Daybreak Zero d-2

by John Barnes

  Heather switched to the good news: Bambi Castro had flown her Stearman to Baker City last night, and after extensive checkout and decontamination, it appeared that the plane was fine. “So is Bambi,” Heather added.

  Too bad Trish isn’t, Arnie thought.

  Larry Mensche had found his daughter. She’d been living as a tribal, and she wanted to come in to the RRC, and apparently the tribe she belonged to had been heavily Daybreaker. “So you’ll be getting another cooperative interview subject, Arnie, and she’s had a real different encounter with Daybreak.”

  Well, that was good news; he couldn’t help grinning. “How soon does she get here?”

  Heather’s scowl of frustration deepened. “She and Larry didn’t fly out with Quattro Larsen on the Gooney Express and they didn’t walk out with the President’s Own Rangers. They’re off doing one of those peculiar missions Larry defines for himself.”

  Arnie said, “Admittedly he doesn’t accept direction much, but I think what he’s doing is valuable.”

  Heather’s face flashed brief annoyance. “I didn’t say what Larry is doing is not valuable. I just don’t understand it. If you can tell me what Larry is doing up there in the woods, I’d be grateful. I thought he was looking for his daughter and cut him slack for that, but apparently that was only part of it.”

  Arnie nodded. “Well, I haven’t spoken with him in two months, but I’ve read his reports. You want my guess?”

  “Sure, what the hell. It’s got to be better than my paranoid suspicions.”

  “I think it will be. The tribes are an astonishing phenomenon, Heather. Think about it. A year ago we were cruising toward a routine election in a dull, prosperous USA; the worst we had to think about was maybe a fresh terrorist strike like 9/11, the Roosevelt, or the Fed bombing. All the people who are in the tribes now were mostly ordinary citizens; they were younger than average, and they listened to a couple musicians and bands more than other people did, but they weren’t significantly different from the people you saw at work or in the house next door. Sometime after October 28th—eight months, Heather, that’s all—they turned into the murdering crazy barbarians we all know and love today.

  “Everything else that’s originated since Daybreak had deep roots in pre-Daybreak society—I mean, how could it be otherwise, in just eight months? The Provisional Constitutional Government is really just the liberal-Democrat think tanks running a rump government in the old Democratic Party bastion of the Northwest. The fundamentalist churches and the Army had been drawing on the same demographics for so long that the Temporary National Government is just those two wings of the old Republicans, in their most reliable area. The Post Raptural Church is the fundamentalists who’ve been preparing for the End Times for four generations, playing them out. The Castles were there from the first Obama Administration on; they were just eccentric right-wingers in fortified houses, harboring romantic notions, until society collapsed around them and they started turning into feudal lords—which was another idea that was already around. Even we, the RRC itself, are just a bunch of intelligence, law enforcement, research, and PR bureaucrats trying to do our jobs after Daybreak. Our technical centers grew up from pre-Daybreak hobbyists who wanted to preserve disappearing arts like steam railroads, blacksmithing, and celestial navigation. You see? Everything we see around us grew out of something that was there for decades before Daybreak.

  “But the tribes are—well? What are they? What were they before Daybreak?”

  Heather’s head was cocked to the side. “You sound like you don’t know.”

  “I don’t. But I want to know, because I think they are a major clue to Daybreak. Where they came from, how they cropped up so fast, who they really are, everything—I think that’s one of the places where we might be able to understand Daybreak. So I want to know all about them—and so does Larry Mensche. That’s what he’s doing out there—pursuing the most important issue he knows about, with you or without you.”

  “Hunh. Well, Larry’s reports do read more like ethnography or anthropology than like military intel or law enforcement reports. And every time I’m forced to look at the tribal problem, it turns out to be much bigger than I’d thought.” She yawned and stretched. “We have a bunch of routine Board business to clear here, quickly, unless everyone would like to spend hours discussing budget points and policies?” She beamed at how hard all of them shook their heads. “Knew I could count on you all. Arnie, you and I are having lunch, on the government’s nickel, this afternoon, and you are going to do your damnedest to make me see things the way you and Larry do, and I’ll help.”

