The Last President (45 page)

In less than an hour, an army of 30,000 mixed tribals and Castle Earthstone True Daybreakers had become an army of 24,000 Castle Earthstone True Daybreakers. The bodies from the fighting lay in the streets, but since what was left of the town would burn tomorrow, they could just lie there, with the soldiers and the townspeople, something else to remind plaztatic America never to insult free people and despoil free Gaia again.

When the crowd had re-gathered at the fire, Robert had been amusing himself by tormenting Glad Ocean with his knife, and when he told her she was a sacrifice and ordered her to walk into the fire, to all appearances she did it willingly. A shout of joy went up as she fell forward into the coals.

“More fuel, do you think?” Bernstein asked, as it burned lower around the charred corpse.

“Naw. Let's hope they get some sleep before they start walking back. Tomorrow's going to be a long day, and then we've got a good month of walking to do, without the river doing most of the work this time. Meanwhile, though, life's pretty sweet.”

He rose and stretched. “I think they were going to fix a special supper for us, and have some nice clean girls waiting, back at our main tent. Speaking of rewards we've earned, let's go get ours.”

3 HOURS LATER. A MOWER SHED, IN THE ORCHARDS OUTSIDE THE FORMER PALE BLUFF. 12:30 AM CENTRAL TIME. TUESDAY, MAY 12, 2026.

Pauline Kloster slipped into the corrugated iron shed without making a sound; only the brief dark moments as her body blocked the moonlight through the crevices revealed she was there. Then Carol May Kloster felt the warmth of her niece's shoulder next to her own, and a soft exhalation into her ear. “Aunt Carol May, they're gonna party all night, sleep it off, and then start walking home. They're going back to Castle Earthstone and taking all these tribals with them. How are the little guys doing?”

“So far nobody that wakes up yelling, thank the lord. How's it look like the party is going?”

“Right now? Just getting started. They've still got some prisoners they're gonna do stuff to. I kinda hurried to get back so I wouldn't have to see none-a-that. Aunt Carol May, I want to help them but I don't see how I can.”

Carol May put her arms around Pauline and whispered, “No, you can't, honey. Most of us would love to be more help, but sometimes we just can't. We've got five little kids to try to sneak out with, and they're gonna wake up scared and hungry and mad at us, 'specially when we have to say they can't see Mama right now, and we can't go find their teddy. It was just dumb luck we found them at the airport; probably Quattro was supposed to fly them but no one told him.”

“I was so upset when I saw him already taking off, I mean he didn't know we were coming but we tried so hard to get there and missed him by just that much. Then . . . right when I thought how can we be so close and still miss it . . . that was terrible, wasn't it?”

Carol May hugged her niece closer. “Yes, it was, try not to think about it, relax.”

“It looked like the whole inside just filled up, all at once, with white-hot fire. Why'd his plane blow up?”

“EMP, I'm pretty sure. Poor guy, I really liked him, and his wife is such a sweetheart, and they were only married less than a year ago. At least he couldn't have suffered much.”

They sat in the dark and listened to the whooping, the shrieking, the occasional cries of pain and hoots of laughter, and the never-stopping drums. No one seemed to be coming back into the orchards, probably because there was no loot here, most of the trees were already burned, and nobody felt any need for privacy while copulating.

The noise went on while Carol May observed the moon moving a handsbreadth-at-arm's-length across the sky, crossing one crack and then another; she watched that one more time, then spoke as softly as she could. “Pauline, honey, you still awake?”

“Yeah. Can't sleep. I keep hoping they've killed the people they were playing with, but then I hear another scream.”

Carol May shuddered. “How's the leg?”

“Not bad. Tired, and it gets sore when it's tired, but it's got some miles in it. Were you thinking of going now?”

“It's going to take these tribals most of the night to fall down and go to sleep, I'm afraid, and then all day tomorrow before they're even halfway started walking back to Castle Earthstone. So if we wait till tomorrow, and let it get light, we'll have to stay under cover for most of the day and keep our little friends quiet. It was bad enough doing that all day today, and we had the help of all the noise from town, and the fires in the burning orchards, to help hide us. Tomorrow anyone who's half curious or hears a funny sound is going to be able to walk right up to the shed and in through the door, and we won't be able to fool them into thinking the place is already torched by burning a little junk right by the door.”

