Daybreak Zero d-2

by John Barnes

  ABOUT THE SAME TIME. ATHENS, TNG DISTRICT. 3 PM EST. THURSDAY, AUGUST 14, 2025.

  Cameron Nguyen-Peters had chosen Terrell Hall on the former University of Georgia campus for his executive office building for what seemed like good, sensible administrative reasons: it was an administrative building with a few big and many small offices, old enough so that it had plenty of windows for natural light. If he had thought about the front entrance at all, it was only that the protruding, windowed bay over the covered stairs might be a good place for the eventual President of the United States to give a speech.

  He had not thought at the time that the chapel, across the quad, faced it directly, so that the two buildings could also be seen as rival positions—let alone in enmity. But back then, the Post Raptural Church hadn’t existed yet, let alone demanded recognition as the First National Church of the United States.

  “The best guess we’ve got,” Grayson said, his face tired and strained, “is that there are about seven thousand people in the quad at any one time. Most of them are from outside Athens and some of them walked three days to get here. There’s probably twelve thousand overall, but some of them are always off getting food or catching a nap. There are probably two thousand watchers around the other side of the building, so slipping out quietly is not an option.”

  The chanting rose and fell in long, slow waves of a minute or more. “At least in the daytime they don’t need torches for light,” Cam observed, “so they don’t have them right there, to give them ideas.”

  “If they want to burn the building in the daytime, they’ll find something.” Grayson shrugged. “And sir, I don’t agree with you about anything, but I don’t think you’re a coward. If you do what I’m suggesting, I know it won’t be because you’re giving in or because you’re afraid.” His small smile was almost a wince. “Though I seriously doubt that you care what I think of you.”

  “Well, you might be wrong about that,” Cam said. “All right, the country is already torn in half; we can’t have a civil war in the strongest remaining part.” He handed Grayson a short, bulleted list and said, “Here’s what I’m going to promise to do. Is it enough? Will it get the mobs out of the streets and the people back to work? And will it get the Post Raptural preachers to stop enflaming their followers?”

  Grayson scanned it and said, “Yes. I think it will. I can sell this to Peet and Whilmire. And sir, again, I don’t think you’re selling out. Changes had to come. It’s a new time in a new country.”

  “Yeah, but our oath is to the Constitution of the old country,” Cam said. “Whatever happens to me, General, don’t forget that.”

  “I don’t think I ever could, sir. ”

  The techs had cobbled together a crude PA system and kept it wiped clean of nanoswarm, though they pointed out that how long it would last was anyone’s guess, and therefore it would be better to speak sooner rather than later. “No reason to delay any further, then.” Cameron moved forward to the mike; there was a squeal of feedback that quieted the crowd, and he began. “My fellow Americans, I have—”

  A shot caromed off the windowsill above his head. Cam froze, his mind blank, but Grayson moved forward, stepping between him and the mike. “If you’re going to shoot anybody today,” he said, firmly, “let me request that you shoot me first, so that I will not have failed in my duty to my civilian superiors.”

  Silence descended on the crowd. Grayson stepped aside, and Cam advanced to the mike. Forcing himself not to hurry, he read off the points: he would reconstitute the Board, naming enough reverends to it to give it a Post Raptural majority; Army and other federal institutions could, if the local commander preferred, fly the Cross and Eagle banner; the First National Church of the United States was hereby proclaimed the official church, but all other non-subversive, non-seditious religions would be tolerated; the Temporary National Government would seek a restored American sovereignty over the whole territory of the United States, under a restored fully Constitutional authority.

  “And finally, please join me in this very short prayer.” He let them fall silent and bow their heads; then he said, “God bless the United States of America, and restore our country to us, in Jesus’ name we pray, Amen,” as Grayson had told him to do. The crowd cheered madly; it was several minutes before, to Cam’s relief, they began to drift out of the quad.

  As Cam trudged upstairs to his personal apartment, he felt as if he dragged a huge, invisible cross. A late lunch and a nap might be in order. What do you do when you’ve lost completely but you can’t just slink under the porch?

