Daybreak Zero (32 page)

ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 10:14 AM MST. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2025.

“Can you tell me what time it is?” Leslie asked.

“I
can
,” Arnie said, “and I will as soon as I see evidence of cooperation. It’s frightening, isn’t it, not to know whether it’s day or night after a while? But, you know, we need to know what is going on—”

“Doctor Yang—Arnie—I know you don’t believe me, but I’m innocent.”

“You’re right that I don’t believe you,” he said. He smiled as if it were their private joke. “Yet. But this is only our fifth session, and you are
becoming
more believable. That’s at least progress.”

“I always feel so safe after you leave but by the time you come back I’m scared out of my mind again.” She shifted uneasily in her chair; his gaze stayed on her face, and the corner of his mouth turned up as if something he hadn’t quite identified wasn’t quite right. He had been sitting and watching her quietly all that time, and she realized that it had been a long time since she’d spoken. “I . . . I should just answer every question, and try not to guess why you ask or what you’re looking for?”

“Same rules as every other time,” Arnie said, softly. “Are you in good enough shape to do that? Have you been sleeping?”

“Too much,” she said. “A chance to run or swim or climb something would be heavenly.”

Arnie’s mouth twitched, but he said nothing.

“What?” she asked.

“Bad joke. I was thinking if you had a head start, you’d probably get to do plenty of running, climbing, and swimming, at least until they caught you.”

She couldn’t help it; she laughed. “All right, let’s get to work.
I
know I’m innocent, anyway.”

He didn’t nod or smile, but he didn’t scowl either. “All right. Think back to conversations with friends and family
since
Daybreak. Remember times when you’ve said that Daybreak was sort of a blessing in disguise, or not all bad, or sometimes you were maybe secretly glad it happened. Tell me exactly what you said.”

“Do you need to know who I talked to?”

“No, not at all. I’m interested in what
you
said. All right, so when you
have
been thinking about the good things about Daybreak, across these last few months, what do you think of?”

“I’m not sure I remember.”

“What do you think you might have said? Just do what you’ve done before, try not to block anything, blurt out any old thing I ask about, just relax and let your mind open to me. Now what do you say when you’re explaining the good parts of Daybreak?”

Part of her wanted to object that she didn’t think she ever had, but it seemed that even before she objected, she was already telling him about the positive side of Daybreak, and that she was remembering thinking those things even before Daybreak. It was nice to be sitting here with a guy who understood; Arnie was smiling, listening intently. Just when she realized she was uncomfortable, he poured water for her. “Need a break? Hungry?”

Arnie would get her out of this. She clung to that.

THE SECOND NIGHT AFTER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 11:30 PM MST. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2025.

“Leslie.” The voice in the darkness was so soft she thought perhaps she was dreaming. She sat up. “Leslie,” the voice repeated, “come to the door so you can hear me better. Don’t make any noise.”

She rolled off her cot and crawled to the door, feeling ahead of her so she wouldn’t knock over the pitcher.

“I don’t know how long we’ve got,” the voice said. “I’ve got the guards timed, but if I hear them I’ll have to go that second—they vary the timing. If I disappear, don’t call out, just get back in your bunk and pretend to be asleep. I’ll always be back.”

“
James?
”

“Who else?”

Reasonable question.
She lay prone to put her mouth and ear by the crack at the bottom of the door. “Can you do anything for me?”

“Working on it. Is Arnie still your interrogator?”

“He’s the only person I’ve seen since I was arrested.”

“Jesus, he’s got things just the way he planned. Leslie, there were three suspects. You were one; I was another. The third was Arnie.”

“Oh, God, James, you’re telling me
Arnie Yang is working for Daybreak?
We are so fucked, James, so totally fucked up the
ass
. What can you do? Do you have some evidence to prove I’m not guilty and Arnie is? Are you going to try to break me out?”

“Not right away. If they’re going to torture or kill you, or they hold a secret meeting without me, I have a way to know, and I have a way to break you out right then. Otherwise, though, I’m going to keep working on catching Arnie Yang. He says you’re refusing to talk.”

“I’ve been totally cooperating! I’m answering every question he asks me! He said it was my best chance!” Her rage shocked her.

