Flashback

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.”