  40 MINUTES LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 12:30 PM MST. SATURDAY, JULY 19, 2025.

  Since Sumer, the smart and the powerful have always met over food, somewhere discreet, where they can stretch out comfortably and decide what the rest of the world ought to do. Elizabeth I’s ministers traded barbs at the Mermaid; the Founding Fathers argued more freely in the City Tavern than in Independence Hall; atom bomb scientists drank at the Owl. When Washington DC still existed, the too-late decision to expand the Daybreak investigation had been taken in a hole-in-the-wall Cambodian diner belonging to Allie Sok Banh’s uncle.

  Nowadays, in Pueblo, Johanna’s What There Is was the place to be well-fed and not overheard.

  Johanna charged by the seat and served family style. She didn’t attempt a menu—she couldn’t depend on having any particular ingredient, and the big wood stove and barbecue grill in her improvised backyard cookshed were really only adequate for preparing one large common meal.

  Heather and Arnie had barely taken their seats in the Mountain View Room—the most isolated room on the third floor of Johanna’s—when Johanna herself brought in a crisp field-green salad surrounding a chilled trout loaf, and a side of elk ragout over polenta.

  It would have been blasphemy to talk business over such a lunch. When they had eaten all of it, Heather said, “Arnie, my problem is when I listen to you, I’m always saying, Yes, sure, the way to get good, balanced, accurate knowledge of anything is to pursue it for its own sake, but when I’m on the radio for any length of time with Cam in Athens, or with Graham in Olympia, I find myself thinking, Right, we’re losing a war here and Arnie’s doing pure science instead of figuring out what to hit and how. And I don’t like being a creature of whatever I heard last. I think you are right. Can you help me settle firmly into your side?”

  “I can try. I wish I knew if it even is a war. Originally I thought it wasn’t—I thought Daybreak was more like a storm than an invasion—and then I thought that it was, because a storm doesn’t pick its targets—and now I think Daybreak is just really hard on analogies; it doesn’t behave like anything else, it’s just Daybreak. We won’t understand anything about it till we admit there’s never been anything like it before. But I do understand that we won’t get it, either, if Daybreak takes the world down into a dark age while we’re still trying to understand. We need to know enough to win, soon enough to use it, and right now we don’t even know what it would mean to know that.”

  “You could be more reassuring.”

  “Yeah, but you wanted the truth, as I see it.”

  “I did.” Heather brought her feet up onto the couch where she’d half-sat during the meal. “Oh, man, Johanna knows how to make a room comfortable.” She groaned. “I really wish I could wait to think about this till after I get my body back, but that’s way too long to wait. So, you think the tribes are the key to… well, what are they the key to?”

  Arnie spread his hands. “Maybe just to finding the right question. But as for your situation with Larry—look, Heather, this is a gift, not a problem. You’ve got a shrewd investigator who knows the territory, and who wants to look into it. And I can’t show you graphs—”

  “I don’t need’em, Arn, I believe in your intuition much more than you do. If you say we have to know about the tribes, then we have to know about the tribes, and I’ll declare that to be Larry’s main mission. The biggest pr
oblem I see is that whenever he gets back with Debbie, he might want to spend some time getting reacquainted, I would think, and frankly, as much time as he’s spent in the woods since December, he’s got to be tired. And I don’t think I have anyone more entitled to a vacation if he asks for one.”

  Arnie leaned back, thinking. “Well, we need way more than one investigator on the job, anyway, if we want results in time to use them. And though we’ve learned so much from Larry’s exploring the Inland Northwest, that’s kind of like looking under the streetlight for the quarter you dropped in the alley, because the light is better. I think we could learn more from penetrating the Lost Quarter, ideally from a traverse of it.”

  “If anybody ever came back after going in,” Heather said.

  “Oh yeah,” Arnie said. “Oh yeah, it would definitely depend on that.”

