The building lurched and the women grabbed for the wall to steady themselves. And still the artillery kept falling. A particularly heavy blast hit somewhere below them and the floor wobbled like something made of rubber. A beam crashed from the ceiling.
It’s real. It’s really happening.
Far from a bluff, their ploy was only reflecting reality. Under sustained bombardment, the abandoned hotel and casino was on the verge of collapse. And if there had been soldiers on the other side, those men had already fled.
Eliza grabbed Miriam. “The chairs. We have to batter our way out.”
Flashes in the street illuminated the room. The stacked chairs had tipped over. Prisoners were on their feet, staggering to hold their balance on the lurching floor. People screamed and when another light flashed, several had disappeared from the center of the room.
Steve found her. “Watch out. The floor collapsed in the middle.”
Another flash and a concussive explosion threw them from their feet. This time the light didn’t go out. White flames licked the carpet just inside the windows. A prisoner beat furiously at his legs. Eliza rose to her hands and knees, trying to regain her bearings. The room was shaking, but she didn’t know if it was her own swimming head or the building doing its best to collapse.
The hole in the floor was no more than ten feet across. Looking down, she could see the story below them, some sort of lounge with a dark TV screen and couches and easy chairs covered with dust and ceiling tiles and shattered glass. Two people struggled among the debris where they’d fallen. One of them screamed in pain, his arm twisted at an ugly angle. It was fifteen feet or so down to the lounge.
She found Miriam and Steve and they recalibrated their plans.
Choking on smoke, the building threatening to go down at any time, the three of them spread word through the remaining prisoners. Grover, when they found him, was shaking and pale, but didn’t cower in a corner awaiting orders. Instead, he was working of his own volition to help the weakened prisoners gather around the hole.
From there, Eliza, Miriam, and Steve lowered prisoners into the hole and dropped them onto a couch in the lounge. Last fall, Steve had been able to pick Eliza up as if she were a child, but now he strained and nearly lost his grip whenever his arms were fully extended into the hole. When they were helping Chambers down, Steve dropped his side. When he did, all of Chambers’s weight transferred awkwardly to the two women, and they lost their grip. The man fell with a cry.
“I’m okay!” he called up.
Soon they had everyone down who could move. The blast had killed three prisoners, and the man with the burned legs was so badly injured that he screamed when they tried to move him. He flailed and begged them to leave him alone. Feeling sick, Eliza abandoned the man to the smoldering, smoke-filled room. The air was so thick she had to find the hole again by feel.
With nobody to help them down, Steve and Miriam had made a jump for it. That left Eliza. They urged her down. She lowered herself into the darkness and cried out that she was jumping. Then she let go.
Steve and Miriam broke her fall and the three of them crumpled to the ground. Eliza regained her feet only to stumble when another shell hit the building. She regained her balance and groped for her companions.
All around, prisoners cried out for each other. A few forced their way down the hall, apparently taking their chances solo rather than waiting around for the soldiers to discover they were missing. The burned man could still be heard above them, screaming from the conference room.
“We have to get out of here,” Miriam said.
“Where’s Grover?” Eliza asked.
“Right here,” came his voice from the darkness. “I haven’t moved.”
“Fayer, are you there?” Steve called. “Chambers?”
They found Fayer coughing, and crying out weakly, but Chambers had disappeared. Nobody knew if he’d staggered off in some random direction, following the fleeing prisoners, or if he was lying in a corner, injured and unable to answer. Nobody had seen him since they’d dropped him through the hole in the floor.
“We have to go,” Miriam said. “Now.”
By now the other prisoners had dispersed. Gunfire sounded in the building, which shuddered from repeated explosions.
Grover found a doorway down the hall in the opposite direction from that taken by the bulk of the fleeing prisoners. “I think it’s a stairwell.”
It was, and the companions—Steve, Fayer, Eliza, Miriam, and Grover—found their way down the stairs by feel, hands following metal railings. They had descended two stories when they came upon a head-sized hole in the outer wall. Eliza looked out to see flashes in the street directly below them—a gunfight playing out only yards away. They continued down and soon reached a pair of heavy metal doors.
Beyond lay the main casino. Smoke and tear gas filled the air. Gunfire lashed from one side of the room to the other. Gaping holes opened in the walls to the outside, and men with gas masks poured through them into the building. Phosphorous grenades flashed.
It was a vision of hell itself, and Eliza tried to retreat. Then Miriam pointed to the destroyed plate glass window to their right, away from the firefight. They made a run for it. When Eliza reached the window, she lowered her shoulder and bashed through the hanging shards of glass. She found herself outside, among desiccated flower beds and toppled statuary. Tracer bullets lit up the sky.
When the others were out, they ran in a tight knot for the sidewalk. A helicopter thumped overhead. A missile roared from its underbelly and lit up a building down the block, which disgorged a ball of fire. Gunshots sounded all around.
It wasn’t until they reached the street that Eliza hazarded a glance back at the casino-hotel. The main building was burning on three floors, staining the night air red, with smoke pouring from its windows. One of the two hotel towers flanking the casino had a twisted, movie-monster look, while the other sat skeletal against the sky. Another shell came screaming in and a clap of thunder split the air.
