The two dead Yemenis hadn’t even quit jerking from the impact of the bullets before Lightning leaped in amid the blood and offal and bits of burning uniform, slammed back the charging bolt on the 50-cal, and swung it over to center on the Humvee.
After Lightning’s bullets had turned the Humvee’s cab and its occupants into bloody sieves, the Yemeni recruits quit firing. One took off his head scarf thing, waved it in the universal signal. They’d all heard the Imams preaching the usual nonsense about the American butchers, but at least one of the now-dead sergeants must’ve clued them in on the odds. The Americans would fight them to the last man, if they were forced. If you didn’t force them, you might get out of the fight alive. The first time.
With Lightning covering him from atop the trailer, he eased out toward the Humvee. The air stank of cordite, blood, vomit, and smoke, while someone writhed and moaned beside the Hummer. Whistler spoke Arabic like an autistic three-year-old, but the meaning of his garbled words was clear. “Throw down your weapons; come out with your hands up.”
A few rifles skittered out into the street. Then the rest of them came, spinning in the road. The first Yemeni recruit stepped out fearfully, ignoring Whistler. He had eyes only for Lightning as she leaned into the 50-cal. Whistler called to him. “Hey!”
The Yemeni kid looked at him. Whistler motioned with the Baldwin. The Yemeni kid dropped to his knees, hands behind his head. The rest slowly shuffled out.
Whistler heard footsteps behind him, boots powdering glass on the sidewalk. Gordon and a bunch of white-faced, shaky kids.
Kids. Kids shooting at kids. What a mess. Whistler spared a glance at Gordon. He’d talk to him later, privately, about what a complete circle jerk Gordon had made of the ambush.
But, for Gordon, it was showtime. He might have been trying for Clint Eastwood (God rest his soul). Gordon leveled his Baldwin at the kneeling prisoners. “We don’t have time. They might’ve got off a distress call.” His volume went up just a little for the benefit of the kids he had almost gotten killed. “We’re only sixty miles from Needles. Better grease ’em now.”
Whistler turned his head slowly toward him, keeping his own weapon pointed at the Yemenis. This stupid insurance salesman was going to buck his authority? Here, in front of Whistler’s kids?
A harsh sound made everyone turn their heads, including the terrified Yemeni prisoners. Lightning had racked back the charging bolt on the 50-cal, and when that barrel creaked around to center on Gordon, Whistler knew it looked as big as a cannon.
Her voice carried clear across the street, ringing in the strange silence that came after a firefight. “Lonesome George said we don’t kill first-timers. That’s the Law, Corporal.”
Knowing that Lightning had his back, Whistler stepped across to Gordon. His voice was low, like a knife coming in under your eyeline. “We don’t kill unarmed prisoners.” Without thinking, Whistler’s hand reached out, brushed across the barrel of Gordon’s weapon. The barrel was cool. His fingers curled hard around the long metal cylinder, which kept him from throttling the owner. “You don’t have the stones to shoot at them when they can shoot back, don’t try to make up for it now.”
Whistler addressed the recruits behind Gordon. “Notch ’em. Take their boots, and send ’em out to Needles.” A chorus of “yes, sirs” broke out.
A stick-skinny recruit, Paley, spoke up. “What about the wounded guy?” He meant the dark figure by the rear of the Humvee that kept moaning through clenched teeth.
“I’ll check him,” Whistler said. “Now hurry up. Paley, you notch.”
Whistler watched them for a second, to make sure they were going to do it right. There were maybe twelve Yemenis kneeling in the street. Three of the Americans leveled Baldwins at them. Paley pulled a huge Bowie knife from behind his back. Whistler sighed. He was gonna have to take over training these kids. Big-ass Bowie knife. Showy, bright shiny metal, but only good for slicing roast beef. More of Gordon’s influence. Whistler had a good old-fashioned K-Bar Marine Survival knife, himself.
Paley positioned himself behind the first Yemeni recruit, a dark-complexioned kid almost his age whose eyes bulged with fear.
Exasperated, Whistler barked at Paley, “Stand to the side! You want to get shot by our guys if your boy there makes a break? And give ’em the speech first. The poor bastard thinks you’re going to cut his throat.”
