This Rotten World (Book 2): We All Fall Down by The Vocabulariast Page A

shopping bag on the passenger seat.
    Sometimes, in the world before,
Katie would pick up a couple of them, and knock them back in the car while
waiting for Kevin to finish up with soccer practice. Soccer... there was one
thing she wouldn't miss. A bunch of kids running around kicking a ball for
ninety minutes while over-aggressive parents rooted on little Johnny as if he
were actually something special. Kevin was nothing special. She knew that. She
was realistic. He probably would have grown up to be a banker or a sales rep
somewhere, something average, something soul-sucking. Katie lowered the window
and tossed the empty bottle out of the window. She grabbed another one and was
concentrating on opening it up when a garbage truck flew by her parked car and
plowed into the steel loading door of a warehouse across the street.
    She managed to twist the cap off
of the bottle of wine, and she knocked it back. Nothing like a little Crane
Lake chardonnay, while you watched your favorite new soap opera, How the World
Stopped Turning. She watched the legs of a dead thing jitter back and forth as
it tried to extricate itself from between the shredded steel of the rolling
door and the now destroyed van. On the back of the van was a smiling plumber in
blue overalls holding a toolbox. "What are you so happy about?" she
asked.
    There was no answer, so she
stepped on the accelerator. Memorial Coliseum was only a few miles away, but
she had already gone through the easy part. Now she was entering North
Portland, a vastly more populated area of the city, home to hotels, convention
centers and the two big arenas in the city, the Memorial Coliseum and the place
where the Blazers played. That building's name had changed so many times, that
she wasn't sure what to call it anymore. For the first decades of its life, it
had been called the Rose Garden... everyone still called it that, though the
rights to the building had been dealt to some corporation or other. No one
cared. It was still the Rose Garden, and it was far larger and more secure than
the Memorial Coliseum.
    She drove down Grand Ave. to get
there. She was familiar with the road, due to the fact that every time Kevin
made the honor roll, he would inevitably get a coupon for a free Blazers
ticket. Only his ticket was free; whoever accompanied him had to pay. Most of
the time, her husband would go, but she had wound up being forced to go a few
times. Kevin loved the Blazers, as did seemingly every boy that grew up in
Portland, and most of the girls too. Katie found them disgusting,
self-involved, and sporting egos that seemed to barely fit within the confines
of the Rose Garden. But she loved her son, so she went, spending exorbitant
amounts of money on beers as she sat and watched Kevin root his team on,
arguing every call, and cheering with every basket.
    Grand Ave. was not empty. In
normal times, Grand Avenue was a wide street, several lanes across that ran south
to north through Portland. It was a couple blocks removed from the Oregon
Convention Center, and it was lined with hotels, office buildings, and
restaurants. Some sort of convention must have been going on, because many of
the people she saw were wearing lanyards with credentials around their necks.
They were dead, of course, stuck attending a convention for the rest of
eternity. They blocked the road with their large backsides and cheap suits, blood
staining their generic, button-up shirts.
    As she wove through the people,
she wondered what sort of convention they had been attending. They didn't look
like comic book geeks or auto enthusiasts. Maybe it was a boring conference,
like one of those one's that Jason sometimes attended, flying off to some boring
town in Iowa or Missouri to attend a conference about teachers and teaching. Katie
never understood why he even bothered;  it wasn't as if he was going to learn
anything new.
    She decided against a teacher
conference as she dodged a plump man, his belt lashed on too tight to