The Big Bang

by Roy M Griffis

  It would be hard to say if it was worse when Jake and Hank were there, or more unbearable when she was alone. In the evenings, they’d have a little something to eat. She didn’t inquire about the origins of the meals too deeply. Jake was a garbage man, and maybe he got creative. They ate a lot of soup, a lot of rice. They ate so much rice Molly worried about beriberi, but only in passing.

  When Jake and Hank were there, for moments at a time Molly could feel normal. In the small kitchen the three of them crowded around a wooden table only recently scarred by Hank’s cigarettes, eating their soup and rice, and the boys might suddenly start talking about sports, of all things. A familiar, almost choreographed routine had Jake singing the praises of soccer (or “football,” as he insisted on calling it), while Hank made disparaging remarks about the masculinity of favored players around the food in his mouth. It was a comfortable teasing, and Molly could sit there over the last of her soup, warmed by their talk and the body heat of two men who’d worked hard all day, and briefly forget where she was and why she was here.

  Too many times, however, they ate in uncomfortable, awkward silence. The different silences would take on their own character, each of which she was able to identify over time. There was the heavy silence from Jake, accompanied by bolting his food and hurrying from the table. That usually meant he’d been on body detail that day. The Imams had no concern for dhimmi burial. When the dead had no relatives or anyone who cared, they’d be left like garbage or tossed into the bay. If Jake had to pick up children’s bodies, he wouldn’t even come to the kitchen, but would sit in the dark in his mother’s room, perched on the edge of her bed holding her Bible. At those times Hank would sip his soup, lean back in his chair, light up a foul-smelling hand-rolled cigarette and say, “So, Molly. Tell me how you really feel about the Caliban.”

  There were other silences. The brittle one that came after she’d ranted about the Imams and the Prophet’s Chosen. The embarrassed one that arrived when there was nothing to eat.

  But she discovered she didn’t mind. She’d spent most of her adult life talking, in one fashion or another. And look at all the good it had done her, or Ginnie. Not a single thing she’d ever said had saved her sister. So the silences, she actually welcomed them. There seemed to be some secret in the silence, but one she would not be able to hear while others were present. In the morning, six days a week, she couldn’t wait for the two men to go to work. She longed for the blissful silence, the way she could go an entire day without speaking to someone, and the way it gave her time to think and remember.

  Especially remember.

  She’d always had a good memory. She’d read up on it, the different kinds of thinking and ways of perceiving the world. She was an auditory thinker, it seemed. She heard words in her head. It hadn’t been that large a step to go from hearing something in her mind to becoming her own secretary. Her writing had essentially been simply a matter of taking dictation from the voice she heard in her head.

  For those first months, she re-lived Ginnie. Re-experienced her sister’s decency, her good heart. Ginnie lacked Molly’s sharp tongue, among other things. There had been a kindness to her. Occasionally, she’d get exasperated with her older sister’s insistence on pointing out that not only did the emperor have no clothes, but he wasn’t packing much to be proud of, either. “Why do you have to keep talking about how they’ve messed up?” she said, irritated.

  “Why don’t you see it, too?” Molly had replied, a little stung by Ginnie’s question.

  At that, Ginnie had laughed. “You see what you look for, Molls.” She smiled. “I’d rather look for the good people are doing. People live up to your expectations.”

  In the silence and dimness of those empty rooms, recalling her dead sister’s words, Molly shook her head, feeling anew the loss of someone as kind and fundamentally decent as her little sister, and slowly coming to realize the depth of the other losses she, and the country, had experienced.

  Winter came to San Francisco. Colder than usual, more foggy, more rain; no doubt a legacy from the nuclear winter of the first year of the war. They were sitting around the table with their bowls of soup. Molly fished something that looked way too much like a rodent foot from her soup, set it under her bowl, and looked around. Jake didn’t seem as big to her. Kid hadn’t been eating enough to keep growing, even though he was still a big boy. Hank, he hadn’t changed, just seemed more compact somehow. Whatever weight he’d lost had been superfluous, and what was left was just the elemental man. She’d dropped some pounds, too, but she could afford to lose ’em. The skin was loose around her stomach now.

