Flashback

“This Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev had better be worth it,” he muttered.

“Yes,” Sato agreed grimly. “He had better be worth it.”

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