Flashback

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.

So much depends upon maintenance, Leonard was thinking. Decades ago, before the Day It All Hit The Fan, there’d been a book and TV series about what the world would be like if human beings suddenly disappeared; not died off, just… disappeared. It had fascinated Leonard, who’d still been teaching his Shakespeare and Chaucer then.

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.”

He’d never liked it when Val called him by his first name. “They might be looking for me as well.”

Val shrugged. “But Nick Bottom’s still our best chance. He’s a stinking flash addict, but he may still have some contacts with the Denver PD. Or at least know how to get us out of town. Building security probably won’t let you past the lobby or security airlock or whatever they have in there, but if they don’t detain you and call the cops right away, they’ll probably let you phone up to the Old Man’s cubie in there. If they do grab you, just tell them that you got out of L.A. but haven’t seen me.”