It seems that our convoy consists of twenty-three eighteen-wheelers, some of which are armed with mini-guns and other serious weapons, while we’re also accompanied by four combat vehicles and a small recon-attack helicopter. The combat vehicles—I forget the details about their armament and such, but Val visibly devoured every caliber and horsepower and armor fact with great interest—are manned by mercenaries from a security company called TrekSec and paid for by these independent truckers or their firms.
Perdita showed us on their satellite nav system that another such convoy, made up of seventeen vehicles, is traveling about fifteen miles ahead of us and a much larger one is about twenty-four miles behind us on I-15. They keep in touch with one another.
According to Julio, the main problem on the Las Vegas–to-Mesquite-and-beyond-to–St. George stretch of I-15 is bandits, although the reconquista still make their occasional foray into the southern reaches of Nevada. Nuevo Mexico’s cartels’ repeated failures at adding Las Vegas to their territory is, according to Julio, forcing the reconquista military forays to be less and less frequent. He added that the increasingly effective anglo guerrilla raids around Kingman and Flagstaff have pretty effectively tied down the N.M. occupation forces over the past year or two.
Our immediate problem, Julio and Perdita showed us, lies just beyond the embattled and mostly abandoned town of Mesquite ahead where I-15 crosses from Nevada to Arizona and from the Pacific Time Zone into the Mountain Time Zone: the twenty-nine miles of Interstate that make their tiny cut across the northwest corner of Arizona and then into Utah and north have been wonderfully scenic and composed mostly of elevated highway, but bandits and warring U.S. and N.M. forces have dropped most of those bridges and elevated sections over the past decade.
Because of the Mormon Range and other mountains that run north and south along the state border like a sheer wall, the convoys will take an entire day picking their way along rubble-strewn makeshift surface roads—just ruts through the tumbled boulders and slabs of the former highway—along the Virgin River into Utah. Julio showed us satellite images of the winding canyon road where the trucks will be vulnerable to any bandit on the clifftops who wants to roll rocks down on us.
—Can’t we just go around? asked Val. Take a detour to the north?
Perdita showed us how there are no roads except desert tracks and dry gullies along the forty miles or so north of Mesquite to the tiny, abandoned towns of Carp and Elgin along the misnamed Meadow Valley Wash dry river, then almost a two-hundred-mile detour on old state roads 93 and 319 into Utah on their battered Highway 56.
—The twenty-nine miles in Arizona called the Diagonal of Death by truckers is slow and dangerous, said Julio. But it’s still faster than any of the half-assed detours. We’re still truckers. We need to get products to their destination on time.
So tonight we’re sleeping in a defensive circle off the highway just short of the abandoned town of Bunkerville. The name is appropriate, since a few military bunkers remain here.
A mile to the east, the mountains rise up like some terrible obstacle in one of the J.R.R. Tolkien–inspired movies. The opening for the Virgin River and the former I-15 looks like a dark and open maw—waiting.
We’ll be moving at first light. Perdita assured us that with the recon helicopter and our convoy’s firepower, there shouldn’t be a serious confrontation—just ten hours of bumping and jolting along in the truck’s lowest gears.
Val said to me tonight—
—This is like those old World War Two B-seventeen movies the Old Man and I used to watch. These convoys are like those packs of bombers huddled together for protection against German fighter planes.
It was the first time in several years that I’d heard Val mention his father without overt hostility.
The cooking fires were doused by 9 p.m. tonight and there was no frivolity around the campfires. The mood was somber. There was no bluster. Everyone knows that tomorrow will be one of the most dangerous parts of the voyage but there’s almost no talk of it. Plans and preparations have been made.
I’m terrified about tomorrow’s slow, exposed twenty-nine-mile gauntlet, but Val seems quietly excited… almost enthusiastic. The immortality of youth, I suppose.
Later tonight, when everyone had turned in, I talked to him after I saw him shutting off the little cell phone he’d brought along and removing the earbud.
I’d noticed the old phone our second night out and challenged Val about it—he had, after all, insisted that I throw away my phone because it might be tracked by authorities chasing him—and he’d explained how it had been his mother’s, and how all of the phone and GPS chips had long since been removed. Reluctantly, he told me that he listened to the daily diary function on it just to hear his mother’s voice.
This fact made my chest ache.
Val was willing to say more. I’m fairly certain that his good mood and talkativeness were a direct result of the marijuana joint that he’d joined Julio and Henry Big Horse Begay and Gauge Devereaux and Cooper Jakes in smoking just an hour earlier around the last campfire of the evening. It had been my impression that Val had been using a lot of flashback over the past few years and perhaps some stronger drugs such as cocaine from time to time—I wasn’t sure about the latter—but had never got in the habit of smoking pot with his friends.
So now, in our high cots under the clear Kevlarglas air dam with the stars bright above us—the surprisingly effective acoustic curtain drawn between our cots and the Romanos’ bed below—Val gave me a very un-Val-like loopy smile and showed me the phone.
—It was my mom’s, your… you know. So like I said, it doesn’t have any of the trackable, traceable chips left in it—I pulled them out myself five years ago—but it’s got her daily voice reminders and a lot of text diary that I’d like to read but can’t.
I nodded but felt uneasy. This conversation was as thin and fragile as a stray strand of cobweb. The slightest wrong word or tone from me would, I knew, sever it or simply blow it away. I heard myself say softly…
—Are you sure you want to hear her voice and private thoughts, Val? Sometimes grown-ups say things in private that they wouldn’t necessarily want to have shared with…
Val grunted and shook his head and I knew that if it weren’t for the friendly effects of the potent grass that Joe Valdez and his wife, Juanita, had brought up from Old Mexico, I’d be looking at Val’s angry back. Instead, he kept talking to me.
—Yeah, yeah, yeah… but I think in that written diary there may be the clue I need to know why my old man turned against her… maybe even killed her.
—Killed her!
I shouted and actually clapped both hands over my mouth. Val cringed and looked toward the closed curtain. But there was no noise from Julio and Perdita below.
Nor did Val turn his back to me. Not yet. His whisper now was a fast, hot hiss, devoid of any joint-assisted relaxation.
—Leonard, you’ve asked me about a thousand times why I hate my old man. The answer might be in that encrypted diary text. It’s the main reason I’ve kept the goddamn phone all these years.
—Val, you don’t hate your father …, I began.
—I do, goddammit. I hate the cocksucker’s guts and if we somehow manage to get to Denver alive, I’m going to track him down to whatever flashback cave he’s rotting away in and kick him awake and put a bullet in his guts…
I had no idea what to say to this madness so I said nothing. It turned out to be the only way I could have kept the agitated boy talking.
—He found out that Mom was doing something, Leonard, and I think he killed her. Or had her killed. I really do.
I started to say something like—But your mother died in an auto accident, Val”—but I knew at
