The Big Bang (32 page)

“Whaddya mean, Molls?” Hank asked, leaning back.

“Don't call me ‘Molls,'” she snapped. “I'm not going to hide from the Caliban. We can't keep hiding, any of us. We have to face them.”

“How are you going to do that, Molly?” asked the gray suit, guiding her toward his chair.

She squinted at him. Even the weak light of the candle made her eyes water. “We tell people the truth.” She jerked her good hand toward the water heater. “Put me on SamziNet. Put my face on it, and we tell them what is happening. What the Caliban is doing. What the Team is doing. What Americans can do to send these fascist fucks back to the shitholes they came from!”

Hank smiled. “We can do that.”

There was a red light shining at her, from the darkness beyond the stage lights. She was vexed to discover that she was sweating. She could feel the dampness on her hands and in the small of her back. She had been on television before, hell, she'd acquired the skills without much trouble at all. Don't gesture too widely or too fast, look at the camera, cross your legs at the knee. She'd heard actors talking about “dying” on stage, but a bad review had nothing on a visit from the Caliban's Master of the Interrogation.

She was giving herself a pep talk.
I'm here to give my testimony. I'm here to be a witness. Can I get an amen?

A voice from the darkness said, “Go.” She wasn't sure which of the two men it was, either small and thin, or medium and Hispanic. Brownie and Skinny, she'd tagged them in her mind.

Now the red light was blinking. They were recording.

“This is Betsy Ross and we're the voice of American Freedom,” she began, saying the only untrue thing she'd agreed to utter. They couldn't use her real name obviously, no sense making it easy for the Prophet's Chosen to find her. “You don't know me, and you know my name isn't Betsy Ross, not by a long shot. But this is truth: a lot of you are just like I was, just surviving, just getting by, wondering what happened to our country and afraid. Afraid it was never going to change. It's going to change, friends. I'm here to tell you whatever I can about the Americans who are fighting for us. Fighting for the black and brown and white and yellow citizens…mostly they're fighting for the Red, White, and Blue, whatever that means to you. I want you to know it, and to take heart. We don't have to bend over and grab our ankles for these camel jockeys who want to ride us back to the year 600.”

She felt herself relaxing. “Here's your Hot News for the Day, with a little history thrown in. A lot of resistance is coming from the Midwest, from the heartland. Most of the bigger cities in the Midwest were bombed or suffered sabotage, but the Caliban doesn't have enough troops to really control those populations. Militias under the direction of the President continue to fight the invaders. Oh, that's right, we still have a President. You might not have heard that because the Caliban doesn't want you to know. You're dhimmi, remember? I'd talk more about that, but I don't want to bore you poor folks who have had to live side by side with the invaders. The rest of you Americans, you've seen the videos of the executions and the stonings, or you've been to 'em live and in person yourself. But we still have an elected President, whether you liked his politics or not. He's still Commander in Chief, and we have a lot of men and women in the center of the country, fighting for all of us and making the soldiers of the Emir and the Caliph pay a very high price for their little piece of the Prophet's Paradise. There's even some of the US Navy out there.” She winked at the camera. “You boys and girls out there keep swinging for us, okay?”

Another camera came on, from her bad side. In the past, it would have made her look jowly, but not these days. “Now, it's time for Aunt Betsy to talk turkey with you. We're gonna have to tell you the truth, and it might hurt. But unless we know the truth, we can't do anything to change what's going on. A second ago, I talked about the Red, White, and Blue, that symbol of the U S of A. We weren't perfect, Lord knows, but to hear some folks talk, America was the worst thing to hit the planet since the bubonic plague. Think about it, now. You can remember them: always talking about everything America did wrong. Never a word about what we did right. Like I said, we weren't perfect, but who or what is? The last person who was perfect was the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and look what they did to Him. There was an entire group of people who were dedicated to crucifying America, over and over, for the sins of the past. But they never could see that America was capable of change. And those people weakened us, friends. Sure, we took part in slavery, but we stopped, didn't we? Bunch of Christians—yeah, those awful Christians—were behind the anti-slavery movement. Nearly one hundred and fifty years ago, we stopped that evil. But to hear some academics talk, we were one election away from the Nazis, America was already an oppressive surveillance society, and those gosh-darned Republicans were just itching to impose a theocracy on us.”

