War of The Wooks Part V
After Dead and Company’s June 8th concert and the massive riot that preceded it, the Mole Person Liberation Front had not yet released their hostages. In fact, that night they launched a final, desperate attack on the United Tunnels of Vegas. The MPLF and their leader, Zuri Zepeda, outright refused to acknowledge the outcome of the vote led by Las Vegas Water Authority Chief Virgil Hidewhittler, supported by Other Side of the Coin founder Vanguard, the UTV’s True Prime Mole Grubby Busch, and Deadheads Advocating for the Freedom of Mole People co-founder Smitty Finkligan.
The MPLF’s late-night attack was, ultimately, a futile effort: the group exhausted all of its resources and used almost every remaining member to carry out the mission. OSOC blocked off all drain lateral entrances after the MPLF took their trustafarian hostages, so Mole People had no covert means of access to the Rio-Caesar’s-Mirage tunnel system. They resorted to attacking the main entrances, where they were beaten by UTV forces with little struggle or fanfare. They stood no chance.
After the MPLF threat was neutralized, UTV combatants moved in on the MGM tunnel, which, according to the terms of the Sphere Summit, was the only designated Mole Person Zone in Las Vegas. The UTV captured former MPLF leader Zuri Zepeda on Sunday morning, and with that, the Mole Person Liberation Front was officially no more. Their last official act before disbanding was the release of the trustafarian hostages, authorized by Grit Sumpump, the acting leader of the MPLF after Zepeda’s capture.
The United Tunnels of Vegas, under the leadership of True Prime Mole Grubby Busch, became the official governing body of the entire Vegas underground.
OSOC, in accordance with Hidewhittler’s plan, disbanded, and Busch immediately instated former OSOC leader Vanguard as the head of his cabinet and Sleeve as the UTV’s Press Officer. Save for a few MPLF diehards who have gone into hiding, all Mole People either assimilated and moved into the wook tunnels or fled to the MGM tunnel.
A short digression: readers are probably wondering why I, Skye Ortak, am now covering this story instead of Michael P. Vincent, who has been reporting on it until now. The night of the show, Vincent, his advisor, and JamBase writer Andy Gustafon all got into an Uber headed to an undisclosed location, and the three have all been missing ever since. In addition to covering the aftermath of the Sphere summit and the attack that followed it, my editor at Shrieks & Whispers has tasked me with locating these irresponsible deadbeats.
My contact in the now-disbanded MPLF, Grit Sumpump, has refused to meet with me, and both of my visits to the MGM tunnel have been met with hostility. I cannot get a hold of Sleeve, either, and he has yet to host a press conference. Apparently, OSOC’s commitment to press transparency didn’t survive the conversion to the UTV.
Peter Shapiro, my former boss and principal financial backer of the UTV, has also been uncontactable and has not made a public appearance since the Sphere Summit. Smitty Finkligan and Patriciana Blinkspinkulli, the founders of Deadheads Advocating for the Freedom of Mole People, whose surprise vote at the summit ultimately put the UTV in power, have also been missing. Nobody has been able to contact them all week.
To make matters worse, I have no idea where Vincent and his friends are. Gustafon shared his location with me when we first met at Golden Corral, but his phone has been offline since Saturday night. It seems like I’m out of options here.
I visited the Apple Store at Caesar’s Palace and after twenty minutes of arguing and a twenty-dollar tip, one of the employees finally gave me the last known location of Gustafon’s phone before it died. He had gone to a strip club/steakhouse called Treasures, but his phone didn’t die until Monday afternoon, meaning that he had either left it there or, for some unfathomable reason, stayed there overnight and well into the next day.
I called to ask if they remembered seeing Gustafon, Vincent, or his advisor, but they wouldn’t give me any information. I decided to stop by to ask in person.
When I walked into the dimly-lit club on Friday night, I was immediately approached by a tall redhead.
“Hey baby,” she said, “what brings a girl like you to a place like this?”
