The Big Bang (23 page)

As he expected, Lightning was back just about the time he'd finished rolling the chain over and over in the dirt. He'd bleach it later, but for now he wanted to keep the moist blood from drawing flies.

She had a standard-issue FEMA body bag. Plenty of those lying around. FEMA had smuggled them out from regional centers about a year after the Big Bang when the Red Flu had swept through the US, probably brought in by a troop of janissaries from Malaysia. Those FEMA boys and girls had impressed Whistler. Bureaucrats for a government that no longer existed, most of them stayed at their posts until they'd been felled by the diseases they were trying to fight or until they'd been rooted out and killed by the Caliban and its brethren. The Imams didn't want the original citizens to be buried, they wanted the people to see Allah's wrath visited upon the people of the Great Satan. Naturally, thousands and thousands of unburied bodies had created additional plagues and fouled water supplies, and the only good thing about the poor dead bastards bloating in the sun was that they took a few million of the Prophet's children with them before the Imams realized sanitation wasn't their strong suit, and began incinerating the dead cities wholesale.

He held his hands away from his body, and away from Lightning. “Open it up.” She unzipped the bag, shook it out beside poor Anselmo with the flap opened, and reached for the body. “Nope,” he told her sharply. He grabbed the dead man by the one leg and under one arm, and tossed the body into the bag.

He rubbed his hands with clay from the side of the road, turned his head and clapped his hands over and over until the dried mud flew from his skin. Then he carefully zipped up the bag. There. He'd done everything he could to keep Anselmo, or his parts, inside the bag. He stood, took the two loops on the side closest to him in either hand.

“Well?” he asked her.

With a crooked grin, Lightning said, “You were doing everything else, I thought
you
were gonna carry him up to the ranch.” She grabbed her two loops and straightened up.

In the end, they stored the body bag in the crawl space under an old tool shed. By the time they were finished, Whistler was reeling with fatigue. Lightning marched him over to the trough, took the metal bucket and poured water over his hands. She made him scrub with a huge irregular lump of lye soap. When that had been completed to her satisfaction, she told him, “Strip down.”

Just one more thing that had changed. You've seen people cut in half by machine gun fire, you've burned bodies, you scoop up some poor dead Mexican and tuck him into a baggie…being nude in front of someone else wasn't that much of a big deal. At least his internal organs were on the inside, where they were supposed to be, and not hanging out of him. He stripped off his dust-caked clothes and kicked them aside. He'd been wearing them for days; it was time to change, anyway.

He stood there naked, hands and face brown from the sun, the rest of him blindingly white. Except for the scars. Chips of masonry, slashes from swords or knives, ricocheting bullets: all had left little twisted, discolored puckers of skin to mark their passing. Lightning brought another bucket, and poured it over his back. The water from the trough was lukewarm, but still felt chilly against his skin. He scrubbed himself with the lye soap, and she poured another careful bucket over him to rinse. Whistler couldn't say for sure what he missed most from Before (the answer varied depending on his mood), but one of the top five would be long, hot showers.

He took a handful of feeble suds in one hand, ran it over his head. He kept his hair cut short, since it was easier to clean, and wouldn't cover his eyes in a crucial moment. A last splash from the bucket, and he was done.

Whistler shook the water from his eyes. “Your turn,” he said.

“Later,” she told him. “You need to get some sleep. You're dead on your feet.”

She handed him a scrap of blanket to dry off with, gathered up his clothes with a stick and walked away. She'd make sure the laundry detail washed those real well. Lye was hell on your skin, but great for killing any number of germs and biologicals. At first, the lye-washed clothes had chaffed miserably, but everyone's skin toughened up. Everyone's everything toughened up, or they died.

At the door of his shed, Whistler sat on the steps and wiped the dust off his feet. He hung the scrap of blanket next to the door and went inside. He'd only be able to sleep five or six hours. By then the day would be too hot, and the room too stifling. He made sure his Baldwin was loaded before setting it between the bed and wall. He put a Glock under his pillow and then, still naked, lay down on the cot.

