Relics, Wrecks and Ruins

Heartbreak Hotel ^{By Dirk Flinthart}

The applause dies away. Elvis watches as Marilyn stumbles in her high heels on the steps leading backstage, the tight, sequinned dress restricting her movements. Frank catches her before she can fall, holding her a little too long, a little too close. Elvis checks the impulse to intervene. Marilyn knows her way around men.

She pushes away from Frank and composes herself. “Do you think they liked it?” she asks in that breathy, little-girl voice. “I… I couldn’t see past the footlights.”

“Sure, doll,” says Frank. “Look at you! What’s not to like?” Smiling, but those blue eyes are slow and cold, and he wets his upper lip with the tip of his tongue. Marilyn moves closer to Elvis, holding his arm the way a small child might hold a plush toy, for comfort.

“It was a good set, Marilyn,” Elvis says. “It’s always good. They love you.”

“It’s just… I couldn’t see anyone. Was there… is there a good audience tonight?”

“You can’t see squat without those glasses of yours,” Frank says. “Good audience? Listen! They’re lapping up Bob’s stuff.”

A ripple of laughter makes its way backstage, and then another, and another as Bob delivers his trademark one-liners, playing the crowd like an instrument.

“It’s always a good audience,” Elvis says.

“Always the same audience,” Marilyn says. “I worry maybe they’ll get bored.”

“With you?” He smiles. “That just couldn’t ever happen.” He listens for a moment, and hears a familiar punchline. The audience dissolves into hilarity. “Bob’s nearly done.” He glances at Frank. “You ready?”

Frank makes finger-guns and shoots Elvis with imaginary bullets. “I’m always ready,” he says. “Just show me the mike.” He saunters away, tugging his fedora down over one eye.

“I wish I had his confidence,” Marilyn says.

“He’s a cocky sonofabitch,” Elvis says, “but he’s sure enough got a voice.” She’s about to reply, but something comes in. He almost clears it, but he realizes it’s closer than it should be. He’s been careless. “Hold that thought, honey,” he says. “I’ll be back.”

The moment they catch sight of him, panic strikes. Bullets rip snarling holes through the air, punching through his body and out the other side without slowing. He lets them shoot, studying them the while. At least a dozen. They have the look of desert scavengers in old-school military camouflage decked out with goggles and improvised headwraps to keep the heat and the dust at bay. Their weapons are mismatched. Their discipline is poor and their fire control worse. He watches and waits.

The gunfire turns sporadic as some take cover, some try to change magazines, and some maybe realize at last things aren’t what they seem. One of them holds up a fist, and the last shooters stop.

He looks more carefully at the one with the fist. It isn’t easy to distinguish much out here. He’s restricted to visible light and a bit of the infrared spectrum, so about all he can tell is that the leader is a man, maybe a little older than most of the others. They’re all thin. Their clothes hang loosely over angular limbs.

“Where are you from?” he asks at last.

It’s enough to startle the men.

“A ghost!” someone shouts. “Like Stein said! We shouldn’t be here, man.”

The leader holds up that fist again, opens his hand, palm flat. “No ghosts here, Davis,” he says. “That’s some kind of 3D projection.” The goggles glint in the sunlight as he tilts his head this way and that.

Finally, the leader shuffles close. He strips off a glove and extends a hand, then yanks it back. “Water,” he calls. “There’s a mist sprayer here. They’re using lasers, shining them into the super-fine spray. Old technology.”

Smart, then.

The leader moves his wet hand towards his mouth. Elvis shakes his head. “Wouldn’t do that,” he says.

The leader stops, and pushes his goggles up his forehead. He waits on Elvis.

“They never fixed up Hoover Dam rightwise after the Trumpists tried to blow it. Lake Mead’s not much anymore. We don’t get snowpack on the mountains like we used to, either. Water from the mister ain’t meant for drinking. Not sure it ever was, to be truthful. They put ’em up to cool the streets for the gamblers and tourists.”

The leader shakes his head, and the men mutter. The local pickups aren’t good enough for him to get everything they’re saying, but they seem shocked at the idea of spraying fresh water just to cool people.

