The Big Bang

by Roy M Griffis

  Soldiers poured out of the vehicles and spread out rapidly, weapons ready, scanning the crowd of nearly five hundred weary, dirty government workers. A whip-thin Hispanic officer pulled out a bullhorn. “This convoy is only for Senior Members of the Legislative Branch, Supreme Court, or District Courts,” she barked.

  A low moan of dismay went through the crowd. “When I call your name,” the officer continued, “Come forward. You and your family will be transported to safety.”

  One voice called from the crowd, a Congressman from Kansas. “What about our staff?”

  “One staff member will be allowed to accompany you,” came the answer from the bullhorn.

  Another noise of distress grew like a physical wave passing over the crowd. Most of them were staff. Standing on tiptoes, Karen could see that the bullhorn officer held a three-by-five card in her hand. There couldn’t be many names. Karen began to understand that the soldiers weren’t worried about attack from the people who’d tried to blow up DC.

  The Hispanic officer began reading names. It didn’t take long…there were only fifteen total from the two Houses, plus those from the Courts. Those who were present hurried from the angry crowd to the safety of the military vehicles, usually taking their most senior assistant with them, leaving stunned and weeping members of their office staff behind.

  There was a commotion, and Karen saw that Kevin was pushing his way to the front of the crowd, with Harriet hobbling behind him. He was big and strong, and he was able to shove people aside with relative ease. Harriet aided him by flinging her elbows like ninja stars. Karen felt she had no choice but to fall in with them. The Congresswoman was her boss, the person to whom she’d given her allegiance.

  Nervous soldiers swiveled toward them, guns ready. It made Karen’s skin crawl to think the weapons of her countrymen were trained on them.

  The Hispanic officer lowered the bullhorn. “Name?” she asked.

  “Congresswoman Harriet Porter, from—”

  “You’re not on the list, ma’am,” the officer said with irritation. “Please move aside.”

  “Do you know who I am?” Harriet demanded shrilly, and Karen felt her stomach lurch. It was the same kind of thing her creepy Republican dad had said from time to time, demanding presumed privileges that he imagined were due him based on his position in society. She never thought she’d hear those words from Harriet.

  “No, ma’am,” the officer said, her voice matching Harriet’s in intensity.

  “I’m the representative from the 37th District of California. I demand you take me to join the House of Representatives!”

  “Ma’am,” the officer said with great finality. “We do not have the time or the room to take everyone. You are not important enough.” With that, she dismissed Harriet from her awareness. She turned to the soldiers and said, “We’re done here.”

  Harriet’s face was ashen with rage as she stood there impotent, watching the convoy drive away, soldiers covering the crowd with mounted machine guns, leaving her with the rest. That was the moment; Karen would come to decide, the moment when the officer had told Harriet she wasn’t important enough. That was the moment that Harriet turned traitor.

  The President awoke after only a few hours. He’d slept maybe seven hours in the last three days. When he was younger, he could get by for days on a just a few hours’ sleep, but no more. It was fear that woke him, fear of what else might have happened when he was asleep. He knew it was a waste of time to be afraid, maybe even a sign of a lack of faith, but he was just a man. A man who worried about his wife and his daughters, his parents, his brothers, even as he tried to do his job. He reeled to his feet, wearing wrinkled dress slacks and a tee-shirt. Okay, it wasn’t his job, he thought as a Secret Service agent silently brought him a freshly pressed business suit. It was his duty, one he’d assumed, but his duty as surely as it was his duty (and honor) to care for Laura and the girls.

  “Would you like some coffee, sir?” the agent asked.

  “Sure, Leonard,” the President replied. “And some juice if we have any, thank you.” While the agent stepped out of the small room, the President washed his face and brushed his teeth. His knees ached a little, and he found himself smiling, however briefly, at his own foibles. The world was going crazy, and he was annoyed because he hadn’t been able to work out for two days. Been plenty of heavy lifting the last couple of days, he told himself. That’s exercise enough for anyone.

