The Big Bang

by Roy M Griffis

  “Are they in Heaven?”

  “No, Becka. Not bad men.”

  “Is Grandpa?”

  “Yes. Grandpa is in heaven.” He looked down at her. “Your Grandpa asked us to take care of you,” he found himself saying. He hadn’t planned on saying that, and didn’t know what he’d do with this little girl. They were three lost men, trying, hoping to get to civilization. If any civilization worthy of the name still existed. But right now didn’t seem like a time for telling the kid every hard truth that came to his mind.

  “Okay,” Becka replied, relaxing against him a little. Baldwin looked up at the tree. The leaves were full and green, moving softly in the breeze. Must be a well nearby, he thought idly, the tree was pretty lush for this time of year. He kept the swing rocking, flexing his legs just enough to keep it moving. The delay in getting to L.A. was eating at him, he realized. If he’d left yesterday, he’d be with Addie. But he’d wanted to get the ranch ready for her. An image of his daughter, scared, frightened, alone, flashed through his mind with enough force to make him feel physically sick. He forced the phantom away, remembering what Hanner had said earlier this week. “Fix what you can, plan for the rest.”

  If vehicles were out…then he’d walk to L.A. No, wait, maybe he wouldn’t have to walk. They’d come across some horses, somewhere. Walking he could make twenty miles a day. Horseback, fifty maybe. He’d buy one, trade for one, work, whatever it took.

  “Whatever?” he asked himself in a soft voice. He wouldn’t steal them. He wouldn’t use force to get them. Then he’d be no better than the two dead men they’d left in the bushes miles away. He’d get to his girl, but he’d do it in a way that would make her proud of her daddy. He would never do anything to make his daughter ashamed.

  Imagining Addie’s smile of delight when she saw him, Baldwin drifted off to sleep.

  He was awakened by Queenie’s soft yip. His mouth was dry, and his side cramped from holding Becka. Hanner was approaching from the front of the house, a rag in his hands. Queenie climbed to her feet from her position next to the swing, and trotted over to greet her master.

  Alec sat up in the swing, Becka snoring on his shoulder. Hanner had a strange expression on his face, half pleased, half…grim.

  “How long have I been out here?” Baldwin croaked.

  “’Bout an hour,” Hanner answered, taking the sleepy little girl. “Got something to show you.”

  Stretching stiffened muscles, Alec followed slowly. Hanner carried Becka into the farm house, laid her on the couch, which had been covered in clean linens from the RV. “Don’t want her sleepin’ where those nasty butts used to sit,” Mike said, watching them. The little girl curled up and went back to sleep without a word. The chubby trucker nodded at them from the stove. “Ten minutes to dinner.”

  Baldwin nodded back, followed Hanner outside. The older man had grease on his hands, and was wiping it off with the rag. “Local Emergency Broadcasting System is out,” he said. “But I found an old radio in the barn. Had enough juice in the batteries I was able to pick up a station out of Seattle.”

  “And?”

  “We got two problems. There’s domestic attacks, and then there’s the ones coming from outside, like that EMP bomb.”

  Alec couldn’t stop himself from glancing reflexively at the sky. Christ, he’d been out in the open with Add— Becka. Fear, fatigue, and the adrenal hangover had made him stupid.

  Hanner nodded in understanding. “Yeah, what with the shooting and finding the little girl, we lost track of the big picture. We’re gonna have to watch that.”

  “Did they say anything else? How long are we going to have to stay under shelter from those…uh, high bursts?”

  “About two weeks, I’m guessing.”

  “Two—!”

  His foreman held out a steadying hand. “Easy, Mr. Baldwin.” They were at the rear of the house. Farther back, near what once had been a plowed field, was a dilapidated barn. “Come on,” Hanner said, walking across the dusty lot toward the barn.

  Alec followed him, seething with frustration. “Did they say anything else?”

  “The radio? Nothing good, and nothing real specific. All they had were reports, you know. ‘We have reports of fires in Detroit,’ that kind of thing. They didn’t have much information on Los Angeles.” He stopped in front of the barn, shoved back one of the sagging doors.

