by John Barnes
Yes, everyone was staying ready.
Through binoculars and spyglasses, some of the officers on the wall were able to observe that at the far end of the fire, there was occasional movement. Their best guess was that the tribals there were slowly dragging or knocking the burning brush into the overflowing ditches, perhaps advancing into the fire by throwing buckets of water ahead. It might take an hour or two for them to clear the fire; then they would have to come straight up the road, and the heavy weapons were already trained on it and waiting.
Birdsall himself came out to that stretch of wall. “We haven’t seen five percent of their force,” he said. “But from the steeples and the trees, we can see for miles all around. The nearest place they could hide a force that big would be on the other side of the bluff itself, three miles away, and at least on the map, I don’t see how they’d get there.” His officers all nodded. “This Lord Robert is smart; possibly much smarter than I am. There’s some reason he would keep launching these futile attacks, but it doesn’t seem like a diversion for a flanking attack, because I don’t see any way he can get at the flanks. And as for—”
Shouts from the watchers on the wall and in the trees.
When everyone looked, they saw that tribals had become visible, through the flames and smoke, beyond the burning windrow. So big and hot a fire could not have lasted in any case, but it was clear now that Daybreakers had simply attacked it with shovels, buckets, and sticks, putting it out, shoving burning matter to the side, and splashing water to cool the road. Snipers took shots at some of the clearing crew, but it was clear that in a few minutes, the road would be open again.
Birdsall looked around at his officers again. “What did this Lord Robert character want us to focus on instead of—”
Drums began to boom, and from each side of the dwindling fire, many hundreds of tribals swarmed across the field of corpses, led as always by spirit sticks, in long, thin lines. Gunfire rattled and banged from the wall and the trees, and the defenses were shrouded in their own black smoke; the Gatlings and volley guns swept the field, adding to the smoke and noise.
There were so many of the oncoming tribals that a few lucky ones almost reached the wall before two and three soldiers in a group would shoot them down.
Birdsall tried to see through the smoke; then he realized there was no longer a plume above the burning windrow, that the Daybreakers had at last cleared the road, and though he didn’t know what was coming, he suddenly knew what they had to do. “Reload!” he shouted. “All weapons! Now! Reload now!”
A dark shape moved through the blue-black smoke of that immense volley, on the road, and a few soldiers shot at it; it was big, perhaps the size of an old-style two-car garage, and rested on enormous spoked wheels, something from some strange museum piece. The shots screamed off it in a shower of sparks; it was armored with pieces of sheet metal on it every which way, several thicknesses of them—there must be fifty or more people pushing it—
Birdsall realized, “It’s a bomb! Shoot, shoot, we can’t let them push it here!”
The troops who had reloaded shot at whatever they could see or find; as the juggernaut rolled in toward them, with the pushers now actually running, some pushers went down clutching a shattered knee or ankle, or fell out of the pack where a lucky shot had found a way through the armor.
Behind the juggernaut came a sort of huge metal turtle; men running with corrugated metal sheets held out to the sides or over their heads, and something in between and under. Birdsall shouted for someone to take some shots at whatever that was, as well, but in the din of gunfire he couldn’t be heard, and most of the troops who could fire were concentrating on the onrushing bomb.
As it rolled up to the thick log gate that closed the road into town, Birdsall screamed, “Down! Take cover!” Most of the soldiers did; the explosion that knocked the log gate flat killed very few of them. They were deafened and stunned, but on their feet. There had been a carnage, but it was of the Daybreakers pushing the wheeled bomb; their remains stained the road red.
“Reload and fire on that next target!” Birdsall shouted, again, but he could not hear his own voice; when he touched his ear, he found blood running down. The metal turtle came on; when shots felled one shield carrier, someone else within grabbed the shield and closed the hole.
Birdsall shouted to them to shoot low, to try to get under the shielding metal, and he shot there himself, but the defenders had simply been overwhelmed, first by the suicide rush, then by the bomb cart, and now with this. Many were fumbling to reload, some were trying to clear jams, and most were deaf from the blast and blind from the smoke. So the turtle was almost at the gate when the metal sheets were thrown aside, and from beneath it, almost a hundred tribals rushed—each clutching a Newberry submachine gun.