She looked directly at the camera and its blinking red light. All folksiness vanished as the fury radiated out of her eyes. “Well, friends, we have a theocracy now, don't we, and it for damn sure isn't coming from the Republicans.” There was a signal from the darkness. “My goodness,” she said, softening some of the steel in her voice, “it's almost time to go. We'll talk again, kids, because I want you to know how we were sold out by our own citizens. I'll give you chapter and verse, because I want you to know about the Americans who hated America so much they weakened us before our enemies. Even so, don't forget who our real enemies are: The Caliban and their people. Mark your calendars: America has been in captivity seven hundred and thirty-seven days. This is Betsy Ross for the voice of American Freedom.”

Molly didn't have time to breathlessly wait for the reviews of her newest media venture. The stumps of her fingers became infected, and the gray suit, Dr. Pogue, a former veterinarian, had to go to work on her. After the vet was finished, she ended up with what looked like an alien's hand. But he'd saved her arm, and her life, and she was grateful.

Because she couldn't hurt the Caliban if she was dead.

She badgered Hank relentlessly for airtime. She'd once felt in his debt, but there had been a shift in their relationship. Ever since Hank had killed Turkey and destroyed her hand, she felt he owed her. She hadn't yet discovered the wellspring that fed his hate of the Caliban, but she felt she was at least his equal now. He did what he did, but he couldn't do what
she
could do, and Hank was smart enough to realize it. Every day or two, they put on another webcast. Dr. Pogue and other members of the Team fed her tidbits on the success of the Resistance, which Molly publicized as sensationally and as accurately as possible.

She knew that just telling people about the Resistance was the first step. To the millions of Americans under the heel of Islam, shuffling through their new lives as dhimmi, the simple knowledge that their countrymen still fought back could subtly alter their reality. It planted the possibility of change in their minds where only apathy and resignation had existed before.

Betsy Ross began to appear in viral videos all over the SamziNet. And she began to have an effect.

The first mass resistance was down at the shipyards. Dhimmi slaves refused to unload the cargo brought over with a new load of immigrants from Yemen. The Prophet's Chosen unlimbered their Kalashnikovs for some target practice. Several of the slaves turned the wharf machinery against them, impaling Chosen soldiers on the tines of forklifts and toppling cargo containers over on them. It still resulted in the massacre of the slaves. It was not, however, as one-sided as it would have been, and reacquainted the Caliban's armed overseers with their own mortality.

The downtrodden citizens quickly realized that mass unarmed resistance was likely to lead to an unmarked grave. Individual, anonymous resistance began to be the order of the day.

Wearing her niqab and cotton-stuffed gloves to hide her deformed hand, Molly wandered among the other dhimmi at the markets and fairs, listening. There was gossip, hints, rumors of resistance and sabotage. None of the speakers could afford to appear to endorse the poisonings of Caliban officials or the dribbles of sugar in Caliban gas tanks, never giving outright endorsement of the resistance, as you never knew where collaborators might lurk. They usually discussed the events as news of the day, and tried to keep the relish out of their voices. Even the Headsman was struck down, according to a rumor that Molly discounted.

Was it always this way?
she wondered, walking home through the twilight, another old woman on this defeated continent, unworthy of the notice of the Prophet's Chosen or their tools.
Does it always start with individuals and slowly spread?

However it happened, it wasn't happening fast enough for her.

“Come on, Molls,” Hank said to her. “Time for another show.”

She was sitting on her bed. It had once been Jeanette Latowsky's bed, but usage and custom had turned it into Molly's bed. Jake had never said anything about that, one way or the other. “Goddamn it, Hank,” she growled. “We ain't doin' a damn bit of good with this Betsy Ross show.”