  “Beg pardon, sir?” Leonard was back with the coffee and tall glass of juice.

  “Just talking to myself, Leonard.”

  The agent was medium height, and not overly broad, but he was as steady as a pillar of marble. His expression was usually as inscrutable as a frog’s. “As long as you don’t start answering yourself, sir.” There might have been the glimmer of a smile on Leonard’s face.

  “I’ll let you know if I do,” the President promised, draining the glass of juice. “Time to go to work, son.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As soon as he entered the situation room, the President could tell that nothing good had transpired while he slept.

  Wild Bill, typically blunt, caught him up as they walked toward the presidential desk. “We’ve had secondary strikes all through the night. They’re going after water, power.”

  “Where?”

  Wild Bill still had that nasty cigar with him. Filthy habit. He took it out of his mouth, gestured with it. “Everywhere. Detroit, Chicago, Tampa—hell, even Dearborn, Michigan.”

  Leonard’s rock-like composure slipped a bit. “What’s in Dearborn that makes it worth blowing up?” At Wild Bill’s inquisitive look, Leonard said, “I went to community college there. It was a nice place.”

  “Well, lately, it’s filled up with immigrants. Immigrants who cheered on Hezbollah. Their anti-American friends blew them up as a way of saying thank you for all the support.” Wild Bill turned back to the President. “Syria tried to invade Israel.”

  The President sat down, his attention fully on his old friend. He’d awakened before the next scheduled meeting with his staff. Even now the Cabinet members were being roused by the Secret Service and would be with him shortly. There would be a full briefing for all of them when everyone was assembled. For now he knew he would get a quick, dirty, and accurate summation from Wild Bill.

  “Iran launched a North Korean nuke at Tel Aviv. The Israelis shot down the nuke.” There was a moment of grim satisfaction in his voice, but it quickly vanished. “Israel has gone into full Masada-mode.”

  “They launched?”

  Wild Bill nodded. “They hit pretty much every asswipe in the area except Jordan and the Palestinians. Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh.”

  The capital of Saudi Arabia. “Even the Saudis?”

  “Sir,” Wild Bill replied dryly. He didn’t need to say more. Members of the Saudi royal family had been funding Islamic terrorists for years, and, in spite of their declarations of being allied with the United States, Saudi Imams and even their official school textbooks had been preaching jihad and death to the infidels and Jews for years. Of course Israel would strike them. “They also erased Mecca and Medina, sir.” The two holiest sites in Islam. Never let it be said the Israelis don’t hold a grudge.

  With Russia and China out of play, that took care of the primary strike packages, the President realized. Our friends in Tel Aviv removed the usual suspects who had been funding Islamic terrorism for years. The other, smaller countries would be safe from immediate direct strikes by the United States, as hitting secondary targets on the way to complete Armageddon had never been part of American policy.

  His advisor went on, explaining the Israelis had left the Palestinians alone initially, preferring to hit their more heavily armed opponents first. Ignored them, that is, until Hezbollah had launched wave after wave of suicide attacks from the Palestinian camps. Wild Bill seemed to have lost his relish in other people’s stupidity. “It was crazy. Not just suicidal, but insane. The Israeli Air Force wiped
out the camps. Israel is surrounded by a ring of fire now.”

  “Jews and Arabs, dying together,” the President mused. So much death in the desert. He offered a silent prayer for the survivors. Leonard appeared with a tray. Breakfast. “I’m not hungry, Leonard,” he growled.

  “Sir…you need to eat.” The Secret Service agent stood there, looking at him like a reproachful nanny.

  “You’re right, Leonard. Sorry. Can you bring a tray for Bill, too?”

  “On its way, sir.”

  He picked up the fork, uncovered the plates. He forced himself to eat, chewing and swallowing as an act of will, saying to his advisor, “Is there any good news?”

  “No, sir. We’re losing control of the cities. People are getting hungry and cold. There’s looting, rioting. Our own homegrown nutcases are taking their chance.”

  “Which ones?” There were so many.

