Daybreak Zero (4 page)

ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 6:30 AM MST. THURSDAY, JULY 10, 2025.

Heather O’Grainne always ignored her alarm; she was too large and heavy, this far into the pregnancy, to go downstairs to her living quarters, the antique wind-up alarm clock would run down in a couple of minutes, there was no one else in the building at this hour, and she had just climbed up here to her office anyway. It had only been this last month when she’d gotten really big, with this great whacking
thing
in front of her; a lifelong athlete and only reluctantly a bureaucrat, she felt as if this were some terrible prank of nature. She rested a hand on her belly and thought,
Get big and healthy before you come out, kid, but don’t waste any time.

She slid out the map table from under the big desk; what was on it was not a map, but her version of a critical path chart, almost three feet by six feet across. No one saw the whole chart except herself, and only half a dozen trusted senior agents and analysts even knew it existed.

At the bottom was the word DONE, dated January 20, 2027; that and a few other Constitutionally fixed dates were the only things written directly on the chart itself. The rest was a tangle of pinned-on index cards, colored with stripes of watercolor and heavily scribbled and rescribbled in India ink, with the stripes linked by strands of cotton yarn of the same color.
The software of 1950 melded with the hardware of 1850,
she thought,
in hopes of getting us to 2050.

Paths where bad things were developing were in yellow; paths where necessary good things had to happen were in green; the places where they crossed were underlaid with pieces of red construction paper, and the red construction paper sheets were sometimes linked in red thread. The branching paths spread upward from DONE like a messy, branching tree until the tips of the branches—representing today—were a tangle of yarn and cards, a few green, more red, most yellow.

She studied the chart and reminded herself of a few issues for today: whether to promote the tribes from minor to major nuisance (but General Grayson’s expedition against them, down the Youghiogheny, seemed to show that they could be overcome with some effort); whether the rapidly expanding Post Raptural Church was a force for stability, a force for chaos, or just a force; whether the peace she’d brokered between the Provisional Constitutional Government in Olympia, Washington, and the Temporary National Government in Athens, Georgia, was deepening and taking root, or tearing and weakening as the Provis and Tempers alike enacted mostly symbolic policies that seemed mainly intended to irritate each other.

The green strip that said EMERGENCE OF A UNIONIST, MODERATE CENTRALIST CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT still did not reach back to the present day. Every reasonable candidate was needed elsewhere, like Quattro Larsen, or politically tainted to some important faction, like President Weisbrod of the Provis or Natcon Nguyen-Peters of the Tempers. There were some unknowns she could push her propaganda people to promote, but no very promising ones. Her best-qualified candidate, General Lyndon Phat, had pissed off the Provis almost as much as the Tempers who now held him under house arrest in Athens.

Well. Gloomy picture established, time to see how it changed. She reached for her inbox.

Arnie had fired up the EMP-trap again—new green card for the DEFEAT MOON GUN pathway. That was good, but better still it meant WTRC was back on the air, and she could have something to listen to this morning.

She pulled her headphones down from the peg and flipped on the grounding and antenna switches. Nothing.

The old LED Christmas tree bulb, which acted as the crystal, looked fine through the clear glass of the protecting Coke bottle, but inside the coil enclosure the capacitor contacts were crusted white. The signal from WTRC, twenty times the power of the big old Mexican “outlaw” stations, had induced enough current in the coil to grow nanoswarm overnight. Wrapping her hand in a dry towel, she laid the metal of a wooden-handled barbecue spatula across the contacts, discharging the capacitor with a bang like a pistol shot, then cleaned the poles and contacts with sandpaper and lye.

Back in her chair—
If I get any bigger I’ll either need a full-time assistant or a tugboat
—she tuned in WTRC immediately. She smiled to hear Elwood Debourrie, who played easy-on-older-ears coustajam with lyrics that were militantly anti-Daybreak.
If putting that message in their kind of music doesn’t provoke them, I guess we’ll have to put on a game show called “Who Wants to Electrocute a Bunny?”

The music so improved her mood that she took the next note off the top of her inbox with near optimism, till she saw:

Emergency Channel Listening Post Pueblo/RRC.

Header. Received At 10:36 PM MST on 7-9-25, CRYP: Clr. SIG: TCAR-NW-9.

Shit, TCAR—Transcontinental Air Route. Flight NW 9, the one that left Pueblo headed northwest on the 9th of the month.

Bambi Castro.

And pilots only radioed if there was trouble, such as:

forced off rte @ BkC
BRK

no fuel
BRK

safe ldng @ US 95 1/2 mi N of ID mi mkr 178
BRK

Plane OK
BRK

Me OK
BRK

RqInst
BRK

B Castro

EOM

“Request instructions,” Heather said aloud. “How about, come home safe with the plane?”

As if to mirror her mood, the radio program changed from Elwood Debourrie to
A Hundred Circling Camps
, a Civil War divided-family drama which Arnie had packed so full of symbols of national unity that sometimes after listening, Heather felt John Wilkes Booth had been unfairly maligned.

At least Bambi said she and the plane were okay. Maybe Larry Mensche was somewhere nearby and could be put on the job? Last she’d known, her most effective and least obedient agent had been near Ontario, Oregon, still looking for his daughter Debbie, who had escaped from the Oregon women’s prison at Coffee Creek the day after Daybreak hit, headed into what had quickly become tribal territory.
I wish Larry would check in more often.

At the Main Street messenger stand, half a dozen teenagers surrounded a pot of hot soup on a hibachi. “Ration coupon, four meals, at the main kitchen, to get this to Outgoing Crypto,” Heather told Patrick, her personal bolt of lightning.

