by John Barnes
So it seemed like we’as in that building for a million years, we took charge after charge, and a few’d die, and then a few more, and finally one Daybreaker charge got inside. I shot till I had nothing to shoot, I remember running out of ammo, and then it was hatchet work, and then, boom, something on the back of my head, right where I wear my braid, which I think maybe saved my skull and my life.
And that’s me.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. ABOVE LAFAYETTE, WABASH.
12:00 PM EASTERN TIME. TUESDAY, MAY 5, 2026.
Nancy Teirson saw her landing field was overrun with Daybreakers and did not begin a descent. She flew on over the Tippecanoe County Fairgrounds, observing guns flaring in the thin open space between the thick double line of people encircling what had been about a third of the army’s encampment. Obviously there was a lot of shit on what remained of the fan.
Staying high, she put the Acro Sport into a several-mile-wide counterclockwise circle to observe, and to give General Grayson a chance to heliograph to her. There was a garrison, a fuel depot, and a radio transmitter back at Terre Haute; she could report the bad news from there. Meanwhile, she needed to make sure she saw as much of it as she could.
The hasty tribal fortifications at the Tippecanoe battlefield were empty, but scattered bodies were everywhere.
She climbed up into the fierce cold, almost to the Acro Sport’s 18,000-foot ceiling, for a better look from a distance. No more big tribal forces moving along the Tippecanoe River, so obviously they had arrived. Circling back over the main battle at the fairgrounds, she estimated 23,000 tribals by a radial count and 27,500 by an area count.
The forces she had been tracking before had totaled no more than 8,000. Had all these others come down the Wabash?
Descending to a much warmer 6,000 feet over the camp, she looked for interruptions in the Daybreaker lines, but found none: the army was surrounded.
As she flew a slow circuit, looking for anything unusual or any clue she could take back with her, a heliograph flashed below:
SORTIE 9 QEO 15 BRK
QSE 30 BRK
They’re going to try to break out in 9 minutes, they expect to have the runway clear in 15, and they want me to land in 30? Grayson must have—no. Not Grayson. He’d never give an order that dumb. He’s dead or unconscious, and some real idiot is in command down there.
She clamped the stick between her knees, got the sun on the positioning spot, sighted the headquarters signal tower down the scope of her own heliograph, and sent,
DO NOT SORTIE BRK
QCI 3X BRK
QSP RECCE B4 QRF TH BRK
Surely they’d understand do not sortie, whether or not they grasped the Q codes for I will circle three times and I will relay reconnaissance information before returning to Terre Haute.
They flashed back
QSL
which meant only “signal received.”
Well, whatever they do, I’m not landing here. One good look and back to Terre Haute. She moved the stick gently forward, slowly descending for a last pass across the fairgrounds. On the western side of the fairgrounds, she saw flashes and puffs of smoke from both sides of the line.
Tribals using guns.
Has to be the Castle Earthstone heretics, which means—what’s that?
She turned sharply to the east, flying straight across the camp, toward the strange object on the other side, near where her landing field had been. The thing was perhaps twenty feet across, like a giant quiver of arrows—no, an array of spears or harpoons—rotating and tilting toward her—
She hauled back and to the right on the stick and opened the throttle wide, avoiding flying over it, trying to climb away. A blue-black cloud appeared where the spear-things had been. She kept climbing, wishing the Acro Sport had a lot more engine.
Multiple thudding booms sounded behind her, audible even over the roaring engine. For an instant, she could hope she had been out of range.
The plane jerked and bucked. With a bang, her prop blades flew up and away, carrying off a piece of the upper wing; she leaned forward to see a long piece of wire wrapped around the shaft, one of those spears dangling from it.
Her leg felt funny, but the engine was shrieking with no load to balance it, so she first unlocked the throttle cutoff and slapped it in. In the abrupt silence she looked around, trying to put the plane into as long a glide as she could, hoping to make it back into the besieged army at the fairgrounds. She couldn’t seem to work the rudder, and as she gently eased the stick back, instead of leveling off, the plane pulled hard right.
