Tevun-Krus #5 - DecoPunk

Casinos in the Sky

Casinos in the Sky

A Decopunk Short by @KingBritain

 

Glory's Casino – what some called to be the finest building ever built by any man – existed solely and completely in the sky, and Bunny Charles intended to rob it.

For twenty years the Casino had hovered high in the perpetual blue skies of Las Vegas, levitating like a jewel of engineering, a palace of splendour and riches that the ordinary folk of Vegas could only ever dream of. Bunny had looked up at the underside of the Casino, large, sprawling even in the air, painted gold and rich and splashed with chrome, for the past twenty years of her life and had thought the same thing every time.

That thing is blocking my sun.

It was a terrible truth for her to behold, but it was so. Bunny had spent half her life subjected to the shadow of the Casino, the tremendous whirling and rattling of the hefty gold turbines that kept the grand building afloat, the fear that one day the thing would simply fall out of the sky and crush her and half of the city flat. When she looked out through her window, or graced the pathways outside her home, her world was a stark contrast to the rest of the city, where the fierce sun was able to burn down freely. Bunny's world was cold, dim, irritating. She sometimes even found rubbish that had been dropped over the side of the Casino. It was terrible.

Bunny thought of moving. Her father had bought the mansion – which was situated along a blazing strip of flashing neon lights and tall, blue casinos – long ago when Bunny Charles hadn't even been born, some fifty years ago. But moving was impossible. Her father had owned the strip as well as the mansion, with all of the casinos running along it. He left everything to her when he died, and although it had made her a very rich woman, it had cemented her place in this part of Vegas, where she was queen, where she could make a man disappear with but a few choice words. Yet none of that mattered. The Casino still plagued her, and despite her riches she could do nothing about it.

'You could move to the Casino,' Donny said to her one day. He was a small, oily man, who despite dressing in the smartest suit he could find still seemed to remain ugly and repellent. 'You'd never have to look at it then.'

'You have a brain, Donny?'

'Yes, Ma’am.' 

'Then use it. They're the enemy. You don't sleep with the enemy.'

Donny looked down, fiddling with his hat. He was a coward, not at all suited to the Vegas lifestyle they pursued, but Donny was family, and Bunny Charles looked after family. 

'You could blow it outta the sky,' he said. 'I know a guy. Works in the Army. Could–'

'She doesn't want to hear your stupid crazy ideas, Don.' 

'Yeah, Don. Shut up.'

Bunny raised a hand, hushing the men around her, men who had once been her father's men. Good men – at least in terms of productiveness, if not morality. She made good use of them. Whenever she needed something happening, they made it happen. 

'I'm not going another day with that thing in my sky,' Bunny said to them. 'My daddy built this place up with his own hands. I've built it up with mine. We're not moving, and they aren't moving, so we're gonna have to hurt them. Maybe if we hurt them enough, they'll cut their loses, move on to some different city.'

'How you gonna do that, Boss?'

'Easy, Don. We're gonna rob them.'

And this is how Bunny Charles, daughter of the late great Nathan Henry Charles, came to be on the docking platform of the grand Glory's Casino.