A breeze drifted in from the west and it was cooling him off as he lay there. Out of some old, old habit of modesty, he pulled the near-transparent sheet across his groin. It was one more of those funny but not-funny things, the way we grew accustomed to certain behaviors. He'd just walked around naked in front of Lightning, there was a dead store-keeper under the tool shed, and yet, he couldn't relax until that thin piece of sheet covered his crank. Well, he had grown accustomed to other new things, too. He couldn't sleep without a pistol under his pillow anymore, either.

Damn Caliban, he thought drowsily. Rat bastards.

And then he was asleep.

As tired as he was, he shouldn't have dreamed. But he did. He was dreaming of Before.

He'd heard so many different things about dreams, all of it contradictory. They were prophetic; they were his subconscious cleaning house. He was all the characters in the dreams; he was only one of the characters in the dream.

Back Before, he'd had a dream that repeated itself—some kind of Terminator figure was chasing him through a dark dreamscape. Whistler wasn't one of those people who dreamed in vivid detail. He seemed to generate images that were more about feelings than specifics. That dream was familiar enough, understandable enough after a while to become boring, and he'd sleep right through it. Oh yeah, he was in an unsatisfying relationship, bring on the Terminator trying to catch him. His new boss was a jerk; his marriage was torment, then
Hello, Arnold
.

After the Big Bang, his dreams changed along with everything else. There wasn't a lot of time for reflection after the Big Bang, no sitting around at Starbucks and pondering the existential questions of life, love, and career. Every now and then, after Anne had recruited him to work for Valley Forge, maybe on a long night watch when he was forced to sit in one place and his only job was to be there and be aware, and he wasn't immediately scrambling to stay alive or find food or fix a broken-down old car or distill more eth; then he had the time to think, and possibly to remember.

There was a lot
not
to remember, most of it very ugly. If it wasn't the end of the world, it was damn sure some kind of dress rehearsal. Things died. That was the sum of it. Death was everywhere. Plants. Animals. People. They all fell, either from the nuclear winter, which lasted nearly eight months, the first time, or from hunger, or from the bizarre plagues that swept irregularly across the population.

He dreamed of the people from Before. The ones who were dead. Not just his family, not just his friends. How about that Eskimo-looking lady who'd worked the bakery at Albertson's for years? Why would he dream of her? Or the librarian: older, kind of goofy-looking good-hearted guy with glasses and a gap-toothed smile. Yet he dreamed of them, and others like them, now just memories and soon to be memories of memories.

Whistler awoke about 2 pm sweating, with a dull headache and an equally dull ache of sadness in his heart. That dream always brought on the blues.

He sat up in bed, mostly to get away from the sweaty sheets. Over by the sink was a plastic pitcher. He splashed a little of the brownish water on his face and patted it on the back of his neck. Standing, he felt a little better. He was still fuzzy, and there wasn't anything waiting for him outside that couldn't wait a while longer. He pulled on a pair of jeans and an “I WON AT THE EXCALIBUR” tee-shirt, and then dropped heavily into the creaking wooden office chair.

The dream was about failure, he could figure that out on his own. No prophecy there. Even though everyone had come home all right last night, the fact they'd come back with nothing remotely useful made it a failure as far as he was concerned.

Hell, he hadn't even given a full report to Valley Forge. The nonsense with Red and Gunny had distracted him. The kids at the Forge had probably moved again, which would make reaching them difficult. They had to keep on the move, the Caliban and the other Caliphates would dearly love to put the Forge out of business. The 'ban favored the sock puppets currently operating in what was left of DC, pretending that they were still a legally constituted government while they danced to the Imams' tune, but most of the OCs would ignore them. Valley Forge was the closest thing to the real United States that was left, and even that was largely a virtual presence. Anne had mentioned a “raggedy-ass Navy” out of Hawaii once, but she hadn't known much about it. Valley Forge, at least, kept the idea of a USA alive, encouraging and directing strikes against the invaders.