  At the door to his private apartment, Colonel Salazar was waiting for him. Cam knew the man slightly, as one of the perpetual staffers who inhabit the mid-ranges of any bureaucracy. He was slim, well-muscled, of average height, deeply tanned and black-haired, and other than an immense Saddam Hussein mustache, he had no distinguishing feature anyone could have named. “Sir? There are a couple of things you should sign off on—it’ll just take a moment.”

  “Sure, come in,” Cam said. Another minute of delay for the lunch and the nap wouldn’t matter. Probably he’d forgotten to sign some of the pile of executive orders he’d hammered out with Whilmire and Grayson earlier that day.

  As soon as Salazar closed the door, he said, “Something you need to know, sir. General Grayson knew that shot was going to hit up above the window. The incident was staged.”

  Cam blinked. “Well, that’s consistent with Grayson, and the people around him. Thank you for telling me.”

  “Information with the compliments of Heather O’Grainne, sir. If you ever need to communicate with her in a secure channel—”

  “I won’t hesitate to contact you,” Cam said. “And my thanks to Heather—”

  Salazar saluted and was gone.

  As Cam put together a sandwich, and watched the demonstrators pouring out into the streets, celebrating the victory of God and the Constitution (at least as they understood either), he thought, Well, it’s still total defeat, but it’s not so bad when you don’t feel all alone.

  THE NEXT DAY. NEAR THE FORMER TECUMSEH, INDIANA. 3:45 PM EST. FRIDAY, AUGUST 15, 2025.

  They’d kept Ecco running for most of two days, usually blindfolded, getting him drunk and dumping him into boats from time to time. He deduced they were cutting off long bends by running him across them, but only when they could keep him on this side of the border, and for some reason it was important to keep him close to the Wabash.

  At mid-afternoon, Ecco vomited on one of the officers, which was the high point of his day. They let him have a whole wonderful sweet quart or so of unlaced water, and sit and rest while a runner went for a boat. He sat, breathed, and took stock; pressing his feet against his bare calves, he could feel even through the soles of his moccasins that his numb feet were swollen and wet; maybe he’d broken some bones under his instep.

  If he got free, he wouldn’t be able to run far or fast; at best he might only be able to force them to kill him. His arms had been bound behind his back for most of the time; even with them free, he doubted he’d manage to roll out of a boat to drown, let alone try to swim for it.

  As they waited he felt that the slope was steep in front of him, and the smell of water was strong. He went limp and tried rolling down the bank. Drowning’s gonna feel like shit but—

  Rough hands stopped him; he stayed limp, feigning a faint. A slave woman was beaten for not having kept a grip on him.

  “That bank’s pretty steep.” It was the woman officer they called Sunshine. “We’re not supposed to let him see where he is, but it’ll be a lot easier to move him into the boat if he can see.”

  Jacob, who seemed to be the CO, grunted. “Let him go down without the blindfold, but put it right back on him.”

  They unblindfolded him and walked him down the slope; he saw the water tower for Tecumseh, across the stream. Ecco remembered that the town constable had been assassinated there, and a series of fires had been set; what was left of the population had
evacuated westward, with stories about rocks and arrows from nowhere and drumming and singing in the night.

  They tied him into the boat, but since they left him sober, he was able to rest and think. Who could have betrayed his mission? Some of the people who had known couldn’t be suspects. Not Carol May Kloster or Freddie Pranger, let alone Heather O’Grainne.

  Had one of the ex-Daybreakers that they studied at Pueblo reverted to Daybreak, and learned about his mission?

  Some spy in Pueblo who just put things together? Their main communication system was having hungry teenagers run notes between desks; what messages might have been intercepted with some smooth talk and a fresh hot pie?

  Dr. Yang? Please, not a guy who’d always treated him with the friendly deference that a man of action wants to see from a smart guy… especially if it’s a fake man of action like me, Ecco thought, bitterly, for the ten thousandth time.

  He kept composing the message, with no idea how he could send it:

  Going N on L bank Wabash with 3 officers, 5-10 enlisted, many slaves. Need help urgent. Traitor in Pueblo.