A strange ripping noise made her look; a spear, stuck through both right wings, was pulling loose in the wind, taking fabric, struts, and wires with it, leaving big flapping shreds. Her right side now had far more drag than lift. She compensated with the stick as well as she could, but the rudder pedals—
Something hurt. She looked down. A spear was sticking out of the cockpit floor and into her left calf muscle.
The shaft must be trailing down between the landing gear.
A crash was probably more immediately dangerous than blood loss. Nancy pushed on the barbed head, then pulled on the shaft, trying to back it out of her calf. With the torn wing it was already a hard fight to keep the Acro Sport in a straight glide toward the fairgrounds. It was trying so hard to tumble and dive. One hand on the stick and the other pawing at the spearhead, she plunged into a rising cloud of rocks and arrows.
She was still holding it mostly level when, seventy yards short of the fairground fence, the spear butt hit dirt. The spear ripped through her calf muscle, freeing her in a rush of blood. Screaming, she hauled back on the stick, willing the tail wheel to touch first. For a half second it felt almost like merely her hardest landing ever.
But the tail did not come down. The saggy, deflated tires grabbed pavement. Nancy jammed her face between her knees, hands clutching her seat belt.
With a sound like dry sticks crushed in a garbage truck, the Acro Sport flipped over its nose, landing on its upper wing and rudder, crushing and dragging them against the fuselage. When the plane stopped sliding, she was hanging from the belt by her waist. She poked her head downward into the light.
Through a drizzle of spattering blood, she peered between the cockpit edge and the crushed upper wing. Her seat belt buckle was jammed. She fumbled for her knife, concentrating on getting out of the plane.
She found the hilt and undid the snap on the sheath just as she smelled the biodiesel, silently praying not like this not like this anything but this. She was sawing on the belt when, through the narrow aperture, she saw a blazing torch laid onto the fuel-drenched fabric of the upper wing.
She sawed as hard as she could, crying please not like this as she did, but the belt did not give way before the whole Acro Sport flashed over into a blazing roar.
ELEVEN:
BY THE TIME HISTORY IS WRITTEN, I HOPE NONE OF US WILL RECOGNIZE OURSELVES
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. RUINS OF LAFAYETTE. 12:15 PM EASTERN TIME. TUESDAY, MAY 5, 2026.
“She’s dead,” Chris said, flatly. “And the plane is already burned beyond repair. Lieutenant Marprelate, there is no reason—”
“I’m in command here,” Marprelate said. His voice was terrifyingly calm and reasonable. “American forces depend on air power. We can’t lose air superiority.”
Jenny looked at the flame towering twenty feet over the heads of the Daybreaker mob, and at Marprelate’s little band of thirty volunteers. She thought, Half of them look like psychos trying to die, and probably are, and the other half look too scared to back out, and I know they are. Forcing her voice to stay level, low, and calm, she tried once more.
“We don’t have air power,” she said. “We used to have an airplane and a pilot. They’re both gone. You’ll be taking these men into a pointless—”
“Return to headquarters and have a situation
report waiting for me when we return. And we will return, with the airfield secured. Go now. If you’re part of this force, that’s an order, and if you’re not, I don’t want to waste time arresting you, but I will, and chain you too.”
Jenny and Chris caught each other’s eyes, and walked away.
Chris said, “Those men could stop the whole thing, just say they don’t volunteer after all, anymore, because it’s fucking crazy. But they’re going right out there with him to die. What makes anyone do that?”
“Let’s run. If we go up on the roof we can at least get a good view of what happens and I think we’ll need to see.” She sprinted and Chris chugged and puffed after her. Twenty years and sixty pounds was a big difference. He didn’t catch up until he was following her up the ladder from the second floor through the roof access.
