Daybreak Zero d-2

by John Barnes

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This’ll be it, people.” Streen bounded up the stairs, the Provi Ranger major at his heels; the spotted and black uniforms made them look like a Dalmatian and a Lab racing after a Frisbee. They’re enjoying this, Arnie thought, enviously.

  The chant grew louder still, less words than grunts of rage. The shutters above creaked and groaned; volleys of rifle fire roared, a few seconds apart. Quentin clicked his stopwatch.

  Streen bellowed, “Lower floor go!”

  The men on the porch swung the steel shutters outward in a screech and boom. Arnie rolled to the middle of the window, awkwardly and slower than the soldier and Ranger coming from the other side. The soldier beside him broke out the glass, knocking the shards out with his rifle butt. Trish, Arnie, the soldier, and the Ranger laid their rifles onto the sill and sighted.

  The silhouettes in the dingy moonlight became distinct over the barrel of Arnie’s rifle—light and dark smears of faces, hats of all kinds, baggy shirts, pantaloons. “Hold, hold, hold,” Quentin’s voice chopped through the din of the onrushing shouting Daybreakers, as level and even as if advising a taxi to turn right at the next corner. “Choose a target and aim. Fire on my command.”

  Arnie kept his sight on a tall man with a bushy beard who was waving a hatchet over his head.

  “Fire,” Quentin said.

  Arnie held his breath, tightened his finger, felt the rifle shove his shoulder. As the dense smoke blew away on the night breeze, he saw the man doubled over, probably hit in the guts.

  “Choose, aim, and fire at will,” Quentin said. “Work fast, people.”

  As the curtains of smoke opened and closed in front of him, Arnie chose a young woman who was swinging something burning on a rope over her head, aimed, squeezed, saw her fall backwards. Chamber and the first from the mag. The next hole in the smoke revealed a man waving a spirit stick—a prime target because every tribal who could see it would be running to follow him. Arnie shot, missed, shot again. As the smoke cleared, he was thinking, One left, chamber it, fire. Spirit Stick Man fell almost at the porch; as Arnie reloaded, the pike and axmen were driving back the followers.

  Existence settled into counting rounds, searching, aiming, shooting, and reloading.

  Feet on the porch.

  “Rifles stay down, axes and pikes away from windows, shotguns now,” Quentin said. Arnie felt feet standing between him and Trish. A great booming roar shook the room. “Rifles, axes, and pikes stay where you are. Shotguns, second barrel, now.” Another boom.

  “Axes and pikes advance. Rifles and shotguns support with fire and be careful.”

  Arnie rolled up into a kneeling position; his back leg brushed Trish’s. The porch was an incoherent struggle of flesh, uniformed backs closest to them, hats, plumes, and headdresses beyond. A shaggy man without a shirt, wielding a chain and a small hatchet, rammed between two uniforms; Arnie and Trish beside him shot simultaneously, and the man fell backward, hit in the face and chest.

  A tribal rammed through the press, jabbing with a spear. Trish stiffened against Arnie; he felt a gurgle as he planted the muzzle in the tribal’s face and pulled the trigger.

  The huge, heavy slug folded the man’s head inward like a rock dropped onto a pillow, and a mess flew out behind him.

  While Arnie’s hands chambered another round, he took one instant to look to his right. Trish was pinned backwards by the spear through her neck to the floor, as if she were stretching her knees in yoga. Her goggle/ glasses lay in the pooling blood around her head; it was the first time he’d seen her without them.

  Back at the window, a space opened between two uniformed backs, revealing a woman wielding two sickles; Arnie shot her squarely in the chest. A pike, swung like a ball bat, swept her body from the porch.

  “Rifles, on your feet, advance behind the pikes and axes,” Streen ordered. Arnie stood up and stepped through the window, careful of the bodies lying there; a Daybreaker stirred at his feet, and as if it had been a venomous snake, Arnie slammed down his rifle butt on the back of her head.

  He moved forward a step behind the soldiers with pikes; stray, unaimed arrows and rocks clattered on the porch roof.

