Whistler, 2011

As he crouched behind a building, the chipped masonry grinding into his shoulder, Whistler’s mind wandered. It would get him killed someday, he knew, but there it went anyway. Instead of watching for the troop transport, packed with new fanatics from Yemen, Whistler was thinking about Lonesome George.

What was George doing these days? As the last elected President of the old USA, back before the Big Bang, he was, in theory, still Whistler’s leader. Which meant, in theory, Whistler was still the claims adjustor for a local HMO…as if HMOs still existed. In actuality, Whistler’s leader was a former Nordstrom manager, a short, still-chunky Armenian woman named Anne—a wizard for organizing who had found her calling as a guerilla fighter when the Caliban torched a Christian school, killing both her small children. The California franchise of the Taliban had little patience for dhimmi practicing their heathen beliefs, and less interest in those beliefs being passed on to the next generation.

Whistler sighed. Until the Big Bang, he never realized that on a night cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey (as his uncle used to say) it was still possible to sweat. He’d almost always taken hot and cold for granted. Turn up the heat, crank down the AC. The occasional foray into the outdoors on his thousand-dollar Trek racing bike was mitigated by the knowledge there was a cocoon of climate-controlled comfort to which he could return. Now, he was always cold. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, clad in his precious bicycle gloves.

They said Lonesome George was somewhere in the West. Whole lot of land out there, tough terrain. George was usually on the move, they said, traveling hard and fast with a bunch of Special Forces guys. Whistler remembered one of the show trials he’d scoped from a MinuteMen satellite broadcast. This kid, maybe all of seventeen, was on his knees in front of the Mullahs. Indian kid, Apache maybe, wide face, thick black hair, black piercing eyes, nose broad and strong. The Mullahs doing the usual “it is the will of Allah” tap dance, the kid staring straight ahead, still in his desert cammies, one shoulder nearly shot away.

A hooded man carrying a sword approached the kid. Whistler couldn’t figure it out. Back when there was a local government, his county had a hell of a time getting people to show up for jury duty. Yet, somehow, the Mullahs never had any problem recruiting Soldiers of Allah, brave lads all, who were happy to chop the head off a defenseless human being.

The kid…ah, the MinuteMen had said his name, but there had been so many names, Whistler lost track of them. He remembered the boy, though. The Apache Scout was how his memory was stored in Whistler’s mind. The Apache Scout looked up at the approaching executioner, then spat on the ground at the Mullah’s feet. He shouted something, and even though two other Soldiers of Allah were on either side of him, he shrugged them off like a bull shaking a rat from its haunches and climbed to his feet. The Scout said something very clearly, directly to the Mullahs.

Of course, the Mullahs had killed the audio, but the MinuteMen had gotten lip readers on the video. Even now, Whistler could hear the slight Texas accent of the female American who relayed the Scout’s words. “I rode with President Bush, and a bunch of you bastards got an express ticket to Allah. Let me show you how an American dies, you pigs.”

The Scout turned and faced his executioner. He spat again and contemptuously turned his back to the man with the sword.

Whistler reckoned Lonesome George had seen too many of his men die that way. It didn’t stop him, but it cost him. George’s hair was dead white now, at least in the last picture Whistler had seen.

Vibrations under his feet pulled Whistler back to the present, rumbling through the road, through the buildings. Once they would have been lost in the flurry of pounding commuter traffic. Now the vibrations were solitary, distinctive; there was no competition from other automobiles.

Then he could smell them. Not the soldiers, although on a warm day you could always smell the Yemeni recruits. They hadn’t gotten used to the abundance of running water in the larger cities, and still relied on traditional desert methods of hygiene (or the lack thereof). No, what Whistler smelled was the diesel. Straight-up, glow-plug burnin’, dead dinosaur juice. That was almost always the tip-off. Resistance machines used bio-diesel; usually they smelled like deep fryers. It was a hell of a thing to be in the middle of a fire fight, a shit-storm of blood and bullets, and find yourself briefly above it all, musing, “God damn, I miss McDonalds’ fries.”

Now he was fully in the moment. His heart was speeding up. It would get that way just before the first salvo, beating so hard he would get light-headed. Whistler forced himself to breathe.

