John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

Two soldiers walked at point. Karl followed, with Robert one polite step behind, and the half dozen soldiers of the honor guard (a pretty grand title for fish-gutters, boat-rowers, and hook-baiters) four or five steps behind Robert. The ground, maybe two notches of damp away from being mud, was pleasant on his bare feet; dew from the tall grass brushed his lower legs.

The trail joined the main, dirt road to Castle Earthstone by a burned farmhouse. The skulls on sticks along the driveway were already being obscured by weeds breaking through the macadam; Robert had put that dent in Cindy’s himself, when she’d acted like just because they’d been in high school together he couldn’t do what he wanted with her and her dumbass stuck-up family.

I always thought they were stuck up with sticks up their butts, and now here they are. Stuck up with sticks.

Robert glanced back. The soldiers struggled to keep two big strings of fish from hitting the ground; Robert’s string was carefully three fewer fish than Karl’s. Yeah. Good fishing, nice morning, he’s ahead of me on everything, he’s gonna be in a good mood.

“Uh, Karl?”

The bulky, older man glanced back at him, one bushy white eyebrow up, a grin showing white teeth between his red lips in the middle of the white beard that covered the lower half of his sunburned baldness. Rings of red and white, Robert thought, like a bull’s-eye. “Yeah, Robert, come on up and walk with me.”

Good mood for sure. “Got some questions. Just wanted some time to talk privately.”

“Yeah, we can make some time, and we should do it today. How ’bout over our breakfast beer? If I get snakebit and die, there’s a raft of things you need to know, and I’ve been neglecting that.”

“Thanks.” Robert dropped back a pace to his usual position.

“No, walk with me the rest of the way. It’s good for them to see us talking, it helps remind them that you’re not one of them. How d’y’think we’ll do for corn? I never grew any before, but that field looks pretty healthy to me; what do you think?”

The barbed wire fence was interrupted by an arch of two-by-fours in a spline-curve pattern. From that, a neatly painted plank sign hung:

On each side of the arch, four posts held up heads at face height. Inside the barbed wire enclosure, the way bent ninety degrees around the outside of a double wall—two cinderblock walls, four feet apart, the outside about twelve feet high, the inside about eight, filled with trash and dirt between, and with a board floor over the trash.

The only opening in the outer wall was into a double-Z of corrugatediron-on-plywood walls screwed into posts, to create a narrow, dark passage with two blind corners. The passage had sliding firing windows every few feet and holes for trip sticks at ankle height.

The slaves had worked all day long as soon as the dirt was soft in the spring, every day, as grateful as if the water and canned food doled out by Lord Karl and Master Robert was divine manna, and singing Daybreak songs while they worked.

The inner courtyard of Castle Earthstone was a simple chain-link enclosure with towers at the corners, surrounding Karl’s old cabin and an array of canvas-roofed cabins for the soldiers and improvised tents, lean-tos, and crates for the slaves. At the gate to this, Robert told the soldiers, “Take these fish to the kitchen bitches, tell’em clean’em and build a fire in the big barbecue. We’ll have’em for lunch.”

In the old hunting cabin’s living room, Karl and Robert stretched out on old leather sofas facing each other, and opened pre-Daybreak beers chilled in the springhouse. “Nothing like a cold brew before breakfast,” Karl said.

Robert laughed and took a chilly swig. He wasn’t about to say he missed coffee.

After reviewing the morning’s fishing and deciding which field to hunt this afternoon, which slaves to bed this evening, and which creek to fish tomorrow, the two men were quiet, until finally Karl said, “I know you hardly ever talk without being asked, and I know you’re thinking, Robert, so what’s on your mind?”

One thing Robert liked about Karl: most people thought because you didn’t talk, you didn’t think, but Karl knew Robert thought all the time. Robert asked, “Who do you talk to late at night over that hidden radio?”

“Daybreak,” Karl said. “I am Daybreak, and I talk to the rest of Daybreak.”

“And what is Daybreak really?”

“That’s like asking who God, or you or I, or anything that took a long, long time to grow is really, or what made it the way it is.”

“But it wasn’t just a back-to-nature club? And it’s not all gone now that the plaztatic world is down?”

“No more than the Catholics are just a wine-and-bread club that folded up after the crucifixion. We knew all along Daybreak couldn’t be a one-time thing. Too damn many asshats out there who want their plaztatic TVs and Wal-Marts and cars and stuff back, too many bastards that think they’re more important than the Earth so they get to crap all over it, too many shitheads that want to be warm in the winter and fill the world with little shitheads that grow up and want houses too. So Daybreak’s not more than half over, even now. Maybe half of what was planned before Daybreak day has not even activated yet.”

“That’s how a couple thousand slaves turned up in early spring to build all this stuff, and as soon as it was built a battalion of soldiers showed up to move in?”

“That’s how. Castle Earthstone was made for a purpose, Robert, and that purpose is still ahead of us. For right now we drill the soldiers, build the castle, and work the slaves.”

“I kind of like drilling slaves, too.”

“Me too, and I love hunting and fishing and living in a world that’s going to be clean and free. But this place has a purpose. That’s how I knew to go loot those warehouses the week before the Chicago bomb went off.”

“A couple dozen slaves died in the storm coming back, though. I guess even Daybreak doesn’t know everything.”

“Daybreak knows everything we need to know, Robert. The slaves mostly gave their lives over to Daybreak a long time ago. They’re here to help Daybreak root out the last stems and shoots of the Big System. Then they’ll die, mostly. The soldiers too. Good, clean, Daybreak people are here to kill the Big System and its servants, then die. We needed supplies for the people coming, because Daybreak needed them to stay alive. After that, when we didn’t need as many slaves, they died.”

“Is that why we kill the babies?”

“Unhhunh. And that’s why we neither of us and none of the soldiers gets a bitch all to himself; nobody can get too worked up about whether any particular little pink monkey is his little bundle of Gaia-raping evil. We’re going to be the last generation, Robert. But we’re going to have a grand time while we do it.” He tossed him another cold beer. Spraddled on the couch, in his long red T-shirt, suspenders holding up his baggy pants, Karl looked more like Santa Claus than ever. “Now, cold beer, hot lunch, straightening out the soldiers and the construction, and then more shooting, fucking, and fishing. Daybreak doesn’t need us just yet.”

“Karl, I don’t know enough yet to take over if you die.”

“We’ll talk more, later today, tomorrow, in a month I’ll have you all briefed. No need to rush unless there’s something important right now.”

Robert thought, taking his time, sipping his beer and watching Karl sip his. “So, Karl, why’d you take me along on Daybreak day?”