Dead Neon: Tales of Near-Future Las Vegas

By Todd Pierce and Jarret Keene

Las Vegas is considered a modern icon of excess. It offers every imaginable extreme of greed, pleasure, and despair, all supported by technology that enhances fantasy and allows residents and visitors alike to forget reality and responsibility. The authors of the fourteen stories in Dead Neon imagine Sin City in the near future, when excess has led to social, environmental, or economic collapse. Their stories range from futuristic casinos to the seared post-apocalyptic desert, from the struggle to survive in a repressive theocracy to the madness of living in a world where most life forms and all moral codes have vanished. Dead Neon explores the possible future of America by examining the near future of Las Vegas. The authors, all either Vegas-based or intimately familiar with the city, capture its unique rhythms and flavor and probe its potential for evoking the fullest range of the human spirit in settings of magic, horror, and despair.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Release date: Oct 28, 2010
• ISBN: 9780874178357

Book preview

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Sin's Last Stand

CHRIS NILES

My name is Melissa Jane Gibson and I've just turned seventeen.

They've asked me to explain what happened. I'll do the best I can. Fact is, I don't know how I got from the person I was back then to the person I am today. If you had asked me before it started, I would have said that I wasn't capable of such things. Even though I'm a nongod, I know the difference between right and wrong.

My mother used to say that nongods were just as moral as forgods. But nobody else did. The forgods tell us that to be good it's necessary to have a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. Nongods by definition are immoral and bad. And they hate America.

There was a time when nongods were given a say in how the country was run. They were able to work as teachers, doctors, and scientists. They were able to hold public office. Apparently there was a time, too, when nongods made licentious feature-length movies that forgods were forced to go and watch and eat lots of bad food, which is how they all got so fat.

But most of the records of that time have vanished. Once the One-god government was established, forgods said that the Onegod didn't like licentious feature-length movies, so they were destroyed, along with the rest of the evidence of that wicked time. You can understand it, I suppose: they are trying to help people to get to heaven and, if licentiousness stands in the way, then it's probably best to try and get rid of it.

My mother raised me to consider the other person's point of view. She called it open-mindedness—that's the word I remember. Although I never hear it spoken now in quite the way she used it. The language has changed quite a bit since my mother was a girl. According to the Words of God dictionary, open-mindedness now means the ability to choose quickly between two flavors of yogurt when standing in line at the lunch counter.

Perhaps I should just talk a little bit more about my mother, because it might explain how I got into this situation. Not that I am seeking to justify my actions. Forgods tell us that nongod science, developed by Jews at a time when they were allowed to live among the righteous, gives weak people an excuse to put the blame for their behavior where it doesn't belong—like on repressed thoughts and feelings—instead of on the wickedness of the first female. But I think if I tell exactly what happened, it might help.

Everybody knows about Sin's Last Stand, the battle for Vegas. I won't go over it again, except to explain how it made me an orphan.

♠ My mother had been a geologist, but her job went away after it became illegal to teach that anything was older than the Bible said.

She had not planned to move to Vegas, but because high principles had never had much traction there, it had become, almost by default, the last nongod refuge. Some of the best scientific brains in the country were working the tables, trying to make their living from gambling. Numbers are numbers, as one theoretical physicist told me once when I asked her whether she minded.

Mom ran a roulette table at Bellagio, and most days I went to the casino with her because the schools had been closed. For years, forgods had been taking their children out of school and telling them things about Jesus at home. And even after forgods had control of the education curriculum, they still thought that schools were bad places where humanistic urges might spring up at any moment. Then forgods decided that nongods didn't need to be taught when all they did was clean forgod houses and ring up forgod groceries. And, as one forgod had explained on television, if nongods were given books, soon they'd be running the schools again, forcing forgod kids to learn some fool theory that contradicted the facts in the book of Genesis. No, it seemed safer all round to only allow the Bible—that way people wouldn't be tempted to learn.

♠ Sin's Last Stand. Sounds grand, doesn't it? Like General Custer, or Thermopylae? But, as the gambling professors once told me, the winners write history, and they usually fiddle with the facts.

Bellagio, like every other casino on the Strip, was home for nongods. We had thought we were safe inside those walls with no clocks, no windows, no references to the outside world. We thought, too, that because forgod leaders were more often than not at the slot machines or checking into the honeymoon suite with women, or men, who were not their wives, that they would continue to describe the Strip as a den of atheistic iniquity, but do nothing.