The ones who lived…they didn’t think about what they were going to do after the fight. They didn’t think about families or women or food. They cut the cord that tied them to a future. They’d learned those thoughts killed. Those thoughts made you second-guess your training, question yourself. Thinking about that woman, or remembering how your buddy looked after he’d taken a round in the face (dead people don’t look real, it was the weirdest thing); thinking about anything except what you had to do turned your movements into a jerky stutter of hesitation. Then, you’d be the one people would remember later, remember how the grenade had shredded you into carnitas.

Ahead of Whistler, down the road, the truck slowed as it came through the canyon of two- and three-story buildings. While the Mullahs and the Caliban lived in the Prophet’s Paradise, moving troops and eradicating cities with a swipe of a mouse cursor, their boys on the ground quickly lost their belief in their own invincibility.

The Yemenis learned the hard way, but they learned quick. The truck, a seven-ton freightliner hauling booty from the ruins of Las Vegas, had 50-cal rifles mounted on top, one each at the front and rear of the trailer. Whistler guessed the least senior of the Yemenis was up there with the raw recruits at the gun mounts. The Americans had quickly made it a practice to snipe the older soldiers. “No sense in letting them school the new guys,” was the way it had been put to Whistler.

So the senior staffers, the sergeants, were probably in the cab of the semi, encased in armor plating. Same with the troop carrier that followed it…gun-fodder recruits, counting their seventy-two virgins on still un-calloused fingers, riding in the back of the Humvee, while the more experienced, salty dogs sat up front, armored in good old American-made Kevlar, anxious to get through this detail alive.

Whistler bit down a curse. The Humvee should have been in front of the semi. The plan was to take out the Humvee. It would have blocked the freightliner and left the goods inside intact. More than one of Whistler’s men had loose teeth, a side effect of scurvy. They had hoped to find some fresh vegetables, maybe fruit in the trailer. Well, there was nothing for it now. The other boys would take out the Humvee. Or not.

Rolling carefully down the street, 50-cals tracking high at the tops of the building, the most likely site to launch an attack, the semi took its time. The road was clear well past the intersection. Anne, Whistler’s commander, had made sure of it. No mysterious bundles of garbage, no abandoned cars, no discarded toys or dolls. Nothing that would worry a nervous conscript far from home. Another city pacified for the Prophet.

The remains of a stoplight dangled over the intersection. The semi slowed even more, executed a kind of slither to get the 50-cals past the now useless hunks of metal.

The charger was wound. The Caliban still had enough going technically that they could scan frequencies and send out pulses across the spectrum. It wasn’t expensive, and they could get lucky…a pulse at the correct wavelength could set off a radio-controlled device, leading to disaster for a small resistance group like theirs. So here they were strictly old school. Slithering on their bellies like snakes, slipping through oily pipes filled with black turgid vileness, they’d run wires through drains right to the center of the intersection.

Whistler imagined the bastards in the Humvee must’ve been heaving a small sigh of relief; they’d gotten through the gauntlet of buildings without any of the pesky infidels shooting at them. They’d made the intersection. Nobody ambushes you at a clear four-way intersection. Too many routes of escape.

The Lord hates a coward, Whistler said to himself. He heard it in a kind of Irish accent. It was something from a movie he’d seen. He’d never known any heroes when he was growing up…if they were around, they’d kept it quiet. By the time Whistler found himself needing a hero, a model, he and everyone else he knew was running like their ass was on fire. So, he took whatever he could find that made sense. It made sense that the Lord hated a coward.

No time now for other thoughts.

Whistler snapped the contacts shut, sending a small spurt of electricity surging from the generator down the wires, through the cement pipes, and under the street to the basin where the shaped charges, bags of fertilizer, and other useful chemicals lay. If he’d had time, Whistler would have thought, Right back at ya.

It was a beautiful thing. The pitted asphalt lifted in four places, a bubble of yellow and green flame pushing it upward. Had Whistler been looking, he would have enjoyed the way the initial blast pushed the semi truck up, ripped it loose and sent it spinning completely over the top of the trailer, wheels hurling flaming melted rubber, to crash in front of the Humvee.