“Cut the crap,” I told her. “I’m on an investigation. You know anybody named Andy Gustafon?”
“Andy? Nope.”
“What about Michael Vincent?”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about. Buy me a drink?”
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and showed her pictures of the two missing reporters. “Look familiar?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. A tip might jog my memory,” she said sultrily.
I signed and gave her twenty dollars. I started a mental log of how much the idiots were going to owe me once I found them, but I had a feeling that they wouldn’t be able to pay me back anytime soon.
After being paid, she told me that she didn’t recognize Gustafon, but Vincent had been with two of her coworkers the weekend before. They wouldn’t be in for another hour, so I sat at the bar and fended off exotic dancers.
Finally, the two I was looking for, Pampelmousse and Pasteque, sat down next to me. “We heard you wanna talk to us?” Pampelmousse asked. “Make it quick.”
I showed them a picture of Vincent. “You recognize this guy?”
She recoiled at his image. “Why are you looking for that derelict?”
“Oh, come on,” Pasteque said, “he wasn’t that bad. He was just in over his head.”
“I don’t care,” Pampelmousse countered. “He only tipped us $700.”
My eyes widened. How much must he have spent to make a $700 tip seem stingy? “What happened to him?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she simpered, fluttering her eyelashes innocently. “Maybe if you pay the rest of his tip I can point you in the right direction.”
“What do you mean, the rest?” I demanded.
“Just round it up to a more appropriate 25%. Then I’ll tell you what happened to him.”
“Is he alive?”
She held up her open palm. $500 later, she told me that Vincent was “probably” still alive, and had come to the club on Saturday night with two of his friends, presumably his advisor and Gustafon. They were apparently DOA (stripper lingo meaning “drunk on arrival”) and Vincent bought two hours of private dances from Pampelmousse and Pasteque plus three bottles of top-shelf champagne.
“All his cards got declined,” Pasteque said, “so we took him to the ATM and emptied his bank account. He had enough to pay us for the dances and tip us but couldn’t afford the champagne.”
What a loser. “Okay. What happened to him then?”
“He’s paying off his debt. With steep interest.”
“What do you mean? How?”
“He’s working in the kitchen now. He’s the new dishwasher at the steakhouse.”
“Are you kidding me?” I shouted. “He’s been here the whole time?”
Pampelmousse shrugged. “Happens. Maybe if you’re nice to the chef he’ll let you go back and talk to him.”
I shook my head, thanked the dancers, and headed to the kitchen next door. Before I made it out somebody tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned around to see Pasteque.
“Hey, listen,” she murmured sympathetically, “I’m sorry about all this with your friend. He was really a decent guy, just, you know, drunk and broke and pathetic and sad. I feel bad that you had to pay the rest of his tip.”
“Oh, believe me,” I replied, “he’s going to pay me back. With interest.”
“Either way,” she said earnestly, “I want you to have this. I think it’s only fair.” She handed me three wrinkled ten-dollar bills.
“Wow. Thanks.”
She smiled. “Tell Michael that if he ever has a few thousand dollars he can still come and ask for me. Pampelmousse might be mad at him, but I’m not.”
“I’ll be sure to pass that on. Cheers.”
I immediately spent the money bribing the chef into letting me into the kitchen, where I found Vincent standing at the sink, looking gaunt. He was gnawing on a chunk of gristle he’d taken from somebody’s dirty dish. He jumped when he saw me.
“Skye! What the hell are you doing here?” he asked, hiding his piece of gristle behind his back. “Don’t tell them that you saw me eating leftovers or they’ll fine me again!”
“I’ve been looking for you all week! Why didn’t you call?”
“They took my phone! They took everything from me! Everything I own!”
“Serves you right, you fucking moron!” I snapped. “Where’s your advisor? Where’s Andy?”
“My advisor called Climax and Clementine and they came from the Peppermint Hippo and bailed him out. I don’t know where he is now. Andy got arrested.”
“Arrested? For what?”
