Daybreak Zero (39 page)

3 DAYS LATER. SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA. 10:30 PM PST. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2025.

Harrison Castro’s first awareness that anything was wrong, as he entered his bedroom, was when a strong man yanked a bag full of feathers over his head, pinned him to the wall, cuffed him behind his back, and bound his feet. Unable to remove the bag, unable to breathe through the dense feathers, Castro was reeling, red flashes in the blackness of the bag, sucking desperately at the little bit of air that penetrated.

“You can have air and you won’t be further harmed,” a voice said, seemingly from a million miles away. “If you give your word of honor not to shout or try to attract attention, then tap my hand, here, twice.”

Terrified, suffocating, Castro tapped. At once the bag was ripped from his head, and a great mass of dense feathers knocked from his face. He gasped; the air pouring in made him dizzy all over again.

The man in front of him wore black shoes, pants, gloves, and hoodie, with the drawstring hood pulled tight around his face, and a black ski mask. He said, very softly, “Should you break your word I am quite capable of cutting your throat, ethically, and equally capable of escaping, practically. Keep your voice down, Mister Castro, I would dislike cutting your throat over the semantic difference between speaking loudly and shouting. There are so many better differences.”

Still gasping, Castro nodded, and let himself sink backward to sit on his bed. The man moved forward to stand in striking distance, blocking Castro from rising again from his seat. “Here is what you will do. We would like to see your League of South Coast Castles succeed, and we want you to be the sole sovereign in this part of the world. You will stand back and close your doors when the Bright Venus Tribe and its allies strike at the FBI Headquarters, the naval command, and the other Federal offices around the bay. You may accept refugees but only on the condition that they leave the area by the first available ship; there are to be no Federal offices, either Temper or Provi, anywhere south of Los Angeles or west of the mountains, ever again. The authority of the Constitution is ended.

“Once that is accomplished, the tribes will want to discuss alliance—which you and we will both need, to keep the Federals from returning. We will be more than willing to ally with you, and even to swear limited fealty, as long as it is understood that most of this area must become wilderness again; San Diego can be a trading post where we obtain some of the things we’ll need, but it must not grow into a city again. That is what we propose in broad outline; we will tell you details once you agree.”

Castro said, “You’re talking about the future of my land, my family—you have to give me time to think. I don’t need much, but I’d rather die than make a decision of so much importance in two minutes with a knife at my throat.”

“We thought you might feel that way. We will strike in about two weeks against the Federals. You may have ten days, though it would be better to say ‘yes’ sooner.”

“And if my answer is no?”

The man shrugged. “We can get to you. If your answer is no, someone else’s won’t be. After I free you, you will remain quietly in this room for at least half an hour. It would be very inadvisable to shout for help or bring guards in any sooner; I might not be alone and I might not be gone, and we have already established that I am not afraid to die, and you are.”

He hauled Castro painfully to his feet by the hair, turned him, and flung him facedown on the bed. The cuffs fell away. “You may untie your feet.”

Castro rolled over, brought his ankles up, and grasped the rope; the knots came apart in his hands and he kicked them from his feet. When he looked, just a moment later, no one was there, just black rope beside the bed and great wads of feathers scattered everywhere.

FOURTEEN
:

NOW ONE BY ONE THE TREES

THE NEXT DAY. BUFFALO, NEW YORK. 3 AM EST. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2025.

Kelleys Dancer
crept through the dark; even under black sails, with the moon not yet up, and no lights on shore as they approached, they couldn’t be sure they weren’t being watched.

And then once we’re on the canal, it will be worse,
Larry thought.
Painting the canoes black won’t help much there.

They sat murmuring together in the bow, while Rosie took the helm.

“I’m thinking your problem won’t be rapids, but mud,” Barbara said. “The water from all those broken dams is long gone. But Stone sent us to investigate the Canadian shore, ’cause they wanted us to find out if pure-fusion fallout behaved like they thought it would. Well, it did—the Geiger counter hardly made a noise, so there wasn’t much lasting contamination, but practically everything was dead except grass and bugs. No plants or trees to hold the soil; upstate New York was on that same wind path, so lots of streams and small lakes will be silted up.”

Kelleys Dancer
crept slowly south and east, aided by the slow current in eastern Lake Erie that pulled toward Niagara. After a while Barbara took the helm and Rosie went forward and began sounding with a bob on a line. Whenever they tacked, he’d scramble to adjust the triangular foresail.

At quarter of four, off to starboard, a dim, low urban skyline appeared, with a small knob that had to be the lighthouse, their landmark. The sun would follow less than an hour behind the moon; they needed to move.

The last they heard of Rosie and Barbara was a whispered “Good luck” as Chris and Jason climbed into their black canoe and followed Larry, paddling slowly across the dark harbor. Behind them, they could hear the creak and thump of
Kelleys Dancer
tacking to head back to the western end of the lake.

The canal entrance loomed in front of them like a concrete-scabbed wound. Paddles came up dripping scum, black at first, but as the sun came up the color of a bloody bruise, climbed, and turned the gold color of old chicken fat, the slime was a deep blue-green, in long yarns and strands.

