John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

“Two of you men come with me,” he said. “I’ve got to go to Terrell Hall and take command. Reverend Whilmire, go wake up the Board, drag them into a meeting, no matter what the actual numbers are it’s a quorum, and vote in a temporary declaration of martial law. To expire in two weeks—if we haven’t salvaged things by then we’ve lost anyway.”

“I’d only slow everyone down,” the Reverend Peet said. “I’m going home to bed to let younger people cope with this. Reverend Whilmire, you have my proxy.”

Most useful thing I’ve ever heard Peet say, Grayson thought. “Mine too,” he said. “Good luck.”

As he ran, the sergeant and one soldier at his heels, he thought, Ask me for anything but time. Supposedly Napoleon said that. For the first time, I really understand him. He ran down the road, faster and faster as his eyes adjusted to the starlight, everything forgotten but the need to be there now, now, now.

Abner Peet had waved off the offer of a soldier to see him home safely. Whilmire and Grayson, he thought, without real disapproval, had certainly fallen for their own act. It was true, of course, that there were dangerous, violent people afoot in the capital tonight, but it seemed to have slipped the general’s mind, and Whilmire’s, that they were the dangerous, violent people, and the enemy were hunted fugitives.

There might be material for a sermon in that idea, though of course he could not use that particular example. The tendency to become obsessed with… well, of course, it was all in the Bible, just as everything else was, motes and beams, and—

“I came as soon as I knew you needed me,” Naomi said, falling into step beside him.

And that was why I sent the soldiers with Whilmire, Peet thought, things making sense at last. “It’s a frightening night,” Peet agreed.

“What are you afraid of, Abner?”

He was startled that she called him by his first name, but it seemed more comforting and familiar than presumptuous. She asked again what he was afraid of.

After a moment he said, “That it will all come back. That I’ll wake up and the Rapture won’t have happened, the cities will be full of crime and evil, all the good work we’ve done will be undone.”

“Is there someone out there trying to do that tonight, Abner? Our scouts heard shooting and explosions and saw fires, and we didn’t know what it was, so I came in to find you and see if we could help.”

“We thought we had caught some of the worst of them, we thought… we thought we had them locked up—”

Her breath hissed in. “What were they doing? What has happened?”

As he explained it to her, he had the strangest sensation that he was surrounded by a crowd of warm, dirty bodies, all listening intently, but when he finished telling her everything ( should I really have told them about who killed the Natcon and why? ) they didn’t seem to be there anymore. There was only Naomi, resting her hand on his arm and saying, very gently, “You have done the right thing, you’re helping to bring about the final triumph, you have served your Lord well.”

He felt lost but happy; bewildered but safe. He drank in the frosty air that reminded him that Thanksgiving was only two days away, and Christmas just around the corner after that, and in the glow, something made him ask, “Are you an angel?”

But there was no answer. He opened his eyes fully; he was standing in a windswept deserted street, and except for the stars and a few flickers of distant flames, in the deepest darkness. The shouts far away had nothing to do with him, he knew, so he went home to sleep.

General Phat took the radio from his ear and sat up straight. “Jason, is your stick still burning?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Time to light the fires; they’ll be here in about twenty minutes.”

Jason pulled the smoldering stick from the little heel-dug trench where he’d kept it under wet leaves, leapt to his feet, and waved it overhead, shaking off the ash, bringing the embers to a bright red glow. On his third swing, flames showed again; a few more swings and it was blazing. By then Larry and Chris, at the two other fire points, were showing bright flames too.

Jason slid the burning stick under the little teepee of kindling. For tinder, he’d come up with a dried-out bird’s nest and pine twigs fuzzed with a steak knife from the guards’ kitchen, to eke out the crumpled pages of Thucydides. The blazing stick set it all off in a yard-high eruption of flames, engulfing the small teepee of deadwood sticks within the larger teepee of broken pine branches.

Jason looked up to see that Chris’s fire was jumping up even higher; Larry’s was ignited, but burning low and smoky.

“That’ll be enough fire to bring’em in,” Phat said.

In a few minutes, Larry and Chris joined them; this was the upwind fire, the easiest one for the helicopter to pick up from.

The war leaders of six tribes squatted on the hillside. Every few minutes, a scout came back from crawling down to where the four men built had three fires and now waited to light them. All night they had been telling their followers, wait, wait, of course we will kill the men, but we can also destroy whatever is coming for them, have a last glorious chance to smash some of the old plaztatic technology. Grumbling, the soldiers listened, obeyed, and continued to prepare for the attack.

One torch blazed up; two more answered; the fires themselves were lit. “This is it,” the senior war leader said, and they all stood up to give their war cries.

Before the last whoops and shrieks from the leaders were over, the hillside was dense with the silhouettes of fighters rising from their hiding places, and the cat-screams and bear-roars of a human wave gathering to pour down the hill toward the three fires.

Grayson looked out from the roof of Terrell Hall with some satisfaction; he didn’t know if they’d succeeded yet but he’d done all he could. At least now he had competent troops. He saw the three fires blaze up, marked their place on the map, and by the time that he reached the bottom of the stairs, he could hear the distant helicopter. In the quad, he shouted, “Major!”

“Sir!”

“Form up! We’re going to the old golf course north of campus, we’re running, and we might have to fight when we get there.”

“Right, sir. Bravo Company, up in the van; Delta Company, rearguard; Alpha, Charlie, and Echo, in that order, main body. We move in one , weapons ready.”

It was much less than one minute. With Alpha Company, in the lead of the main body, Grayson raced north along the old brick walkways, across the street, and into the abandoned part of town.

“What are we going to find, and what are we going to do, when we get there?” the major running beside him asked.

“We’ll get there about the same time as a helicopter from the Bush lands—I hope. There are some dangerous people, menaces to national security, who are there. I’m not sure what side the helicopter is on; the plot reaches very high up into our military. We don’t want to fight our own men—we’ve had enough of that already—but we can’t let the men on the ground get away, either.”

“Are they the spies from Pueblo, sir, the ones we busted last night?”

“Some of them.” Inspiration struck Grayson. “One of the reasons I want them is to question them about the Natcon’s murder. I don’t think they did it but I think they witnessed things that might give us a clue. So we can’t let them leave for Pueblo even if they’re innocent.”