Hell's Fortress

by Michael Wallace

  Eliza’s thoughts trailed back to an illicit kiss all those years ago between a teenage girl and a young FBI agent who she’d taken for a Mexican laborer. Eduardo. Now he was dead.

  “Here it comes,” Steve said, breaking her from her memories.

  The thump of artillery shells grew louder, as if the bombardment were following a known pattern through the center of Las Vegas. Then another thundering blast, and the building tottered. More tiles crashed down from the ceiling. Prisoners cried out. Grover covered his head with his hands. His lips moved in a silent prayer. At last the building stabilized.

  Steve had paled even further. “That was a bad one.”

  Eliza’s pulse throbbed in her throat. She forced herself to remain calm. “Then what happened?”

  “After Death Valley? We crossed the Nevada border into Pahrump. It was a war zone. Loyalists hid us in basements when the Bear Republic troops overran the town. Not much food, though.” He let out a bitter laugh. “I thought I was hungry then.”

  “When was that?”

  “Let’s see. February, I think. We moved out in early March. About three months ago now, I guess. We made contact with Washington, who ordered us back to L.A. Nobody seemed to care anymore that I’d been fired from the agency. I was back in, as far as they were concerned.”

  “So you returned to California?”

  “Hell no. Fayer wanted to. Chambers and Higgs, no. I was going straight to Blister Creek. Figured I’d get there by Easter.”

  “Probably better you didn’t. The drone quarantine was still in force. They would have bombed you off the road.”

  “I’d have taken my chances. It would have been better than what came next. We stumbled into a camp outside Vegas just as a cholera epidemic hit. Half a million refugees from the Pacific coast. Most of them died. I caught a nasty bug, had terrible diarrhea for a week—that’s when I got skinny. Not this skinny, but skinny. Higgs died. Essentially crapped himself to death.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “The camp got bombed, which finished off what was left. California was winning the war, but then the U.S. pulled out of Iran and shoved a bunch more troops into the conflict. Might have pushed back all the way to the Pacific, but they ran short on fuel. The offensive stalled in Vegas.”

  “But how did you get here?”

  He started to answer, but another shell detonated in the street with a thunderous boom. Eliza braced herself, but the shaking was minimal this time.

  “There were five of us left,” Steve said. “We ran into a company of irregular army troops hauling around artillery with mules. And a wagon filled with leaking, eighty-year-old mustard gas shells. Like something out of the First World War or something. They’d lost several men in an air strike and forcibly drafted us to fill the ranks. At least we got fed.

  “That didn’t last long. We met up with another unit run by this insane major with more wagons filled with shells. I was thinking nerve gas or something equally nasty, but no, it was worse than that. Low-yield atomic artillery shells—real Cold War stuff. The kind of thing you launch to keep the Soviet tank army from breaking through. Not the sort of thing you want to blast off and watch detonate.”

  “That’s horrible. Did you fire them?”

  “We didn’t, no. The colonel was obsessed with security. He interrogated every man in the old company. Threw some kid in front of the firing squad. For what, I never found out. He heard I was from California, and wanted to shoot me too. Didn’t care that I was—or had been—FBI. Fayer and Chambers managed to convince him not to. But he had us in confinement when he took a bullet from a sniper. They let us go, but there was apparently another hard case on the way to take charge of the unit. We made a run for it. So here’s where it gets weird.”

  “Weirder than mustard gas and atomic warheads carted around by mules?”

  He looked puzzled at this. “That’s a good question. The whole world has gone nuts. A few years ago I was an FBI agent looking into doomsday cults. Then somehow I found myself living in one of those cults. And now doomsday is here. I feel like I’m living in a sci-fi movie. Or maybe it’s a horror movie—I can’t tell. Maybe both.”

  “Is the Book of Revelation horror or sci-fi?”

  Eliza had raised her voice, and now Grover came edging over, as if he wanted to listen.

