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 wa
s 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.
Even though he was weaving through the frightened throngs, their unwashed faces, grimed clothes, and universally gaunt malnourished bodies rendered them all anonymous. He couldn’t have told you what kind of people they were: black, white, Mexican, Chinese. He would have bet good money that they were OC, Original Citizens. The collaborators tended to look healthier, at least for a while.
Whistler raised the Baldwin high over his head. The sight of it was an instant passport. He glided through the OC like a shark in a school of minnows as they shoved and stumbled well clear of him. Poor bastards didn’t want any of it, too beaten down to care, or just waiting for it to blow over.
Low thump ahead. Rocket Propelled Grenade. Inaccurate as hell, but perfect for punching a hole through an assault line or a building. In this case, it was the corner of the building, just to the west of the traffic light. Powdered brick masonry rocketed outward.
Like Pete Rose going for a steal at third, Whistler pumped his arms and legs and made a sliding dive at the base of that corner, trying to get below the scattering debris. He curled himself into a ball as he slid, arms over his head. Chunks of red brick pebble dropped around him.
He wiped the grit from his eyes. He didn’t have the Baldwin. After a brief moment of throat-thudding panic, he pawed it out of the debris on the sidewalk, slung it forward. There was a crater about the size of a basketball in the corner of the building, five feet above the ground.
Whistler knew he wasn’t doing anybody a damn bit of good here. To his left, he could hear the sound of the Baldwins’ desperate chattering. They sounded like pop guns compared to the booming reports of that damned 50-caliber machine gun. Rat-bastard Yemenis, it was probably one they’d lifted from a US Armory.
If this went on much longer, the shakes were going to get him. Cussing his cowardice as if he was an obstinate mule, Whistler forced himself to grab a fast look. He popped his head up long enough to see that it was one hell of a party.
Gordon and the boys to the east, damn it; they’d gotten themselves pinned down in that old coffee shop. The Humvee was directly opposite them, blocked by the burning wreckage of the semi tractor. The Yemeni recruits had piled out of the Hummer and were firing in all directions. They were doing a lot of damage to windows and doors, but at least one rag-head sergeant had gotten his recruits to shoot at the building that was actually shooting at them.
And the .50. There were still two Yemenis on the rear of the semi trailer. One was guiding the ammo belts; the other was firing at the coffee shop, the 50-caliber metal-jacketed shells chewing fist-sized chunks out of the front of the shop. If Whistler’d had time to swear, he would have. He’d told Gordon to put a few boys on the other side of the street, but you can’t tell Gordon anything. Never could.
Whistler’s thumb checked the safety on the Baldwin without conscious thought. He was too far from the semi for anything like accurate suppressing fire. The best he could do was start flinging lead in their direction. It’d distract the machine gun; bring a whole crap-load of trouble on his head. But maybe it would create enough of a diversion for Gordon to get some of those kids out the back of the coffee shop. No sense in all of us gettin’ killed, Whistler thought as he stood.
He stepped out from the side of the building. The hole in the masonry was no good; he needed to be able to aim up at the semi. The first rounds from the Baldwin plinked low, punching holes low into the sheet metal sides of the trailer like a sheep’s footprints in mud. Whistler adjusted, lifted the barrel of the Baldwin higher. He wasn’t as much shooting at the two Yemenis as hurling lead high at them and hoping some of them hit. His first shots split the sandbags piled around the machine gun; well that got the Yemeni soldiers’ attention. They dove down behind the sandbags for a quick conference while hot metal rain continued to fall from the Baldwin.
He didn’t have much time, Whistler knew. One of the senior soldiers over at the Humvee would be quick to notice that the machine gun was no longer keeping Gordon and the boys pinned down so
they could be killed with a minimum of fuss or discomfort. Either the soldiers in the Humvee would take him out, or the two brain surgeons running the 50-cal would get ambitious. If he got close enough to the semi, the Baldwin could send two more of the faithful to Paradise. He’d better make this count. The Lord hates a coward.
Whistler ran out into the intersection. As he did, he saw what he had feared. A brown arm reached up from behind the dribbling sandbags, groped for the trigger of the 50, while a separate arm reached out from an angle, grabbed the handle and swiveled the barrel in Whistler’s general direction.
Holding the Baldwin high over his head, Whistler clamped his finger over the trigger, sweeping the rifle across the sandbags, aiming at the base of the machine gun, trying to blast away those controlling hands. The Baldwin against a 50-cal: worse than bringing a knife to a gunfight. To his right, Whistler heard Gordon’s Baldwins start up. Without the 50-cal filling the air with death, they could lift their heads and make a stand. Maybe he’d bought ’em a little time.
No time left for Whistler. The barrel of the 50-cal was tilting down at him, cranking right, splinters of black asphalt peppering him as each bullet moved closer. Maybe he could run up under the trailer, but what for? What good would that do Gordon and the kids too stupid to know better than to listen to him? Whistler stood his ground, the Baldwin bucking in his hands.
Out of the corner of his eye, Whistler saw something crossing the top of the semi. Lightning.
Her name was Taneisha. But everybody called her Lightning. She was the fastest human they’d ever seen with their own eyes. The crazy woman had scaled the far end of the trailer, and was running across the top toward the still-working machine gun nest at the rear. Her Baldwin was slung across her back, and she held two mismatched pistols in either hand.
Lightning’s first shot hit the ass end of the 50-cal, knocking it off line where it had been poised to ventilate Whistler. Shrieking some kind of insane war cry, Lightning ran right up on the sandbags and emptied her clips.
The Big Bang Page 1