Whistler (2)

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

“He wasn’t shot,” she announced.

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

“I’ll get a bag.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well?” he asked her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the door of his shed, Whistler sat on the steps and wiped the dust off his feet. He hung the scrap of blanket next to the door and went inside. He’d only be able to sleep five or six hours. By then the day would be too hot, and the room too stifling. He made sure his Baldwin was loaded before setting it between the bed and wall. He put a Glock under his pillow and then, still naked, lay down on the cot.

A breeze drifted in from the west and it was cooling him off as he lay there. Out of some old, old habit of modesty, he pulled the near-transparent sheet across his groin. It was one more of those funny but not-funny things, the way we grew accustomed to certain behaviors. He’d just walked around naked in front of Lightning, there was a dead store-keeper under the tool shed, and yet, he couldn’t relax until that thin piece of sheet covered his crank. Well, he had grown accustomed to other new things, too. He couldn’t sleep without a pistol under his pillow anymore, either.

Damn Caliban, he thought drowsily. Rat bastards.

And then he was asleep.

As tired as he was, he shouldn’t have dreamed. But he did. He was dreaming of Before.

He’d heard so many different things about dreams, all of it contradictory. They were prophetic; they were his subconscious cleaning house. He was all the characters in the dreams; he was only one of the characters in the dream.

Back Before, he’d had a dream that repeated itself—some kind of Terminator figure was chasing him through a dark dreamscape. Whistler wasn’t one of those people who dreamed in vivid detail. He seemed to generate images that were more about feelings than specifics. That dream was familiar enough, understandable enough after a while to become boring, and he’d sleep right through it. Oh yeah, he was in an unsatisfying relationship, bring on the Terminator trying to catch him. His new boss was a jerk; his marriage was torment, then Hello, Arnold.

After the Big Bang, his dreams changed along with everything else. There wasn’t a lot of time for reflection after the Big Bang, no sitting around at Starbucks and pondering the existential questions of life, love, and career. Every now and then, after Anne had recruited him to work for Valley Forge, maybe on a long night watch when he was forced to sit in one place and his only job was to be there and be aware, and he wasn’t immediately scrambling to stay alive or find food or fix a broken-down old car or distill more eth; then he had the time to think, and possibly to remember.

There was a lot not to remember, most of it very ugly. If it wasn’t the end of the world, it was damn sure some kind of dress rehearsal. Things died. That was the sum of it. Death was everywhere. Plants. Animals. People. They all fell, either from the nuclear winter, which lasted nearly eight months, the first time, or from hunger, or from the bizarre plagues that swept irregularly across the population.

He dreamed of the people from Before. The ones who were dead. Not just his family, not just his friends. How about that Eskimo-looking lady who’d worked the bakery at Albertson’s for years? Why would he dream of her? Or the librarian: older, kind of goofy-looking good-hearted guy with glasses and a gap-toothed smile. Yet he dreamed of them, and others like them, now just memories and soon to be memories of memories.

Whistler awoke about 2 pm sweating, with a dull headache and an equally dull ache of sadness in his heart. That dream always brought on the blues.

He sat up in bed, mostly to get away from the sweaty sheets. Over by the sink was a plastic pitcher. He splashed a little of the brownish water on his face and patted it on the back of his neck. Standing, he felt a little better. He was still fuzzy, and there wasn’t anything waiting for him outside that couldn’t wait a while longer. He pulled on a pair of jeans and an “I WON AT THE EXCALIBUR” tee-shirt, and then dropped heavily into the creaking wooden office chair.

The dream was about failure, he could figure that out on his own. No prophecy there. Even though everyone had come home all right last night, the fact they’d come back with nothing remotely useful made it a failure as far as he was concerned.

Hell, he hadn’t even given a full report to Valley Forge. The nonsense with Red and Gunny had distracted him. The kids at the Forge had probably moved again, which would make reaching them difficult. They had to keep on the move, the Caliban and the other Caliphates would dearly love to put the Forge out of business. The ’ban favored the sock puppets currently operating in what was left of DC, pretending that they were still a legally constituted government while they danced to the Imams’ tune, but most of the OCs would ignore them. Valley Forge was the closest thing to the real United States that was left, and even that was largely a virtual presence. Anne had mentioned a “raggedy-ass Navy” out of Hawaii once, but she hadn’t known much about it. Valley Forge, at least, kept the idea of a USA alive, encouraging and directing strikes against the invaders.

If there was one way the Caliban had stepped on their own dicks, it was their willingness to whack their own people when they stepped out of line. It resulted in a populace that wasn’t deeply inclined to independent thought, and it also meant a lot of the best and brightest, the pain-in-the-ass question-askers, ended up minus a head.

The simple bastards wanted to return to the time of Mohammed. They didn’t have personnel available to keep the complex electronics working…so while they had the edge in numbers and scores of fanatic kids willing to martyr themselves to go to a paradise where they could get a drink and get laid, the Americans still had technicians to run the aging equipment that linked and directed the resistance.

Whistler doubted there were more than a dozen Caliban planes capable of flight in the whole Caliphate of California, anymore. It was one of the things that made it possible for resistance groups, like his, to keep fighting. Back in the day, a little sat imagery, a little drone recon, and the only warning his boys would get that they’d been found would be the sound of the ranch being blown to splinters around them. Now, as long as they kept moving, kept switching their trails, they had a chance to make the Saudis (and the Malaysians and Syrians and Filipinos and Indonesians and whoever else the Imams imported) pay for what they did.

The real problem, though, worried at Whistler, like a splinter buried too deep in his hand to reach with a needle, and one that he didn’t feel like cutting out of his flesh. The problem of what they were fighting for.

On one hand, people like him were fighting for payback. To make sure the Islamic fascists couldn’t walk the stolen streets of America without fearing for their lives, to make sure when they went to their confiscated mansions they didn’t sleep peacefully in looted beds. To share with them the redolent benefits of mass graves. To make those scumbags pay for what they did to our country and our people.

