The Big Bang (27 page)

“How's she do that?” Lightning wondered, not really looking for an answer. She was talking about the way Anne got around the country, contacting each cell, giving them orders and information, without really having a car or way to get there.

“Maybe she really is a witch,” he suggested.

“No more than I am.”

They drove in silence for a while, each with their own thoughts. Finally, Lightning spoke. “Too late to go see the Chief.”

He'd been thinking the same thing. A wise man didn't stop by the Apache stronghold at night without plenty of warning and with good cause. There was something else, though. “Red and Gunny.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Rather do it at night.” The less people knew who the militia was, the better their chance of staying alive and keeping word from reaching the ears of collaborators.

“Uh-huh.”

“Tonight?”

She nodded. No more words were necessary.

The next morning, the townspeople found Gunny and Red hanging from the lamppost in front of the old post office. Both men's hands were bound behind them and they were blindfolded. A red “C” had been painted on each man's shirt, and a printed warrant of execution for actions supporting the efforts of the Caliban was pinned to their legs.

None of the citizens moved to cut them down. As a public service, they'd be left to hang for at least a day before being taken away and burned.

No one mourned their passing.

After taking a cold bath and scrubbing themselves roughly, Whistler and Lightning fell into his bed without a word an hour or two before dawn. His bed was small, but they curved themselves against one another and made it work. He'd covered the windows before they'd gotten into bed, and he hoped they'd sleep a long time.

He felt her shivering, and put an arm around her. She clutched it tightly, and slowly drifted off to sleep. He was glad she wasn't one of those people who covered their fear with stupid wisecracks. He was sure she never felt fear going into battle. He did, and he wasn't ashamed of it. It was a hell of a life, but at least he wasn't one of the walking dead, stumbling through their days without hope or action. He wanted to make sure he lived before he died. And if he died fighting the 'ban, at least he was doing something.

Molly (2)

She went a little crazy. Okay, she went a lot crazy. When she looked back on it, she wondered if it was because she was hiding out in the dreadlocked woman's house, sleeping in her bed, for pity's sake.

Jake and Hank wouldn't let her go out. They had the quaint notion that the Prophet's Chosen would be looking for her after the near-riot she had caused. Hank, a man with no apparent acquaintance with tact, added, “Hell, if it ain't the Chosen, then it'll be those old biddies in the black coveralls who want your hide. They only get one chance to party a year, and you done up and ruined it for them, girl.”

Since she had plans of her own, Molly was willing to heed their suggestion at first. But the enforced idleness ground at her. Jake and Hank both had jobs: Jake worked as a garbage man while Hank did something in maintenance. They brought her food, found some clothes for her, but when they were gone she didn't even have a cat to talk to. Anything edible had been hunted down the first winter after the Bang, when the bridges were blown and the plagues had marched through the City by the Bay like a viral Sherman on its way to the sea. Molly'd eaten cat, dog, probably even parrot. There came a point in hunger when you didn't ask anymore, you just asked, “Any more?”

It would be hard to say if it was worse when Jake and Hank were there, or more unbearable when she was alone. In the evenings, they'd have a little something to eat. She didn't inquire about the origins of the meals too deeply. Jake was a garbage man, and maybe he got creative. They ate a lot of soup, a lot of rice. They ate so much rice Molly worried about beriberi, but only in passing.

When Jake and Hank were there, for moments at a time Molly could feel normal. In the small kitchen the three of them crowded around a wooden table only recently scarred by Hank's cigarettes, eating their soup and rice, and the boys might suddenly start talking about sports, of all things. A familiar, almost choreographed routine had Jake singing the praises of soccer (or “football,” as he insisted on calling it), while Hank made disparaging remarks about the masculinity of favored players around the food in his mouth. It was a comfortable teasing, and Molly could sit there over the last of her soup, warmed by their talk and the body heat of two men who'd worked hard all day, and briefly forget where she was and why she was here.

