The Big Bang (31 page)

Then a man stepped in front of her. He was of average height, in the white robes favored by some immigrants, with dark hair and very dark skin. He spoke to the stick-bearing convicts, and a loud something took place. She couldn't tell if the harsh sounds were an argument or a casual discussion about the weather. She kept her head down, and noticed the man had jeans and running shoes beneath his clean robe.

She looked up when the loud something stopped. The two convicts were glaring at her, unused truncheons clutched in their hands. The man took her by the arm and turned her. Surprised, Molly allowed herself to be led away.

“Do you understand me?” the man said in clear, but accented English.

“Yes,” she muttered back.

“Please come with me.” He kept his hand firmly on her arm, and was marching her away from the mosque. “I told the Muttwas I would have you decently covered, and I would be responsible for you. Are you in possession of yourself?”

It took her a moment to puzzle that question out. He thought she might be one of the City's nuttier street people, some of whom had managed to survive and even thrive in the new world. “Yes,” she said empathically. “I'm perfectly lucid.”
Right now
, she added silently, thinking of her night of weeping.

He kept walking. “The Muttwas only let me take you because they thought you were deranged. Please keep your eyes down.”

He did not live far. It was in the Tenderloin, which, while seedy, lacked the pervasive pulse of danger it had once carried. With addiction and a second conviction of theft punishable by death, some kinds of moral failings had become less attractive to certain thrill-loving types. There were still bad men and women around, but they'd become more circumspect. No criminals became rap stars in the Caliphate of California.

The man took her down a dirty street to a small complex. The smells of breakfast cooking from a range of countries wafted to Molly and her empty stomach roiled. Past a small wooden fence and in the back, the man unlocked a door, bowed, and held it open for her.

Inside the tiny apartment, it was tidy with only one chair. Books neatly stacked everywhere. He pointed to the chair and sat on the floor, facing her.

“It is not safe for you to walk about, thus, surely you know this.”

She looked down at her lap, noticed one hand was trembling. She wondered whether it was from hunger or fear. “I know,” she answered. “Thank you for…stopping those men.”

A kind of weary disgust crept onto the man's face. “The Muttwas?” He shook his head. “They're criminals. A disgrace to the Prophet.”

“I'm.… Betsy,” she said, out of nowhere. She lied automatically, without thought. It was just another manifestation of the Face. She couldn't say why she'd picked that name.

“My name is Turki Zaki,” the man answered with grave courtesy.

Molly's momma hadn't raised a daughter stupid enough to laugh at the name of the man who saved her from a horse-whipping, so she kept a straight face even as the name was stored in her memory as a kind of poultry. “Thank you, Turkey.”

He stood, and gave a small bow. His manners and voice seemed more English than Middle Eastern. “I'll be right back.” Before she could say anything, he was out the door.

Outside, she could hear a brief flurry of language. He returned with a niqab. “You will need to wear this, Betsy,” he said, apologetically. “The Muttwas will have followed us.”

While she slipped the surprisingly clean niqab over her head, he started a kettle of water on the small stove. “I've not had breakfast. Would you care for something?”

What the hell, Molly thought. Might as well live large on the invader's dime. “Please,” she said.

He moved around the tiny kitchen like a man unaccustomed to having guests. He kept checking on her, asking after her comfort, fussing and arranging. She decided to put him out of his misery and come into the kitchen area and help.

“No, please, you must stay there,” he said with a nervous glance at the window.

Good Christ, she thought, do they watch each other in their homes? She took the chair and moved it over to the window. If anyone wanted to make a report they were going to have a good clear look at her. “What was the argument about, back at the mosque?”

Turki pursed his lips, thinking. “The Muttwas—”

“Who?”

“The Muttwas. They're…oh, they're purity police, if you like. They have license to enforce proper behavior.”

“You said they were a disgrace,” she prompted him, her old reporter instincts apparently not having completely deserted her.

Pouring tea, he said, “Most of them are convicts. Criminals who won their release by memorizing the Quran.”

“How'd you get them to back off?”