Whistler wasn’t looking, though. He’d grabbed the detonator at the sound of the first crack of asphalt and was racing away down the alley. A kid on a Schwinn was waiting at the corner. Whistler shoved the detonator at the kid. It was valuable, hard to manufacture, harder to replace. As for Whistler, he knew they could find another HMO claims adjustor anytime.

The kid on the bike spun away. People always ran from the explosions, so the kid would blend in as part of the panicked crowd. By the time the Caliban brought in more troops, the kid and the detonator would be untraceable, no matter what happened to Whistler and the boys.

Whistler jigged to his right, toward the sound of the gunfire. He could have found his way without the sound. The glow from the burning semi lit the electricity-deprived streets.

As he ran, he unslung his Baldwin, an ugly, efficient tool that was especially useful for exporting true believers to an early chat with Allah. No good at distance, but in the confines of say, your average street, a single shot from the Baldwin would knock a man down. The hydrostatic bullets also did a nice job of turning internal organs into pudding.

The Humvee still worried him. It had been far enough from the explosion that it might be essentially undamaged. As he ran, he could hear the heavy reports of a single .50. Only one. Good. Concussion from the blast must’ve taken out the forward gun emplacement.

He slowed as he neared the corner. People were already streaming away from the street fight. As always, Whistler was surprised. Surprised that anyone still lived in those unheated buildings, surprised at how many of them there were. If there’s so many of us, why can’t we get the Caliban’s foot off our neck? he wondered briefly.

Even though he was weaving through the frightened throngs, their unwashed faces, grimed clothes, and universally gaunt malnourished bodies rendered them all anonymous. He couldn’t have told you what kind of people they were: black, white, Mexican, Chinese. He would have bet good money that they were OC, Original Citizens. The collaborators tended to look healthier, at least for a while.

Whistler raised the Baldwin high over his head. The sight of it was an instant passport. He glided through the OC like a shark in a school of minnows as they shoved and stumbled well clear of him. Poor bastards didn’t want any of it, too beaten down to care, or just waiting for it to blow over.

Low thump ahead. Rocket Propelled Grenade. Inaccurate as hell, but perfect for punching a hole through an assault line or a building. In this case, it was the corner of the building, just to the west of the traffic light. Powdered brick masonry rocketed outward.

Like Pete Rose going for a steal at third, Whistler pumped his arms and legs and made a sliding dive at the base of that corner, trying to get below the scattering debris. He curled himself into a ball as he slid, arms over his head. Chunks of red brick pebble dropped around him.

He wiped the grit from his eyes. He didn’t have the Baldwin. After a brief moment of throat-thudding panic, he pawed it out of the debris on the sidewalk, slung it forward. There was a crater about the size of a basketball in the corner of the building, five feet above the ground.

Whistler knew he wasn’t doing anybody a damn bit of good here. To his left, he could hear the sound of the Baldwins’ desperate chattering. They sounded like pop guns compared to the booming reports of that damned 50-caliber machine gun. Rat-bastard Yemenis, it was probably one they’d lifted from a US Armory.

If this went on much longer, the shakes were going to get him. Cussing his cowardice as if he was an obstinate mule, Whistler forced himself to grab a fast look. He popped his head up long enough to see that it was one hell of a party.

Gordon and the boys to the east, damn it; they’d gotten themselves pinned down in that old coffee shop. The Humvee was directly opposite them, blocked by the burning wreckage of the semi tractor. The Yemeni recruits had piled out of the Hummer and were firing in all directions. They were doing a lot of damage to windows and doors, but at least one rag-head sergeant had gotten his recruits to shoot at the building that was actually shooting at them.

And the .50. There were still two Yemenis on the rear of the semi trailer. One was guiding the ammo belts; the other was firing at the coffee shop, the 50-caliber metal-jacketed shells chewing fist-sized chunks out of the front of the shop. If Whistler’d had time to swear, he would have. He’d told Gordon to put a few boys on the other side of the street, but you can’t tell Gordon anything. Never could.