The casino shuddered. When it fell, it would take down smaller hotels and strip malls around it.
“Over there,” Steve said.
He pointed across a cratered three-lane street. The poles holding the dead traffic lights bent at crazy angles across the road. In the near darkness, she couldn’t see what he was pointing at. An underpass of some kind, emerging from beneath the opposite side of the street.
Another explosion hit the hotel. A split second later, something whistled past Eliza’s ear. Grover stumbled, crying out in pain.
Eliza and Miriam grabbed his arms and hauled him along. He regained his feet and they raced after Steve and Fayer, now in the lead. Red tracer bullets sliced across the road to their right. They came from a supermarket parking lot, and return fire answered from a brick office building opposite.
They reached the other side of the street, and Eliza found a metal staircase that descended from the sidewalk into the underpass. When they reached the bottom, it turned out not to be a road at all, but a wide, boxy concrete culvert. These must be the storm drains the FBI agents had taken to after abandoning their armored vehicle.
After passing beneath the road, the culvert stretched across the open ground for maybe thirty yards before disappearing into a yawning hole beneath a parking garage. Peeling graffiti colored the concrete walls where they lay exposed to the sky. Bullet holes pocked the surface.
Grover was groaning and clenching his left bicep, so Eliza stopped him just before they plunged into darkness. The tunnel emitted a wet, foul odor, like a cross between a diaper pail and a bag of wet clothes left to mildew.
“Let me look.” She made to unbutton his long-sleeved shirt. He flinched away. “Come on, Grover, you’ve been hit. I’ll be careful.”
Grover nodded at Steve. “Could he do it instead?”
She stared. They could be killed
by a bullet or a stray shell at any moment and Grover was too shy to take off his shirt. But he was insistent, so she looked away while Steve helped him out of his shirt.
Meanwhile, Miriam searched a pair of dead soldiers sprawled at the mouth of the tunnel, apparently looking for weapons. She came up empty-handed.
But the bodies hadn’t been completely looted. Fayer took off one man’s shirt and buttoned it over her tank top, then tugged off the second, smaller man’s boots and socks. She winced as she pulled the socks on over scraped-up feet.
Steve pulled something from Grover’s arm. The boy hissed.
“Well, look what we have here,” Steve said.
He held something up to the dim light cast from the burning hotel across the street. It was a poker chip, glossy gold and stained around the edges with Grover’s blood. Five thousand dollars.
“You’re a high-roller now.” Steve slapped it into Grover’s hand. “Bet there’s a bunch of these things back on the road. Want to go back and scavenge up a fortune?”
Grover managed a thin smile. He caught the others looking and hurriedly put his undergarments and shirt back on.
Then the gunfire picked up again and they ducked into the dank tunnel and safety.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The air grew thicker as they penetrated deeper into the tunnels, first smelling of motor oil, then changing to the stench of rotting bodies. The gunfire grew muffled and then silent after a few corners, but the walls continued to shake as periodic explosions pummeled the ground above them. Steve went first, followed by Eliza, then Fayer, Miriam, and finally Grover. They whispered and touched each other’s shoulders to stay in contact.
After a few minutes, they splashed into water up to their ankles, and before Eliza could stop her, Fayer had dropped to her knees and was gulping away. Steve tried to do the same, but Eliza pulled him back and begged him not to.
“I’m so thirsty. Please, just a mouthful.”
“Steve, you know it’s filthy. You can’t.”
“She’s right,” Fayer’s voice said hollowly as she rose to her feet. “It tastes awful. I hate to think what’s in it.”
“Didn’t stop you from guzzling like an idiot,” Miriam said.
“I couldn’t help it.”
“What if we filtered it?” Grover suggested. “We could strain it through our shirts like you’d do in the desert.”
“That’s for clearing out sediment and mosquito larvae,” Eliza said. “It won’t help with water-borne pathogens.”
“Then what do we do?” he asked. “I’m so thirsty.”
Yes, so was Eliza. It had become almost unbearable. And that was after less than a day baking in the abandoned hotel conference room. Steve said their last water delivery had come the previous evening, but they’d been thirsty for days. He and Fayer must be suffering from serious dehydration.
But at the same time, cholera had already killed tens of thousands in and around Las Vegas. Any water down here would be swimming in it. Introduced to bodies already weakened with hunger and dehydration, an infection would surely prove fatal.
On the other hand, Steve had already fought off an attack of some sort of intestinal illness. Could you build an immunity to cholera? She had no idea and it wasn’t like she could grab her phone and call Jacob to ask.
Steve was edging away as she wrestled with these worries, and she realized just in time that he was heading for the puddle anyway.
She grabbed his arm. “No, not here. I’ll find you water, I promise.”
“How will you do that?”
“I don’t know. I’ll go to the surface and look.”
“It’s impossible.”
“If we don’t find water by morning, then you can drink the puddles. Can you hold on until then?”