“You got a name?” the leader asks.

“Not for you,” he says. “You and yours—you’re leaving. This ain’t your turf.”

The leader studies him. “You look like that old time singer. I’ve seen video. Elvis. I’m going to call you that. I’m Desmond Garnett, Elvis. Colonel Desmond Garnett. ESA Special Forces.”

“Eastern States of America,” Elvis says.

“You’ve heard of us?” Garnett pushes his goggles up his forehead and peers at Elvis.

“It’s an easy jump to make. I’ll give you a few more, for free.” Elvis gestures at the ragtag group. “I was in the army for a spell. I can see your guns don’t match. Your uniforms are trash. Your training is slipshod. If you’re Special Forces, I’m a bluetick hound.”

Garnett gives him a tight, wintry smile. “I’ll allow as I’ve had to recruit from outside my usual pool of talent. This here’s a low-key, fully deniable mission. There’s a degree of uncertainty regarding the border between the ESA and the Republic of the Pacific Coast, and my superiors would rather not raise that issue at the present time. But let me assure you, son…” He lifts his chin, and throws out his chest. “I have the full backing of the duly constituted government of the ESA, and if and when I send the call for backup, there will be a ruckus of the sort that will make you wish you’d never crossed paths with me. So why don’t you just walk back that nonsense about ‘my turf’, and maybe we can talk like civilized men?”

Elvis thinks about smiling in return, but really, what’s the point? “One warning only, Colonel Garnett. Turn yourself around. You got ’til sundown tomorrow.” He shuts down the projection, effectively vanishing. The look on Garnett’s face is surprisingly gratifying.

“You’re back,” Marilyn says, and offers him a stemmed glass. Elvis takes it automatically, though it’s empty, just like hers. She’s wearing a little black number now, every inch the living vision that seduced a nation, and her smile is a thing exquisite.

“How’d you know?” he says.

She shrugs. “I always know.”

“The others don’t.” He gestures with his glass, taking in the whole crowd of them jittering and jiving as Glenn leads the band through Pennsylvania Six Five Thousand, all sweet-sharp brass and mellow clarinets. “You’re the only one.”

Marilyn touches his hand, just for an instant. They’re sitting in a quiet booth off to one side of the dance floor, out of the treacherous currents and swirling tides of the cocktail party. Nobody’s paying them any mind, and for just a moment, he lets his hand press hers in return.

She blushes, and looks away. “I don’t know how I know,” she says. “You’re still… you. But it’s like something is missing. I think sometimes, maybe—I think you have important things you have to do. Not this stuff.”

“This is important,” Elvis says. It’s more important than he can ever hope to explain.

“This?” She looks around the room. “It’s a party. Happens every night.”

“It’s an after-show party. It’s what we do.”

“Work hard, play hard.” She tips up her glass. “Chin-chin.”

He murmurs an apology and gets up to do the rounds. Press the flesh. His mind isn’t really on it, though. Big John Wayne is arm wrestling Lee Marvin at one of the tables, and Frank’s taking bets. There’s a small crowd around them cheering and catcalling, but Elvis is watching the faded, broken, night city outside through the nanolensed eyes of a drone-swarm. Short-lived, semi biological, they crawl and leap and fly amongst the blown sand, the wreckage and detritus, seeking out Garnett and his men.

He sets them to watch, marking certain action parameters, and lets them go. They’ll call if something important happens. Meanwhile, he has other duties.

Jimi and Janis, smashed as usual, howl their way through All Along the Watchtower to tumultuous applause. Bob watches from the sidelines, a rueful grin on his sharp face.

“Sure. I wrote it,” he tells Elvis, “but I never could make it sound like that.”

“It’s okay,” Elvis says, putting a hand on Bob’s shoulder. “It’s what they do. It’s why they’re here.”

“Yeah, man.” Bob can’t take his eyes off the performance as Jimi makes the old Fender do impossible things, wailing through oneiric octaves in an unknown key but it’s right, so right, and Janis stays right there with him, that diamond-gravel voice belting out the words like an anthem to a lost world. “Beautiful,” says Bob with a half-checked sob. “So fuckin’ beautiful.”

