The Last President (30 page)

The door opened again, and Weisbrod said, “Just coming,” but the guard said, “Uh, no, sir, sorry, but there's an urgent radiogram that was waiting for you here in town. The mayor's already told the crowd that you'll be delayed at least twenty minutes.” He held out three sheets of paper. “You'd better read this right away.”

Graham Weisbrod stood up like a much younger man and took the pages. The guard ducked back through the door as if he had seen a bomb with the fuse burning down. Weisbrod glanced at the triple line of decoded message; his eyes widened and the paper crumpled and bent as his grip tightened. Allie rose to stand beside him, reading over his shoulder.

Army beaten at Tippecanoe.

Survivors under command of Jenny Whilmire Grayson & Chris Manckiewicz NOT TYPO under siege.

All senior officers incl. Jeffrey Grayson dead.

TexICs, Presidents Own Rangers, other units wiped out.

Scout plane destroyed. Pilot killed.

Tribal horde of at least 20k under Lord Robert believed headed for Pale Bluff.

Grayson/Manckiewicz attempting breakout today but probably unable to overtake horde before Pale Bluff.

No way to stop them.

“Well,” Weisbrod said, “shit.”

“Yeah. Are we going—”

He grabbed up a pencil stub, turned the radiogram over, and scrawled a few words.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Getting ready to break the news to them.”

“You're supposed to just give a quick speech, do a q&a, and get on down the line, Graham, chances are no one will have heard before you're done and out of town, and we'll have a lot more time to think—”

“So, what's to think about? There is terrible news. As a nation we have to face up to it and deal with the consequences. We don't know much yet so we can't say exactly what we're going to do. We'll come through this and we're strong and brave and smart enough to handle it. That's all there is to say, Allie, so I'm trying to find a dignified, respectful way to say it.”

“But if we can work on it on the train on the way down to Bigfork—”

“It'll be the same simple problem, and we'll just over-think it. Is there anything to add? As far as you can tell, did I just leave anything out of the analysis?”

Reluctantly she shook her head; he bent to his work with the pencil, muttering as he scrawled, beating cadences with his free hand, satisfied in a few minutes. “Make sure you get this paper back from me. We want to give the local paper a scoop, and breaking the exact text should do it. All right, let's go.”

It was clear that the crowd around the platform had not heard the bad news, because they were bouncing up and down, chanting and cheering, and when Weisbrod walked onto the platform there was a great thunder of applause. He waved; Allie remembered that big, infectious Graham-grin, profiled against the distant forested and snowy peaks, for the rest of her life.

Clearly some of the officials had heard the news, because they tried to huddle around Weisbrod as if to shield him, and buzzed with obvious advice delivered fast and low. Weisbrod shrugged them off like an ugly sweater, and said, “I've worked out what I'll say already.” He walked to the edge of the platform.

Allie recognized the format of Graham's speech from her PR classes, ages ago. First he asked the crowd for silence because he had bad news, and waited for a wave of shushing and silencing to run through them. Then, simply, in the plainest of plain sentences, he told them as much as he knew. As they collapsed into themselves, absorbing the blow, he said, “This is a terrible blow to all of us, to the Provisional Constitutional Government, to the United States and the people of Earth and to generations not yet born. And we have not seen the last of it, much as I wish I could say we had. The enemy have the advantage, and they are going to press it just as hard as they can, and so we can expect more terrible blows will fall before we are able to recover.

“Nonetheless, the United States and civilization will survive. Nonetheless, ultimately this war will be won. Even if we are not the ones to win it, nonetheless our children or our grandchildren will live in a world that has returned to the upward path, and their children will walk and advance along it, not only all the way back to the level where we stood so recently, but far beyond where anyone has ever been. We begin their long march back to civilization as we knew it, and beyond to something better, at this moment—nonetheless.

“I'm not much of a praying man; as most of you know, I'm a non-observant Jew, which means I only talk to God maybe three times an hour, at most, but I'd like us all to take a moment to pray together, silently, for our country, and our people, for all of our leaders, and for our planet and all its people.”