But what were the kids fighting for, his kids? Were they fighting for their iPods and MTV and wireless Internet? Did they even care about the freedom to go where they wanted, to worship any God or no God if they wished? Hell, what about the freedom to read what you wanted, to think what you wanted, even if it made you a horse’s ass?

At least his kids, his young men, knew about the flagrant freedoms they’d so lately taken for granted. But how soon will that generation be killed off? He hadn’t buried as many of these boys as he should have, he’d had to leave too many behind in red, ragged pieces at the side of the road while the rest of them hauled ass for daylight. Far too many had died.

The ones afterwards, they’d be accustomed to this life of less. They’d get tired of the running and the hiding. They’d question it, “What’s in it for me, old guy?” They wouldn’t see the need for dying, for sacrifice, even. They would be slowly settling, assimilating. Would the parents on both sides be the ones who resist that change? he wondered. Will it become Resistance Romero and Jihadi Juliet? Who will become the marginalized fanatics—people like Whistler who claimed allegiance to a country long destroyed? Would they be “Christians,” or just “Americans,” (not so far from Armenians, another group and nation that was wiped out by a country with a long Islamic history) fighting a futile battle for something that’s already gone and probably can never be recaptured?

“Goddamn,” Whistler said aloud. He was feeling morbid this morning. He’d have to do something to snap out of it. Action, he’d found, was a way to put fear at bay. Fear was what you imagined might happen. Taking action gave you a chance to find out what would happen.

Likely, nobody was in the communications shed. “Comms bag” was probably more accurate, since it would all fit into one old duffel. They just had a military-issue sat phone, a laptop, chargers for both, a web cam, the scrambler token, and an incendiary grenade. The token was the most important. It was mil-spec, with a battery life estimated to be seven years. It was a small, flat disk of plastic, with an LCD that randomly generated a set of thirteen digits every ten seconds. The thirteen digits somehow synced with Valley Forge’s portable server, and allowed them to link up. They could afford to lose anything to the Caliban except the token. The token was strapped to the incendiary grenade and if they were in danger of being captured or overrun, the pin was pulled while the comms kid held the release handle in one sweaty hand. It was a deadman switch, after that. When the kid was dead, the grenade went off, and there went the token.

Whistler dressed and made his way over to the main ranch building, squinting in the afternoon sun, his boots scuffing in the dust. He’d have to make the rounds of the blinds, after he had a cup of coffee.

The kitchen was stifling, as usual. It took up almost one fifth of the floor space of the building, with an island in the middle, large sinks and oversized oven and stove. Someone before them had jiggered the gas lines to work on bottled propane. They had hot meals as long as they could liberate propane canisters from the bomb makers, many of them US military veterans with combat IED experience.

The windows were open and Cookie was sitting beside one, fanning himself with a towel. He might have been a fat man, once, but now he was just medium. Medium in height, weight, and blondness. He wore thick glasses, though, which sometimes fogged up when he was leaning over the stove or the fire in winter. Whistler thought Cookie had been a butcher before. The man’s fingers were cross-hatched with small white scars.

“Afternoon,” Cookie said. He had a voice like gravel in a garbage disposal. A scar down one side of his throat. Cancer had taken one of his vocal cords, back Before. Still, Cookie loved his cigarettes and smoked whatever he could get. The kids knew that, and if they could snake a pack of smokes on one of the raids, they could trade it for special treats. Cookie was a magician in the kitchen, when he wanted to be.

“Coffee?” Whistler asked.

Cookie snapped the towel toward the stove, where a very old kettle sat.

“Is it the good stuff?” Whistler asked dubiously. They’d liberated a case of vintage Starbucks from an emir’s convoy a few months back, and had been dribbling it out slowly.

“Just for you, boss,” Cookie said.

He ignored the “boss” comment. He wasn’t the boss. He was just the oldest and sneakiest, which meant he knew a little more about distributing death and destruction to the ’ban.

It was too damned hot to drink the coffee in the kitchen, so he took his mug and walked outside. There was a porch around the ranch house, and he sat on the edge of the porch in a shady spot on the east side. He was about halfway through the coffee when Lightning settled down beside him, soundless as a cat.

“We’ve been here a long time,” she said, taking the cup out of his hand and helping herself. That was Lightning, no hello, just right down to business.

“Yep,” he agreed. “If the two dimwits felt comfy enough to drive out here yesterday…”

“Prophet’s Chosen could get here just as easy,” she nodded, taking a swig of coffee.

“We’re running out of places to hole up,” he replied, taking the mug when she offered it back. “Where should we go?”

She was quiet for a while. “We have to take Anselmo home tonight. Let’s go see the Chief.”

The Chief of the White Mountain Apaches. “They don’t want anything to do with us.”

“Caliban rides them harder than you white boys ever did.”

Whistler couldn’t argue that. Multiculturalism and diversity were just words in the Apostate’s Dictionary, as far the Imams were concerned, and the Prophet’s Chosen were sent after the renegade Indians regularly. But in some ways, the Big Bang was the best thing that had happened to the Apache in a hundred years. They’d retained some skills from their wilder days, and more than a few of them were damn fine cowboys and woodsmen. When things went to crap, a bunch of them banded together, bolted from the rez and headed for higher ground. They were tough hombres, and they wanted to be left the hell alone.

“Yeah,” he nodded. “White Mountain ’pache is like the final exam for the PC.”

She was quiet now. She could get spooky quiet sometimes. Finally she said, “Something to think about.”

He would. When she said something, only a fool would ignore her. Speaking of fools, there was Gordon, walking toward them. Whistler looked down at his empty mug. “I need a vacation,” he muttered.