  Baldwin peered inside, expecting to see maybe a scrawny cow. What he saw instead was something shadowy and curved toward the rear of the barn. Stepping inside, his eyes adjusted to the dimness. “Son of a gun,” he said.

  Toward the back of the barn, draped in paint-stained tarp, was an old truck. How old, he wasn’t sure, but old enough, he thought. He turned toward Hanner, who grinned at him.

  “Where’d you think I found a radio? The truck needs some work,” he cautioned. “I think I can get her up and running. The battery is weak but I was able to pick up that station in Seattle.”

  Hope flared in Baldwin’s heart once more. “How long will you need?”

  “Two weeks, maybe.”

  Hell. But that was about as long as they’d have to stay under shelter, anyway. He did some quick calculating. In a perfect world, he might be able to walk three hundred miles in two weeks. There wasn’t a perfect world left, however, with radiation and a lot of scary, angry, or just bad people out there. But in this truck…he could get to L.A. in a single day.

  “When do we start?”

  “Daybreak. We’ll need the light to see.”

  They spent the first night in the storm cellar. The house was stifling, even in the evening. Baldwin had wanted to open the windows, but Hanner vetoed it. “If there’s any drifting radiation, we’ll take a bath in it.” When Mike mentioned the storm cellar, cool even on this hot night and more protected from radiation, they quickly agreed.

  Mike wouldn’t let Becka lie on any of the grimy sheets on the unmade beds in the house. He found some winter quilts that were mostly clean, and using them, made a bed for her against one cellar wall for her using couch cushions. The cellar smelled of old moist dirt and the sticky sweetness of a burst can of some fruit, with a slight hint of kerosene from a lantern Hanner’d brought in from the barn.

  Becka hugged herself, and looked at each one of the men, their faces unnatural in the flickering lantern light. “It’s okay,” Mike told her. “We’ll be here when you wake up.”

  Hanner, the oldest of them, the one with the most experience with children, squatted down to get his face level with the little girl’s. “Do you know how old Queenie is?”

  Thumb in her mouth, Becka shook her head.

  “She’s eight years old.”

  Mike and Baldwin took his lead, the trucker asking casually, “How much is that in dog years?”

  Baldwin pretended to count on his fingers. “That’s…my goodness, that’s almost sixty-five years old!”

  “Really?” Becka said with interest.

  Hanner nodded with elaborate regret. “At our house, we have a nice soft bed for her to sleep on. Would you mind if Queenie slept on your bed? It would be really nice if you did.”

  “That’d be okay,” Becka agreed. Hanner patted the quilt-covered cushion, gave a short whistle, and the Shepherd obediently trotted over and lay down beside the little girl. Becka twined her fingers through Queenie’s thick fur and curled up against the dog’s back. In minutes she was asleep.

  The men made themselves as comfortable as they could on other piles of cushions or musty mattresses. Mike and Hanner laid rifles beside them. Alec put the Glock between the mortar-and-rock wall and the corn husk mattress. Hanner spoke in a low voice. “It’s going to be dark as a black cat inside a coal mine. We don’t want to shoot each other if somebody gets up to take a leak and knocks over a stack of paint cans.”

  “Password?” Mike offered.

  “Not tonight, lad. Just don’t shoot yourself.” He dropped the shutter on the lantern. “Good night, John-Boy.”

  B
aldwin felt a smile creasing his face. He replied in a falsetto, “Good night, Daddy.”

  Mike snorted and then, in incredibly quiet darkness unbroken by electronic hum or even the gurgling of a water heater, each man was alone with his thoughts.

  Alec’s thoughts turned to Addie. At first, the predictable frustration rose up in him. He wondered how the old settlers had ever stood it. Moving across the country, only as fast as a mule or team of oxen could walk, leaving everything they knew behind. Some of those poor bastards had worked for years before going back to what they loved. Like the coolies who’d worked the railroads…Christ, how had they survived that separation?

  He recognized that lying there grinding his teeth with impotent rage would do him no good. He wished he could communicate with Addie, somehow. Call her, send her an email, something. Hell, even the Pony Express would be an improvement right now. What would he say to her, he wondered. He imagined himself writing her a letter, telling her about his fight to get to her. He wouldn’t tell her about the two dead riflemen, he decided. Later, when she was older. She didn’t need to know that now. He could tell her about Mike and the way he cared for the cattle. About the moccasins for Queenie. About towing the ice chests with the rope harnesses. She’d like those stories.