  “Apart from some Army scouts who never get ten miles north of the boundary rivers, has anyone come back yet?”

  “Not really.” Arnie was looking down at the table. “Two bodies have floated downstream on the Wabash, and one on the James.” He dragged some of the water from around his glass into a long thin line. “Heather, it’s got to be done, it’s dangerous, and it needs to be soon.”

  “Yeah.” She sighed. “All right. I’ve got an agent that was going to go out to Pale Bluff, just to see how he did on a milk run. He was going to leave late next week anyway. He’ll be about twenty miles from where the Lost Quarter starts, by the nearest approach. Ex-Army ranger, did mountain man re-creation, martial artist—”

  “Is it Steve Ecco or Dan Samson?”

  “Ecco. Is there a difference?”

  “Not really. They’re both my friends. And I just lost a friend to Daybreak, trying to find out how it works and what it thinks, and I don’t know if I’m ready to lose another one.”

  Heather nodded slowly and sadly. “Someday, I hope, RRC will be big enough so that I don’t know and like everyone who works for us. Till then, though, I’m always sending my friends into danger. One more time, Arn, is this the best way to find out what we need to know?”

  He seemed to be looking at something a million miles away. “I don’t know. I can’t know. But it’s our best guess, and if we don’t take it, we might still be guessing when Daybreak burns the last book. Steve Ecco will be glad to get the assignment. I think he’s afraid that he’ll never get his chance to prove himself. And I like giving him the chance to do what he wants to do, but I don’t want to lose another friend. I know you make harder decisions than that all the time, and I’m being selfish and silly.”

  “I’d say, just human.”

  “I just wish being human didn’t have to be quite… so… human.”

  They talked about how life hurried on, and the friends that they had made and lost, for another hour.

  He had walked all the way home in the glaring Colorado summer afternoon, and was checking the temperature of his solar hot water tank with the idea of a long hot shower, before he remembered that he still hadn’t told Heather about Aaron.

  But I guess now I don’t need to. The conversations with Aaron will give me insights I couldn’t get any other way—in fact, yeah. What I extract from Aaron, I can use to plan Steve’s mission, make sure he’s safe and his mission’s productive, and it will be much more believable coming from a guy like Ecco, and from first-hand observation, than it will be coming from my talking to a hippie in a blanket in the middle of the night. RRC will get independently verified information, and my friend will have a much better chance at succeeding at this mission, which is going to mean so much to him.

  Besides, what the hell could I tell Heather now? That I just forgot?

  THE NEXT DAY. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 3:20 PM MST. SUNDAY, JULY 20, 2025.

  James Hendrix was lost in Great Expectations; Miss Havisham had just gone up in flames, and he was considering whether it might be worth opening the ice box for some cold roast chicken, and contemplating his tight waistband, trying not to let the idea prey on his mind. Can’t stay under fifty years old, much as I’d like to, but I’d sure like to stay under a hundred kilograms.

  He was far ahead of his students in the literacy class that he taught most nights of the week. But conditions were perfect for reading: on this bright, sunny day, opening one set of drapes and laying a mirror on the floor to reflect up to his white ceiling made lovely indirect reading light where he lay sprawled on his comfortable couch. Besides, he would rather be doing this than anything else in the world. Perhaps some cold water would help him ignore his stomach? He could—

  The knock at the door was followed at once by scratching, so he knew it had to be Leslie Antonowicz and Wonder. He pretended to sigh at the interruption, but three seconds later as he opened the door, he was grinning.

  “Come on, old man,” Leslie said. “It’s beautiful outside but I had radio room crypto duty all morning, so I couldn’t get out to the fun part of the woods.” By “fun part,” he knew the tall, slim blonde woman meant some mixture of “scary” and “exhausting.” She was beaming at him. “I saw that one window open and knew you were lying here in the dark turning into a library fossil. Now come on, you and Wonder both need a walk.” Wonder, hearing his name, woofed once; he was a shepherd-husky cross—James always said, crossed with a moose.

  “Just so you don’t expect us to use the same trees,” James said, pulling his boots on.

