The Big Bang (19 page)

His eyes flickered open at her touch. “Thank you,” he whispered.

“You're welcome,” she said, holding his hand.

Tarik died a few minutes later, just before the office building folded in on itself like a flower wilting, and toppled.

The leaders of several totalitarian regimes viewed the place that had once been Pyongyang with immense surprise: someone had finally decided to take Kim Jong Il at his word and eliminated the chance that he'd do anything else stupid. He may have been a crazy bastard, but he was
their
crazy bastard. The firestorm circling over what was now the largest parking lot in the world (or it would be once the radioactive half-life was down to a manageable level) gave the leaders of China and Russia something to contemplate while pondering their options.

It also gave the United States a moment to breathe. Within hours of the initial strikes on the country, martial law was declared. The electrical grid had failed under the shifting load; upgrading the post-World War II infrastructure had been overlooked for decades in favor of more politically attractive social programs. Huge losses of electricity had created a cascade of failures, from the Internet to simple telephone communications, which made ascertaining the full extent of the separate attacks difficult.

The Joint Chiefs had been torn, some recommending immediate implementation of the existing strike packages carried by military units across the globe, but the President forcefully overrode them. “We don't know who the hell is doing this,” he said. “We can't bomb another country just because we're being attacked inside our own borders.”

But the President was not blind to the dangers to the nation's armed forces. He still remembered his own father's stories of Pearl Harbor, how he'd seen the wrecked ships listing there in the water, some still smoking months after the raid, with the occasional corpse drifting to the surface when a compartment was breached for repair. With a child's literal mindedness, the little boy had imagined the body rise, swollen as road kill on the side of a Texas highway, until it bobbed like the orange and white float on his Daddy's fishing pole. Well, he'd had a bad dream or two after that, and Mother had given Poppy hell about it.

“Get the Navy out, away from the cities and ports. Put missiles on alert and the bombers in the air.” When an Army General suggested that was insufficient to defend the country or those military assets, the President said, “They are to defend this nation and themselves only from direct attack until we determine a target.” One stupid son of a bitch, that Commie nut from North Korea, had already learned the US wasn't helpless yet, but the President wasn't about to start bombing everything in sight, like some green infantryman on the line shooting at noises in the dark.

The only nuclear blast that took place in Washington apparently had been aimed at the Pentagon. About a third of the structure had been torn away by a blast from a do-it yourself suitcase nuke. The bomb had converted most of its energy into EMP radiation, knocking out unshielded electronics for over twenty miles. This included police and fire radios, car alarms, personal computers, and cell phones. Almost any commercial product using microprocessor technology was useless. As such, over twenty-five commercial airliners plummeted from the sky like wounded birds, causing additional devastation and death.

Strategic military and critical government equipment had been hardened against such a blast, so while the government was staggered, it was not, strictly speaking, deaf and blind. One curious effect of the EMP was the confusion it created in the teams working on threat assessment. Unable to determine if the strike had been directed at national communication ability or the military center, contemplating the purpose of the blast sent several military planners and academics off on an unproductive tangent of speculation for almost a day and a half; in fact, the chaotic effects of the blasts had been due to bad design and haphazard planning between too many small groups. Future historians, if there were any, could print reams of paper on the many unintended consequences of the bomb and its faulty design.

Other bombs had been intended for Washington. The terrorist cell in DC was not as competently deadly as the Martyrs of California or their Paradise-bound brothers in Detroit, Miami, and other large cities.

An Iranian named Ahmed Mohamed Barodi was supposed to drive a van across Interstate 395 and stop directly opposite the Capitol. When the bomb went off near the Pentagon, battering most of the city's electronics into a standstill with the EMP wave, the ignition system of Barodi's rented truck was also fried, along with the arming device for the nuke in the back. Cars on the interstate sputtered to a stop, some blundering into each other with painfully slow grinding crashes as drivers were unable to steer or stop them without the aid of electronically enhanced hydraulics. A whirling cloud rose on the other side of the Potomac. At the sight of the cloud and the impact of the reduced blast wave, most drivers abandoned their cars and sprinted for the illusory safety of the side of the road.