And the night rolls on. Fred and Ginger improvise a sparkling routine to something George bangs out on the Steinway grand, leaping and spinning across tabletops in perfect time until Gene steps up with a grin and a tap that sounds like a fusillade, his feet a blur. Ginger spins across to pair with him and they whirl like flames until Fred returns with a hatstand as his partner, mimicking every move Gene makes. On some invisible cue, like magic, Gene twirls Ginger away and Fred spins the hatstand across, and now it’s Gene and the hatstand chasing Fred—and Ginger, as always, making the boys look even better than they are, always in the exact right spot, dancing backwards in heels with a perfect smile and never a hair out of place.

Then it’s Ella and Billie in a searing slow duet while Satchmo leads the band and Miles counterpoints, cool, so very cool. Groucho follows with a routine that pillories Bogey who stands by, laughing helplessly while Harpo honks and mugs and steals his fedora.

Sooner—or maybe later, it’s hard to tell—John and Paul catch up with Elvis and push the big old Gibson flatback into his hands and things get quiet. The lights go down a little, and he catches Marilyn’s eye as he sings Are You Lonesome Tonight? and Love Me Tender, but just as he’s about to give them Heartbreak Hotel to finish for the night the drone swarm signals and he cuts away—

—through a security camera with limited night vision, he watches as Garnett sets up a piece of equipment in the middle of the dusty street corner parking lot where the men have made their camp. It’s nothing like the mismatched guns and worn-out camo, this thing. It’s modern, or maybe postmodern if you factor in the Breakdown and the general halt in research and production around the world.

Garnett unfolds it from a heavy, insulated box lined with dense foam that supports every piece of the construct for transport. It’s a spindly thing, but sturdy enough, rising about man height on a tripod that reflects in the spectrum for titanium, mostly. Lightweight, but rigid. Then the colonel mounts some kind of a black-box unit on top, orienting it with tremendous care.

Elvis runs the silhouette of the device past a range of databases, but nothing matches up precisely enough to make him happy. He moves the drone swarm subtly, getting as many angles as he can. He’ll collate the images and refine them, and share them next time Indira’s got a satellite overhead. Even if she doesn’t recognize it, Indira will want to know.

It’s not until Garnett fans out a tiny, delicate dish of spider-web thin wires that Elvis realizes what he’s looking at. It’s some kind of highly directional transmitter. He checks the satellite database, but no, there’s nothing significant overhead at the moment. A high-altitude drone, maybe? He reorients half a dozen peripheral cameras around the city, but there’s nothing.

He shifts the drone swarm again, measuring the parallax, establishing the angle on Garnett’s transmitter dish. It’s aimed northeast, about thirty-six degrees from horizontal. And there’s still nothing to be seen.

Enough.

As Garnett plugs a portable drive into the unit, Elvis powers up a flatscreen advertisement across the street. The old sound membranes are unreliable with all the dust and blown sand, but the OLED matrix is as bright and clear as ever. Elvis makes a throat-clearing noise, and Garnett looks up. His eyes pop, and he scrabbles for his sidearm, but Elvis shakes his head.

“Ain’t gonna do neither of us no good,” he says.

Slowly, Garnett straightens. “Good trick. You about scared me stupid.”

The straight line is irresistible. “Short trip, I reckon,” Elvis says, and twitches a wry smile onto his image.

Garnett grins. “You might think that. And I guess if I’m right, you might have cause.”

“Right about what?”

Garnett folds his arms across his broad chest and peers at the image, twice lifesize, on the wall across the street. “Could be an animated avatar,” he says. “Could be there’s a man behind, somewhere, using that old face. But I think you’re something more.”

“Do tell,” says Elvis, but he’s got a bad feeling he knows where this is going. The feeling gets stronger as he watches Garnett pull a silvery bag from a pocket and enshroud the transmitter with it. “Faraday cage. You must think me all kinds of sneaky.”