  “How did it come to this?” she asked aloud.

  Jake, who wasn’t a mind reader and couldn’t know what the hell she was really talking about, said, “Well, I got the greens from this guy who has a fishing boat…”

  “No,” she snapped, more sharply than she meant. “How the hell did America end up like this?”

  Hank leaned back and pulled out a cigarette. After he lit it, his eyes were bright above the ember. “Al Qaeda snuck in some nukes, shoved them up our backsides and lit the fuse, Molly.”

  “No, what really happened? How was it possible for them to do it?” Her voice was getting loud. “How could we have LET THIS HAPPEN??”

  Hank was smiling, but the eyes focused on her were hard. “You want to know?”

  “Of course I do! But how are we going to find out? Caliban burned the books, bulldozed the libraries, and salted the ground.”

  He took another infuriating drag on that vile cigarette. “Still a lot of information on the Internet.”

  “Internet, my Texas ass. That’s blown to hell, along with everything else.”

  That smile again. “Not if you know the right people.” The smile was gone as he looked at Jake. “Dangerous, though. The Prophet’s Chosen will take you apart with a cheese grater if they catch you.”

  Jake nodded deliberately. “They’ll do that if they catch you with the Bible, anyway.”

  “What do I have to do?” Molly interrupted impatiently. That’s when she headed down the path to crazy. Just asking that question: “What do I have to do?” She’d never be able to pinpoint when she started running headlong down that path.

  “The dishes,” Hank said, standing up. He took a jacket from the hallway, turned off the light, and slipped out the door.

  So, she did the dishes with Jake. There weren’t that many, given the skimpy soup and rice that was their mainstay, but what with heating the water on the stove for the washing, and then hand drying everything, it took nearly an hour. Not that they had anywhere to go. Lights would go out about 8 pm or thereabouts when electrical power was shut down. Handcrafters had flourished under the Caliban. Candles were a growth industry. One of the things Molly did during her solitary days at home was gather up wax drippings and store them for later use. Nor was there anything on television except hagiographies of bin Laden and, oh boy, English-subtitled reruns of a miniseries from Egypt, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Zip for movies or theaters. No wonder the public floggings and executions got such a great turnout from the colonizers. They didn’t have a damn thing to do for entertainment otherwise, if they were obeying the injunctions of the Prophet against alcohol and premarital sex.

  She made an effort to talk to Jake like a normal person as they washed the dishes. She was afraid if she didn’t talk, she’d start screaming. “You have a girlfriend, son?”

  “No,” he replied, not looking at her.

  Okay, she thought. “You have a boyfriend?”

  “No,” he said, more forcefully.

  They stood side by side, silently, their hands immersed in the cooling water. Understanding blossomed for Molly. She said quietly, “You had a girlfriend.”

  Jake shook his head, and then changed his mind. He nodded slowly. “She was working in DC when it happened. The attack, you know.”

  Molly took a pot from him, rinsed it in the graying water, and dried it of
f. Oh, Lord, DC. She’d heard stories. Not as bad, at first, as Los Angeles, but it got bad fast. “Did she make it out?”

  “We don’t know.” He scrubbed hard on an already clean bowl. “She…she might still be alive.”

  “I’m sorry,” Molly told him softly. This poor kid. Loses his girl, then he loses his Mom. All he has is two crazy coots (Hank being Coot #1 and Molly being Coot #2) squatting in his dead mother’s house. That flat part of her, the one born at Ginnie’s purification, that part she heard from more and more often these days suggested, He’s no different than a hundred million other kids in the US. Hard to find anybody who hasn’t lost someone. Yeah, she argued back, but he’s the boy standing next to me. He’s my anybody who lost somebody.

  Molly dried her hands, reached up and put an arm around his shoulder. “That’s tough, Jake. That’s real tough.” It wasn’t poetry, but hell, it was the best she could do. There was a reason she was unmarried with no kids to grieve for, herself. She wrapped both her arms around him, and he leaned against her. Standing, she rocked him, felt his tears on her shoulder.

