The Last President

by John Barnes

  “So we’re in?” Tang asked.

  “You’re in. Whorf, Ihor, I think you probably have two more math tutors. Mister Whorf, find Mister Rezakhani some bedding, and put him in berth 104; Mister Reshetnyk, same thing for Mister Tang, berth 88.”

  2 DAYS LATER. ABOVE THE INTERSECTION OF THE FORMER INDIANA HIGHWAY 14 AND INDIANA HIGHWAY 17. (DOMAIN OF CASTLE EARTHSTONE/NEW STATE OF WABASH). 12:30 PM LOCAL SOLAR TIME/1:15 PM EASTERN TIME. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29, 2026.

  The continuing cold and soggy spring had grounded Nancy Teirson for a couple of days, but today was bright and clear, and there was plenty to see. Two miles below her Acro Sport, Highway 14 was a river of tribals pouring west. She guessed that they extended a little less than seven hundred yards along the road, in loose ranks of six to ten abreast. She circled lower for a better look; rocks and arrows rose toward her, dropping back far below. The tribals were pumping their spears and axes up and down in rhythm; sorry, guys, the engine’s a little loud for me to appreciate all that ooga booga you’re doing.

  She thought about buzzing them for fun, but the Acro Sport was unarmed and unarmored, and there was no sense pushing her luck. In the months after Daybreak, it had occurred to her that her old expensive hobby of building kit airplanes might be highly relevant to becoming rich in the new world, and she’d had the kit already, though she’d had to copy many parts in materials that stood up to biotes.

  Her “all natural materials” Acro Sport was a great aerobatic biplane, a short-landing tail dragger she could set down on a short stretch of dirt road or even a large building roof, but building it without synthetic fabric, fiberglass, plywood, or plastic had added weight and cost structural strength, and her version of a bio-diesel flathead 8, running on modified kitchen grease in a fog of spraying lye, was badly underpowered. Poor old Acro, stuck as a mailplane with a part-time job in reconnaissance, she thought. Besides, right after Daybreak day, who knew I’d even want a mount point for a gun, let alone a bomb bay?

  She circled, staying up out of arrow range, taking a good look before she turned away from them and headed back to the makeshift airstrip at Terre Haute.

  Affectionately, she patted the cowling on the Acro Sport. This coming winter, she was supposed to spend a few months down at Castle Newberry, helping them start building the next-generation copy. You’re going to have grandchildren, she thought to her plane. Don’t you mind that you’re not a war bird; we’re going to win the war, get some peace, and go back to being a country where the mail must go through.

  AN HOUR LATER. TERRE HAUTE, NEW STATE OF WABASH (FORMERLY INDIANA). 3:20 PM CENTRAL TIME. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29, 2026.

  “What did something like this?” Neville Jawarah asked Jimmy. Most of the old frame houses were burned down to the foundations, and the streets were a tangled maze of wind-drifted debris heaps higher than a man’s head with blown-clear pathways between them. The reek of the rotting asphalt was everywhere. But directly in front of them, a circle seemed to have been scoured, with an almost-neat edge; dunes of debris encircled it like rings around a black carbon bull’s-eye.

  “Firestorms look like this sometimes,” a voice said behind them; they jumped into salutes, because it was General Grayson. He returned their salutes absently, talking to the officers around him.

  Neville thought, Please God, don’t let anyone notice a general and ten other guys could just walk right up behind us. Also please don’t let me be that absentminded when we’re fighting. Also please let me get home. Especially also please help Jimmy keep his stupid wiseass mouth shut.

  “. . . more like a fire tornado,” Grayson was explaining to the men around him. “Sometimes with so much fuel per acre you get a vortex with winds up to hundreds of miles an hour, and blast-furnace temperatures. I saw something like this one time in Teheran. What makes it so eerie is you never see a really bare space this big in a city, normally, so the sheer scale gets to you. Look at that office building and count windows—five storeys, right? So it’s—”

  “My dear God.” The voice was deep and resonant; Neville recognized Reverend Whilmire from mandatory chapel. “This circle must be ten times as big as it looks.”

