The Big Bang (29 page)

She nodded, and turned on her side facing him, pulling the quilt up over her shoulder and curling into a ball. He took the laptop and sat down.

He read silently, the only sound the occasional click of a key. She fell asleep to that sound.

It was dark and the room was cold when she awoke. Her eyes were sticky from the tears, and there were salty tracks down her face. Hank had pulled the chair close to the bed. He was sitting there watching her sleep, his face only two feet from her own. The laptop was on his lap, closed.

When he saw that she was awake, he nodded. “I think you're ready now,” he said.

Her first job was a simple one. She went shopping.

“Just watch,” Hank told her. “Just observe.”

She dutifully put on her niqab, dressed in Ginnie's jeans (which were unworn enough to still be stiff), pulled on her only pair of shoes (which were Ginnie's old boots), and she went shopping.

She shuffled outside with a canvas bag hanging from one arm and followed the directions Hank had given her. It had been a long time since she'd been around anyone except the other old coot and Jake, so she was glad there weren't a lot of people out on the street. She wouldn't have known what to say to them, or even if she could speak like a normal human being.

It was about 6 in the morning, cool and crisp in the strange way the San Francisco winters can suddenly turn. She felt a little drunk at the barrage of visual sensation after having secluded herself in the tiny house for so long. Maybe that's why she noticed the trash so much.

San Francisco had been a reasonably clean city, Before. There were bad parts of course, but overall there had been a pride in the place, an awareness of the stunning beauty of the setting that seemed to touch most of the residents and made them careful about litter and such. Now the city, or this neighborhood at least, was turning into a sty. As she shuffled along the sidewalk in the early dawn, she could see the garbage that was everywhere. Faded posters of The Gasbag, Xeroxed copies of exhortations to purity, crumpled boxes with foreign printing on them, cans, shredded clothing, scraps of Sheetrock.

Plodding along, she tightened her fists around the canvas bag while broken glass crunched beneath her feet. One good thing about the detested niqab, it hid the look on her face.

Her route was taking her to the border between her dhimmi neighborhood and a more prosperous locale, one where most of the homes had been confiscated for the colonizers. She was able to recognize the scribbles of their writing on the outside of the stolen houses, the dark marks of the ink as empty of meaning to her as the tracks in windblown dunes they resembled.

The market itself was set up in what had once been a children's park. Now, instead of little kids doing hand over hand on the monkey bars, the carcasses of some animals swung in the morning breeze. The market's location, so close to the Caliphate's true supporters, had made someone nervous, and there was a troop of the Chosen (Yassar-bes, again, the
bastards
) ringing the edges of the park, bored, AK-47s hanging at their side. Bored, she noted to herself bitterly. That meant they weren't afraid of getting their guts strewn across the grass.
That meant
, she thought with tears springing to her eyes,
no one was fighting back
.

The market was just getting busy at this time of the morning. She was one of the few dhimmi in the place, surrounded by robed shapes she imagined were the women of the households, usually with men beside them, brothers or uncles. The women didn't speak to the male vendors, they pointed at what they wanted. Molly forced herself to move from stall to stall, looking. They were selling largely foodstuffs, a few vendors with fabric or spices still in their McCormick bottles, the same kind she'd so casually tossed in her shopping basket years before Ginnie has been slaughtered in the name of a peaceful religion. The voices jabbed at her, just noise, sounds and stops, with very little meaning. The occasional word in English floated by, a bright bubble in the torrent of the invader's language.

She became aware that as dhimmi, she was drawing unwelcome attention in what amounted to an upscale shopping center. Hank had told her to buy something while she was there, something expensive. She found a half-full bottle of shampoo in the back corner of one of the stalls. She pointed at it, and was glad to see that her hand didn't shake. The merchant, a big balding man with a stringy beard, held up five fingers. Molly extended the handful of bills she had. The wad was mostly Caliban scrip, with one American bill in it. The merchant frowned, glanced around, and his hand quickly closed over five scrip, folding it over the greenback before taking the lot. As he passed her the used bottle of shampoo, his fingers caressed the back of her hand.

