Bump in the RoadPamela Sheldon was driving her boss, the Patriarch of the Praxis Family Association, John Praxis, back to the compound on Coyote Creek, which lay along the East Bay shoreline in what used to be the cluster city of Fremont. They were traveling south on the battered strip of asphalt and concrete that in years past had been designated Interstate 880, or the Nimitz Freeway. Neither name meant much of anything anymore. The highway now connected nothing except one burned out crater in Oakland with another in San Jose, and the states that had once been so interconnected, as well as the national government that had built the highway system in the first place, no longer existed. Even Pamela, who was old enough to remember the name “Nimitz,” couldn’t say exactly who or what that had been. And the “way” was nothing like “free.”Taking the highway was just barely better than going cross-country. Almost every overpass they came to had fallen into the roadway. Then they had to divert to the off-ramp, drive across the intersecting street—without breaking an axle in the potholes or grounding the car’s blast-resistant V-frame on chunks of concrete—and come back down the on-ramp.
What do You think about Coming Of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict?