Objectively the Daybreaker submachine-gunners were poor fighters. They wasted ammunition, often not even aiming. Some of them were blinded, maimed, killed as guns blew up in their hands. But they kept coming, kept shoving in fresh drums of ammunition until the guns blew up, and kept attacking every living soldier they could find around the gate.
Automatic fire at such close range, in such volume, swept Birdsall’s forces away from the gates, drove the crews away from their heavy weapons, and opened the gap for a critical few minutes, as ten thousand Daybreakers, spirit sticks, hatchets, clubs, torches, and spears raised high and screaming for Mother Gaia, poured into the orchards and toward the town. Birdsall’s thoughts, dying among others on the wall, were first that he didn’t think a messenger could get to town with a warning before the tribals did, then that anyway he had no messengers, and finally that his tummy really hurt and he wanted to go home now.
• • •
When the first tribals with spears appeared at the other end of the field, Quattro, Asanté, and the ground crew had already pulled off the grounding wires and reconnected everything on the Gooney. “I still wish,” the chief began.
“They’ll burn it and us with it on the ground here,” Quattro said. “And we don’t know that the moon gun shot was even aimed anywhere near us. The last few have been over Pueblo, and the jolt from that might damage a radio, but it won’t shut off my ignition. And we only need to fly about forty minutes to reach Paducah and safety. So die for sure here, or try to make it out on the Gooney. Now departing from all gates, dude.”
The ground crew piled in, the chief going last, and strapped down on the benches. Asanté took his place at the gun. Quattro revved up; the sound of the plane apparently attracted more tribals, for suddenly they were running out onto the end of the runway. He gave the engine full throttle and roared toward them, lifting off just in time to clear them by scant feet, and climbing as quickly as the Gooney could manage.
The brilliant flash of light gave him just a moment to realize that the EMP, this time, was right overhead. The spark for the engines stopped, and they coughed on fuel-air mix they could not ignite, the propellers slowing, not even finishing a complete turn. Wires on the plane reached far above their kindling points, but most did not have time to burst into flame; the men in the back were lashed by shocks but the signals from the neurons just under their skin never reached their brains.
In the small airspace in one of the almost-full fuel tanks, a spark touched off an explosion just big enough to rupture the tank and mix the fuel thoroughly into the air in the heated, sparking interior of the plane; there was a moment of terrible light and pain, and then nothing for those within. Outside, in the burning town strewn with bodies, the cheers and drumming grew louder and louder.
2 HOURS LATER. PADUCAH, KENTUCKY. 3:30 PM CENTRAL TIME. SUNDAY, MAY 10, 2026.
He was the sort of guy that Lyndon Phat had always disliked on sight, and always forced himself to be nice to. Somehow, even through the food shortages and the disappearance of most mechanical work-savers in the past year and a half, this guy Davey Prinche had managed to remain pudgy and out of shape; there was something subtly dirty and messy about every aspec
t of him, from his grimy T-shirt to his crude coat-hanger glasses, and from the dirty dishes scattered among the tools on his workbench to the grime under his fingernails.
But he had invented an EMP detector and direction finder that worked even for a close-in hit like this one, and if listening to him brag about how clever he had been was part of the price of having it, well, so be it. He was nattering away right now. “The big trick was realizing that these old-style recording thermometers were mechanical and wouldn’t react to the EMP. So as long as all the loops are identical, the ones that got the hottest are the ones where the plane of the loop was closest to parallel to the wave front coming out of the EMP, and by doing a linear interpolation between the hottest and second hottest pair of loops on each side of the circle, and stretching that string between the points, we can come up with a more exact direction. So, yeah, it was right over Pale Bluff, at least if the topo maps from back before were accurate.”
Phat thanked him and didn’t wince while shaking his hand. He raced down the stairs, a couple of aides chattering after him. On the street outside he told them, “Be polite, and she won’t be, but have Bambi meet me at the airfield. I’m taking the pedicab.”
