The Big Bang (9 page)

It wasn't an adult toy, she knew that for sure. Maybe some kind of version of brass knuckles? As she held the cylinder in her hand, something inside it shifted back and forth. A flash of memory and almost in the same moment Molly snapped her wrist hard. A metal rod shot out of the cylinder. Instantly, it transformed into about two feet of hard black steel, with a wicked sphere tip. An expanding baton. Molly remembered hearing about them being used against convicts in the Texas state prisons. If it was good enough for those old boys, then it was good enough for her. She tried to compress the baton back to its original length with her hand. No good. She ended up smashing the tip against the floor before it would collapse. If she ever hit someone with this thing, it would hurt like a son of a bitch. And that was okay with her.

She made herself eat before she left. It was hard, each swallow grinding down her gullet like a lump of dry poison. But she'd need the energy to get through the next few hours. Then in the bathroom, she checked for water. A tepid trickle from the shower, but it was enough. She scrubbed herself hard and remembered to grab some of Ginnie's hoarded soap and a roll of toilet paper.

Molly dressed in the hiking boots, her own jeans, and a flannel shirt. She threw on the hated niqab, then shouldered the backpack, checked the straps, and walked to the front door. She paused. Not to look around at this place that had nothing for her, but to decide. Did she want to leave this little house for the Caliban? She could set the damn thing on fire, leave nothing for those bastards. Nah. She hated the idea of desecrating Ginnie's home, and she could burn down the whole block on accident. If she trashed the place like a kid having a tantrum, no telling if the Caliban would consider it an offense against the good Muslim who was going to buy the place and then any dhimmi in the area would pay.

She stepped outside and pulled the door to, then walked next door and knocked loudly. She had to knock twice more and lift the veil over her face before the door opened hesitantly. The owner, a bushy-haired woman of about forty who was a former professor at San Fran State University, stared out at her suspiciously. “We're leaving. The 'ban will be here tomorrow to claim the house. Door's open. Take what you want or need.” The professor just stared at her. “Tell the others.”

Molly waved at her and strode out to the sidewalk. The sun was setting. The day had been unusually clear. She turned and looked up Geary toward the Bay. The fog was rolling in. She was tired of the fog and clouds. She was ready for some hot Texas sun, so bright it hurt your eyes and drained the land of color, baking the grass and fence posts to a dull, lifeless brown. God, she wanted that. She really wanted the simplicity of the plains, the scouring winds, and the emptiness. She turned her back on the setting sun, and started walking.

She had to walk most of the night through the darkened city to get to the stadium and join the queue of people at the Park. At least the Caliban was good for one thing: no one robbed or molested her…or else she looked so beat down no thief could imagine her having anything worth taking. She was lucky, in a way. Thousands of other dhimmi had been rounded up last night and trucked to the Candlestick parking lot, forced to wait there overnight under the guns of the Prophet's Chosen, waiting for Purification in the morning. Molly couldn't understand the Caliban's preference for morning executions. Maybe it gave their first prayers of the day a special savory tang.

The route chose her, really. Since this was the last time she'd look upon this city, which had once seemed so beautiful and vibrant to her, she played tourist. She headed first toward the old Marina and then down to Fisherman's Wharf. Once, such a stroll at night would have been the height of folly, but most of the street people had been swept away by other Purity Patrols. So she was able to walk past the sagging, twisted ruins of the Golden Gate Bridge, the once formidable 746-foot-high towers that had supported the bridge toppled, bent and rusting from a McVeigh special that had been set off beneath them. She could not see them now for the evening fog, but their image was firmly in her memory, the huge beams jutting sideways from the water like the ribs of some ancient Lovecraftian leviathan.

So much lost, she thought, strangely not feeling the loss she could intellectually perceive. Mostly, she was accompanied by a strange emptiness in her mind, a vacuity that seemed to buzz ever so slightly.

