Standing Before Hell's Gate

by William Alan Webb

  “Yeah, the coffee’s good. So fuckin’ what? Zhang has asked me to be his military advisor. You got any objection?”

  “On the contrary, that’s perfect.”

  “I thought so.”

  “You should really try the coffee.”

  “I already took some. Look, I’m heading back up north for a few days. Zhang’s trying to spread his footprint into new areas and I wanna go back up there and supervise.”

  “You were just there.”

  “Yeah, I made an example of a couple of farms on how to press-gang recruits and scare the shit out of the farmers, so they’ll be afraid to withhold their harvest from Zhang’s people. But I want to go back and do some more. Two farms aren’t enough to teach his people how to instill fear. They’re mostly young recruits and I want to assess them in person. Then I’m going on a quick tour of their remaining mechanized units, which are mostly south of Sacramento. They lost a whole armored brigade last year trying to move into Arizona.”

  “Is that what Zhang alluded to at dinner the other night? The big battle over in Arizona?”

  “Everybody’s pretty tight-lipped about it, but here’s what I’ve pieced together. They had some kind of partner in Arizona who they traded with, gas for slaves. It was called the Republic of Arizona, but it sounds to me like it wasn’t much of anything. Zhang apparently felt the same way and saw no reason they couldn’t have both the slaves and the gas. He sent out scouts to find a way for heavy AFVs to get there, and they found a bridge intact over the Colorado River that would hold main battle tanks. He wasn’t sure how strong the Republic of Arizona was, so he sent an entire armored division manned by the original crews who invaded California.”

  “They were all still alive after four decades?”

  “I’m tellin’ ya what I heard, Károly. I’m sure they’d had to replace some of them. They loaded some of the fuel trucks with troops to unload once they got inside the town.”

  “Like the Trojan horse.”

  “I guess. So they got close to their objective, a town named Prescott, and out of nowhere American helicopter gunships bring hell down on them. The survivors swore they had American markings, and then they ran into a column of… get this… Abrams tanks. They get the shit shot out of ’em and hightail it for home, leaving fifty tanks burning on the field.”

  “American helicopters… sounds like our friend General Angriff was busy. But that all matches what Colonel Mwangi said.”

  “Couldn’t be anybody else. If Mwangi has the dates right, this battle would have had to be right after they came out of Long Sleep. The Chinese might be old, but if they were sent to invade America, then at some point they were considered badasses. Old or not, to get your ass kicked by a unit just coming out of Long Sleep only adds up to one thing — Angriff.”

  Rosos sipped his coffee and made a face. It had gotten cold. He drank it anyway. “We knew he was the man in charge and we knew Steeple picked him for his battlefield prowess. I fail to see the reason for your surprise.”

  “It’s not surprise, it’s admiration. And concern.”

  “Oh? About what?”

  “Haven’t you been listening? Angriff’s gonna be tough to beat.”

  “You misunderstand. We don’t want to beat him. We want to control him. Failing that, we want to kill him.”

  “That’s easier said than done. I can’t imagine anybody controlling him.”

  “For the time being, that’s not our concern, so let’s quit this pointless debate. Your job now is to expand our new ally’s combat power, to put in an effective training regimen and turn them back into an effective fighting force while using younger people to do it. I’m going to ask Zhang to make you his top military advisor.”

  “Already done.”

  “Excellent! I applaud your initiative.”

  “Unless you’ve got something else, I’m off to put the fear of God into some more locals up in the mountains.”

  “God? That sounds odd, coming from you.”

  “It’s just an expression, Károly.”

  #

  The top of Bravo Company, First Battalion, First Mechanized Infantry Regiment Commander Captain Bernita De Lorenzi’s helmet came up to Angriff’s shoulder, but as she stood with binoculars raised staring toward Hoover Dam, he might as well not have been there. Viewing everything below her from the lookout position atop the ridge east of the dam, she scanned from left to right and back again, slowly. Using his own binoculars, Angriff had already decided there were no immediate threats to a forward movement, but waited for her to conclude the same thing. As time dragged past the two minute mark, however, he began to chaff.