Whistler’s thumb checked the safety on the Baldwin without conscious thought. He was too far from the semi for anything like accurate suppressing fire. The best he could do was start flinging lead in their direction. It’d distract the machine gun; bring a whole crap-load of trouble on his head. But maybe it would create enough of a diversion for Gordon to get some of those kids out the back of the coffee shop. No sense in all of us gettin’ killed, Whistler thought as he stood.

He stepped out from the side of the building. The hole in the masonry was no good; he needed to be able to aim up at the semi. The first rounds from the Baldwin plinked low, punching holes low into the sheet metal sides of the trailer like a sheep’s footprints in mud. Whistler adjusted, lifted the barrel of the Baldwin higher. He wasn’t as much shooting at the two Yemenis as hurling lead high at them and hoping some of them hit. His first shots split the sandbags piled around the machine gun; well that got the Yemeni soldiers’ attention. They dove down behind the sandbags for a quick conference while hot metal rain continued to fall from the Baldwin.

He didn’t have much time, Whistler knew. One of the senior soldiers over at the Humvee would be quick to notice that the machine gun was no longer keeping Gordon and the boys pinned down so they could be killed with a minimum of fuss or discomfort. Either the soldiers in the Humvee would take him out, or the two brain surgeons running the 50-cal would get ambitious. If he got close enough to the semi, the Baldwin could send two more of the faithful to Paradise. He’d better make this count. The Lord hates a coward.

Whistler ran out into the intersection. As he did, he saw what he had feared. A brown arm reached up from behind the dribbling sandbags, groped for the trigger of the 50, while a separate arm reached out from an angle, grabbed the handle and swiveled the barrel in Whistler’s general direction.

Holding the Baldwin high over his head, Whistler clamped his finger over the trigger, sweeping the rifle across the sandbags, aiming at the base of the machine gun, trying to blast away those controlling hands. The Baldwin against a 50-cal: worse than bringing a knife to a gunfight. To his right, Whistler heard Gordon’s Baldwins start up. Without the 50-cal filling the air with death, they could lift their heads and make a stand. Maybe he’d bought ’em a little time.

No time left for Whistler. The barrel of the 50-cal was tilting down at him, cranking right, splinters of black asphalt peppering him as each bullet moved closer. Maybe he could run up under the trailer, but what for? What good would that do Gordon and the kids too stupid to know better than to listen to him? Whistler stood his ground, the Baldwin bucking in his hands.

Out of the corner of his eye, Whistler saw something crossing the top of the semi. Lightning.

Her name was Taneisha. But everybody called her Lightning. She was the fastest human they’d ever seen with their own eyes. The crazy woman had scaled the far end of the trailer, and was running across the top toward the still-working machine gun nest at the rear. Her Baldwin was slung across her back, and she held two mismatched pistols in either hand.

Lightning’s first shot hit the ass end of the 50-cal, knocking it off line where it had been poised to ventilate Whistler. Shrieking some kind of insane war cry, Lightning ran right up on the sandbags and emptied her clips.

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.”

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.

Inside the small office, Whistler hung the bike on two pegs behind the door. His “home” wasn’t much: neatly made-up cot near the center next to the stove, an old wooden desk and chair, some clothes in a trunk. A useless rotary phone still hung from one wall. It would be gutted for parts, someday.

Whistler crossed to the cot, knelt, pulled out a suitcase from beneath. Inside, a stack of weapons: pistols, sawed-off shotgun, full auto rifles. He pulled out a fresh Baldwin, slung it over his back. Might as well clean the old one while he was on watch. Closing the suitcase and shoving it under his cot, Whistler rose, his knees popping. He grabbed the cleaning kit from a desk drawer and opened the door.

Lightning was waiting by the path, two large, steaming metal mugs in her hand.

“Chili for breakfast,” she said, extending a mug. “What every growing boy needs.”

Whistler grunted, took the mug in his free hand.

“Did you see what Cookie put in there?”

She shook her head, fell into step with him. “I don’t want to know.”

Whistler sniffed the chili with care. Sometimes, Cookie’s creations had enough spice in them to burn the hairs out of your nose. This batch didn’t smell half bad. “Thanks,” he told her. “You should be gettin’ to bed.”