Carrying a tray, he smiled modestly. “I know the Quran, as well. Their knowledge is deeply rote and whatever the Imams have told them. I was able to confuse them with the facts.”

So he was a smart fella, too. “Such as?” she asked, helping herself to a tiny English muffin and the tea.

“I reminded them the Prophet said there was no compulsion in religion. And for them to listen to the Imams, they were heretics for placing the words of mere men above those of the Prophet.”

She sipped her tea. It was ghastly stuff, he'd dumped butter or something similar into it, and chunks of mystery dairy product bumped against her teeth. She smiled politely anyway. “Isn't that dangerous?”

“Not against dullards.”

Now her smile was real. It made her look younger in a way that went beyond years. It made her look hopeful for a moment.

“You are dhimmi,” he went on, offering her the plate of tiny muffins. “You have no idea, of course, of the many varieties of thought in the Islamic tradition.”

“Do tell,” she said, and she could have sworn she batted her eyes in her best Scarlett O'Hara fashion.

And he did. Through the pot of tea, he chattered about heresies, conflicting interpretations, assassinations (the Muslims were just as willing to strike down their brother based on their revealed understanding of Gods' plans as the various warring Christian sects of the Middle Ages), and more.

He interrupted himself. “I regret, I must escort you home.”

“I can find my own way,” she said, pushing away the last of the lumpy tea with no regret.

“It would not be wise. The Muttwas may still seek you.”

She didn't want him to know where she lived. It wouldn't be good for the Team. “All right. Partway.”

He nodded, only to indicate he'd heard, not to indicate agreement. He led her outside, locked the door, and as they walked, he continued talking. In her fatigue haze, Molly had a hard time focusing on what he said. She was able to grasp one fact: the most numerous modern translations of the Quran were based on the Wahhabist sect. What their main beef was, she had not been able to decode, but Turki was very clear. “The Wahhabists added ideas and concepts which were not found in the Quran.”

“Such as?” she asked. Lord, she was tired. She'd been up all night, and not a drop of whiskey to ease her continuing consciousness. She was getting closer to her neighborhood. She'd have to give Turkey-boy the brush-off, soon.

Turki would have been called a nerd in other times and other circles. He was a font of obscure knowledge, and she realized with a touch of pity that he couldn't talk this way openly in the Caliphate of California. To even question the dictates of the Imams and the Emirs was apostasy, punishable by an unpleasant, prolonged interrogatory torture that ended mercifully in death. Happily, he told her, “In no previous English translation except the
Saudi
-sponsored version of the Quran has Surah Fatiha contained a reference to Jews and Christians.”

The next corner
, she thought.
I'll dump him there
. “How'd they do that?” she asked, not really caring.

“They added words. Phrases like, ‘such as the Jews' and ‘such as the Christians' were added to Surah Fatiha. Thus, the Saudi rendition fixes the meaning of the expressions ‘those with anger upon them…'”

“Such as the Jews,” she supplied.

Nodding, he went on, “Those who are astray…”

Stifling a yawn, she started to say, “Such as the…” but a loud voice interrupted her. In her fatigue, the Arabic was jarring, and her heart sped up. When she and Turki turned, the two Muttwas were behind them, polished clubs swaying in their hands.

Turki blanched and asked something with as much authority as his quivering voice could muster.

The Muttwas were having none of it. They were far from the mosque, far from whatever legitimate authority that had rein over them. The one in back looked around, checking for witnesses.

The Muttwa in front raised his club. Then his brains splashed back onto the white robe of the one behind him. The rear Muttwa jerked at the noise, but was too stunned to do anything but stare in disbelief at this shocking show of resistance.

Hank stepped from behind a tree, smoking pistol in his hand. He was swearing like a Tourette's patient on meth, and he drilled two shots into the Muttwa who was still standing.

Even as the Muttwas were falling, Hank turned the gun toward Turki, insane and incoherent profanities falling from the red-haired man's mouth.

Molly reached out a restraining hand. “No,” she said.