  Until she stopped scanning, fixed on one spot, and adjusted the binoculars. “Sergeant O’Toole!” When her senior NCO came up, she handed him the binoculars. “Tell me what you see.”

  Angriff put his binoculars back up to his eyes and tried to find what she had seen, but he saw nothing… nothing… noth–… was that it? What was it? When it moved, he realized.

  “That’s a very small woman,” O’Toole said. “I think.”

  De Lorenzi nodded. “Good, that verifies my observation.” She seemed to only then notice Angriff. “Do you agree, General?”

  “I’m betting that’s Lulu.”

  #

  Chapter 20

  This morning I came, I saw, and I was conquered, as everyone would be who sees for the first time this great feat of mankind…

  President Franklin Roosevelt on seeing Hoover Dam in 1935

  Hoover Dam, Arizona side

  0903 hours, April 25

  Lake Mead lapped far up on Hoover Dam, nearly cresting the basin holding back its water. The road snaked downward from the lookout, past desolate parking lots with once-black asphalt bleached light blue-gray by decades of sunlight, until it finally crossed the top of the dam. Two Stryker APCs filled with troops crawled toward the eastern edge. Once there, two eight-man squads exited the vehicles and fanned out in case of attack, while their platoon commander approached within shouting distance of the tiny, bent old woman holding a broom and blocking the roadway.

  Standing beside his Humvee five hundred yards back, Angriff thought the extreme caution being shown by Captain De Lorenzi was unnecessary, but said nothing. It wasn’t his place to intrude on how she handled her company in a tactical situation, although even from that distance he could see the woman posed no threat. Sure, it could be an elaborate trap, and others could be waiting in ambush, maybe, but he highly doubted it.

  Captain De Lorenzi spoke into a handheld radio and waved the column ahead. Then she walked back to him. “We’re good to go, General.”

  “Thank you, Captain. I’d like to speak to that woman, if I could.”

  “Absolutely, sir.”

  Flanked by two soldiers, Angriff approached the gnomish figure of an elderly black woman bent nearly double, as if she carried a great stone on her back. Bright white hair ran from her forehead to the base of her skull in an afro Mohawk, tinged at the ends with pink. The rest of her skull was shaved to the skin. She clenched a pipe in her teeth and held a broom, with which she swept dust off the roadway.

  “You bringin’ a lotta metal for one old lady,” she said without looking up. “Fancy stuff, too. Guessin’ I must be mighty scary.”

  “You scare me,” Angriff said.

  A gust of wind howled over the dam, drowning out the scritch scritch of broom straws on concrete. “Doubt anything scares a big fella like you.”

  “Lulu does,” he said. “She always has.”

  The old woman raised her head and stared at him through half-inch-thick eyeglasses that made her eyes look as big as oranges. Her saw her nostrils dilate, as if she sniffed his scent on the wind.

  “Who dat Lulu?” Her voice was as much screech as cackle.

  “You are.”

  “Why you t’ink I’m this Lulu?”

  “Because we’ve met before, Dr. Repperton.”

  “Don’t know no doctor named Zip
perdoll.”

  But Angriff grinned. “Oh, I think you do, Louise. You gave me a tour of the dam a long, long time ago, when you were just starting to work here.”

  The woman twisted her head, moved the glasses down to the bridge of her nose and appeared to inspect him with her peripheral vision. Then she looked away, lost in thought, and her posture straightened a bit. When she turned around, she waggled her finger at him. “I know who you look like,” she said. The cackle was gone, along with the bad grammar, and now she sounded like an aged but well-educated woman. “But that was the better part of sixty years ago and you look the same, so you can’t be the man I’m thinking of.”

  “Unless that man is General Nick Angriff.”

  #

  Against Captain De Lorenzi’s urgent advice, Angriff and Major Iskold followed Lulu, aka Dr. Louise Repperton, down an endless series of stairs deep into the bowels of Hoover Dam. The first thing she asked the general was how he’d remembered her.

