The whole town was contaminated with uranium, dangerous levels the medic said, but just barely, we’d be okay if we washed regularly. We marched down the strip at dawn, a couple of hours behind the tank brigade, and by the time we got there those motherfuckers had taken all the good rooms at the Luxor and MGM Grand.
Most of the strip was in our control, but up past the Wynn was still un-cleared and considered hostile territory. My unit was assigned to the Tropicana, but they had units at New York-New York, Caesars Palace, and what was left of the Flamingo. We were the third military occupation of Las Vegas in as many years. It started with the Mormon Militia, affectionately known as the Youngsters, then it was the Well-Armed, who moved in when the party decided to crush the Mormon state in its infancy. Finally it was our turn. I marched into Vegas with the Pacifica National Guard.
The idea was to clear and hold the city so they could use it as a staging ground against Phoenix. If we held Las Vegas and Phoenix, then with LA we would have San Diego surrounded. All supply lines to the militias holding San Diego would be cut off, except from the south. It would force Mexico to either openly side with the party, or stop the supply-lines that everyone knew had to be coming through Tijuana. Liberating San Diego was seen as winning the war in those days, and liberating Las Vegas was the first step to make that happen.
It’s axiomatic in the military that any action will either be a lot easier or a lot more difficult than you think it will be. We expected Vegas to be hard to clear and easy to hold, but it was the other way around. We had almost no resistance coming into the city, but that preceded nine months of skirmishes, mostly in North Vegas against small groups of guerillas. They were old Youngsters who had joined the buttons and were just fighting to justify receiving the supplies they needed to survive. They’d been fighting in Vegas for years by then, so they had home field advantage.
Anyone who was a part of that mess, anyone who was honest, would tell you that neither side was truly committed to the fight anymore. The enemy was attacking just enough for us to know they were there, and we were doing just enough to keep the sirs happy. It was like we had an understanding, we were all sleeping in beds and had access to food and booze- winning or losing would put an end to it. The sooner we had Vegas under control, the sooner we’d all be back in the desert, cowering under camo-tarps and hoping not to be annihilated by wandering clouds of nanobots.
I think some of our commanding officers felt the same way. It was technically a warzone, but after six weeks or so we all treated it as a break from the war. The locals who we came into contact with were solicitous and friendly, as no doubt they had been for the previous armies. Any civilian with any sense had already headed to points east, or had gotten to California somehow, so what was left were a bunch of sleazy entrepreneurs trying to get rich in what was left of paradise.
One such denizen of the wasteland was Carrie Masters. She must’ve been in her late forties when I first met her, but surgeries and injections kept her ageless if not young-looking. She was like a work of art that would’ve been a masterpiece if the artist had known when to stop. I guess you could say she used me, but I liked it, and I got something out of the deal too.
Spitz introduced me to her in the hall outside my room. I was heading out to scavenge some abandoned houses with my little crew. She was dressed like a celebrity who didn’t want to be recognized, she was wearing sweats and sunglasses. “Matt tells me you play the piano.” She said.
“Yeah I play.” I said. “Or I used to. I haven’t been able to practice much.”
“We don’t need a concert pianist or anything. Can you play cocktail-style?”
I laughed. “Are you a singer?”
She nodded and smiled at me. “I do mostly standards and ballads and things.”
“You have sheet music?” I asked.
She shook her head no.
“That’s okay, I can probably fake it. Where’s the gig?”
“Some guys from the 51 are starting a club at the Bellagio.” Spitz said. “They’re looking for entertainers.”
“Like what the 112 did at Circus-Circus?” I asked.
“Oh no.” Carrie said. “That was just a whorehouse. We’re trying to do something with some class.”
“Carrie’s their entertainment director.” Spitz said.
“When do we start?”
“Tonight.” She said.