Lightning queried him with a raised eyebrow. He didn’t reply, just watched Gordon stump over to them. Gordon was one of those people whose “graceful” gland had been removed at birth. He approached them the way he walked through the world: legs stabbing down, driving his feet into the ground, upper body stiff, hands held out from his sides like they were alien objects grafted onto his arms. When Whistler imagined the man in his former life, in a coat and tie selling insurance, he saw a deeply lonely and completely clueless man who couldn’t understand why no one liked him. For a moment, he actually felt bad for the silly son of a bitch.

Gordon took a stance in front of Whistler. “Lopez was trading with La Raza. You know they talk to the ’ban.” In his own way he was abrupt as Lightning, but for some reason it bothered the hell out of Whistler when Gordon did it.

“That’s what I hear,” Whistler grunted, offering no opinion one way or the other.

“Folks need to know there’s a line you don’t cross,” Gordon insisted. Oh, Jesus, if this was how he sold insurance, he must’ve starved. It was like he was reading from a card someone else had written out for him.

Whistler hated confrontations…what a waste of time and energy. He stood up, brushed his hands on his jeans. “There is a line you don’t cross, Gordon,” he said, looking down at the other man. He knew that word of this discussion would get around soon; in a small camp like this you couldn’t help it. People just talked. It lightened the dullness of routine watches and cleaning weapons. Even so, he lowered his voice. He didn’t need to humiliate the man in front of God and everybody. “Gord, let’s just work together to get the job taken care of, okay? You can’t encourage this kind of thing.”

Lightning hadn’t moved from the porch. Whistler wondered what it must be to be her, always on the alert, treating every situation like a battle about to happen. She stayed where she was so she could watch all the approaches. She had his back, even here. She spoke as quietly as Whistler. “Keep doing it, and pretty soon we’ll all be at each other’s throat. Caliban would love that…just sit back and let us kill each other off.”

Gordon’s gaze bounced over to her. She had made him lose track of where he was in his mental cue cards. She smiled at him. It was the kind of smile the Yemenis might have seen on her face when she swiveled the 50-cal at them. “Don’t do it again, Gord,” Whistler told him. “That’s an order. Don’t cross me on this.”

Gordon stood for a confused minute, his fingers moving restlessly, not sure what to do, then stumped away toward the kitchen.

“Wanna check the blinds?” Lightning asked, watching Gordon.

“Yeah.”

After dark, they loaded Anselmo’s body into the back of an old VW bug and drove to town. The old VWs were used by people everywhere. Easy to work on, simple condenser and points ignition, they hadn’t been fried by EMP in the first days of the war. The roads and streets were littered with the expensive and useless hulks of SUVs and Minivans, all of them inert as boulders. Converting their electronics was a long, arduous process that more often than not produced a lumbering behemoth of a vehicle that shuddered and convulsed its way down the road, with a tendency to backfire flaming flatulence. You never passed an old Bug or any car from earlier than about 1972 sitting unattended on the side of the road. They were in use, and used hard.

This VW was off-center; one of the tires was larger than the others. It made you feel like you were moving sideways, and you had to constantly correct your course to compensate for the wheel. There was no driving along with one hand on the wheel and a beer in the other.

Anselmo’s store was on the far side of town. It was a good forty-five-mile drive to town, and then maybe another twenty to the store. The roads were breaking up, unmaintained these last three years, and with no working streetlights, it would take at least two hours to get there.

“You should wait here, watch the kids,” Whistler said after they draped a blanket over the body bag. Lightning nodded. She had mastered the art of making a nod look like Hell, no! “All right,” he assented. “No telling what stupidity Gordon is going to get up to while we’re gone.”

“We’ll check on Gordon when we get back.” She shrugged, and then loaded her weapons into the car. Shotgun, pistols, and Baldwin shoved under the body bag. Anybody who tried to jack this Bug would find it had a most unpleasant bite.

“After we talk to Anne,” he replied, climbing into the old Beetle. He’d sent her a quick message early this afternoon via Valley Forge. She’d been in the county, and would meet them not far from Anselmo’s store. Her cover was that of a traveling curandera. The ignorant called that being a witch, but it was just a folk-healer, herbs and such, and she wasn’t half bad at it.

Weapons in easy reach, Lightning settled into her seat next to him. “Ready, Miss Daisy?” he asked. She looked at him blankly. Ah, yeah, she was too young to get it. He turned the key, patted the accelerator. The engine coughed and caught. He listened for a minute. It sounded strained to him. “Gotta check the still,” he said. The eth mix was off, and it would make the engine run hot. Fortunately, it was evening, the air was cooler, and they weren’t going far. But if they were running for their lives, bad eth could overheat an engine, seize it right up and deliver you into the hands of your oppressors. Lightning didn’t reply and he didn’t repeat himself. She’d remember. That woman never forgot a thing.

He eased the gearshift into first, and they slowly pulled away from the ranch.

It was strange to drive after sundown. Out here, away from the larger cities, the towns had unreliable access to the electrical grid, and most shut it down at night. Where the darkness would have been softened by the glow from streetlights and neon and cozy lamps in front rooms, now the sky was a deep black, with stars burning like slashes in the velvet. He’d not really seen much of the stars, growing up in the cities, and he wasn’t often able to give them much attention in his current circumstances. Caliban attacks came from the ground, not from the air, so he rarely looked to the skies.

Lightning did a strange thing. She reached over and turned the knob on the radio. This Bug had been mostly stock and so it had the old-school AM-only radio. The hiss of static filled the Volkswagen. Out here, that wouldn’t have been so unusual. Miles from anywhere, the local AM stations would have been blown out at night; it was one of the electrical spheres around the earth reacting to the solar waves, Whistler remembered that much. That was why you’d only pick up the hugely powerful stations after sundown. “Broadcasting with 50 Thousand Watts!” one of them had proclaimed in his youth. Lightning idly spun the dial, moving from 530 up toward 1500.