  The pikemen danced momentarily backward and forward on the edge of the porch. Streen cried, “Pikes, open for rifles, now.” Half the pikemen stepped back and to the side; suddenly it was as if a door had opened for Arnie, and even before Streen bellowed, “Rifles to the front and fire at will,” he was there.

  The Daybreakers had fallen back just far enough to form a clear space, littered with bodies, between themselves and the pikemen. They were no longer chanting, and the front row was held in place only by the struggling, oscillating, confused mob behind them.

  Arnie looked straight into the terrified eyes of a boy holding a machete. He shot him in the face. All around, rifles and shotguns lashed out into the mob. Arnie fired again and again, reloading as fast as he could, as the Daybreakers fell back screaming and begging; when they turned to run, he shot at their backs until his last couple of shots were simply too far to get even the stragglers; by now the roar of fire had faded down to the last few bangs.

  Quentin gently pressed down on his forearm. “Point your rifle at the ground, and take the round out of the chamber. The colonel needs to talk to all of us.”

  THE NEXT DAY. CASTLE CASTRO (IN THE FORMER SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA). 11 AM PST. TUESDAY, JULY 15, 2025.

  “I appreciate your coming to see me,” Harrison Castro said, as Pat O’Grainne rolled his wheelchair onto the balcony of the big office that overlooked San Diego Harbor. “If you’ll join me at the table, let’s have a drink and just enjoy the fact that it’s a fine day and no one is shooting at us.”

  Two weeks after the Awakening Dolphin Children’s assault, the main keep of Castle Castro looked like what it was: a fortress under a collection of wreckage. The original design had concealed its nature as a system of concrete bunkers by putting stuccoed-plywood and z-brick frouf, fancy stained glass windows with steel veining, and ornate (but heavy) metal gratings in front of the bunker walls, all sunny hallways on the inside, all frivolity on the outside.

  During the attacks of the last six months, all that faux decor had been smashed and burned. The charred, broken remains of it now clung in strands and heaps to the reinforced concrete walls between open spots where Castro’s own forces had pushed it aside to clear loopholes, observation slits, and sally ports.

  “I’m sure glad you built this place,” Pat said, “and even gladder that old Heather had a connection to you, to get me in here. It doesn’t look like the old neighborhood stayed very nice.”

  “Well, the people who came out of there sure weren’t.” Castro poured the sweet red wine that his Steward of the Barracks had assured him was Pat’s favorite. To judge by how fast it went into Pat, the steward had been on top of things. Well, no matter. The old guy took his turns at his loophole, and sober or not, he was a good shot, and how many real fighters aren’t hard drinkers anyway? “One more bit of business I ought to check with you while I have you here and before I forget. Those wheels we came up with for your chair—”

  “Working fine. We were lucky to get a wheelwright in here, too.”

  Actually luck had nothing to do with it. I put in years developing a big, big list of people with unusual skills I could shelter whenever it finally all fell down. I had so many people on such a diverse list that I was even ready for something as weird as Daybreak turned out to be. But it’s better for people to believe in luck; they don’t resent it the way they do foresight. “Sometimes luck is all that matters,” Castro said, sipping at the cheap, too-sweet wine and stretching expansively.

  Pat was stretching, also, his eyes closed in bliss. “Mister Castro, I’m aware that you have three thousand people here at your Castle, and an old biker wouldn’t usually rate a private room in the inner keep. So… I kind of think you’re hoping to lobby my daughter in Pueblo.”

  “Why don’t we talk business
after lunch? I take it you’re not offended by my approaching your daughter through you?”

  “No, I’m not. She might be. She was always ornery; I always thought she became a cop in the hopes of busting me someday. She might throw a hissy fit, but you know, Mister Castro, I’ve been dealing with Heather’s tantrums since she was two years old.”

  After lunch, Harrison Castro refilled Pat O’Grainne’s glass. “Here’s the thing. For all its many failings, this has been a good country, hell, a great country, but what it finally died of was what most people thought made it great—it died of democracy. We just plain forget that the first colonies were founded by men who survived all sorts of hardship and danger to do it, and then rose to the top, so you had about four generations of really brutal natural selection, and then afterward all those natural leaders intermarried. So there was a real, genetic superiority about the Founding Fathers, and they wrote a constitution that would keep power where it belonged, in those superior families. And there have been other little pockets of superiority, produced by adversity and breeding, as well—the Louisiana Creoles, the Russian Jews, and if I may say so, the old Californios.

