The Big Bang (18 page)

Tarik drew in a ragged breath, and in a hoarse, somehow wet voice, he yelled, “You have to try and shut up!”

“What the hell happened, man?” the voice insisted.

“Kevin, shut your mouth!” Tarik snarled. When the younger man fell silent, the other articulated voices stilled, but there was still weeping from one corner. Tarik coughed. “We'll find everyone, all right? If you're not really hurt, you have to be quiet. Bear the pain, for a little while.” The beam swung deliberately around the room. Each time it illuminated a human figure, the light paused. Tarik was assessing the wounded. Counting the dead, if dead they were.

“If you think you can stand, get to your feet,” he said, still with that wet sound in his ragged voice.

I can stand
, Karen thought, carefully sitting up. The little squares of glass performed a tinkling avalanche down her body. She swept a circle of the floor clear of the glass, put her hand down and pushed herself up onto her feet. By the time she was standing, wobbly, Kevin was also upright, swaying.

“What happened, man?” he asked. His voice was no longer angry. He sounded very young and very frightened.

Tarik's voice was firmer. The flashlight beam no longer trembled. “We have to care for the wounded and evacuate the building.”

“But…but we don't know if the building is going to…” Kevin's voice was veering toward terror.

“No,” Tarik said again with great calmness. “We have to work together to help our friends.” He lowered his voice and Karen might have been the only person close enough to have heard what he told the young man. “These people are going to need you, son. You're strong, and some of them will need your strength to stay alive. I know you can do it.”

There was a long pause. Sounds from outside the office were audible now, as well as some from outside the building. Weeping, screams, water pouring from a broken pipe, debris falling and settling. But, oddly, no sirens, no car alarms.

Kevin came to a decision. “Yeah. Yes, sir, I can,” Kevin answered.

“Good.” Tarik used the flashlight as a pointer, aimed it at the canteen before pressing it into the boy's hand. “Get the first-aid kit. We're going to need it.”

While Kevin hurriedly picked his way over the rubble, Tarik stepped over to Karen.

“Anything broken?” he asked.

“Bad cut on my head,” she mumbled. He turned his face away from her, coughed with a racking sound. Then he took her chin in his hands, guided her face toward the feeble light from the windows. He lifted her hand from the gashed section of her scalp, winced and gave a low whistle. He tugged off his tie, wrapped it carefully around the wound and across the back of her head, and then cinched it snug. “Too tight?” he asked.

She started to shake her head, stopped, and said, “No.”

“Anything broken?”

“I don't…I don't think so.”

“Can you sit?” Tarik guided her toward the desk. She resisted.

“I'm okay. I can help.”

One of his shirt sleeves was in shreds. He tore it off, wiped some of the blood off her face.

“Can't have you scaring everybody,” he said.

Just about the time Karen smelled the smoke, The Congresswoman began screaming.

In the Worker's Paradise of North Korea, Dear Leader was informed about the chaos in the United States. Chinese sources indicated two, possibly three nuclear blasts along the West Coast, with additional unspecified destruction in other cities on the Eastern Seaboard, including Washington, DC. Even now China's Politburo, the Central Committee, was in secret session planning the Sino response.

The time seemed propitious. A thunderous blow would be struck by the People's Army for the oppressor workers who were writhing under the yoke of the running dog Capitalists. Dear Leader ordered his beloved Taepodong-2 missile armed and the silo opened.

If Kim Jong Il could have been said to have loved anything more than himself, it would have been that long, bright metal cylinder of the Worker's Will. He had sold his original Russian launch technology, along with several of the Russian scientists, to the Iranians. Using their petrodollars (much of which, he had noted with glee, came from the Imperialist West), he had purchased upgraded nuclear technology from the Pakistanis and improved rocketry from old Soviet Union stockpiles, all the while artfully dodging UN inspectors.