It gave Whistler a weird, disconnected feeling. For a minute he felt as if he were floating. In the darkness, in the old car rattling along, with the static and the sewing machine roar of the engine, it seemed so normal. This could have been him thirty years ago, in an old beater VW; out on a date with the gal he trusted most in the world. And it was still all ahead of them: their personal stories, their dreams achieved or broken, success or failure. And ahead of them, too, would be the bombs, the invasion, the fall, the plagues, and all the other events that had rendered everything in their personal Before into gall and wormwood.

He’d never had such a sense of vertigo, such a sense of coming unmoored in time. He tightened his hands on the cracked steering wheel. Lightning must have had a similar sensation. She looked out the window at the passing darkness, then she reached over and snapped off the radio.

“What did you want to be when you grew up, Whis?” she asked, not looking at him.

That caught him off guard. It was nothing he’d thought about in a couple of lifetimes. “Uh…veterinarian, I guess.” He felt her gaze. “I really liked animals.” He noticed how he said “liked,” not “loved.” Love was too dangerous a word for these times, it seemed. “I worked for a vet in high school.”

“You’re smart. You could have done it.”

“Hated having to put animals down.” The words felt strange and awkward in his mouth. It was like speaking an ancient language, something from another world. Euphemism had no place in this life. “Which seems pretty dumb, when you consider how many men I’ve killed.” How many had it been? When he was a younger man, young and dumb, he’d sometimes counted the number of women he’d slept with. There was no counting the dead men—he never wanted to face that number.

“You were just a kid.” Her voice was soft.

He was concentrating on the interstate ahead of them. This far from the major population centers, the roads hadn’t been choked with traffic that day and in some ways I-10 was still passable. The gangs and barrio boys mostly worked the remains of the cities, so while the possibility of an ambush remained, it was tolerably low. He didn’t want to impale them on the rusting hulk of a semi, if he could help it, and so he almost missed what she said next.

“I spent five years over there.”

Over where? he wondered, his eyes on the twin beams of sickly yellow light from the headlamps. Wasn’t anything out here except… “You worked at the prison?”

“I didn’t work there.”

“Hmmm,” he grunted. What the hell was he supposed to say?

“I didn’t want to be anything when I grew up,” she said. Her talking, this was important. He knew it, so he drove as quietly and carefully as he could, making no sudden moves, downshifting with languorous care. “Whenever I thought about growing up, all I saw was a big blank.”

“None of us saw this, that’s for sure,” he offered.

“I’d probably be dead if I wasn’t in prison. Mr. G—the Warden—he turned me around, showed me a better way.”

Whistler had heard about the local prison, the Alamo, being pounded into the ground by the invaders in the early days of the war, so there was no sense in suggesting they go pay the Warden a visit. Taking prisoners was not a real high priority for the ’ban, in the past or the present.

She turned to look at him. “You ever get tired of this life, Whistler?”

Now there was a question that had a million answers. “Yeah,” he said. And then, “No. I mean…well, at least what we’re doing means something.”

Her silence was skepticism itself. Where was this coming from? he wondered. Aloud he said, “I did insurance claims adjusting back Before. How important was that, really, in the big scheme? We spent as much time looking for reasons not to pay as we did figuring out what to pay.” There wasn’t any honor in it, he realized. “It wasn’t worth a damn, really.”

“Maybe to the person being paid,” she offered.

“Maybe,” he conceded, a bit grumpily. “But it didn’t make the world any better. If I never showed up for my job again, it wouldn’t make any difference.”

She was nodding, slowly. “But we make a difference.”

“Hell, I don’t know that.” He risked a glance over at her. She was looking off toward the north, in the direction of the ruined prison. If she saw it, it was only with her memories. “I guess it makes a difference to me. To know I didn’t just roll over and wet myself when the Caliban came in.”

“I know things I wish I didn’t,” Lightning said, her voice low. He wasn’t sure she was even talking to him anymore. “I’m good at some wet work…and I don’t want to be.” She straightened up, turned back to him. “You know what I want?”

He wasn’t stupid enough to even try to guess. “What?”

“I want my innocence back. I don’t want to know anymore.” She gestured at the body bag in the back. “I don’t want to know what it looks like when you drag a man to death. Or how long somebody kicks in their own blood after you’ve cut their throat.”

Now it was his turn to nod silently. There was nothing he could add to any of that. Combat, both stand-up and sneaky style, reminded you over and over that at the bottom, we’re bags of meat. After a while, the nine million ways a person could end up dead stopped being surprising or worthy of comment. That knowledge eroded you, somehow, changed how you looked at people. It made you kind of forget that inside those bags of meat were plans and hopes, all the ephemeral, intangible stuff that made us human.

“I found a lump,” she said. Whistler thought maybe he was getting stupid in his advancing years. He was having trouble keeping up with her conversation. “A lump,” she repeated. “In my breast.”

Oh. “Damn,” he said, voicing the first inadequate thing that came to his mind. Nine million ways you can end up dead, and some of them were a lot slower and more ugly than others, what with the medical system blown to hell. Thank you, bin Laden. “Maybe Anne has something,” he suggested.

She sat stiff in the seat, unwilling to acknowledge that hope shared space in her breast with what might be a killer. “Maybe.”

It had to be a bitch, he thought. This tough, capable woman…afraid of nothing and her own body turns on her. He took his hand off the stick shift, reached over and thumped her thigh clumsily. “It’ll be okay,” he told her.

She didn’t respond. He lifted his hand to her shoulder, kneaded the muscles of her back. “It’ll be okay,” he said, and this time, he believed it.

Biting her lip, Lightning leaned against him, and he felt the tension in her drain away as she sobbed against his chest. He couldn’t drive like that so he pulled over near a clump of scrub, killed the engine and the lights.