Passing around the fallen ramps that led to the Bay Bridge, seeing the outlines of the wrecked Navy vessels there backlit by fires from Oakland, the thoughts returned. During the first days of the attacks, the Navy had immediately tried to pull out to sea, the Coast Guard as well. She'd heard the blast, even in the Sunset District miles away, as she stood in the front yard kicking angrily at some weeds. The sound had made her look up to notice a wild pattern of light darting across the clouds overhead, and she felt a peculiar warmth that had washed over her, while behind the windows rattled in their casements and something like a hard hand pushed at her back.

It had been a small nuclear bomb of some kind, but how the saboteurs had been able to set it off, she had no idea. Yet it had destroyed a number of vessels and uncounted sailors and airmen, to say nothing of those onshore nearby. It had also made eating fish from the Bay a chancy gamble for anyone with more imagination than appetite. The dead were gone, but the wreckage onshore and in the water remained to proclaim the intensity of the hatred that had driven the country's new masters.

When she was just a slip of a girl, Molly's momma had dragged her to church every Sunday and had her read the Bible regularly, quizzing her on the chapters. Once what Momma called “her monthlies” arrived, she announced, “You're a woman now, you can make up your own mind about going to church,” and Molly had decided to follow her own heathenous heart. But those early verses had a way of staying with her, for woven amid the groveling proclamations of the Israelites' unworthiness, and the divinely approved smiting and raping and enslaving, there had been some wisdom. Pausing by what she imagined was only one of the hundreds of graveyards of the US Navy across the nation, if not the world, the words of a man three thousand years dead came back to her. “
One fool
,” Ecclesiastes had said, “
One fool can destroy the work of many wise men
.” There had been enough fools to go around, when the time came.

So, she walked on, not in obedience to the Yasser-be's commands, but as a way of paying tribute to the works of the wise and decent that had been destroyed, and the lives lost with those works.

Molly grew tired, but it was only her legs. Her mind was not wearied, and she mused that in other cities, such a huge gathering of Americans would have been an invitation to riot or rampage. The Caliban had found San Francisco a much easier city to pacify, due to the delightfully restrictive gun-ownership laws enacted by decades of concerned city councils. That was another attraction of Texas. Large swaths of it were untamed by the invaders, still the Wild West. She'd derided the macho mentality when she was younger, “You'll take my gun from my cold dead fingers” types, and to be honest, at times she'd had a point. There were always going to be the dimwits who abused any privilege, but she'd been too ready to tar every gun owner with the same brush every time some yahoo shot a kid for kicking over his trashcans. At the same time, she'd been way too ready to overlook all the times a young mother with a legal weapon defended herself and her babies against trash who tried to invade their home, or the gun-toting Samaritans who'd stood up to armed robbers in public places. Working her way through the parking lot, stepping over the muck and waste generated by a crowd of people jammed into a small space with no sanitary facilities, she thought a few more guns in San Francisco might have been a good thing.

It wasn't hard for her to get to the edge of the crowd. Almost none of them wanted to be in front of the pack, or would really care to see too clearly what was happening. So when the gates opened, Molly was able to position herself right up against the rails around the ballpark itself. Behind her, the Americans shuffled to the stadium seats listlessly. There wasn't a lot of chatter. A few babies complained, but they were soothed or smacked until they hushed. The exhausted adults slumped back in their seats, and many closed their eyes right away, trying to get some sleep. A few even jammed their fingers in their ears, against the inevitable aural assault that would accompany the executions. There were some kids, teenagers, who were looking alert and anxious. Some trying to act tough, hoping they wouldn't puke. Other youngsters affected a bored look, hoping that an ironic attitude would help keep reality at bay and their nascent adulthood intact.

Across the way, in the good seats, were the occupiers and their army of settlers. Muslims had comprised nearly a billion people, Molly had learned, and she'd decided many of them lived in countries that were shit-holes. Why else would so many be ready to leave their homes and move here? For the settlers, at least, this was a party. The women were in their black body suits, dancing and doing that ululating thing with their tongues. Nothing like seeing some blood splashed on a beautiful morning in April to put a spring in your step.

Seeing the settlers reminded Molly far too clearly of the pictures of the Palestinians dancing when the World Trade Center Towers were attacked. She'd excused it then. After all, America was supporting the Israelis, who were oppressing the Palestinians. She found it harder to find an excuse this morning, because those black-clad crones were dancing on American soil.