  He fell asleep in the gently rocking boat, and when he woke again, no light was leaking around his blindfold. Sunshine ordered him to climb out and to run; she had to have three slaves lift him, but after some kicking and slapping, he ran, despite the scalding pain in the balls and heels of his feet, and the wracking ache of breathing through sobs.

  THE NEXT DAY. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 8:30 PM MST. SATURDAY, AUGUST 16, 2025.

  Heather was exhausted and she felt like someone had been beating on her guts with a flat shovel for a few hours, so it was almost a relief when MaryBeth switched over from “Come on, push” and “Breathe, Heather, breathe” to “One last push!”

  The next sensation was like uncontrollably having the mother of all bowel movements three seconds after making it to the toilet. She watched the lamplight flicker on the ceiling and thought, Kid, you’re not ever going to hear from me that you felt like a giant turd.

  Everything—the pain, the exhaustion, the sheer sense of force—became too intense for her to focus; then suddenly, it was merely painful and she was just exhausted and needed to sleep.

  “Hey, sweetie. You passed out and missed the first yodel.” MaryBeth Abrams stood beside her, stroking her face with one hand, holding a little wailing bundle in her other arm. “Say hi to Leonardo.”

  “Leo,” Heather corrected her. “He’s Leonardo Plekhanov Jr., but he’ll be Leo at home. I just hope his friends don’t give him any horrible nicknames.”

  “Well, right now he’s working on being called ‘Noisy.’ Let’s set him up to feed and see if that’s what the matter is.”

  He promptly stopped yowling and went to work, contentedly nursing. Well, Leo, now you’ve done it, she thought, looking over his tiny, perfect body. Mom’s going to have to fix the world; it just isn’t fit for a boy like you.

  30 MINUTES LATER. OLYMPIA, NEW DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA (FORMERLY IN WASHINGTON STATE) AND PUEBLO, COLORADO. 8:15 PM PST/9:15 PM MST. SATURDAY, AUGUST 16, 2025.

  Ever since high school, at the beginning of each month, Allie had written out a list that began a year from now, copying, crossing out, recopying, and changing as the world and her goals changed. In August 2024, I don’t think I’d’ve typed out “a year from now I will be the First Lady,” or “I’ll be waiting up to hear about Heather’s baby,” let alone “and it’s Lenny Plekhanov’s.”

  Graham Weisbrod (my husband the president, okay, I couldn’t have guessed at anything last year) asked the technician, “So do—”

  The technician held up a hand. “QSL, Pueblo, loud and clear, go to encryption as previously selected in five, four, three, two, one…” She tripped off the pendulum-clock contraption that turned three eccentric plywood cams at different speeds, adding noise to encrypt the signal; in Pueblo, an identical cam set would take it out. The tech talked to her opposite number to ensure that voice was intelligible, handed headsets to Graham and Allie, and said, “About an hour, and you’ve got a nice clear channel right now.”

  A very tired, weak-sounding Heather O’Grainne said hello. Graham seemed to settle into his chair in the radio room as if he’d suddenly dropped thirty years and was back in his office, falling back into the old close friendship with Heather instantly. Allie felt childish for feeling left out, as if she were a little girl kicking the ground with a plastic sandal and complaining to Papa that, Well, but Heather is my friend too and Graham is my mentor too. And she could practically hear her father saying to be a patient child, a wise child, one who others would want to have around. Which was your subtle Khmer way, Papa, of telling me that people didn’t really want me around.

  She tuned out most of the discussion of the sentimental wonders of perfect little ears and toes; she’d seen babies turn grown people into idiots before. This was no more interminable than any other baby, any other time. As Graham and Heather ran out of things to say, Allie realized that, lost in her own irritations, she really hadn’t heard much of the conversation. She sincerely wished Heather a quick recovery and welcomed little Leo to the world, sat patiently while Graham did the same in much more time and with many cutesier words, and fought down sighs of relief and impatience.

