Daybreak Zero (13 page)

ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 12:30 AM MST. SATURDAY, JULY 19, 2025.

Arnie felt slightly silly about feeling as good as he did. He’d had a few beers. Samson and Ecco had accepted and welcomed him into the beerand-hanging-out circle of, as they dubbed themselves, Jedi Rednecks, and introduced him to the few other serious martial artists in the circle. It was so friendly and comfortable. Nobody asked him to judiciously frame an exact thought; it was warm and fun and there hadn’t been much just-let-your-hair-down in his life lately, or at all, ever, really.

Arnie had always liked country music (initially because it annoyed the crap out of his sophisticated parents). And it was so flattering that they wanted him to help teach the beginner classes.

The dark, empty street seemed so much friendlier, till Aaron fell silently into step beside him.

“I just came from martial arts practice and the bar. Maybe I’m not real controlled; startling me might be a good way to get stabbed.”

“Oh, Doctor Yang. Going slumming with the working class, I see. Looking for some bovine blonde in a cowboy hat—a cowgirl, or some might say a cow-girl—to fill the wide open spaces of your heart?”

“That’s none of your damned business.” Arnie was stalling as he tried to bring his list of questions to the forefront through the beery fog.

“Well, I can hardly fault you for enjoying respect, friendship—and who knows, maybe love—where you can find it, considering how things have been going with your friends and supporters.” Their feet beat out a soft rhythm for a block before Aaron spoke again. “So you are interested in how long Daybreak has existed, Doctor Yang? How long has God existed?”

“For those who believe in him, I suppose forever.”

“Do you believe in God?”

“Do your questions just keep getting more personal?”

Aaron tugged the blanket tighter around himself, and muttered, “Poor Tom’s a-cold, eh? The king and the fool. It’s the fool’s job to ask hard questions, that’s all. Not really personal at all, you know. At all. But if you don’t believe God exists, you do believe the concept or the image or the idea of God exists, don’t you?”

“I see where you’re going,” Arnie said. Gah. Sophomore solipsism. “So for believers, their idea of God is the creator of the universe, so there has always been God, whereas unbelievers would just say God came into being sometime after people came into existence. What the fuck’s it got to do with Daybreak?”

“You know, better than anyone, Doctor Yang, Doctus of the Doctrine and the Doxology where all Documents are Docked into the Docket, Doctor, that worrying about whether information is relevant is the surest way to prevent learning anything. Aren’t all your troubles caused by everyone wanting something relevant right now instead of waiting for you to look into something interesting? How can you start complaining that something is interesting but—”

The voice had become softer and softer, and after a moment Arnie said, “Not relevant?” and turned to find he had said it to the empty street.
And that means I wasn’t watching him, either, for at least a full minute. Oh, man, no more walking by myself when I’ve been drinking, and I need to get Heather in on this.

That thought seemed to bring back the happiness from the evening at Dell’s Brew.
Once I tell Heather what we have, we’re going to be able to move so fast. I’m going to
crack
this Daybreak thing.

The last couple of blocks to his house, he walked with his hands in his pockets, hugging himself with his elbows, surprised by how well things were going and how many friends he had. The world after Daybreak was really, honestly, not so bad at all, at least not for Arnie.
Interesting how it’s not relevant.

THE FOLLOWING DAWN. HELLS CANYON. 5:20 AM PST. SATURDAY, JULY 19, 2025.

The cliff fell almost vertically away from their feet. It was still night below but the river reflected the indigo of the dawn sky. Before them, a great fan of mighty razor-edged ridges rose directly up from the water into a high palisade veined with dark rock and darker crevices, sawing into the dark cloudless sky.

“There’s a path on both sides that connects to a bunch of rocks that you can cross on, if you’re lucky and the water’s low,” Debbie explained.

“Cold as hell down there, I bet.”

“Yeah. And dark. But if we start climbing down now, when we get there it’ll be light enough and warm enough.”

“Is that what you want to do, Deb?”

“Naw, I
want
to spend three weeks in pre-Daybreak Vegas with a no-limit credit card.”

He laughed. “Damn straight. I’d join you, just for the casino hot dogs.”

Debbie grinned. “On the other hand, I think what we
ought
to do is very carefully climb down to this place I know: a nice sheltered spot under a rock overhang, about half a mile and three hundred feet down from here, right by that hidden trail. Since we haven’t heard a trace of pursuit, I think we could chance a fire. On my way out of camp I liberated some beef jerky and a box of Jiffy, so if you’ve got a mess kit—”

“Happens I do.”

“Cornbread and soggy warm jerky for breakfast, get all the way warm, maybe a nap, how’s that sound? You bearing up okay?”

“Better than okay, I think. Let’s go.” He stretched. “If I’m too old for this stuff, I’m still too young to admit it.”

Descending a steep spot wet with spray from the spring, he slid for an instant. She caught his arm, he found his balance, and he smiled his thanks. Her surprised smile in response felt like warm lotion on his heart.

FIVE:

SCHOLARS TAPPED TO FIND HIS NEW REMAINS

4 HOURS LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 10:40 AM MST. SATURDAY, JULY 19, 2025.

It wasn’t Arnie’s regular hangover: he hadn’t had very much beer last night, he’d been up for hours this morning, and he’d had breakfast. Nonetheless he had a headache, queasy stomach, and painful clarity about the world’s failings.

What failings?

He was lonely but he had friends; he was frustrated but Heather was listening, and once he told her about Aaron, she’d really listen. And a cool July morning in Pueblo beat the hell out of what he was used to in DC. Clear, bright, high-altitude sunlight made everything pop out of its background. Midmorning was pleasantly warm, not the searing dry heat of late afternoon.