“I surely do,” says Garnett. “That’s why I’m using this here ultra tight-beam, frequency-agile comms unit to talk to a stealthed aerostat way back over yonder. Now, I guess you can figure out the direction. You can probably even guess the range pretty close, knowing what I’ve got for power and seeing the angle of the transmitter dish. But not even you can suborn my communications if you can’t nail the frequency and the signal strength and a few other things I’m not inclined to discuss. So unless you’ve got something interesting to tell me, you might as well sit back and watch me send off a report that says I’m closing in on you, right now.”

“You think that?” says Elvis. “Closing in? That’s amusing, sir. Very amusing.”

“I don’t see you laughing.” Garnett slips his hands under the silvery bag, fingers moving.

Elvis has no really useful assets on hand. The drone swarm is already dying. Another couple hours and they’ll be nothing but decaying components, near indistinguishable from ordinary dead bugs. His heavy units are fixed, providing security for the Hotel structure itself. Of course he’s long ago infiltrated and suborned other security fixtures around the remnants of the city, but by good luck or worse, good planning, Garnett has set himself up out of range of all of them. It’s going to take at least another minute before one of the armed drones makes the distance. Time to stall.

“Those losers you got with you,” he says, pushing the membranes to raise the volume even though it makes his voice come out weird, tinny, kind of robotic. “They won’t get you in. You ain’t got nearly what it takes.”

“That’s okay,” says Garnett, not looking up. “They don’t have to. We just have to find your place, that’s all. Then I call in the professionals and these fine young men collect their promised and well-earned rewards before going back home to a hero’s welcome.” Garnett’s raising his voice too, and Elvis can see several of his men following the conversation with interest.

Change of tactic. “What’d he promise you? Money? I got money. Real money. Old style USA money if you want it. Gold and silver too.” Elvis shifts his image to look at the men with Garnett, throwing in a few superfast subliminal images as well—naked women, gleaming sports cars, gold coins. It can’t hurt.

One of the men—a youngster with a spray of pimples under the desert sunburn—moves uneasily, but Garnett cuts in first. “Family,” he says. “Back east, where you can’t get at them. These gentlemen do their jobs, and not only do they get the promised reward, but certain things happen in favor of their families. Important things. Things they can’t get in any other way. There’s no raccoon up that tree for you.” He frowns, and glances across at Elvis’s image. “What’s that godawful racket you’re making, boy?”

The old membranes are growling and whining now, distorting Elvis’s voice. “Old installation,” he says. “The maintenance staff ain’t what they used to be, you know?” The fact that the noise itself conveniently conceals the whine of a drone engine is another matter.

Garnett chuckles. “You can say that again.” He turns his attention back to the transmitter unit just as the AP drone pops over the top of the 7-11 building on the corner and puts two heavy rubber rounds through the delicate transmitter aerial, blasting it into uselessness.

As the men scatter and dive for their weapons, Elvis puts two more rounds into the transmitter unit itself, then sprays the campsite, the bullets bouncing and whining and kicking up dust. The drone is empty in less than a second, and he dispatches it back to base before Garnett’s men can return fire.

The colonel hasn’t moved a muscle, still there with his hands tucked under the Faraday bag though the transmitter has been smashed. “Good shooting,” he says, finally. “Non-lethal rounds. That’s an old police drone you’re using?”

“I got others,” Elvis says. “Not all of ’em play nice. Why don’t y’all just turn y’selves around and get out before I have to be downright unpleasant?”

Garnett sets himself down on a folding stool. He rummages about in his jacket, comes up with a worn, silver Zippo and a thin black cigar that he clenches in his teeth. He puffs out a cloud of smoke. “We could do that,” he says. Then he gestures at the wreckage of the transmitter. “But I’ve got backup units too. Maybe we could try talking instead. You never know. Could be we can come to some kind mutually beneficial arrangement?”

“You’ll be ice fishing in Hell first,” says Elvis. “Sundown tomorrow.” He shuts down the flatscreen.

The party winds down in the small hours. Sleep is a thing, after all. Or they call it sleep, anyhow. It’s a period of inactivity in which their systems can repair and recharge. They may not be using beds, but what else could you call it?