Too many times, however, they ate in uncomfortable, awkward silence. The different silences would take on their own character, each of which she was able to identify over time. There was the heavy silence from Jake, accompanied by bolting his food and hurrying from the table. That usually meant he'd been on body detail that day. The Imams had no concern for dhimmi burial. When the dead had no relatives or anyone who cared, they'd be left like garbage or tossed into the bay. If Jake had to pick up children's bodies, he wouldn't even come to the kitchen, but would sit in the dark in his mother's room, perched on the edge of her bed holding her Bible. At those times Hank would sip his soup, lean back in his chair, light up a foul-smelling hand-rolled cigarette and say, “So, Molly. Tell me how you really feel about the Caliban.”

There were other silences. The brittle one that came after she'd ranted about the Imams and the Prophet's Chosen. The embarrassed one that arrived when there was nothing to eat.

But she discovered she didn't mind. She'd spent most of her adult life talking, in one fashion or another. And look at all the good it had done her, or Ginnie. Not a single thing she'd ever said had saved her sister. So the silences, she actually welcomed them. There seemed to be some secret in the silence, but one she would not be able to hear while others were present. In the morning, six days a week, she couldn't wait for the two men to go to work. She longed for the blissful silence, the way she could go an entire day without speaking to someone, and the way it gave her time to think and remember.

Especially remember.

She'd always had a good memory. She'd read up on it, the different kinds of thinking and ways of perceiving the world. She was an auditory thinker, it seemed. She heard words in her head. It hadn't been that large a step to go from hearing something in her mind to becoming her own secretary. Her writing had essentially been simply a matter of taking dictation from the voice she heard in her head.

For those first months, she re-lived Ginnie. Re-experienced her sister's decency, her good heart. Ginnie lacked Molly's sharp tongue, among other things. There had been a kindness to her. Occasionally, she'd get exasperated with her older sister's insistence on pointing out that not only did the emperor have no clothes, but he wasn't packing much to be proud of, either. “Why do you have to keep talking about how they've messed up?” she said, irritated.

“Why don't
you
see it, too?” Molly had replied, a little stung by Ginnie's question.

At that, Ginnie had laughed. “You see what you look for, Molls.” She smiled. “I'd rather look for the good people are doing. People live up to your expectations.”

In the silence and dimness of those empty rooms, recalling her dead sister's words, Molly shook her head, feeling anew the loss of someone as kind and fundamentally decent as her little sister, and slowly coming to realize the depth of the other losses she, and the country, had experienced.

Winter came to San Francisco. Colder than usual, more foggy, more rain; no doubt a legacy from the nuclear winter of the first year of the war. They were sitting around the table with their bowls of soup. Molly fished something that looked way too much like a rodent foot from her soup, set it under her bowl, and looked around. Jake didn't seem as big to her. Kid hadn't been eating enough to keep growing, even though he was still a big boy. Hank, he hadn't changed, just seemed more compact somehow. Whatever weight he'd lost had been superfluous, and what was left was just the elemental man. She'd dropped some pounds, too, but she could afford to lose 'em. The skin was loose around her stomach now.

“How did it come to this?” she asked aloud.

Jake, who wasn't a mind reader and couldn't know what the hell she was really talking about, said, “Well, I got the greens from this guy who has a fishing boat…”

“No,” she snapped, more sharply than she meant. “How the hell did America end up like this?”

Hank leaned back and pulled out a cigarette. After he lit it, his eyes were bright above the ember. “Al Qaeda snuck in some nukes, shoved them up our backsides and lit the fuse, Molly.”

“No, what really happened? How was it possible for them to do it?” Her voice was getting loud. “How could we have LET THIS HAPPEN??”

Hank was smiling, but the eyes focused on her were hard. “You want to know?”

“Of course I do! But how are we going to find out? Caliban burned the books, bulldozed the libraries, and salted the ground.”

He took another infuriating drag on that vile cigarette. “Still a lot of information on the Internet.”

“Internet, my Texas ass. That's blown to hell, along with everything else.”

