"Let's do this thing," Gutter said, "Animal style."
He aimed his revolver slowly around the hallway corner. There was a dimly lit row of lockers, sitting adjacent to a tinted checkpoint. A small, bulky camera at the end of the hall whirred, glancing back and forth slowly.
"Saguaro?" Mike tapped on his earpiece.
Ron looked up, taking nearly silent breaths. The shiny metal vent plates above rattled, and a scrabble emerged, growing louder as it neared. Dents, the size of a working man's boots, sank into the ductwork.
Someone rummaged above, rolling a cylinder down the duct's entire length. At the end, the grenade clattered past the loosened frames. The checkpoint's black windows first filled with a fiery, orange haze, followed by the concussive shattering. Saguaro kicked the flaming door off its hinge, sending it sliding across the corridor.
He winked. "One step ahead of you, brother."
Two more of Saguaro's henchmen piled out of the vent, torches and heavy drills in hand. They crouched at the bottom rim of the Vault door, a giant, circular steel mass of locks and keypads, finished in a hue of brass. With a heavy clunk, followed by a few more small fissures and a shower of sparks, the Vault door rotated counterclockwise on an oversized marble gear rack, opening to three of The Ring's footsoldiers.
"We want to make a deal--" one of the guards on the Vault Inner started, cut off by a sudden burst of bullets. The three, all donning rough leather jackets, slumped over against the trays of gold.
"It only gets its value from the guards, and chains, and locks," Ron said, looking around. "Pretty rocks."
"Sweet!" Laura leaned against Mike, and shoved a few bars into her pockets.
The Casino's Vault lamps, a sweeping grid lined with sensors, dimmed, pulsating strangely. "Jamba Juice," Saguaro radioed over, "Where are you?"
"On the way," Jamie managed to respond, steering an old Chevrolet van through the jagged, cluttered streets of Mexicali. He glanced at the SAT-NAV unit, blinking a bright red at the Casino. A pair of two-door Chevrolet Blazers, outfitted with rusty, spinning turrets, trailed him on adjacent roads.
"Guacamole," one of the gunners yelled, opening fire.
Jamie approached the Nugget Casino's loading dock, just a few hundred feet down. More rounds punctured the windshield, sending cracks splintering into his view. The mirrors were blown right off, discarded somewhere into a poor chiquita's cart. He cut the tattered wheel sharp, and the van crashed through the leafy underbrush, off the hilly thoroughfare, and through the Casino Floor's roof.
"Yikes," he muttered, dodging the various slot machines on the Floor. They buzzed, hummed, and blared all sorts of coinage sounds, flying off the hood of the van. The carpeted floor collapsed, along with the Cards of Death, plunging Jamie and the van into the Vault Inner with an abrupt stall. The headlights caught Gutter and the crew below, bags, shirts, hats, and pants all stuffed to the brim with gold.
"How's it goin'?" Ron asked Jamie, hopping in.
"Ron," said Jamie, "All I can say is that it's been a hot girl summer!"
They both grinned, and Jamie jumped the van forward, through the Secondary Vault door, and out the Casino's loading dock. A wild pane of blinding sunlight hit everyone's faces, shielded in between palms alongside the local highway. The ground rumbled, moving to the slow beat of jazz, and chunks of concrete fell from Mexicali's high rises. "It's a cosmic gumbo," Mike said, realizing.
The Sun was unusually oversized, looming over the city's skyline. It was a saturated, burnt orange disk, bordered by a dusty ochre haze, a mix of heat distortion waves and jet trails. A set of U.S. Navy Supercobras banked down, the Sun's glow casting a thin line of yellow on their top edges, leaving their bellies completely shadowed.
The Zetan Mothership, but a curious set of white lights, shimmered in the morning sky. It laid almost dormant, cutting a chunk out of the Sun's front yard real estate despite being stationed off the far side of the Moon.
Behind the crew, the Nugget Casino erupted in an upward spiral of smoke and blazing rubble, just as the Mothership's Planetary Superlaser swept the city's far reaches.
"God, Joy Behar's been eating a lot," Gutter joked.
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Written by Jerry Zervas on 6/19/26.
DO NOT USE UNLESS GIVEN PERMISSION BY ME (i.e. email
me)
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