“Then we’d better find this piano and practice.” And just like that I became the house player for the 51 club. Truth be told Carrie wasn’t much of a singer, but she was passable and dressed elegantly, and she represented the dead world all the soldiers longed for. The Bellagio was in pretty good shape, it had been rebuilt in the twenties and it still had a working septic system. The entrepreneurial soldiers had scavenged a solar array from an abandoned base up north, so the place had electricity to power the slots and virtual blackjack machines, and to keep the ice cold. The exchange rate made most of the games obsolete, hitting a major jackpot might win you two hundred thousand dollars, which was worth about seven PAC blue stripes back then. But the games still had their mind-numbing, time-consuming power, and people still spent hours playing.
The real profit for the 51 was in the table games and at the bar where it was PAC only, and the few soldiers who had it were happy to spend it there. Playing in the joint meant I ate a lot better, and it kept me out of harm’s way. When duties with my unit interfered with my duties at the club, the leader of the 51 paid a visit to my commanding officer, Rebecca DeMay, and got my assignment changed. I always liked her, and I was worried for awhile that they had threatened her, but then I saw her at the tables playing on house credit.
The 51 quickly became one of the most popular places for soldiers to go. I was lucky to have gotten in on the ground floor, and after a week of performing together Carrie and I had become a real team. I knew when to help her out and when to lay back a bit, and we were a team offstage too. As entertainment director she would talk to me about what we could bring in to the club to keep the soldiers from killing themselves. We showed movies when we could find them, and started an open-mic comedy night. We discovered two or three really funny performers, and we put them in regular rotation. Essentially what it turned into was a kind of variety show, like something out of vaudeville. We were packing the house regularly.
One of the things the 51 was responsible for, in an official capacity, was housing and corralling all the non-combatant citizens who were running around Vegas and generally getting in the way. Mostly they were held in the smaller hotels off the strip, like the Embassy Suites, or the Raddisen, and those who couldn’t be put to work had their comings and goings monitored.
Carrie and I were having a smoke between shows when a drunk old non-combatant came out the side door of the Bellagio. He walked past where we were sitting on the loading dock and did a double take when he saw Carrie. “Mya!” He shouted at her. “What the hell are you doing here? I figured you for long gone or dead by now.”
“Hiya Larry,” she said, smiling at him, “I go by Carrie now. Carrie Masters. I’m singing for the soldiers.”
“Oh yeah?” He sidled up to the steps and leaned an arm on the rail. “You a real survivor huh? S’admirable, really. I mean it.”
“That’s nice of you to say Larry.” She said.
“S’true.” He said. “It’s good to see an old friend.” He looked down at his hands and back up at me and Carrie. “Listen, I hate to ask, but do you think you could spare a little treason? Honest work’s hard to come by in this town, and I’m in a spot here. I’m tryna get to LA.”
“Sorry Larry, I’m not doing too well either, financially speaking. If you come by the show I can get you some drink tickets.”
“Aw come on,” he said, “you can’t spare a few blues for a discrete friend?”
“I don’t remember discretion being one of your strong suits.” She said.
“It can be.” He said. “Depends on how well I’m eating.”
Carrie looked
at me. “Honey I’m short on cash, could you lend me a fiver to give to my friend? I’ll pay you back.” I paid the guy and gave him some nicotine too. I asked Carrie what it was all about after he left. She said he knew her in another life and left it at that. By then I’d been in love with her about a month, although I hadn’t done anything about it. I showed my love in my work, playing everything much better than necessary. I put everything I was feeling into our corny torch songs, and I like to think I brought subtle shadings of emotion into the schlock we played, even though sometimes it was just for just a few stoned soldiers at three in the morning.
I felt very protective of Carrie, so when this old drunk started turning up with his hand out on a daily basis I didn’t like it. It seemed like he was always there, at the back of the audience drinking booze he’d gotten with her drink tickets, or at the tables, trying his luck with her money. Every time he came around I noticed a change in Carrie’s personality. It was obvious that she was feeling the turn of the screw, and I decided to put a stop to it.
