The Big Bang (3 page)

Now Whistler shook his head. “Nah.”

The Baker looked disgusted. “If you desert, or if you go back home, the Republican Guard takes a bunch of recruits to your house. Force them to rape your mother, your wife, your sister…any woman in the place. Because of the stain you put on the honor of the Prophet and Allah. Then they kill them. Then they kill you.”

What do you say to that?
Whistler was silent.

“Yeah, it's a bitch,” the Baker went on. “It's a bitch. I liked America. Good pizza in Boston.”

Whistler said quietly, “I wouldn't know.”

The fallen man looked up at him without fear. “Do me one favor, if you can. Don't leave me here…I'll get buried with these fanatics.”

Unholstering his pistol, Whistler said, “I'll do what I can, buddy.”

The Baker closed his eyes. “Thanks.” He didn't flinch when Whistler put the barrel of the Glock against his temple. He felt Whistler's hesitation. “Don't worry about it,” he told Whistler.

Whistler pulled the trigger. With the muffled boom of the pistol still ringing in his ears, Whistler didn't feel much like talking. He watched silently as Gordon and the boys collected the newly notched Yemenis' boots and put them in a pile on the sidewalk. After Whistler and his boys disappeared, locals would scavenge through the pile. Good boots were hard to come by. Whistler's boys left the invaders their socks, if they had any. Gordon thought Whistler was a softy for that, but Whistler was damned if he'd make some scared teen-aged kid walk thirty miles across busted asphalt in his bare feet.

Most of the Yemenis had wadded up their head scarves and were holding them to their ears. Dark blood on the right shoulder of each man marked their uniforms like a dubious badge of honor. But at least they were alive. Gordon's boys used their Baldwins to gesture the Yemeni kids to their feet. Paley had blood on his hands, his flannel shirt. The sight of that nudged Whistler back into action.

“Paley, get over here.” To Gordon, he said, “Get 'em down the road to Needles.”

Gordon stood in front of the Yemeni and pointed down the empty road out into the desert. “Needles,” he said with great emphasis. The Yemenis hesitated. They had no sergeants to guide them now, nobody to take the lead.

Whistler went to the first kid they'd notched, took him by the shoulders and turned him to face down the road. “Needles,” he said, and pointed. “It's okay.” He gave the kid a little shove. The notched kid looked back at Whistler for confirmation. Whistler nodded. The kid took a tentative step, then another. He called back to his fellow soldiers. The other Yemeni soldiers shuffled after him in twos and threes. They might make it back to Needles. All depended on how many citizens of this town had lost relatives because of the invaders. A baseball bat could do grievous harm to an unarmed man.

Paley stood beside Whistler, the Baldwin hanging loosely from his arm. “Give me a hand,” Whistler said. Paley followed him around to the back of the Humvee to stand beside the body of the Baker. “Take off that shirt,” Whistler ordered. After a second, Paley peeled off the blood-soaked flannel. Whistler took it from him and tossed it over what was left of the Baker's face. He looked at Paley appraisingly. “Give me the thermal top, too.”

“It's cold out here,” Paley protested. “Besides, you got his face covered.”

Whistler felt the first warning sparks of anger. He was tired, jagged from the adrenaline rush, and he knew in a second his anger would flare like a lit match tossed into gasoline.
Christ, what had Gordon taught these kids?
“You've got blood all over you,” he said with forced calm. “Those soldiers come in with all kinds of exotic diseases and desert parasites. You want to catch any of that?”

That got Paley's attention. He skinned off the thermal top and stood there topless and shivering in the night air. Whistler dropped the bloody top on the Baker's body. “Let's drag him over here.”

Whistler grabbed the Baker's wrists without a thought. It was another gift from the Caliban. Whistler wasn't sure if he'd ever seen, with his own eyes, a real dead person before the Big Bang. He'd seen thousands on television portrayed by actors. But they never captured the true, inhuman stillness of death. It struck him one day, walking amid the victims of some Caliban massacre
. Dead people don't look real
. Something was missing. Sometimes he thought maybe his subconscious was always aware of the clues of physical life; the small shifting, slow breathing, even the tiny pulses in the throat or wrist. Other times, it just seemed to him that something essential was gone, and it wasn't just breathing or the circulation of blood. Anymore, he didn't think about it. With two-thirds of the world's population dead, one more stranger's lifeless body didn't make much of a difference to the other strangers who might come across it. Nowadays, wounds or splattered guts didn't bother him. He was okay with the dead until they started to smell.

