acquitted. In less than a week of rioting, thousands of fires were set—many of the burned-out areas still had not been rebuilt, forty years later—and more than fifty people had died with a couple of thousand injured.
Leonard had thought of those riots that morning when he’d heard details of how an entire company of
This upset Leonard. He wondered how his friend Emilio Gabriel Fernandez y Figueroa and Emilio’s son Eduardo were. He wished them well. There was no doubt in George Leonard Fox’s mind that even though he’d demanded payment, Emilio had saved Val’s life—and perhaps Leonard’s as well—by getting them out of Los Angeles nine days ago.
Leonard noticed that Val had led them up a flight of steps out of the sunken Cherry Creek walkway and onto the street-level sidewalk that ran alongside Speer Boulevard. There were fewer bicyclists on the pathway below, Leonard saw, and many more homeless filling the path and riverside banks.
He’d just been thinking about the Alamo—he’d once proofread a friend’s essay about Texas’s Alamo and the fighting of February–March 1836, where Travis, Crockett, Bowie, and the others had died at the hands of General Santa Anna, the essay focusing on the failure in leadership of Sam Houston, Austin, and the other self-named Texians—so he was surprised to see the greensward of Denver’s Alamo Placita Park across the street to the north. On the south side of the boulevard was the smaller Hungarian Freedom Park.
There were hundreds of hovels and tattered tents in both parks, but especially in the Hungarian Freedom Park just to their right, and many more hundreds of the homeless, mostly men, milling around.
Val dropped back next to Leonard. “Stay close to me, Grandpa.”
A group of the lean, angry-looking men, perhaps twenty-five or so, crossed the busy street to the median sidewalk and began following them.
Speer Boulevard turned into East First Avenue here and ran due east and west. To their right now was a high fence shutting off access to what had once been the Denver Country Club with its extensive grounds. Cherry Creek disappeared into that forbidden area.
Across the street to the north was one of the oldest wealthy areas of Denver with shaded streets and what had once been multimillion-old-dollar homes, small estates, really, set back on deep lawns. Now those houses were in ruins, many burned down, others occupied by street people or turned into low-quality flashcaves.
The group of men behind them rushed to cross South Downing Street and catch up to them.
Val dropped Leonard’s duffel bag, turned around, and removed the Beretta pistol from his belt.
The group of men stopped about thirty feet away. They launched curses and one threw a small rock from the street, but—still cursing and flashing obscene gestures—they turned around and headed back toward the Hungarian Freedom Park.
Leonard found that he was having some trouble breathing as Val tucked the pistol back into his belt, picked up his grandfather’s duffel bag, and, gripping Leonard’s elbow firmly, moved him more quickly down the sidewalk outside the country club barriers.
“I’m surprised they didn’t have guns themselves,” managed Leonard when he could talk. He kept glancing back over his shoulder.
“If they had guns,” said Val, “they wouldn’t be homeless. And we’d be dead. Let’s keep moving.”
Passing the entrance to the country club, Leonard’s heart pounding from the exertion and adrenaline in his system, he looked into the grounds and saw blue tents pitched everywhere on what had been the tennis courts and an eighteen-hole golf course behind the large main buildings. In the few clear areas, those large swivel-wing planes the military called VTOLs or… what was it?… Ospreys were lined up, their engines and propellers aimed skyward.
“I wonder what…,” he began.
“Keep walking, Grandpa. We’re almost there.”
Leonard’s son-in-law’s shopping-mall-turned-cubies took up a very long and wide city block, with the river at its backside. High fences and razor wire between the former mall’s parking garage and the river kept squatters from taking up residence along the banks. Across Cherry Creek to the south, Leonard and Val could see more expensive condominium complexes guarded by more razor wire, gun positions, gates, and private security guards. This side of the river was more problematic.
Leonard remembered Cherry Creek as one of the most upscale shopping districts in Colorado. Now the two-to four-story buildings across First Avenue from Nick Bottom’s mall-condo complex were a maze of stall shops and burned-out structures left over from old rioting or turf wars. None of the high-end shops had made it through the last decade.
What he hadn’t really understood until that TV program—he never did read the book it was based on—was that the physical web of modern life was so dependent upon almost constant maintenance. Leonard had always imagined, in the few apocalyptic visions he’d had, that cities would stay pretty much the way they were for years, decades, a century perhaps, until weeds, grass, trees, and wild animals began to intrude upon the urban landscape. But no, that turned out not to be the case. The program had shown how service tunnels, subways, and the rest of the subterranean parts of a major city like New York would be underwater within a day without human intervention and maintenance. The flooding alone would soon result in high-pressure explosions of pipelines, basements of tall buildings submerged, foundations undercut, and an amazingly rapid dissolution of the urban grid.
Humans weren’t gone in the United States—far from it—but the national sense of having given up, linked to the ubiquitous use of flashback to the point that very few people were actually doing their jobs at any given moment, had created a similar breakdown of infrastructure.
Leonard’s son-in-law’s cubie was in a huge fortified, windowless concrete mass. It was on the wrong side of the tracks—or in this case, the wrong side of the river—and it hulked there like a sightless Fort Apache deep in Indian territory. During the day, Leonard saw, people lived and shopped for basic items and moved through the ruined blocks of what had been the North Cherry Creek shopping area across the broad street, but at night it must be a nightmare for unarmed civilians.
On the river side of the building, the gaps in the once-open parking garage had been covered with electrified fencing. The fenced-off, grassless, muddy riverbanks were under video surveillance from the condo complex. The west end of the building was bordered by the private drive to the parking garage. Any car approaching that parking garage had to pass through automated gates, a bang box—a concrete structure designed to search automobiles and contain the explosions if they were rigged with bombs—and then through another inner gate and only then up the ramp into the garage.
The north-facing front of the Cherry Creek Mall Condominiums had main doors of windowless steel. Surveillance video-cam bubbles looked down from above those impenetrable doors.
Leonard and Val had crossed First Avenue and paced back and forth for the two blocks facing the mass of the mall.
“If we could just phone,” Leonard said. He had to sit down.
“Be quiet, Grandpa,” snapped Val. They’d been staying in the shadows, hiding their faces from the higher- surveillance video-camera bubbles hung like cheap jewelry along the front of the mall. “You’re going to have to go in and see if the Old Man is home.”
“Me?” said Leonard. “Alone? Aren’t you coming?”
“The Denver cops are looking for me. We heard on the truck radio all the names of the guys I hung around with, so there has to be some sort of bulletin out on me. Probably FBI and DHS looking for me too. They figure the first place I’d come is here… and here I am. But they might not be looking for you, Leonard.”