  “The animal rights goons are going to be the biggest problem in the short run. Testing labs across the country are being broken into. Ft. Meade was bombed.”

  He had to search his mind for a moment. Ft. Mead was a secure Army installation, not twenty miles from DC. For bio-weapons defense. The Army was supposed to be there. “Was it breached?”

  Now Wild Bill’s wild energy was diminishing. “Yes, sir. A lot of specimens were aerosolized. We can expect viral outbreaks within a few days.”

  “How far will they spread? Is there anything—”

  “George, we aren’t going to be able to hold the country together.”

  Wild Bill was the most no-bullshit man the President had ever known. He would never piss down your leg and tell you it was raining. If Bill said the country was going to fly apart, time to buckle on your flight helmet and get cleared for an emergency takeoff.

  Still, he was the President, and he wasn’t going to let the country go down without a fight. “There’s nothing we can do, Bill? The army—”

  “Two weeks,” Will Bill said flatly. “Two weeks at the most. It’s one domino toppling over and taking out something else. The cities will go first. We’ve got radiation poisoning in the largest cities, and food is going to run out…most of it is trucked in, Dub. Refined gasoline won’t be available soon, probably no power to run the refineries or staff to work it. Or hell, Dub, even a way to get it where it’s needed. People will die from hunger or accident. Disease from the dead bodies will break out and kill more people. Then there’s just the crazies. For every PETA pissant hitting Ft. Meade, you’re going to have five other fringe losers taking their shot at whoever or whatever in society pissed them off in their pathetic lives, further destroying what’s left. Railroads are getting blown to hell by…somebody. Whether it’s the ones who attacked us, or just jerkweeds with a beef, we may never know. To say nothing of the organized gangs in the urban areas who will probably begin trying to take control of their turf. If they’re smart, they’ll hook up with some of the separatists groups like La Raza to consolidate their efforts. Down south, the damn Border Patrol is spread too thin. We can’t get data from the cameras. A few on-scene reports say a hell of a lot of people are coming across the border.”

  The President was holding himself very still, watching his oldest advisor tell him the war was lost before they even knew they’d been in one. “Anything else?”

  Wild Bill took a deep breath, pulled the stogie from his mouth and threw it in the trashcan by the President’s desk. The cigar hit with a wet, squelching sound. “We can’t contact the Special Ops boys we sent after Laura.”

  “What was their last report?”

  “Roads blocked with cars. Cities choking on their own automotive vomit. Fires burning out of control in the cities they flew over.”

  “But they never found Laura.”

  “No, sir. They were close to Dallas when we got a report of another nuke going off at DFW airport.”

  The President swallowed hard, clenched his hands together. For a moment, he didn’t trust that his voice wouldn’t betray him. “So you don’t know where Laura is.”

  “No, sir.”

  George stared at his hands. The country was going to be lost, and his wife, his dear fine wife, was already lost. He stood up, and took off his jacket, draping it over the office chair. There was only one thing do.

  So help me God, he thought, as solemn and as sacred a vow as he’d ever made in this life, he was going to find his wife, and then he was going to put the country back together.

  Whistler (2)

  After watching the two imbeciles drive away, Whistler looked down at what remained of Anselmo Lopez. Boy, was this morning turning to crap in a hurry. Lightning squatted beside the body, observing it with the detached interest of a professional.

  “He wasn’t shot,” she announced.

  “Figured,” Whistler said. He knelt beside her and began unwrapping the chain. “He’ll turn fast in this heat.”

  “I’ll get a bag.”

  “Thanks,” he grunted. Delicately, trying to get as little blood on himself as possible, he loosened the shackle under what was left of the dead man’s arms. What the hell, he thought. I’m older; I probably had better health insurance than anybody for a hundred miles around. My immunizations were up to date.

  He’d rather not do this, but his other choices held less appeal. Leave a perfectly good length of steel chain with the body when it was returned to his family, or have Lightning free the chain. That would expose her to the dirt-caked blood and fluids. This way, only one of them risked infection. It was another gift from our Islamic guests. With the breakdown in interstate commerce and transport, along with the fracturing of the manufacturing infrastructure, diseases long forgotten had made staggeringly virulent comebacks. Antibiotics, even those in crumbling foil packages long past their expiration date, were worth more, literally, than their weight in gold. The only things more valuable than the antibiotics were working batteries and bullets.