Hank, patient as cancer, sat beside her on the bed. “Sure we are. Does people good to know about the Resistance. Keeps their hopes up. Gives 'em ideas. We make life uncomfortable for the 'ban until George and his posse get here and kick some Muslim ass.”

For a woman who made her living as a commentator, she was doing a piss-poor job of communicating her thoughts on this one. George might get here, and he might not. She didn't have the patience to wait for him. “I'm talking about me, Hank. All I'm doing is talking! Other people, they're out there puttin' their skin in the game. I'm doin' exactly what I did before…flapping my jaws and never having to break a sweat.” It irked her that even though she was doing Good Work, work she believed in with all her soul, she was just like she'd been before, talking about what she saw. It was just from the other side now, and with fewer fingers.

Jake was at the door, listening. For a brief moment, Molly had a weird sense of shame, like they were his parents, and he'd caught them arguing. “What do you want to do, Molly?” the boy asked.

The question wasn't asked casually, and she took another look at him. He wasn't a boy anymore, surely hadn't been since the day he'd seen someone cut the head off his mother. “I want to hurt them,” she told Jake. To Hank she added, “I don't want to talk them to death. I want them dead, and I want to be the one to do it.”

“That's a good idea,” Jake said seriously. “I've already killed the Headsman.”

Both Hank and Molly turned to him. She was waiting for him to let them know he was making a joke to keep his nominal parents from arguing, waiting for the expression on the young man's face to change.

It didn't. “I cut his throat.”

Molly opened her mouth, but words had failed her, for a moment.

“He thought I was a rent boy,” Jake went on.

“But…” Hank started. “The 'ban put our people in camps. They made being gay a capital offense.”

Jake looked at him with a little contempt. “That's only for dhimmi. In the 'ban, you're only gay if you get caught with another Muslim.” Jake sat down next to her, and she felt a ripple of gooseflesh along her arms when he did. This young man had an entire secret life she'd never bothered to be aware of, and there was dark knowledge upon him. “Who do you want to kill, Molly?”

Molly and Jake caught the Translator at Seal Beach, where he lived among the favored of the Caliban. Someone on the Team had supplied them with a name and an address for the California-boy collaborator, and Jake had scouted the man's home from the back of a garbage truck.

The Translator was now going by the name Yusef Achmed, but he still was a Cali boy at heart. He surfed several times a week, between trips to the mosque and his other official duties translating the directives and orders of his Muslim masters.

Early one morning, in the back of the garbage truck, Jake smuggled Molly into the enclave of Sea Crest. Formerly home to celebrities and the famous, it was now prime real estate for high-ranking members of the Caliban.

No one spoke to Molly on the ride over. She surmised that everyone on the truck was a member of a Team. She and Jake hopped off the truck in the pre-dawn darkness near the old State Park entrance to the beach, and hurried down to crouch beside the ruined walls of the abandoned dressing rooms. They had only an hour before the truck returned to take them out again.

Molly was dressed in black, and she had a burka rolled up and tied around her waist. If they missed the truck or the plan otherwise went to crap, she'd put on the burka and try to walk out of the gated community. She privately doubted if that would work, and thought she might take her chances with the tides back and forth through the Golden Gate and try to swim around to the old fort. Hypothermia and drowning seemed a much pleasanter way to go than facing the Master of Interrogation.

Hank wouldn't be waiting for them if they got back. “This is stupid!” he'd raged. “It's war, not revenge. You can't make this into some personal vendetta.”

The distinction escaped them. He'd lost something, maybe even someone. But he hadn't watched his loved ones' heads bouncing past their bodies like a tumbling basketball.

It was personal every day, from the echoing cries of the muezzin five times a day to the goddamned niqab she wore whenever she dared to venture out. It was personal with every spoon of dishwater gray soup they had for dinner. It was personal that Molly courted death every time she opened Jeannette Latowsky's old Bible. It was personal that Jake's mother would never see him married, or hold her grandkids. It was personal that Jake had no idea if the girl he loved was alive, dead, or something in between.