Desert Hawk

In September of 23 I was on my first patrol in Las Vegas. The Coyote Platoon had been deployed to Vegas late in August and we'd been given a week or so to adjust tot he climate. Even though the summer had begun to cool down, it was still insufferably hot and the sweat rolling off my head and arms collected ash and dust which stuck to my skin like a sticky paste. I hated the desert. I hated the heat. I think I may have hated myself for volunteering. Despite that, I did what I was told and drank all the water I could get my hands on. I was a good soldier, if a little green around the collar still.

Our patrol had started just after dusk and were moving by foot near what remained of West Charleston Avenue. Like the silhouettes of wraiths we moved swiftly and almost silently from one ruined wall to the next, always keep in the pitted ribbon of the road to our right shoulder. Actually traveling on the road would have been an invitation to get shot, so we stuck to the cinder block skeletons of bombed and fire ravaged buildings. Whenever we came across a building that was more or less intact we'd set up hasty perimeter security and a few teams would move in to sweep the building for personnel and equipment.

We'd keep an eye out for booby traps and antipersonnel devices like laserpods, but they were relatively easy to defeat as long as you saw them before they saw you. Our primary concern was running into US Army patrols doing the same thing we were doing. It was a tense cat and mouse game through the ashy hot Nevada night. I was young and new at the game, and let the tension get the better of me more than a few times before I managed to get my nerves under control.

The platoon had split up to search a largish building that used to be part of the old medical complex. We were just east of the no man's land that was the I-15 corridor and there was a real concern that we'd run into a US patrol. Moving through the dark and ruined corridors, my partner and I were doing a text book job of clearing each room before moving to the next. Hastings had signaled that his room was clear and I had moved forward to the next room when I nearly poked my eye out on the barrel of a rifle.

My feet kept up their smooth half run pace as my head and neck attempted to prevent me from performing an ocular cavity search on the offending object. There was a brief moment when I was staring through a hole in the wall above my head before I found myself on my ass, fumbling to bring my own rifle to bear on a target I could barely make out in the dim light.

"I think maybe you're in the wrong place white man." was the quite and calm challenge from the shadow. That was the first time I met Bill Daboda.

He and I got drunk and laughed about that first night a number of times. When he tells the story I fall over backwards trying to run away and piss myself at the same time. "I only seen rabbits do that before I met Hawks" he was fond of telling people. When I tell it, the story included the other four people in the room training guns on me, and the tense moments before they realized I wasn't a US Army soldier. and helped me to my feet. Both versions are more or less true. I didn't piss myself, but I must have looked foolish and confused with parts of my body trying to run in opposite directions.

The Paiute, and then later the other tribes that moved into the area, where an enormous asset to our effort. Bill and I became good friends and we had some precious moments of peace, we'd sit and drink, and watch the sunset. He's tease me about how white I was, despite the deep desert tan I was developing, and I'd just keep quiet. It's not that I was afraid of Bill, although I suspect he could have taken me in a straight fight, it's just that it's tough to find something to tease the Paiute about. They've been getting the shaft from just about everyone for close to four hundred years.

Bill used to tell me that the war was the best thing that ever happened to his people. "Sure we're caught in the middle of you white bastards and your silly war, but at least now I can shoot some of you sonsabitches without the cops getting pissed." Not only that but the war gave them the opportunity to jump the rez. Most Paiute had moved off the side of Snow Mountain and down into Summerlin, evicting those few crazy enough to remain by threat of violence. Then they barricaded some of the bigger houses and turned the neighborhoods into fortresses. They had taken advantage of the war to get back what we had stolen from them, never mind that no one had really lived in the Vegas Valley before the Mormons set up fort here.

I figured they had it coming to em, and I never begrudged Bill his real estate policies. According to this packet that I'd been delivered he was in charge of the tribal council now, and I wondered what that, and twenty years had changed for him, and maybe between us. As my horse picked its way down the pass into Las Vegas, I thought back to our last meeting and wondered if maybe I wasn't getting myself into more trouble than I could handle.

Coming back to Vegas wasn't something I had ever really planned to do. It's not that I was purposefully avoiding it, although in hindsight it's very likely that I was subconsciously doing just that. It had been just about 20 years since I'd been here during the war. During that time I had wandered, settled, married and buried, and I'd done it all in places like Overton, Pahrump and Laughlin. Little dusty towns that had been little dusty towns even before the war cut them off from the rest of the world. They only thing they had going for them was their relative proximity to Las Vegas.

For 20 years I'd been dancing around the memory of those war years in Vegas, circling my past and unable to confront it. I'd been a farmer, a miner, a sheriff, a husband and a father. For a time I was a drifter bent on vengeance, but revenge never brings back those you lost, or salve the pain of their absence. All it does is remind a man of how mean he can be. For the last seven years I'd been running from myself and the demon I had become, in war, and in love.

I'd taken to accepting courier jobs between Republic cities and the Desert Territories. It didn't pay that well, but I don't have much need for money. I knew the area and knew how to move through it without getting killed by the gangs that watched the roads and valleys. The trick was to use a horse and stay off the roads. Large caravans could move with relative safety, but only if they had guides and guards. I'd done those jobs too, but they required a level of social interaction that I wasn't always prepared to participate in.