  “I might have lived a sheltered life, but before I met you, I’d never met a Doctor of Hydroelectric Engineering with a blue Mohawk.”

  “It stopped being blue a long time ago, but I’m lucky that it’s still thick enough to have the Mohawk.”

  She’d asked how it was that Angriff hadn’t aged in sixty years and he put her off until they had met with her family, the other people who lived there. Strangely enough, she accepted, as though meeting people who hadn’t aged was an everyday occurrence. Lighting in the stairwell came partly from an ingenious series of mirrors mounted in such a way as to reflect sunlight down the shaft of the stairs. When they became too dim, LEDs took over. They weren’t bright, but Angriff was surprised they worked at all.

  What stunned Angriff most was how easily she moved down the long rows of steps. Although tiny and frail in appearance — she had to be nearing ninety — nothing about her suggested she was that old.

  She noticed him studying her and laughed. “Clean living,” she said, knowing his thoughts without asking. “Not by choice, just necessity.”

  “Before we get down there, let me ask you something. You didn’t seem concerned about a column of armored vehicles pulling up to your doorstep. Mind telling me why? Did you know we were Americans?”

  “I didn’t know who you were.”

  “Then why just stand there sweeping? Why not hide and see if we were friendly?”

  “That road you came in on?”

  “What about it?”

  “There’s a few thousand pounds of high explosives lining each side, and it’s in strategic places up on that ridge overlooking the dam. We had somebody watching the whole time with their finger on the firing switch. If I’d gone down, you’d have gone up.”

  “What if you’d had a heart attack?”

  She paused at the next landing, turned, and shrugged. “Bad luck for you.”

  “Is she serious?” Iskold whispered from behind him.

  “I’d like to think not. By the way, Lulu, Dave Weiner said to tell you hello.”

  “I used to babysit him when he was in diapers. Those were days when we tried to keep electricity flowing to some of the outlying communities. My second husband, Rory, he did most of the line work. I’d go along to help sometimes, but usually wound up doing things like babysitting while the dads went and helped Rory with the heavy work.”

  “Wouldn’t that be sexist?”

  “After the world ends, you stop worrying about stuff like that, and people do whatever it is they do best. Nobody cares who kills dinner and who cooks it, as long as everybody eats. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly built for hard physical labor. Not now, not fifty years ago.”

  The place they met in had once been a communal dining room and was still used for that, and for the occasional community meeting. Forty-seven people stood, sat, or lay around the room, ranging in age from an infant to a man older than Lulu. Old as she was, and bent as she was, Lulu still managed to climb onto a low table and wave her hands for quiet.

  “Our guests are Major Alexis… Iskold?” She turned to the young brunette woman, who nodded. “Major Alexis Iskold. I’ve never met her before, but this man here, General Nicholas Angriff, I gave him a tour of this place the year I started here. That was 2014 or maybe early 2015. As I recall, you had a lot more entourage on that day, Nick.”

  There were smatterings of nervous laughter, but the people did the math and then inspected Angriff more closely. He didn’t look like more than sixty years had passed.

  “How he got to be here without aging a day, now that’s a trick I want to hear about. But I promised I’d tell him about us first.” Once she’d finished introducing the room full of people to Angriff and Major Iskold, she explained this was the core of those who kept the turbines running and the dam in the best repair they could. “We’ve run out of a lot of maintenance items and replacement parts,” she said.

  “We might be able to help with that.”

  A man in the audience spoke up. “Now you’ve got our attention!” Everyone laughed.

  “Who is we?” said another.

  “We’ll get there, Julie,” Repperton said. “But our story first.” She turned to their visitors. “It’s a long one,” Lulu said. “You two might want to pull up a chair.”

  “Let me tell it,” said the man who’d spoken up before. “I want you to get the whole story, not the part Lulu leaves out ’cause she’s humble.”