Once he stood beside her on the flat roof, she said, quietly, “Jeff said once that some men want to die with honor, and other men will die just to be around them. He was big on honor. Probably, so are these guys. I just wish Marprelate was—”
Chris said, “Here they go.”
The platoon waited behind three iron-pipe cannon, which sat behind an old flatbed trailer covered on its far side by a chain-link and barbed-wire gate. At Marprelate’s whistle, men dragged the gate aside.
Daybreakers rushed the emerging gap; the iron pipes erupted in a point-blank volley of “Edison shot”—electrical parts from hardware store bins, crushed into juice cans with a perchlorate mix, so that the rotted plastic exploded and burned and the copper and aluminum fragments formed shrapnel. The smoke blew off to reveal ground covered with blood and shattered bodies, almost a third of the way to the downed plane.
Marprelate’s scant platoon of volunteers jogged forward, slipping on patches of blood. A few downed Daybreakers were still reaching upward with knives and hatchets; the soldiers clubbed them with rifle butts.
As they reached the tip of that little peninsula of murder sticking into the tribal sea, Marprelate barked orders. Because the volunteers were drawn from a dozen different units and had never worked together, their execution of Street Firing was ragged and slow, but they did put out three volleys, pushing the enemy farther back.
“Reload.” Sergeant Patel, on Jenny’s other side, spoke it like a prayer. Chris and Jenny turned.
“Marprelate sent me here to guard you because I tried to talk him out of it too.” His gaze remained on Marprelate’s men, who had drawn hatchets and were charging into the panicked tribals in front of them. “I wish they had reloaded. The enemy was hesitating. Newberrys load quick, wouldn’t’ve taken more than a couple seconds and they might not get—aw, shit.”
Tribals were pouring into the space behind Marprelate’s party. Patel shook his head. “It’s gonna be all hatchets and bayonets from now on. And everybody along the line back here’s gonna have to shoot too low to do any good, for fear of hitting them.”
All around the little surrounded party, Daybreaker spirit sticks rose high, rattles and whistles sounded, and the crowd pulsed like an amoeba engulfing food. Army snipers from building roofs and windows brought down spirit-stick bearers and silenced booming war-drums, but there were more every second.
Then dozens of spirit sticks rose all at once, drums pounded to a crescendo, and the knot of tribals yanked closed around the surrounded soldiers.
Their first volley was a single disciplined roar, and the attackers staggered back. But instead of trying to break through back to the gate, Marprelate’s men surged a couple of yards closer to the burning plane.
Again the sticks rose, the drums thundered, and the tribals leapt in. This time the answering volley was feeble and scattered, and did not even slow the tribals closing around them under the big puffs of blue-black smoke. A few more shots cracked like the last popcorn in a kettle. Hatchets, pikes, and poleaxes rose above the crowd and plunged into the center, too fast to follow.
The tribals ululated exultantly, then fled back toward the still-blazing plane. On the suddenly bare, crumbling pavement, Marprelate’s force was now a pile of still bodies at the center of a ring of tribal dead and wounded. A lone young man stood holding Marprelate’s severed head aloft, upside down by the beard, singing “Give Gaia Her Rights.” Then he fell backwards, hit by a sniper, and Marprelate’s head bounced a few feet from him on the pavement.
But it was mere revenge; as the crew slid the gate closed, the war-drums were already thundering again.
Chris turned to Jenny. “Your army now, General.”
“I told you, I am not—”
Very softly, Patel said, “Don’t let them hear you.”
She turned to follow his gaze; a little knot of lieutenants and sergeants, the unit commanders she had appointed, were emerging from the opened skylight onto the roof, looking like ashamed children expecting to be spanked. Shoulders drooped, weapons dangled in loose grips, and sooty cheeks had been tracked by tears like snails.
Looking down, Chris murmured, “Remember, two years ago, most of these guys weren’t ready to manage a shift at McDonald’s. Some of them just made sergeant a month ago. Now they’re commanding battalions.”
