Flashback

Nick tosses the beer can in the recyclable bin by the door and sets both arms around her, pulling her tight to his chest. The top of her head doesn’t even come up to his chin. Her late-pregnancy-full breasts feel strange against him after so many thousands of hugs in the past two years. Nick realizes, not for the first or thousandth time, how young she is. And how lucky he is.

“Do me one favor,” whispers Dara.

You’ll like this favor, thought Nick from where he floated, feeling his wife against him but also paying attention to the ambient sounds and movements he hadn’t consciously noted that night sixteen years and one month earlier. The sudden breeze that moved the high branches of those miserable Siberian elms, just waiting to dump their countless leaves in the yard for raking and bagging in a month or two. The Bakers’ TV blaring too loudly again from two houses away. The cat moving like a four-legged tightrope walker along the high fence back by the alley…

“I want you to…”

“… get up, Bottom-san. Get up now. Wake up, damn you.”

Somehow Dara is no longer hugging Nick but lifting him off the ground, shaking him fiercely. Nick can feel the bulk of her pregnancy against him as she shakes him.

Someone jammed a needle into his thigh.

“Hey, watch it, kiddo!” shouted Nick, pulling away from Dara in shock.

Dara lifted him higher, shook him harder. No.

Nick reached for his gun. It wasn’t there.

Someone tore the IV needle out of his arm. Another needle was jammed into the same thigh as before. Nick felt the ice-water-in-the-veins shock of T4B2T counterflash throughout his body and he screamed.

“Mickey! Lawrence!”

Mickey was nowhere to be seen in the glowstick gloom. Lawrence the bouncer was down, his massive, armored body out cold and facedown and filling the narrow aisle between cots.

Dara against him, hugging him in the summer night…

Nick fought to slide back into flashback reality but the pain in his arm and thigh and the T4B2T in his veins kept him up, out, and away from her. He cried out again.

“Shut up,” said Sato. The security chief was carrying him over his shoulder through the darkened warehouse as easily as Nick used to carry his son to bed when Val was a toddler. A few flashers came up and out of their fugue to peer angrily at the intrusion—being left alone and undisturbed was what flashcaves were about—but most slept and twitched on, oblivious.

Where was Mickey? Didn’t he and Lawrence the bouncer keep a shotgun handy for just this sort of invasion?

Nick’s arms and legs were tingling painfully from the T4B2T, fizzing inside like limbs that had fallen asleep for hours, so Nick couldn’t use them yet—couldn’t kick, couldn’t even make a fist.

The September night air was chilly and there was a light drizzle. Nick realized that it was dark outside as Sato carried him down the alley, out of the alley to a side street with cars parked along the rain-filled gutter. Was it the same night? How long had he been under?

Sato beeped open the front passenger-side door of an old Honda electric, dumped Nick into the front seat, and then quickly handcuffed Nick’s right hand, running the short cuff chain through a naked steel bolt in the overhead door frame before he clicked the left cuff tight.

The pain scouring through his awakening arms and hands made Nick feel like he was being crucified. He screamed again just as Sato slammed the door shut and walked around to the driver’s side.

Nick shouted and Sato ignored him as he drove the Honda up Speer Boulevard in a cold rain that was coming down more heavily by the minute. The streets were almost empty. Even the thousands of homeless along the sunken Cherry Creek riverside walking paths and bikepaths were huddled in their shanties and boxes under the street-level overpasses. A dull lightening of the sky in the east told Nick that it was almost dawn. How long had he been under? Just the flash of that Friday afternoon with Dara back in the Year of Clear Vision and into that evening and night. No more than eight hours. Damn.

Nick shut up when Sato turned west on Colfax.

The Jap couldn’t… he can’t be… he wouldn’t…

The Jap was. Crossing over I-25, Sato turned south on Federal Boulevard and then east onto West 23rd Street, then south onto Bryant—a narrow, barricaded street running along the bluff’s edge above I-25 with ABSOLUTELY NO UNAUTHORIZED ADMITTANCE signs to either side and above.