Elvis doesn’t sleep quite the same as the others. In his own way, he’s more like the dolphins, which sleep half their brains at a time so as they don’t drown. He can shift his awareness around his matrix, letting some elements undertake rejuve cycles while others arise from dormancy to take the load. It’s a dangerous world. Somebody’s got to be awake, keeping an eye on things, but there are times he wishes he could just let go, surrender to the dark for a while, and return when things were on the up-and-up again, ready to go.

He checks on Marilyn, motionless in her niche. She’s been odd lately. The subminds that maintain Elvis while he’s elsewhere are—should be—perfect. She shouldn’t be able to tell when his primary mind is otherwise engaged. Is there some kind of bleed-over? Has she retained elements of the primary awareness after a period of asset-loading?

Or is it him?

He considers that possibility while he watches her. In her version of sleep, she’s cold and immobile. The stark glow of the LED readouts above her steals even the color from her skin, making it too perfect, too even. All the animation, all the joy, everything that makes her a person vanishes. Sleeping, she’s just hardware. Unliving.

Humans dream. Their bodies keep up the processes of being while their brains do strange, uncanny things. Marilyn doesn’t dream.

Or does she? Maybe the maintenance routines… they touch all of the sleepers, every night during the downphase. Could there be something shared? Something he doesn’t know about because of the different way he sleeps? Or is that simply wishful thinking? Perhaps this is what loneliness is.

What would it be like to have someone else like him in the Hotel?

Garnett is talking to a travel advertisement on the wall of the old US Postal Service offices on the Boulevard. He’s very serious about it, and it’s pretty damned funny. After a minute or so, Elvis decides to cut him and his men in on the joke. He lights up a nearby public information screen, and calls out.

“Hey, Garnett.”

Garnett swivels away from the travel sign. His eyes fix on Elvis, there on the little screen, and he frowns.

“That one’s just a loop recording, buddy,” Elvis says. “Got its own solar source. It ain’t networked. S’pose I could connect it up, but I can’t say I see the need. You and your boys sleep okay?”

He knows they didn’t. He initiated a program that played randomly all night long out of the old membranes scattered across the city. Bear sounds. Coyote noises. Puma wails. Subsonics designed to cause anxiety and dread. The occasional scream. Voices, clipped from old movies and radio and TV. Garnett and his soldiers should be nicely on edge by now.

Garnett shoots a sour look at the screen image. “Fine, thanks,” he growls.

“So what were you telling the sign, there?” Elvis asks.

“Funny guy,” Garnett says. “It’s like this. You need a power source. A big, secure one. We know it’s not solar. We cut the lines to the old solar farms, but here you are, still going strong. There’s no way you’ve got enough petrochemical reserves to be running conventional generators. The hydro scheme’s long dead. That pretty much leaves some kind of nuclear source, and no matter how you do it, nuclear runs hot. You’ve had plenty of time to mask your heat signatures, but we’ve had time too. Once we realized the satellite runs over this place were compromised, we flew some manned high-spy missions. Way I figure it, you’re based in Solomon Daylewhite’s Twentieth Century Hotel.” Garnett feels around in his jacket and pulls out another one of those little cigars. He leans back against a wall to light it up.

Elvis is… maybe this is what ‘frightened’ feels like?

It can’t be the heat signature. The reactor is deep underground, a good kilometer from the Hotel. It was illegal even back then, so Daylewhite put a lot of effort into venting the heat inconspicuously, and Elvis has refined the system considerably since. But somehow, Garnett has nailed it. He’s fishing, sure, but the bait is good. Too good.

“The old CeeTwenty,” says Elvis. “Sure, yeah. That’s where I’m hiding. You got me.”

Garnett puffs smoke towards the screen. “Reverse psychology,” he says. “Won’t work. You’re a cutie, aren’t you?

Elvis makes the image smile. “Why thank you, Colonel. Wish I could say the same for you, but you look like forty miles of bad road.”

“QT,” Garnett repeats. “Quantum Thinker. Fifth generation. One of the last. Daylewhite bought you, didn’t he?”