Lightning shook her head again. “You can’t clean your gun and keep watch at the same time. We’ll take turns. You clean, I watch. I clean, you watch.” Whistler didn’t answer. He wouldn’t mind the company, and he knew Lightning wouldn’t fill the silence with conversation. She was different from the women of B³ (Before the Big Bang). He remembered how women then needed to talk. A lot. How they would pile details on him, set the scene, create a context, all the while he’s wondering, “What’s your point?”

Maybe Lightning had been that way, too. Not now. Maybe it was because she was the only woman and one of only four adults in the outfit. The boys, yeah, they thought they were men, but they were still kids. Kids who’d seen and done terrible things. Paley, the oldest, was seventeen. Whistler knew the boys sometimes went to Lightning to talk, especially when they’d had nightmares. He doubted whether any of them looked at her as a real woman. She was a stern aunt or older sister who was as deadly as anyone they’d ever known. Besides, fatigue and fear and hunger tended to move a man’s mind right past sex to basic survival. Still, in a way, he hoped his boys had some of those stirrings. It’d mean that the war hadn’t completely ground out their youth and humanity.

Whistler took a test swig of the chili. Okay, it wouldn’t kill him, and you wouldn’t use it to clean pipes. He was hungry all of a sudden. As they climbed the trail to the blind, he kept pouring the chili into his mouth, greedily chewing whatever savory meat that Cookie had found.

Lightning slowed as she came up on the blind, which looked a lot like a weathered rock up there on the hill. Whistler lowered the mug. “June six,” he called in a low voice.

The answer came back. “Nineteen forty-four.”

D-Day. They tried to use passwords from American history. They were less likely to be guessed by infiltrators, and Whistler liked the excuse to remind the kids of what their country had accomplished over the years.

Lightning stood to one side of the blind, eye-checked Whistler. He nodded, lifted his Baldwin. She flipped up the painted canvas side of the blind, and the morning light poured into the blind.

Beaver crouched there, his eyes shut, like he’d been trained. If anyone was in there with him, their dark-adjusted eyes would have been dazzled by the influx of light. Beaver unsquinched his face, letting light slowly seep through his closed lids, and finally opened his eyes.

“Good job, Tom.” Whistler told him. The other kids called Tom “Beaver” because of the unfortunate teeth, but Whistler wouldn’t address him by anything but his given name.

“How’d it go?” the boy asked, scrambling out of the two-by-four and canvas-covered blind. The canvas was painted the same dun and white of the surrounding rocks. The view slits were painted to resemble shadows and pits in the rock.

“Had some problems.” At the look on Beaver’s face, Whistler added quickly, “No casualties. Just nothing in the trailer worth our time or ammo. Any action here?”

Beaver shrugged. “No, sir. Thought I heard some wolves, though.”

“Okay.” Whistler gave the boy the now-empty chili mugs. “Gordon has the next watch. You let him know.” They watched the boy head down the trail. He made a game of it, jumping from rock to rock.

Lightning gestured with her head. On his hands and knees, Whistler climbed inside the blind. Lightning followed him, tied the canvas shut behind her.

It smelled like a locker room laundry hamper inside the blind. Teen-aged boys shut up in here day after day, in the heat and lack of circulation. Out of habit, Whistler lifted the binoculars from their hook, scanned all the approaches. The blind sat on the highest point of rolling land for about ten miles. They’d have a little warning if the Caliban approached. Whether it would do them any good was a different issue entirely.

Lightning unrolled the cleaning kit, laid it on a slab of rock. “They’re gonna find us someday.”

Whistler propped his fresh Baldwin against one two-by-four beam, laid the dirty one on the cleaning cloth. “Yep.”

“Won’t be pretty if they do. We’ve notched a pack of those camel jockeys.”

“You mean those dune coons?” His voice was thoughtful.

She ignored him, eyes on her hands as she stripped the rifle. “Whatever you call them, we didn’t invite them to come over here.”