When he had allowed less than a minute to pass, he said, “All right, I was planning to speak briefly and then you would ask me questions. I've already spoken briefly. Please pardon that I probably don't know any more than you do about what's going to be foremost in all our minds. But if you still have questions about anything else, let's go to those.”

Hands near the platform waved, and Graham chose one.

The man was small and very thin, with whiskers most of the way down his chest, and he said, “I just wanted to point out that sad as all this is for Grayson and all his men, the truth is, we were invading their territory. In fact for three months the so-called civilized people have been invading tribal lands and slaughtering as many as we can, every chance we get. What's wrong with living in peace? It's a new world now, maybe not a shiny one, but new. Why not just make peace?”

Graham Weisbrod couldn't get an answer out because of all the shouting. People were grabbing the man as he shouted, “It's a question, it's just a question, I only want to know—”

Allie felt more than saw something move in the front row, and then a man in a long dark coat leapt between two of the guards, onto the platform. She had an instant to realize she recognized the face, another to know it was Darcage, but no time at all to scream or raise a hand before Darcage lunged between the mayor and a councilman, shoving them against the guards on either side, and threw his arms around Graham.

She saw her husband jerk back, but his face was away from her. Darcage's gaze seemed to pass through her and go a million miles farther into space; there was no sign of recognition. His hands clenched together around Graham's middle, tightening and pulling the two men close together.

She felt her feet try to fling her forward, when—

A terrible roar.

On her back on gravel. Everything hurt. People all around her. Shouting. Someone wanted a doctor. Someone wanted troops.

Someone always wanted something.

Her mouth wouldn't work well enough to ask what had happened to Graham.

Dark and quiet. It felt like sinking into freezing cold ink. She could not swim back upward. She felt herself trying to come back, over and over, like sparks struck off flint in a cave, until there were no more sparks, just the attempt, and then not even the attempt.

3 HOURS LATER. PUEBLO. 6:30 PM MOUNTAIN TIME. WEDNESDAY, MAY 6, 2026.

“Today's situation report is . . . well, honestly,” James Hendrix said, “my main purpose today is to make sure you don't all decide to just give up. We are in a very bad spot, but we may yet reach January 20 with the United States back in place and some hopes for another 250 years. The country has suffered terrible losses, and our side is in more danger than I could have imagined even three months ago, but we're only beaten if we decide to be. So, per Heather's request, I'm going to wade into the bad stuff right away, and then talk about what we've still got going and what our options are.”

They were in a conference room that had once been judge's chambers in the Old Pueblo County courthouse. The late afternoon sun provided enough light through the north-facing windows so that the kerosene lanterns on the sideboards were unnecessary. James stood at the end of the long table; behind him there were two easels, one with maps and one with a newsprint pad, and a kerosene lamp on a stand for lighting, since they expected the meeting to run late.

To James's right, Heather sat quietly, her attention seemingly on smoothing the covers around the sleeping Leo. James had asked her to be present for this meeting, but she had said it would be difficult enough even to be there. Graham Weisbrod had been her teacher, friend, and mentor for twenty-five years; the initial radiogram had included the detail that the explosion had cut him in half. Allie Sok Banh had been her rival and her dependable ally, her most-trusted buddy and her debating foil, for nearly as long; the radiogram had said that though she was alive, she had lost her left eye and hand for sure, with cracked ribs and broken pelvis, and a probable severe concussion with high risk of brain damage, adding that they urgently needed tetracycline from the new facility in Pueblo.

Graham was really as much family as Heather ever had,
James thought, looking at her, and hated that he had even had to ask her to be present.

Lyndon Phat sat at the opposite end of the table, fingers resting and tented as if he couldn't quite decide whether he was praying. He was gazing out the window right now; James wondered if he was thinking about the strange, sometimes horrible story of Jeffrey Grayson, wondering if he might have done any better or any worse, perhaps wondering if the deep cracks he had perceived in Grayson's character had helped cause the debacle, or if Grayson had gone to his abrupt death without the fatal break.
In any case, now no one will ever know.