As they sat there in the dark, she wept silently, hitting his chest with one clenched fist. “It’s not fair,” she’d gulp out, and then hit him again.

He put both arms around her and rocked her. “I know,” he murmured, over and over.

She looked up at him, her eyes shiny with tears. Then she was kissing him.

It was a hell of a surprise, the last thing he would have thought or expected. And that he was kissing her back, well, to be honest he’d never ever thought about that, either. She wasn’t some chick, she was Lightning, the bad and black force of nature that put fear into the hearts of invaders everywhere, the fastest and deadliest person he’d ever known. But there they were, clamped onto each other like drowning swimmers, and they pulled each other down into those long-forgotten waters.

If either of them had been any bigger they couldn’t have done it, but somehow she wriggled atop him in the cramped confines of the VW, her mouth still pressed to his. It had been a long time since Whistler had been with a woman, and it was over for him in less than a minute.

“Ah, jeez, I’m sorry…” he started to say, embarrassed as a high school kid.

She took his face in both her hands, still moving, breathing against his mouth, “It’s okay, just hold me,” and she was kissing him, and damned if he didn’t catch fire again. This time the fire burned long and hot for both of them, and they finally were still, clothes scattered around or only half off, windows fogged up, Whistler’s arms around Lightning.

They were still there an hour later when the Caliban patrol found them.

The headlights coming up behind them jolted them into awareness. Lightning eased off his lap, and they both quickly skinned into their clothes as the headlights slowed and stopped.

There was a cautious rap on the window. It was with a Kalashnikov barrel. It took Whistler back to an equally awkward moment in high school, his pants around his knees and a girl a year older than him hurriedly pulling her blouse down. It might have been funny, in some other place and some other life; that is, if he didn’t have a dead guy in the backseat and illegal weapons stashed throughout the car. And the cops in his hometown weren’t likely to string him up by his ankles and beat the soles of his feet until the blood flowed.

Whistler rolled down the window, all the while thinking of Bonnie and Clyde. They had died in a car and he heard that Bonnie screamed like a wounded panther. He didn’t want Lightning to go out like that. “Yeah?” he said with as much innocence as he could muster.

“Why you here?” the shadowy form asked with a heavy accent. Prophet’s Chosen, no doubt. The desert wind was blowing outside, and through the open window he could hear the footsteps of people moving around the car.

“Cooling off the engine,” Whistler replied. He said it slowly, so the soldier could process the information. “Engine hot.”

Someone shined a flashlight in from the passenger side. It illuminated Lightning clearly. Whistler said a quick prayer than none of the Yemeni troops had told their story about the black genie, yet. Lightning sat still, her clothes a little disarrayed, and, honest to God, she looked embarrassed. Somebody outside said something, and there was laughter.

The man at Whistler’s side seemed to relax and Whistler thought they were going to get away with it, but the flashlight moved to the backseat, and the beam froze on the body bag.

“What that?” said the soldier, no longer relaxed.

Remembering what he’d once heard about three ways to lie, he choose option three, which was to tell the truth, but to tell it so badly nobody would believe him. “Dead man.”

They were apparently talking at cross-purposes, because the soldier said, “Bag. Bad bag.” Oh, for the love of Mary, they were honked on the fact there was a FEMA bag in the backseat. If they decided to move it, or check it in anyway, they’d find the Baldwin.

Lightning lifted her hands, and held her nose. “Stinky.”

They both sensed the hesitation outside. Keeping her hands in plain sight, moving slowly, she reached into the back seat and unzipped the body bag.

Anselmo, poor bastard, had been ripening under the tool shed all day, and the undeniable funk of decomposition that filled the car was enough to make the soldier step back. She zipped the bag up again and sat back in her seat.

“Don’t keep bag,” the soldier said.

“We won’t,” Whistler promised.

The soldier barked something in his harsh language and the footsteps receded. They sat silently in the VW bug until the lights from the Chosen’s vehicles had faded.

“That was close,” Whistler said.

“Time to get moving,” Lightning added, rolling down her window, trying to vent the odor of the dead man from the car.

He started the engine and pulled out onto the otherwise deserted interstate. They drove in silence for a while, the roar of wind through the open windows dimming the opportunity for conversation. After about fifteen minutes, he was freezing. He closed the window, and she did the same. “Is there anything we need to talk about?” he said tentatively.

“Not here,” she replied. Then she gave what sounded very much like a giggle, jabbed a thumb over her shoulder. “Not in front of him.”

“Yeah, we don’t want to do anything personal in front of him.”

The sound of their laughter filled the car as they drove on. Lightning had a good laugh, full and rich, and he hoped he’d hear it again someday.

When they saw the little store and its small compound of homes, they sobered quickly. As he took a wide reconnaissance loop on the rutted dirt road around the adobe huts, Lightning checked her weapons and pulled the Baldwin out from beneath the body bag. She waited until they’d come to the darkest part of the road, well back from the store. She cracked the door open, stood on the running board, and then stepped off into the night, carrying her armory with her.

Whistler reached over, tugged the passenger door shut, then drove straight up to the store.

There was a flicker of light behind a largish glass window fronting the shop. He could see shadows moving behind the glass. Well, this was going to be interesting. To minimize his chances of being shot outright, he turned off the engine, opened the door and stood behind it, his hands in plain sight on the roof of the car. “Inside the store. This is Whistler.”

A voice spoke from the side of the store, from the shadows about where he expected he’d hear it. “Just stand there, Whistler.” The owner of the voice stepped out into the light, carrying a shotgun. It was Charlie, one of the Salazar kids, maybe fifteen, recognizable by the family flat nose and the scarring on his face from the Red Flu. Charlie called out, “Está desarmado. Salgan de ahí.” He’s unarmed. Come on out. Whistler didn’t react, just stayed still. Fine with him if they thought he didn’t understand the Spanish.