He was deep-brown skinned, all bony legs, gangly arms, appetite, and energy—the delight of some high school track coach, pre-Daybreak. His father had been on occupation duty in Tehran when Daybreak hit, and his mother had started out for her job in Colorado Springs on October 29, and never returned; that thirty-five miles of I-25 was now a litter of abandoned cars and decaying bodies.

She handed the teenager the folded message, which he dropped into the pouch around his neck, and the ration coupon, which he tucked into a leather wallet and dropped into his pocket. Whooping “The mail must go through!” (
Orphans Preferred
, Arnie’s Pony Express radio drama to make national unity cool for kids, had seemingly taught every kid in the United States that phrase) Patrick shot off, ragged shirt tail flapping over his baggy shorts, hard-soled moccasins slapping pavement.

Man, I wish I could still run.
Heather’s next stop was Dr. MaryBeth Abrams, half a mile away; yet another reminder of how different her body was now.
Oh, well, forward waddle.

ABOUT THE SAME TIME. ONTARIO, OREGON. 6:15 AM PST. THURSDAY, JULY 10, 2025.

Larry Mensche got a radiogram at the first real breakfast he’d had in three weeks, which followed the first real hot bath and the first real night sleeping in clean sheets. It canceled his first chance to do laundry and his first full day of meals eaten at a table.

He was grateful that the radio staff in Ontario had not checked to see if he was in the Reconstructed Radisson Ontario, as the place styled itself, last night when the message from Bambi came in; he couldn’t have done anything effective till this morning anyway.

He was not displeased. He hadn’t been up US 95 yet, so he’d be covering new territory in his private search for his daughter, Debbie, missing since Daybreak day. He knew she was somewhere among the tribes—not good, but at least she hadn’t starved in a locked cell at Coffee Creek Women’s Penitentiary, where her habitual bad checks, petty theft, and impaired driving had landed her. He’d been lucky to reach Coffee Creek only nine weeks after Daybreak, and picked up her trail from there; he knew now that Debbie and a dozen other women had reached this general area, bent on joining a tribe, though he didn’t know which one they’d found.

The hotel owner accepted an RRC purchase order for Larry’s bill, conserving his cash and trade goods. “I guess the RRC is more stable than any bank we have. I still don’t get it, is the RRC Provi or Temper?”

“Yes.” Larry was trying not to fuel gossip. The owner looked annoyed—accepting that p.o. had been a big favor. Larry softened it a little: “The Provis and the Tempers in Athens are both trying to bring the country back together under the Constitution. Mostly they disagree about mechanics and details. We’re trying to help them in the areas where they agree. What we’re
not
is against either of them.”

“I guess that’s the answer you have to give.”

“Well, that, and it’s true.”

“For an outfit that calls itself the Reconstruction Research Center, you don’t seem to have much information.”

“Hey, we’re a
research
center. If we knew anything it wouldn’t be research, would it?”

The owner shrugged. “I guess government hasn’t changed
that
much since Daybreak. It’s still hard to see what we get for our taxes.”

If you’re paying taxes,
Larry thought,
you’re the only one. I guess habits of speech die hard.
“I do need to research one subject. I’ve got to outfit an expedition up into the wild country north of here in a hurry. Do you know anyone that can rent me some mules, help me handle them, and doesn’t mind carrying a gun on the job?”

The owner grinned. “Is it okay if it’s my brother-in-law?”

“You’re right, things haven’t changed
that
much.”

Ryan and his son Micah lived on the far side of town, but this wasn’t much of a problem; Larry had only what would fit into his backpack, and anyway he needed to check at the biofuel plant to see if they had any avgas they were reasonably sure was sterile.

As he walked he saw that Ontario, Oregon, was in better shape than most towns: Fortifications mostly finished. Militia drilled and ready. Salvage crews working through ruins in an orderly way. Community mess hall reliably open. The blacktop on the streets was falling apart, of course, as the volatiles in the asphalt spoiled, and there were still flooded spots, packs of feral dogs, and abundant cars and electric wires yet to be hauled away, but you could feel the town coming back together.

The biofuel plant had clean avgas, and Ryan and his son Micah were indeed open to the idea of an expedition north into the mountains. “To make good time,” Ryan said, “you want to under-load the mules and use more of them. Mile Marker 178 is 108 miles away, a week’s trip nowadays. To fill up your friend’s tank, I make that three mules hauling four jerry cans each, with not much else, plus two more mules for supplies for the three of us, so’s we’ve got hands free to fight when the tribals turn up.”

“You’re sure they will?”

“I don’t go up there unless the money’s awful good. Tribals are why.”

“Then I won’t haggle about money,” Larry said. “So five mules will do it?”

“Unless you want to ride, or pay for me and Micah to ride.”

“Nah. People ought to be self-propelled.”

Detailing Ryan and Micah to acquire supplies, fill jerry cans, and load mules, Mensche went to the post office to radio Heather and then to the town square to trade for ammunition.

At the biofuel plant, Larry found Ryan and Micah almost ready to go, and paid for the fuel with another RRC p.o. Larry sprang for a quick brunch at a stew-and-bread stand in the square, and they set off at about 10:30 in the morning, not bad for a job he’d been unaware of at 7:00.

Like Larry himself, Ryan and Micah wore a mix of camo, denim, and deerskin, and carried black-powder guns, crossbows, axes, and big belt knives. Together, they looked like three old-time mountain men who had walked through a time machine for a ten-minute shopping spree at Wal-Mart.

The mules’ hooves clopped over the high truss bridge, loud in a town with no automobiles or electricity, but soft and lonesome against the roar of the river below.
One down, and one hundred seven to go.