The Zona (16 page)

Then one night I dreamed a dream.  I was sitting on a hill immersed in long grass.  The sky was blue again, not the dusty mess it had become.  Out of the grass a rabbit appeared and sat next to me.  The rabbit cleared his throat and I looked down at him.

“There’s not going to be any rain,” the rabbit said.  “The weather is broken.  Take your people across the desert, for they will die here.”

I woke happy.  God had revealed himself to me.  I gathered the flock and told them of my divine message.  We were to cross the desert east.  Las Vegas was the logical choice.  City like that was built to accommodate three million, maybe more.  Shelter wouldn’t be a problem.  All those resorts were bound to have canned reserves, bottled water, swimming pools.  We were destined to turn the city of sin into a city of holy gathering.

Preparation took very little time; we had been idle in our shelter and took enthusiastically to meaningful labor.  We repaired our vans and got them to running condition.  We hallowed out the cabs to better fit people and supplies.  We stuffed the vans with sixty-three of my flock plus scant provisions.  Twenty-four, including Jericho Ericson stayed in the compound to await our eventual return.  The waiters trusted that God would provide or accept them into heaven shortly.  They were martyrs in their minds.  They’re probably still out there.”

Reverend Greek barked a sudden laugh and took another drink from his flask.  He wiped his suit sleeve across his chin.

“I’ll bet Jericho is standing in one of my towers, old and mean, that same 30-06 strapped across his shoulder, waiting to shoot the devil himself.

Highway Fifteen to Vegas was an absolute mess.  The parts that weren’t clogged with derelict cars were broken to rubble by bad weather and lack of upkeep.  We traveled at a near crawl in the dirt next to the highway.  We had eight vans in a line, like cowboy pioneers on the Oregon Trail.  We’d cut portholes into the roofs with mobile platforms for riflemen.  I was in the lead van, standing out on the platform, swinging a birch staff I’d fashioned from a table.  I was Moses leading the chosen to the promise land.

We got to Barstow as the sun dipped into the horizon.  The light refracted orange through a dusty sunset, and all was quiet except the hum of our engines.

Unfortunately, our calm didn’t last.  A horn blast cleaved the evening stillness.  The blare echoed off of empty cars and buildings and drowned out our engines, and then Barstow came alive.

Hundreds of men and women ran out of broken homes and buildings.  I hesitate to call them men and women; they were caked in filth and rags and looked the very jagged edge of humanity.  They were barbarians without leader or direction; they just swarmed us in a dead blind run over broken cars and debris.

My riflemen did their work. They opened fire without hesitation.  It was like firing into the ocean.  The bullets did nothing.  A man would fall dead to the ground and the crowds would implode around the body while others ran past.  Each implosion was a collapse of hungry mouths and hands; they were eating the dead and wounded.

I yelled for the vans to punch it. We bounced through the rubble and rocks, swerved around overturned cars.  I waved my staff at the sky and yelled to God for deliverance.  Rifle shots punctuated the mindless screams and that infernal horn and they just kept coming, and coming.  One of the rear vans overturned and was overrun.  I watched as those monsters pulled members of my flock from the shattered windshield and tore them apart.  The van’s rifleman gave up on the attack and pumped rounds into his own people to save them from the barbarians.  The scavengers stripped him of his rifle, his clothing, his flesh, all in a matter of seconds.”

Reverend Greek spit again into the fire.

“His name was Frank Holister.  I found him on a roof in Inglewood eight years prior.  He’d converted and took a wife in the flock.  Her name was Elise James Holister.  She was in that van.  They had a little boy named Richard Bell Holister.  He was also in that van.

We didn’t turn back.  We didn’t try to save them.  We kept driving,” Reverend Greek grimaced in the dying firelight.  “The human swarm consumed everyone and everything in that van and we fled.  We took off and left them to a brief and horrible fate.”

Reverend Greek was silent for a moment.  The heat of the rising sun touched the back of Lead’s neck.  In the distance, a steady thump signaled the start of the corn grinder workday.

“We made it to Vegas the next morning.  We drove into the part of the city once called the Strip.  The hotels stood tall and intact, a monument of what was.  