He told his pedicabbie, “Airfield, right away.”
Ground crew had cleared the Stearman to fly by the time that Bambi rode up on horseback. “This was their quickest way to get me here,” she said, dismounting and handing the reins to a slightly bewildered lieutenant, who managed to persuade the horse to go with him off the field, but it looked like the deal might unravel at any moment. “Are you going to give me my plane back?”
“You must have felt that EMP even in the shelter—”
“Even in jail,” she said. “We’ll stick to right names for things.”
“In jail, then. I am sorry I had to put you there. But the EMP was directly over Pale Bluff, and we have not been able to raise them on the radio. We need to take a look right away, and I’m going to ask you to fly me over—”
“Get in.”
She talked to the ground crew chief for less than a minute, until another ground crew member came running up with her flying helmet, scarf, and jacket. “Thanks for taking care of these,” she said. She looked around at the ground crew. “Remember you can always come to California, if anything gets shitty out here, ’kay?”
She hopped up on the wooden step and into the plane so quickly that Phat couldn’t think of anything to say; he just got into the front, passenger cockpit. Ground crew wheeled up the magneto cart, connected it to her coil, and cranked it to charge the capacitors.
“Chocks out?”
“Chocks out.”
“Charge?”
“At charge.”
“Coupez!”
They unhooked the magneto cart and rolled it away; Bambi engaged the prop clutch. “Coupez,” the ground chief confirmed, walking around to the prop, and grasping one tip.
“Contact!”
He spun the prop hard and stepped back; with bang and a couple of pops, the engine fired and caught. Bambi disengaged the clutch for a moment to let it rev up to speed; these cold starts with a deliberately dead battery, after an EMP, were always touchy affairs, but the short flight to Pale Bluff should be enough to recharge.
She engaged the prop and taxied around slowly; the engine was still running fine, so she opened the throttle and headed down the runway, into the air, and out over the broad green Ohio River, across into Illinois, and on to the northeast.
80 MINUTES LATER. PALE BLUFF. 5:50 PM CENTRAL TIME. SUNDAY, MAY 10, 2026.
Thirty miles away, they could see the columns of dense black smoke. Bambi circled above the town, taking a look from all angles; the Daybreakers had managed to get the orchards burning despite the damp (the smell like frying oil meant that perhaps they had used fuel from the airfield). Bodies by the hundred lay in the streets and along the walls. Some of the tribals were still in the town, carrying armfuls of whatever had caught their fancy, or dancing in lines behind spirit sticks and drums.
She swooped lower, and then Phat saw what she had seen: the Gooney Express lying on its back, the rear part of the fuselage bent as if with giant pliers, at the end of the runway. A lower pass revealed a great, gaping hole on the bent side; black char covered the old yellow-and-black checkered markings.
She brought the Stearman around and he started to lean back to confer with her, but she shoved his head out of her way, and landed the plane, threading between bodies on the runway as she brought it around and taxied back to the Gooney. By the bigger plane, she locked the clutch down so that the propeller was disengaged and whuffed to a halt. Leaving the engine running, she jumped out and ran to the Gooney.
Phat could not think what to do; they had seen tribals in the town, they couldn’t afford to be caught here on the ground, was she out of her mind with grief?
She knelt beside the open door of the overturned, burnt plane, peered inside, and began to keen and wail. Tentatively, Phat climbed out of the Stearman and approached her, trying to think how to tell her that they had to go, afraid to say he was sorry, afraid to sound wrong in any way.
When he was close enough to see the texture of her leather flying jacket, Bambi stood, turned, sighed, and drew a pistol from her jacket. “You are not getting back on my plane,” she said. “Move that way”—she pointed toward the orchard—“or I will shoot.”
He stood without speaking or moving, realizing what this must mean, until she fired a shot into the dirt to his right. He flinched away, and she said, “You know I’m a better shot than that. Next one is into your center. Run.”
