The Big Bang (24 page)

The kitchen was stifling, as usual. It took up almost one fifth of the floor space of the building, with an island in the middle, large sinks and oversized oven and stove. Someone before them had jiggered the gas lines to work on bottled propane. They had hot meals as long as they could liberate propane canisters from the bomb makers, many of them US military veterans with combat IED experience.

The windows were open and Cookie was sitting beside one, fanning himself with a towel. He might have been a fat man, once, but now he was just medium. Medium in height, weight, and blondness. He wore thick glasses, though, which sometimes fogged up when he was leaning over the stove or the fire in winter. Whistler thought Cookie had been a butcher before. The man's fingers were cross-hatched with small white scars.

“Afternoon,” Cookie said. He had a voice like gravel in a garbage disposal. A scar down one side of his throat. Cancer had taken one of his vocal cords, back Before. Still, Cookie loved his cigarettes and smoked whatever he could get. The kids knew that, and if they could snake a pack of smokes on one of the raids, they could trade it for special treats. Cookie was a magician in the kitchen, when he wanted to be.

“Coffee?” Whistler asked.

Cookie snapped the towel toward the stove, where a very old kettle sat.

“Is it the good stuff?” Whistler asked dubiously. They'd liberated a case of vintage Starbucks from an emir's convoy a few months back, and had been dribbling it out slowly.

“Just for you, boss,” Cookie said.

He ignored the “boss” comment. He wasn't the boss. He was just the oldest and sneakiest, which meant he knew a little more about distributing death and destruction to the 'ban.

It was too damned hot to drink the coffee in the kitchen, so he took his mug and walked outside. There was a porch around the ranch house, and he sat on the edge of the porch in a shady spot on the east side. He was about halfway through the coffee when Lightning settled down beside him, soundless as a cat.

“We've been here a long time,” she said, taking the cup out of his hand and helping herself. That was Lightning, no hello, just right down to business.

“Yep,” he agreed. “If the two dimwits felt comfy enough to drive out here yesterday…”

“Prophet's Chosen could get here just as easy,” she nodded, taking a swig of coffee.

“We're running out of places to hole up,” he replied, taking the mug when she offered it back. “Where should we go?”

She was quiet for a while. “We have to take Anselmo home tonight. Let's go see the Chief.”

The Chief of the White Mountain Apaches. “They don't want anything to do with us.”

“Caliban rides them harder than you white boys ever did.”

Whistler couldn't argue that. Multiculturalism and diversity were just words in the Apostate's Dictionary, as far the Imams were concerned, and the Prophet's Chosen were sent after the renegade Indians regularly. But in some ways, the Big Bang was the best thing that had happened to the Apache in a hundred years. They'd retained some skills from their wilder days, and more than a few of them were damn fine cowboys and woodsmen. When things went to crap, a bunch of them banded together, bolted from the rez and headed for higher ground. They were tough hombres, and they wanted to be left the hell alone.

“Yeah,” he nodded. “White Mountain 'pache is like the final exam for the PC.”

She was quiet now. She could get spooky quiet sometimes. Finally she said, “Something to think about.”

He would. When she said something, only a fool would ignore her. Speaking of fools, there was Gordon, walking toward them. Whistler looked down at his empty mug. “I need a vacation,” he muttered.

Lightning queried him with a raised eyebrow. He didn't reply, just watched Gordon stump over to them. Gordon was one of those people whose “graceful” gland had been removed at birth. He approached them the way he walked through the world: legs stabbing down, driving his feet into the ground, upper body stiff, hands held out from his sides like they were alien objects grafted onto his arms. When Whistler imagined the man in his former life, in a coat and tie selling insurance, he saw a deeply lonely and completely clueless man who couldn't understand why no one liked him. For a moment, he actually felt bad for the silly son of a bitch.

Gordon took a stance in front of Whistler. “Lopez was trading with La Raza. You know they talk to the 'ban.” In his own way he was abrupt as Lightning, but for some reason it bothered the hell out of Whistler when Gordon did it.

