Zero Visibility Possible

Chapter One: The Man in the Window

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Today, free for subscribers, I offer up chapter one of my debut novel.

Zero Visibility Possible opens with a mass public trauma you will remember, and explores the uses to which bad actors will put such events. It’s got more than that, too — love, sex, bitcoin, spies, religious nuts …

Greg Olear has called it “a stick of dynamite” and Ian Shapira of the Washington Post has described it as “a dark satire about people bearing witness to cruelty and violence, abject to algorithms and surveillance, and the lure of conspiracy thinking as disinformation ops flood the zone and anything seems possible and true in a society de-linked from agreed-upon fact.” A recent reader told me the writing is so tight and sharp it reads like a shot of hard spirits. That made me happy because I worked to tighten it down through many revisions. (All writing is rewriting!)

The book is short, the first in trilogy of short works I am writing on how aspects of our dystopia affect the inner lives of a few loosely connected characters.

So, as we say in the business, More TK.

I will gift a paid subscription to the Freakshow to anyone who buys the book (paperback or e-book) at this link.

Zero Visibility Possible

Copyright © 2024 Nina Burleigh

All rights reserved

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – for example, electronic, photocopy, recording – without prior written consent. The only exception is brief quotations in parenthesis.

CHAPTER 1. THE MAN IN THE WINDOW

Las Vegas, 11:11 p.m. Monday

Under American skies, where eagles soar high,

I thank God for this land so free-eee-ee.

From amber waves of grain to mountains majesty,

Lord’s liberty shines on me.

Twenty-two thousand people are in the audience, and at least half are singing along with Jonny K Blue on the Vegas strip at the True Grit Country music festival. Voices carry. Closer to the ground are ripples of laughter and hoo-hahs, sloshing plastic cups, and sticky bodies jostling. Tattooed white skin in tiny tank tops with golden Eagle heads. Cowboy hats, cowboy boots. MAGA hats. Flags. American flag towels around shoulders, flag doo-rags. Some people brought kids. They wave flags on tiny sticks.

Blue and the band are engulfed in stage smoke. A pair of red, white, and blue towers of light rise from the haze and pierce the void of desert sky. The Twin Towers of Old Glory. Music rises with the light towers; sound and glow dissipate somewhere in the stratosphere. American spirits time traveling on a light bridge into the Milky Way.

The True Grit is an outdoor music event in name only. This stretch of the Strip is as indoor as it is possible to be and still be outside. Neon and glass. The air smells air-conditioned or canned, like the oxygen coursing through ICU ventilators or maybe the International Space Station.

With a hand on my heart and a prayer on my lips,

I salute our flag, and the freedom it grips,

And the soldiers who fought, and those who still fight.

Their sacrifice echoes through days and nights.

In this land of the brave, freedom ain’t free

Lord’s liberty shines on me…

The air vibrates with thousands of voices. There are many patriots here. Not a few have hands on their hearts. A few wipe at tears.

Blue was on his second “Lords’s liberty shines” when the shooting started.

Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pocketypop! Pop!

Sounded like firecrackers at first to everyone—except the gun enthusiasts, of whom, at this event, there were not a few. They knew the sound of automatic weapons fire when they heard it before the bodies started to fall.

For the first thirty seconds, the band played on. Blue stopped singing just before security rushed onstage. A screech from colossal speakers followed the last guitar chord. By then, horror was rippling out from the middle of the crowd. The first bodies were down. The inhuman Pop! Pop! Pop! Pppoppopopopopopopop! continued, a staccato metronome to the screams.

No one was listening by then. One thought only: Where is the EXIT? But what is an exit under a sky raining bullets? They need interiors, ceilings, doors, walls, and tunnels.

Half the crowd surged toward a five-foot-high chain link fence. Those who could hoisted themselves over it. More were crushed against it. The fence made them better individual targets because, oh, yes, he had a scope. For a second, bodies fell off the wall; then, the shooter aimed his spray back into the disintegrating pack in the middle of the street.

For ten minutes, the man on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay gazed down on the faux daylight of the Vegas night and fired no less than 3,000 bullets. He had chosen the Vista Suite for this view, and when the reservations desk made an error and tried to put him in a different one, he threw a fit, an outburst recorded by the lobby camera and later viewed hundreds of times by police.

It would later be said that Bill Meadows was living out a long-cherished fantasy of shooting human fish in a barrel. He’d once earned five million dollars from a single video poker game in the same building where he took his firing position. A high roller and brilliant gamer, he beat the system.

This was video poker of another sort.

It had taken him two days and five trips up and down the elevators with a luggage trolley to bring all the necessary equipment up. Some of his guns could hit their targets at five hundred yards. He’d bought them all at gun shows in Arizona, Nevada, and Texas—legally.

Stockpiled. Cached by the dozen. You never knew when the government would try to stop the trade.

Oh, and ammo. Thousands of rounds.

The sellers would not remember him.

There were records, of course. No man eludes them entirely. But his name was so common and his face so average. He was Everyman. He was no one. He had lived in multiple states. He had twenty-five addresses in the previous dozen years.

Conspiracy speculators hit Reddit minutes after his name was published. They swarmed a new thread under r/conspiracy — R/vegas and speculated.

Anything could be said of a man after a scene like this.

Shooter was a military-industrial complex ghost.

ISIS, White ISIS.

He was laundering drug money. He was putting dirty dollars into the Wynn properties and taking clean dollars out.

Gamblers or people claiming to be posted on the thread. Over the last ten years, one or two had spotted Bill Meadows in high-roller VIP rooms. He was colorless, glassy-eyed, and easily forgotten. Diffident. On Valium. Often flanked by bored-looking sylphic young women.

He didn’t have much to say.

Was he even just one man?

Time should have provided some answers.

But none came, only unreliable witnesses, shrouded employment history, and half-answers to every question. Facts, suppositions, and lies floated around the black hole of him, and pfft! he was reduced, an infinitesimal element in impenetrable mass.

Up high, at the edges of the smashed Vista window, the desert breeze blew the drapes in and out, raspy whisper, like the sound of last breaths. The sound of real human terror and agony was distant and dreamy, muffled by the toilet paper he’d stuffed in his ears. He would not completely noise-cancel this event with his gun-range headphones.

Oh, no.

This was the chorus of angels that would carry him into his eternal rest as he placed one of the pistols in his mouth and pulled the trigger.