That smile again. “Not if you know the right people.” The smile was gone as he looked at Jake. “Dangerous, though. The Prophet's Chosen will take you apart with a cheese grater if they catch you.”

Jake nodded deliberately. “They'll do that if they catch you with the Bible, anyway.”

“What do I have to do?” Molly interrupted impatiently. That's when she headed down the path to crazy. Just asking that question: “What do I have to do?” She'd never be able to pinpoint when she started running headlong down that path.

“The dishes,” Hank said, standing up. He took a jacket from the hallway, turned off the light, and slipped out the door.

So, she did the dishes with Jake. There weren't that many, given the skimpy soup and rice that was their mainstay, but what with heating the water on the stove for the washing, and then hand drying everything, it took nearly an hour. Not that they had anywhere to go. Lights would go out about 8 pm or thereabouts when electrical power was shut down. Handcrafters had flourished under the Caliban. Candles were a growth industry. One of the things Molly did during her solitary days at home was gather up wax drippings and store them for later use. Nor was there anything on television except hagiographies of bin Laden and, oh boy, English-subtitled reruns of a miniseries from Egypt,
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
. Zip for movies or theaters. No wonder the public floggings and executions got such a great turnout from the colonizers. They didn't have a damn thing to do for entertainment otherwise, if they were obeying the injunctions of the Prophet against alcohol and premarital sex.

She made an effort to talk to Jake like a normal person as they washed the dishes. She was afraid if she didn't talk, she'd start screaming. “You have a girlfriend, son?”

“No,” he replied, not looking at her.

Okay
, she thought. “You have a boyfriend?”

“No,” he said, more forcefully.

They stood side by side, silently, their hands immersed in the cooling water. Understanding blossomed for Molly. She said quietly, “You
had
a girlfriend.”

Jake shook his head, and then changed his mind. He nodded slowly. “She was working in DC when it happened. The attack, you know.”

Molly took a pot from him, rinsed it in the graying water, and dried it off. Oh, Lord, DC. She'd heard stories. Not as bad, at first, as Los Angeles, but it got bad fast. “Did she make it out?”

“We don't know.” He scrubbed hard on an already clean bowl. “She…she might still be alive.”

“I'm sorry,” Molly told him softly. This poor kid. Loses his girl, then he loses his Mom. All he has is two crazy coots (Hank being Coot #1 and Molly being Coot #2) squatting in his dead mother's house. That flat part of her, the one born at Ginnie's purification, that part she heard from more and more often these days suggested,
He's no different than a hundred million other kids in the US. Hard to find anybody who hasn't lost someone
. Yeah, she argued back, but he's the boy standing next to me. He's
my
anybody who lost somebody.

Molly dried her hands, reached up and put an arm around his shoulder. “That's tough, Jake. That's real tough.” It wasn't poetry, but hell, it was the best she could do. There was a reason she was unmarried with no kids to grieve for, herself. She wrapped both her arms around him, and he leaned against her. Standing, she rocked him, felt his tears on her shoulder.

The dishwater was cold and the kitchen was freezing by the time he straightened up. The gangly kid wiped his eyes, dragged his sleeve across his nose. “I keep telling myself that I won't cry anymore,” he said, ashamed.

“You stop feeling, you might as well stop living,” Molly told him. She was reminding herself, as well. Jake didn't appear to believe her. To change the subject, she asked, “Where'd that leprechaun get off to, anyways?”

That brought a smile to Jake. “Hank? Dunno.” It was full-on dark outside. “We better get to bed.”

Molly agreed. It was best to be in bed, with your book and candle lit, before the power switched off. That let you warm up the sheets before the real chill of the night settled into the house. And, Lord have mercy, each sleeping room had its own chamber pot. Dark ages, indeed.

Her dreams that night were troubled. She was between bookcases. They were huge, a canyon of wood shelves and bound volumes that were just out of her reach. No matter how high she jumped, she couldn't get to the books. Her fingers would brush the bottom of the aged leather. In her dreams, she jumped all night long.