Our ritual was to have a smoke between shows. I loved our time alone together, we sat on the loading dock behind the stage. “Carrie you know this is a warzone right?”
She smiled at me with no idea what I was getting at. “Yeah, I’ve heard that.” She said.
“People dying left and right,” I said, “I don’t think anyone would miss Larry.”
Her demeanor changed as soon as I said his name. “He’s just a pest.”
“He’s a bloodsucker Carrie, I’m going to follow him back to his room tonight and put a bullet in his head. Problem solved. How’s that sound?”
“Gee it’s the first time anyone’s offered to commit murder for me.” She said, batting her eyelashes. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Carrie I’m serious here. I’ve killed lots of people, most everyone here has. This guy’s blackmailing you, fuck him. He’s a dead man. I just wanted you to know.”
“He’s just an old drunk. As soon as he’s gone to LA he’ll forget about me.”
“I don’t think he’s going anywhere.” I said. “He seems to have a pretty good thing going right here.”
“But still, I couldn’t live with myself if I caused his death, even indirectly. Please don’t do it. Promise me.”
I shook my head, wishing I hadn’t said anything about my plans. “Okay Carrie, but no more blackmail. I’m going to talk to the guy. This has to stop.”
“No, don’t.” She said. “It’s my problem to deal with. You’re sweet, really, but you don’t have to worry about me.”
I would’ve argued some more, but it was time to get back to the stage. I figured she just didn’t want me to find out what Larry had on her. I knew that whatever it was, it wouldn’t change how I felt about her. So she’d been a prostitute, or she’d been in jail for something ugly, I didn’t give a damn.
One of my friends in the 51 was Arnold Egon. Everyone called him Ego. He worked as a kind of fixer for the club, greasing the sirs and acquiring the goods. I thought if anyone could help it was him. I went to see him the next afternoon. He wasn’t at all happy. “This piece of shit is blackmailing Carrie?”
I nodded. “His name is Larry, he stays over at the Embassy Suites.”
“What’s he got on her?”
“I don’t know and I don’t really care, do you?”
“No, you’re right, it doesn’t matter. It’s Carrie!” He stood up. “Let’s go talk to this fucker.”
The hotel smelled of bleach and piss and half the lights in the place didn’t work. Ego got Larry’s room number from the guard out front, and we went down the dark corridor to his room. Ego pounded his fist against the door four times and a moment later the door opened slightly, revealing a shrunken colorless face. Ego pushed the door the rest of the way open, making Larry jump back out of the way. There were clothes all over the floor and trash too, and there was only one light on in the place. Ego and I entered and I shut the door behind us. “Larry Materson, listen the fuck up.” Ego said. “Carrie Masters works for the 51, so when you fuck with her, you’re fucking with a bunch of people who kill other people for a living. That’s our job. The club is just a diversion until we can get back to our primary function: Murder. If for some unknowable goddamned reason you want to continue your sorry excuse for an existence, you will leave her alone. Understand?”
He straightened up his back and grimaced a little. “You think she works for you?” He said. “You have no idea who that woman is or what she’s up to.”
Ego looked at me. “This guy’s a fuckin’ moron.” He turned to Larry. “What you say now is ‘Got it, I’m sorry, I’ll leave her alone.’ Say those words and live.”
“Got it,” Larry said, “I’m sorry. I’ll leave Mya Petrova alone.”
“Shut up.” I said. “A lot of people change their names.”
“Yes, for a lot of different reasons.” Larry said.
“Okay Materson, you’re fucking dying to do it,” Ego said, “so just go ahead and tell us what you know.”
Larry looked around the mess near his bed and found a bottle. He poured some in a paper cup. “You want some?” He asked. We declined. “Sit, please, you two are making me nervous standing there. Do either of you have a smoke? No? Sit, please. I’ll tell you what I know about Mya.” Ego picked up a chair from the floor and I pulled one out from the table and turned it around. “I hate to get her in trouble, she’s an old friend, but really it’s better that you know. I was considering finding someone in the 51 to warn about her anyway.”