“I
bet
he did. Tell me about what he does. He’s already got you framed so he doesn’t need to create more evidence. He could have had you executed by now. So he can’t be after information because he knows you don’t have any, and he can’t frame you any more than you are already framed. So what’s he spend all that time talking about?”

Even there, lying on the dark floor of her cell, and feeling like she owed James her life, Leslie couldn’t help noticing that James spoke in the same tone he did on the drunken lonely evenings when she told him too much about her love life. But he was right, he needed to know this, so she said, “Well, he always tells me to put myself into his hands and trust him, and he wants to talk about Daybreak ideas I had before Daybreak day . . .” She told James everything she could remember.

He said, “I think I’m recognizing the basic technique for implanting a false memory, but it’s been a long time since I read that circular. FBI thing, I think, about how not to be fooled by things like UFO abduction stories and Satanist conspiracy stories, and how not to lead witnesses into deceiving you. I’ll find it and be able to tell you for sure next time. Meanwhile I guess the main trick is to not believe any thought that might have been his suggestion. So if—gotta go.”

She rolled onto her cot silently, pulling the blanket over herself. She counted six long, slow breaths before a guard came in with a candle in one hand, and a tray holding a dubious meat patty, fried potatoes, onions, and zucchini in the other; as always, there were no utensils, just one wet and one dry cloth.
Same thing four times in a row; probably another way to break down my time sense.
She ate looking down at her plate, because she never knew when they were watching, or from what angle, and she was afraid they might see her smile. On the last bite, she blew out the candle, wiping her face in the dark.

3 DAYS LATER. NEAR THE RUINS OF ALTON, INDIANA. 6:45 PM EST. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2025.

“How deep is that?” Roger asked.

“After it’s past your neck, it doesn’t make much difference,” Debbie pointed out. “Unless you can’t swim. Last chance to tell us.”

“I can swim. I just hate being wet and cold at the start of a thirty-mile hike in soggy moccasins.”

Samson looked up from where he was lashing the last of the 55-gallon drums together. “I agree. We’re going to do it, of course, but I agree; I hate it too.” Before them, the Ohio River was broad and olive-green.

The flow was faster and deeper than anyone had seen in at least 150 years. Dozens of dams on the Ohio and its tributaries had toppled. A cold early fall was drenching the Appalachians. The Allegheny basin’s forests, dying from fallout, were releasing their grip on thousands of mountain slopes, and the water they once slowed and absorbed poured unimpeded over bare earth, freighted with dead black mud.

Lashed together with hemp line, the empty drums made an awkward raft. They tied their packs on top of two closely bound drums, hoping something, somewhere, might stay sort of dry. Not wanting to lose the last of the daylight, they grabbed handholds on the lashing ropes and walked into the river, beginning to kick with their feet, at Samson’s direction, when it became too deep to wade.

Roger clamped his jaw and pressed his lips together; he’d drown before he let himself swallow what was in the river.
How many unburied bodies must there be upstream? Pathogen soup, that’s what it is.

Roger kicked when told to, hung on otherwise, and did his best to keep his head out of the filth. Twice something, a tree branch perhaps, bumped at him; once a floating rag, perhaps a diaper or T-shirt, wrapped over his wrist, and he flung it away in a near panic.

After what felt like a century of cold misery, Samson said, “I’m kicking dirt. Don’t try to stand yet, but kick harder.”

A moment later, Roger felt bottom too, as they passed over a sandbar sheltering the inside of a bend. They entered a slow, steady-flowing channel, kicking the drum raft out of the current upstream of a sloping gravel bank. When they planted their feet and stood up, the water was only waist deep, and they walked their raft aground easily.

They cut their packs free, held them over their heads, and bore them ashore, mostly dry. Samson waded back in, and pushed the empty raft out past the bar. Holding on with one hand, chest-deep in the filthy water, he slashed the lashings with his knife, detaching the drums and setting them bobbing along in the current. Two minutes later, on a narrow gravel road just above the river, Debbie said, “Shit.”

“What?”

“Eaahh, I hate being wrong. Looks like we’ll only be traveling 103 miles since you asked me, including the river. Off by four. Damn, damn, damn.” She muttered about it off and on, until, an hour later, they made camp for the night, not completely out of danger, but safer than they had been in a long time.