♠ The soldiers came before dawn. All the casinos were doing brisk business. Nongods usually stayed up all night because, since the Love Crime Act had made it legal for a forgod to kill a nongod if they thought their faith was being threatened, there was no sensible reason to be out on the streets during the day.

The troops wore goggles and had television cameras strapped to their helmets providing live network coverage. One carried a megaphone.

Nongods, in the name of Brother John and the Onegod government, I order you to repent.

Nobody answered, nobody moved. The only sound was the clatter of a roulette wheel as it slowed.

Step forward, nongods. Accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior.

Still nothing.

The man with the megaphone seemed agitated now. His hands shook; perhaps he was as frightened as we were. He cleared his throat before speaking.

Christ died for your sins. Step forward, and repent!

The roulette wheel stopped, the ball settling on red 14.

The soldiers fired. Round after round.

The lights went out. It got dark and dusty, and I could smell blood and fear. My mother was one of the first to be killed. She died right in front of me. I don't know how all those bullets missed me.

♠ Nongod orphans are usually sent to the Suffer the Children Home for the Ungodly. I'd heard that it was well named: kids do suffer there, and repentance is guaranteed after a short period of what's described as godly persuasion.

But they didn't put me there, because it turned out that I have the same name as some old saint.

Mel Gibson? The woman at the front desk started when she saw it. That's your name?

I showed her my nongod papers, stamped with a pentacle.

Goodness me, perhaps it's a sign, she muttered and reached for the phone.

There's something else I should mention. There are few children left. After the third repeal of the Clean Air, Water, and Mind Act, it was discovered that industrial pollutants—even when they're legal and blessed by God—permanently damage unborn children. Many of the forgods are sterile now, and nongods are forbidden to breed because, as the Onegod government says, Acid rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.

So that was how I got to go and be the foster daughter of a forgod couple, Brian and Judy Lovely.

♠ Judy was fat. She ran a successful business that performed plastic surgery on forgods who wanted to look like their favorite biblical character. One had to credit her for spotting a gap in the market, she told me on the Super Enviro Hummer ride to their place north in the suburbs. She'd been looking through some old documents one day and had seen how years ago a piece of toast with a likeness of the Virgin Mary had sold for thousands at auction, and she wondered how much more people would pay to have their own face altered to look like that.

Judging by the size of their house, the answer was a lot.

It was much larger than the motel room my mother and I had shared out in the Boulder corridor. It was in a gated community and surrounded by a high fence so nobody could see in. Like a castle within two walls.

They even had a swimming pool and a hot tub, which Judy said I was welcome to use any time I wanted. Just like a real daughter, I was to consider this my home. Those were her exact words.

Then she showed me my room and left me alone to unpack. I sat on the bed and thought about my mother and wondered when the forgods would try to convert me.

But they didn't. They went to church three times during the week and twice on Sundays. (Judy said she did some of her best business at prayer meetings.) They never asked me to join them. They almost never spoke to me about God.

Sometimes, usually at breakfast, when she was enjoying a large plate of blueberry muffins served by her indentured homosexual, Iglesias, Judy would say something like, It must be such a help, dear, to know that your mother repented at the last minute and accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as her personal savior and is now smiling down from heaven. What comfort to know that she's with the Redeemer at this very moment. And they're watching you, dear.

I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but, apart from the implication that my mother was now spying on me, I didn't like the way Judy called me dear. She didn't sound like she meant it. My mom had never called me dear. She had called me kiddo.

I missed my mom and my friends from the casino. I still couldn't believe I was the only one left, so one day I spent all the money I had left on a taxi to the Strip.

I wish now that I hadn't. Bulldozers were creeping over piles of rubble where the casinos had stood, and the air was smoky and smelled of death. A sign said the site was being transformed into the Jesus Conquers America Museum, which would feature a moving diorama, showing how the peaceful conversion of the last of the nongods had taken place.

When I got back to the house, I sat by the pool and cried.

♠ Hey. The hand on my shoulder was light. I jumped. Are you OK?

Brian sat down beside me.

Come on, he said. I'm going to show you something I think you'll like.

He led me to a part of the house that I'd never been to and pushed open a door.

It was a library. Row upon row of books. Floor to ceiling. Every book you could think of.

You can read?

Yes. I was proud of that fact. It was an unusual skill.

