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That’s my inventory!” hissed Nathan.
    “I thought we were switching to light bulbs.”
    The guards slammed the trunk and staggered back, laden with small household appliances. They dumped their stashes in the guard house and returned as if nothing had happened.
    “Now,” said the first guard. “ID please.”
    Sam held out his wrist and the guard scanned it with a small hand-held device.
    “Thank you, Mr…Hammett. And you, son.”
    Nathan extended his arm. Sam could see that he was shaking and just hoped the guards didn’t notice as they swept their reader over his wrist.
    “Nathan Berlin. Thanks. Okay. Welcome to Century City. Just drive down this way about fifteen miles. You’ll come to a parking structure just outside the walls. You can leave your vehicle there.”
    Sam’s face fell. “You’re kidding, right?”
    “No, sir. No internal combustion vehicles of any kind permitted in Century City. You have a nice day now.”
    The great wooden gates creaked open and the GTO rolled through and along the road toward the city.
    “Oh, man, what a nightmare,” muttered Nathan.
    “You used your real name.”
    “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”
    “Well, we can’t turn around and go back now.”
    He glanced in the rear-view to see if there was anything going on, but the two guards had just moved to the next vehicle.
    “Why did you use your real name?”
    “I don’t know! There wasn’t time to think!”
    Sam was about to make some less-than-helpful remark about panicking, when they reached the crest of the hill and were suddenly struck silent. Beneath them, stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction, were the sprawling remains of a once-great city.
    The streets were still clear, scything through the rubble and the few surviving structures, a latticework of asphalt and concrete. There had obviously been a lot of very tall buildings lining the wider streets and some were still impressive, though most were in varying degrees of collapse, their glass and cladding fallen away, leaving rusting steel skeletons clawing at the yellow sky.
    The smaller buildings seemed to have fared better. From what Sam could see at this distance, some were almost complete and pockets even seemed to have electric light, though in the fading afternoon there were more small fires pock-marking the landscape than actual streetlamps.
    “Wow,” he whispered. “It’s huge!”
    “It used to be one of the biggest,” said Nathan. “Los Angeles.”
    “Unbelievable. But…it doesn’t look very…I mean, it’s big, but it doesn’t look much better off than most of the small towns in the Wilds.”
    “That’s because it’s not the city any more,” said Nathan. “That is.”
    He pointed north of the sprawling conurbation and there, glistening against the sky, was Century City, one of the last of the great cities of the west coast, its gleaming black spires stretching upwards while rings of thick grey walls and razor wire ensured the security of all within.
    “So the rest of it’s just outlands?”
    “Pretty grim, huh?”
    “Yeah, you could say that,” muttered Sam. “Windows up.”
    He drove down the hill and into the squalid outskirts of the city. The roads, which had seemed the lone remaining sign of order when viewed from a distance, turned out to be little more than rough pathways through a rabbit-warren of ruins and ramshackle shelters where the downtrodden, the angry, and the hopeless clustered together in the sleek shadow of the great walled city.
    Sam felt as though all his instincts were in overdrive as he piloted the old red car toward the grey walls. His main focus was on reaching the city before nightfall, but the resentful glares of the people in the streets made his eyes flick from side to side, half expecting someone to suddenly lunge for the vehicle. He found himself wishing he’d repaired the lock on the passenger door. It hadn’t worked for months and he’d been meaning to get it done but