Whistler said softly, “We can’t call ’em names. Then they’re not human. We’ll make ’em into things, and then…then we’ll start acting like them.” That’s what Whistler feared. It was like a fear for his own soul. He killed men, he shot them from ambush, blew them up, left some to die in ditches. No matter what he did, he forced himself to remember they were men. Humans, with hurts and hopes, fears and dreams. He remembered all too clearly what happened when the Yemenis and Saudis who heard the call of jihad stopped seeing their opponents as human, but as a label. As “Zionists” or “Imperialists.” Detroit, he’d heard, was still burning from the second wave of attacks, even now. Motown was no mo’, because Americans had ceased to be people in the eyes of their enemy.

“Yes, sir,” Lightning said. From Gordon’s mouth, that would have been a provocation. The way she said it, he heard all kinds of things. An apology, agreement, and even a little teasing. She said it like a friend.

He was glad she was his friend. He wouldn’t want her for an enemy. “Those kids we notched,” he said, musing. “They said you were a genie.”

At that, she snorted, and almost laughed. Whistler wasn’t sure he’d ever heard her laugh. At least she could still be tickled by something. “Like ‘I Dream of Jeannie?’” She shook her head, slid the bolt into the Baldwin, and then snicked it back to check the action. A click of the trigger, the bolt slammed home smoothly. Out on the line, that would be one more dead Arab. Or Filipino. Or even one of the kids from Malaysia. “A genie. Must be because I’m so big and black and bad.”

She wasn’t big, but she was black and she was very bad. “Maybe that’s how they think of the angel of death,” Whistler offered, raising the binoculars for another scan. He thought he saw a wisp of something on the road, just at the limits of his vision.

“I’m done,” Lightning announced. “Switch with me.” Whistler duck-walked over to the cleaning cloth, while Lightning scooted around behind him.

“I thought I saw some dust out there at about two o’clock.”

Lightning popped a magazine into her Baldwin and leaned it carefully against the frame of the blind. She wiped off the lenses of the binoculars, held them up. With a sigh, she readjusted the focal lens. “Your eyes,” she said. “Getting as bad as my grandmother’s.”

Sitting cross-legged by the cleaning cloth, stripping the Baldwin, Whistler said mildly, “Were you always this much of a nag?”

When she didn’t reply, he looked up. Ah, hell. She was stiff, hands tight around the binoculars. It was one of the hazards of talking to almost anyone who’d been in-country when the Big Bang hit. Sooner or later, you’d say something, anything, and it would find its way right through the carefully maintained armor. The armor came in all kinds of manifestations. Cynicism. Hopelessness. Near-lunatic anger. Dull-eyed depression. But everyone, everyone sane that is, had some kind of gap. Some soft place unseen and unknown, perhaps even by them, where an innocuous comment could lodge with the force of a sniper’s bullet.

Whistler reached out a hand greasy from cleaning the rifle. “Hey. I’m sorry.”

She wouldn’t look at him, kept the field glasses pressed against her face. “My daddy called me a fuss-budget.” Lightning swept the glasses from side to side.

“He probably meant it kindly,” Whistler suggested.

“Probably.”

She had just showed up one day. Thin, but tough and black as a hide left out in the sun. Whatever sun had burned that toughness into her was Lightning’s own secret. She didn’t talk about it. Whistler hadn’t asked. Since she was an unknown, they’d kept watch on her until they trusted her. Trusted her with their lives.

Whistler looked down at the half-assembled Baldwin. He was never very good at these moments with anyone, worse with women. Those moments of completely unintended hurt. In his mind, he thumbed through some responses, trying to find a healing word or two.

He didn’t have time to locate the right sentence. Lightning stiffened again.

“Visitors.”

Whistler slipped over beside her, stared in the direction of the field glasses. Now he could see the moving dust cloud with his naked eyes. “Caliban?”

“No.” She handed him the glasses, swung around behind him and quickly began to assemble the Baldwin that lay in parts on the cleaning cloth.

Through the glasses, Whistler could see what was creating the dust cloud: an old pickup, plowing along the dirt road, weaving in slow arcs from side to side. “Drunk?”

Lightning’s hands moved rapidly. “Too controlled.”

“They wanted to be seen.”

“Trap.”