The front door to the grocery store creaked, and people began filling the space, looking out at him. Their eyes weren’t friendly.

“I’ve got your uncle here,” he said, gesturing with his head toward the backseat of the Bug. At that, a couple of the women began to weep.

A hard voice cut through the weeping, and a broad-shouldered young man forced his way through the doorway onto the sidewalk. “You have the putas who did this?” Bennie. Shaved head gleamed in the lantern light from the room. What might have been shadows on his head and neck were tattoos, most of them jailhouse.

“Nope,” Whistler said evenly. “I wanted to bring Anselmo back to his folks.” Standing here felt a lot more dangerous than running at the machine guns on the semi last night. Combat had a strange predictable unpredictability: no matter the setting or situation, the other side was trying to kill you; you were trying to kill them. Here, there was no telling which way Bennie was going to land. He was a smart, tough kid who hadn’t decided who he hated more: the gringos or the Caliban. If what Red and Gunny said was true, these people had been trading with the ’ban, which did make them collaborators, and which called for some harsh penalties. Americans against Americans. Not for the first time, Whistler hoped bin Laden was roasting on a spit in a special part of Hell. “Give me a hand, Bennie; we’ll take your uncle inside.”

Bennie walked over to the VW stiffly, muscles in his jaw bunched. “I’m sorry about your uncle,” Whistler said quietly as he eased the body bag out of the backseat. Lowering his voice even more, he added, “Don’t let your aunt see him. It’s pretty awful.”

“She’s gonna want to see him, say goodbye,” Bennie mumbled back, his pain now more evident than his anger.

“Let’s you and me clean him up, then,” Whistler offered. “Then we’ll talk, okay?”

The younger man nodded, took the straps in his hands, and together, they carried the dead man inside.

It wasn’t the ugliest thing he’d ever done. Like so much after the Big Bang, it would have been tough to pinpoint the worst anything. But if asked, Whistler might have had to point to the Christian school that was torched by the Prophet’s Chosen. The children inside had the choice of burning to death or facing the automatic weapons outside. It was while cleaning up after that atrocity that he first met both Lightning and Anne, before Anne was a curandera and when Lightning was still Taneisha.

Trying to make what remained of Anselmo presentable was no picnic. He and Bennie took the bag around to a back room and laid it on an old metal table. They tied tequila-soaked bandanas over their mouths and noses and unzipped the bag.

The tough young kid turned his head away, then forced himself to stare down at his uncle. Whistler let him look. Bennie was hard, and he was probably a killer, but he hadn’t had a lot of experience with the flesh and blood consequences. It’s one thing to shoot at people from a distance or to gang stomp them in a pack, but it’s a whole ’nother game to see what was left after those kinds of deeds. He was glad, in a school-teacher kind of way, of how shaken the tough kid was. Bennie hurried over and opened a window on one wall, then the other. A clean breeze swept through the room.

Whistler reached into the body bag. All of Lightning’s hard work to get his hands clean this morning was going to waste. He lifted the pitiful remains and said, “Move the bag, put it at the foot of the table. You’re gonna need to burn that bag when we’re done…the Chosen will torch this house just for you having it, you hear?” Bennie nodded, and slipped the bag from beneath his uncle’s body.

He laid the body back on the table. “Bucket. Water. A blanket.” The nephew turned, barked some orders over his shoulder. Whistler had prepared a few bodies for burial in his time. There wasn’t a lot he could do for most of Anselmo, but he could wash off the blood and dirt, maybe stitch some of the skin back on his face.

When he was finished about an hour later, Anselmo looked like a cross between a mummy and rag doll. His body was tucked up neatly in a blanket that tended to disguise his missing limbs, and there were thick blue stitches across his face, holding it together. It didn’t look much like the cheerful man had in life, but he didn’t look like a hundred and fifty pounds of raw meat anymore.

Bennie had puked once quietly in the corner, and now he was swabbing that up. Whistler did a last wipe-down of the table with some water, bundled all of the rags into the body bag, and carried it over to Bennie. He took the bottle of tequila, poured it over their hands, tossed those rags in the bag. “Remember, you have to burn this,” he said, handing it to the nephew.

“’Kay,” Bennie said numbly. He opened a back door, set the bag outside. “I have to get Tia Victoria.”

Whistler nodded. “I can come back, you want some private time.”

Some of the old tough was reasserting itself. “No. You wait. We’ll talk soon.”

A shadow went by the window at Bennie’s back. Lightning. She’d been out there for a while. He didn’t like that. She was tough, but she wasn’t invulnerable. The desert could get damned cold at night. Besides, he didn’t like being ordered around by this hood. “I’ll wait another thirty minutes, then I’m gone.”

Bennie didn’t reply, just walked back into the front room. Whistler composed his face, and followed him solemnly.

The crowd of relatives was larger; there was barely space to walk. Small children, faces solemn and eyes sunken from malnutrition, lanky teen-aged boys, coltish, graceful teen-aged girls, more hard guys in their twenties and thirties, and the older men and women, prematurely aged by years of hard work Before, and further burdened by the even harder years afterwards.

Anne was there, too, a short woman with black hair and pale skin, dressed for travel in hiking boots and flannel shirt, a large backpack at her feet. She sat beside Victoria, the widow, empathy radiating from her dark eyes. She spared one glance for Whistler, and then refocused her attention on the bereaved woman.

He found an empty space along one wall and hunkered down there like the older guys, the farm workers. The men nodded at Whistler. He nodded back. The hard guys slouched and posed, more interested in looking tough and cool. That was okay. You reach a certain age, or a certain attitude, you see the wisdom in resting when you can, so you have the strength and energy when you need it. Whistler had a feeling he was going to need both before the night was over.

Bennie took his aunt’s arm, helped her to her feet. Anne was on her other side, and together the two of them walked with her. Out of respect, Whistler stood up when she passed. The low chatter in the front room fell away. For a long moment, expectant silence rippled across the room. Then there was a wail from the back.