  Arnie came back on the line. “I’ve dropped the patch through to Heather’s room, but we’ve got a good clear channel up and running on crypto, and about forty minutes left on it, so is there anything you all would like to talk about? We’ve got most of the section heads for RRC someplace in the building, and it would only take a minute to get one of them in here.”

  Graham said, “Heather keeps us very up-to-date, so thanks, but I guess we’ll just say good night.”

  He lifted the phones off his head without bothering to get Arnie’s acknowledgment. Or to consult me. Allie said, “Arnie, if you don’t mind just talking, just to talk, we never get time for it on the regularly scheduled crypto radio.”

  “Sure,” Arnie said.

  Oh, good, he sounds happy. She nodded at Graham, keeping a straight face at his irritated expression. Looking forward to a Saturday night game of Bang the Pretty Girl, were we?

  Outside the courthouse, Pueblo would be dark, buzzing with the threat of Aaron, and besides, Arnie was lonely.

  Before he could even wonder what to talk about, Allie said, “Geez, Arnie, it’s August, remember how last year the big issue was whether to go to Maine or to the Virginia beaches for our vacation?”

  “Oh yeah. And we thought it was such a nuisance to have to take the train to Boston and then rent a car—”

  “And then we had so much fun,” she said. He’d forgotten how musical her voice became when it was soft and low, across a table in a café, or with her head on my shoulder sitting on the beach and watching the waves, or in bed.

  The conversation ranged through a dozen shared experiences, nearly all of them things that had been routine before Daybreak. They both agreed that it felt good to talk about it, and that they shouldn’t do it too often.

  “I try not to think about the old days too much,” he said. “Phoning for a pizza at midnight, flying to Paris, my old Porsche… tonight I put all my time into thinking about typhus among the tribal population this winter.”

  “Bad?” Allie asked, suddenly alert.

  “Bad. Very bad. It’s spread by lice, and bathing is plaztatic, not to mention hard to do out in the woods, especially since with all the soot in the air, this is gonna be the coldest winter since 1816. One case of typhus anywhere will spread through that whole population this winter.”

  “Won’t that solve some of our problem for us?”

  “Well, sort of. It’ll hit the tribes harder than it hits civilization, and if our brewers can make enough tetracycline—”

  “If who can what?”

  “Tetracycline stops typhus cold, and you can make it with a yeast, kind of like brewing beer. We’ve got a pilot plant running here, and if it works, you and Athens both get a crash course in brewing the stuff. Once we h
ave it, some of the tribals might even surrender to get treatment, especially mothers with young kids. But even if it’s mostly on their side of the line, I don’t like all that unnecessary suffering and dying. Hey—there’s only about five minutes left on the encrypting cogs. Gee,” Arnie said, “it was great to bat ideas around. Like old times.”

  “You romantic devil. Reminding me of all the good times in the relationship and using it to segue into typhus, antibiotics, and mass death. You haven’t lost your touch. I remember how you rubbed lotion into my legs while talking about the shifting attitude matrix on tax policy,” Allie said.

  “Funny thing, I remember the legs more than the policy. God, things in the old days were nice,” he said.

  “Yeah. Oh, crap, Arnie, we don’t have much time and I’ve enjoyed this so much. Listen, if you’re not doing too much on Saturday nights, can I call you? Just to talk, old friend to old friend? Sometimes I just need to blow off some steam. I’ll send you a message to set it up, regular channels, but save me next Saturday night.”

  “Sure, I’d like to have someone to talk to, too. We’ll talk next week.” The cams came to a halt as he was speaking; he wasn’t sure whether she’d heard the last of it.

  Darcage was waiting for her, and grabbed her on the back stairs from the radio room to the suite she shared with Graham, pressing a hand over her mouth gently for a moment. “Just so you don’t scream from being startled. I wanted to discuss something. We very much approve of your idea of a back-channel contact with Doctor Yang in Pueblo, and we’d be happy to coordinate.”

  “Coordinate what?” she asked.

  “We don’t have to be enemies, you know. You must realize that once the Tempers are done with the tribes, they will turn on you, and we are better fighters—”