I'm sure you'll find something here, Brian said. What are you interested in? Biographies? Science? Murder mysteries?

I reached for The Origin of Species. My mother had told me about Charles Darwin, but I'd never seen the book. I liked how heavy it felt in my hands.

It's OK, Brian said. Take as many as you want. And he smiled. I realized how different he was from Judy. He seemed much younger and kinder. He wasn't fat, and he didn't call me dear.

Graham Greene, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Aldous Huxley, Kurt Vonnegut. It was a huge illegal stash. The last passage of the Seditious Documents Act had got rid of all words that were contrary to forgod values. A person could be flogged for having even one of them.

You're safe here in the house, but I wouldn't take them out, Brian said, his face serious.

I didn't want to go out. Now that the Strip was in ruins, there was nothing in Vegas for me. Seeing the wrecked casinos had brought home just how utterly alone I was.

You don't know what this means to me.

Brian didn't say anything, but his smile was sad.

That big house seemed less like a prison after that. I still missed my mother and my friends, but I could escape.

In the morning I swam in the pool. Sometimes I'd go into the kitchen for a snack and a chat with Iglesias, who was very sweet, but because the homosexual aversion electrotherapy had been experimental, he was not very good with words.

After that, I'd go to my room and read until the heat became less intense, and then I'd sit out by the pool again in the shade with a glass of iced tea and something lighter, like a spy thriller.

Brian often joined me. I began to look forward to that. I began to like Brian. He treated me with respect. Judy was always nice, but I could never escape the feeling that it was only because she thought that was how forgods were supposed to behave. Brian laughed.

♠ You know where this is heading, don't you? I wish I didn't have to write it down.

I became infatuated with Brian, even though he was married.

I started to imagine things about him, late at night. I started to see us together. I started to think horrible thoughts about Judy. And I began to wonder if, as a nongod, I really was as wicked as the forgods said.

One day when I climbed out of the pool, he was there with a big white towel. He handed it to me.

I took the towel. His hand closed over mine.

My god, you're beautiful.

And that was it.

♠ I knew that sleeping with Brian was wrong. I told myself that I loved him, but I'm not sure that was true. Perhaps I just wanted to be close to somebody because I felt so terribly alone.

Mealtimes became awkward, although Judy, who seemed to have a lot of not very nice things to say about people who went to her church, didn't appear to notice that Brian and I didn't speak to each other. Iglesias served our food and cleared our plates. Sometimes I caught him looking at me, but I couldn't read the expression in his eyes.

Then I started to vomit in the mornings.

♠ I knew I had to tell Brian, but I didn't know how. And I frantically reasoned that if my pregnancy remained unspoken, then it would go away.

I started praying, can you believe that? I tried to do a deal with God. My mother had told me that there was no convincing scientific proof that God existed, but in my more bitter moments I figured, Hey, it's Vegas. You never know your luck.

But God didn't answer, and in the end Judy figured it out.

More sausages, dear? Iglesias, make sure she eats more. Melissa, you're as thin as a stick, it's contrary to God's will. Judy gestured to Iglesias to fill up my plate.

The meat smelled sweet and, to my pregnant state, slightly off. I ran from the table with my hand over my mouth. Judy followed me to the bathroom and stood outside, fingernails tapping the door while I threw up.

♠ A life-sized oil painting of Jesus looked at me as I broke the news to Judy and Brian in the living room.

Is this true? Judy demanded of Brian.

He forced the word out: Evidently.

How far along? Judy spat the words at me.

What?

How pregnant are you?

I don't know.

How long since your last period, you stupid little girl, Judy hissed.

I thought hard. Three months.

Judy said nothing. Her lips were a thin, tight line. She didn't even look at Brian.

Then she hoisted herself out of her chair and walked out of the room. For the first time Brian met my gaze.

I'm so sorry, he whispered. So very sorry.

♠ I thought about running away. I had heard about underground networks that helped nongods escape to Mexico or Canada, but I didn't know how to contact them. Even getting out of the house would be a big problem. The walls were electrified and the gates were secured by an electronic code that I didn't have. And if I did manage to escape, as a pregnant nongod, I wouldn't get far.

There was nothing to do but stay put.

Iglesias fed me milk and meat and fresh vegetables and fruit. I was always hungry. I ate everything. The baby grew. I began to feel it moving inside my body and, despite everything, suddenly I was