Her teeth flashed in a feral smile. “Maybe.” A final snap, twist, and the Baldwin was whole again. She slung it over her back. “Let’s take a look.”

In less than five minutes, Lightning had run down to the bunkhouse, grabbed Paley as he was coming back from the still and dragged him up to the blind. Whistler handed him the field glasses and gave him a quick pass-down.

“This truck could be the decoy. If we’re too busy paying attention to the truck, somebody could sneak up on us. I want you to check out all approaches. Watch the road, watch the sky. Ignore the truck. Me and Lightning will take care of it.” Paley nodded, rubbing tired eyes. Whistler gave him a stern look. “You’ve got our back, right?”

Paley straightened up, looking more awake. “Yes, sir!”

Whistler hurried down the path, pebbles and dirt skittering from beneath his feet. He didn’t think it was a decoy, but it paid to be sure. After all, they’d just blown up some emir’s load of swag, and that emir might be a touch unhappy about that. That pickup truck, it moved with purpose. It knew where it was going.

In the early morning light, Whistler broke into a trot. He wanted to catch the truck on the road, before it got to the bunkhouse. If there was shooting and other unpleasantness, the farther from the boys, the better. It would give them a chance to slip away. Of course, if Whistler got himself perforated or captured by a buttload of the Prophet’s troops, that would mean the boys were going to be led by Gordon, which was its own death sentence, just slower. Well, a man can’t be in two places at once, so Whistler jogged on, the Baldwin held loosely in front of him.

He didn’t look around as he ran. He knew Lightning was out there somewhere, moving like a shadow, pacing him, flitting through the scrub and mesquite. Hell, she was probably ahead of him already.

When he saw the tall cloud of dust, puffed out and swaying from side to side like the tail of a scared cat, he slowed to a walk, a little winded. The sound of the truck’s laboring engine told him little. The engine whined and strained. Which meant it wasn’t running on gasoline, probably on poor-grade ethanol or methanol. That didn’t guarantee it wasn’t Caliban, but pointed in that direction.

He found a place he liked, at the bottom of a rise. The truck would have to come over the rise and into the morning sun. Whistler would be at the bottom, in a dim depression. They’d be sun-blind for a second, and it would give Whistler the time to decide whether they were going to live or not. He stood in the middle of the road, finger on the trigger, thumb flicking restlessly to the safety.

The engine noise on the other side of the rise got fainter and then grew stronger. They were almost upon him. The front of the old Chevy poked over the crest of the rise. As Whistler expected, it was a beater from the late sixties. They were easier to convert, and their ignition systems were impervious to the EMP weapons that the Chinese had exploded over the West Coast in the first couple of weeks of the war. The white paint on the truck was scraped and faded. Flaking Bondo along the left front fender. Whistler recognized the truck, but didn’t relax his grip on the Baldwin.

He lifted a hand. It could have been a command to stop, or a friendly hello. Whistler let the driver decide what it was. The truck slowed, skidded a little in the powdery dirt. When it stopped, the plume of dust swept forward and covered Whistler. He squeezed his eyes shut against the cloud, the Baldwin centered on the cab of the truck.

Whistler opened his eyes a slit. The dust was past, but he was coated in the reddish-brown stuff. He’d need a bath, damn it. Irritably, he gestured with his rifle. “Out.”

The driver’s side window rolled down. A hand reached through and pressed the outside door latch. The door opened with a protesting creak. “Hey, Whistler,” the man said, stepping out.

“What’s up, Gunny?” Whistler moved over at an angle, checking the cab. There was another man in the cab, his hands studiously in plain sight on the cracked dashboard. “Is that Red with you?”

“Yep.”

“You don’t usually get out this way, Gunny.”

Gundersen grinned. He had been a good-looking kid in high school, smart, but kind of lazy. The years since hadn’t been kind and the war didn’t help. Now he was paunchy, but had retained a good-looking face and full head of hair. That made up for his other decline, a little. He had been a dentist, of all things, and still did some teeth work. Whistler never used his services, remembering Gundersen’s jackassed self-assurance from back in the day. He’d been cruel to the homely girls who liked him, and for some reason, Whistler held a grudge against Gunny on their behalf.