  As he expected, Lightning was back just about the time he’d finished rolling the chain over and over in the dirt. He’d bleach it later, but for now he wanted to keep the moist blood from drawing flies.

  She had a standard-issue FEMA body bag. Plenty of those lying around. FEMA had smuggled them out from regional centers about a year after the Big Bang when the Red Flu had swept through the US, probably brought in by a troop of janissaries from Malaysia. Those FEMA boys and girls had impressed Whistler. Bureaucrats for a government that no longer existed, most of them stayed at their posts until they’d been felled by the diseases they were trying to fight or until they’d been rooted out and killed by the Caliban and its brethren. The Imams didn’t want the original citizens to be buried, they wanted the people to see Allah’s wrath visited upon the people of the Great Satan. Naturally, thousands and thousands of unburied bodies had created additional plagues and fouled water supplies, and the only good thing about the poor dead bastards bloating in the sun was that they took a few million of the Prophet’s children with them before the Imams realized sanitation wasn’t their strong suit, and began incinerating the dead cities wholesale.

  He held his hands away from his body, and away from Lightning. “Open it up.” She unzipped the bag, shook it out beside poor Anselmo with the flap opened, and reached for the body. “Nope,” he told her sharply. He grabbed the dead man by the one leg and under one arm, and tossed the body into the bag.

  He rubbed his hands with clay from the side of the road, turned his head and clapped his hands over and over until the dried mud flew from his skin. Then he carefully zipped up the bag. There. He’d done everything he could to keep Anselmo, or his parts, inside the bag. He stood, took the two loops on the side closest to him in either hand.

  “Well?” he asked her.

  With a crooked grin, Lightning said, “You were doing everything else, I thought you were gonna carry him up to the ranch.” She grabbed her two loops and straightened up.

  In the end, they stored the body bag in the crawl space under an old tool shed. By the time they wer
e finished, Whistler was reeling with fatigue. Lightning marched him over to the trough, took the metal bucket and poured water over his hands. She made him scrub with a huge irregular lump of lye soap. When that had been completed to her satisfaction, she told him, “Strip down.”

  Just one more thing that had changed. You’ve seen people cut in half by machine gun fire, you’ve burned bodies, you scoop up some poor dead Mexican and tuck him into a baggie…being nude in front of someone else wasn’t that much of a big deal. At least his internal organs were on the inside, where they were supposed to be, and not hanging out of him. He stripped off his dust-caked clothes and kicked them aside. He’d been wearing them for days; it was time to change, anyway.

  He stood there naked, hands and face brown from the sun, the rest of him blindingly white. Except for the scars. Chips of masonry, slashes from swords or knives, ricocheting bullets: all had left little twisted, discolored puckers of skin to mark their passing. Lightning brought another bucket, and poured it over his back. The water from the trough was lukewarm, but still felt chilly against his skin. He scrubbed himself with the lye soap, and she poured another careful bucket over him to rinse. Whistler couldn’t say for sure what he missed most from Before (the answer varied depending on his mood), but one of the top five would be long, hot showers.

  He took a handful of feeble suds in one hand, ran it over his head. He kept his hair cut short, since it was easier to clean, and wouldn’t cover his eyes in a crucial moment. A last splash from the bucket, and he was done.

  Whistler shook the water from his eyes. “Your turn,” he said.

  “Later,” she told him. “You need to get some sleep. You’re dead on your feet.”

  She handed him a scrap of blanket to dry off with, gathered up his clothes with a stick and walked away. She’d make sure the laundry detail washed those real well. Lye was hell on your skin, but great for killing any number of germs and biologicals. At first, the lye-washed clothes had chaffed miserably, but everyone’s skin toughened up. Everyone’s everything toughened up, or they died.