  The dishwater was cold and the kitchen was freezing by the time he straightened up. The gangly kid wiped his eyes, dragged his sleeve across his nose. “I keep telling myself that I won’t cry anymore,” he said, ashamed.

  “You stop feeling, you might as well stop living,” Molly told him. She was reminding herself, as well. Jake didn’t appear to believe her. To change the subject, she asked, “Where’d that leprechaun get off to, anyways?”

  That brought a smile to Jake. “Hank? Dunno.” It was full-on dark outside. “We better get to bed.”

  Molly agreed. It was best to be in bed, with your book and candle lit, before the power switched off. That let you warm up the sheets before the real chill of the night settled into the house. And, Lord have mercy, each sleeping room had its own chamber pot. Dark ages, indeed.

  Her dreams that night were troubled. She was between bookcases. They were huge, a canyon of wood shelves and bound volumes that were just out of her reach. No matter how high she jumped, she couldn’t get to the books. Her fingers would brush the bottom of the aged leather. In her dreams, she jumped all night long.

  Molly woke with a headache. After pulling on socks, slippers, jeans, and two sweaters, she navigated out to the kitchen. She found Hank kneeling in the small utility room just off the kitchen, his tool bag beside him, working on something behind the water heater. He’d already made the coffee-ish stuff they drank, so she poured herself a cup and sat down at the table.

  “Problem with the water?” she asked.

  “Nope,” came the reply, muffled by the big tank of the occasionally useful water heater. “When’s your birthday, Molly?”

  She had to think for a minute. “June,” she finally realized.

  “Ah, that’s too far away.” He waved her over. “Consider this your Valentine’s present.”

  “I’m touched,” she said from where she sat, unwilling to leave her coffee.

  “You want to see this,” he insisted.

  With an unladylike grunt, she climbed to her feet and shuffled closer to him.

  “Take a look.” It was close in the utility closet. The damn thing was just big enough to hold the water heater, some pipes and a few miscellaneous wires and whatnot. The house had not been built with an eye for detail, and there was a lot of unfinished carpentry work in the closet. She leaned over Hank. He pointed to the far wall, which had been framed but not drywalled.

  “Uh-huh?” Her head was killing her. It was Sunday, she didn’t have a job (she didn’t have anything when you came right down to it), what in Heaven’s name was she doing up? She should just take her coffee and crawl back into bed.

  “It’s a fake wall, Miss Molly,” Hank said with a grin. “Built it for you.”

  “How sweet.” Jesus, they were all going nuts in this place.

  Then he did something interesting. He pushed up on a cross brace, twisted on two side pieces, then pulled the entire middle section of the wall away. Behind it, in the darkness, a few green lights glowed. “What the hell?” she asked.

  Hank set down the section of fake wall, reached inside the space, and pulled out a laptop. A NIC cable and power supply trailed from it. “Today’s Internet,” he announced, placing the computer in her hands. “Course now we call it the SamziNet.”

  “Like Samizdat?” Those bootleg copies of forbidden books in Communist Russia and its serf satellites.

  “I guess.”

  She plopped down on the floor beside him, legs crossed Indian style. She opened the laptop case with what could only be called reverence and pressed the power button. “User name is Mollykins,” Hank offered helpfully. “No password.”

  While waiting for the machine to boot up, she asked, “How?”

  “Some bright boys have figured out how to get Internet traffic passed over power lines. If you know what you’re doing…you can connect.” He scooted over beside her, and lit up a cigarette. “Thing is…that’s a death sentence sitting on your lap. The ’ban won’t purify you, or us. They’ll take us right to Treasure Island and see how much they can get you to tell them, between the screams.”

  She glanced up at the mysterious collection of equipment in the hidden space, the green lights flickering, the wires. Of course the Caliban would try to destroy this. Knowledge was power. Keeping their people ignorant, controlling the flow of information had worked for hundreds of years in a variety of totalitarian regimes, and it was one lesson of history the Imams and Emirs were happy to heed. Hell, the only reason there was electricity in the Caliphate was for communications, so they could keep control of their empire in the West. They’d be happy with the population using horse and buggy.

