Flashback

After die-ought-if, after the Day It All Hit The Fan, when the U.S. ceased to be a serious trading partner and world power, and especially after the surprise attack that Tehran had called Al-Qiyamah (the Resurrection, Day of Judgment, and Final Reckoning, three days that removed Israel from all maps) and then by the global Islamic triumphalism that swept across all of Western Europe in less than a decade, Canada had turned to the Caliphate for trade and military protection. It had no other choice. Just as it had no choice now about the heavy Islamic immigration that had already changed Canadian laws and culture forever.

And now Nuevo Mexico would have no choice but to sell its reconquista lands back to… to whom?

Nick slaved his phone to the outside monitor views.

North-central New Mexico was sliding by on either side of the M-ATV—overgrazed fields with no cattle left, empty ranches, abandoned small towns, abandoned rail lines, empty highways. Except for the damage done to the high-prairie environment by more than a hundred years of cattle overgrazing and the minor tread-tracks vandalism of modern mechanized armies on the move, this area was almost as pristine as it had been to the first white explorers more than two centuries earlier.

Why shouldn’t the Global Caliphate want this southern part of North America, even if they had to pay for it in a priced-to-sell second Louisiana Purchase? wondered Nick. It was the perfect place for a former desert people to colonize. And with the upper tip of the Islamic scimitar-crescent pressing down against the Canada–U.S. border to the north and now the lower tip thrusting up from Mexico against and into the cash-strapped and militarily impotent western states like Colorado, how long would it be until the two horns of the sharia crescent came together?

Nick had to ask himself the central questions—Do I care? Do I give the slightest shit if this part of the country goes to the jihadis? It isn’t even part of America any longer. Is there any reason in the world that I should give a damn if the Caliphate towelheads replace the Nuevo Mexico beaners as America’s nasty new neighbors to the south? Or even as our new masters in Colorado, for that matter, replacing the fucking Japanese looking down on us from their fucking mountaintops? The Mexicans are all about drugs and corruption, the Japanese all about… well, all about Japan. Why should I care if it’s a hajji bureaucrat rather than a Jap bureaucrat running things? They’d be more efficient than the Mexicans and more honest than the Japanese. Word on EuroTel, Sky Vision, Al Jazeera, and the CBC is that the life of Dhimmis in old Europe and Canada is pretty damned easy.

As long as the hajjis leave me alone to spend my days and nights with Dara, thought Nick, is there any reason I should care if their stupid crescent-moon-and-scimitar flag flies over Denver’s rotting gold-domed capitol?

Nick had taken off his sunglasses, removed his earbuds, shut down his phone, and set his head back in the webbing so that he could sleep the rest of the way home.

The place where that guy did that thing that time was all that was left of the old Tattered Cover bookstore out in the 2500 block of East Colfax Avenue. Colfax, which ran from the prairie to the east of Denver all the way through the rottenest parts of the city to the foothills of the Rockies in the west, was once called by Playboy—one of the early stroke magazines, now out of print for decades—as “the longest, wickedest street in America.” It was true that it was one of the longest main streets in the country, but cops knew that it was mostly East Colfax that was the wickedest, if one judged liquor stores, run-down taverns, prostitutes, pimps, and really bad poets as proof of wickedness.