Sheepishly, Paley took a step that brought him out to the right of the first prisoner. In memorized, phonetic Arabic, Paley announced, “You have one chance to leave America. We are going to mark you. Americans everywhere know this sign. If they find you fighting us again, you will receive no mercy.”
Then Paley turned back to the Yemeni. He took the young man’s right ear delicately between his fingers, made a quick horizontal slice from the middle of the ear almost to the scalp. The Yemeni recruit took it stoically, muscles in jaw jumping when the blade cut through his ear, but refusing to cry out. Whistler nodded approvingly at both the kids. The Bowie was sharp at least, and Paley worked like a surgeon, no unnecessary sawing. Whistler had seen guys who might as well have used rusty spoons with all the hacking they did at the prisoners’ ears.
The Yemeni was now “notched.” Lonesome George didn’t want Americans to descend to the level of the invaders, but neither could the Americans run a catch-and-release program. Any notched soldier captured in battle was executed summarily. You only got one Get Out of Jail Free card these days.
A faint moan interrupted his thoughts. Whistler turned toward it. One last dirty job to do. It was a hell of a thing. He was right, fighting to free his country…but he never felt good, even when he knew he was doing the right thing.
Baldwin ready, Whistler approached the wounded man. He was older, which meant he was all of thirty-five or so. Unlike most of the Yemeni recruits, he was clean shaven. That was a sign. These boys had been out a while. If they’d been closer to the ruling Imams, the Prophet’s Chosen would have been enforcing Hadith, or proper living.
The clean-shaven man lay on his back, head propped against one flat tire of the Humvee. His teeth were gritted, his hands clutching down low on his abdomen.
Behind him, Whistler could hear some hurried words from the kneeling Yemeni recruit.
The wounded man suddenly spoke. “They’re saying she’s a djinn.” His voice was accented, not typical invader, an odd mix of the foreign and the familiar, yet his English was clear.
Whistler scanned the area around the man, making sure there were no weapons in easy reach, then squatted beside him.
“A gin. Like a genie?”
The wounded man nodded. Then grimaced and swore. “Hurts bad.”
“Won’t get any better.”
The wounded man nodded. “Shoulda stayed in Boston.”
Well, that explained the accent. Whistler had a canteen. He unscrewed the cap, poured a little water in the cap, and lifted it to the man’s lips. “You were in Boston?”
The man gratefully let the water dribble into his mouth. “Yeah, a baker. I didn’t learn English back home.”
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“My dad got sick. Had fifteen or twenty brothers and sisters to take care of. Republican Guard drafted me as soon as I got home.”
Whistler pointed to the ragged scar running across the man’s ear, where the notch had been roughly stitched up. “No, what the hell are you doing here?” He gave the man some more water. You shouldn’t let wounded men drink, he knew, but it wouldn’t matter. “Why didn’t you go back?”
The Baker shook his head. “Don’t you know what they do if you try to leave?”
Now Whistler shook his head. “Nah.”
The Baker looked disgusted. “If you desert, or if you go back home, the Republican Guard takes a bunch of recruits to your house. Force them to rape your mother, your wife, your sister…any woman in the place. Because of the stain you put on the honor of the Prophet and Allah. Then they kill them. Then they kill you.”
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What do you say to that? Whistler was silent.
“Yeah, it’s a bitch,” the Baker went on. “It’s a bitch. I liked America. Good pizza in Boston.”
Whistler said quietly, “I wouldn’t know.”
The fallen man looked up at him without fear. “Do me one favor, if you can. Don’t leave me here…I’ll get buried with these fanatics.”
Unholstering his pistol, Whistler said, “I’ll do what I can, buddy.”
The Baker closed his eyes. “Thanks.” He didn’t flinch when Whistler put the barrel of the Glock against his temple. He felt Whistler’s hesitation. “Don’t worry about it,” he told Whistler.