Vincent shrugged. “Lewd behavior? Soliciting prostitution? Being an asshole? I don’t know. He was long gone by the time I started having problems.”
I squeezed my temples in frustration. “He must have left his phone here before he got arrested. I traced his location here. What precinct do you think he was taken to?”
“Listen, forget about him. He doesn’t even work for Shrieks & Whispers.”
“I guess you’re right. How much longer do you have to work here?”
“Not sure. Two, maybe three weeks? That’s with overtime.”
“Good lord. Don’t you have an assignment in New York next week?”
“Not at this rate. Unless you can get me out of here.”
I laughed. “I spent half a grand just getting to talk to you. I’m not helping you any more than that.”
He began to panic. “Can’t you call our editor? Maybe he can give me an advance. I’ll work for free for a month!”
“I doubt that he’ll go for that. I think you’re stuck here, Vincent.”
He started to tear up.
“I hope it was worth it,” I said as I walked out.
I called our editor, who actually agreed to the advance payment Vincent requested. Still, I decided to let him sweat it out in the kitchen for another day or two. It would probably be good for him.
The next day, Sleeve and Busch called a press conference, which turned out to be poorly attended. Only I and two other journalists bothered to make it out. Apparently interest in the story nearly died after last week’s calamity at Sphere.
“We’ve been working, like, really hard all week to establish the United Tunnels of Vegas and we’ve already accomplished a lot that we’re proud of,” Sleeve said into the microphone. “True Prime Mole Busch, would you like to make the announcement?”
Busch, who looked like he aged a few years in the past week, stepped up to the podium. “Thanks, Sleeve, of course. Well, you might have heard the rumors, and they’re true! We at the United Tunnels are happy to announce that we’ll be hosting afterparties after every Dead and Company show for the rest of their residency here in Vegas. Open only to registered members of the UTV, we’re happy to announce that the Discus Busicut will play in the junction this weekend!”
Sleeve cleared his throat. “The Disco Biscuits, True Prime Mole.”
“Right, the Disco Biscuits,” he corrected himself. “And next week… who’s coming again? Uncle McCree?”
“Umphrey’s McGee,” Sleeve interjected.
“Right, right. We’re happy to announce that, uh, both these bands are gonna be playing at the junction!”
I raised my hand. “True Prime Mole Bush, both of those bands have ties to Peter Shapiro. Was he behind these bookings, and does he still make financial contributions to the United Tunnels of Vegas?”
Busch looked to Sleeve, who took over for him. “Mr. Shapiro has remained, like, very open about his continued support for the UTV, so the answer to your question is ‘yes.’ He’s helped us a lot and booked both bands.”
“If he’s as open as you say, do you have any idea why I haven’t been able to reach him for comments?” I asked.
“Well, you have a pretty contentious relationship with him, don’t you? Maybe your partner will have better luck. Why isn’t he here, by the way? We, like, haven’t heard from him in a while.”
“Well, maybe you’ll get to catch up soon,” I said.
One of the other reporters raised a hand. “What is the current status of Zuri Zepeda? Is she still in your custody?”
“Yes,” Sleeve confirmed, “she is, and she unfortunately won’t be free anytime soon. She’s, like, a huge flight risk, and a threat to the peace we’ve fought so hard for in the tunnels.”
The last remaining reporter raised her hand. “Nobody has heard from Smitty Finkligan or Patriciana Blinkspinulli since the Sphere Summit. Do you have any idea where they are?”
Busch took this question. “Smitty and Patriciana are safe, you can take my word for it. They’ve received threats from some of Zepeda’s followers who still don’t believe in the unifying message of the United Tunnels, so we’re keeping them in a safe place until we know they won’t be in any danger.”
“Well,” Sleeve said, “that’s all the time we have today, folks. Thanks for coming.”
I followed Sleeve down the tunnel after the press conference and confronted him outside his office.
“Oh, come on!” he complained, “the press conference is over! Leave me alone.”