He hated that. The sounds the survivors made were usually worse than those made by the dying and wounded.

A nearly bald man to his right spoke up. “Her kids were in L.A. when we got hit. He was the only thing she had left.”

There was nothing to say to that, so he nodded. Everybody had lost something or someone in the Big Bang. Then Bennie was standing in front of him, face dark with rage. “Let’s go outside and talk.”

Going outside made sense, Whistler knew. If he was going to be shot, the cleanup would be easier, and Bennie and his boys wouldn’t have to further upset their Aunt Victoria.

He kept his hands loose at his sides as he walked out to stand on the front walk. The Volkswagen was to his right, and the house was to his back. At least he’d be able to keep everyone in front of him.

Bennie got right up in his face. There were maybe five or six of the hard guys out there with him, but it was hard to tell since Bennie took up so much real estate in Whistler’s immediate line of sight. “Tell me who did this,” he said, quivering with anger. The muscles in his shaven head bunched.

“Got to ask you a few questions, first,” Whistler said evenly.

He never even saw the hand coming that grabbed him by the throat and slammed him against the wall. A knife appeared in Bennie’s other hand, close enough to shave Whistler. “I want names,” Bennie snarled.

“Uh-uh,” said a voice from the night, and that was followed by the unmistakable sound of a shell being racked into a chamber. Shotgun. Thanks to the movies, it was the universal call sign for “Think real hard about your next move.”

Bennie froze, breathing hard. The tough guys turned. Just over the big man’s shoulder, Whistler could see Lightning behind the bug, the barrel of the Baldwin across the roof pointing at Bennie and the shotgun pointed at the hard guys. “Your uncle just died,” Lightning said reasonably. “You want to make your aunt cry some more?”

The knife stayed where it was. “Whaddya wanna know?” Bennie spat.

Whistler lifted a slow hand, loosened the grip on his throat. “Somebody said your uncle was trading with the ’ban.”

The knife was lowered grudgingly. “Auntie Vic would have cut the nuts off anybody who traded with those cabrones. They killed her kids. She hates the ’ban.”

“Makes sense to me,” Whistler said. He couldn’t see the knife now, and he wanted to be sure he knew where it was. Lightning could take care of the hard guys, but if Bennie got belligerent, he was Whistler’s problem.

“This looks cozy,” an even voice said, off to his right. Anne had joined them in the front of the house. She was a short woman, but she stood with authority. “Can you put away your knife, Bennie? We all came here as friends.”

Bennie didn’t move, trying to do the emotional calculus. Impulse control and math, both of which he’d been terrible at all his life. He wanted somebody dead, but that black bitch had the drop on him and his posse.

Anne’s voice took on a harder edge. “Whistler didn’t have to bring your uncle back. He had to get past the Prophet’s Chosen to get here. Now put the knife away, kid.” Whistler noted she was well clear of Lightning’s line of fire. Anne might not want bloodshed, but she was realist enough to be ready to drop them where they stood. Unlike Bennie, her emotional math was clear and simple: anyone who was not against the Caliban was as good as working for them.

Bennie’s hidden hand moved, and then he stepped back from Whistler slowly. Lightning might kill him, but Anne…she might not cure them anymore.

Whistler kept himself from rubbing his neck. He coughed, then turned his head and spit. “Why would somebody do this to your uncle, Bennie, if he wasn’t trading with the ’ban?”

“It was money,” a new voice said. Auntie Victoria was standing beside Anne. Hellfire, might as well get the rest of the family out here and it would turn into the OK Corral. “Those two, they wanted to close down our store. Selmo wouldn’t do it.”

Hellfire, Whistler thought again. Just a strong-arm job. Red and Gunny, stupid bastards, pulling them away from the real fight for this petty nonsense.

Bennie looked at his aunt. “You knew who did this?”

“I don’t want you doin’ bad things no more, Bennie. You’re like my son, now. I don’t want to see my son go to hell for being a bad man.”

Anne said calmly, “We’ll take care of it, Bennie. Prometo.”

The nephew wasn’t ready to let go of it, yet. “La Raza will take care of it.”

One of the hard guys added, “Yeah, we get rid of them, then we get rid of the rest of you white pigs.”

Anne shook her head. “Who are you going to kick out first? The Castilians, the ones who came from Spain and invaded Mexico five hundred years ago? Then you get started on the Aztecs? Because you know what they did to the local people, the remains of the Mayans? So you, and whoever is left settles down out here in the middle of nowhere, and you can wait for the Apaches to come. Because they were here ten thousand years ago. If anybody owns this land, it’s them.”

Bennie and the tough guys weren’t even trying to keep up with her history lesson. They’d made up their minds, such as they were. “At some point,” Anne went on, “we have to stop blaming about the past, and deal with what’s happening now. Deal with the invaders who are killing our friends and neighbors.”

“Like the putas who killed Uncle Selmo,” Bennie said sullenly.

Maybe Tia Victoria had a little bruja in her, because she was standing beside Bennie before he or Whistler even saw her. She looked up at her nephew, her face blazing with fury. Then she slapped him. “What about the people you hurt, the people you killed? You, and them,” she gestured at the tough guys, “they turned our barrio into a toilet. You saw people pissing all over everything, so you just joined them. Selmo, he was more of a man than you. He didn’t make the world a worse place, he tried to build something, he helped people. You want to honor your uncle, you be like him.”

Bennie held his hand to his face where she’d slapped him, shock on his face. Victoria reached out and took Whistler’s hand. “For bringing my husband home, I thank you. Gracias, Señor Whistler.” Then she turned and walked back into the house.

In a level voice, Anne said, “I think we’re done here.”