Two hours later the land they paddled through was still urban, though empty and dead. The green scum smelled like fresh horse manure when the paddles turned it over. Chris, in the bow of the lead canoe, saw a headless corpse still wearing a bra and panties; a swollen hair-covered lump that must have been a dead horse or cow; and scattered human bones, including two small skulls, around the black smear where a rubber raft had rotted.

“Kids trying to get out of the city that way?” Jason asked.

“Or kids looting somebody’s abandoned raft, killed by something bigger and meaner than them,” Chris said. “Or maybe feral dogs got them and it just happened to be near a raft. The amount of really sad shit that happened is just plain impossible to imagine.”

Apart from the green slime, nothing lived; the trees that leaned over the canal had no leaves, the clay and stone banks eroded without plants growing on them, no fish jumped in the water, no bird flew overhead, nothing scuttled in the dead brush. Skeletons of humans and dogs lay on the banks; probably for a while the bodies had swarmed with beetles and worms, but now those were gone.

By noon they were well into suburban areas. Jogging trails and little decorative shopping malls bordered the canal at intervals between long stretches of factory yards and common dumps. Hearing booming and thundering ahead around a bend, Larry had them pull over and tie up; Jason drew the short straw. He came back to report an old landfill seething with fires and explosions. “Probably the biotes that infected it are methanogenic,” Jason said. “And lightning or something started the rising gas burning.”

Not wanting to give up the canoes, they walked along the bank opposite the landfill, towing the canoes on long ropes. “‘I got a mule, her name is Sal,’” Jason said. “Except I don’t. I got me.”

“But we can probably do better than fifteen miles today,” Larry said, “and right now, every mile is looking like a blessing.”

After relaunching the canoes, they paddled till twilight. The sun crawled down behind them, turning from mucus-yellow to gory red again; they slept under the beached, overturned canoes that night, taking turns sitting watches.

ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 9:30 AM MST. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2025.

“Yes, even in Pueblo,” James said, looking at the crowd of excited people jumping and waving as the Gooney Express came in low to verify the FUEL CLEAN, NO NANOSWARM white flag with the blue slash. One bunch of young, clean-scrubbed kids of both genders had been singing praise songs while waiting to see Reverend Whilmire, but much the larger component of the crowd was young women in their best clothes, and old men in veterans’ organization caps, clutching small Cross and Eagle flags and whooping it up for General Grayson. Nobody was cheering for Cameron. “Maybe one in ten of our people are Post Raptural. What’s it like up in Olympia?”

“About the same,” Allie Sok Banh said. “But we’ve been putting some more pressure on the Pus Rupturals, telling them to be less overtly political or they can kiss the tax exemptions and parade permits good-bye.

Norm McIntyre added, “Plus twice we’ve raided the Piss Wrapper Church of Olympia for arms caches.”

“Did you find any?”

“Yes and no. So many of those assholes pack all the time that if you raid their services you’ll always find personal weapons. But we didn’t find any arsenals under the altar. Yet.”

“We’re a little more laissez-faire here,” James said, noncommittally.

Allie shrugged. “Typical Heather. More important to follow the rules than to win, and even after Daybreak she won’t admit an idea can be dangerous.”

“Oh, I’ll admit an idea can be dangerous,” James said. “Though having spent a good part of this summer teaching in our night school here, I’ve also noticed that ideas aren’t terribly dangerous to very many people.”

The Gooney rumbled to a stop. Reverend Whilmire emerged first, waving as the crowd cheered; the cheering became overwhelming when Grayson came down the stairs, holding hands with his wife, Jenny. “You know,” Allie said, “if I were a spiteful, jealous person I might be annoyed that you and I didn’t make anything like that kind of splash when we arrived.”

“It’s not obvious yet that we’re going to run for president,” Graham Weisbrod said. “Perhaps we should put out word?”

Allie gave her husband a broad grin. “On five minutes’ notice the whole country can know.”

“Let’s talk soon.”

As Allie resumed watching the Athens team coming out, she was leaning back against Graham with a happy little smile. James thought he was probably meant to see that.

Whilmire and Grayson each gave a short speech to their cheering crowd. Meanwhile, Quattro shut down the Gooney, and came down the steps with Cam and a couple of aides. The party headed over to join the Olympia delegation and James. “Leo was fussing, so Heather deputized me. I’m supposed to deliver you—”

Cheering from the runway, heavily laced with “Praise the Lord!” drowned out James for a moment. It didn’t last long, but immediately after, even louder whooping covered Grayson’s short speech.

When they could hear again, Cameron said, apologetically, “This might take some time. Were they like this when you came in last night?”

Graham raised an eyebrow, and smirked. “It was terrifying, Cam. There were thousands of them out there chanting for ‘a precisely calculated, carefully designed, culturally nuanced mixture of incremental reform and necessary innovation.’ Must’ve taken them ages to learn to chant that whole phrase in unison.”

Cam’s small, wincing smile was about as close to an outright guffaw as he would ever manage. “Trust a bureaucrat to ask a dumb question, and get a flip answer from a professor.”

