The Big Bang

The Big Bang

The Lonesome George Chronicles

Book One

Roy M. Griffis

New York, NY

To my father, Wayne Griffis (USAF retired, 28 years of honorable service), my brother, Matthew Griffis (Tucson Police Department retired, 26 years of honorable service), and my wife, Alisa, an educator for over 15 years

This is a work of fictional speculation.

Special thanks to:

All of my early readers at WesCorp (too many to list), along with Janis Keough, Kathryn Kamish-Gilliam, and John Taibi. With much appreciation to my early volunteer editor, Carinda Petrivelli Mickelsen, and even more gratitude to Jamie K. Wilson for her enthusiasm, encouragement, and kindness. This book would not have been possible without the inspiration, love, and support of all of these folks.

Whistler, 2011

As he crouched behind a building, the chipped masonry grinding into his shoulder, Whistler's mind wandered. It would get him killed someday, he knew, but there it went anyway. Instead of watching for the troop transport, packed with new fanatics from Yemen, Whistler was thinking about Lonesome George.

What was George doing these days? As the last elected President of the old USA, back before the Big Bang, he was, in theory, still Whistler's leader. Which meant, in theory, Whistler was still the claims adjustor for a local HMO…as if HMOs still existed. In actuality, Whistler's leader was a former Nordstrom manager, a short, still-chunky Armenian woman named Anne—a wizard for organizing who had found her calling as a guerilla fighter when the Caliban torched a Christian school, killing both her small children. The California franchise of the Taliban had little patience for dhimmi practicing their heathen beliefs, and less interest in those beliefs being passed on to the next generation.

Whistler sighed. Until the Big Bang, he never realized that on a night cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey (as his uncle used to say) it was still possible to sweat. He'd almost always taken hot and cold for granted. Turn up the heat, crank down the AC. The occasional foray into the outdoors on his thousand-dollar Trek racing bike was mitigated by the knowledge there was a cocoon of climate-controlled comfort to which he could return. Now, he was always cold. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, clad in his precious bicycle gloves.

They said Lonesome George was somewhere in the West. Whole lot of land out there, tough terrain. George was usually on the move, they said, traveling hard and fast with a bunch of Special Forces guys. Whistler remembered one of the show trials he'd scoped from a MinuteMen satellite broadcast. This kid, maybe all of seventeen, was on his knees in front of the Mullahs. Indian kid, Apache maybe, wide face, thick black hair, black piercing eyes, nose broad and strong. The Mullahs doing the usual “it is the will of Allah” tap dance, the kid staring straight ahead, still in his desert cammies, one shoulder nearly shot away.

A hooded man carrying a sword approached the kid. Whistler couldn't figure it out. Back when there was a local government, his county had a hell of a time getting people to show up for jury duty. Yet, somehow, the Mullahs never had any problem recruiting Soldiers of Allah, brave lads all, who were happy to chop the head off a defenseless human being.

The kid…ah, the MinuteMen had said his name, but there had been so many names, Whistler lost track of them. He remembered the boy, though. The Apache Scout was how his memory was stored in Whistler's mind. The Apache Scout looked up at the approaching executioner, then spat on the ground at the Mullah's feet. He shouted something, and even though two other Soldiers of Allah were on either side of him, he shrugged them off like a bull shaking a rat from its haunches and climbed to his feet. The Scout said something very clearly, directly to the Mullahs.

Of course, the Mullahs had killed the audio, but the MinuteMen had gotten lip readers on the video. Even now, Whistler could hear the slight Texas accent of the female American who relayed the Scout's words. “I rode with President Bush, and a bunch of you bastards got an express ticket to Allah. Let me show you how an American dies, you pigs.”

The Scout turned and faced his executioner. He spat again and contemptuously turned his back to the man with the sword.

Whistler reckoned Lonesome George had seen too many of his men die that way. It didn't stop him, but it cost him. George's hair was dead white now, at least in the last picture Whistler had seen.

Vibrations under his feet pulled Whistler back to the present, rumbling through the road, through the buildings. Once they would have been lost in the flurry of pounding commuter traffic. Now the vibrations were solitary, distinctive; there was no competition from other automobiles.

Then he could smell them. Not the soldiers, although on a warm day you could always smell the Yemeni recruits. They hadn't gotten used to the abundance of running water in the larger cities, and still relied on traditional desert methods of hygiene (or the lack thereof). No, what Whistler smelled was the diesel. Straight-up, glow-plug burnin', dead dinosaur juice. That was almost always the tip-off. Resistance machines used bio-diesel; usually they smelled like deep fryers. It was a hell of a thing to be in the middle of a fire fight, a shit-storm of blood and bullets, and find yourself briefly above it all, musing, “God
damn
, I miss McDonalds' fries.”

Now he was fully in the moment. His heart was speeding up. It would get that way just before the first salvo, beating so hard he would get light-headed. Whistler forced himself to breathe.

The ones who lived…they didn't think about what they were going to do after the fight. They didn't think about families or women or food. They cut the cord that tied them to a future. They'd learned those thoughts killed. Those thoughts made you second-guess your training, question yourself. Thinking about that woman, or remembering how your buddy looked after he'd taken a round in the face (dead people don't look real, it was the weirdest thing); thinking about anything except what you had to do turned your movements into a jerky stutter of hesitation. Then, you'd be the one people would remember later, remember how the grenade had shredded you into carnitas.