“There’s just one thing I don’t quite understand,” I said, ignoring his plea for solitude. “Why are you letting Mole People live in the tunnels alongside the wooks? Wasn’t the point of the whole OSOC occupation to create a wook ethnostate?”
Sleeve sighed. “Sure, that was, like, the goal at the beginning. The United Tunnels of Vegas wasn’t part of the plan at all. But Vanguard saw the Liberation Front’s weakness: they weren’t willing to compromise. We figured out a way to fight that on our own terms.”
“So is Vanguard still essentially in charge of everything here? He’s the head of Busch’s cabinet, isn’t he?”
He threw his hands up in exasperation. “Look, I don’t know what you’re getting at, okay? For the first time since we got here, there isn’t a war going on. What are you, like, causing all this drama for?”
“Just asking questions, Sleeve.”
“Well, if you don’t get out of here soon I’ll have to get somebody to escort you out. I like the other guy much better. Bring him around when I’m not so, like, exhausted, and we can talk details.” He closed his office door.
To my chagrin, I realized that I would have to release Vincent from his indentured servitude earlier than I hoped. With no other leads to pursue, I set out toward Treasures.
You can’t avoid being assailed by sketchy club promoters any time you walk down the Las Vegas Strip. You guys goin’ out tonight? They ask. Pool party tomorrow afternoon, you’re not gonna miss it, are you?
I’ve been in Las Vegas for over two weeks now, and I’ve learned to drown it out. So it was a great surprise to me when a voice actually broke through my mental shield and entered my conscious mind.
“Topless girls, 24/7. Come on, guys, free limo pickup. Topless girls.”
I whipped around to see Vincent’s advisor handing out business cards with pictures of naked women. I slapped the stack out of his hand and they scattered over the concrete.
“What the hell?” he screamed. “Skye? What are you still doing here?”
“I should ask you the same fucking question!” I screamed back. “I’ve wasted a week of my life looking for you and your idiot friend!”
“What? Do you know where he is?”
“He’s a busboy at Treasures!”
He laughed. “Are you serious?”
“Yes, I’m serious! I’m going there now to get him out.” I picked up one of his business cards. “What are you doing? You work for the Peppermint Hippo now?”
“Yeah,” he said, “I got into sort of a financially sticky situation at Treasures and I had to call Climax to help me out. We’re living together for the time being and she got me this job so I can get back on my feet.”
“I’m disgusted with the both of you,” I said. “First you go totally missing for an entire week, then I find out you’re both working for different strip clubs. Climax couldn’t bail Michael out, too?”
“He was rude to her on an airplane and she didn’t want to.”
“His loss, I guess. Do you know what happened to Andy?”
He groaned. “You don’t want to know what happened to Andy. Let me just say that it’s unfit to print, even in Shrieks & Whispers.”
We walked into Treasures late Saturday afternoon and paid off the floor manager with Vincent’s advance payment, which our editor had just sent me. He met us outside, looking even worse than when I had seen him earlier.
“Where the hell have you been?” he asked his advisor, incredulous at the sight of him.
“I’m living with Climax and working as a promoter for the Peppermint Hippo,” he explained. “I ran into Skye on the strip… we need to get out of this town.”
“Not so fast,” I interrupted, “we’ve got business to attend to. Michael, I need you to talk to Sleeve about the details of the new UTV. He seems to like you more than me. And Zepeda, Finkligan, and Blinkspinkulli are all still missing. We can’t leave Las Vegas until we get some sort of word on their status.”
“Jesus,” Vincent complained. “Back to work already, huh? Have you heard anything from Shapiro?”
“Not a word, to me or to anybody else. But he booked the Disco Biscuits and Umphery’s McGee to play in the junction after the Sphere shows.”
Vincent looked disgusted. “Typical wook bullshit,” he muttered. “Okay. I guess we should head back to the tunnel and try to get more info from Sleeve.”
“Can we stop somewhere for some food?” his advisor asked. “I’m hungry.”
“I don’t think I can afford it,” Vincent replied sadly.