Together, Whistler and Paley half carried and half dragged the Baker toward an alley. Lightning appeared from somewhere, checking her watch. “About out of time, Whis.”

“Yeah.” Whistler crossed back to the Humvee, pried loose a jerry can of gas. It had been punctured by Baldwin rounds in several places, but some gas still sloshed inside. “Anything in the trailer?”

She shook her head. “Tourist junk. Slot machines, statues of naked women. Lots of colored neon in packing crates.”

Well, this had been a tremendously valuable use of his time. Whistler crossed back to the alley, emptied the jerry can over the Baker's body.

Lightning clucked her tongue. “You know what they're gonna say, Whis.”

The Caliban media would take pictures of this poor bastard on the ground, run more feverish stories about the American butchers. It would be used for all kinds of things: recruiting posters, justification for more troops. In any number of the Arab empires, simple ignorant citizens would work themselves up into a fury, firing guns into the air, burning American flags, and screaming “Death to America” under the watchful eye of Republican Guards. Protesting was fine back there, as long as the citizens didn't comment on their reduced food, endemic corruption, lack of civil rights, or the dictatorship. Bitching about America, even a defeated America, was an approved outlet, like a street fair.

Whistler tossed a match on the Baker's body. The flames flared up, the way his anger threatened to do just a second ago. “I know. What's one lie, more or less?”

He turned to Paley. “Let's get you cleaned up, son.”

Whistler was quiet on the drive back to camp. It was an old stocking station, back when this area had been a thousand miles of ranch. The cattle were scattered or dead, barbed wire fences sprung from drifting snow or just torn down by Caliban troops. They loved their goat or sheep, but they'd eat beef in a pinch.

It would be dawn soon, Whistler mused as the pickup bounced over the trail. Normally, as acting lieutenant, he'd ride up in the cab, composing an after-action report for the staff at Valley Forge. But Whistler was beat, tired to the bone, so he rode in the open truck bed with Paley and the other boys (including Lightning, who was definitely no boy, but they were all his “boys”) and their bikes. The slam of the truck, the crashing of the bikes, and the rush of the wind tended to discourage conversation…just what Whistler wanted.

He couldn't believe how tired he was. Maybe he'd caught a Dose. There might have been some drifting in from Los Angeles, a little airborne gift of dirty isotopes courtesy of the Martyrs of California. He'd heard that radiation sickness would drain the life out of you. Good hygiene, proper nutrition, and bed rest would allow your body to resist. Without it, you got weaker and weaker.

Whistler gave a surreptitious tug on his teeth. They weren't loose. Well, maybe that one way back in his jaw, but it was probably scurvy.

The truck slowed and turned down a road intentionally untended and rough as a field full of gopher holes and rocks. Whistler could tell they were almost home. When the truck stopped, Whistler climbed to his feet. The sky to the east was just beginning to show small touches of pink.

“All right, boys, get it cleaned up and get to bed. Paley, you've got first watch.”

Paley whined, “Cap, I have to check the still.” The kid actually
whined
. Whistler figured they were all tired, but at least Paley kept focused on what was important. The still that generated their ethanol needed to be tended. Eth and bio-diesel worked pretty well together.

“Yeah,” he grunted. “I forgot. Okay, I'll take first watch.” He raised his voice over the clatter of bikes being pulled from the bed of the truck. “You've got half an hour to stow your gear and clean your weapons. Then I want everybody in the rack and undercover.” The Caliban troops had a hell of a time tracking little bands like Whistler's group at night, but they did a fair job of looking during the day. Whistler figured they didn't have the technicians to keep the gear working. You could find tech dweebs in any culture, but if they were constantly beaten down by the Prophet's Chosen, the dweebs might not want to stick around to keep the equipment running, or stick their necks out when they might get their heads cut off for a mistake.