Our road was soon blocked by the stalls of an outdoor market.  The Vegas folk looked at us cautiously but no one rushed the vans.  They looked fed.  They looked like humans.  We stopped near the market.  A black man in a cop’s uniform approached us.  He held out his palms to show he had no weapon.  He explained to us that a lot of people lived on the Strip, but if we were looking for shelter, the Downtown area was still pretty empty.  He explained how the market was for food and sundry traders, for people who hunted in the hotel stores and traded their wares with residents and other hunters.  He showed us the operational town wells and warned us not to approach them armed.  He introduced Vegas militia men who guarded the wells.  He was a good man.  His name was Anthony Jackson.  The Vegas militia had designated him as an ambassador to new people, a sort of greeter for Las Vegas. It was his job to contact the new residents and direct them to a part of town that had room.  Fifty-three of us arrived in Vegas. Anthony told us about ten-thousand lived on or around the Strip.

We chose the Vesper Hotel, a golden twenty-story structure. The lobby was a massive casino floor of white marble, buttressed with red velvet walls.  Slot machines, hundreds of them, were smashed open.  Silver dollar coins coated the floor; whoever broke the machines left the money.  I guess the destruction was done for its own sake.

The children of my flock invented a game of who could throw the coins the farthest across those vast empty halls.

From the roof of the Vesper, I saw the desert on all sides. Anthony followed me and my people up there.  He told me the story of his people.  He told me how Vegas was empty when he and division of the California National Guard came here years ago.  The streets, the hotels, the homes, were full of dead bodies, dried out by the desert air and heat.  They removed the bodies.  They made room for a civilization.  

One of my flock spoke, a quiet young man named Joseph Barnes, who asked, ‘What about Barstow?  Are we safe here from them?’

Anthony gave a long silence to this.  He looked us over.  I’ll never forget the shake in his voice.

‘You went through Barstow?’  He asked.

‘They took one of our vans, and everyone in it,’ I replied.

‘There are no people in Barstow,’ Anthony said.

His jaw got real tight, so you could see the muscles working in his chin.

‘No one in Barstow, but if an animal comes to us from the desert, we’ll shoot it dead soon as anything else.’

Anthony drove a stare right through me.  He looked to the flock.

‘Don’t go telling anyone you drove through Barstow.  People here have funny ideas about that place.’

Anthony left us to get settled in.  We rifled our way past the hotel room mag-locks.  More times than not the room had a body, sometimes two or three; dried husks of men and women settled into bed.  We burned the bodies in the street.  I said a prayer for each one.

The basement of the Vesper was a kitchen of volume and expanse, like a warehouse.  The pantry made my eyes water.  Canned hams, bags of dry beans, any kind of canned fruit or vegetable, row after row after row.  I saw that and knew the flock could live here, in this hotel, for years.  We were safe.  God’s prophecy had come true.  We’d crossed the desert and been tested and found salvation.”

Reverend Greek stood up from his throne and stretched his arms and legs.

“Come, follow me to the shade.  It gets so hot I can’t work my head right.”

Reverend Greek limped around the ashes of the fire; nimbly avoiding sleeping lepers and debris.  Lead and Terence followed him into a mission church.  Reverend Greek felt his way to a couch in the reception lobby.

“Not what I expected, being blind,” he said.

“I always imagined I’d see nothing but darkness, black.  Instead I see nothing but white.  Why do you think that is?”

Neither Terence nor Lead responded.

“So, the condition of our lives was much improved in Vegas. The wells pumped clean water. The well guards demanded food for use, but there was so much food in the Vesper and all the other hotels that it was no loss for us to trade.  The people in Vegas were friendly, mostly just wanted to be left to themselves, they were rattled by the end of the world and sought peace in response.  The residents rarely fought, if they did Anthony and the guards would exile them, which was the punishment for most offenses.  The guards would round up the offenders, give them a jug of water, some food, and send them north, east, or south.  They never sent them west; never towards Barstow.

Our daily lives eventually fell into routine.  Every morning I gave a sermon on the roof.  The flock created jobs for themselves.  Some scavenged books and magazines, some acted as traders, and some foraged for food and supplies.  We even had a team who appointed themselves beautifiers of the Vesper.  They were equal part artist and janitor.