“Makes sense. Packs are still loaded, right?”

“Yep. I grabbed a pilot emergency radio kit at the airport, and that's in my pack—”

“One of those radio in a jar things?”

“Yeah.”

“Man, Aunt Carol May, all I thought to bring was that applesauce and apple butter we've been eating,” Pauline said. “I didn't even think where there might be anything useful.”

“Pauline, sweetheart, you can't get more useful than food. Especially the kind where kids'll eat it, and you got enough to get us a couple days down the road. And I'm glad it's all applesauce and apple butter, because, honey, you know it's the last thing that's going to taste like home, ever. Aw, don't cry on me, Pauline, please don't cry or I'll start. Come on, we need to wake these kids up quietly and be on our way.”

4 HOURS LATER. PUEBLO. 8:30 AM MOUNTAIN TIME. TUESDAY, MAY 12, 2026.

“Who's the most excellent boy in the whole stinking world?” Heather asked Leo, who was making noises that indicated he knew. She hugged him close and thought,
And I do mean stinking. Well, at least Dad'll get to know his grandson, and there are worse places to live than San Diego, and . . . man, we are so beaten.

The knock at the door was soft. “Ms. O'Grainne? Got an emergency message from Incoming Crypto.”

She opened the door to find Ntale standing there. “Patrick sent me 'cause it was further to Mister Hendrix's house. And Melissa at Crypto told us both to run, run, run, she said it just like that, three times, she said you'd want this news right away.”

Heather handed Ntale a pile of meal coupons and said, “Hang around till I read it, just in case I need to send a message with you.”

She set Leo down with a final little tap of her finger on his nose, which made his eyes cross in a way that always made her laugh. She grinned at the silly boy, then got the letter opener from her desk, slipped it under the envelope flap, and drew a deep breath against the coming bad news. The horde was already on its way down the Ohio, perhaps an advance party had already attacked Paducah? The Army of the Wabash ambushed and cut off again? Another declaration of independence somewhere? The tribes that had been moving around in the Tennessee Valley and the Ouachitas had broken out again?

Whatever it is, we'll get through it,
she thought.
Strange that I'm still the President, this morning, so I guess getting through whatever it is, is my job.

Then she opened it, and saw that it was from Carol May, who was alive and transmitting from a barn fifteen miles northwest of Pale Bluff, and expected to make it into Wayne City late today. She teared up;
Carol May, alive!

She had to wipe her eyes before she read the even better news. When she did, she handed Ntale a fistful of meal tickets, and said, “If James hasn't started cooking breakfast, make him start. If he needs groceries, get his order and take it to the commissary, put it on the RRC tab. And then you and Patrick go get Leslie, and the Duchess from wherever she's staying, and Jason and Beth, and Izzy Underhill, okay? We need to meet, which means you and Patrick get us all into James's house, quick as you can.”

Ntale grinned. “Let me
show
you how quick that is. I've been getting my growth this year and Patrick's not the only fast one in the family anymore.”

2 HOURS LATER. PUEBLO. 10:30 AM MOUNTAIN TIME. TUESDAY, MAY 12, 2026.

“Well, the attendants are saying he only started to move about an hour ago. He's had time to pee and they gave him a little breakfast, and they're saying he's kind of drifting around, which is pretty usual the morning after a severe seizure.” James looked up and down the conference table. “So we're agreed on the basic strategy, right? Shock him with the news and see what happens. Maybe we can get him loose enough from Daybreak to clue us in to something else. Now, any other thoughts?”

There were none. When they filed into the little room, Arnie barely looked up from where he sat on the bed, leaning forward, arms folded as if he were a small boy with a stomachache.

James said, “The horde led by Lord Robert of Castle Earthstone has converted, en masse, to the version of Daybreak that he calls True Daybreak, which preaches that the clean, natural Earth is here for human beings to enjoy, and instead of driving forward in a great raid against the plaztatic world, they are going home to plant crops, raise children, and repopulate the Earth.”

“Liar.”

“All true. Every word of it. Daybreak is betrayed. The Lost Quarter is in the hand of heretics, or whatever your stupid bush-hippie movement calls them.”

