The passengers were in no mood to talk; this was a purely utilitarian exercise – you left Vegas at night and got to Reno in the morning with minimal hassle. Most people tried to catch some shut eye; the only noise was the loud clacking of the engine and the music leaking from the driver’s earbuds.
Junior had thought a lot about what happened in the house, how he would not have killed the thieves if it had been up to him. He had told Turnbull that, and Turnbull replied, “No, you probably wouldn’t have. That’s your problem.” And Turnbull had not said anything more, packing a jacket in a tight ball next to a window pillar and bracing it with his head before shutting his eyes.
When they got pulled over at a checkpoint, Junior saw Turnbull’s eyes crack just a bit, his hand disappear under his shirt. The PSF officer was well-aware of the essential shittiness of holding down the graveyard shift out on People’s Route 95. He half-heartedly swung his flashlight from face to face, alighting for a moment on Turnbull, who did not react, and shining it in Junior’s eyes – Junior held up his hand and blinked. Nothing. Just another batch of surly, stinky people in a crappy bus in the middle of nowhere. The thug turned and walked off the bus without a word. The driver closed the door, reinserted his ear buds, and started back up the highway.
They transferred buses in Reno, taking care to stand apart during the long wait – the bus to Los Angeles was two hours late – just in case the PSF was looking for two men traveling together. The bus finally rolled out wheezing and belching black smoke.
Reno had never been a showplace city, but it was barely a city at all any more. The high rise casinos were closed. Many of the businesses were boarded up. The people on the street seemed listless and without direction – they did not seem to be going anywhere. Junior looked for one, but never saw a single smile.
They turned south on old US 99, now the Prosperity Freeway. The bumps and jolts from the ruts in the road shook their teeth and made sleeping impossible. They stared out the window.
The Central Valley’s legendary farms were gone. Once, settlers had merely poured the Sierra Nevada’s bountiful water on the earth and the crops had practically sprung up overnight. But the water was gone. The run-off of the snowpack that California’s intricate system of dams, reservoirs and canals used to catch and store now ran out to the sea through the Delta unhindered. After the Split, free from the constraints of the federal government, the new government had decided to fix what it saw as the mistakes of the past and had decided to restore the California that existed before any of its 40 million inhabitants’ grandfathers had been born. They started tearing down the dams. Not all of them, to be sure. The Hetch Hetchy dam, which fed the Crystal Springs reservoirs hundreds of miles to the west on the San Francisco Peninsula that slaked the thirst of the coastal elite, stayed intact. Those were deemed necessary. But the others, the ones that stored water for farmers and for people in less exalted places like Modesto and Stockton, came crashing down to widespread self-congratulation. Turnbull and Junior watched the result pass by outside their windows – miles and miles of burnt brown former farmland now reclaimed by the desert, and towns abandoned and empty.
Every few hundred yards they passed a derelict vehicle, sometimes a car, sometimes a bus or a tractor trailer rig. They had run out of gas and lay where they had stopped. Their owners never bothered to come back for them. Most had been pillaged, their hoods propped up and all the parts that could be carried away long gone, taken by the scavengers who wandered the empty landscape of what had been the breadbasket of the west.
The billboards, though, were all new, replaced every few weeks, but rarely before some graffitist marked them with his tags. “PRESIDENT DE BLASIO LOVES CHILDREN” one said, the picture showing the grinning, elderly President surrounded by eager, uniformed kids. The graffitist – who knows where he got the purple spray paint, since such items were so hard to find in the government stores – had added an engorged appendage to the aging President’s photo that unwholesomely changed the nature of the love for children the text referenced.
Another billboard warned, “THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC STANDS AGAINST RACISM, SEXISM, DENIALISM, TRANSPHOBIA, AND ISLAMOPHOBIA!” The photo depicted a diverse group of angry young people, fists up, implicitly promising to unleash their wrath upon those who failed to meet their exacting standards. The artist had hit this sign too – in purple, capital letters he had written “WHERE IS OUR FOOD?”
A third billboard quoted the President: “WE WILL NOT TOLERATE WRECKERS AND HATERS FROM THE UNITED STATES ATTEMPTING TO STOP OUR REVOLUTION!” In the background was the latest flag of the People’s Republic. The artist had not got to this one yet. Maybe he had been deterred by the pile of stinking garbage strewn around the base of the sign.
The billboards were all posted on wooden frames; metal would have been taken by scavengers for scrap within a matter of hours.
The bus was making good time, despite the desperate condition of the freeway, largely because the road was nearly empty other than a few buses and some trucks. The air conditioning was out, so the bus’s windows were cracked as far as they could be. It was stifling. An old man sitting in the row in front of Turnbull was sweating profusely, and had finally reached his limit.
“These buses used to be comfortable!” he shouted. “They used to work! Everything used to work!”
“Shut up,” said a bitter woman across the aisle who, under other circumstances, probably would have been fat.
“I won’t!” the old man cried. “I remember how it used to be before! It was good before. The stores had food! We had cars!”
“You old racist fucker, shut up!” the woman screamed.
Shamed, the old man looked down. “It was better before,” he mumbled.
“I’m calling the police!” the woman spit. The old man just looked down at his knees.
There was a rest stop at fifty kilometers south of Stockton. Dust and litter blew across it before being carried off into the distance. The old cyclone fence that had divided it from what had been the surrounding farmland was gone, the metal poles had been cut off a few inches above their cement footings and the metal dragged away for scrap years ago. The bathrooms were shut tight; those so inclined could walk to a stinking ditch and do their business behind a rude screen of plywood nailed to shallowly-planted beams. Feral cats wandered about, wary of humans, gorging on the rodents.
Some Mexican food entrepreneurs had set up crude stands on the grass; Junior caught the smell of cooking meat and realized he was hungry. Turnbull was more concerned with the two black uniformed People’s Security Force thugs lounging beside their SUV at the south end of the lot, their AKs hanging off their shoulders. No doubt they were collecting a cut of these unauthorized capitalists’ business.
“You want some food?” Junior asked.
Turnbull satisfied himself that the thugs were not giving even a second thought to the bus and its disgorged passengers then replied.
“Yeah, but not here.”
“It smells good. Anything wrong with me getting a taco?”
“What kind of meat is it?’
“What kind?”
“Yeah, what kind? You see a lot of cows around here? I do see lots of kitty cats.”
“I’m not that hungry.” Junior took off toward the improvised latrine.
By the time Junior returned, the angry lady from the bus had found her way to the far end of the lot, and was animatedly describing the old man’s heresy to the thugs. They seemed bored, yet they followed her back to the bus. It was hot, but apparently not too hot for some fun. They confronted the old man, who sheepishly tried to explain that he was just so tired that he didn’t know what he was saying.