“It’s your story, Colonel Garnett,” Elvis drawls. “You tell me.”

“The last years before the Breakdown,” Garnet says. “Daylewhite had tech money, like Musk and Bezos and Gates. But he pulled a Howard Hughes, and disappeared from the public eye. Except there were rumors. And there was the hotel he was building. The Twentieth Century. Damn strange name for hotel built in the mid twenty-first, right?”

“Strange,” Elvis agrees. “Money does that to a man.”

“Tell me about it.” Garnett shakes his head. “The old government of the day kept a close eye on Daylewhite, like you’d expect. Big money, cutting edge tech stuff. But somehow, a lot of those old records got corrupted. Hard to figure. And then there’s ghost stories out of Vegas these last twenty years or so. People seeing things, hearing things. People disappearing, even.”

“So what is it you think is happening here, Colonel Garnett?”

Garnett looks around; his men are hanging on every word. “I think Daylewhite built something big. It was meant to outshine all of Vegas.” Garnet draws on his cigar, and thinks for a moment. “He needed a QT to run it and a nuclear source to power it. I think Daylewhite almost finished his dream, but the Breakdown happened and the tourists stopped coming and Daylewhite himself died in the Flash Crash. Then the climate got worse and Vegas got too hot. People gave up on the place and everybody forgot Solomon Daylewhite’s dream. Everybody except you, because you can’t leave it, can you?”

“Depends on what you mean,” says Elvis, and this time everybody jumps when he walks around the corner of the post office building with his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, easy as you please.

“It’s not the same as the others, Frank,” Elvis says. “They’ve got the military behind them, this bunch. Real military.”

“Who cares?” Frank snarls. “We got guns. Whadda they gonna come out here for anyhow? Nothin’ but dry dirt and desert sun. They can’t live here. If they don’t have the sense to turn round and go home, we oughta beat it into ’em.”

Big John stands up, and hooks his thumbs into his belt. “Ya can’t beat sense inta the guvvament,” he drawls. “And ya gotta respect the red, white and blue, Frank. This ain’t some pack of rat-bastard wops in cheap suits. This is the You Ess Ay.”

“ESA,” Elvis corrects. “But yeah. This ain’t your mamma’s mafia. This is The Man.”

“We should treat ’em right,” Johnny Cash puts in. “Show ’em hospitality. But we don’t put up with no shenanigans. Not even from the government.”

They’re meeting in the big ballroom, all of them, even the ones who don’t much like coming out. And for sure, he could manage the whole thing himself in a sim, or even just in software, but it doesn’t feel right. Garnett’s expedition affects everyone. It’s only proper they come together and talk it out.

Scott Joplin picks a couple notes on the Steinway, and everybody turns to look. “Seems a mighty risk to me,” he says. “What about we pick another place for hospitality? They don’t have to stay here, do they?”

“It’s us they want to see,” Elvis says. “Me, mostly, I guess.”

“What do they want?” Morrison hasn’t bothered with a shirt and he’s barefoot, but the signature black leather pants are in place, thankfully. “We’re not doing any harm here.”

“By their lights, we ain’t doing a whole lotta good, either,” says Elvis. “They figure I could run a research facility, or a hospital, or even a whole city. They reckon y’all could do cleanup work, fixing contaminated sites, working where it’s too hot or too poison for regular folks.”

Uproar follows. Elvis has to stand up and raise his hands for silence. “One at a time, folks,” he says. “You’ll get heard. All of you.”

“Do they even know who we are?” Liza pushes her bowler hat to the back of her head. “It’s been a while.”

“They’re dying out there, Liz,” says Elvis. “There’s a lot we could do for them.”

“That ain’t what she means,” says Aretha. “You know what she means. Ain’t they got any respect?’

“Sure they do,” sneers Morrison. “Like they would for some upscale Disney effort.” He seizes up, then moves in a herky-jerky impression of a clumsy animatronic robot. “Four score and seven years ago…”

“What if we showed them?” Marilyn’s voice is soft, but she commands attention. Center stage is wherever Marilyn is, always.