  The morning’s rain had left the air damp and cool, and the sunlight since hadn’t warmed things much; down by the rain-swollen Arkansas River, they followed the trail away from town, watching Wonder run back and forth and smell everything. Friends from long before Daybreak, they didn’t have to talk; James knew that Leslie usually didn’t want to spend her weekends in his indolent company, so there must be something on her mind, and she knew she could take as long as she wanted about getting around to it.

  He wanted to watch for the moment when she’d say something, but that was too much like watching her all the time, and he didn’t feel free to do that: years ago he’d let himself get fascinated by her grace, by the big eyes and high cheekbones, and by her lithe, muscular body, until awkwardly, angrily, she’d told him it was creepy. So he looked at the sky and the river and enjoyed her nearness.

  After a while, she said, “Last night, when I was walking home from Dell’s Brew, something just slightly weird happened.” After a few more steps she said, “Arnie Yang asked me to walk him home.”

  He fought down the twinge of jealousy; Arnie was their boss and close to Leslie’s age. Word had it that the girl he was courting at Mota Elliptica had died in the tribal raid there. He’d long suspected Leslie told him more about her love life than she really wanted to, just to keep him from developing hopes again, and was sorry she had to do that.

  She still hadn’t spoken, and he was calm now. Keep it light. “It’s not that unusual for a man to ask you to go home with him.”

  “No, it’s not, you dirty old man, but what was really unusual was, he just wanted me to walk with him. Expressed no interest in having me come inside. Really didn’t talk much, either. Now, since I always take Wonder when I go to Dell’s, it wasn’t unreasonably dangerous—after we dropped Arnie off we went on home, me and the mutt, no problems on the way and for part of it we walked along with the watch, anyway. But… well, everyone’s heard how brave Arnie was in the battle at Mota Elliptica, and everyone knows he’s pretty good with those double knives he carries. If anything, I should’ve been asking him to walk me home.”

  “Maybe he’s just shy or got cold feet.”

  “No, I’m sure he wasn’t trying to hit on me, James, because I have a pretty good sense of that, and because he didn’t hang around me at the bar before, and he didn’t ask like a guy who was trying to find company for the night.”

  “Hunh. What did he ask like?”

  “Well, that’s the weird part I wanted to talk to you about. He asked like a guy who was really scared. At least that was my first impression. But if you’re bringi
ng along backup because you’re afraid of something, don’t you tell the backup what it is?”

  “Well, I would. Maybe Arnie is weird.”

  “Definitely Arnie is weird. I’ve just never seen him weird this way before—really, he was terrified. But he didn’t tell me what of. Do you know anything about him?”

  “Just what I know from working with him. I archived his report on the Battle of Mota Elliptica yesterday afternoon, but it was more or less a normal action report. It’s a mystery to me, too.”

  They walked for another hour and a half, and then James fixed them a light supper before Leslie went home, well before sundown because she had early morning duties. He watched the tall, strong girl and the big dog till they went out of sight around a building, then adjusted his mirror to catch the last hour of sunlight, and returned to Great Expectations.

  2 DAYS LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 10:15 PM MST. MONDAY, JULY 21, 2025.

  Tonight was starting out like Stephen Ecco’s favorite books and daydreams did. Heather O’Grainne’s note, delivered in a neat pocket-drop by Patrick, had asked for a night meeting and specified “tell no one you are coming.” Even if it was Heather, not M or Wild Bill Donovan, and the organization was the Reconstruction Research Center, not MI6 or Mosby’s Raiders, still, it was a secret night meeting straight out of his fifteen-year-old self’s fantasies.

  Central Pueblo was inhabited, but it was already dark; candles and lamp oil were expensive, and nowadays people rose early. He saw the watch only once, from more than a mile away.

  Knowing himself too well, he tried to fight down his excitement, not wanting the sheer romance to affect the mission. Sure hope it is a mission or I’m gonna feel like a total fool with a headful of dreams. Which ain’t exactly unfamiliar.