He had been stout, back before, and he was in worse shape now, but he turned and ran, an undignified, pumping, fast waddle, for the trees. Before he reached them, behind him, he heard Bambi shout, “I told you it was my airplane!”
The propeller engaged in a deep buzzing roar. When he turned around he saw the Stearman racing down the runway and taking off.
General Lyndon Phat stood and stared at it. From here she could reach St. Louis, Columbia, or Iowa City, easily, and be refueled without question. It would be hours before they were overdue in Paducah. He had a pistol under his jacket, and a reserve knife strapped to his thigh, and nothing else.
The drumming grew louder and closer. He turned around to see a flock of tribal shamans walking toward him, with hundreds of armed men behind them. Reckoning that with four shots in the revolver, he didn’t want to take a chance on the last one being a misfire, he took a firm shoulder-width stance, shook out his shoulders (still stiff from the flight that had ended only minutes ago), relaxed, steadied, and shot two of the men carrying spirit sticks. As the rest began to run toward him, he put the still-hot muzzle into his mouth, ignoring the burning because it was just for a moment, pushed far back and up, and pulled the trigger.
• • •
Bambi Castro Larsen, Duchess of California, did not look back, or even think again about the vile little man. He was in the past. This is my airplane, she thought. They’ll refuel me on my say-so at Columbia, and again in Hays. Once I’m at Hays, I’ll have to decide whether to avoid Heather and fly on to Vernal, or face up to things and fly down to Pueblo. Heather better not expect me to turn myself in, but I feel like I owe her a confession, and an apology for the things that didn’t work out. And if she ever needs it, I’ll never turn her away from Castle Larsen.
But maybe not. She might try to arrest me or hold me for having gotten rid of General Shithead, instead of thanking me that he didn’t end up as our president. And nobody’s making me that helpless again. Nobody. I have my airplane and my Castle, and I’m going to keep them. I’ve already lost my Duke and my country.
3 HOURS LATER. COLUMBIA, MISSOURI. 9 PM CENTRAL TIME. SUNDAY, MAY 10, 2026.
There wasn’t much of twilight left as Bambi came in to the field, but unlike so many of the places she flew the Stearman into and out of, Columbia had been a real airport, back before, though a small one, and there was so much room on a jet
liner runway that the Stearman could practically have landed crossways. She taxied up to the hangar, shut down, and climbed out of the plane.
“Always a pleasure to have you here, ma’am,” the ground chief said. Bambi couldn’t quite remember her name, and it took her another moment to think, Right, I’m in Columbia, en route to Pueblo.
“Good to be down for the night,” Bambi said. “I’m pretty well ex-hausted. Can I just ask you to fit my plane out, and if there’s a carriage to the hotel—”
“We’ll have you there right away. You look pretty well worn-out, ma’am.”
She had to be awakened when the carriage came by, almost an hour later. The hotel was just an old religious-retreat facility near the airport, but the staff knew how she liked things, so when she staggered into the only room with a private bath, it was all set up, with the tub already filled with hot water and towel-covered board covering it. There was bread, meat, and cheese on the sideboard. She made up three sandwiches, stripped, ate while she soaked, toweled off, and fell asleep on top of the covers without setting an alarm.
FIFTEEN:
THE LAST PRESIDENT
THE NEXT DAY. PUEBLO. 10 AM MOUNTAIN TIME. MONDAY, MAY 11, 2026.
James wished they had met at his home; Heather’s office was comfortable enough, and the logbooks and records were there, but it would have felt good to be cooking. Here, he had nothing to do. A review of the facts would have been useless.
All three of them were miserably aware that there had been an EMP over Pueblo, just after Carol May’s last fragmentary radio message, in clear, that the tribal horde was inside the walls. About an hour later, Phat had sent the cryptic message from Paducah that he was going to take a look himself with Bambi Castro, and nothing had been heard since. The Army of the Wabash had only reached Terre Haute yesterday, finding everything destroyed, and would not have air reconnaissance that could reach Pale Bluff until Sally Osterhaus reached them in her Piper Cub later this week.