She forced herself to look back at the approaching men and women with a level, expressionless gaze. I will pretend that I am reading an order to them very clearly, an order from Jeff, the one he’d give if he could, and I see it in my mind’s eye. Aaaand . . . I read it, aaaand I say . . .
“Thank you for coming. We don’t have much time. When I send you back to your units, if you’re up on the line, give the bastards three good volleys if they’re close, or some sustained sniping if they’re farther back. We’re still far ahead on firepower and both your men and the tribals need reminding.
“Then keep the enemy well back for the next hour.” To her surprise, her voice stayed even and controlled. “As I said before, don’t spare the shot. Keep sending runners for ammunition till you are up to full stock.”
“If your unit is not on the line, then appoint company and platoon commanders as you need to, let them pick their XOs, and get ready to go up on the line. Clean and maintain all weapons. Distribute ammunition, food, and water. Make them eat a meal. Be ready to move up to the line and take over from a unit there within an hour and a half. Units on the line, same drill as soon as you’re relieved.” Jenny felt as if the person Jeff had always wanted to be had taken over her spirit.
“Now, before you go, we’re going to figure out who’s going where. Walk with me around the roof. This is my XO, Sergeant-now-brevet-Major Patel, and most of you know Chris, my intelligence staff. Chris, get out the notepad.”
In a quick circuit of the roof, she assigned everyone to advance or retreat to straighten and contract the line, pressuring them to volunteer and to keep their mouths shut about difficulties or objections.
Back at the access ladder, Jenny halted them all with a glare. “What kind of example are you setting your men? Stand up straight, hold those weapons like they’re yours, and when you give orders make them sound like orders. Dismissed!”
The men and women climbing back down through the skylight were still frightened, worried, unsure, even traumatized, but they moved like people who intended to do their duty.
“You were saying, General?” Chris said, smiling slightly.
“You know, right now they’d hang any man I told them to. What if I turned out not to have a sense of humor?” She saw the speculation in his eyes that she might mean it, and scolded herself for enjoying it.
9 HOURS LATER. RUINS OF LAFAYETTE. 10 PM EASTERN TIME. TUESDAY, MAY 5, 2026.
“We’re six hours into blackout, ma’am.” Adele was a heavyset young woman who had probably been ignored by everyone back before because she was quiet, but there was no problem with her assertiveness now. “If I set up a radio we’re risking destroying irreplaceable parts at best, and a fire or an explosion at worst, and anyway chances are no one i
s on the air to hear us right now. Plus all the parts will have been out of sealed containers and the nanospawn’ll start up on them. I’ll do it if you order me but you’re going to have to order me.”
Jenny nodded. “Then I’m ordering it. We’ll get you a couple more oil lamps so you have light to work by.”
“Don’t need the lamps. They’d just be one more thing to burn if the radio blows up. Just give me a clear table and have someone ready to run the antenna out.” Adele hoisted the metal file box onto the table and began unpacking parts. From the corner, Chris said, “I’ll have the encryption all rechecked in a couple more minutes.”
Jenny nodded. “Great, and thanks, both of you. And remember, some folks on the west and south sides of the line did think there was a flash in the sky late this afternoon. Good chance the moon bomb already went off, probably over Pueblo. We weren’t monitoring for an all clear at the time.”
“We were a little busy,” Chris muttered. The tribals, having exhausted the possibilities of their crude firearms once the army had re-discovered taking cover, had fallen back on massed charges. It was no more effective than it had been before, but it still had to be coped with and it was still nerve-wracking. For the last hour things had been quiet, and after a quick meeting to assign responsibilities for the night, they were catching up on everything that went into running an army under siege, and preparing a breakout for the next day.
Chris reminded himself that he was alive, behind the lines, and might even get some food and sleep soon. And thank god or some such person, Jenny banished Reverend Daddy to the supply office, where he’s useful, which means I didn’t have to add murder of clergy to my sins. I don’t think he has any idea how much she’s not his little girl anymore. That’s going to be—