Flashback

The seven reanimated boys lit cigarettes and sprawled out on the exposed girders. They liked the girders, but no one wanted to lie on the narrow bands of steel sixty feet above the empty highway while twitching under flash. All of them wore holed jeans, black combat boots, and faded interactive T-shirts of the sort that almost all middle-class high school kids wore to their classes: images front and back of chillsweet dudes like Che and Fidel, Hitler and Himmler, Mao Somebody and Charles Manson, Mohammed al Aruf and Osama bin Laden—all of whom they knew almost nothing about. Coyne had interactive and voice-responsive faded images—which could go holo and respond in real dialogue when spoken to—of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris on the front and back of his T-shirt. Val and the others really didn’t know anything about Klebold and Harris, either, other than they were chillsweet killers about the age of the guys in this pathetic little flashgang who’d tried to off their entire school back when that was a new idea sometime in the last century when dinosaurs and Republicans still walked the earth.

Val, like the other guys lounging and smoking here high above the highway, had often thought about and talked of killing everyone in his school. The problem, of course, was that schools weren’t soft targets anymore. Klebold and Harris had had it easy (and word was that they’d screwed the pooch even so, their propane-tank bombs not even going off). Today the halls of Val’s high school near the Dodger Stadium Detention Center had almost as many armed guards as students in the halls, the local militias protected the kids stupid enough still to be going to and from school, and even the damned teachers were required to pack heat and take regular target practice at the LAPD’s firing range in the old Coca-Cola bottling plant off Central Ave.

Coyne stood up, unzipped, and took a leak out into space, the arc of urine falling six stories to the weed-spotted highway pavement far below. This started an epidemic of pissing. Monk, Toohey, the Cruncher, and Dinjin were the first to follow their leader, then Sully and Gene D. and finally Val. He didn’t have to piss, but long flashback sessions often created that urge and he didn’t want the other guys to know that he’d gone under for only a few minutes while they’d all been reflashing on their rape fun for an hour or more. Val unzipped and joined the piss brigade.

“Hey, stop!” Coyne shouted before the younger boys and Val were finished.

A roar echoed down the concrete canyon of the 101. It was hard to stop urinating once you started, but Val managed. Suddenly a dozen or so Harleys roared under them, the exposed tats and muscles of their male riders visible outside the black leather, the long black or gray hair streaming behind them.

“They’re burning real fucking gasoline!” screamed Gene D.

The riders passed under them without looking up, despite the fact that the boys were plainly visible with their little peckers hanging out over the void. The roaring Harleys were doing about eighty miles per hour.

“Shit, I wish we were down the road a mile or so,” breathed Sully.

They all knew what he meant. A little less than a mile ahead, with no exits in between, a twelve-foot chunk of the 101 had fallen away during the Big One, creating a twelve-foot gap dropping down sixty feet or so to darkness and concrete blocks studded with rebar stakes and twisted, rusted metal of old wrecks and, the boys had heard, scores of skeletons of other bikers. Some Harley-borne chillsweet had wedged a wide slab of concrete as a sort of ramp years ago and these bikers would have to hit that ramp at high speed, no more than three abreast, to jump that gap and go on their way to the first opening in the exit barricades out where the 101 met what was left of the Pasadena Freeway. Val had seen the stretch on both sides of this break in the raised highway and there were streaks of dried blood and torn rubber and sculpted rubble piles of chrome and steel on the west side of that ramp-jump gap. But the 101 curved just a little north here beyond Alameda and they couldn’t see the jump point from this overpass.

The boys avidly watched the bikes recede, the Harleys already narrowing their formation and jostling for position, the huge, hairy leader with his red tats injected with real blood leading and accelerating away around the curve, and as the roar of power and fuck-you-death defiance grew and echoed around them, Val felt himself grow physically excited in a way he hadn’t when the others had been banging poor Hand Job Maria.

Coyne caught his eye and smiled a bit, cigarette dangling from his thin lower lip, and Val knew that the older boy was also getting a hard-on. At times like this Val felt a little gay.

He spat loudly over the edge to hide his blush and embarrassment and zipped up, turning his back on the others. The roar of Harley engines grew, peaked, and diminished to the west.