John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

Heather was exhausted and she felt like someone had been beating on her guts with a flat shovel for a few hours, so it was almost a relief when MaryBeth switched over from “Come on, push” and “Breathe, Heather, breathe” to “One last push!”

The next sensation was like uncontrollably having the mother of all bowel movements three seconds after making it to the toilet. She watched the lamplight flicker on the ceiling and thought, Kid, you’re not ever going to hear from me that you felt like a giant turd.

Everything—the pain, the exhaustion, the sheer sense of force —became too intense for her to focus; then suddenly, it was merely painful and she was just exhausted and needed to sleep.

“Hey, sweetie. You passed out and missed the first yodel.” MaryBeth Abrams stood beside her, stroking her face with one hand, holding a little wailing bundle in her other arm. “Say hi to Leonardo.”

“Leo,” Heather corrected her. “He’s Leonardo Plekhanov Jr., but he’ll be Leo at home. I just hope his friends don’t give him any horrible nicknames.”

“Well, right now he’s working on being called ‘Noisy.’ Let’s set him up to feed and see if that’s what the matter is.”

He promptly stopped yowling and went to work, contentedly nursing. Well, Leo, now you’ve done it, she thought, looking over his tiny, perfect body. Mom’s going to have to fix the world; it just isn’t fit for a boy like you.

Ever since high school, at the beginning of each month, Allie had written out a list that began a year from now , copying, crossing out, recopying, and changing as the world and her goals changed. In August 2024, I don’t think I’d’ve typed out “a year from now I will be the First Lady,” or “I’ll be waiting up to hear about Heather’s baby,” let alone “and it’s Lenny Plekhanov’s.”

Graham Weisbrod ( my husband the president, okay, I couldn’t have guessed at anything last year ) asked the technician, “So do—”

The technician held up a hand. “QSL, Pueblo, loud and clear, go to encryption as previously selected in five, four, three, two, one…” She tripped off the pendulum-clock contraption that turned three eccentric plywood cams at different speeds, adding noise to encrypt the signal; in Pueblo, an identical cam set would take it out. The tech talked to her opposite number to ensure that voice was intelligible, handed headsets to Graham and Allie, and said, “About an hour, and you’ve got a nice clear channel right now.”

A very tired, weak-sounding Heather O’Grainne said hello. Graham seemed to settle into his chair in the radio room as if he’d suddenly dropped thirty years and was back in his office, falling back into the old close friendship with Heather instantly. Allie felt childish for feeling left out, as if she were a little girl kicking the ground with a plastic sandal and complaining to Papa that, Well, but Heather is my friend too and Graham is my mentor too. And she could practically hear her father saying to be a patient child, a wise child, one who others would want to have around. Which was your subtle Khmer way, Papa, of telling me that people didn’t really want me around.

She tuned out most of the discussion of the sentimental wonders of perfect little ears and toes; she’d seen babies turn grown people into idiots before. This was no more interminable than any other baby, any other time. As Graham and Heather ran out of things to say, Allie realized that, lost in her own irritations, she really hadn’t heard much of the conversation. She sincerely wished Heather a quick recovery and welcomed little Leo to the world, sat patiently while Graham did the same in much more time and with many cutesier words, and fought down sighs of relief and impatience.

Arnie came back on the line. “I’ve dropped the patch through to Heather’s room, but we’ve got a good clear channel up and running on crypto, and about forty minutes left on it, so is there anything you all would like to talk about? We’ve got most of the section heads for RRC someplace in the building, and it would only take a minute to get one of them in here.”

Graham said, “Heather keeps us very up-to-date, so thanks, but I guess we’ll just say good night.”

He lifted the phones off his head without bothering to get Arnie’s acknowledgment. Or to consult me. Allie said, “Arnie, if you don’t mind just talking, just to talk, we never get time for it on the regularly scheduled crypto radio.”

“Sure,” Arnie said.

Oh, good, he sounds happy. She nodded at Graham, keeping a straight face at his irritated expression. Looking forward to a Saturday night game of Bang the Pretty Girl, were we?

Outside the courthouse, Pueblo would be dark, buzzing with the threat of Aaron, and besides, Arnie was lonely.

Before he could even wonder what to talk about, Allie said, “Geez, Arnie, it’s August, remember how last year the big issue was whether to go to Maine or to the Virginia beaches for our vacation?”

“Oh yeah. And we thought it was such a nuisance to have to take the train to Boston and then rent a car—”

“And then we had so much fun,” she said. He’d forgotten how musical her voice became when it was soft and low, across a table in a café, or with her head on my shoulder sitting on the beach and watching the waves, or in bed .

The conversation ranged through a dozen shared experiences, nearly all of them things that had been routine before Daybreak. They both agreed that it felt good to talk about it, and that they shouldn’t do it too often.

“I try not to think about the old days too much,” he said. “Phoning for a pizza at midnight, flying to Paris, my old Porsche… tonight I put all my time into thinking about typhus among the tribal population this winter.”

“Bad?” Allie asked, suddenly alert.

“Bad. Very bad. It’s spread by lice, and bathing is plaztatic, not to mention hard to do out in the woods, especially since with all the soot in the air, this is gonna be the coldest winter since 1816. One case of typhus anywhere will spread through that whole population this winter.”

“Won’t that solve some of our problem for us?”

“Well, sort of. It’ll hit the tribes harder than it hits civilization, and if our brewers can make enough tetracycline—”

“If who can what? ”

“Tetracycline stops typhus cold, and you can make it with a yeast, kind of like brewing beer. We’ve got a pilot plant running here, and if it works, you and Athens both get a crash course in brewing the stuff. Once we have it, some of the tribals might even surrender to get treatment, especially mothers with young kids. But even if it’s mostly on their side of the line, I don’t like all that unnecessary suffering and dying. Hey—there’s only about five minutes left on the encrypting cogs. Gee,” Arnie said, “it was great to bat ideas around. Like old times.”

“You romantic devil. Reminding me of all the good times in the relationship and using it to segue into typhus, antibiotics, and mass death. You haven’t lost your touch. I remember how you rubbed lotion into my legs while talking about the shifting attitude matrix on tax policy,” Allie said.

“Funny thing, I remember the legs more than the policy. God, things in the old days were nice,” he said.

“Yeah. Oh, crap, Arnie, we don’t have much time and I’ve enjoyed this so much. Listen, if you’re not doing too much on Saturday nights, can I call you? Just to talk, old friend to old friend? Sometimes I just need to blow off some steam. I’ll send you a message to set it up, regular channels, but save me next Saturday night.”