Sleeve was thrilled to see Vincent and his advisor, and after catching up he agreed to let us talk to Finkligan and Blinkspinkulli in the private quarters where they were being kept safe. The DAFFOMP co-founders were living in a cement wook mansion halfway down the Mirage tunnel, and they were not happy to see us.
“Do you understand how bad you made us look in your article?” Blinkspinkulli asked. The DAFFOMP Instagram account lost almost a thousand followers and we’re being absolutely lambasted all over social media.”
“Shrieks & Whispers didn’t publish anything you didn’t explicitly do or say,” I told her. “What inspired you to vote to put the UTV in power, anyway? You were supposed to be the MPLF’s biggest supporters, and you cast the deciding vote that led to their dissolution. What inspired the sudden change?”
“Pragmatism, I guess,” Finkligan replied. “The MPLF wasn’t doing very well, in case you didn’t notice at the time. Supporting an obviously failing organization isn’t the best look, and we knew that for better or worse the only way the conflict was going to end was by supporting the United Tunells of Vegas. We just want people to see us on the right side of history.”
“Was this ever about anything more than optics?” I asked.
“We’re social media activists, for the love of god,” he said. “Nothing is ever about anything more than optics.”
“And if you hadn’t ruined our reputation,” Blinkspinkulli added, “we would have great optics. We never should have spoken to you in the first place.”
“Like she said,” Vincent interjected, “we never reported on anything you didn’t actually say or do. You must have known that it would eventually reflect poorly on you.”
“We never knew that! You think we’re sitting around thinking about the long-term consequences of our decisions? We’re social media activists!” Blinkspinkulli shouted.
“Either way,” Vincent said, “now you need to decide on your next move. Are you going to live down here permanently?”
“We’re going to have to move out of Vegas,” Finkligan answered with disdain. “We already had to close our booth at the Tuscany Shakedown because we got attacked twice. We’re unwelcome in our hometown because of you!”
Vincent’s advisor tapped him on the shoulder. “It’s getting hostile in here,” he whispered, “and I advise that we get out of here.”
For once, I actually agreed with him, and we left the two activists in their wook mansion.
“You guys need anything else?” Sleeve asked as he escorted us out of the Mirage tunnel. “I can get you guys tickets to the Disco Biscuits this weekend if you want.”
“Thanks, but I think we’ll pass,” Vincent said. “We need to get out of this cruel whore of a town.”
I elbowed him in the ribs, trying to remind him that we weren’t done.
“Oh!” he shouted, “actually… we were wondering what happened to Zuri Zepeda? Is she being held in the tunnels, too?”
Sleeve shook his head. “That’s, like, super proprietary information. You know I can’t tell you that.”
“Can’t you just tell me if she’s being held here or somewhere off-site?”
Sleeve sighed. “Okay, fine. She’s not here. That’s all I can say.”
“Thanks,” Vincent said. “That helps.”
“That doesn’t help at all!” I shouted at Vincent when we finally left the tunnel. “She could be anywhere!”
“Well, excuse me for trying to sustain amiable relationships with my sources,” Vincent snapped, “which is more than you can say. Have you been in contact with Grit Sumpump at all?”
“It’s not my fault he hasn’t talked to the media! They won’t even let me near the MGM tunnel!”
“Maybe you should have been nicer.”
“I was plenty nice! And that’s rich coming from you! You basically slandered me in your articles! You and your unprofessional bullshit–”
Vincent’s advisor inserted himself between us. “Jesus H. Christ, you two,” he interrupted, “get a fucking room. Look, I really think we should all eat something. Let’s go back to Climax’s place.”
Climax lived in an apartment complex not far from the tunnel, and he let himself in with a copy of the key she had made for him. “She’s out getting groceries, but she’ll be back soon. It’s her night off.” He gave us granola bars from her pantry, which we ate sullenly.
Climax finally arrived and was somehow unsurprised to see us. “Oh, hey there,” she said to Vincent, “I see you survived last weekend.”