  “Worse than that. Your eye wants it to be about a block across, and it’s more like fifteen, and that works out to maybe fifty times as big as your eye tries to estimate.” Grayson glanced at the patch on Neville’s sleeve. “Pullman Militia?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If this firestorm happened in the part of Pullman that’s still inhabited, how much would be left?”

  “Not much, sir.”

  “We have to beat these assholes because if we don’t”—Grayson’s arm swept out toward the empty space in front of them—“somewhere in there, Mom’s house. Got that, soldier?”

  “Got it, sir.”

  “Well, I’ve kept you from working long enough, your sergeant’ll be looking for you. Carry on.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The general and his officers were long out of earshot, and Neville and Jimmy were pounding a post into the strangely soft, crusted black dirt of the circle, before Jimmy said, “You sure said ‘Yes, sir,’ a lot, there, Nev.”

  “He’s a general. It’s what they’re for.”

  “Yeah. Anyone ever tell you you’re a kiss-ass?”

  “Yeah, you. All the time. But since we got here, nobody’s told me I’m getting a lash on the butt or time in the stockade.”

  • • •

  “I do believe you frightened those boys,” Whilmire said, as they rode north.

  Colonel Goncalves, the commander of the President’s Own Rangers, fluffed his long gray beard. “The general also made their day. Frightening attention from authority makes a young man stand straighter and try harder.” He grinned.

  Grayson thought of Jenny’s private nickname for Goncalves, Santa the Hun, and grinned back. “Just reminding them that even this far away, they’re still defending their town and their family. Which they need help remembering.”

  Whilmire frowned. “Obviously you saw something else I didn’t.”

  “Those two gave off the not-subtle aroma of having been sent to mark trail as a punishment for doing something stupid,” Grayson explained. “They were out away from the main body, and out here that means ‘in danger.’ But they were slumped over, looking at their feet, and dragging themselves through their work. I mean, honestly, sneaked up on by a whole pack of brass?” Grayson’s smirk was as annoying to his father-in-law as it was to anyone else. “I guess I felt sorry for them too. Being sad sacks in a pretty good army must suck. But if loser-ness could be screamed and punished out of them, their CO would’ve done it by now. So I figure, remind’em about Mom’s house.”

  THE NEXT DAY. RUINS OF MONTEZUMA, NEW STATE OF WABASH. 3:30 PM EASTERN TIME. THURSDAY, APRIL 30, 2026.

  At first Larry Mensche thought someone had tied a piece of firewood to the lamppost on the former US 36 bridge across the Wabash. But it was a naked corpse, covered with pitch.

  The eye sockets were empty. The hair was matted into a slick cap on the skull. The face was distorted, as if it saw something horrible on the horizon. A sign had been wired around its legs:

  ECCO

  RRC

  DEATH 2 U ALL

  Steve Ecco, scout for the RRC, sent here last summer. Betrayed by Arnie Yang before he ever got here. Captured and tortured to death by that half-ass warlord who now called himself Lord Robert.

  The right thumb was missing. Pauline Kloster had described how Robert had battered it off with a hammer and cauterized it with hot solder. The strangely clean emptiness of the eye sockets, so unlike what a bird would do, was probably because they had been burned out with a hot screwdriver while Ecco was alive.

  Larry whirled at the soft cough.

  Freddie Pranger was there, with Chris Manckiewicz, and Roger Jackson, and other scouts Larry knew less well. “You got here,” F
reddie said. “We were kind of waiting for you, ’cause we’d heard you were coming this way too, and we knew you knew Steve.”

  “Yeah, I did. Pretty well. And all of you?”

  Roger said, “He was the first guy who trained me as a scout.”

  Chris Manckiewicz added, “And he wanted to be a great scout more than anything else. If it hadn’t been for him, Pauline would never have escaped, and she was our main warning about what was brewing at Castle Earthstone. And we all know Steve was as good as any of us, and it wasn’t lack of skill or bad luck.” The words “Arnie Yang” seemed wrong to speak here.