One taxi driver, a kindly African immigrant named Donopa Abu, noticed the driver who leapt from his vehicle and ran to the back, instead of fleeing with the others on the roadway. Thinking the man needed help with a family member, Abu raced to assist him. In the rear of the van, he found Barodi crouched over a large metal work of wires and strange shapes, cursing in another tongue and hitting a metal sphere with a ball-peen hammer. Abu had not learned as much English as he wanted, but he understood enough to know the man was screaming “Death to America!” Chips of metal flew from the inert device with each swing.

With the heat from the Pentagon blast lapping at his back, Abu stared at the sweating, swearing man for a second. As a gypsy taxi driver, Abu had been forced to work on his own car, and he knew the device before him was no engine. When Barodi saw the African, he began pawing in his belt for a pistol. As a gypsy taxi driver on the mean streets of Anacostia, Abu knew what that jerky move of hand toward pants meant. Barodi's grab was hampered by the mallet in his hand, which gave Abu just enough time.

Abu died three days later from radiation poisoning. Those chips of metal and their even tinier counterparts were his death; the object that Barodi had been striking was a globe of uranium. Abu did not inhale much, but he inhaled enough. Without proper medical care, he was doomed but he died happily enough. This country had been good to him. Back home, he would have never been allowed to be a rich man and own a car. He would have been forced by caste to be a dung collector, as had his father. At least before he died, he'd been able to give something back to America.

A nuclear arming device requires a certain amount of electronics and explosive material to begin its deadly work. A pistol requires the ability to pull a trigger. A metal hammer just needed a reason, and Abu had a lifetime of reasons to wrench the hammer away from Barodi and bury it up to the handle in the man's skull.

Someone had started a neat pile of the dead next to the sidewalk. Karen covered Tarik's face, and with Kevin's help, carried him over and laid him with the other victims. The pile was nearly waist-high. She was glad of that. It allowed them to gently place Tarik with the others, not toss him like a sack of garbage. She crossed his wrists and stood for a moment, her hand on the dead man's shoulder, as ashes drifted down on the streets.

It was funny. She could feel he was gone. This body that was left, it was like a suit of clothes that he had worn for a while. Tarik had moved on, and left them behind. She had no special feeling for this suit of clothes—they were simply a memory of the man who'd inhabited them. The least she could do was treat them with dignity, out of respect for Tarik.

“What now?” Kevin asked after a while. He sounded so young. Lost.

Karen wiped the tears from her face, smearing the ashes. She looked around. Other buildings were still burning, wounded people wandered the streets. “This is pretty big. The government is going to meet. They've got to have some kind of emergency plan. Harriet should know it.”

“Have to get her leg fixed,” Kevin pointed out.

“Then we have to find an EMT,” Karen said wearily, walking back to the group from their office. By now, the park was filling with survivors, mostly adult men and women. Most wore torn clothes and similar expressions of shock. And most of them were huddling in groups, trying to gather comfort from the presence of something normal and known, even if it was just their coworkers, while within those groups some were already attempting to restore order.

When she had a moment to think about it (later, before falling asleep on the couch on display at a furniture store, surrounded by other exhausted refugees), Karen realized there was nothing about her experience that long day that was different from a thousand other stories of heroism, pain, loss, and death. If it was only a thousand. No one yet knew the extent of the damage or the attacks. It was strange…she had come of age in the clammy embrace of a technology that had the ability to keep her in touch with Paris Hilton's every gymnastic gynecological exploit. Yet now, when she really needed to know something important, the technology failed. Cell phones, radios, computers…almost anything electronic was as inert as the silicon that once gave it life.

What they had was rumor. People passed by in a constant, meandering stream, some silent, others shouting out what they knew. A paramedic in a torn uniform walked by slowly, doing quick triage on the survivors in his path. “National Guard is on the way,” he'd tell people, separating those who had a chance from those who were doomed. His supplies were long gone other than a plastic bottle of Betadine, a stethoscope, and a pair of penny-cutter scissors.

