The Big Bang (28 page)

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

“Problem with the water?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

“You want to see this,” he insisted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I guess.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus passed a year, seeking answers.

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

The Word document grew to over three hundred pages. Cut-and-paste copies of text, web pages, photos, graphics. Glancing over it ruefully one day, before her first cup of nearly-coffee, she would not have been surprised to find a section of the document with a banner that appeared to be in letters cut from newspaper headlines, crying out “Stop Me Before I Kill Again.”

But she kept going. It began to verge on a Zen koan for her—instead of the sound of one hand clapping, it was
How now, Al Q
? But the search for answers, Zen-like, was elusive. Everywhere she looked there were more examples, more stories, more evidence. Plenty of what, plenty of who, but no single, definitive “why.”

Then she found the photos.

She was goofing off, to be honest. The pounding recitation of political failures large and small, omissions, appeasement, outright lies, and capitulation would wear her down after a while. She ran across an archive of more lightweight sites, tracing down some academic appreciation of good old Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. One link led to another, and she found herself in The Drawing Room.

The Drawing Room, their pretentious name aside, had fancied themselves a mainstream site for the progressive, socially conscious crowd. Molly was able to while away a few pleasant minutes over the film reviews, remembering when there had been theaters to attend, and even dawdled over old gossip about people she could barely remember. A lot of the alleged peccadilloes had taken place in New York or Los Angeles, and the people she was reading about were most likely dead, which lent an especially piquant futility to the girlish feuds, squabbles about paternity, and rumors of homosexuality.

She found her way to the home page of the site and the momentary glow of pleasant reverie vanished. The site was filled with the predictable accusations of the Last President (back when he had merely been the forty-third man to hold the office). She sighed, noting the address of the site. She figured it would be useful for her increasingly fragmented research. She did a scan of the page, trying to decide which “report” to tackle first. The link to the photos was at the bottom of a long list of screeds and accusations, interspersed with personal laments about various writers' oppression by the forces of Republican darkness or manifestos about their liberation thanks to their embrace of illegal drugs and promiscuity (unless of course it ran them afoul of the forces of Republican darkness, in which case they would be writing a personal lament or a screed).

The photos: Abu Ghraib. She remembered the case. She'd been one of the people concerned about the torture. She seemed to recall that Ted Kennedy had windbagged about it, something along the lines of, “The torture chambers of Saddam Hussein have re-opened under United States management.”

She'd only seen one or two of the photos, not really having much interest in them at the time. According to the patriots at The Drawing Room, they were publishing this series on the events at the prison to highlight the failure of a democratic society to investigate documented abuses by its soldiers.

She began to read in a feverish fury. There was some trailer trash girl holding a leashed naked prisoner. It was tacky and it was stupid…obviously the people who'd taken the pictures were not members of Mensa. Male prisoners standing naked, or in uncomfortable positions, some with wires attached to their bodies. It was humiliating, it was ugly, some of it was obviously a criminal abuse of their authority (some poor woman prisoner in a cell flashing her perkies at the camera), but was it
torture
?

As far as she could tell, no one left Abu Ghraib without a head. Women prisoners were not raped as a matter of course, nor were the prisoners beaten with rods until their internal organs ruptured. But…The Drawing Room ran the story for months. She paged back in time. Abu Ghraib and the two hundred or so photos were linked on its home page day after day…yet, there were no balancing, compensating photos of the Al Qaeda atrocities. No pictures of Christian schoolgirls beheaded. No images of chunks of dead Muslims left after a mosque was bombed by an opposing group of Muslims, or photos of walls spray-painted red with blood after a Palestinian rode the dynamite express to Paradise, bringing along twenty or thirty innocent Israeli citizens.

Where were the photographs of dead Americans to contrast the living if humiliated prisoners?

When Hank came home that evening he found her crouched over the laptop. She was muttering to herself as she typed and whipped the mouse around, now in full bag-lady, crazy-old-coot mode.

He put down his tool bag and knelt beside her. “Hey, Molly, what's going on?”

She was almost blind in her stuttering incoherent rage, “They…she…lying backstabbing…” She was reduced to pointing at web pages randomly, a venomous word salad tumbling out of her.

Hank reached out with one of those huge, callused hands, closed it gently over her shaking finger. “You need to lie down,” he said quietly. He lifted her up, but she wouldn't let go of the laptop. He reached around, disconnected the NIC cable and power cord, and carried her into the bedroom. She was weeping, still trying without success to talk.

He placed her gently on the bed, and began to touch her face with his finger. “Can you feel this? Can you feel this?” He was afraid she'd had a stroke, that the cauldron of hatred in her guts had finally boiled over, blasting an artery when it did. She nodded impatiently to his inquiries, and kept pointing at the open Word document on the screen.

He reached for the quilt. She was still pointing at the laptop as he covered her. Tears were staining her face. “You want me to read this? Sure.” He pointed at a chair. “I'll sit right there and read it. You get some rest, you hear me?”