Molly fought to keep herself from vomiting. In the Caliban's view, as a dhimmi woman, she was exempt from the Prophet's injunctions against defiling the purity of women; she was thus exempt from the protections the Koran extended to Muslim women. She snatched the bottle away, thrust it into the canvas bag, and hurried to another stall.

At home (Lord, she'd called this little place home), she stood in the shower under the cold water, screaming and shaking in rage. These invading pigs were in her nation, were in her city! After the tears had stopped, she put the tiniest drop of precious shampoo in her hand, and washed her hair, rubbing her scalp roughly over and over.

She dried herself, and crawled under the quilt to get warm and to wait for Hank to come home. She had a report for him, and she had some questions.

“He took the Washington? Good,” Hank nodded, sitting in the chair beside the bed. “That tells us he's got some black market connections. The Resistance, the ones in the center of the country, they don't take 'ban scrip. It's useless there. They still want good old American cash.”

She didn't care about that. “You should have seen them, strutting around the park.”

“I have seen them,” he snapped, surprising her. Usually, his voice was calm, amused. Not now. “I see them every damn day.” He got hold of himself. “You, however…you have to show the Coach that we can trust you.”

“The Coach.”

“I'm the Manager. We're the farm team for the Giants.”

“Leave it to a bunch of men to come up with that kind of code. Lord, what does that make me? The bat girl?”

Now some of Hank's good humor was returning. “No, it makes you the crazy lady who lives in the basement.” Not noticing how that stung her, he went on. “Most of these 'ban grunts are uneducated, fresh off the camel farm. If they've been memorizing their Korans like they should and staying away from all those evil things in the West like music and televisions and sports…they shouldn't have any idea what we're talking about even if a spy overhears us.”

Molly had only one question, a question she never would have imagined she'd utter in her innocent blindness during the times Before. “When do we starting killing them?”

In some ways it was worse, now that she was on the Team. Hank couldn't tell her anything about the other Players, or even the other Teams. There were times, in her frustration, stalking around the tiny apartment, she'd think there might not even be other Teams. Then Hank would send her on some obscure errand (what the hell did she need to count satellite dishes for?) and she'd think maybe there was a real Team.

Once, on another vague mission for the Coach, she found herself shuffling beside the remains of the Great Highway along the Pacific Coast just below the now-overgrown and seldom-used Golden Gate Park (all the wildlife including the bison having been eaten, neither the dhimmi nor their masters had much use for the place). Her head down, counting the fallen posters exhorting the faithful to Hadith as she had been tasked, she nearly ran over a crowd of the black-clad immigrant women she now thought of as “the crows.”

Why they bothered to come to the beach in their bodysuits at all was a mystery to Molly, but there they were, bunched together, chittering to one another in their hated, incomprehensible tongue, pointing at the water. Molly let her gaze follow those bent fingers. Maybe the desert crones had seen a whale. She'd like to see one of those vast cetaceans herself, moving along unmindful of men and the barbarities they practiced upon their brother in the name of their gods.

Instead of the slow, rhythmic, unconcerned swim and submerge and swim of a migrating gray whale, she saw something else entirely. It was huge and gray, perhaps a mile off shore, a vessel of some kind. She didn't know a battleship from a battle axe, nor did she require any identification beyond the oversized Stars and Stripes that drifted from a tall mast in the center of the ship. The great gray ship resembled a small city moving upon the waves, steaming with no apparent concern for its proximity to an enemy city.

Tears blurred her eyes. Somewhere, there was still a US Navy, and thus, a USA remained. Wiping her eyes, she stared with fascination, straining to see details. Even from that distance, no-bullshit cannon barrels were visible. Looking on this remnant of the nation's maritime forces, she felt a strange shiver of pride and fear go through her. In the fear, at least, she shared something with the crows. For even one as previously willfully ignorant of the military as Molly had understood that such a ship could rain terrible destruction down upon the City by the Bay. Her pride was in knowing they had refrained due to the large number of captive dhimmi. Her fear was that one day the presence of the original inhabitants of San Francisco would not be enough to withhold the burning hand of American vengeance from the invaders that lived among them.