Bennie nodded. He gestured, and the tough guys headed into the house, still looking darkly at Lightning. Her face never changed as she moved her weapons to follow them. Whistler put his hand on Bennie’s arm. “I will take care of this, Bennie. I have to.”

“Okay.”

“Your aunt needs you now, son,” Whistler added.

Anne looked up at the kid with compassion. “And we’re going to need you soon. We’ll need your leadership and your courage.”

Bennie just nodded again and Anne let it go. He stopped at the front door. “Thanks,” he said, not really looking at anyone. “For my uncle.” He closed the door quietly behind him.

Lightning kept the weapons ready. “Time for us to get on home,” Anne said. Her backpack was in the dirt by the Bug. She climbed into the backseat with her gear, and Whistler got behind the wheel. Lightning waited until the engine was running and Whistler had unrolled her window and opened the passenger door before she slipped inside, with the barrel of the Baldwin out the window. “That mouthy one might be stupid enough to come after us,” she said. No one in the car questioned her judgment.

Whistler backed away from the house for nearly a hundred yards, spun the wheel, and they bounced off into the night.

Anne talked as he drove. It was dangerous for all of them to be together for very long. The pain merchants mustered by the Prophet’s Chosen could get a stone to speak, whether the stone knew anything or not.

“We’ve got a big push coming soon,” she told them. “Valley Forge has identified five main centers of control.”

“All in big cities,” Lightning observed dryly.

“Or close to them,” Anne agreed. “The point is, outside of those cities, they have garrisons and patrols, but they don’t really have the citizens under control. Yet. They’ve just been exploiting the chaos and civil breakdown since the Big Bang.”

As she spoke, Whistler found himself marveling a little at her. She’d been this frou-frou lady, dressed in suits and getting fifty-dollar manicures Before. All of that went away when the Chosen had torched that school. Her two daughters had been inside, died in one of the horrible nine million ways. Now here was Anne, risking death every day, dedicated to driving the Caliban into the sea. You can never tell about people. Hell, look at that actor, Baldwin, and what happened to him.

“How are we going to do it?” he asked.

Anne paused before answering. He knew she was calculating how much she could tell him. Couldn’t be too much, otherwise if the Chosen caught him and began to peel him like an onion, no telling what he’d spill. “We’ve got a line on their weakness,” she said carefully. “What you two need to know is we’re hurling everybody at them this time.”

“Bennie, too?” Lightning asked, her eyes scanning the road ahead.

“Lots of Bennies. And the Apache are throwing in with us.” That was news.

“When?”

“Soon. Valley Forge will let you know.”

Good. He’d still have time to deal with those two skid marks, Red and Gunny. He would have to. You don’t give your word to a man like Bennie lightly.

Lightning turned in her seat, spoke suddenly. “Have you seen Lonesome George?”

In the rearview mirror, Whistler could see Anne nod.

“How’d he look?”

How could he look? Whistler wondered. His wife a prisoner, his daughters lost and probably dead, his country under the boot of invaders who considered the citizens already damned and in Hell and therefore worth less than a good stock animal. “He looked tired. But he was proud. Proud of you all.”

“I want to see him, just once before I die,” Lightning said.

“You’ll see him soon on Valley Forge. He’s going to give the order to attack.”

Whistler thought it was time to start making arrangements for the boys who would be left behind. It wouldn’t be a will, exactly, more like a bunch of suggestions. This wasn’t going to be a skirmish, a hit and run. They were going to go up against the enemy in their strongholds. The odds of coming home were against him, and he’d never been a lucky gambler.

“I should get out here,” Anne said.

They were on a deeply lonely stretch of the interstate, so dark even the stars seemed dim. Whistler eased the Bug onto the shoulder, left the engine running. Before Anne climbed out, she thumped him on the back of the head. “You watch your ass,” she told him. Lightning stood by the open passenger door. “And you take those herbs,” Anne told her, and hugged her.

Lightning got back inside the car, and Whistler dropped into gear and pulled away, leaving their leader standing by the side of the road, briefly bathed in a red glow from his taillights. In the rearview mirror, she looked almost demonic.

“How’s she do that?” Lightning wondered, not really looking for an answer. She was talking about the way Anne got around the country, contacting each cell, giving them orders and information, without really having a car or way to get there.

“Maybe she really is a witch,” he suggested.

“No more than I am.”

They drove in silence for a while, each with their own thoughts. Finally, Lightning spoke. “Too late to go see the Chief.”

He’d been thinking the same thing. A wise man didn’t stop by the Apache stronghold at night without plenty of warning and with good cause. There was something else, though. “Red and Gunny.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Rather do it at night.” The less people knew who the militia was, the better their chance of staying alive and keeping word from reaching the ears of collaborators.

“Uh-huh.”

“Tonight?”

She nodded. No more words were necessary.

The next morning, the townspeople found Gunny and Red hanging from the lamppost in front of the old post office. Both men’s hands were bound behind them and they were blindfolded. A red “C” had been painted on each man’s shirt, and a printed warrant of execution for actions supporting the efforts of the Caliban was pinned to their legs.

None of the citizens moved to cut them down. As a public service, they’d be left to hang for at least a day before being taken away and burned.

No one mourned their passing.

After taking a cold bath and scrubbing themselves roughly, Whistler and Lightning fell into his bed without a word an hour or two before dawn. His bed was small, but they curved themselves against one another and made it work. He’d covered the windows before they’d gotten into bed, and he hoped they’d sleep a long time.

He felt her shivering, and put an arm around her. She clutched it tightly, and slowly drifted off to sleep. He was glad she wasn’t one of those people who covered their fear with stupid wisecracks. He was sure she never felt fear going into battle. He did, and he wasn’t ashamed of it. It was a hell of a life, but at least he wasn’t one of the walking dead, stumbling through their days without hope or action. He wanted to make sure he lived before he died. And if he died fighting the ’ban, at least he was doing something.