Years of his own party's propaganda about the machinations of the American Imperialists had infiltrated the Dear Leader's consciousness. Forgetting the historical grievances of his own father's generation, Dear Leader thirsted to be the People's Hero, surpassing the legendary deeds of his own father, who had only thrown the United States off the peninsula. He, Kim Jong Il, would be the one who struck a fatal blow to the Americans and their capitalist stooges. By using the capitalists' money and system against them, he had brought into being a weapon which would bring the American swine to their knees. With a feeling that was close to religious ecstasy, Dear Leader gave the command to launch.

Unfortunately for Dear Leader, the Strategic Air Command's hardened satellites and their enlisted controllers had not been completely disrupted by the earlier incidents in California and elsewhere. Absent any direct orders from the Pentagon, and with no way to reach them, a twenty-five-year veteran of the Air Force named Bob Garcia made a snap decision when faced with the Korean incursion. A hunter-killer blasted the Taepodong-2 out of the sky somewhere over the Bering Strait, and then two high-yield Minuteman III ICBMs slammed into Pyongyang, incinerating Kim Jong Il along with his palace and several million of his starving citizens, mingling his ashes with those of the people he'd tortured and abused for over twenty years. If he had possessed anything resembling a sense of humor, Dear Leader might have laughed to realize that one of the few truly Communist acts of his life was delivered courtesy of the hated imperialist USA.

In the office, Tarik had started coughing blood, nearly doubling over. Gritting his teeth, he'd ordered Kevin to find the screaming Congresswoman, and then he told Karen to lead the others from the office.

She'd frozen. She was just the administrative assistant. The secretary, for Pete's sake. They'd never listen to her.
If they want to live, they will
, she realized. She'd gotten the ones who were still ambulatory to their feet, encouraging them to help others near them, if they could. She had them link hands, and like blind elephants they stumbled out into the hallway through the broken door. There was dim light from windows at either end of the hall, and she found the emergency stairway doors easily. “Go down and get away from the building. I'll meet you at the park.” She meant the little area of grass and picnic tables across the street that was a tiny oasis amid the concrete and glass of the buildings. She left them fumbling down the metal stairs, most too stunned to speak.

Kevin emerged from the office, carrying The Congresswoman like a groom crossing the threshold. Harriet clung to him, her face buried in his neck. “I think her leg's broken,” he said.

She pointed him down the hall, repeated her instructions on where to meet, and then ducked back into the dim office. The flashlight beam helped her locate Tarik. That, and his coughing.

He was bent over a crumpled bloody mess of clothes. Marlene, she thought it was, buried by a fallen bookcase. As Tarik kept trying to locate a place to find a pulse, she told him, “We have to get out.”

“I'll stay until the EMTs get here,” he said. He tried to stand straight, and then folded under another racking spasm of wet coughing.

She did a quick mental count. Eight people had gotten out, including Kevin and Harriet. That left four people, besides herself and Tarik. She took the flashlight from his unresisting fingers, whipped it around the office.

The moving disk of light revealed images of destruction. Cabinet doors half broken, computer monitors shattered, papers everywhere like fallen blossoms, and the dead. Her coworkers, people who had almost been friends. If not dead now, dying.

As they would be, too, if they didn't move. She could see the smoke now. One of her brief practice college boyfriends was a chemistry major with a taste for the ghoulish. He'd told her more people were killed by the chemical fumes from burning insulation than were actually burned to death in fires. “They're high when they die, so it's not so bad,” he'd said. Karen was glad she'd never slept with him.

She took Tarik by the shoulder, pulled him close. “They're dead. We have to leave.”

“You go. I'll…” and he coughed something wet onto her forearm. He weaved in front of her, then slumped back onto the desk. “You get out,” he insisted weakly.

She couldn't carry him like a bride, but she'd given some piggyback rides in her life. She shoved the flashlight in his hand. “Hold the light,” she said, then bent her knees, backed into him, threw her hands around his thighs, and hoisted the man onto her back.

When she straightened up, she wasn't sure she could do it. Oh, God, it was hard. Her heart began slamming against her chest. Her breath came in harsh gasps that seemed like boards ramming in and out of her lungs. He was the only decent man she knew…and she wouldn't leave him to die in the wreckage and terror of the dark office.