“That's what I hear,” Whistler grunted, offering no opinion one way or the other.

“Folks need to know there's a line you don't cross,” Gordon insisted.
Oh, Jesus, if this was how he sold insurance, he must've starved
. It was like he was reading from a card someone else had written out for him.

Whistler hated confrontations…what a waste of time and energy. He stood up, brushed his hands on his jeans. “There is a line you don't cross, Gordon,” he said, looking down at the other man. He knew that word of this discussion would get around soon; in a small camp like this you couldn't help it. People just talked. It lightened the dullness of routine watches and cleaning weapons. Even so, he lowered his voice. He didn't need to humiliate the man in front of God and everybody. “Gord, let's just work together to get the job taken care of, okay? You can't encourage this kind of thing.”

Lightning hadn't moved from the porch. Whistler wondered what it must be to be her, always on the alert, treating every situation like a battle about to happen. She stayed where she was so she could watch all the approaches. She had his back, even here. She spoke as quietly as Whistler. “Keep doing it, and pretty soon we'll all be at each other's throat. Caliban would love that…just sit back and let us kill each other off.”

Gordon's gaze bounced over to her. She had made him lose track of where he was in his mental cue cards. She smiled at him. It was the kind of smile the Yemenis might have seen on her face when she swiveled the 50-cal at them. “Don't do it again, Gord,” Whistler told him. “That's an order. Don't cross me on this.”

Gordon stood for a confused minute, his fingers moving restlessly, not sure what to do, then stumped away toward the kitchen.

“Wanna check the blinds?” Lightning asked, watching Gordon.

“Yeah.”

After dark, they loaded Anselmo's body into the back of an old VW bug and drove to town. The old VWs were used by people everywhere. Easy to work on, simple condenser and points ignition, they hadn't been fried by EMP in the first days of the war. The roads and streets were littered with the expensive and useless hulks of SUVs and Minivans, all of them inert as boulders. Converting their electronics was a long, arduous process that more often than not produced a lumbering behemoth of a vehicle that shuddered and convulsed its way down the road, with a tendency to backfire flaming flatulence. You never passed an old Bug or any car from earlier than about 1972 sitting unattended on the side of the road. They were in use, and used hard.

This VW was off-center; one of the tires was larger than the others. It made you feel like you were moving sideways, and you had to constantly correct your course to compensate for the wheel. There was no driving along with one hand on the wheel and a beer in the other.

Anselmo's store was on the far side of town. It was a good forty-five-mile drive to town, and then maybe another twenty to the store. The roads were breaking up, unmaintained these last three years, and with no working streetlights, it would take at least two hours to get there.

“You should wait here, watch the kids,” Whistler said after they draped a blanket over the body bag. Lightning nodded. She had mastered the art of making a nod look like
Hell, no!
“All right,” he assented. “No telling what stupidity Gordon is going to get up to while we're gone.”

“We'll check on Gordon when we get back.” She shrugged, and then loaded her weapons into the car. Shotgun, pistols, and Baldwin shoved under the body bag. Anybody who tried to jack this Bug would find it had a most unpleasant bite.

“After we talk to Anne,” he replied, climbing into the old Beetle. He'd sent her a quick message early this afternoon via Valley Forge. She'd been in the county, and would meet them not far from Anselmo's store. Her cover was that of a traveling curandera. The ignorant called that being a witch, but it was just a folk-healer, herbs and such, and she wasn't half bad at it.

Weapons in easy reach, Lightning settled into her seat next to him. “Ready, Miss Daisy?” he asked. She looked at him blankly. Ah, yeah, she was too young to get it. He turned the key, patted the accelerator. The engine coughed and caught. He listened for a minute. It sounded strained to him. “Gotta check the still,” he said. The eth mix was off, and it would make the engine run hot. Fortunately, it was evening, the air was cooler, and they weren't going far. But if they were running for their lives, bad eth could overheat an engine, seize it right up and deliver you into the hands of your oppressors. Lightning didn't reply and he didn't repeat himself. She'd remember. That woman never forgot a thing.

