by John Barnes
The light flickered slightly. She looked up. He wasn’t there. Her coffee was now too cool, anyway, the Wild Turkey wasted, the Kona wasted, and she felt sad and lonely. Maybe she’d go down to the main bedroom and curl up with Graham tonight; he always liked it when she did.
She poured her pitcher of Turkey and Kona down the sink, rinsed everything thoroughly, blew out the lamp, and took the back stairs passage down to the main presidential suite.
Darcage had not concealed that Daybreak was more interested in Arnie than they were in her. It bothered her; she didn’t like being second to anybody.
2 DAYS LATER. WAPAKONETA, OHIO. AROUND NOON EST. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2025.
Larry handed Jason a GPO brochure-map from the 1990s, Scenic Waterways of Ohio and Indiana. “Look up Wapakoneta.”
“I know that town name for some reason.”
“Yeah, you do, but it’s not the reason I’m interested in.”
“Just look up,” Chris said, pointing to the landmark sign forty yards down the road. It was like ten thousand other historic-landmark signs that appeared outside almost every small town in the Midwest, except that this one said:
WAPAKONETA, OHIO.
BIRTHPLACE OF NEIL ARMSTRONG,
FIRST MAN ON THE MOON.
“I’d forgotten that, Larry. Probably hadn’t thought about it since fifth-grade American history. Crap,” Chris said, an odd, desperate strain in his voice. “I remember when the moon was a good thing. My dad watched the landing on TV when he was a little kid, I guess along with everybody, and… I don’t know, I guess you had to be in that generation, but to a lot of people, it meant a lot. Now… we look up at the moon, and we’re scared.”
Larry sighed. “Yeah, but what I wanted Jason to read was this.” He pointed at the old map-guide.
Jason read aloud. “The Auglaize River is canoeable from Wapakoneta, a small town pronounced Wop Ock Kuh Net Uh. (Many Ohioans shorten it to Wapak, pronounced Woppock.) The Wapakoneta Canoe Trek Company, just downstream of the Hamilton Street Dam, has canoes and kayaks for rent from mid-June to mid-October. May not be accessible in low-water years. Shouldn’t be a problem, it’s rained like a real booger for an hour or two almost every day since we landed. And, okay, Larry, I see where you’re going with your idea. It says, The Auglaize River flows north to the Maumee at Defiance, down which canoes can continue nearly to Toledo.”
“Unh-hunh, and Toledo’s a port on Lake Erie, and there are Provi garrisons on the western side of Lake Erie—Put-in-Bay, Kelleys Island, Port Clinton, and Sandusky.”
“You’re figuring that if we can get canoes—”
“Never walk when you can ride, son, stay in gummint service and you’ll learn that’s a rule.” Larry grinned. “Along with always patronize anybody with less time-in-grade than you have. Anyway, that’s my thought. And looking up ahead, at least it looks like the town hasn’t been burned.”
In the warm midday sun, intact roofs peeked through the bright red and orange leaves. Larry said, “This road’s as good as any for going into the town, I guess. That little thumbnail map seems to show Hamilton Street, and the Auglaize River, right in the middle of town.”
A mile farther on, a sign pointed off to Auglaize Street. “You don’t suppose they put Auglaize Street anywhere near the Auglaize River?” Larry said. “It leads into town, anyway.”
Half an hour later, after passing a number of intact but empty houses, Jason said, “Weird. The tribals usually burn towns on general principles. But I haven’t seen a burned house, or any sign of fighting, or even any human remains.”
“But if this place were well-defended,” Chris said, “you’d think we’d have met a patrol or run into a sentry by now.”
Beyond an overgrown cemetery, a wide, placid stream, perhaps a hundred feet across, appeared below them.
“All right, found the river,” Larry said.
In town, most of the big old twentieth-century frame houses and little nondescript brick storefronts still had all their glass; where they did not, they were boarded up. No doors were broken down. Larry said, “This feels like we walked into a Ray Bradbury story.”
“Who are you?” a voice asked.
They formed up into a triangle with their backs together.
“I’m waiting,” the voice said.