  “All the usual stuff works,” Hank went on. “Instant messaging, search engines. Web-based mail. Try America.net for your mail. Probably not a good idea to use your real name on anything or give out too much personal information, of course.”

  Looking down at the laptop screen, with all the old familiar icons sitting there, ready to be accessed, Molly felt tears pricking her eyes. They burned. “Why did you do this?” she asked.

  His voice, close to her ear, was gentle, but had a great weight of finality to it. “I told you we could find a use for a crazy girl like you.”

  She hoped it would all be there. It wasn’t “all” there (a lot of servers on the West Coast and in major cities had been smoked by EMP in those first hours), but enough of it was there to keep her at the laptop almost constantly. The Library of Congress was online, somehow, along with mirror sites that had replicated content from Before the Big Bang. There was garbage, too. One site seemed amusing at first, declaring that the Big Bang had actually been part of an alien invasion plot. But one thought of Ginnie and the end she met at Candlestick Park was enough to wipe the smile from Molly’s face and send her back to her serious quest.

  There were changes, too. Hardly any pop-up ads. And nothing looked as slick. A lot of these pages were fairly simple text, some with photos. And the content had changed. There were message boards, looking for missing people—so many boards, they had to be divided by region. There were update pages, oral history types, recording people’s memories of the attacks.

  Then she found VVF. Virtual Valley Forge, claiming to be reports from the real American Government, even with some pictures of a haggard George Bush. It was a site that was up and down, gone for days, and then back up. She suspected the invaders on both coasts were trying to find those boys and girls who put VVF online.

  She read it avidly. It had a feeling of hard, honest authenticity other sites lacked (for one thing, it didn’t look like it had been put together by a drunken dyslexic thumbing out a story on a Blackberry). From VVF, she learned that the West Coast from California to the middle of Washington State was run by the Caliban, while the East Coast was known generally as the American Emirates. News from Canada was scarcer, but she got the feeling the Canucks were fighting their own Islamic i
nvasion as well. In America, the two factions of invaders hadn’t yet gotten around to trying to overthrow each other, but it was expected to happen sooner or later, fratricide being endemic to warring sects in Islam.

  What most struck Molly was the realization that the center of the country was as yet unconquered territory. With the country stunned by the attacks, it was possible to get some Al Qaeda troops and Islamic immigrants in by sea (where the early saboteurs or the later resistance hadn’t bottlenecked ports with wreckage), while most of the land migration flowed through Mexico up into California, spreading like an alluvial fan across the Southwest. Texans (bless their hearts) were one of the toughest foes of the border-crossing hordes, which limited the invaders’ ability to penetrate deeper into the heartland of the nation. That limitation had consequences: a lot of food was still being imported into the new colonies, so the populations weren’t as fat and happy as they’d been promised by Al Qaeda propaganda. It also meant the dhimmi in those areas suffered most from want, while famines and starvation were said to be less common in the middle of the country.

  As cheering as the knowledge of a resistance was, dissatisfaction still weighed on her. She still wanted to know how they had allowed it to happen. How could these fanatics who wanted to turn the world back to the year 600 infiltrate her country and turn it into a vassal colony?

  Thus passed a year, seeking answers.

  In moments of pure rationality, when she wasn’t feverishly typing notes into a document (Word 2000—whoever had previously owned the laptop had never gotten around to getting Word 2007) or surfing Samzinet using FreedomSeek, she’d wonder why Jake let her and Hank stay there, and what the two men wanted from her. Sometimes at night, she wondered if one of them might come into the bedroom expecting some payback for the food and shelter they’d offered her, but neither did. She wasn’t vain enough to think that she had the radiant older-woman beauty that might have fueled a young man’s fantasies, but Hank was closer in age to her own. He never pestered her, or leered or made “joking” suggestions. In time she decided that hate was a stronger force in the man’s heart than idle lust. Just as hate for the Caliban and their fawning lackeys was the strongest feeling in her soul, possibly the only thing she would ever be able to feel again.