Whistler pulled the trigger. With the muffled boom of the pistol still ringing in his ears, Whistler didn’t feel much like talking. He watched silently as Gordon and the boys collected the newly notched Yemenis’ boots and put them in a pile on the sidewalk. After Whistler and his boys disappeared, locals would scavenge through the pile. Good boots were hard to come by. Whistler’s boys left the invaders their socks, if they had any. Gordon thought Whistler was a softy for that, but Whistler was damned if he’d make some scared teen-aged kid walk thirty miles across busted asphalt in his bare feet.
Most of the Yemenis had wadded up their head scarves and were holding them to their ears. Dark blood on the right shoulder of each man marked their uniforms like a dubious badge of honor. But at least they were alive. Gordon’s boys used their Baldwins to gesture the Yemeni kids to their feet. Paley had blood on his hands, his flannel shirt. The sight of that nudged Whistler back into action.
“Paley, get over here.” To Gordon, he said, “Get ’em down the road to Needles.”
Gordon stood in front of the Yemeni and pointed down the empty road out into the desert. “Needles,” he said with great emphasis. The Yemenis hesitated. They had no sergeants to guide them now, nobody to take the lead.
Whistler went to the first kid they’d notched, took him by the shoulders and turned him to face down the road. “Needles,” he said, and pointed. “It’s okay.” He gave the kid a little shove. The notched kid looked back at Whistler for confirmation. Whistler nodded. The kid took a tentative step, then another. He called back to his fellow soldiers. The other Yemeni soldiers shuffled after him in twos and threes. They might make it back to Needles. All depended on how many citizens of this town had lost relatives because of the invaders. A baseball bat could do grievous harm to an unarmed man.
Paley stood beside Whistler, the Baldwin hanging loosely from his arm. “Give me a hand,” Whistler said. Paley followed him around to the back of the Humvee to stand beside the body of the Baker. “Take off that shirt,” Whistler ordered. After a second, Paley peeled off the blood-soaked flannel. Whistler took it from him and tossed it over what was left of the Baker’s face. He looked at Paley appraisingly. “Give me the thermal top, too.”
“It’s cold out here,” Paley protested. “Besides, you got his face covered.”
Whistler felt the first warning sparks of anger. He was tired, jagged from the adrenaline rush, and he knew in a second his anger would flare like a lit match tossed into gasoline. Christ, what had Gordon taught these kids? “You’ve got blood all over you,” he said with forced calm. “Those soldiers come in with all kinds of exotic diseases and desert parasites. You want to catch any of that?”
That got Paley’s attention. He skinned off the thermal top and stood there topless and shivering in the night air. Whistler dropped the bloody top on the Baker’s body. “Let’s drag him over here.”
Whistler grabbed the Baker’s wrists without a thought. It was another gift from the Caliban. Whistler wasn’t sure if he’d ever seen, with his own eyes, a real dead person before the Big Bang. He’d seen thousands on television portrayed by actors. But they never captured the true, inhuman stillness of death. It struck him one day, walking amid the victims of some Caliban massacre. Dead people don’t look real. Something was missing. Sometimes he thought maybe his subconscious was always aware of the clues of physical life; the small shifting, slow breathing, even the tiny pulses in the throat or wrist. Other times, it just seemed to him that something essential was gone, and it wasn’t just breathing or the circulation of blood. Anymore, he didn’t think about it. With two-thirds of the world’s population dead, one more stranger’s lifeless body didn’t make much of a difference to the other strangers who might come across it. Nowadays, wounds or splattered guts didn’t bother him. He was okay with the dead until they started to smell.
Together, Whistler and Paley half carried and half dragged the Baker toward an alley. Lightning appeared from somewhere, checking her watch. “About out of time, Whis.”
“Yeah.” Whistler crossed back to the Humvee, pried loose a jerry can of gas. It had been punctured by Baldwin rounds in several places, but some gas still sloshed inside. “Anything in the trailer?”
She shook her head. “Tourist junk. Slot machines, statues of naked women. Lots of colored neon in packing crates.”
Well, this had been a tremendously valuable use of his time. Whistler crossed back to the alley, emptied the jerry can over the Baker’s body.
Lightning clucked her tongue. “You know what they’re gonna say, Whis.”