Larry shrugged slightly. “We are Federal agents reconnoitering this area for the Reconstruction Research Center.”
“Please wait here and be comfortable. You are among friends. I must alert other people. It may be fifteen minutes before anyone else contacts you.”
“We can wait that long,” Larry said, slipping his pack off and sitting on it.
There was no answer; apparently the mysterious voice’s owner had gone off on his errand—her errand?
“What do you think?” Chris asked, his voice barely a murmur, pointing his face down into the ground between his feet to hide his lips.
Jason muttered, “I think that was a kid’s voice, reading from a card.”
“I’m trying not to think,” Larry said. “Whatever’s here, it’s not like anything else we’ve found. Did you both notice, no cars? Not even the muck from the rotted tires?”
“Yeah, and the boarded windows that must have gotten broke,” Chris said, “they’ve swept up the glass around them.”
Jason looked around. “They’re not tribals. No downed wires, no wrecked refugee carts, so many things that just aren’t here.”
Larry nodded. “So often what’s not there is what police work depends on.”
“News reporting too,” Chris said. “Congratulations, Padwan Jason, you have achieved the level of consciousness in which old poops pat you on the head.”
Jason grinned. “My head lives to be patted, oh master. So who is here? The tribe of the Extremely Tidy People?”
“Close, but not quite,” a deeper voice said, seemingly from nowhere.
Larry said, “You’re not as invisible as the first person was. Part of your shadow is visible just beyond the corner of the laundromat. Does that mean we get six more weeks of winter?”
High-pitched laughter broke out all around them.
The deeper voice joined it. “Well, I don’t suppose there’s much point in keeping this up. Are you guys from Pueblo?”
“That’s where we started from but it was a while ago,” Larry said. “I’m Federal Agent Larry Mensche, mission commander; we’ll be reporting back to RRC eventually. My younger teammate here is Jason Nemarec, and the big bear of a guy is Chris Manckiewicz, who you might remember from when there was net and television—”
“And radio,” the voice said. “We heard you on KP-1 and WTRC, Mister Manckiewicz. And if I’m not mistaken you’re also the narrator on Orphans Preferred and on A Hundred Circling Camps. You’re a celeb here.” A tall, rangy man walked out from the corner of the laundromat. “Although the biggest news this month, if not this year, is going to be that you caught me with my shadow showing, Mister Mensche.”
He might have been sixty, or eighty. His face was grooved, more eroded than sagging. His full head of hair was iron-gray flecked with white, he stood straight as any ex-soldier, and his muscles bulged and knotted over thick bones; he looked like the barely covered skeleton of a giant. His khaki pants and faded plaid shirt were neatly pressed. “My name is Scott Niskala. I’m the scoutmaster of Troop 17. Everyone, you can step out of cover.”
About twenty kids seemed to appear in a single motion. An instant later one tiny old lady in thick glasses stood beside Niskala. He said, “This, as you can probably guess, is Mrs. Niskala, who is—”
“—quite capable of introducing herself, thank you. Ruth Niskala. Scoutmaster of Troop 541. The outfit that shows the boys how to do things. We were thinking you might like to have a good meal and a good rest, and then maybe we can talk about what we might do for you.”
ABOUT 5 HOURS LATER. WAPAKONETA, OHIO. 6 PM EST. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2025.
The old stone church, headquarters for the W
apak Scouts, had a small library with wooden tables and chairs, where Larry, Chris, and Jason were treated to fresh biscuits and venison gravy. This was followed by hot baths (“There aren’t any regular scheduled baths right now so we have plenty of hot water for you”), and a long nap before dinner.
While they were napping, the Wapak Scouts insisted on cleaning and mending their clothing.
“Aw,” Larry tried to protest, “you don’t have to do this.”
Ruth Niskala said, very softly, “Let them do this. This is the day we’ve promised them for a long time, the proof of their faith, and the reason they’ve been good all year. Think of it as cookies for Santa. They need to do something for you.”