Hank's next shot took off two of Molly's fingers and tore through Turki's throat.

Molly wouldn't let herself scream, but a shrill sound, like tea kettle's whistle, slipped from her lips. Without thinking, she clutched her wounded hand with the other, and nearly passed out from the contact. Tears of pain blurred her vision and she stumbled blindly toward the fallen scholar.

Turki was fighting to breathe, blood bubbling around the hole in his throat, and spurting from the exit wound on the side of his neck. His face was lamb's fleece white, as white as his robes where they weren't darkened by blood.

Hank was beside her as she reached for Turki. She was shaking her head, unable to speak for the pain, trying to make the American understand.

“He's done,” Hank said and then fired point blank at Turki's forehead.

She slammed her eyes shut and turned away, but she was too slow and the image of that gentle man's skull shattering outwards like a rotten tomato stomped by some thoughtless foot would always be with her.

Hank dragged her to her feet and pulled her away.

They spent the day in hiding. She never knew where, or how. She was nearly blinded by the pain in her maimed hand. She had a sense of Hank near her, wrapping her hand in cloth. He was pacing near her, sometimes speaking to her. “I was looking for you,” she recognized him saying. Other words, sentences wriggled through the darkness that pain had drawn around her. “We used to worry about them creating concentration camps for AIDS victims.”
We
, she wondered.
Them, who?
“We laughed at the people who said it, but part of us believed it. Now the Caliban has done it.”

Then sometime later he was pulling her to her feet, wiping her face with a damp rag, forcing a coat onto her. “You have to put your hand in your pocket and walk normally. Can you do that?”

She nodded. Hank took the niqab, slipped it over her head. “Hand in your pocket,” he said, quieter now, more like his old self.

She held her breath, eased her hand into the large pocket. She tried not to brush the two ragged stumps with her remaining fingers, sure she'd scream or puke if she did.

All the way back to the house he whispered encouragingly to her, the way you would a weary pack animal. “Come on, Molls, you can do it. Keep it up. That's good.”

They walked past Jeanette Latowsky's house at first, and Molly felt the strength going out of her legs. Her concentration, her will, her hate had got her this far. She couldn't go further. Hank told her, “Just a little more. We have to go around back, make sure we weren't followed.” Leaning on him like a tired child, Molly struggled across that last hundred miles of barbed wire and broken glass, down the street and then up the alley. When Hank eased the gate open and she stepped inside to the tiny backyard, her knees buckled and she folded up quietly onto the grass.

She awoke days later, emerging from feverish dreams of monstrous Muttwas and bloody Qurans, and something about a talking turkey. She was in Jeanette Latowsky's bed, her hand bandaged, with a repulsive taste in her mouth.

Jake was at the door. He noticed she was conscious. She tried to speak to him, her mouth sticking with dehydration. Jake raced to the kitchen and came back with a glass of water.

As he held the plastic tumbler to her mouth, he said, “Molly, I'm sorry.”

She pushed the tumbler away, tried to speak again. “Hank.”

“He's not here. He's at work. It's nearly two o—”

“Hank!” she insisted, and then turned her head and spit out a wad of gummy mucus. “As soon as he gets here.” She fell back against her pillow, exhausted.

It was dark when she next awoke. There was candlelight from the kitchen, down the hall, and faint voices.
Goddammit
, she thought, and forced herself to sit up. She was wearing some granny panties and a stained flannel shirt.
The hell with it
, she told herself, standing on unsteady legs.

She tottered into the kitchen. Hank and Jake were at the table with a third person, some balding man with black-rimmed glasses and a gray suit. They looked up, and the gray suit hurried over to her.

“You should be in bed,” he said, taking her arm.

She was too damned weak to fight him off, but she ignored him and focused on Hank. “You killed a decent man back there. He'd been taking care of me.”

“Didn't mean to,” Hank answered blandly. “They all look alike to me.”

“They're all alike to me, too. He was a decent man, but he was one of them nonetheless.” She looked around at the men. “I'm not going to hide from them anymore,” she croaked.