  The corn husk mattress rustled with each breath Alec took. He doubted whether he could sleep. He was still doubting that when he woke up in the dark to find Becka snuggled up against his side and Queenie at her feet. It was almost cold in the basement, so he pulled up one edge of a quilt to cover her and then he slept without dreams.

  It took Hanner nine days to fix the truck. Baldwin had never acquired basic automotive repair skills, so the most he could do was lend what Hanner referred to as “Strong back, weak mind” brute force assistance. Alec ended up taking several trips back to the RV to strip parts from it, notably the two twelve-volt batteries, radiator hoses, and belts.

  During the periods he wasn’t helping Hanner with the truck, Baldwin listened to the increasingly infrequent Emergency Broadcasts from Seattle. On day three they announced the elimination of both Russia and China as active threats to the United States but didn’t say how it had happened. Hanner and Baldwin relaxed a bit at that, and allowed Becka to play outside with Queenie.

  Mike looked after the little girl as if she were his own. There was a large stash of prepackaged brownie mix in the cupboards, and he did what he could with water and a few eggs he’d rescued from the filthy refrigerator in the kitchen and stashed carefully in the darkest, coolest part of the cellar. Baldwin would sit cross-legged on the wooden floor with Mike and Becka at daily afternoon tea parties, choking down the dry brownies with cups of well water. Becka would always insist on saving a brownie for Queenie and Mr. Hanner.

  Alec spent part of his free time practicing with the pistol. Hanner had purchased enough ammunition for them to hold off the Bolivian Army, if necessary. Baldwin’s strong feelings about the weapon had calmed. It was a tool, just as Hanner had said. No different from the ice chests or the pickup truck. It was useful and could help get him to Addie, if he used it correctly.

  He explored the outskirts of the farm and was not surprised when he found a meth lab in a trailer about a mile from the farm. He backed well away from the trailer. He’d heard the chemicals used to make meth were volatile and explosive. With any luck, they’d be long gone before they had to worry about the danger from the chemistry set in the trailer.

  He found that he couldn’t get to sleep unless he wrote Addie a letter. After locating a spiral-bound notebook in one of the upstairs bedrooms, he took to sitting beside Becka as she was falling asleep and penning a description of the day. By the time he was done with a page or two, Becka and Queenie would both be asleep. He’d slip off his boots and lie down beside them; otherwise she’d wake in the night and stumble around until she found him. He might as well save her the trip.

  Hanner went out to the lab trailer with him one morning. He did a careful inventory of the contents, and put a red X on two of the barrels. “Can you drag those over to the garage?” he asked Alec.

  Alec hefted one. “I can manage.”

  “Good. Bring them over in three days.”

  “For?”

  “Fuel. This stuff is volatile as hell. We might need it to give any gas we find some pep.”

  Hanner had tasks for Mike, as well. “We need some kind of hand pump and rubber hose,” he told the trucker. “This was a farm. There’s probably one somewhere.”

  Mike enlisted Becka’s help in the search, making it a game. One of the memories that Baldwin would carry to his grave was the image of the slightly chubby man in his glasses walking with the little girl across the dusty yard toward the barn. The man was pretending to be confused about where to look while the little girl chattered excitedly about all the places they could look and what they might find. Hanner had quietly hoped the pair might run across some living livestock on the grounds, but Baldwin had no such hopes after seeing the meth lab. He’d been around addicts before, and he knew how they had the reverse Midas touch of turning everything they touched into shit. If this farm had ever held any chickens or cows or pigs, the poor things had likely died of neglect long before.

  However, Mike and Becka did find a hand pump, located behind the walls of the cellar, along with a strange stash of miscellaneous goods still in boxes. The three men agreed the goods were stolen property and most of it was now useless: MP3 players, televisions, computers. But they did find a few boxes of pristine, expensive camping gear, including sleeping bags and down jackets. Still in plastic bags, the fabrics were musty, but two days of hanging from the tire tree baked most of the smell out of them.

