John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

“Then we need to trap that deep-secret operation here at Castle Earthstone, where it can look like an unlucky accident. Do it right, and at the end of the day the Pueblo bitch’ll’ve lost six agents and arrested the wrong one from her staff.

“Besides, it’s time to get rid of Bloomington; we were only using it to relay to agents in Kentucky and those have all been rolled up, and the techie people at Bloomington are all too close to the border and know too much. If you say go, soldiers can leave at dawn—”

“Go.” Karl beamed at him. “That was easy. Robert, you are probably the smartest decision I ever made.”

“Love you too, boss. Let me start things rolling; I’ll be back later for a drink and some hanging out.”

Once Robert had learned that Karl was afraid of being alone, he had lost his fear of him. I am going to run this place so much better than you. Robert caught a whiff of broiling deer liver, and contemplated which bitch he’d bed that night. From assistant lineman to about-to-be-lord in ten months. How could anybody not love Daybreak?

“All right,” Larry said. “Time. Jason, ready?”

“Ready.”

Jason crouched to spring up onto the bridge; he’d rechecked his gear a dozen times and knew nothing was loose. He looked at deck level along the bridge to where a Budweiser truck sat crosswise in the black puddles of its rotted tires, a bulky, dark shadow in the twilight.

Gaze locked on that truck, he felt but didn’t see Larry moving into a comfortable firing position on the bank beside him. He heard Chris roll up onto the road and plunge across to the far ditch.

“Chris, ready?” Mensche’s voice seemed too soft to carry.

Chris’s voice came back soft and clear as one of Jason’s own thoughts. “Ready.”

“Jason. Go.”

The run to the beer truck was not quite as far as the hundred meters Jason had regularly run in high school track, but he had not run it wearing a full pack, or in heavy rawhide moccasins—or worrying about catching an arrow. He seemed to run forever until he bounded up into the truck bed, dropped to his belly against the steel plates and board floor, rolled over once to place his shoulder gently against the truck wall, and swung his black-powder rifle around. He whistled the bobwhite sound, the signal to Larry.

With the hummocks covered, Larry raced across the bridge, his steps soft slaps and scrapes, till a faint thud indicated he was in position behind the concrete abutment. He chirruped like a squirrel with a nut.

Chris rushed across the bridge, surprisingly quiet for a big man, and continued beyond them to the place they’d picked out, a U-haul trailer tipped on its side; Jason rushed to an overturned bread truck as soon as Chris was in place.

The alternation continued until finally they were all at a shed deep in the trees, with the Tippecanoe just a whispering splash and gurgle behind them. After the moon rose, by its dirty blue light, they moved on. Jason thought, Back when I believed I was a poet, I’d have made such a deal about the soot in the stratosphere and the bomb launcher on the moon. Now… meh.

Concentrating on the roads, trails, woods, and prairie, if Jason had another poetic thought before they camped at dawn, he didn’t notice.

Arnie Yang had mostly decided that Allie wouldn’t be coming. He’d only casually mentioned that he sometimes grabbed a beer. Probably she hadn’t picked up the hint.

She appeared at Dell’s front door like a vision of pre-Daybreak—linen dress, high-heeled pumps so pricey that there were no synthetic materials to fall apart, and she was even wearing some lipstick and eye shadow— how’d she get that? I guess if anyone could…

She squinted in the dim lamplight till she spotted Arnie, then strode between the old picnic tables and wooden office chairs; the mostly male crowd fell silent as she passed, more startled by the vision than anything else. Glenda, the waitress, followed her, carrying a mug and pitcher.

When Allie slid into the seat across from Arnie, Glenda set the mug in front of her and poured. “Thank you,” Allie said.

Arnie reached for his scrip pad and Glenda shook her head. “Dell’s gonna name this the First Lady’s Table; you drink free tonight, Ms. Sok Banh, and feel free to bring the president by any time you like.”

“That’s so nice, thank you, and it’s just Ms. Banh.” When she had gone, Allie cautiously tried a sip. “Oh, thank God, it’s good.”

Same old Allie. “You don’t want to be grateful for anything that you don’t actually like.”

She did the old shrug and head toss that used to disarm him completely. “Exactly. I hate to waste graciousness.” She took a deeper drink of the dark brown brew. “Definitely not wasted here. Well, so here we are a year later, and it’s really a different world, isn’t it? I mean we used to say that all the time, that it was going to be a different world, but now… well, look at us.” She held her glass up in a toast; reflexively, he clinked with her.

She’s got a hell of an act going, but I don’t seem to fall for it the way I used to. Disconcerted by the thought, Arnie blurted out, “Well, more of what we do matters more.”

“Oh, I always treated any job I had like it mattered. That’s how you keep good jobs and get better ones.”

“Me too, I hope, but nowadays the job matters to other people, not just to me.”

“Arnie, that was always true too. If you’d had better luck or seen what was coming sooner, maybe we could have done something about Daybreak before it happened—and if you had, I’d have been the one who had to carry out whatever the plan was. Nothing’s changed, Arn, lives still depend on us, and so do our ambitions.”

“I guess in the old days lives did depend on us, but it didn’t feel like it, it was all kind of removed. Nowadays, when I need data, I don’t tell an intern to look it up and email it to me, I send a man out with a pack and a gun, and he goes because he trusts me that it’s important, even though he and I know he might not come back. I really have to count the cost.”

“Things got more expensive,” Allie said, “but that still doesn’t really matter if you can pay the price.” She drained the glass; before it touched the table, Glenda was back to refill it. “Or if someone else does.”

The Wabash is immense—the French explorers originally thought of the Wabash as the main stream and the upper Ohio as a tributary—and the twin bridge over I-64 was more than half a mile long; both bridges were choked with wrecked cars and trucks. Roger had started to cross with an hour of darkness remaining, but the sun had been full up for a while and he was still working his way forward from hiding place to hiding place, trying to stay away from the visible edges of the bridge.

Now that he could see the rest of his way, he hated to come out from cover, but there were just a few more rows of cars to go to the jackknifed semi that, on the morning of October 29, 2024, had blocked two lanes of traffic when its tires all burst, leaving hundreds of cars stuck on the bridge to wait for a state trooper who never came, their tires rotting and bursting, gasoline fermenting into unburnable vinegar, electrical systems encrusted with nanoswarm.