2 DAYS LATER. SOUTH OF THE RUINS OF THE FORMER CELINA, OHIO (NEW STATE OF WABASH). 4:30 PM EST. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2025.

“The way Earth’s curvature works,” Larry said, “the horizon on flat ground or water is usually less than five miles off. So all we can say for sure is that it’s mud at least that far out.” From the burned and crumbled docks at Celina, a plain of drying mud, once Grand Lake St. Marys, stretched to the eastern horizon.

They’d been able to shake the fitful and sporadic pursuit within a mile or two each time. Apparently word was out that three men traveling together were supposed to be caught, but without Castle Earthstone soldiers standing over them, most tribes didn’t see it as a high priority, especially not if it involved going into centers of larger towns, where the tribes seemed to fear disease, feral dog packs, or perhaps ghosts.

“So,” Chris said, “on the map, anyway, the short way around the lake from here is the north shore. Shall we keep going that way? I’d rather camp here than run into a tribe close to dark.”

Larry said, “Let’s see if we can break into that lighthouse and get a long view.”

The sign in front said ROTARY LIGHT HOUSE. “But I don’t see how it could rotate,” Jason said.

Larry laughed. “There used to be a service club—sort of like a fraternity for grownups that did good things—called the Rotary Club, and my old man was in it. God, I wish I had him here to hear you say that.”

Someone had been there before them; the broken door lay on the pavement. From the top of the tower, about three storeys high, they could see that mud stretched to the eastern horizon, broken up by ponds where the water had been deeper. Grass was coming in around the edge, and big flocks of ducks and geese were on the ponds.

In the open country south of the drained lake, leaves were the thousands of colors of an eastern forest in fall; brush was spreading out of the small woods, fencerows, and creek bottoms into the long grass. Jason said, “This is sort of what we Daybreak people were trying for. The fields are back to meadows, really, already, and there’s going to be prairie grass, and bushes, and then the trees will grow tall enough to choke out the undergrowth, and you’ll have the old forest back.”

“It would look real pretty,” Chris observed, “if we didn’t know it was a graveyard for tens of millions of people.”

They walked around to the southwest side of the tower, and saw a great ravine where the maps had shown none, stretching to the horizon.

“Well,” Larry said, “that certainly explains where the water went. I guess we should be good scientistificalable explorers and all, and go take a look.”

“Scientistificalable?” Jason asked.

“Add more syllables, gain more authority. First rule of bureaucratic prose.”

ABOUT 20 MINUTES LATER. A MILE SOUTH, NEAR THE FORMER OUTLET TO BEAVER CREEK, ALONG US 127. 5:45 PM EST. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2025.

“You know, they could have done this with one big bomb on Daybreak day,” Chris said. “Just loaded it into a pleasure boat, sunk it next to the dam, blown it off. Nobody would have been searching or stopping them.”

“This accomplished more of what they were trying to do,” Larry said. “Look how they did it—a tunnel five or ten feet below the lake bottom, so that the water running through would erode the embankment and cut a really deep hole in a hurry. All those graves. Four whipping posts. Shovels and picks just left here when they were done. The
point
of it was to work a few hundred people to death, besides making it much harder to restore that lake, which means nobody can reopen this canal for a long, long time.”

“Was the canal open before?” Jason asked.

“No. But we’re back to 1800s tech, and that’s what this was. Now if we want the canal, we’ll have to do all that pick and shovel work all over again.” Larry looked over the field where so many bodies had already come to the surface from their shallow graves. “Part of making sure the Lost Quarter stays lost.”

“But why?” Jason asked. “I mean, couldn’t they do the same thing with half the killing?”

“Once you’ve beaten starving people to make them dig a tunnel they’ll drown in, you’re
committed
.” Chris looked out to the west, across the field of human bones and the muddy gouge through the flat land, to the setting sun, huge and bloody with the soot of so many burned cities. “It’s just the small, personal version of the big picture. Anyway, it’ll be dark soon. We’d better camp for the night, and I’d rather not do it here.”

“Let’s head back to the lighthouse,” Larry said. “It has a roof and it’s easy to defend. But when you’re doing sentry duty and have to look this way,
no brooding
, okay? Keep telling yourself it’s just mud in the moonlight, and that’s all it is.”