“Brought you fellas a present,” Gundersen said, walking toward the rear of the truck. Whistler cut his eyes over at Red, gave a quick jerk of the head. Red climbed out silently. He was Gundersen’s running buddy, tall, with no chin and a face that tended to acne. Along with the rapidly thinning hair, he was thoroughly unlovely.

Keeping Red in front of him, Whistler walked around to the back of the truck. Lighting was already there, like she’d risen out of the ground. Like so many others before had been, some fatally, Gunny was startled to see her. She ignored him and was staring at the ground in disgust.

A length of chain about ten feet long was shackled to the bumper. Something else was shackled to the other end of the chain. It had probably been a human being. With the skin and major muscles shredded off and the body now caked with dirt from the jeep trail, it was hard to be sure. That one leg was missing below the knee made identification harder.

Lightning spoke. “Who is it?”

“Lopez,” Gunny said easily.

“Which one?” Lightning asked.

“Does it matter?” Red interjected.

Lightning lifted her eyes to him. It was as if she’d poked stiff fingers into his throat. He stepped back, blinking.

“Anselmo,” Gunny said defensively. “He was trading with the Caliban.”

Whistler sighed. “You saw this yourself?”

Gunny didn’t exactly answer the question. “Everybody knew it. A Mexican, trading with the ’Ban. He was probably working for them, too.”

“Did anybody talk to him?” Whistler lowered the Baldwin, flicked the safety on.

Red recovered the power of speech. “We did.” Something in Lightning’s face made him add, “And so did Gordon.”

That was answer enough. Whistler felt Lightning’s eyes on him. He turned heavily to face the two men. “You put him in the back of your truck and take him back to his people. They’ll want to bury him.” Red, never the more insightful of the two, started to open his mouth. Lightning lifted her Baldwin. It was ugly and homemade, but anyone who’d seen them in action knew how destructively fatal they could be at short range. Red shut his mouth. Whistler went on, his voice growing quieter. Somehow, the lower the volume, the more dangerous he sounded. “Now, I don’t want to see you two out to the ranch anymore, ever. You forget you ever knew anybody is out here. And this,” he pointed at the remains of the dead man on the ground, “this doesn’t happen again. There’s rules. You understand?”

The other two men exchanged glances. This was apparently not the response they had been expecting.

Lightning spoke up. “Lonesome George told us the way it would go.” She spoke like a teacher, but she held the rifle like the killer she was. “We don’t live like it’s the Dark Ages. We don’t live like the Caliban. Nobody takes the Law into their own hands.”

“The Law!” Red made it sound like a dirty word.

Gunny cut in, “You and Whistler think you’re the Law here?”

Now it was Lightning who was ready to flare. “You don’t know anything about the Law. It keeps us from turning into animals.”

There were a lot of things Whistler would rather have been doing on a beautiful morning than standing over a dead man, smelling the chemical stink of the ethanol fumes, and talking to these two dim bulbs who were too important to join the fight full-time, but somehow had managed to find the time to accost an unarmed grocer and drag him for miles behind their pickup truck. He squatted down by the trailer hitch, unhooked the chain and dropped it in the dirt. “Go home,” he said flatly. “And remember what I said. You two morons don’t come out to the ranch anymore.”

“That chain cost me five gallons of eth,” Gunny protested.

“Shoulda thought about that before you dragged Lopez to death with it,” Whistler said from the ground. “You boys are getting on my last nerve. Get out of here.”

Whistler and Lightning watched the two men climb sulkily into the truck and edge it around. To punctuate the beauty of a morning gone to hell, when Gunny backed the truck to the second part of the three-point turn, it bogged in the loose dirt at the edge. Whistler and Lightning had to push the stupid bastards back onto the firmer ground of the road just to get them out of their sight.

As he stood on that dirt road, covered with more dust, Lightning beside him and the dead grocer at his feet, watching the truck bounce away over the ruts, Whistler wondered how much longer they would have to keep fighting. He wondered how much longer he could keep fighting.

“So, we’re gonna take him home,” Lightning said unnecessarily.

“Yep.”

It had been three years since the Big Bang.