The Caliban media would take pictures of this poor bastard on the ground, run more feverish stories about the American butchers. It would be used for all kinds of things: recruiting posters, justification for more troops. In any number of the Arab empires, simple ignorant citizens would work themselves up into a fury, firing guns into the air, burning American flags, and screaming “Death to America” under the watchful eye of Republican Guards. Protesting was fine back there, as long as the citizens didn’t comment on their reduced food, endemic corruption, lack of civil rights, or the dictatorship. Bitching about America, even a defeated America, was an approved outlet, like a street fair.
Whistler tossed a match on the Baker’s body. The flames flared up, the way his anger threatened to do just a second ago. “I know. What’s one lie, more or less?”
He turned to Paley. “Let’s get you cleaned up, son.”
Whistler was quiet on the drive back to camp. It was an old stocking station, back when this area had been a thousand miles of ranch. The cattle were scattered or dead, barbed wire fences sprung from drifting snow or just torn down by Caliban troops. They loved their goat or sheep, but they’d eat beef in a pinch.
It would be dawn soon, Whistler mused as the pickup bounced over the trail. Normally, as acting lieutenant, he’d ride up in the cab, composing an after-action report for the staff at Valley Forge. But Whistler was beat, tired to the bone, so he rode in the open truck bed with Paley and the other boys (including Lightning, who was definitely no boy, but they were all his “boys”) and their bikes. The slam of the truck, the crashing of the bikes, and the rush of the wind tended to discourage conversation…just what Whistler wanted.
He couldn’t believe how tired he was. Maybe he’d caught a Dose. There might have been some drifting in from Los Angeles, a little airborne gift of dirty isotopes courtesy of the Martyrs of California. He’d heard that radiation sickness would drain the life out of you. Good hygiene, proper nutrition, and bed rest would allow your body to resist. Without it, you got weaker and weaker.
Whistler gave a surreptitious tug on his teeth. They weren’t loose. Well, maybe that one way back in his jaw, but it was probably scurvy.
The truck slowed and turned down a road intentionally untended and rough as a field full of gopher holes and rocks. Whistler could tell they were almost home. When the truck stopped, Whistler climbed to his feet. The sky to the east was just beginning to show small touches of pink.
“All right, boys, get it cleaned up and get to bed. Paley, you’ve got first watch.”
Paley whined, “Cap, I have to check the still.” The kid actually whined. Whistler figured they were all tired, but at least Paley kept focused on what was important. The still that generated their ethanol needed to be tended.
Eth and bio-diesel worked pretty well together.
“Yeah,” he grunted. “I forgot. Okay, I’ll take first watch.” He raised his voice over the clatter of bikes being pulled from the bed of the truck. “You’ve got half an hour to stow your gear and clean your weapons. Then I want everybody in the rack and undercover.” The Caliban troops had a hell of a time tracking little bands like Whistler’s group at night, but they did a fair job of looking during the day. Whistler figured they didn’t have the technicians to keep the gear working. You could find tech dweebs in any culture, but if they were constantly beaten down by the Prophet’s Chosen, the dweebs might not want to stick around to keep the equipment running, or stick their necks out when they might get their heads cut off for a mistake.
Gordon, again: “What if we ain’t sleepy, Whis?”
“Then you lie in the rack and count dead Iranians until you do go to sleep!” Whistler hefted his bike to one shoulder and turned away.
Bikes. The horses of the new century, or, they would be until the rubber ran out. Already, Whistler had heard some enterprising souls were trying to put wood on the wheels. Wood they could grow. Rubber, that was another story.
He hiked up the path to the office. As the nominal commander, he had his own space and didn’t have to live and sleep in the bunkhouse with the others. The quiet, the space, was a blessing, although the tiny room could get fiercely cold in the winter. With the front wheel of his mountain bike, Whistler eased open the door to the office. Even if he had a key, he wouldn’t have bothered to lock the door. If the Caliban had brought one good thing to America (and it was a big “if,” Whistler had to admit), it was a new appreciation for law and order. Most people were armed, and banditry was seen as a fast-track career to being elevated on a rope. If somebody just had to steal, they quickly realized that it was better to hit the collaborators and raise the languid response of the Caliban or its mercs than face the certain wrath of the citizens and the Resistance.
The Big Bang Page 2