Flashback

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 the 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