CHAPTER 2

.....Far beneath the notice of the cloudless azure sky, a 1967 Plymouth Valiant sporting dusty California tags roared past a sun-bleached billboard.
....."Welcome to Marlboro Country."
.....The swaybacked billboard served as a forlorn greeting, set against the hardscrabble landscape that ran alongside the road.
.....Ahead, the beer-tacked town limits sign waited.
.....If Daniel Wolfe could have been bothered to glance at the population account, he wouldn’t have been all that surprised to see that the number had not been changed since he’d roared off in the opposite direction twenty years before.
.....The small Wyoming town of Harding was a classic case of the more-things-change adage, with one teenager running off on the heels of each new birth. Or ahead. Sometimes it was related, sometimes not. Somewhere in between, someone died or came back.
.....For what it was worth, the population held at 616.
.....Give or take.
.....And with the town limits sign suddenly behind him, Wolfe was back home. Just for a visit, of course.
.....Twenty years... where did it all go?
.....Twenty years of California had replaced the former teenager with a fairly fit man holding off his approach to middle age middling well. His longish, unkempt hair danced in the breeze that swept through the Valiant's open window. He scratched at his three-day stubble, batted an American Spirit from the pack and popped it in his mouth.
.....He fired the cigarette up with the dashboard lighter, the core still managing to summon up a dull red glow beneath the crust of forty years of cooked tobacco.
.....Rebellius Americanus.
.....He coughed out the smoke in appreciation.
.....The air conditioning and radio in the car had long ago given up the proverbial ghost, but for the eight hundred mile-plus road trip, the lighter had remained a trooper.
.....The crowded ashtray could attest to that.
.....Through his passenger window flashed the ruins of what looked to have been at one time a convenience store. Cheap plastic signage bolted to a tall wooden pole at the edge of the parking lot promised a KWICKIE-STOP.
.....There was nothing left behind the promise.
.....Charred and smoldering two-by-fours poked skeletal fingers up from the sooty ruin, mattressed on the small patch of scorched earth that lay at the far side of the empty parking lot.
.....Wisps of smoke filtered up from the debris and dissipated in the breeze.
.....Then he was past, the stench of scorch still lingering in his nose.
.....The Valiant rolled past the town's rustic service station. The two pumps stood together on the island looking positively ancient. Steampunk even, although the station itself probably wasn't more than sixty years old. Still, he wondered where on earth they could even find replacement parts for the damned things.
.....He noted with satisfaction that over the years no one had bothered to change the faded Sinclair signage outside Harlan’s gas station.
.....A steel postcard from another era, the white silhouette of the big ol’ brontosaur held its tiny head high against a field of sun-bleached green. Once as ubiquitous as trading stamps and service attendants that cleaned the bugs off of your windshield, anymore Sinclair Oil was nothing but the answer to some Trivial Pursuit question.
.....Wolfe figured that some corporate octopus such as British Petroleum or Exxon was probably the supplier of record at moment.
.....In Harding, tradition was sacred and old traditions held more sway than some out-of-town branding, and the silhouette of the apocryphal bronto would continue to greet traffic as it had for decades.
.....That is, until the black stuff finally disappeared, and the last residue of the ol’ dino was belched out of an SUV exhaust pipe.
.....Wolfe pulled a grin and another drag off of the cigarette.
.....One of his more sentient students back in California had caught the Peak Oil bug and, seeing that he was sort of obliged to kindle the sporadic curiosity that might present itself among his charges, Wolfe had encouraged the kid’s research.
.....Soon enough, Wolfe had caught the bug himself.
.....Not so much as an excuse to tear off into the wilderness, grow a beard, clean the guns and wait eagerly for the utter and complete collapse of civilization, but more for the cranky “Wouldn’t it be nice?” woolgathering material it afforded.
.....The ancient signage of the gas station shrinking in his side mirror, Wolfe mused that as the concept of Peak Oil was ignored by the public and the petroleum companies scrambled to squeeze the last gasp of resources from embattled grounds, Harlan's last dinosaur would likely stand proud twenty years on down the road in a fitting epitaph.
.....Beneath it, townsfolk would once again use teams of horses to pull their stripped-down Escalade or Suburban SUVs from one end of the town to the other.
.....Wolfe couldn’t wait. He had no problem with bicycles.
.....He just wondered where the mohawked gangs of rampaging mutants, geared up in football shoulder pads and warpaint, would find the fuel in the post-petrol apocalypse to keep their dune buggies running.
.....The Valiant entered Harding proper.
.....His own twenty years down the road had finally looped around to lead him back, the facades of the downtown welcoming in their familiarity.
.....At a casual glance, they didn't look any different from when last viewed by young Daniel Wolfe in his rearview mirror.