  “The Constitution rests on the premise that the only meaningful freedom is the freedom of the alphas to—” Castro heard a sort of wet buzzing.

  Pat O’Grainne was sound asleep, his leathery liver-spotted face tipped up to welcome the sun.

  Harrison Castro shrugged, called in a servant, and instructed him to quietly return the old guy to his quarters. After O’Grainne was wheeled out, Castro stood a while on his balcony.

  In the harbor, the half dozen boats coming out and going in all belonged to him; the second-biggest port on this side of the continent, now, and it’s all mine, if I can keep it.

  IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARD. CASTLE CASTRO (IN THE FORMER SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA). 12:45 PM PST. TUESDAY, JULY 15, 2025.

  Pat O’Grainne had always loved crossword puzzles, and always been able to hold his liquor; many nights when Heather was growing up he’d gotten a sixer-buzz on and done a crossword puzzle, flawlessly, in ink, just to show her he could. He sometimes thought that the intellectual stimulation of figuring out “ten-letter word, breathing toward Cleopatra’s death,” might have had something to do with how well Heather had done in school.

  This wasn’t very different; first he wrote the letter to her, then he scrawled out his handmade crossword puzzle. 15 across (the day of the month) was “orogeny.” He used the definition and the text after it as a key to code the letter he had just written. Sometimes he surprised himself at how fast he could do this drunk; Heather said it was good because he never shortened or simplified messages to make the coding easier.

  It pissed him off, though, seriously, that she said he should use the crappy grammar and spelling that he’d have used texting his biker buddies; she said it made the code harder to break, but he thought if some enemy ever did break the code, they’d think he was an idiot.

  He returned to his coding:

  …rilly has talk himself n2 this idea tht him n his buddies r tha natch leaders n shud run USA. he wants 2 chg tha constitution n b the fuckin Duke of California. I cud of herd mor but wz gettin 2 mad so faked a snore 2get 2go…

  When he had finished, he recopied the code, wrote a mawkish note about how they didn’t pay enough attention to him and how Heather was ignoring him, copied the handmade crossword puzzle and the “secret code for you to work out, just like when you were a little girl” below that, and put the finished letter between books on his shelf; he’d give it to Carlucci or Bambi whenever they passed through. Then he put the original into the split log in his fireplace; it was a good thing this summer was so cold and he had an excuse for a fire almost every night.

  THAT EVENING. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 10:15 PM MST. TUESDAY, JULY 15, 2025.

  When Heather couldn’t sleep, she’d go upstairs, roll out her chart, and study it. Tonight she felt huge, lonely, and miserable, and bitter experience had taught her that once it reached the point where she couldn’t find a comfortable position, she was going to be up for at least another hour. So she padded upstairs, feeling like a grouchy she-bear, lit a lamp, pulled out the chart, and let her eyes just roam.

  If there was any consistent pattern in tribal attacks, she thought, it had to be that they were always bigger and sooner than anyone might reasonably have expected. She scrawled a note to Leslie, her librarian for intelligence reports, asking for the action reports on tribal attacks in the last ninety days. I suppose I’ ll be able to put Arnie on that one. Poor bastard, Mota Elliptica was such a good project for him, and now… well, poop. We had a solid five companies protecting it and we probably needed ten or fifteen. But it’s gone now, and God knows how many things we really needed with it.

  She had pinned in more red cards, yarn, and construction paper blocking the DEFEAT MOON GUN path, and she had emphatically moved TRIBAL ACTIVITY way up on the priorities. Looking things over, she thought, Well, I had been thinking we needed to assert ourselves somewhere; Arnie tells me public opinion won’t stay with us if we don’t obviously do something to stand up to some bad guys. I was thinking it was time to move against the Castles, but we’ d better make it against the tribes. Her eyes fell on a deep red slash running across the chart. Now if Larry will just uncharacteristically call in and coordinate, and we get some cooperation from Olympia, I see my next move, plain as day.

