Flashback

“No!” cried Nick but Sato ignored him, stopping just long enough to show his ID to the automatic station and then to drive through the CMRI-torus tunnel. Nick felt his atoms being shifted into a different spin dimension—twice now in twenty-four hours—and wondered if this amount of exposure was unhealthy.

Far below and to their left, I-25 disappeared. To prevent conventional explosives damage, regular traffic was routed off I-25 two miles in either direction and had to bounce through what Californians called surface streets through the railyard district. VIP cars had single north-and southbound lanes in blastproof tubes two hundred feet under the surface.

He almost laughed then at his own concern, given the black-dipped edifice that was filling the windshield. The next checkpoint had the slanted one-way spikes rising from the empty access street’s pavement, so once beyond that point there was literally no turning back.

“No,” Nick said again, dully.

“Yes,” said Sato. But he stopped the car.

The huge structure blotting out the cloudy sunrise in front of them had once been called Invesco Field at Mile High.

This “new” football stadium, opened in 2001, had replaced the old Mile High Stadium that had hosted football, soccer, and baseball games since 1948. The wavy top edge of the stadium had caused execs in Invesco, some long-defunct company that had seized naming rights for the new stadium in 2001, to sneeringly call the new home to the now equally defunct Denver Broncos “the Diaphragm.” The place was built to hold more than 76,000 football fans and around 50,000 doped-out screamers for the rock concerts that used to be staged there. On August 28, 2008, Invesco Field at Mile High—a clumsy name that no one except announcers under strict orders had used even then—had reached an apotheosis of sorts when more than 84,000 people had crowded in (and a billion or so more had been present via early high-def TV) to listen to candidate Barack Obama give his nomination acceptance speech as the last act to the spectacle that had been the 2008 Democratic Convention held nearby at the so-called Pepsi Center here in Denver.

Now Invesco, Pepsi, the Broncos, the NFL, public sporting events, and that iteration of the Democratic Party were all defunct, and so, of course, was the man nominated to the chant of Hope and Change that night more than twenty-eight years earlier.

No one who’d gone to those football games or attended the nominee’s media bacchanalia of an acceptance speech in those naïve days would recognize Mile High Stadium today. The stadium, now the Department of Homeland Security Detention Center, looked as if it had been dipped in a hundred thousand gallons of 10W40-weight oil. This black foil-fabric, Nick knew, stretched across the top of the formerly roofless stadium, turning the 1.7 million square feet of space—rooms, corridors, ramps, steps, room for more than 76,000 seats, and hundreds of boxes and skyboxes—into a dimly lighted pit on even the brightest of days. The north entrance to the detention center was a concrete-lipped and steel-doored black cloaca large enough for two trucks to pass in opposite directions.

There was no light coming from the 150-foot-tall structure this dark morning.

No, that wasn’t quite true; over the black oval entrance to the DHSDC was a giant blue demon-horse, red veins standing out on its belly, its hooves of razor-sharp steel, its demonic eyes firing two laser beams from its distorted horse-demon face. The beams cut through the moving fog—or perhaps low wisps of clouds—and whipped back and forth until they converged on the Honda, then on Nick Bottom, and stopped.

“Tell me everything you know about the horse, Bottom-san,” Sato commanded softly.

The horse!? thought Nick, his thoughts scampering back and forth like rats trapped in a box. Who cares about the fucking horse? He rattled the short chain of his handcuffs against the doorframe D-bolt.

But then Nick heard his own voice answering in dulled, stupid tones.

“Originally the stadium horse was Bucky the Bronco. Bucky was twenty-seven feet tall and was cast and enlarged from an original mold of Roy Rogers’s horse, Trigger, when Trigger was rearing up on his hind legs. Roy Rogers was a TV and movie cowboy around the middle of the last century. Roy allowed them to make the cast from his mold of Trigger before this version of the stadium was built only if the city and stadium owners promised that they wouldn’t name the new horse ‘Trigger.’ The people voted, I think it was in the nineteen-seventies, and named this bigger Trigger ‘Bucky the Bronco.’ ”

Why the goddamned hell am I telling Sato all this crap? wondered Nick. I didn’t even know I knew all this garbage… He tried to clamp his jaws shut to stop the flow of stupid trivia but found that he literally couldn’t keep his mouth shut.