  Steve continued. “So here we are, traveling across the desert on foot when we find a trailer. Beat up, paint sandblasted off, it looks like it’s been abandoned for years. But maybe we can find a can of beans or a tin of Spam or something. We try the door and find ourselves facing some naked old dude with a shotgun. His skin looks like leather, and he’s got more hair growing out of his ears than on his head. Really crazy guy. I can see guns in his trailer, boxes of ammo. This guy has come here to wait out the end of the world.

  “We have a few anxious moments, while we try to back away without shooting the guy or getting shot ourselves. The man says something and we realize he doesn’t know. He has no freaking clue that civilization is coughing up blood. That there’s a war going on. Never heard of the supervolcano. That the crops have failed around the globe. He noticed the long, weird winter, but that was it.”

  She marveled at this. “Wow.”

  “Oh, it gets better. Turns out he’s a crazy old prepper who bought a trailer and hid it out on empty BLM land with ten thousand pounds of food and fifty thousand rounds of ammunition. He was worried about all sorts of crap: the president being a socialist, UN helicopters, the Chinese harvesting Americans for their organs, whatever. Out of his freaking mind with paranoia. He moved to the desert because he thought the world was going to end. And he was right.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “You know how Elder Smoot is always going on about the End of Days? This guy made Smoot look like the voice of reason.” He glanced at Grover. “Sorry, I forgot. That’s your dad.”

  “That’s okay,” Grover said. “I know how he gets.”

  “How did you get out of there?” Eliza asked.

  “I haven’t got to the weird part yet. No, trust me. It’s weirder. This old man—I’ll call him Methuselah, since we never got his real name—gets all excited. He takes us into the canyon behind his trailer, where he shows us a homemade tank hidden beneath tarps. It’s an old Wells Fargo armored car with extra plate-metal armor welded around the sides. Gun ports built into the side and .50-caliber machine guns. Inside, RPGs, boxes of grenades, thousands more rounds of ammo. This thing is out there waiting and all it needs is a tank crew to run it. He’ll give it to us on two conditions. First, we take him with us. Second, he wants to drive through Las Vegas on our way east.”

  “Why?” Eliza asked.

  “That’s exactly what I ask him. Turns out that Methuselah wants to see his fantasies come to life. He used to live in Las Vegas—had worked as a pit boss there for many years. Then Obama got elected, maybe Methuselah went off his meds, and he put all his savings into a doomstead in the desert. Now he wants to see Las Vegas destroyed. The three of us had a little conference.”

  “I thought you said there were five survivors.”

  Steve’s face darkened. “I glossed over a few things. When we were in the artillery company we fought several battles. We took casualties.”

  “Oh. Sorry, go on.”

  “And we decide—this is crappy, I know—to steal Methuselah’s homemade tank and leave him with his trailer and his food. Then we can go wherever we want. Fayer and Chambers are thinking Salt Lake, leaving me in Cedar City to hike over the mountains to Blister Creek.

  “Meanwhile, Methuselah goes out to this Cold War–style bunker he has buried behind his place. He has a bunch of stuff he wants to get—gas masks, iodine pills, probably more guns and ammo. You can never have too much. While he’s pulling away the boards that hide it, he stirs up a rattler underneath waiting out the heat of the day. Big old diamondbac
k. It bites his hand. All that time hiding in the desert, with the world falling apart around him, and it’s a stupid rattlesnake that does him in.”

  “Did you drive off and leave him?”

  “No. We couldn’t do that. He was in terrible pain and I knew right away he was going to die, with the hospitals being the way they are. We weren’t sure what was waiting around Vegas, if we’d be shot as deserters or if there was a military government who could put us in contact with FBI headquarters, but Methuselah was no threat anymore. What would it hurt to find a field hospital and turn him over?

  “We never found a hospital. Methuselah died on the road, and when we stopped to bury him, someone started shooting at us. We drove off in our armored car, got chased into the suburbs of Las Vegas. Where we found ourselves in the middle of a growing battle. We stashed the vehicle in an abandoned air conditioner factory and tried waiting it out in the tunnels. We were safe at first. Three, four days—the bombardment never stopped.”