“Get to the fuckin’ point.” Ego said.
“The woman you know as Carrie Masters is really Mya Petrova, widow of the late Vlad Petrov, and I can see by your faces that you don’t know who that is. Vlad Petrov owned a majority share in the Bellagio hotel and casino. I worked for the man before the crash, I was his bodyguard and driver. I knew him even longer than Mya did. He bought controlling interest in the Bellagio in ’21 or ’22, and married Mya around that same time. She was a backup singer in Lady Gaga’s show over at the MGM Grand. You should’ve seen her back then. She was radiant with energy, she was like a fountain of light, it just came out of her…”
“So she used to be married to some rich Russian fucker,” Ego said, “who cares?”
“Because Petrov was way up the food chain in the party out here. When the Youngsters took over Vegas he went along with the other casino owners and cut a deal, but he was working intel for the Well-Regs the whole time. He was financing the local opposition and getting money and supplies to the advance-units. Rumor has it that he’s the one who planted the dirty bomb at the Disney Experience. There was a big meeting between the casino owners and Mormon militia leaders, and Vlad pretended he had to take an emergency call and left the meeting. A couple of minutes later? Boom. Everyone knew he did it, and a month later he was killed by a Youngster sniper and his compound was incinerated. Everyone assumed Mya was incinerated with it, but here she is, working with the Pacifica National Guard all of a sudden. I guess she’s given up on the Christian Nationalists.”
“You think she’s still working for them?” Ego asked.
“She would do just about anything I asked to keep from being identified, what does that tell you?” He took a sip from his cup. “She’s just lucky I’m a gentleman. She’s gotta be working for the Well-Regs, otherwise what’s she doing here? She has the resources to get herself far away from the war if she wanted to.”
“You can’t make an assumption like that.” I said. “You have no real evidence.”
“Maybe not,” he said, “but if she ever leaves an important meeting to take an emergency call, I wouldn’t hang around.”
On the way back to the Bellagio I begged Ego not to turn her in. “You can’t assume she’s working for the buttons just because her husband was.”
“She’s a possible enemy agent,” Ego said, “gotta report it. I have no choice.”
And so Mya Petrova, AKA Carrie Masters, was taken into cu
stody. The 77th tactical had a prison camp at the old airport, and she was classified as ‘suspected due to past affiliations.’ It was a classification that warranted decent treatment. She wasn’t in a cage, but she wasn’t free either, and it was my fault. She would be investigated and all the evidence against her would be sent with her to LA for trial. It was possible that they wouldn’t find anything, in which case she would be freed. I clung to that hope.
I kept playing the Bellagio but it wasn’t any fun anymore. When they said they wanted to try out new singers I quit. I went back to regular duty with the 112 and started going on patrols and risking my ass again. I thought about Carrie. I thought about her a lot.
Eventually it couldn’t be denied that we’d secured Vegas. Word went around that most units would be moving south to try to liberate Phoenix. I decided that if I was ever going to talk to Carrie again, I’d better do it. I’d been imagining rows of cots in a hanger or something, but she was in a hotel room. It was the Marriot connected to the airport. A guard signed me in and I just went and knocked on her door. I thought she’d be mad at me, but she greeted me warmly and invited me inside. “I’m so sorry.” I said. “I was trying to help you.” We were sitting on the edge of her bed.
“You should’ve listened to me when I told you not to talk to Larry.” She said.
“I just couldn’t stand the idea of that creep blackmailing you.” I said. “I shouldn’t have brought Ego with me when I went to talk to him. If I’d have gone alone…”
“You’d have kept my identity secret?”
“Yes.”
“That’s sweet.” She said. “It’s too late now, my identity is well established. Now they’ve got my DNA on file and everything.”
“Why did you stay in Vegas?” I asked her. “It’s the only thing that bothered me.”