“Touché. It’s going to be a different world, isn’t it? Look at the way Grayson speaks, all that arm pumping and flying hands, like an old-time whistle-stop orator.” His hand closed around Allie’s. “I guess I’ll have to learn to do that too.”

When the reverend and the general had been torn from their adoring publics, James directed the TNG and PCG delegations to the row of carriages and buggies to be taken to Johanna’s What There Is, which Heather had reserved for a special breakfast. Once there, James moved quietly to a corner and concentrated on his plate, which might be the last chance to get food in for the rest of the day, given how busy life was about to become. Johanna paused beside him with a tray of eggs and trout, murmuring, “All clear upstairs as vetted by Heather.”

James finished the last bite just as Cameron announced, “You know, I don’t really feel the need to go to our rooms first. I slept like a brick on the plane and I feel pretty fresh. We had discussed holding the opening meeting this afternoon, if everyone was feeling up to it, but I was just thinking, why don’t we do it now and have time for some real work this afternoon?”

“Well,” Heather said, “it would take some time to move you all over there in buggies and carriages—”

“Isn’t there a meeting room here? I thought there was, the last time I was here.”

“This seems like a great idea to me,” Graham said. “I was wondering what I would be doing with myself till this afternoon.” He appeared to be completely unaware of Allie trying to hit his instep with her heel, except that his foot kept dodging just enough so that if she were going to hit her target, she would have to make it clearly deliberate.

In less than five minutes Heather had reached a deal to keep Johanna’s What There Is through the lunch hour if necessary, and they were all trooping upstairs to the meeting room that she, Johanna, and a couple of trusted agents had spent the morning creating. Last in the procession came Johanna and two slightly awkward waiters—Roger Jackson and Debbie Mensche—carrying coffee and water urns.

As soon as everyone was seated, and the transcriptionist signaled
ready
, Heather said, “All right, here we go. For the record: I am Heather O’Grainne and I am convening the Third Intergovernmental Summit of 2025, with Graham Weisbrod, President of the Provisional Constitutional Government, and Cameron Nguyen-Peters, National Constitutional Continuity Coordinator of the Temporary National Government, and—”

She rattled through the list, alternating between the governments and laddering down in order of rank, finishing with “. . . invited guest Jenny Whilmire Grayson. We will commence with opening statements. Call it, Mister President.” The coin was in the air.

“Heads.”

“Heads. Graham, when you’re ready.”

Wonder if she bothered with a two-headed coin or just figured no one else would get a look?
James thought, idly.

Graham Weisbrod pulled out a short, typed document and spread it before him, adjusting his reading glasses.
Okay, definitely, he cut Allie out of the game to do this,
James thought,
because she looks like she’s trying not to let anyone know she just felt a snake go up her pant leg.

Weisbrod’s grandfatherly smile had been famous in the media for more than a decade before Daybreak; somehow, seeing it now, James had a flash of the old sense of security. Weisbrod said, “Please keep in mind that this is preliminary and that large parts of it are intended to start discussion about details and implementation; this is merely the beginning of overworking our staffs.” He raised the paper and said, “The Provisional Constitutional Government proposes to issue an overall order stipulating that all Federal employees are to accept, support, and obey the government to be elected in 2026. By all, I mean all. All the military forces down to privates, every postal carrier and every clerk filling out forms. Accept means if you believe the restored Constitutional government’s not legitimate, you quit your job before you say so. Support means you do everything in your power to make the restored Constitutional government succeed even if its policies are exactly what you don’t want. Obey means just that.” He looked around the room. “Of course, the truth is, we’re just telling people to do what they’re supposed to do anyway: obey the 2026 restoration government. Fundamentally what it says is that whether either side likes the election results in 2026 or not, what’s elected is what there is. No option for either of us to stay in business and try to negotiate a deal we like better. Vote the new government in, hand off to it, and be done with it.”

Cameron Nguyen-Peters nodded. “I believe I understand your proposal in broad outline, and of course we’ll want to go over the text of your order. May I ask what you’re hoping we’ll do in return?”

“Nothing,” Weisbrod said. “This isn’t a negotiating position. It’s the right thing to do, so I’m doing it unilaterally.”

“Oh.” Cam was genuinely smiling. “I thought that might be the case. In that case, we’ll need to issue a similar order, also unilaterally, so that we’re
all
in good faith here. If you don’t mind I’d like to look over the exact text of your order; perhaps we could order exactly the same one.”

Grayson sat bolt upright. “Sir, this really requires discussion.”

Allison Sok Banh’s expression was very like the general’s, but prettier. “Shouldn’t the staff explore some proposals—”

“Oh, exactly,” Cam said. “If you’ve got copies of your text, Graham, maybe we should adjourn for twenty minutes or so to read it?”

“Right here,” Graham said. “And I have copies for my side as well. Heather, do we have any kind of separate conference rooms available?”

James, from his corner, thought that the biggest problem in moving to separate caucuses might be maneuvering everyone around all the dropped jaws on the floor.