“Yeah, somehow,” he replied. “You know, people in your line of work really know how to take advantage of vulnerable men.”
“Someone’s gotta do it,” Climax told him, not without sympathy. “We’re just providing balance against the social dynamics of greater society.”
“Commendable, I guess.”
She made us a quite passable carbonara, which Vincent wolfed down like somebody who had been living off scraps of beef fat for a week. “Can’t we just get the hell out of this town?” he moaned from the kitchen table. “What the hell is even left to do here?”
“We need to at least track down Zepeda,” I told him, no longer disguising my annoyance at his complaints. “And it would be nice to get some kind of statement from Peter Shapiro.”
“Well, we have no leads on either, do we? I say we give up and skip town.”
“Hey,” Climax interjected, “are you guys talking about the Mole Person woman who was captured? I saw her on TikTok. She was on CNN or something.”
Vincent, his advisor, and I all dropped our forks in surprise. “What?” I asked. “CNN?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Climax replied, pulling her phone out of her pocket. After a few moments of scrolling, she showed us a clip of Zepeda being split-screen interviewed by Anderson Cooper.
“First off, Ms. Zepeda, where are you now? Are you safe?” Cooper asked.
“Yes, for now.” Zepeda answered. “A few loyal followers from the former Mole Person Liberation Front broke me out of wook prison a few days ago and I’m hiding on the East Coast. I can’t say where.”
“Understandable,” Cooper said. “What are your thoughts on the fallout of the Sphere Summit?”
“What happened at the Sphere Summit was a gross misuse of a democratic system to support a colonizing movement and oppress innocent Mole People,” Zepeda told him, sounding very well-rehearsed. “I regret that our attack afterward didn’t do more damage to the wook menace.”
“Right. The wooks are now living in the former homeland of you and your supporters. How does that make you feel?”
“It makes me livid, Anderson. Believe me when I say that sometime, somehow, the Mole Person Liberation Front will ride again, and we will take back our home.”
“My heart goes out to you and anybody else who was displaced,” Copper said before the clip ended and looped back to the beginning.
“Well,” Vincent said, “looks like Anderson Cooper got a hold of her before we did.”
“She said she escaped a few days ago,” I said. “No wonder the UTV took so long to hold a press conference and Sleeve was so evasive regarding her whereabouts. If we could just get a hold of Shaprio–”
“You know what?” Vincent interrupted. “Fuck this. Fuck Peter Shapiro. If that douchebag doesn’t wanna talk there’s nothing we can do to force him. Let’s get the fuck out of Las Vegas, and soon.”
I took a few moments to think. “Actually, I agree. This is going nowhere, we’re wasting out time. Let’s go to the airport.”
Vincent’s advisor looked up at Climax. “I guess that means I’ll be going home, too. I’ll really miss you.”
“I’ll miss you too,” she told him, holding his face in her hands. She looked at me. “Could you two give us a few moments of privacy?”
Vincent and I begrudgingly left the apartment and sat in the hallway waiting.
“What an unsatisfying resolution to this whole saga,” he said.
An unsatisfying resolution, indeed. But isn’t that, in some sense, the essence of Las Vegas? Who goes to Harry Reid International Airport, gets on a flight back to their hometown, and looks back on the time they spent in the city with a feeling of certainty or fulfillment? Save for a select few ascetic Deadheads who arrive Thursday, leave Sunday, and only venture out of their hotel for shows at Sphere, I’d say nobody. Any normal person leaves Las Vegas with a deep sense of unease, the days they spent there all having been rolled into one single blurry recollection of money lost and misspent, poor decisions made under the influence of uncharacteristic quantities of drugs and alcohol, and actions that in hindsight evade rationalization.
Maybe the wook invasion of the Las Vegas tunnels is nothing more than a rare example of the city’s reprobate spirit pushed to its limit. An occupying force, a resistance movement, a shadow government, and an activist group that ultimately turned on the very resistance it was created to support. Nothing new under the sun. Not even the Las Vegas sun.
Shrieks & Whispers 
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