Chapter 35
FRAYVILLE WASN’T quite coming back to life, but it didn’t echo quite so emptily. Two young men maneuvered a dolly loaded with a pair of stacked kegs down the sidewalk. A woman in shorts and a tank top came out of the darkened pharmacy with a bulging shopping bag in each hand. A civilian car, a little blue-and-yellow two-door with tinted windows, puttered towards the mall at a sedate fifteen miles an hour.
Seeing the car took me back. In the three years between the northern nations’ saturation nuclear bombing of the southern hemisphere and Absolute’s final assault on humanity, gasoline had been tightly rationed. Most of the fuel production switched over to diesel, taking official vehicles like my police cruiser with it. They stank, but nobody worried about global warming back t