A few weeks back a guy in a sharp suit had cornered me outside my house in Victorville. I don't get many visitors on pleasant business and I made mention to him that if he was looking for trouble it might save me the effort if he just kicked his own ass. He was very polite and said things like "Mr. Hawks" and flattered me by saying nice things about my reputation as a scout and courier. he said some other things, that while not necessarily impolite, suggested he had more information about my past than I care to divulge. He asked if we could talk some place a little more discrete and after giving it a few moments to mull over I invited him inside.

What he had was a job offer, full of secrets, from the Republic. The Republic needed my help he said, and they were willing to compensate me for it. he outlined a simple plan. I would take a package to a man named Bill Daboda in Las Vegas. That was it. For my troubles I would get a fee that was several times my normal billing rate. They would provide me with a motorcycle and a generous ration of gasoline for the trip and if Bill Daboda had something he wanted me to send back, the Republic would really appreciate it if I did that too.

I took the job and large sealed envelope, and the next morning I headed out on my new motorcycle. I rode through the oven heat of the mojave as far as Fort Baker where I traded the motorcycle and gasoline for a horse, lots of water and a night in the whore house. Before the punishing sun rose the next morning I was already leaving Fort Baker. I stayed on the road for a few miles, until I was out of sight and then I headed north up into the mountains. Only an idiot would try to ride a brand new motorcycle with extra gasoline through the I-15 pass by himself.

A week later I crested a pass and crossed into the Las Vegas valley. For a second I stopped near the ridge line and looked down at my past. The wind tore at my face and the setting sun behind me rouged the valley below. Only then did I realize that I had been avoiding Vegas all these years. The city hadn't changed nearly as much this time. There were a few lights coming on below me, but none of them were rockets or laser pods, twinkling with the promise of violence. These were cooking fires and lamps, the lights of people who weren't afraid of aerial assault or mortar attacks.

I camped on the mountain that night, and ate a cold dinner. I didn't start a fire. A lone man on a mountain, even this close to peace, had reason to be cautious. In the morning I rode down into the city, to find my old friend Bill Daboda.

I wasn't real sure what I'd find in Vegas. It's been a long time since I was last here. My folks picked up and moved us north not long after the shit hit the fan in the southwest. That was a little more than 30 years ago and Vegas has been through some hard times since then.

I was only nine when we left, and I don't recall much more than our neighborhood and the school I went to. The famed Vegas Strip is just a blurry and gaudily colored cornucopia of images thrown together and collected into one hazy memory of light, heat, and noise. My parents rarely took me down to the strip and mostly I remember the lights and the noise of the machines.

The heat, the light, and the noise. That's what I remember most from the Vegas of my youth. I came back during the war for a while but aside from the heat and the noise, Vegas was a very different place. After Hoover Dam was blown back in '13 the city lost most of its power and water. Almost overnight Vegas became a ghost town, a desiccated skeleton with the baggy flesh of desperation hanging on at the edges.

Some die hards hung on, either delusional about Vegas's inevitable decline to wasteland border town or simply out of plain stubbornness. A huge empty desert city with little power and water was a recipe for destruction and it wasn't long before a negligent heating fire claimed most of the city on a windy and dry winter day.

During the war, Nevada and parts of western Arizona and Utah were the battleground. Neither the US nor The Republic thought much of turning the desert into a wasteland, as far as they were concerned it already was. Vegas was caught right in the middle, one of the only sizable civilian population centers in the declared war zone. Reno fared better for being closer to the Republic lines and having a plentiful water supply. Phoenix and Salt Lake City were spared Vegas's fate by becoming the forward fortified positions for the US Army along the southern and northern fronts.

The next time I came through Vegas was at the head of a Republic Desert Raider platoon in the winter of '22. There was little of the Vegas of my youth left, except the heat and the noise. We set up a forward base on the west side of the valley in an old shopping center that had largely been spared from what the Paiute in the area called the Cleansing Fire. It was the best thing that had happened to them since the white man had come west. They left the reservation and moved into the abandoned houses of rich retirees. When the artillery and rockets rained down on the city during the night, I could sit out in the heat and if I squinted my eyes, the lights of the tracers, flares and rocket tails looked a bit like I remembered Vegas. Hot, loud, and bright.

The ruined husk of Vegas held a great number of bad things, land mines, sentry guns, laser pods, bio/gas sacks, unexploded ordinance, not to mention the more persistent and deadly of the Armies weapons, people like me. Both the US and the Republic had fielded platoons of Guerilla units in the desert. We would sneak past each other behind the enemy lines and do our jobs; break their stuff.

That war was twenty years ago though, and I hadn't been back since a few months before the NeoCon power in the US collapsed and the war ended. Nevada was part of the Republic of Western America now, at least officially it was. Reno was about the only place that actually had people, civilization, or law. Vegas was just a scar on the land scape and in the memory of a nation that used to worship greed. The Paiute were still there, holed up in the remains of abandoned wealth, and if you asked them, they'd tell you that Vegas wasn't that bad. It was still hot, but it wasn't very loud much anymore and pretty much everyone just left them alone.

I didn't know what to expect in Vegas, but I certainly didn't expect to stay.