Ahead of Whistler, down the road, the truck slowed as it came through the canyon of two- and three-story buildings. While the Mullahs and the Caliban lived in the Prophet's Paradise, moving troops and eradicating cities with a swipe of a mouse cursor, their boys on the ground quickly lost their belief in their own invincibility.

The Yemenis learned the hard way, but they learned quick. The truck, a seven-ton freightliner hauling booty from the ruins of Las Vegas, had 50-cal rifles mounted on top, one each at the front and rear of the trailer. Whistler guessed the least senior of the Yemenis was up there with the raw recruits at the gun mounts. The Americans had quickly made it a practice to snipe the older soldiers. “No sense in letting them school the new guys,” was the way it had been put to Whistler.

So the senior staffers, the sergeants, were probably in the cab of the semi, encased in armor plating. Same with the troop carrier that followed it…gun-fodder recruits, counting their seventy-two virgins on still un-calloused fingers, riding in the back of the Humvee, while the more experienced, salty dogs sat up front, armored in good old American-made Kevlar, anxious to get through this detail alive.

Whistler bit down a curse. The Humvee should have been in front of the semi. The plan was to take out the Humvee. It would have blocked the freightliner and left the goods inside intact. More than one of Whistler's men had loose teeth, a side effect of scurvy. They had hoped to find some fresh vegetables, maybe fruit in the trailer. Well, there was nothing for it now. The other boys would take out the Humvee. Or not.

Rolling carefully down the street, 50-cals tracking high at the tops of the building, the most likely site to launch an attack, the semi took its time. The road was clear well past the intersection. Anne, Whistler's commander, had made sure of it. No mysterious bundles of garbage, no abandoned cars, no discarded toys or dolls. Nothing that would worry a nervous conscript far from home. Another city pacified for the Prophet.

The remains of a stoplight dangled over the intersection. The semi slowed even more, executed a kind of slither to get the 50-cals past the now useless hunks of metal.

The charger was wound. The Caliban still had enough going technically that they could scan frequencies and send out pulses across the spectrum. It wasn't expensive, and they could get lucky…a pulse at the correct wavelength could set off a radio-controlled device, leading to disaster for a small resistance group like theirs. So here they were strictly old school. Slithering on their bellies like snakes, slipping through oily pipes filled with black turgid vileness, they'd run wires through drains right to the center of the intersection.

Whistler imagined the bastards in the Humvee must've been heaving a small sigh of relief; they'd gotten through the gauntlet of buildings without any of the pesky infidels shooting at them. They'd made the intersection. Nobody ambushes you at a clear four-way intersection. Too many routes of escape.

The Lord hates a coward
, Whistler said to himself. He heard it in a kind of Irish accent. It was something from a movie he'd seen. He'd never known any heroes when he was growing up…if they were around, they'd kept it quiet. By the time Whistler found himself needing a hero, a model, he and everyone else he knew was running like their ass was on fire. So, he took whatever he could find that made sense. It made sense that the Lord hated a coward.

No time now for other thoughts.

Whistler snapped the contacts shut, sending a small spurt of electricity surging from the generator down the wires, through the cement pipes, and under the street to the basin where the shaped charges, bags of fertilizer, and other useful chemicals lay. If he'd had time, Whistler would have thought,
Right back at ya
.

It was a beautiful thing. The pitted asphalt lifted in four places, a bubble of yellow and green flame pushing it upward. Had Whistler been looking, he would have enjoyed the way the initial blast pushed the semi truck up, ripped it loose and sent it spinning completely over the top of the trailer, wheels hurling flaming melted rubber, to crash in front of the Humvee.

Whistler wasn't looking, though. He'd grabbed the detonator at the sound of the first crack of asphalt and was racing away down the alley. A kid on a Schwinn was waiting at the corner. Whistler shoved the detonator at the kid. It was valuable, hard to manufacture, harder to replace. As for Whistler, he knew they could find another HMO claims adjustor anytime.

The kid on the bike spun away. People always ran from the explosions, so the kid would blend in as part of the panicked crowd. By the time the Caliban brought in more troops, the kid and the detonator would be untraceable, no matter what happened to Whistler and the boys.

Whistler jigged to his right, toward the sound of the gunfire. He could have found his way without the sound. The glow from the burning semi lit the electricity-deprived streets.

As he ran, he unslung his Baldwin, an ugly, efficient tool that was especially useful for exporting true believers to an early chat with Allah. No good at distance, but in the confines of say, your average street, a single shot from the Baldwin would knock a man down. The hydrostatic bullets also did a nice job of turning internal organs into pudding.

The Humvee still worried him. It had been far enough from the explosion that it might be essentially undamaged. As he ran, he could hear the heavy reports of a single .50.
Only one
. Good. Concussion from the blast must've taken out the forward gun emplacement.

He slowed as he neared the corner. People were already streaming away from the street fight. As always, Whistler was surprised. Surprised that anyone still lived in those unheated buildings, surprised at how many of them there were.
If there's so many of us, why can't we get the Caliban's foot off our neck?
he wondered briefly.