Leonard Fox was going. The old man with his new cloned heart valve—friskier than ever, in his own words—would be there on the beachhead with 1,099,999 other Jews.

Dara had never told him that her father was a Jew. It must have slipped her mind.

Nick wouldn’t be going to the New Israel any time soon. Starting today, his Ranger division—12,000 men and women strong—was moving across the border into New Mexico with more than 200,000 men and women in the Republic of Texas Sam Houston Army.

The armored forces were tasked with clearing out the last of the “foreign presence” in the once and future states of New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California. Then the armored divisions would sweep south, at least as far as Monterrey and Torreón and Culiacán. They would decide about Ciudad de México later.

To those who cried “Imperialism!”—and there were many of those kind left in what were now being called the Timid States of America—the answer was “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of your neighbor’s kitchen.”

The last e-mail was from Dr. Linda Alvarez, a woman Nick had met at a Christmas party on the Riverwalk and with whom he’d spent quite a lot of time since New Year’s. He would open that e-mail later.

I’ll tell you more about her later, Dara.

When he’d been using flashback, Nick had never sent mental e-mails to Dara. He hadn’t really thought about her much in those days. He hadn’t needed to, since he was reliving hours and days with her constantly. But those were frozen memories. Now, without flashback, his thoughts turned to Dara often—even as the immediacy of her touch and look faded for him—and he sent her a daily mental e-mail. They were brief, but not as brief as Val’s two-sentence notes.

We have to learn to accept our losses. It was not a pseudo-profound thought that Nick was generating, but something Major Trevors had said in the Company D briefing the day before. The losses for the Texas Rangers should not be too dear—they were following the army as a civilian infrastructure and police force.

But one never knew.

In three weeks, Omura’s troops—Sato’s commandos plus the California and Washington State National Guards—would be going into Canada to face the Caliphate militias assembled there. That might be fierce fighting with many losses to face. Nick rather wished he’d be part of it… but not all that much. Not when he was spending time with Dr. Linda Alvarez. Or when reading a good book. Or watching one of his old movies. Or waiting for one of Val’s rare overnight layovers.

We have to learn to accept our losses.

Nick was ready. He’d already learned the hard part, he thought.

He set a towel on the counter. Then he flicked the scalpel-sharp switchblade open and dipped the slender blade in alcohol. He leaned on the kitchen counter, the city coming alive with morning light outside his window, the Alamo glowing—today was some sort of anniversary for it, he’d heard—and then Nick drew the blade across his forearm until blood welled up and flowed in rivulets down his forearm and soaked in red butterflies into the towel.

Nick dug the knife blade in deeper, clenching his teeth as he moved the blade into his flesh. He’d cut to the bone if he had to.

But no, this pain was enough. It was a sharp, real, undeniable pain. It was precisely the sort of pain that Flashback-two would never allow in its dreams. Never.

Nick withdrew the blade, treated the wound, then quickly bandaged it. There would be a scar there but it would soon join the dozens of others in the small spiderweb of scars.

For this Nick Bottom had learned from his Dream—from his years of drugged dreaming—Being alive means suffering pain. Being willing to suffer pain.

Nick finished tidying up, cleaned and put away the knife, tossed the towel in the tub to soak, and put water and coffee into the coffeemaker. What the hell—he was going to make a big breakfast today: eggs, bacon, toast, the whole nine yards. Muster wasn’t until 0900, but it was going to be a long day and he didn’t know when he’d eat again.

You can’t have life without pain, Nick now understood. You can’t have a future without pain. Being alive means having the strength to face pain and loss and to find something real through it and beyond it.

Anything less is just flashback.