Arnie shuddered and wiped his eyes. “I can't feel Daybreak,” he said. “It's not reacting. It's just me, left here, now that it's done with me.”

“Then why won't you believe me?”

“I don't know.” He wiped his eyes again.

“Do you remember what we talked about yesterday? Do you remember telling me how Daybreak tricked us into playing its game, and losing the war?”

“Like it was a hundred years ago.” He rocked back and forth. “Daybreak . . . it's in trouble. Or not, maybe it's just finished what it came for. This True Daybreak, is, is, is, not yet, no, no seizure this time. True Daybreak or not, it doesn't matter. This plaztatic world will rise no higher, this world will not . . . your species, this species, my species, doesn't matter, the world will be wild and safe, no danger to anyone.” He looked up at them with a vacant stare. “James? What have I been talking about?”

“Nice fake, Arnie.”

“I can't remember what we're talking about.”

“Do you remember that True Daybreak is taking over the Lost Quarter, and Lord Robert has betrayed you?”

“No, I . . . maybe, you just told me, didn't you?”

“Can you feel Daybreak inside you? It almost gave you a seizure. You said you couldn't feel it.”

“It lies a lot. I lie a lot. I'm sorry. Can I sleep now?”

Back in the Facility 1 conference room, James said, “Well. I think that Daybreak definitely wants us to believe that Lord Robert's heresy is not something Daybreak approves of and it's not the next move in Daybreak's development. We're being set up to believe that it's his own particular invention, and what he has re-invented is barbarian tyranny. That's pretty awful if you consider all his subjects were ordinary Americans or Canadians, regular people with regular jobs, two years ago. But if you consider that he's just a plain old barbarian conqueror, not too different from Attila or Chaka Zulu or one of the Khans, and civilization has five thousand years of practice in how to deal with those, well, yeah. We couldn't live with the tribes, but we can live with the Domain. They'll come to us to trade, maybe not this week or this year, but soon, and they'll want all those nice toys and a warm house in the winter and out of season food, and in a hundred years they'll be absorbed. That's the story it's telling us.”

“But you don't believe it's true?” Bambi asked.

“Not really. It looks like classic Daybreak, the lies are just wrappers for more lies.”

Jason nodded. “That's the way I see it too, James. Yeah, I buy that civilization can absorb some of Daybreak, but that doesn't mean the end of Daybreak; it means Daybreak is going to be all through civilization. Everywhere, all the time, as the new world grows up, Daybreak will be there whispering that machines are wicked, knowledge is poison, and people were meant to be big hairless monkeys huddling in the bushes and dying before they're forty. That was around before, but look at Castle Earthstone. Me and the other scouts didn't see a city that's going to grow and advance and change. It was a hunting cabin, a place for guys to play out their big man in the woods fantasies. If it turns into a real castle, it's still going to be a backward, primitive, progress-and-people-hating kind of place. Kids that grow up there are gonna grow up with the idea that dirty, smelly, overworked, and sick is virtuous, and that enjoying life and comfort and having the tools and leisure to explore a long way is degenerate and wicked. Lord Robert hasn't defeated it; he's just driven it underground, and it'll trickle up all around his Domain, and keep it stuck in the mud forever.”

“But he's not burning down the civilized world,” James pointed out.

“True.”

Beth said, “I have the strangest idea.”

Heather smiled, trying to look as encouraging as she could, because Beth was often nervous around people who had a lot of schooling, big vocabularies, or impressive titles. “Well, share.”

The young woman looked down nervously. “So if Daybreak is trouble for, like, regular civilized people, and Lord Robert is trying to set up a regular civilized Domain, but it's all made up of ex-Daybreakers or heretic Daybreakers or whatever they are . . . what if we gave him a shot of the original Daybreak to cope with? Something to keep him more backward, and focused on his own troubles?”

James clapped his hands. “I get it. Fighting Daybreak with Daybreak. And it gives us something to do with poor old Arnie. I'd been afraid that someday we'd have to decide he was too dangerous to keep, or all used up, and kill him. And since the research here is over . . . yeah, why not? Either we release him or we murder him, and the world has had enough murders.”