When they awoke an hour later, their freshly cleaned clothing was waiting for them. Scott Niskala guided them up the stairs, away from the main meeting hall. “They’re putting something together and they want it to be a surprise. And if you even try to tell the kids that they didn’t need to, I’ll knock you flat. Let’s go to my house across the way here.”
Except for the absence of electric lights in the gathering dusk, the room seemed as it might have been before Daybreak. “The first thing I’ve got to say is that there wasn’t any plan. We just made it up as it happened, and it kind of worked out.”
Larry Mensche said, “I don’t quite see why you weren’t just overrun by the nearest tribe; a few hundred crazy tribals could sweep through this town, burn everything, and slaughter everyone. Even if a hundred of them died doing it, Daybreak’d’ve counted that as a benefit—more burden lifted off Mother Earth. So how are you here?”
“Well,” Scott Niskala said, “that’s kind of a story, but it’s what I wanted to tell you about. Excuse an old man beginning at the very beginning, but it’ll be faster if I don’t try to edit. So to begin with, my father came from Finnish stock, and learned English mostly in school, from the Iron Country up in Minnesota. The Depression drove him out of his home…”
…and he bounced through crap jobs and work camps till 1942; then there was plenty of work for a healthy young man. In 1945 he got a slot in the Regular Army; in 1947, down in Georgia, he found himself a sweet farm girl who wanted to marry anything but a farmer, and in 1948, there I was.
My old man just assumed I’d follow him into the Army, so he trained me up as a good little soldier. I took to the hiking-camping-hunting, Daniel Boone kinda stuff, but my war was Vietnam, and when I got home it was the Hollow Army years. Sorta took the fun right out.
I did college, for the money, and majored in forestry, because it was outdoors. I did Forest Service, BLM, all that, but ended up managing state forests for Ohio. Along the way, when I was doing a stint at Ashley National Forest, I ran into Ruth here, who was a Mormon farm girl that went over the fence. Since we couldn’t have kids ourselves, it came kind of natural to foster.
We’d usually have four or five kids around the house; we adopted four of them in thirty years or so, when it seemed like the right thing to do, but mostly they just passed through, a year or two at a time, and then kept coming back to visit.
Eventually we retired here in Wapak. Ruth and I’d both been scoutmasters for so long, we just kind of went full-time with it. Our troops were closer to each other than they were to the national organizations, ’cause we agreed with each other more than we did with our nationals.
We were weird scoutmasters, I guess, or if you look at it my way, we were the only scoutmasters who didn’t get weird. We skipped out on all the urban crap, excuse the expression, where the kids just went to antidrug lectures and pep rallies and never out in the woods, because what’s the point of being a scout for that? And later on we didn’t let the council and the region ram Jesus into everything we did, either. We covered our asses, excuse the expression, with upper leadership, ’cause my troop turned out so many Eagles, and hers turned out so many Gold Awards.
Well, one thing we did, we found local business people to throw in money so all the County Orphanage kids could be scouts. Plenty of the hard-to-adopt kids end up living in those places, with no money for extracurriculars at school, or anything much else, so getting to be scouts was real big to them, and we had enough donors so our orphans could come on all the trips and camps.
We had our fosters, and most of’em’d keep coming after they moved home or moved on, and later on our old fosters brought their kids around. In just a few decades we had a real good bunch of dead-end kids with woods skills. By Daybreak all our assistant scoutmasters’d grown up in our troops, and we even had a few third-generation scouts.
Well, you might remember Ohio tried to evacuate right after the elections last year; this whole area was supposed to try to walk along I-75 down to Dayton to evacuate. Ruth said it sounded like something a couple interns might’ve thought up, looking at a map and counting beans. There couldn’t be enough food or shelter at Dayton, and besides the plan bet everything on good weather. Oh, we told them so, but people had been scared out of their minds since Daybreak day. So they didn’t listen to us; they bagged up what they could carry and left.
The room was dark and silent. Chris asked, “Was that the time of that first big storm?”