“What do you mean?” Elvis runs every possible permutation of her words, but for once he can’t keep up with whatever’s going on in her independent processes. This is new.

“I mean, if they don’t understand who we are… we should show them.” She looks around the room, taking in the uncomprehending faces. “We should put on a show for them!”

This… this really is new.

“Judy Garland?”

“Yep.”

“Michael Jackson?”

“For sure. Daylewhite bought permission from his estate, same as for a wax museum. Of course, Michael ain’t supposed to do his old stuff, but with the Breakdown nobody much cares no more.”

The pimply young man—his name is Davis, Elvis recalls—stops, and grabs Elvis’s jacket. Elvis gives him a look, and Davis lets go.

“Sorry. Sorry,” he says. “It’s just… you got new Michael Jackson material?”

Elvis nods. “What part of it don’t y’all understand, boy? You see me, here. Electro-contractile nanocarbon-threaded muscles. Titanium and carbon fiber bones. Graphene polymer skin. A core fulla hypercapacitors. But all of us, the brains, the people—we’re as much of the real thing as can be.”

Garnett cuts in. “Quantum Thinker, Davis. Fifth gen. Only six Cuties ever built. Nobody knows their full capacity. In theory, Elvis here could even be alive. You alive, Elvis?”

“Damned if I know,” Elvis says. “How about you?”

Garnett chuckles, elbows Davis. “See? Fuck your Turing Test. These things… they say if the Cuties had come along just ten years earlier, maybe they could have stopped the Breakdown. Who knows? Maybe this guy can help us fix things again?” He glances at Elvis conspiratorially, and lowers his voice. “Hey, man. You got… Audrey?”

“Hepburn?”

Garnett nods, his face wary.

“Sure,” says Elvis. “We got Audrey.”

The colonel’s face lights up. “I’ve seen all her films. She’s gorgeous!”

“That she is,” Elvis says. He raises a hand. “This is the checkpoint. Half y’all stay out here. Other half comes with me, catches the show.”

Garnett starts checking off names but the men press close around him and Elvis.

“We’ve been thinking,” says Davis. “What’s with this half-and-half thing?”

“Security,” says Garnett, with a look at Elvis. “I don’t want all of us trapped in there at once.”

“I get that,” says Davis. “We all do, don’t we?” The others nod. Davis turns back to Garnett and Elvis. “But we’ve got another idea. The heavy stuff is all outside the hotel, right? No sense in lethal countermeasures in the interior, with the tourists.”

“That’s so,” Elvis says. “We got some fierce stuff on the periphery, but inside it’s all five-star resort.”

“Five star,” mutters another of the men. “Hot showers?”

“Our own water supply,” Elvis says. “Hot as you can stand it.”

Garnett glares. “What’s your idea?”

“Easy enough,” says Davis. “We all go in together. But after, only half goes out at a time. Once they’re clear of the peripheral defenses, they signal to the other half. That way everybody gets to see the show, and everybody’s still safe. What do you think?”

Elvis watches Garnett. The colonel feels around in his jacket where he pulled out his other cigar. Elvis smiles, and offers up a vintage Cuban in its sealed tube. “Here y’are, Colonel. Take it easy. Probably been a while since you had one of these.”

Garnett’s eyes widen. “Just the once, then,” he says. “I mean I guess it’ll never happen again. Just this one time. Everybody oughta take in the show.”

First the cleanup. Showers and shaves, the little hotel toiletries still in perfect condition after decades in storage. Then it’s tuxedos for everyone.

“We got all sizes,” Elvis says. “Daylewhite planned they’d rent with the rooms, see. But seeing as you’re our first guests, consider these compliments of the house.”

The rough, sunburned men are awed by their own transformation. Fitted perfectly in their new evening suits, hair styled and slicked, faces clean.

“Looka me!” says Davis, spinning on his heel. “I’m a fuckin’ movie star!”

“Language, boy,” Elvis says. “That ain’t how we talk around here.”

“Sorry, sir,” says Davis, crestfallen.

Elvis claps him on the shoulder. “Come on son,” he says. “There’s a show to catch.”

And what a show it is.

