John Barnes: The Last President

Bambi shrugged. “The laundry staff and the maids are the only ones I feel sorry for.”

Carlucci looked around; blood had splashed up to the ceiling on all the walls, dripped from limbs of the Christmas tree, pooled on the still-wrapped presents. He avoided looking down at his clothes.

“We’ll have your clothes clean and dry in a couple hours,” Bambi said. “We’ve got wood-fired dryers now. And meanwhile we can loan you something. But before you clean up”—she handed him a steel tenderizing mallet—“please pound on that thumb with this, and leave both on the floor beside him.”

She pulled an artist’s brush from her back pocket, dipped it in the still-warm puddle of blood around Signor’s thighs, and wrote ECCO on the wall. “That should explain the thumb so the maids will remember it.”

James Hendrix would have been happy to leave Interrogation Subject 162 alone on Christmas morning; in fact he had planned to. But yesterday, his line of questioning had sent 162 into the severe convulsions that characterized a struggle between Daybreak and its host, and often, a subject who slept it off awoke amenable.

But since Hendrix had a busy social and professional life, rather than wait around for 162 to wake up, he had simply scheduled this wakeup call for him. Hendrix’s assistant, Izzy Underhill, had no family or friends to be with, so she had come over to have “orphan breakfast” with James, plus Patrick and Ntale, the brother and sister messengers he had befriended. Either all my friends are co-workers or all my co-workers end up as my friends, James thought. Well, probably there will be nothing new here, and it’s painful for 162, and it’s Christmas, so let’s get it over with.

When he opened the door slot to check, the man was curled in a fetal position, with a woven straw pad and a blanket under him, and two blankets thrown over the concrete bench that was the only furniture in the cell. It was less uncomfortable than it looked, perhaps, but it seemed like the very image of misery. James set the lantern onto a shelf, crouched next to the huddled figure, and spoke loudly. “Tell us how Daybreak will react to an attack on the camps along the Ohio.”

The man shot to a sitting position, wiping saliva from his face, and yelled incoherently.

“Bad dream?” James said, almost sympathetically. “Tell us how Daybreak will react to an attack on the camps on the Ohio River, and we will see about getting you a pillow.”

“A pillow would be nice,” 162 agreed. “I don’t know what it will let me tell. The situation is that Daybreak is on a cusp, a balance, a tipping point to use that old inaccurate term. Daybreak is pushing the tribes it controls very hard and they are starving and dying of overwork, and it is driving them down into those camps. As soon as they can cross over, they will be after your surviving towns and cities in Kentucky like a hungry Rottweiler on a litter of kittens, and they won’t stop until they are stopped; left to themselves, the tribal hordes will go all the way to the Gulf. If all you do is stop them from moving, they will wander away from the river to forage, and Daybreak will just gather the survivors back up over the winter, to try again next year. But if they are actually defeated and beaten, Daybreak does not have the people or resources to create more. Remember it is not even a parasite, it is a carrion eater, and the Lost Quarter is a corpse that it has already fed on more than once once once—” 162 finished in a long scream, flailing and thrashing on the bench, and James and Izzy had all they could do to restrain him.

On their way out, Izzy said, “We didn’t learn anything new, did we? That’s the same thing he said last time.”

“We have to keep asking because we never know when Daybreak might fail for a few seconds and let him tell the truth. Or remember, he was one of our best minds, and he’s still in there trying to get out, and he might find a way to suggest something to us. Thanks for working on Christmas morning. Do you have anywhere to be for the rest of the day?”

“Jason and Beth are having me over for lunch. We all tend to get pretty quiet around holidays, you know, because Daybreak took us away from our families back before, sometimes way back before, and we missed our last few chances to talk to our parents or our siblings or whatever. It makes holidays really sad.” She brushed her flyaway brown hair away from her face. “Also makes me sad that I have two fresh bruises from his thrashing. I never hurt anybody when I was having Daybreak seizures, at least as I recall, but then I’m a little bitty girl and he’s a good-sized man. I hate to be a wimp, but if you think you’re going to cause a seizure, maybe you should have Jason as your assistant?”

“Yeah, you’re probably right. Well, I just wanted to make sure you had somewhere to be.”

“That’s nice of you, and I do. Merry Christmas, James.”

“Merry Christmas, Izzy.” He hurried on to his next stop; Incoming Crypto at the Main Post Office, where he was expecting some good news.

General Lyndon Phat stood and reached for the stack of wood by the fireplace. “I can’t tell if it’s really cold or I’m just old.”

“It’s really cold,” Heather O’Grainne said. “And as president, you will only be allowed to be old enough to seem strong, reassuring, and paternal.”

Phat gazed at her over his reading glasses, which perched on his nose like a last pathetic fence against the avalanche of his gray unibrow. He was short and square-built, with gray hair surrounding a monk’s spot, and his deeply creased face recorded a lifetime of worry. He wore a blanket draped around his shoulders; a thick sweater; baggy sweatpants; and multiple pairs of wool socks that wilted into bundles of color around his ankles. He had been leafing through a hundred-year-old Atlas of North American Resources .

A guard knocked at the door. “It’s James Hendrix, Ms. O’Grainne. He’s waiting at the ground floor door.”

“Send him up,” Heather said. “And for the third time, put him on the list of people who are allowed immediate entrance, and tell your sergeant that if they ever make James stand in the snow waiting again, I will have the sergeant’s guts on a stick.”

“I’ll tell him exactly that, ma’am. I’ll get Mister Hendrix right now.”

From his crib, Leo whimpered, testing what wasn’t right with the world. Heather strode to the crib, leaned down, and put on the joyful excited tone she usually reserved for creamed spinach. “Guess what? We’re going to have a visit from Uncle James! And he’s going to tell us that our friends killed some bad guys!”

“Your confidence warms my heart,” James said, coming in and shucking off his tent-like coat. He still looked every pudgy inch the government documents librarian he had been back before. “And we did kill some bad guys. Good morning, Leo.”

Leo emitted the short “ah!” noise that he reserved for people he especially liked, and waved his hands until James leaned down and extended a finger to grasp. “You been keeping them in line, fella?”

“Ah!”

“Good. I’ll take it from here.”

Leo gurgled and settled; he’d be deep asleep in a minute. Heather wasn’t sure what was so reassuring about James, but Leo wasn’t the only one who felt it.

James drew up another armchair and pulled off sweaters, draping them over the back. “Nice and warm in here. Leo’s getting big.”