Flashback

“Thanks,” said Nick, closing the bag and dropping it on the carpet next to his feet. It had been seven long days and nights since he’d last gone under the flash, but he found that the sight of the vials hadn’t excited him the way they had for the last half-dozen years. In fact, the thought of inhaling the stuff and going under its influence made him feel slightly nauseated.

“Sato,” he said softly, “I keep hearing from people who Keigo interviewed that the boy kept asking them about F-two… Flashback-two, that old legend. Is there something going on there?”

“Going on there, Bottom-san?”

“Is there something happening with F-two that I don’t know about?”

The big man shook his head in that Sato-way that involved his shoulders and entire upper body more than his massive neck. “There are rumors, Bottom-san, that this F-two has been sold on the streets of New York City and Atlanta, Georgia, in the last months, but as far as I can tell, they are only rumors. There are always rumors of the fantasy drug being available somewhere.”

“Yeah.” If any of the rumors had turned out to be real, Nick knew for a certainty, F-two would have been available everywhere in what was left of the country within a week. A nation addicted to its own past via flashback was ripe for the fantasy version of the drug. Since it hadn’t popped up everywhere, Flashback-two was still a myth. Part of Nick was sorry. Part of Nick was just… confused.

And very weary. He shouldn’t have drunk the sake.

Nick looked out the aircraft window. They’d passed beyond a region of clouds and the starlight and moonlight illuminated a convoluted western topography five miles below. When Nick had traveled by air as a young man, there had been more constellations of lights from small towns dotting even these barren stretches of the country at night, but those constellations had all but disappeared as the small towns in the west and elsewhere in what remained of the United States had fallen victim to the economy and other new realities. One’s instinct was to think of small towns as a better survival-center come catastrophe, but it had turned out that they were more brittle and less resilient than the big cities. Staring now at the solid darkness below, Nick imagined the millions who’d fled those now dark and silent towns over the past decade and a half—millions of the newly homeless who’d embraced at least a chance of survival in the battered big cities.

He dozed off while watching the tousled-gray bedspread of the western canyons, mountains, and deserts roll on darkly beneath them.

Why do you have him in custody?” Nick had asked Chief Ambrose as his father’s old friend and former student led Nick back through overcrowded holding cells to an isolated cell now holding only one man.

“His father and grandfather were both assassinated shortly after the fighting began,” said Ambrose, unlocking a door that led to the isolated cell. He paused to finish saying what he had to say before opening the door to the room. “Evidently they weren’t killed in the general fighting, but were assassinated… or so Roberto believes. His own reconquista unit had been cut off in the Culver City fighting and Roberto was sure that if he surrendered to the National Guard or state authorities or to any of the mercenary armies down from Mulholland, Beverly Hills, and the rest, they’d execute him as well. So he and the few surviving members of his unit found some CHP patrolmen to surrender to and we brought him to the Southern Division barracks’ lockup here in Glendale.”

Nick’s stolen Menlo was parked in the walled and razor-wire-protected visitors’ parking lot outside this North Central Avenue CHP headquarters. He just hoped that no trooper decided to run the plate numbers.

“Do you think he’ll talk to me?” asked Nick.

“Let’s find out,” said Dale Ambrose and swung open the door. The metal cell in the center of the larger room looked strange to Nick. Ambrose nodded and left.

Nick and the young man—in his late twenties, Nick thought—were alone in the room, except for the very obvious video camera near the ceiling in the far corner, and sat opposite each other on bunk beds in the oversized cell.

“I am Roberto Emilio Fernández y Figueroa,” said the young man in a strong voice. “Someone assassinated my grandfather Don Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa and my father, Eduardo Dante Fernández y Figueroa, last week, and those assassins will reach me soon, Mr. Bottom. Ask me what you wish to know and if I am able to help you without dishonoring my name or informing upon my family or comrades, I will do so.”

“I’m only hunting for my son,” said Nick. “But are you sure your grandfather and father were assassinated? It’s been a pretty crazy week.”