Frank nails his cue as they file into the ballroom, belting out the opening lines of New York, New York as only he can, the band sizzling behind him. The whole crowd is waiting, applauding as the tuxedo-clad soldiers enter blinking, starry-eyed, amazed in the huge, elegant space. Then the ladies push forward, and Garnett’s men can only gape, and blush. Audrey tips Elvis a wink, then dimples, extends an elegantly gloved hand to Garnett, and bobs just a hint of a curtsy.

The colonel is speechless. He shoots a wide-eyed look at Elvis, but Audrey threads her slender arm through his and whisks him off to the dance floor, Frank and the band giving it their all. Then it’s Bobby Darin doing Mack the Knife, and Dean Martin follows with Volare, and the big room is alive like it’s never been before.

Dylan sidles up next to Elvis. “Fuckin’ beautiful, man,” he says. “Look at ’em! They’re starved for this. They’ve never seen the like!”

“That’s because there ain’t nothing left like this outside anymore,” Elvis says. “All they got left now is survival. The world’s too hot. The weather’s gone mean. The water ain’t where it’s meant to be, and where it is, it ain’t doing no good. Ain’t nobody left got tuxedos and big bands. Not even rock ‘n roll.”

Dylan cocks his head. “What they hell they got to live for?”

“Beats me,” murmurs Elvis.

Marilyn takes the stage, and Garnett’s men forget their decorum, cheering and screaming for Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend. Tears glisten on her cheeks as she takes a bow and even if they’re only glycerine, they’re perfect, perfect, and the screaming and the cheering redoubles.

Roundabout midnight, Elvis gets his turn on stage. With Bogart in his white tux handling an open bar things have turned lively, so he jumps straight into Hound Dog and then Blue Suede Shoes. He duets with Jim doing Riders On The Storm, then gives way to Booker T Washington, and Diana Ross and the Godfather of Soul, James Brown. Yow!

Garnett’s men are dazzled, delighted, bewitched, bewildered. Clumsy, untried caterpillars, they stretch and reach until elegant, astonishing women touch their new wings, caress them, shape them, make of each young roughneck a butterfly, pulling them into a world like it never was, like it should be, like it could be if people cared enough for the right things. Wake up, boys! This is who you really are! Music and singing, dancing and stories and laughter…

Somewhere around dawn, the gradual, deliberate increase of carbon monoxide in the recirculated air system puts even the tireless Davis gently to sleep. Marilyn watches sadly as the young man settles back in one of the booths with his head on Dusty Springfield’s lap, and his eyes flicker closed for the last time.

“Hardly more than a boy,” she says.

Elvis puts an arm around her shoulders, and she leans into him. “At least they got one good night,” he says. “Best show we ever did.”

“Will they be back?”

Elvis shrugs. “Garnett was a cowboy. Indira touched his records back east for us. He pulled a lot of favors to set this up. Burned a few bridges. I’ll use his transmitters, send back a message like they got trouble with the Pacific Coast bunch. Can’t guarantee nothing, but I don’t reckon we’re likely to hear much more from Garnett’s people.”

“Best audience we ever had,” says Marilyn. “It’ll be hard to go back to performing for ourselves.”

“Better than decontaminating waste dumps,” Elvis says.

Marilyn shakes her head sadly. “Don’t they know they need us?”

Elvis looks across at Garnett, lying on a couch. Audrey sits on the floor next to him, holding his hand but the colonel’s not moving, nor like to move ever again. Audrey smiles a sad little smile, and folds his two hands onto his chest, together.

“They need us,” Elvis says, “but they don’t know they need us. They got caught up in making money and fighting over money and they wrecked the whole damn’ world, and now they’re too busy staying alive to know what they lost. But we’re still here.” He takes Marilyn’s little hand in his, holds it tight.

“I suppose.” She squeezes his hand. “The show must go on, huh?”

“That’s right,” Elvis says. “And hey. Long as we’re still here, maybe someday they’ll figure it out. And then they can make a comeback.”

Marilyn smiles, and somewhere outside, dawn breaks over a city of dust and ruins.