Flashback

Realizing that part of his anger came from flashback withdrawal that was hitting him as well—he was sure he had a one-hour vial left, but the empty vial suggested that someone else must have found and used it, so Val hadn’t flashed for almost forty-eight hours now—Val turned his back on his grandfather and walked toward the huddle of truckdrivers, hunting for the tall, old Indian.

They crossed the Colorado state line around midnight.

Bandits were not a problem in Colorado for a convoy this large and security-protected and the reconquista armies only conducted nuisance raids this far north, but all but fifty or so miles of I-70 across half the broad state before Denver were through serious mountains, and lack of federal and state maintenance had turned the highway into its own obstacle. Twenty-five years earlier, Begay told him, a convoy of heavy trucks would have covered the 243 miles between Grand Junction in the west of the state to Denver in four hours—less if there were no Smokies waiting to pounce.

Now the trip took twelve hours. On a good day or night.

This was a good night, Begay grunted. The weather was holding. Pretty soon snowstorms would close Loveland Pass for the winter, and that was the end of the relatively easy I-70 access from Utah to Denver. After Loveland Pass closed, said Begay, truckers would have to take the northern route to Salt Lake City and then take I- 80 across Wyoming to Cheyenne and then south to Denver, adding hundreds of miles to the trip.

“Can’t they keep the pass plowed?” asked Val. “Just keep it open during the winter?”

Begay barked his Navajo laugh. “Who’s to pay for the plows and workers, kid? The state of Colorado? It’s been bankrupt longer than the federal government of the United Fucking States of Fucking America. Besides—there are other passes between here and there, including Vail Pass, that’ll be closed for good after the first couple of serious snowfalls.”

“Wasn’t there a tunnel?” asked Val, remembering something his old man or grandfather had said.

Begay nodded, his face all sharp, chiseled edges and points in the amber light from the dash instruments. He usually wore a black cowboy hat, but tonight it was just a band to hold his long hair back. “Yeah, the Eisenhower Tunnel at about eleven thousand feet. It went under the Continental Divide about sixty miles west of Denver. Two tunnels—one eastbound, one westbound. They were about a mile and a half long but they saved that last miserable fucking climb up Highway Six over Loveland Pass. I think the summit of the pass we’ll go over tonight is… I don’t know, around twelve thousand feet.”

“What happened to the tunnels?” asked Val and immediately wished he hadn’t. The lack of sleep and flashback withdrawal were making him stupid.

Begay just laughed. “One of the first things the motherfuckers blew up when things got weird after the Day It All Hit The Fan. Took the state and feds a year and a half to repair just one of the tunnels, get traffic flowing across the nation again in winter… three weeks later, they blew it up again. Pretty soon, like everything else in this fucking country gone down the drain, they just quit trying.”

Val nodded, trying to stay awake. “If the pass is just a thousand feet higher,” he said, voice thick with fatigue, “it shouldn’t make that much difference. Should it?”

Begay barked his laugh again. “You’ll see, kid. You’ll see.”

The highway was all but empty except for their convoy and a rare convoy headed westward. The quarter- moon and stars seemed very bright against the permanent snowfields that soon showed up on the peaks to either side.

Begay didn’t have a TV in the cab either but he kept his pirate radio blaring through the night. Val was used to the officially sanctioned sat radio stations—NPR, CNR, MSBR, VOA—but what Begay called his pirate radio pulled in a lot of unlicensed, fuzzy AM and FM pirate stations that blasted away through the night.

Most of them were right-wing talk radio, outlawed for years, and old Begay seemed to drink the crap up.

Val half dozed to the singsong revival-preacher-sounding right-wing polemics being shouted out by the all- night talk-jockeys, interrupted only by weird call-in programs where the people calling in were crazier and more right-wing than the radio announcers.

“The radio stations and announcers and engineers and shit have to keep moving,” Begay said at one point. “Stay one step ahead of DHS and the other feds.”

Val woke up for a few minutes at that but then started dozing to the rhythms of the radio gabble again.

“… no, we weren’t always like this, friends. Thirty years ago… twenty-five years ago, even… we were still a great nation. A united nation. Fifty full states, fifty stars on the flag. We chose decline, my friends. We chose national bankruptcy and the bankruptcy of forty-seven states to keep the government’s entitlement programs going… seventy-three percent of the population pays no taxes at all, my friends, but still expects cradle- to-grave health care, cradle-to-grave guaranteed employment with a minimum wage of four hundred and eighty dollars an hour, thirty-hour workweeks—when anyone chooses to work in this great, lost, botched, ruined nation of ours… and retirement at age fifty-eight with full Social Security benefits, even though there are now eighteen nonworking retirees in this country—including the eleven million illegal immigrants who’ve just received the most recent amnesty and citizenship—yes, eighteen nonworking retirees for every working American in this country that’s forgotten what hard work really is…”

The voices droned on. Val half slept.

Just a few hours beyond Grand Junction, they ran into one of the reasons that it took twelve hours rather than four to get from Grand Junction to Denver.

Just past an abandoned husk of a mountain town called Glenwood Springs—with food distribution all but broken down except for major cities, little towns across the nation had just dried up, but especially impossible-to- get-to-in-winter mountain towns—there was a twelve-mile stretch of canyon, Begay said, that had been one of the most spectacular dozen or so miles in the entire continental U.S.’s grid of Interstate highways.

No more.

What had been double ribbons of elevated two-lane highways, the westbound lanes rising forty feet above the eastbound lanes for miles and miles, punctuated with lighted and well-ventilated tunnels through stubborn outcroppings of the sheer cliffs that rose more than a thousand feet on either side, slicing the sky into a thin sliver of stars, was now a narrow two-lane gravel road, filled with potholes and hard curves around fallen boulders and tumbled sections of the Interstate itself, where the convoy crept and bounced and jounced along in low gear beside the churning, dam-broke, no-longer-harnessed Colorado River.

But after ninety minutes or so to get through those twelve miles, they were back on battered but serviceable concrete and asphalt again and Begay was shifting up through the gears.

“God, I’d love to learn how to do that,” said Val.

Henry Big Horse Begay looked at him and then back at the road and taillights ahead of them. “What? Shift gears? There’s sixteen forward gears on this lovely baby. Four back. That’s what you want to learn? How to shift and split gears on a big rig?”

“Just how to drive a truck,” said Val. The fatigue and withdrawal were working on him like sodium pentothal. Or just turning him into a baby again, he thought.

Begay nodded. “Yeah, Gauge said that you was going to ask me that. The answer’s yes… maybe. I’ll give you a week or two’s tryout, riding shotgun. Learning the gears. You can pay me as we go. Providing you got the NICC, of course.”

“I don’t,” said Val. He was very close to tears. If he started blubbering like a baby here, he thought he might throw himself out the door toward the white-watered Colorado churning by to their right. “I won’t have one,” he managed. “No fucking money to buy one with. And no fucking time.”

“Time?” said Begay.

“Devereaux says it takes weeks… sometimes a month… to get the NIC Card, even when you can pay for it. You guys are leaving… when? Sunday morning in the middle of the night sometime?”

“For Chrissakes, kid. I wasn’t talking about this weekend. I’m coming back through Denver in late October, right before Halloween. You got the NICC then, I’ll give you a week or two probation. No promises, though. You fuck up the way I think you probably will, I’ll leave you by the side of the goddamned road. That’s a damn promise.”

Val could only stare and keep himself from bawling after all.