  With the choice made, she felt as if some hand had uncorked her head and poured a bucket of sleep into it. She barely made it back to bed before she was out for the night.

  FOUR:

  KING GEORGE’S BIRDS CAME ON

  THE NEXT DAY. NEAR PINEHURST, IDAHO, ON US ROUTE 95. 2 PM PST. WEDNESDAY, JULY 16, 2025.

  “’Bout eight o’clock behind us,” Ryan muttered to Larry. He fiddled with the harness on Mortimer, the most placid mule. “At least two.”

  They’d been shadowed most of the day. Bambi must still be alive and negotiable-for; if she were already dead and war under way, they’d have shot Larry, Ryan, and Micah from cover and then taken their mules and gear.

  The ground was dry, the afternoon was warm, and the little creek running through the meadow ahead of them was inviting. “Let’s let’em graze and drink a little,” Larry said. “We’ve got plenty of daylight left.” Give the other side time to decide to show themselves.

  They unburdened the mules, tied them where they could reach the creek, and sat down to a late lunch on a big, comfortable, sun-warmed rock. They had just finished when the woman stepped out of the trees, her hands up.

  “I make it three of them covering her,” Micah said, softly, looking down at the ground.

  “Four,” Ryan said, behind his hand. “Bet you missed the one in the tall grass behind that stump. Mister Mensche, what do you want to do?”

  Mensche shrugged. “I’m going to walk forward and talk to her. If they start shooting, shoot back and run. Count me dead unless I catch up with you. If any of the hidden ones move suddenly, give me a long whistle. Anyone acts like they’re about to use a weapon, shoot, but I think it’s going to be all talk for a while.” He stood slowly, raising his hands over his head, and walked toward the woman.

  In my FBI days, I was assigned four different hostage negotiations and two ransom turnovers. Carlucci said he gave them to me because I moved slow and looked trustworthy. Hope I haven’t lost my touch.

  When he and the woman were a few yards apart, Larry said, “My side won’t fire if you lower your hands.”

  “Neither will mine if you do.”

  They relaxed. Larry said, “I’m a Federal investigating agent; you can call me Agent Mensche, Mister Mensche, or Larry—any of those is fine. I’m here to inquire into the disappearance of a mailplane and its pilot, Bambi Castro.”

  “I’m Helen Chelseasdaughter, it’s polite among our people always to use both names, and the Blue Morning People sent me to guide you to the place where we will negotiate. We are a people who think long before acting; there will be no qu
ick response.”

  “Then I won’t expect one, Helen Chelseasdaughter. Is it far? Our mules are tired.”

  “About an hour’s walk,” Helen Chelseasdaughter said. “May I signal the people with me to come out of cover and join your party, Agent Mensche?”

  “That will be fine, Helen Chelseasdaughter.”

  She raised her arms and waved twice; six tribals broke cover quietly, with hands over their heads. At Larry’s signal, Ryan and Micah set their weapons down.

  As the Daybreakers and Larry’s party continued up the road, no one seemed to have anything to say.

  ABOUT 3 HOURS LATER. NEAR PINEHURST, IDAHO, ON US ROUTE 95. 6 PM PST. WEDNESDAY, JULY 16, 2025.

  Wow, their weed sucks, Larry thought, taking the required fourth hit off the peace pipe. The council fire had been built in the trail ride center’s fire pit; Larry, Helen Chelseasdaughter, and Michael Amandasson were sitting in a row on what must have been the performer’s bench, and three hundred or so members of the Blue Morning People were facing them from the bleachers. I feel the strangest desire to start talking like a crusty old character to the little buckaroos.

  The deal was done; now the tribe was having fun holding ceremonies. Larry was getting good at emphasizing the quality and wonders of the four hundred blankets, two hundred steel hatchets, three hundred pairs of new moccasins, and five hundred sweaters, every time his turn came up—the tribals always applauded. The peace pipes out there must’ve been being passed along pretty regularly.

  When there was only about an hour of daylight left, Larry said he needed to see the plane and Bambi. Michael Amandasson led Mensche to the guarded guest cabin.