  “The tunnels?” Eliza asked.

  “There are storm drains beneath the city. Homeless people used to live down there and come up at night to panhandle and Dumpster dive. When it rained, they’d flee like rats. There are still people down there, only now they’re refugees from the war. It’s pretty miserable.” He shrugged, and she could see more ugly details being glossed over.

  “The problem is,” he continued, “the federal troops were using the tunnels to infiltrate the city. They overran our camp one night. When we realized they weren’t Californians, we surrendered and explained who we were. Lot of good it did. They arrested us anyway. That’s more or less how we ended up here.”

  Grover had been listening in silence. “You’re either super lucky,” he said, “or you’ve hit one terrible stretch of bad luck. I can’t decide.”

  “Either way, it’s a strange story,” Eliza said. “One crazy thing after another.”

  “Only the dead have boring stories these days,” Steve said. “Short, boring, and deadly. They got herded into a refugee camp and died of cholera. Bandits shot them. They starved to death while waiting for flour rations. Those of us still around are only alive because of a series of crazy coincidences.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “How long have you been prisoners?”

  “About a month. They put us with these others, mostly California-born government officials. Nobody has been charged with any crime. They’ve moved us around, but always within Las Vegas.”

  “How many prisoners are there?”

  “About thirty now. We had a lot more. Maybe half have died. Every once in a while, new prisoners join us—like you—but nobody ever leaves, except as a dead body.”

  Eliza let go of Steve’s dry, warm hand and rubbed at her scalp, trying to think. They couldn’t sit here, waiting for the building to collapse. Starving, dying of thirst.

  As if to punctuate her thoughts, fresh artillery shells rained down on the hotel. The building shook and bucked, and more tiles fell from the ceiling. The bombardment continued for several minutes, then faded to the west. When it was over, Eliza went to find Miriam.

  She had no intention of waiting here to be killed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Eliza found Miriam near the blown-out windows, taking in the scene. A wrecked armored personnel carrier sat in the street below. Craters pockmarked the road. The strip mall across the street lay in smoking ruins. Papers tumbled down the street. A block down, a slot machine sat in the middle of the intersection, as if carried away from its home by an explosion, then set gently to the ground.

  The air blowing in from the street felt like a blast of air from an oven. But the shadows were long and with any luck the evening would bring relief.

  “Don’t linger,” Miriam warned. “There might be snipers.”

  Eliza stepped back. “Any ideas?”

  “No good ones. I didn’t realize we were so far up. Seven stories. If you go up to the edge, you can see that a few people have made the jump anyway.”

  Eliza shuddered. “Steve didn’t say anything about that.”

  “He’s probably numb to death. You saw that Fayer and Chambers are here?”

  “Steve told me, yes.”

  “I talked to Fayer. The things she’s gone through would curl your toes.”

  “You mean the part about the helicopter?” Eliza asked.

  “I was thinking more about those drugged-up gang members in L.A.”

  “You mean there’s more? I didn’t hear about that.”

  “Let’s worry about the here and now,” Miriam said. “There’s no food, and barely any water. The army either doesn’t know what to do with the prisoners, or doesn’t care.”

  “The army can’t even feed itself. Question is, what do we do? I’m not going to sit here waiting to die.”

  “Me either. Maybe we could get the chairs and batter down the doors.”

  “There are men outside with guns,” Eliza reminded her. “What about tearing up the carpet and dangling it out the window? We can lower someone to the next floor.”

  Miriam raised an eyebrow. “How would we do that? Roll it into a big thirty-foot-long roll?”

  “If we had tools we could cut strips and tie them together.”

  “I’ve already looked around. There’s nothing.”

  “I didn’t come all this way to fall into Steve’s arms and die by his side.”

  “You don’t have to tell me, I’m not dying here either. I’ve got a husband and a baby at home. Did Krantz give you anything to work with?”

  “Steve had an escape vehicle at one time. You heard about the tank?”

  “The armored car thing built by the old-timer? Wasn’t it destroyed?”