“Yeah. Three days after they left, freezing rain came down all one night and the morning after, then maybe four inches of snow with high winds the next afternoon. Once the weather cleared, I sent people south to take a look; they found lots of bodies in the highway ditch, especially kids and old people, all within thirty miles, but no survivors. Figure the ones who could kept walking or holed up too far from the road to hear the scouts calling.
“The last we heard of Columbus radio was on the twelfth, when they were begging the counties to send them help. Meanwhile the folks in town’d just abandoned the orphanage, so we took those kids in, and our five fosters stayed with us, and some other families just dropped their fosters on us before they walked out. Ruth and I had pritnear all the abandoned kids in Auglaize County, I think, plus around ten families who had stayed. We drew up articles and enrolled 164 Wapak Scouts, which is what we decided everyone would be.”
Ruth’s eyes flashed behind her glasses. “And we had to wreck the whole country to do one simple thing, let everyone be a scout! Look at what it took to get rid of the sexist barrier and the ageist barrier and all the rest! How old do you have to be, after all, before you’re too old to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, and all the rest of it? Or how does having two X chromosomes let you out of keeping yourself ‘mentally awake’? So, anyway, you are now at the home base of the Wapak Scouts, which is still one hundred fifty-seven people, about two-thirds of us under twenty. Our youngest is four, our oldest is Scotty here, and we’re still here.”
“You still haven’t told us how you’re still here,” Larry said. “There’re at least three tribes within a day’s walk; how come they haven’t wiped you out?”
It was too dark now to see Niskala’s features, but he sounded smug, or maybe amazed. “That started as an accident, and then just sort of developed.”
By February, we’d dragged all the cars into one common area for salvage, boarded up every broken window, picked up the downed wires, all that stuff you noticed. Originally we did it to keep the kids busy and not to have to look at all that wreckage. By then the big bombs had gone off, and we’d lived through the fires from that big EMP that took KP-1 off the air—that made us feel pretty smart about having picked up all those wires.
Because Ruth’s a thinker, the minute she heard about biotes, way back on October 29, she went to the hardware store here in town and made them put all the ammo into mason jars. We lost some ammo to spoilage but not much. There were some older guns, crude enough to be almost all wood and metal: the single-shot bolt-action rifles for the Rifle Shooting merit badge, a bunch of old deer rifles, my personal handguns. We had a couple kids who’d gotten their metalworking badge build replacement parts for the plastic over the winter.
Between some surviving food stocks from grocery stores, and rigging up a grinder fo
r the corn and wheat from elevators nearby, and hunting and fishing, we were feeding everyone. We were pritnear on top of things.
So one day early in March, three guys who looked like a real shitty, pardon my French, imitation of American Indians came walking into town shouting that we all had to obey the high tribe of Booga-Booga. Harry Blenstein, commanding the town watch, sent a runner for me—I was ice fishing.
Meanwhile Harry got quite the tribal lecture. Now, he was a pretty serious Christian and I guess they laid on that Mother Gaia horseshit, sorry, French again, real thick, and well, they must’ve said something to set off his bad temper. He apparently told’em what he thought, and it must’ve offended’em, because one of them whacked Harry on the forehead with an ax—no warning at all.
Luckily, I’d been paranoid enough to insist there were always snipers covering any visitors coming into town. The two girls on duty for that, Hannah and Meg, did what they were supposed to do—pow-pow, two dead tribals, clean head shots, and the third got two steps before Meg had reloaded and hit him in the spine.
Harry’s backup, Jim, tied up that survivor, neat as you please, and started first aid.
The tribals weren’t stupid, not even really careless; we just lucked out. They had two men with bows watching from up there on the hillside, with a girl runner ready to go back to a main party a couple miles off. But by pure luck, we had hunters out there that day. Their two bowmen had set up right in front of our deer blind, so my hunters were already watching those creepy guys, and when they heard shooting start, they hit them from behind while they were still reaching for their bows.
More luck was that one of my hunters was a big, strong, fast kid, he’d been a running back for the Wapak Redskins—I mean the Warriors, they had to change that a while back—and he just chased their runner down, knocked her flat, gagged her, and dragged her back. If he hadn’t had the presence of mind to do that, I don’t know what would’ve happened.