“Because the Bellagio is my hotel.” She said. “My husband’s estate is mine, and that’s his most valuable asset. I needed to stay close to it if I was going to claim it. Timing would’ve been crucial. Ownership is in a state of limbo because of the occupation. I would have had to come forward at just the right moment.”
“And now you’ll lose it?”
“Maybe not,” she said, “I’ve been in contact with a lawyer in LA, and she says if they don’t find any evidence against me, and they wont, I should be able to retain most, if not all, of my husband’s estate”
“That’s good.” I said.
“I’m sorry I lied to you, I was just scared.”
“It’s okay,” I said, “performing with you was the most fun I’ve had since the war started…”
“You play beautifully.”
“Carrie,” I said, “Mya I mean, did you know I was in love with you?”
“I did suspect it when you offered to kill Larry for me.” She said. “But honey, it wouldn’t have worked out.”
“Maybe not.” I said. “I’m headed to Phoenix soon.”
She looked around the room and smiled at me. “You want something to remember me by?”
I nodded slowly.
When it finally was time to board the transport south, I still felt blessed by Carrie Masters. All I had to do was think of her and warmth went all through me.
A couple of years later, after I’d lost my arm and had been discharged from the Guard, I was in a dingy bar in south LA when who should I see but Larry, holding court with a couple other old drunks in a back booth. I was feeling gregarious and forgiving at the time. “Hiya Larry, ya old blackmailer, remember me?”
His eyes bugged out of his head when he saw me. “Of course, of course!” He stood up and shook my hand and then turned to his companions. “This guy, this guy right here! He can back me up. He was there in Vegas, he used to play piano for Carrie at the Bellagio. Tell them, tell them.”
“I used to play piano for Carrie at the Bellagio.” I said.
“No, no, sit down, please sit, and tell them the rest of it.”
“Really?” I asked. “You really want me to?”
“Yes, tell them.”
“Okay.” I said. I sat down next to Larry in the booth. “This motherfucker right here, he tried to blackmail Carrie because he knew who she really was. He got her arrested.”
“And who was she really?” Asked a thin man sitting across from me.
“Mya Petrova.” I said.
“And there you have it.” Larry said.
“You seem awfully proud of the fact that you tried to blackmail someone.” I said. “She got locked up. I know she’s rich or whatever, but still…”
“She’s free as a bird, and her lawyer was able to get her quite a payout for Petrov’s share of the casino. Last I heard they were tracking down his foreign accounts.” He looked at his companions. “And what do I get? The man who made the whole scam possible? Nada, nothing, jack shit. Biggest score I was ever involved in and I didn’t see a dime!”
“’The fuck you talking about?” I asked him.
He looked at me. “She’s a remarkable woman. I don’t blame you for loving her, even if she was old enough to be your mother. I forgot, what name did you know her by?”
“Carrie Masters.” I said.
“That’s pretty close. Her real name is Carrie-Anne Moore. She was friends with Mya and Vlad back in the old days, she was probably jealous of Mya, marrying into that kind of money. She knew Mya had been obliterated during the second Mormon war. No corpse would’ve been found. So in the chaos of the occupation she saw an opportunity and took it. I agreed to be her shill for a fifty-fifty split. I should’ve known there would be no way to collect. People with that kind of money can insulate themselves.”
“So she wanted to get arrested?”
“She did. It established her identity, and she knew they wouldn’t turn up any evidence against Mya. Vlad never involved her in anything. Ever.”
“You weren’t really blackmailing her?”
“No, of course not,” he said, “that was my part to play. She suspected you would want to protect her, and also that you would want to know what I had on her. Nothing is as predictable as a young man in love. She used you to get the money, just like she used me. I would consider you a sucker, but I got played too.”
“You got played worse.” His friend told him.
I laughed and called out to the bartender. “I’ll take another vodka.” I shouted. “Another vodka for the second biggest sucker in the room.”
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Annihilating the Past