  “No, they stashed it in an abandoned factory somewhere in Vegas. Might still be there. Of course, we have to get out of here first. The prisoners have been here a week. I’m sure Steve has given it a lot of thought, but he didn’t seem to have any ideas.”

  “Fayer didn’t have anything either. She thinks we’re finished. And not from starvation. You know how the building shakes when it gets hit? It didn’t used to do that. The foundation is giving way. When that happens, we’ll pancake all the way down.”

  As horrifying as that sounded, it gave Eliza an idea. “Do you think you could take down one of the guards and get his weapon?”

  “Maybe. I was looking for an opportunity on the way up, but I was always facing at least two guns. What are you thinking?”

  “If Fayer has noticed the shaking, those kids outside have too. You’re a good actor, you could convince them the building is about to give way.”

  “They’ll think I’m a panicky woman. What will that get me?”

  “No, you’re not,” Eliza said. “You’re a structural engineer. Make stuff up. You infiltrated the Zarahemla cult—surely you can manage this.”

  “Keep talking,” Miriam said. “Then what?”

  “Then they’ll move. And they’ll take us with them.”

  “Unless they leave us here to die.”

  “They’ll take us,” Eliza said, with more confidence then she felt. She couldn’t think of any other plan. “When they do that, we’ll create a distraction, and you’ll take out one of the soldiers.”

  Miriam looked thoughtful. “Those soldiers are jumpy. Even if I get a gun, the others will start shooting. People will die.”

  “They’re going to die anyway.”

  A thin smile. “Now who’s the ruthless one?”

  “I’m desperate,” Eliza said. “Aren’t you?”

  “Getting there.” Miriam nodded. “Okay, let’s make it happen.”

  The prisoners were a starved, ragged bunch, plagued by weak, muddled thinking. Most of them wanted nothing to do with the plan. They wanted to lie down and be left alone. To curl up and die. Eliza imagined what they’d gone th
rough and fought down her frustration.

  She remembered another time, a pit in the desert outside Las Vegas. A young woman starving on a diet of lettuce. Starvation didn’t turn one into a fighter. But at the same time, Eliza’s current predicament didn’t sound impossible. She’d survived worse situations, or at least equally bad.

  Together, Eliza and Miriam coaxed, prodded, pleaded, and threatened. Those who were too far gone they told to stay down and keep their mouths shut when the time came. And then they waited for the next artillery attack. And waited.

  The shelling continued to the east, then swept through the center of the city again without passing near their building. The heat was suffocating and Eliza’s mouth felt like it had been stuffed with wads of cotton gauze. A woman cried out for water.

  Eliza waited with Steve. She was sweating profusely, but his hands were dry and hot. If the soldiers ever delivered water, she’d fight the others if she had to, to get him his share.

  When darkness came, gunfire started up in the streets. First a few isolated shots, then back-and-forth chatter. The gunfire grew louder, into angry-sounding bursts. A series of thumping detonations like an enormous bass drum sounded from the direction of the Strip. They were answered by lighter machine guns. A jet roared overhead. A light flashed, followed by a thundering explosion several seconds later.

  Finally, the artillery came. Shells rained down on the hotel and its surroundings. Gunfire raged in the streets below. As soon as the building started to shudder, Eliza and Miriam pounded on the conference room doors.

  “The building is about to collapse!” Miriam cried. “You have to listen to me—this is what I do for a living. I’m a structural engineer. I’m telling you, the center post of this room is the main load-bearing support of this whole wing. It goes, and we all go down with it—and it is going. They do not just vibrate like that!”

  No answer. A thin blue light seeped beneath the doors, so someone had to be out there still. They kept pounding.

  Miriam continued. “Please, for God’s sake. The post goes all the way to bedrock. There has to be a stress fracture running right down the center of it for it to shimmy like that. And if the post goes, the entire building pancakes in about ten seconds. You have to let us out.” She pounded the flat of her palm against the door. “I was the chief engineer for this building, do you hear me?”