Gordon, again: “What if we ain't sleepy, Whis?”

“Then you lie in the rack and count dead Iranians until you do go to sleep!” Whistler hefted his bike to one shoulder and turned away.

Bikes. The horses of the new century, or, they would be until the rubber ran out. Already, Whistler had heard some enterprising souls were trying to put wood on the wheels. Wood they could grow. Rubber, that was another story.

He hiked up the path to the office. As the nominal commander, he had his own space and didn't have to live and sleep in the bunkhouse with the others. The quiet, the space, was a blessing, although the tiny room could get fiercely cold in the winter. With the front wheel of his mountain bike, Whistler eased open the door to the office. Even if he had a key, he wouldn't have bothered to lock the door. If the Caliban had brought one good thing to America (and it was a big “if,” Whistler had to admit), it was a new appreciation for law and order. Most people were armed, and banditry was seen as a fast-track career to being elevated on a rope. If somebody just had to steal, they quickly realized that it was better to hit the collaborators and raise the languid response of the Caliban or its mercs than face the certain wrath of the citizens and the Resistance.

Inside the small office, Whistler hung the bike on two pegs behind the door. His “home” wasn't much: neatly made-up cot near the center next to the stove, an old wooden desk and chair, some clothes in a trunk. A useless rotary phone still hung from one wall. It would be gutted for parts, someday.

Whistler crossed to the cot, knelt, pulled out a suitcase from beneath. Inside, a stack of weapons: pistols, sawed-off shotgun, full auto rifles. He pulled out a fresh Baldwin, slung it over his back. Might as well clean the old one while he was on watch. Closing the suitcase and shoving it under his cot, Whistler rose, his knees popping. He grabbed the cleaning kit from a desk drawer and opened the door.

Lightning was waiting by the path, two large, steaming metal mugs in her hand.

“Chili for breakfast,” she said, extending a mug. “What every growing boy needs.”

Whistler grunted, took the mug in his free hand.

“Did you see what Cookie put in there?”

She shook her head, fell into step with him. “I don't want to know.”

Whistler sniffed the chili with care. Sometimes, Cookie's creations had enough spice in them to burn the hairs out of your nose. This batch didn't smell half bad. “Thanks,” he told her. “You should be gettin' to bed.”

Lightning shook her head again. “You can't clean your gun and keep watch at the same time. We'll take turns. You clean, I watch. I clean, you watch.” Whistler didn't answer. He wouldn't mind the company, and he knew Lightning wouldn't fill the silence with conversation. She was different from the women of B
³
(Before the Big Bang). He remembered how women then needed to talk. A lot. How they would pile details on him, set the scene, create a context, all the while he's wondering, “What's your point?”

Maybe Lightning had been that way, too. Not now. Maybe it was because she was the only woman and one of only four adults in the outfit. The boys, yeah, they thought they were men, but they were still kids. Kids who'd seen and done terrible things. Paley, the oldest, was seventeen. Whistler knew the boys sometimes went to Lightning to talk, especially when they'd had nightmares. He doubted whether any of them looked at her as a real woman. She was a stern aunt or older sister who was as deadly as anyone they'd ever known. Besides, fatigue and fear and hunger tended to move a man's mind right past sex to basic survival. Still, in a way, he hoped his boys had some of those stirrings. It'd mean that the war hadn't completely ground out their youth and humanity.

Whistler took a test swig of the chili. Okay, it wouldn't kill him, and you wouldn't use it to clean pipes. He was hungry all of a sudden. As they climbed the trail to the blind, he kept pouring the chili into his mouth, greedily chewing whatever savory meat that Cookie had found.

Lightning slowed as she came up on the blind, which looked a lot like a weathered rock up there on the hill. Whistler lowered the mug. “June six,” he called in a low voice.

The answer came back. “Nineteen forty-four.”

D-Day. They tried to use passwords from American history. They were less likely to be guessed by infiltrators, and Whistler liked the excuse to remind the kids of what their country had accomplished over the years.

Lightning stood to one side of the blind, eye-checked Whistler. He nodded, lifted his Baldwin. She flipped up the painted canvas side of the blind, and the morning light poured into the blind.