  They had been at the farm just over a week when Hanner told Baldwin the truck was ready. Alec was so thrilled, he busted out a disco move he hadn’t used since his days as a busboy, a tight spin that ended in a near split. Bemused, Hanner told him they’d spend the next day provisioning and loading it, and then they’d leave for Los Angeles.

  Using wood stripped from the barn and a falling-down shed, Hanner had built a wooden shell over the back of the truck, a place for them to sleep in bad weather in a pinch. Inside it was a bit like a ship’s cabin, with storage bins along the sides and overhead. Two passengers would have to ride in the back, as the cab would not be large enough for all of them and the dog. “We’re goin’ Grapes of Wrath style,” he announced, showing the finished product to Alec. “Can you drive a three-on-the-tree stick?” There was a short lesson after that in using the column-mounted shift lever on the old Chevy, which Baldwin picked up easily. Even easier was mastering the “kill switch” the wily cowboy had wired into the radio. If the radio was set on anything other than the fifth punch button, the truck wouldn’t start. “Too easy to hotwire one of these old girls,” he declared.

  Alec didn’t think that he’d be able to sleep the night before they left, but oddly he felt sleepy as soon as he finished his nightly letter to Addie. He took his accustomed place beside Becka and Queenie, and dropped right off.

  It took Baldwin twelve days to get to Los Angeles, or as close as he could. The trip from the farm house could have been done in twenty hours or less, back in the day, but Hanner’s caution had them driving only during daylight, and using only the blue highways, so it wasn’t until the third day after they’d left the farm house that they arrived in Southern California, moving against the flow of refugees fleeing the disaster.

  He didn’t know if it would ever be called Los Angeles again. It might be called “The place where Los Angeles once stood.” By the time they’d reached the outskirts of San Bernardino County they’d already seen the dead stacked by the sides of the road, some horribly burned, others covered with strange sores. Mike ended up sitting in the camper shell with Becka as they rolled through scenes that would have driven even Dante mad, the men doing what they could to shield her from the horrific sights around them.

  Hanner and Baldwin had a quick conference. “I’m gonna guess
we’re on the edge of the hot zone here. Lot of those dead people we passed died from radiation.”

  Baldwin was quaking with impatience. “Yeah,” he had to admit. “We can’t take Becka into that. Can’t take any of you into that.”

  “But you’re goin’.”

  “I can walk. You guys take the truck, go somewhere safe.”

  “You walk, you die. Driving will be dicey enough…you’ll get enough RADs to make sure you die of cancer in twenty years. Walking, you’ll be dead in a week.”

  Both men were silent. Hanner said, “Two days. You set us down somewhere, give yourself two days to get it done.”

  Baldwin thought about it. “Where? Every half-ass town or post office we passed was filled with refugees.”

  “Yeah, we don’t want to be there. Some of those poor bastards who are still walking will be radioactive themselves. And close like that, no sanitation, you’ll get cholera and dysentery going through.” Hanner took a half cigarette from his shirt pocket, lit it up. He’d been rationing himself ever since they started on the trek to L.A. He took a slow, careful puff. “We can camp out for two days. Be good for Becka and Queenie to be out in the fresh air.” That decided, he extinguished the cigarette by pinching the end, and then returned it to his pocket for another day.

  They drove up a state fire road in the low hills of the San Bernardino Mountains and found a sheltered, defensible spot under some pines where they could camp. It was within walking distance of the highway.

  Baldwin insisted on unloading everything from the truck. Hanner didn’t argue, not in front of the little girl. They told Becka they would be staying here for a couple of days while he went to look for his daughter. Becka became distraught. “You won’t leave me, will you, Mr. Alec? You said you’d take care of me!”

  Baldwin carefully untwined her arms from around his neck. “I’ll be back, honey. I have to go make sure my little girl is okay.”

  He topped off the tank with a little of the meth mixture and left all the weapons with Hanner. The cowboy shook his head, returned the Glock to him. “You don’t go nowhere without this.” Alec set the pistol on the seat beside him. He gave Becka a kiss goodbye and Mike surprised him with a burly hug.