.....A squat skyline of plain brick buildings and the crisscross of narrow avenues frames the central block that serves as park.
.....The park is a token collection of cottonwoods rooted in a verdant green. The trees provide some amount of shade for those who pause to relax on the antique park benches, seats crafted with slats of green-painted wood and held together by cast iron.
.....As the seasons change, the occasional drift of fallen leaves floats in the basin of the faded green bronze fountain.
.....On the north end of the block rises the flagpole, up which the Stars and Stripes forever are hoisted fresh each morning by the local postmaster. Over the years, the number of stars had changed, but the routine remains the same.
.....With the sun, the flag rises before the people of the town do, to snap in the breeze against the big blue sky.
.. ..At nightfall, the flag is brought down and folded by three members of the local Boy Scout troop. The procession then carries the triangle of tightly folded red, white, and blue across the street, to place it back in the hands of the postmaster.
.....Each day the darkly arched eyes of the spartan buildings watch the ceremony, as they continue to hunch shoulder to shoulder about the park. The are old, old friends.
.....The buildings had been erected towards the dawn of the twentieth century with handcrafted red brick. Over one hundred and twenty years before, the imported brick had been stacked carefully to raise block-like structures that would form the heart of the town.
.....As the town grew, the spread of buildings remained satisfied enough not to aspire to being over a story or two high. Over the course of ensuing decades, red acrylic paint was periodically applied to the facades to conceal the coarse material of the brick, applying a certain glossy coarseness of its own.
.....The occasional liberal layer or two of white or yellow paint brings out the ornate plaster flourishes that frame the vaulted windows, imbuing a certain shrewd gaudiness to the facades that brings out a pleasant contrast to the otherwise plain architecture.
.....The tallest structure represented is the grim looking City Building, which houses both the City Hall and the Police Department.
.....Higher than them all rises the steeple of the Main Street Protestant Church.
.....It spears up into the wide Wyoming sky, as if in a constant reminder of what had created them and what will make the town’s continued existence possible, a monument to humble hubris.

.....As Wolfe slowed in the street that ran along the park, the flag hung listless in the non-existent breeze.
.....Mounted below the flag, a camera swiveled to follow the approach of the Valiant.
.....The old Plymouth seemed positively dainty compared to the ass-ends of the SUVs it passed, each adorned with a seemingly mandatory yellow-ribboned ‘Support Our Troops’ decal.
.....Adding a distinctive touch of regionalism, the ribbons were in the shape of the Christian fish symbol.
.....“Ichthys,” Wolfe muttered to himself, debiting five cents from his still outstanding student loan. Finally spotting an open slot, he wheeled the Valiant in and turned the key off.
.....The car shook itself like a dog as it dieseled to a stop. He'd have to swing by Harlan's station and get that looked at.
.....Through the dusty windshield, Wolfe could see the open door of a video arcade. Darkness abided beyond the threshold, an open invitation to the innocent to come be debauched.
.....The sounds of electronic screams and gunfire spilled out.
.....Across the street, two Boy Scouts paused in their rounds, watching Wolfe ease his door open and climb out.
.....The two boys were incongruously in their early twenties, with greasy hair that hung lank. They squeaked like sausages in their poly-blend suntan skins. The uniforms protested against a man-child girth most designers had not considered a potential scout to reach.
.....The first scout was pushing two-seventy and the other was lagging slightly, but he was catching up fast.
.....The jumbo Snickers bar and liter of Diet Coca Cola he was alternating his attention between was adding plenty of fuel to the race.
.....Although the visitor himself was of passing interest, they found the sticker on his rear bumper to be of even more interest:
.....“BRING ‘EM ON”...HOME!
.....The message didn’t seem all that patriotic to them.
.....In fact, it seemed downright plain Un-American.
.....The first entered the fact into his BlackBerry as his second looked on in approval. They watched intently as Wolfe paused to feed the meter.
.....The man patted his pockets: no change.
.....Moving in towards the arcade, Wolfe stopped to eye a large poster scotch-taped inside of the window by the door.
.....The impassive face of a United States Marine eyed him back stonily. The soldier was posed ramrod-stiff against a backdrop of American flag.
.....Block letters printed over his green beret identified him as Sgt. Bryce Crawford. Printed across his lower chest was the epitaph:
....."Keep Fighting That Harding’s Sacrifice Wasn’t in Vain."
.....Wolfe half-turned, looked up and down the avenue. Every storefront seemed to sport one of the posters.
.....Almost as many as the MISSING fliers of teenagers.
.....Snaps of kids frozen in casual poses. Smiles and postured scowls caught like butterflies, photocopied and pinned to tele- phone poles by the hand of the spare few who cared enough to waste the energy.
.....Wolfe entered the arcade.
.....Across the street, the two scouts radioed in a status report.

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