Flashback Dawn 2: "The Devil's Shambhala" by Wayne Kyle Spitzer

He stopped talking as he noticed the primitive girl’s reaction to the spectacular light show, which was one of stunned silence and awe, even, it seemed to him, outright reverence. He tried to imagine it through her eyes, the vast atrium of artificial light with its carnival rides and fanciful structures, its concession stands and lamplit boardwalks, and its manmade river which wound through everything. For it was a place designed to make precisely such an impression. Less obvious, beyond all the glittering lights and flashing signboards, were the 15-foot tall security fences with their tangles of concertina wire and glowing electrification indicators, as well as the moats of muddy water which in time would become clogged with human waste—once the power and the plumbing failed. Once the Flashback had taken its full and inevitable toll. And beyond all those things, in the now semi darkened catacombs of what had formerly been the Havana Flats salt mine, stood a sole cavern raptor—blue-gray skin painted in horizontal shadows from the fence, sickle claws glinting by the light of the carnival rides, its round, white eyes blinking. And as Red squinted, it was joined by another. And another.

Indeed, it was precisely this contrast between what lay within and what lay without that had given rise to the place’s nickname: The Devil’s Shambhala.