  “So we were thinking,” Freddie said. “They sent us scouts to make sure the bridge was open and secure, and we did that, and to hold it till the army gets here later today, and with no tribals for miles around, we can do that. We have some time on our hands, and Steve Ecco was a scout. Scouts should bury him.”

  Larry nodded. “Let’s put him somewhere where he can rest easy. Maybe facing east, toward the enemy?”

  Freddie nodded. “Might make sense, and it would honor him, but I kind of think about times I’ve been scared and alone, and I thought he might want to face toward Albuquerque.”

  The other scouts looked at each other.

  “Where his kids and their mother live,” Freddie said. “Home. Where we all wish we could go.”

  3 DAYS LATER. PORTA CORSINI (AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE RAVENNA CANAL), ITALY. 4:30 PM CENTRAL EUROPEAN TIME. SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2026.

  So far north, and so close to the solstice, the sun rose before 5 a.m., but Whorf was already awake, casting, sounding, and calling as Discovery made her way into the canal that joined Ravenna to the coast. A few minutes before the graying light had made it unnecessary to hold the depth line up to the lantern; now at Whorf’s call of “five fathoms,” Captain Halleck ordered, “Heave to, then, and drop anchor when she’s steady.”

  They were in Ravenna precisely because there was nothing there: the city lay within the southern edge of the Dead Belt produced by the North Sea bomb.

  Lisa Reyes found most other radiation sources negligible, and background tritium down to tolerable levels, but recommended they not stay long.

  A shore-scouting party came back with an odd request: please detach Whorf from drawing microorganisms for Lisa, and send him to draw what looked like a long list of places that began with “San.”

  “Feel like I’m in California,” Whorf muttered.

  Ihor went along to keep watch while Whorf drew.

  As Whorf was rolling up his sketch of San Vitale, Ihor asked, “May I look at this one?”

  “It’s not really finished, I’m going to get some of it done on the ship, but now I remember enough.”

  “But may I see?”

  “Sure, but it’s not finished.”

  Ihor looked for a long time. Then he wanted to see Whorf’s sketch of the tomb of Gallia Placidia, and said, “I see it now because you showed it to me, Whorf. It is so good that the first voyage I have where I get to look, I have you to show me how to see.”

  “Dude, the philosophy is getting deep around here. Our shoes are going to be a mess.”

  By the end of the day, Whorf had made a few dozen sketches, most not finished but all at the point where he thought he could finish them well enough from memory later. He was surprised how many people wanted to see them. “It’s just draftsmanship,” he said. “I know just enough about art to know I’m not an artist.”

  “They’re still having a hard time redeveloping cameras with film that works and lasts,” Lisa Reyes said. “By the time someone gets back here with a working camera, this might all be lost—tribals might come up from the south to knock it down, more fires might sweep through the city, anything. So this is the last chance humanity gets to see what it looks like, and we all see through your eyes and hand, Whorf. I don’t know about art at all, but I know this: you might be our last view of Ravenna. And if you’ve been listening to your history tutor at all, this was the last place where the Western Roman Empire sort of guttered, gasped, and slid before finally giving up.”

  “Sort of like Pueblo today,” Whorf said.

  THE NEXT DAY. RUINS OF LAFAYETTE, NEW STATE OF WABASH. 4:30 PM EASTERN TIME. MONDAY, MAY 4, 2026.

  “Sir,” the major beside him said, “there’s a scout approaching; he just came out of that side street—”

  Grayson looked up from the tattered paper street map of Lafayette, Indiana, on which he’d been trying to place the only standing street sign in sight. He did not need to raise his field glasses to see which scout it was; he could pick out Larry Mensche’s awkward seat on a horse clear to the horizon, or possibly from the moon. There’s a man with an incentive to see the bicycle redeveloped, he thought.

  As soon as it was practical, Mensche dismounted and walked to them. “Sir, a party of about two hundred tribals is digging in at Battle Ground State Park; looks like they’re preparing a fortified camp for a much larger party. As of about three hours ago, they had some breastworks up along the edge of a rise, they were building some fires, and they were clearing junk out where the roof of the visitor center had fallen in, turning it into sort of a fort, I guess. There’s a creek—”

  “On the west of the hill?” Grayson gave him that strange smile, the one that always made people uncomfortable.