Kevin pulled the paramedic away from a crowd. “I've got a hurt Congresswoman here.”

The medic was in his late thirties, a little overweight, with dark hair and a nose like a falcon's beak. “Boy, have I heard that a lot today,” he said, but followed Kevin anyway.

Karen met them, and held out the plastic first-aid box for the EMT to inspect. “It's not much.”

The hawk-faced medic flipped open the lid as they walked. Within, a few small empty cardboard containers slid back and forth. The contents—Band-Aids, over-the-counter analgesics, even the crushable ammonia capsule—were gone. The only thing left of use was a bottle of iodine pills. He tossed the plastic box aside and gave the pills to Kevin. “Hold onto these.”

The medic didn't have the time or energy to display much of a soothing bedside manner. He ran his hands down The Congresswoman's body, squeezing and flexing her as if she were a turkey at Safeway. He lightened his touch around her lower leg, and announced, “Tib-fib break. Simple fracture, no displacement.”

Harriet winced. “Is it bad?”

“Nah, pretty common.” The medic called to Karen. “Hey, lady! You know any first aid?”

Karen nodded, and he saw the bloodstained tie around her head. “Lemme look at that, and then you get a splint on the Senator here.”

“Congresswoman,” Harriet insisted.

“Yeah.” The medic put his hands on his thighs, pushed himself to his feet. His joints cracked when he did. “I'm gonna sleep good tonight,” he muttered.

He unwrapped the tie from Karen's head. The blood had started to clot around the fabric, and she couldn't keep herself from wincing when he peeled the tie up, pressing his bare fingers against the scalp to keep the flesh in place. “Not too bad. You need stitches, try to get some soon, okay?” He fished the bottle of Betadine from a cargo pocket on his pants leg. “This is gonna sting, but if we get it clean, you've got a better chance of keeping that on your head.”

She had barely nodded before he tilted her head back and poured the Betadine into the wound. She gasped and her muscles began cramping again as she fought to keep herself still against the pain. “Sorry,” the medic said, and sounded as if he meant it. Kevin was hovering nearby, knowing he should be doing something to help, but unequipped by his background with any useful skills or real knowledge. “Yo, homeboy,” the medic said. “You wearing a tee-shirt? Give it up.”

Kevin unbuttoned his Bill Blass dress shirt, peeled off the white tee-shirt. The medic quickly cut it into strips and neatly bandaged Karen's head. The remains of the tee-shirt he stuffed into one cargo pocket. She never would get stitches, but the cleaning and the tight bandaging kept her from losing that chunk of her scalp or dying from infection. She would have a triangle-shaped scar through her hairline forever afterwards, and the hair that grew from it was dead white, leaving a startling streak through the brown that made her look unaccountably fierce.

“You folks need to get inside,” the medic told them. “If there's any radiation drifting around, you don't want to make it any easier for it to find you. Take those iodine pills, alright?”

“Can you stay with us?” Karen asked, instantly hating the neediness in her voice.

“Nah,” the medic said kindly. “I'm just tryin' to get home myself. But remember what I said. You guys get inside somewhere. And boil your water,” he added over his shoulder as he walked away. “No idea if it's safe.” He disappeared in the slow stream of people moving down the street, and Karen was unable to ever discover what happened to him or even his name. He became just one more of the dutiful, unknown heroes of the Big Bang. She finally decided he'd died in the plagues that ran rampant in DC in the weeks and months that followed. She could easily imagine him working with no mask and no gloves, cleaning the sick, cooling their brows with damp rags, working until he was barely able to stand, and then dragging himself off to a dark, quiet corner to die quietly.

Harriet's hand clamped on Karen's arm. “My leg…he said you'd splint it.”

Karen looked down at her. “He did.” She stood in spite of her weariness. Kevin was loping toward her, from the far side of the park. His arms were filled with plastic bottles of water.