Beside Phat, on the corner of the table, Quattro and Bambi leaned on each other, looking down at the notes Bambi was preparing to take.
Bambi always takes so many notes, and more when she's nervous. She says she needs something to do with her hands, and it's a good habit anyway for someone who ever only really wanted to be a cop.
Her free hand clenched on one of Quattro's; he had both hands pulled against his chest as if cradling a kitten.
Lot of pain there too.

All the aviators are such a close-knit community,
James thought.
And Nancy Teirson was popular, and the way she died is all of their nightmare.

About halfway along the table, her long, rawboned frame in the careless sprawl of a lifelong athlete, Leslie Antonowicz was the only person that James was sure was really listening.
And not as a favor to me, either,
he thought. As if she'd heard him, she smiled for an instant, just with her mouth. He hoped she was signaling
Go on, we'll get this, James, we'll make it work.

Having finished his
I am serious
scan of the room with only that encouragement, he suppressed a sigh and launched into details. “Grayson had to strip out every still-functioning unit he could from the Temper states to mount his expedition. That's not blame; he had to bet the works to win, but unfortunately, he didn't win, so we lost most of the works.

“When I say ‘most of,' that doesn't mean we have nothing left or can't recover. Red Dog's really wired into the Army at Athens, and that picture is very reliable, even if it's discouraging. What's left down in the Temper corner of the country is mostly jumped-up militia trying to find their way, and some old and disabled officers and sergeants who are trying to turn it into an army. They'll get there but not till late summer.

“It's a little worse in the Northwest, to judge by Blue Heeler's reports. The Provis didn't start with much of an army, just the Rangers and a scattering of cadre and a half-dozen decent National Guard units. Most of those are smashed or stuck in that useless pocket on the Wabash, and the Rangers are gone. The Provis will take even longer to have any really professional, functional units available. The best news might be that our analytics team says there's no risk of a Second Civil War in the next year.”

Leslie added, “I
am
that analytics team. Temper and Provi states don't even touch each other at any point anymore, now that the New State of Wabash is lost. Neither of them has an army that will be ready to go on the road for at least a year, so even if we can't bring them together, they can't push themselves farther apart.”

Phat cleared his throat. “You're overestimating the time to get both Temper and the Provi forces back on line. They won't be as good as what we've lost but we'll have a functioning army—well, two functioning armies—well before the end of the summer. First of all, a black-powder foot army just doesn't take as long to train, and besides, as soon as we can get the Army of the Wabash onto trains and shipped back to their home territories, that's a lot of men who have lived through combat. Give them a chance to win, and some time to train more militia from back home, and they'll be there for you. Don't sell those old sergeants in Temper territory short; there's a reason why they used to say a good sergeant had to be trilingual, English, Spanish, and Alabaman.

“As for the Provi area, Norm McIntyre was a pencil pusher and a garrison commander all his life, and I wouldn't want him running a war, but he had a knack for training and readiness, and especially without Allie Sok Banh and the Provi Congress riding him to do social work and provide special cushy slots for their relatives, and with a bunch of experienced troops to mix in, he'll turn the new recruits into an army faster than anyone else could. In another hundred days, tops, maybe much sooner, we'll have road-ready armies again. I'm more worried about Manbrookstat and Texas. Can we skip to that part of the report?”

That's good. At least Phat's attention is here in the room,
James thought. “Governor Faaj stuck his neck out politically and twisted a lot of arms to loan us the TexICs, which the State of Texas was pretty proud of, and there's
one
survivor. The name of the United States is below mud, and well down into shit, in Austin. The unofficial word from Governor Faaj is that he couldn't hold the legislature back from declaring independence for more than about a week, and anyway . . . he doesn't want to.” It made James sick to see the old general look so sad, but some perverse desire to share the full misery made him add, “He told me that Texas has had a good time in the USA, but Texas is Texas first, and the United States has nothing much to offer anymore.”