The Prophet's Chosen were patrolling between the two sections of the stadium. The first Purifications staged by The Gasbag had mingled the two populations, but that had been quickly discontinued. Too many settlers were being found dead in the bathrooms.

Out on the ball field, the killing ground was set up. It was near home plate, closer to the settlers. A raised platform, so everybody could see. A couple of the stadium cameras were still working, and there it was on the Jumbotron, twenty times larger than life. Displays that had shown athletes, rock stars, even an occasional President, were now filled with images from this place of death. The wooden platform was painted white, perhaps so the blood would show better. It had been scrubbed, but there was still a patina of carmine across the platform, like rust bleeding through white painted metal.

Molly suddenly realized she was holding herself tensely, as if expecting to be hit. She could have stayed away, headed on to Texas, blending in with thousands of other pieces of American flotsam…but nothing could have stopped her from being here.

A thirty-foot moving van with a faded U-Haul paint job rumbled across the ball field (“See America!” from back when there was an America to see), flanked by two black Hummers. The U-Haul trembled to a stop in front of the American side of the field. A bunch of Yasser-bes piled out, Kalashnikovs held importantly.
Like anyone here was going to be able to stop them
, Molly thought bitterly. The Yasser-bes unlocked the sliding gate and shoved it upward, the crash and bang of the metal wincingly loud to her. Two burly occupiers climbed into the back of the van and began hurling the prisoners out. The prisoners, hands zip-tied behind their backs and wearing knee-length gray shirts, landed on shaky legs, some of them bloody, and fell or rolled over to avoid being buried under the other prisoners. One woman hit awkwardly, and Molly could hear her leg snap from fifty feet away. The woman uttered a shriek of pain that wouldn't stop. One of the Chosen shut her up with a rifle butt to the stomach and dragged her limp body over against the fence.

It took a special kind of cruelty to arrange the field this way. Put the prisoners close to the Americans and then drag them over closer to the settlers for their enjoyment. Molly knew there were others in the crowd like her, relatives who had been forced to come here, forced to watch their loved ones' last terrified moments before the execution. How many, she wondered, were like her, here to bear witness for her sister. She would not watch the screens…she would be staring at the platform when Ginnie was up there. She would not let herself take the easy out by watching her sister's death broadcast on the huge display screens. That would remove it from ugly reality, make it just another video of horror and despair that happened to someone else.

Ringed by the Chosen, most of the prisoners had turned toward the stadium, looking for a familiar face, hoping to snatch one last crumb of reassurance, of love, before their appointment with the Headsman. Molly couldn't see Ginnie in the crowd of shaven-headed women, with their bruises and cuts and tear-streaked faces. Her heart leapt in spite of herself.
Maybe they'd let her go!
She knew this was a foolish hope, and she tried to stomp down the thought, but hope fought to live as her eyes scanned the crowd.

One woman caught her eye. She was white, not that it mattered. There were all races and ethnicities of women in the crowd: Hispanic, black, Asian. This woman stood out because her head wasn't shaved. Strangely, she had dreadlocks. Molly had never understood dreadlocks; they looked too much like the matted fur you'd find on a long-haired dog that had been allowed to run wild. Maybe it had been too much trouble to get the shears through the thick mats of hair. This woman was maybe fifty or a little older…the dreads made it hard to tell. She was standing, staring out at the crowd. For a moment, Molly thought the woman was looking at her. Then she became aware of the strapping young man standing next to her.

The man's fingers were twined in the fence. “Mom!” he croaked. The woman smiled. She was short and skinny with a little paunch. She mouthed the words to her son.
I love you
.

When he looked away from the awful sight of his mother among the condemned, Molly saw that he was just a boy, just a big teen-aged boy. His voice twisted with anguish, he said, “They caught her at church.” Molly nodded. The boy sobbed, and leaned against Molly. She reeled under his weight, caught her balance, and put an arm around him. The first words that came to mind were meaningless reassurances. She bit those back, and instead said, “Come on, kid. Be strong. Be like her.”