And the world was healing. In March a clear sky had looked like a few drops of blue food coloring in a barrel of old dishwater. Now it was slateblue again, on its way to real blue. Spring rains had washed a lot of soot out of the air and extinguished most of the fires in the old big cities, though snow might have to smother the last smolders.

Next summer or the one after, the sky will be bluer than it’s been in centuries.
The world was rewildernizing—silly Daybreaker word, but still, from the train coming up from Mota Elliptica, he’d seen buffalo and wild cattle. In thirty years something big with horns would rule the plains again.

Hunh.
Another note to feed to James Hendrix, over in research. Flying over the Gunnison Valley, Bambi had sighted a herd of yaks. Paul Ferrier had reported flocks of emu in Oklahoma. At Castle Castro down in San Diego someone had found a dead baby kangaroo in a bean field. What had happened to all the imported animals? Were there lions or baboons breeding on the Great Plains, tigers in Louisiana, cobras in Florida?

How would the Daybreakers feel about that? Evolution taking its course, the blasphemous mistreatment of Gaia redeemed into a new kind of wilderness? Or a gigantic replay of dogs on the Pacific islands and kudzu in North America? He could build either narrative, using Daybreaker core signs—that was an intriguing idea.
If I were in Daybreak, and I wanted to embrace the hybrid wilderness—

We’ll embrace it,
he realized. They’ll definitely embrace anything that makes it tougher for human beings.

Heather waddled in, less than a month to go, over six feet tall, carrying low and all in one place, and Arnie blocked a smile at her exasperated expression—the lifelong athlete having lost control of her body.

She began with the obligatory platitudes, welcoming Arnie back, sorry for the losses at Mota Elliptica, shall not have died in vain, blah blah. Everyone else on the RRC Board looked at Arnie, faking polite concern.

Heather switched to the good news: Bambi Castro had flown her Stearman to Baker City last night, and after extensive checkout and decontamination, it appeared that the plane was fine. “So is Bambi,” Heather added.

Too bad Trish isn’t,
Arnie thought.

Larry Mensche had found his daughter. She’d been living as a tribal, and she wanted to come in to the RRC, and apparently the tribe she belonged to had been heavily Daybreaker. “So you’ll be getting another cooperative interview subject, Arnie, and she’s had a real different encounter with Daybreak.”

Well, that
was
good news; he couldn’t help grinning. “How soon does she get here?”

Heather’s scowl of frustration deepened. “She and Larry didn’t fly out with Quattro Larsen on the Gooney Express and they didn’t walk out with the President’s Own Rangers. They’re off doing one of those peculiar missions Larry defines for himself.”

Arnie said, “Admittedly he doesn’t accept direction much, but I think what he’s doing is valuable.”

Heather’s face flashed brief annoyance. “I didn’t say what Larry is doing is not valuable. I just don’t understand it. If you can tell me what Larry is doing up there in the woods, I’d be grateful. I thought he was looking for his daughter and cut him slack for that, but apparently that was only part of it.”

Arnie nodded. “Well, I haven’t spoken with him in two months, but I’ve read his reports. You want my guess?”

“Sure, what the hell. It’s got to be better than my paranoid suspicions.”

“I think it will be. The tribes are an astonishing phenomenon, Heather. Think about it. A year ago we were cruising toward a routine election in a dull, prosperous USA; the worst we had to think about was maybe a fresh terrorist strike like 9/11, the
Roosevelt
, or the Fed bombing. All the people who are in the tribes now were mostly ordinary citizens; they were younger than average, and they listened to a couple musicians and bands more than other people did, but they weren’t
significantly
different from the people you saw at work or in the house next door. Sometime after October 28th—eight months, Heather, that’s all—they turned into the murdering crazy barbarians we all know and love today.

“Everything else that’s originated since Daybreak had deep roots in pre-Daybreak society—I mean, how could it be otherwise, in just eight months? The Provisional Constitutional Government is really just the liberal-Democrat think tanks running a rump government in the old Democratic Party bastion of the Northwest. The fundamentalist churches and the Army had been drawing on the same demographics for so long that the Temporary National Government is just those two wings of the old Republicans, in
their
most reliable area. The Post Raptural Church is the fundamentalists who’ve been preparing for the End Times for four generations, playing them out. The Castles were there from the first Obama Administration on; they were just eccentric right-wingers in fortified houses, harboring romantic notions, until society collapsed around them and they started turning into feudal lords—which was another idea that was already around. Even we, the RRC itself, are just a bunch of intelligence, law enforcement, research, and PR bureaucrats trying to do our jobs after Daybreak. Our technical centers grew up from pre-Daybreak hobbyists who wanted to preserve disappearing arts like steam railroads, blacksmithing, and celestial navigation. You see? Everything we see around us grew out of something that was there for decades before Daybreak.

“But the tribes are—well? What are they? What were they before Daybreak?”

Heather’s head was cocked to the side. “You sound like you don’t know.”

“I don’t. But I
want
to know, because I think they are a major clue to Daybreak. Where they came from, how they cropped up so fast, who they really are, everything—I think that’s one of the places where we might be able to understand Daybreak. So I want to know all about them—and so does Larry Mensche. That’s what he’s doing out there—pursuing the most important issue he knows about, with you or without you.”

“Hunh. Well, Larry’s reports do read more like ethnography or anthropology than like military intel or law enforcement reports. And every time I’m forced to look at the tribal problem, it turns out to be much bigger than I’d thought.” She yawned and stretched. “We have a bunch of routine Board business to clear here, quickly, unless everyone would like to spend hours discussing budget points and policies?” She beamed at how hard all of them shook their heads. “Knew I could count on you all. Arnie, you and I are having lunch, on the government’s nickel, this afternoon, and you are going to do your damnedest to make me see things the way you and Larry do, and I’ll help.”