She stumbled out into the hall, bent under his weight, joining the stream of workers fleeing their offices. He was too weak to resist her, and his head lolled on her shoulder. The light slipped from his hand, bounced and rolled away, the beam shining uselessly at a corner as she lurched into the doorway of the emergency stairs.

It was fourteen floors down. Clutching the handrail, she fought to keep her balance as people scurried past in the darkness. When her feet touched the first landing, she wanted to drop to her knees, but she kept going. At the next landing, she began swearing silently, goading herself, using every vile phrase she'd ever heard to keep herself going.

People were running in the dim stairwell, shadowy figures that made strange noises as they flitted past.
I'm going to hell
, she thought as she turned onto another landing, sucking in huge gulps of air while the phantoms fled deeper into the darkness.
There are levels of hell
.

Air was rushing past her face, cooling her. She didn't think she was moving that fast. The metal stairs and handrail grew warmer.
It's the fire
, she realized.
Drawing the air up as it burns
. Tears were running down her face. She had no idea why. Fear, exhaustion, frustration.
Take your pick, find an excuse, blame anybody or anything you want
, she thought,
but you will not stop
.

She didn't black out, exactly, but her universe took on a new reality that contained only the essentials. No planets, no politics, no purging, no puking. Slide one foot forward, bend that ankle, flex the opposite knee as the foot hit the stair tread, one hand on the rail, the other hand around Tarik's thigh pinning him to her back, then repeat entire process, rocking from side to side like a Sumo wrestling match on an incline.

Fighting his way upstream against the survivors, Kevin met her on the second-lowest level of Hell. “Jesus!” he said, when he saw them. It didn't sound like a casual blasphemy, more like an actual invocation for divine assistance.

She was almost unable to talk. Hell was inside her. Every breath blazed in her lungs like a blast from a furnace, the trembling muscles of her back and legs were on fire.

“He's gone,” Kevin said, reaching for Tarik. “Drop him and let's go. The building is about t—”

“
No
,” she said, and it was a sacred oath that rang inside the stairwell. Other survivors stumbling down the steps even paused in their flight to look around for the source of that terrible sound. “I'm not leaving Tarik.” Her fingers tightened around the chipped handrail. Stopping like this had cost her momentum, broken through the complete commitment she'd created so far. “Take him,” she gasped. Kevin hesitated, debating his chances. “Goddammit, Kevin, take him!”

Kevin moved to her side, slipped an arm around Tarik's ribs, bent, and then straightened with the older man over his shoulders in a fireman's carry. Kevin shambled down the stairs, Tarik's feet swinging, limp.

When the weight was lifted from her, she felt, for just a moment, as if she might rise lightly into the air and drift away. A groan shuddered from Tarik.
He's alive, thank you, God
, she thought, trying to stand upright. As she did, the muscles of her back cramped, knotting and twisting like overstretched springs snapping back into place.

One more floor to the street. She'd come this far, she would be damned if a cramped muscle was going to kill her. She was ready to use her will like a flail as she had for all those years, denying the needs and weaknesses of her flesh, but the familiar curses and insults faded from her mind. A quieter understanding filled her.
We got this far together
, she told herself reasonably, taking a slow, deep lungful of air.
We'll get out of here together
.

Holding her body carefully in position, she crept down the stairs and out of Hell.

Kevin had laid Tarik on a soft, grassy slope, protecting him from the milling, fleeing crowds. The young man was watching anxiously for Karen and waved wildly when he saw her. She hobbled over to them as the office building burned behind her. She didn't know it, but she looked like a phoenix emerging from the flames.

Karen lowered herself beside Tarik. There were other people from the office nearby, including The Congresswoman, who thrashed and complained about her leg, but Karen's universe was narrowing again. Her eyes were only on Tarik. His face was a terrible gray, his breathing coming in uneven waves. Blood had stained his jaw and throat. She unbuttoned what remained of her blouse and took it off. When she did, she saw another stain on the shoulders, which ran all the way down the back. Tarik's blood, too. She found a dry, clean area of fabric, gently wiped the blood from his face.