The spectral crones continued to huddle together and point. One old specimen stepped forward and shook a fist at the vessel and Molly had to mask a snort of laughter at the uselessness of the gesture. She walked on, seeing other groups of people, citizens old and new, who watched the ship silently pass them by like the angel in Egypt.

Even though encouraged by her sighting, she stayed away from the laptop, left it to lie undisturbed in the hidey hole behind the water heater. She wanted to open it up, she wanted it as a bad as a drunk wanted to hear the malt sloshing into a shot glass, but she feared where the laptop would take her, and if she went there would she ever come back?

Instead, she honed her hate. To her shame, she found herself snooping around the tiny house when Jake and Hank were gone. She learned a little about Jake's mother. The woman's name had been Jeanette Latowsky. Jake had put her things in boxes and shoved them under the bed. In those boxes, Molly found books and letters. She had the self-control, at first, not to read the letters. But the books told her what she already knew. Hell, the woman had died accusing George of causing her death, why would books by the usual complement of honest and fair-minded individuals like Noam Chomsky and Andrea Dworkin surprise her? After all, Chomsky had said the reports of the Stalin purges and Khmer Rouge atrocities were conservative fairy tales. She briefly wondered if he was still alive. The Emirates wouldn't have had much interest in the survival of secularists of any stripe or persuasion. Andrea Dworkin, poor deluded thing, she was already dead. She thought that Western culture devalued women? The Caliban would have showed her what real oppression looked like.

Of course Molly read the letters. Jeanette Latowsky had her own story, just like the rest of us. Never married, Jake's father more of a concept than a real person, mistakes, bad choices in liquid and pill form, recovery, and, about ten years before her death at the hands of the Caliban, redemption in the arms of Jesus. If the woman's private demons had been booze and bennies, her personal Satan had voted Republican.

Molly found herself hating someone who would never have a chance to defend themselves or change her mind. She found she hated Jeanette Latowsky and her simple-minded reactions. The “scary” Republicans. “Mean” George Bush. Nothing in her letters about William Jefferson and the $90,000 in cold cash found in his freezer, for instance, or Mr. Jackson's mistress on the payroll of the Rainbow Coalition or William Hsu and his flood of donations to the Democratic party from a secretive ninja army of oddly solvent dishwashers and busboys, nothing about Bill Clinton's serial predations on women. Nope, the Evil One was white (at heart, if not in actual skin tone), had an American flag lapel pin, drove a gas-guzzler, was in favor of the war, and the fault was
always
America's. Those gentle, peaceful folks on the other side of the world would never have bothered to slaughter innocent citizens if the darn Americans hadn't just made them do it, doggone it.

Molly put the letters away, but it was already too late. She tried to fight the raging fire that was swelling inside. She'd fed it with SamziNet, and Jeanette Latowsky's letters stoked the flames high enough to almost consume her.

Trembling, Molly sat in the kitchen, a quilt around her. She was afraid now. Afraid of herself. Her world, not very large in the last year, was shrinking even more. She wouldn't open the laptop. She wouldn't read the letters again. What did she have left?

Being on the Team.

She didn't ask where the food came from anymore, although she noticed the quantity had increased since she'd joined the Team. It might not taste worth a damn, but at least your belly felt full once in a while.

It was that unaccustomed feeling that got her talking. For once she wasn't cold, she wasn't hungry, and she wasn't quivering with rage. She hadn't been out on any missions for the Team lately, and she'd been re-reading Jeanette Latowsky's Bible in the quiet hours when she was alone in the apartment. For all the nonsense that had been undertaken in His name, the actual text gave her hope. Hope calmed her, a little.

Now the boys were back, pushing their dishes away with a feeling of satiation, if not satisfaction. Jake spoke first. “Did you figure out what happened?”

Hank looked at him with mild surprise. The boy rarely exhibited much of an interest in anything these days. The loss of his mom seemed as real and recent to the kid as yesterday.