He eased the gearshift into first, and they slowly pulled away from the ranch.

It was strange to drive after sundown. Out here, away from the larger cities, the towns had unreliable access to the electrical grid, and most shut it down at night. Where the darkness would have been softened by the glow from streetlights and neon and cozy lamps in front rooms, now the sky was a deep black, with stars burning like slashes in the velvet. He'd not really seen much of the stars, growing up in the cities, and he wasn't often able to give them much attention in his current circumstances. Caliban attacks came from the ground, not from the air, so he rarely looked to the skies.

Lightning did a strange thing. She reached over and turned the knob on the radio. This Bug had been mostly stock and so it had the old-school AM-only radio. The hiss of static filled the Volkswagen. Out here, that wouldn't have been so unusual. Miles from anywhere, the local AM stations would have been blown out at night; it was one of the electrical spheres around the earth reacting to the solar waves, Whistler remembered that much. That was why you'd only pick up the hugely powerful stations after sundown. “Broadcasting with 50 Thousand Watts!” one of them had proclaimed in his youth. Lightning idly spun the dial, moving from 530 up toward 1500.

It gave Whistler a weird, disconnected feeling. For a minute he felt as if he were floating. In the darkness, in the old car rattling along, with the static and the sewing machine roar of the engine, it seemed so normal. This could have been him thirty years ago, in an old beater VW; out on a date with the gal he trusted most in the world. And it was still all ahead of them: their personal stories, their dreams achieved or broken, success or failure. And ahead of them, too, would be the bombs, the invasion, the fall, the plagues, and all the other events that had rendered everything in their personal Before into gall and wormwood.

He'd never had such a sense of vertigo, such a sense of coming unmoored in time. He tightened his hands on the cracked steering wheel. Lightning must have had a similar sensation. She looked out the window at the passing darkness, then she reached over and snapped off the radio.

“What did you want to be when you grew up, Whis?” she asked, not looking at him.

That caught him off guard. It was nothing he'd thought about in a couple of lifetimes. “Uh…veterinarian, I guess.” He felt her gaze. “I really liked animals.” He noticed how he said “liked,” not “loved.” Love was too dangerous a word for these times, it seemed. “I worked for a vet in high school.”

“You're smart. You could have done it.”

“Hated having to put animals down.” The words felt strange and awkward in his mouth. It was like speaking an ancient language, something from another world. Euphemism had no place in this life. “Which seems pretty dumb, when you consider how many men I've killed.” How many had it been? When he was a younger man, young and dumb, he'd sometimes counted the number of women he'd slept with. There was no counting the dead men—he never wanted to face that number.

“You were just a kid.” Her voice was soft.

He was concentrating on the interstate ahead of them. This far from the major population centers, the roads hadn't been choked with traffic that day and in some ways I-10 was still passable. The gangs and barrio boys mostly worked the remains of the cities, so while the possibility of an ambush remained, it was tolerably low. He didn't want to impale them on the rusting hulk of a semi, if he could help it, and so he almost missed what she said next.

“I spent five years over there.”

Over where?
he wondered, his eyes on the twin beams of sickly yellow light from the headlamps. Wasn't anything out here except… “You worked at the prison?”

“I didn't work there.”

“Hmmm,” he grunted. What the hell was he supposed to say?

“I didn't want to be anything when I grew up,” she said. Her talking, this was important. He knew it, so he drove as quietly and carefully as he could, making no sudden moves, downshifting with languorous care. “Whenever I thought about growing up, all I saw was a big blank.”

“None of us saw this, that's for sure,” he offered.

“I'd probably be dead if I wasn't in prison. Mr. G—the Warden—he turned me around, showed me a better way.”

Whistler had heard about the local prison, the Alamo, being pounded into the ground by the invaders in the early days of the war, so there was no sense in suggesting they go pay the Warden a visit. Taking prisoners was not a real high priority for the 'ban, in the past or the present.

She turned to look at him. “You ever get tired of this life, Whistler?”