If there was one way the Caliban had stepped on their own dicks, it was their willingness to whack their own people when they stepped out of line. It resulted in a populace that wasn't deeply inclined to independent thought, and it also meant a lot of the best and brightest, the pain-in-the-ass question-askers, ended up minus a head.

The simple bastards wanted to return to the time of Mohammed. They didn't have personnel available to keep the complex electronics working…so while they had the edge in numbers and scores of fanatic kids willing to martyr themselves to go to a paradise where they could get a drink and get laid, the Americans still had technicians to run the aging equipment that linked and directed the resistance.

Whistler doubted there were more than a dozen Caliban planes capable of flight in the whole Caliphate of California, anymore. It was one of the things that made it possible for resistance groups, like his, to keep fighting. Back in the day, a little sat imagery, a little drone recon, and the only warning his boys would get that they'd been found would be the sound of the ranch being blown to splinters around them. Now, as long as they kept moving, kept switching their trails, they had a chance to make the Saudis (and the Malaysians and Syrians and Filipinos and Indonesians and whoever else the Imams imported) pay for what they did.

The real problem, though, worried at Whistler, like a splinter buried too deep in his hand to reach with a needle, and one that he didn't feel like cutting out of his flesh. The problem of what they were fighting for.

On one hand, people like him were fighting for payback. To make sure the Islamic fascists couldn't walk the stolen streets of America without fearing for their lives, to make sure when they went to their confiscated mansions they didn't sleep peacefully in looted beds. To share with them the redolent benefits of mass graves. To make those scumbags pay for what they did to our country and our people.

But what were the kids fighting for, his kids? Were they fighting for their iPods and MTV and wireless Internet? Did they even care about the freedom to go where they wanted, to worship any God or no God if they wished? Hell, what about the freedom to read what you wanted, to think what you wanted, even if it made you a horse's ass?

At least his kids, his young men, knew about the flagrant freedoms they'd so lately taken for granted. But how soon will that generation be killed off? He hadn't buried as many of these boys as he should have, he'd had to leave too many behind in red, ragged pieces at the side of the road while the rest of them hauled ass for daylight. Far too many had died.

The ones afterwards, they'd be accustomed to this life of less. They'd get tired of the running and the hiding. They'd question it, “What's in it for me, old guy?” They wouldn't see the need for dying, for sacrifice, even. They would be slowly settling, assimilating. Would the parents on both sides be the ones who resist
that
change? he wondered. Will it become Resistance Romero and Jihadi Juliet? Who will become the marginalized fanatics—people like Whistler who claimed allegiance to a country long destroyed? Would they be “Christians,” or just “Americans,” (not so far from Armenians, another group and nation that was wiped out by a country with a long Islamic history) fighting a futile battle for something that's already gone and probably can never be recaptured?

“God
damn
,” Whistler said aloud. He was feeling morbid this morning. He'd have to do something to snap out of it. Action, he'd found, was a way to put fear at bay. Fear was what you imagined might happen. Taking action gave you a chance to find out what would happen.

Likely, nobody was in the communications shed. “Comms bag” was probably more accurate, since it would all fit into one old duffel. They just had a military-issue sat phone, a laptop, chargers for both, a web cam, the scrambler token, and an incendiary grenade. The token was the most important. It was mil-spec, with a battery life estimated to be seven years. It was a small, flat disk of plastic, with an LCD that randomly generated a set of thirteen digits every ten seconds. The thirteen digits somehow synced with Valley Forge's portable server, and allowed them to link up. They could afford to lose anything to the Caliban except the token. The token was strapped to the incendiary grenade and if they were in danger of being captured or overrun, the pin was pulled while the comms kid held the release handle in one sweaty hand. It was a deadman switch, after that. When the kid was dead, the grenade went off, and there went the token.

Whistler dressed and made his way over to the main ranch building, squinting in the afternoon sun, his boots scuffing in the dust. He'd have to make the rounds of the blinds, after he had a cup of coffee.