He paused, then said, “Okay. Until morning.”
“That goes for all of you,” Eliza said. “You too, Agent Fayer.”
“Water or no water, we can’t stay down here forever,” Miriam said. “Does anyone have any ideas?”
“What about Methuselah’s tank?” Eliza asked.
“Methuselah’s what?” Grover asked.
“An armored car,” Steve said. “We got it from some old survivalist. We left it in an abandoned factory.”
“Do you remember where?” Eliza asked.
“For all we know, it’s buried in rubble,” Fayer said. She sounded stronger after her drink, and Eliza wondered if she’d made a mistake denying Steve a mouthful or two.
“Or stolen,” he said.
Eliza wasn’t so sure. “You said it was an air conditioner factory?”
“That’s right,” Steve said.
“Nobody is looting AC units these days. And Las Vegas is a big place. Even with all the troops fighting, there’s a good chance the factory has been untouched since you took to the storm drains. Could you find it again?”
“Sure, if we’re above ground,” Steve said. “In the daylight. But if we come up, people will start shooting.”
“I agree,” Fayer said. “We have to stay down here. It’s too dangerous up top.”
“Everything is dangerous right now,” Miriam said. “Even sitting here. Soldiers could come around that corner any minute. Or heck, starving hordes of cannibals might tear us apart.”
“Let’s not get carried away,” Eliza said.
“Point is, we’re wasting time. There’s nowhere safe, so we may as well start moving.”
All five of them agreed with this much, and with no better ideas, they decided to make an attempt to find the abandoned factory via the drainage tunnels. Apparently, the tunnels went on for miles and miles, but it was difficult to navigate them in the dark, so the first step was to find another entrance so they could pop out long enough to get their bearings. They groped their way forward, making slow progress.
There were other survivors in the tunnels. Eliza heard breathing, saw lights snuff out as they came around the corner, smelled a hint of burning kerosene, or saw a wood fire quickly doused. Once, she caught a glimpse of a mattress and several thin, filthy children staring, before someone hastily turned off a lantern.
“I’d feel a lot better with guns and flashlights,” Miriam said when they’d put some distance between themselves and the children.
“They’re just kids,” Eliza said.
“What do you think they’ve done to stay alive down here? What do you think they’ve done for food and water?”
At last the tunnel emerged into open air again, emptying into a gravelly wash as it passed beneath the road. The gunfire sounded distant, so Eliza and Steve risked climbing the bank to the street for a better look. Up above, they found more deserted roads, with darkened duplexes, crummy cinder-block houses, and a partially collapsed strip mall across the street. Fires burned to the south and west, and the gun battles continued in those directions as well.
They located the Strip and the burning hotels and office buildings downtown, maybe a mile distant.
“Glad we’re out of there,” Eliza said.
“Yeah, but in the wrong direction,” Steve said. “We’ve been going east. We need to get west of the Strip and north of Highway 95.”
They returned to the edge of the tunnels, where the other three waited. Eliza gave the bad news.
“We passed another culvert about ten minutes ago,” Fayer said. “It seemed like one of the main lines. If we took that, it would cut us back under the city and to the west. If we can get under the freeway and then north of 95, we’ll be safer.”
“I can’t go back in there,” Grover said. “Not until I get water.”
“What choice do we have?” Eliza asked.
“If you have to leave me, I understand.”
“We’re not leaving anyone,” she said.
Fayer bent over with her hands on her knees. Steve leaned
against the concrete and slid to the ground. He looked almost fatally exhausted. Miriam put her hands on her hips and started to say something, then turned away with a sigh.
This was no good. Get settled here and they’d never get going again.
Eliza kicked at the rubbish buried in the sediment that had collected on the side of the drainage canal. She pried loose a two-liter soda bottle, tapped it to dump out the sand, then blew into it to pop out the collapsed sides.
Miriam came over. “What have you got?”
“Something to hold water. Stay with the others. I’ll see what I can find.”
“I’m going too.”
Eliza nodded. “Okay. Let’s go. The rest of you, go back underground. We’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Eliza and Miriam climbed out of the culvert and crossed the street to the strip mall Eliza had spotted earlier. Darkened signs advertised a liquor store, payday loans, and a Mexican bodega. The first two stores were collapsed and the bodega had been looted to the floorboards. Cautiously, they made their way onto a side street and into the surrounding subdivisions.
It was a poor, working-class neighborhood, now in ruins. The houses that hadn’t burned had suffered from looters. There wasn’t a scrap of food or water in any of them. No clothes, no mattresses. The furniture was missing, probably burned for fuel. And the taps were dry. Even the toilet bowls and tanks held no water. With no other options, they continued down the street, house by house.
After nearly an hour of fruitless searching, their luck turned. It started with Miriam spotting a pair of dead soldiers sprawled in the street. Others had stripped their boots, but one of the soldiers, his body nearly cut in two by gunfire, had a pistol holstered at his waist that Miriam discovered when she rolled him over.
She lifted it to the moonlight, then checked the magazine. “Now we’re talking. Grab me that holster, will you?”
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