  “Exactly, sir.”

  “I was kind of thinking this might be where they’d meet us. Maybe they have a sense of history, or maybe it’s just that it’s about the only defensible piece of ground near the confluence of the Tippecanoe and the Wabash, but either way, they are setting up camp exactly where William Henry Harrison defeated Tenskwatawa.”

  “You think it’s on purpose?”

  “Definitely. I just don’t know what purpose it’s on. It’s the only high, dry ground around here with covered access to water and there’s a ton of symbolism too.” Grayson scrawled on a sheet of paper. “Messenger, take this to Colonel Prewitt at the TexICs’ HQ, and bring me back word that he’s received it. Urgent.”

  “Sir.” The messenger mounted and galloped away.

  Goncalves said, “You’re sending the TexICs to raid them while they’re setting up?”

  “Yes. That force of four thousand of them coming down the Tippecanoe that Nancy Teirson has been shadowing was well below Monticello at nine this morning; they’ll be down here at the Tippecanoe battlefield before dawn tomorrow. Half a day behind them there’s another horde that size, and when Quattro bombed them at Winamac he didn’t think he had slowed them up at all, so figure they’ll be here by noon tomorrow. Larry, did that force at the battleground park look like they were working hard?”

  “They were digging trenches and throwing up breastworks like maniacs, sir.”

  “Well, there you have it. By noon tomorrow, which is about the soonest our main force could get there, they’ll be dug in up there with eight thousand fighters. At logistics and maneuver, this guy Robert is at least a very gifted amateur: he put together two forces the size of back-before divisions, and moved them a long way into a position where they’re a serious threat. Just in case he also turns out to have a knack for combat command, we’re not going to spot him any more advantages. I think the TexICs can get there by six tonight, and sunset’s not till almost eight. Plenty of time to smash up whatever preparations Robert’s advance parties have made. But once they do, a short regiment of cavalry doesn’t have the firepower to hold it against what’s coming down the Tippecanoe.”

  “Sir,” Goncalves said, “I hope this doesn’t look like I’m angling for glory—”

  “You’re ahead of me, Goncalves, and you’re right. Whatever it looks like, I need the President’s Own Rangers to get there before those first four thousand Daybreakers do, dig in, and hold that hill. I’ll push a couple of reserve regiments to try to reinforce you by noon, but I think three is more realistic. You’ve seen the same
things I have: soldiers staggering till they fall asleep wherever they lie down. We’ll be lucky to get the main body moving any time before noon tomorrow, and I doubt they’ll be able to maintain route step, let alone anything faster. So, if you have to do it alone, can your Rangers get there before the Daybreakers and hold that hill till the main army gets there?”

  “I would feel honored—”

  “Goncalves, I know you’ll say ‘yes, sir,’ if I order you to, and die trying if you have to. If I asked you to take four guys and conquer Asia you’d say ‘yes, sir,’ and offer to leave two behind for a reserve. But physical reality counts for something too. You started off from Pale Bluff with an official three battalions, but in numbers you’re more like two. And you were the avant garde coming in here, so your troops are tired, even if they show it a lot less than the regulars and the militia. So I don’t need the answer from your pride, which I already know. I need your judgment. If I send you to do this, will our side still be holding the hill when I get there with the main army tomorrow evening? And will I still have a functioning President’s Own Rangers once you do that?”

  Goncalves stroked down his belly-length beard slowly; Grayson had learned to respect it as the Don’t interrupt, I’m thinking hard gesture. “Candidly, sir, yes. If it’s not any later than sundown tomorrow. Just don’t be any later.”

  “It’s a deal. I’ll make sure that whenever the TexICs send a report back it goes straight to you. Get going.”

  Goncalves saluted and thundered away.

  Grayson turned back to Mensche. “All right, I’ll send you after Goncalves in a minute, to give him the details, but while he’s kicking things into motion, you’ll have time to tell me the rest. So is anything else unusual about the Daybreaker force?”