  The man identified himself only as Docker. Although he was well past sixty, his voice had a deep and melodious texture over a heavy Southern accent, much like that of Shelby Foote, who Angriff remembered from a documentary about the Civil War. At its core, the story was the same as Creech’s. When the Collapse began, people initially flocked to the big cities, where central authority seemed most likely to feed and shelter them. But when the food began to run out, so did the people.

  The first sign of societal disintegration was the hyper-inflation. When the Chinese stopped buying U.S. Treasury Bonds and sold off the debt they held at bargain prices, the dollar collapsed. Civil services such as the police, firefighters, and postal employees gradually quit going to work when a week’s salary couldn’t purchase a loaf of bread.

  In Las Vegas, the casinos closed in the third week of May, about five weeks after the New Madrid fault let go. With no tourists, they had no reason to stay open. Unemployed workers with no way to feed their families then went hunting for the necessities of life, and with no police to stop them, the streets became a shooting gallery. Some teamed up with friends and neighbors to increase their firepower. The owner of a pawn shop that became famous because of a reality TV show tried to stop a looter from stealing an 18th century French Charleville musket, and took three rounds to the head for his troubles.

  By the end of the year, Las Vegas had lost 90% of its population. Those still alive coalesced around various gangs that had the organization, numbers, and weapons to survive the early violence. Over the decades, things settled down so that four gangs divided up the territory. Trade began with outside entities. The cartel that took over the Mexican government traded them coffee, tobacco, tequila, fruits, and vegetables, as well as a laundry list of other things. In return they got guns, locally produced gunpowder, cooking utensils scrounged from the ruins, and various tools. The arrangement worked because Las Vegas had reverted to what it had been throughout most of history, a dusty spot in the middle of the desert with no resources and nothing to offer a conqueror.

  Meanwhile, the staff at Hoover Dam that once numbered in the thousands fell to under one hundred, mostly engineers and technical people with no place else to go. Nobody knew how they would survive, although protein would never be a problem with Lake Mead so near at hand. Eventually a large force moved out from Las Vegas to overrun the dam and thereby control the most precious commodity left in the world, energy. Hoover Dam’s turbines were still online.

  Technicians and engineers weren’t fighters. With hundreds of armed men on their doorstep, they saw no
alternative to surrendering and begging for mercy. After all, without them, who would keep the electricity flowing? But one voice convinced the rest of them that it would be better to destroy the dam and die than to live on as slaves… the voice of Louise Repperton.

  Angriff thought that even in her early thirties, Repperton must have been a formidable presence, despite being less than five feet tall and weighing no more than 80 pounds. She had grabbed a broom and placed herself in the road leading to the western side of the dam. A few brave engineers went with her, although they stood well in back.

  The mob consisted of lean, hard men and women carrying every kind of weapon imaginable, from hatchets to automatic weapons. They eyed Repperton like a snake in a nest of newborn mice. Standing alone, she gave no hint of being bothered by them. Instead, she swept the road.

  “I wish you could have seen her,” Docker said with obvious awe. “David against a few hundred Goliaths, with the flagpole and Winged Figures of the Republic at her back. They tried to threaten her, but she laughed at them. They demanded she turn the dam over to them or they’d shoot her, and she laughed again. The whole road was planted with explosives and if they killed her, the others would blow them all to hell, she said, including the dam itself. I don’t think they believed her, but who could be certain? She sure acted crazy. Besides, she told ’em, they didn’t want the dam, they wanted the power the dam produced. Did they know how to run the machines?

  “No, they said, so she worked it out where instead of them worrying about forcing the staff to keep running the dam to give them power, why didn’t they just barter for it? There was plenty to go around and nobody had to get blown up. So that’s what happened. For the next forty years, they brought us things like food, tobacco, tequila, coffee, and other stuff like that, and in return we kept the current flowing and one power line to Vegas in repair. That only ended a few years ago. It seems like the gangs have all killed each other off to the point where none of them need much power any more.”