Flashback

The first twenty-four hours—just getting into the city from the untowered landing field out east of the I-15—had been the most dangerous. But after surviving the slums and exodus of half a million panicked spanics and the gangs behind them, Nick was finally shot on a quiet side street in San Marino near Pasadena, in one of the most upper-class suburbs L.A. could offer.

It was more than fifty miles by car from this hillbilly Flabob Airport to his father-in-law’s neighborhood near Echo Park just northwest of the huge Homeland Security holding pen at Dodger Stadium. Using surface streets and alleys to keep out of the way of the fighting and massive evacuation, it was—Nick saw on the GPS mapping function of his phone—more than sixty miles with most of the route winding up through Ontario, Claremont, or Pomona, and down through south Pasadena. If he had to do it on foot, Nick thought, he might as well have started walking from Las Vegas. So the first thing he did was to steal an electric moped from a spanic kid who was just trying to flee the chaos behind his family, packed into an overloaded gelding SUV. Nick would have stolen the SUV, but the father—seeing the man with a gun emerge from the darkness—floored the rattling wreck of a vehicle, getting every dying amp he could from it while leaving his teenage son on the moped to a gunman’s mercy.

Nick used the Glock to wave the weeping kid off the moped, untied and tossed the bundled luggage to the now-howling teenager, and drove away without feeling the slightest hint of guilt. The father and family would return for the kid, even if they had to lash him to the roof rack with the rest of their belongings.

Probably.

The primitive display showed that the moped had been recently charged and had a range of two hundred miles. Nick told his phone to plot a bicycle-friendly trip to Echo Park and was informed that it would take him five and a half hours, but Nick knew that if he had to dodge fighters and fleeing civilians all the way, the trip would take at least twice as long.

Nick didn’t have the time for this shit. He knew now that he should have pulled his Glock on the pilot as they approached L.A. and demanded that the coward land them at some civilaviation field much closer to his destination—or even someplace like the Brookside Golf Course in Pasadena.

Cursing his own stupidity, Nick squatted on the undersized moped and goosed the little machine to its full speed of thirty miles per hour. Somehow the fact that the moped gave forth only a low electrical hum made it seem to go even slower.

To the west, northwest, and southwest, as Nick left the empty, dark airport grounds, all of Los Angeles looked as if it were on fire. Scores of helicopter gunships and TV news choppers flitted in front of the orange glow like bats fleeing a burning belfry. Ancient California Air National Guard A10 jet ground-support bombers were making runs on targets somewhere in Chino. The sound of the distant explosions arrived long after the tiny flashes.

For the first three hours of his circuitous route west toward the city, no one shot at him. He’d brought a ball cap that he tugged low so his ethnicity wasn’t obvious in the dark, and there was something about a grown man on a kid’s battery-powered moped—perhaps it was the knees higher than the handlebars—that made him a nonthreatening figure.

Even though it was after midnight, the freeways and surface streets were filled with fleeing civilians. Nick realized that he was seeing the tail end of several days of evacuation from L.A.—mostly from East L.A.—of hundreds of thousands of spanics, both residents who’d been there for many decades and hordes of the new immigrants who’d come north on the wave of reconquista victories. Nick caught only a few glimpses of the remnants of that Nuevo Mexican military force—clusters of battered Hummers forcing their way through the mobs of civilians in the night and the occasional N.M. helicopter roaring low above the freeways in an attempt to escape that was every bit as panicked and purposeless as the east and southeast surge of civilians.

Nick kept his phone GPS—he’d long ago named her Betty—constantly updating his route to keep him out of the path of these refugees, and Betty’s sexy voice whispered through his earbud to lead him down alleys across Claremont and Glendora, along empty bikepaths through Monrovia and Arcadia—most of the explosions and fighting seemed to be going on south of his route—and across the empty campus and soccer fields of Citrus College. The moped was happier on sidewalks than it was on streets.