Vegas residents intermarried with our flock, and our numbers swelled.  Everyone was from desolation, a lot of people had lost family members to the storms or plagues or hunger.  Vegas was quiet, peaceful, a place to rebuild lives.  When I was a kid my dad taught me about the idea of utopia, a perfect society.  Vegas after the storms was the closest thing to a utopia I imagine I’ll ever see.”

“How long were you there before the attack?”  Lead asked.

“About a year and a half. We had no idea they were coming.  There was a guy in town, Jack, who owned a functional two-way radio.  He caught chatter about governments reforming in the ruins of the states.  He told us about the Reformed Arizona Theocracy, later renamed the Zona, North and South Utah, the Peoples Republic of Northern California, the Colorado Colony, the Revised Confederate States.  It didn’t matter to us.  Whatever was not within our immediate sphere seemed not to exist at all.

Everything was broken; cars, planes, trains, cell phones, computers, television, they were just garbage.  One of the beautifiers built a wall of flatscreens in the courtyard of the Vesper.  He cemented them together in a twelve by twelve cube with screens facing out.  It was impressive.  Kids used it for shade on hot days.

We didn’t think anyone would threaten us. The thought of war never entered my head.  After the beating humanity took in the apocalypse, why would any man wage war?  How can you justify the loss when there were so few of us left?

I found out later that the states attacked Vegas to purge sin from the world.  We were without sin, our society was pure and good, or as close to it as I can imagine.  That slaughter filled me with a rage so all encompassing that I haven’t felt anything else since.

I was on the roof performing a sermon when we heard the helicopters.  I hadn’t heard the sound of a chopper in so long I assumed it was weather, but there they came, up the Strip, a swarm of black helicopters.  Their engines churned and blades spun and the noise of it disturbed all peace far and wide.

One of their numbers detached and hovered in front of the Sedgewick Hotel, north on the Strip.  The chopper stood there for a moment, like it was in contemplation, and then its guns went off.  I couldn’t hear the gunfire over the swarm’s cacophony, but I watched the muzzles flash and the side of the Sedgewick imploded and glass rain down upon the earth.  The keepers of the Sedgewick fled out onto the street and were run down by men in trucks, who seemed to slip in during the distraction of the helicopters.  They looked like ants and toy cars from where perched.  It was ugly, a butchering.  The Sedgewick held thirteen families, all survivors of the Plagues who had traveled together in caravan before they settled in Vegas.  They joined the Vegas colony two weeks before my flock had.

I looked back to my flock.  They stood in still shock at the carnage.  I broke the spell with a call to arms.  I screamed and slapped and shook men and women alike.

‘Go to arms!  Defend the Vesper!’

I thought for certain they had come to take our beautiful city.  I thought they had come for our food and buildings and our wells.  I could not imagine they would kill us for some antiquated imagined debt.

My flock took to action.  The world had gone so bad for them, and then to find peace, and then to lose it again.  They left me on the roof, swinging my birch Moses staff in the air, screaming commands to the wind.  A helicopter took notice of us and flew over.  It fired into the broadside of the building with missiles, punching holes across the front.  The air filled with return fire of my flock, pops of rifles, the shouts of the wounded and dying, and glass, fucking glass raining to the streets from all those majestic shelters.  The helicopter hovered and pounded the Vesper relentlessly.  I strode to the edge of the roof and pointed my staff at the helicopter, willing it to fall apart.  It just kept tearing into our beautiful building, with all of my people inside.  I shook my staff at the sky and yelled at God.  I remember that.  I yelled at God.  I thrust my staff at the helicopters strafing the families on the Strip and swung it to the one hovering just below me. I commanded the Lord to strike these murderers from the sky, to smite the slayers, to slay them!”

Reverend Greek wheezed and fought to clear his throat.  His face darkened and his hard breathes turned into a ragged cough.  He slumped over the side of the couch and let his lungs regain the air to breath.  Terence and Lead watched the Reverend.  They both were lost in the memories of Vegas, in the memories of the roles they had played.

Reverend Greek gripped his bench and pulled himself into sitting position.

“I’m sorry,” he gasped.  “I asked God to smite the helicopters and the trucks, to destroy the machines of war.  Of course my wish was granted in the worst possible form, you know what happened next.”