John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

There was a crunching sound under his feet, and splashes in the river below; he darted away from the place where the sealant between the steel web deck and the crumbled and dried blacktop had decayed and broken away, sending a mass of gravel into the Wabash below.

He crouched beside an old rusted Honda Citiscoot; a half dozen bumper stickers, their glue rotted, lay by its rear bumper.

When nothing moved or made a sound after fifteen minutes, Roger rose to take a look around.

Pressed against the passenger-side window, inches from his face, a mummified child looked back at him. The lips had pulled back from the teeth as it had dried, and the eyes had fallen in, but the Spider-Man T-shirt still hung from the bony shoulders, and the hand stuck in the rotting plastic of the door sill seemed about to reach for Roger.

The driver-side window had a bullet hole in it. The long-haired mummy slumped on the wheel was draped in a partly decayed sweatsuit. A tiny shriveled body lay in a puddle of pudding-like slime, which must once have been a baby carrier, in the back seat.

Roger charged down the highway at a dead run; terrible tradecraft, and he wasn’t sure what he was running from, but nothing pursued him, and in a minute or so, he was among the trees, beside a ditch full of water, watching minnows and listening to the birds. He ate some jerky, drank from his canteen, and lay back to look at the sky.

Had someone been shooting at the bridge at random? Crazy guy walking through the traffic jam with a pistol? Her ex-husband seeing his chance? Stray round from a gunfight between two stranded drug dealers over a briefcase of money?

With Daybreak remains, you could break your brain, and your heart, trying to understand how someone had happened to die that way.

He slept for an hour or so, woke feeling better, and cautiously advanced along the ditch, still headed east.

As James was laying out the copies of all the available Castle charters, at the request of the Olympia delegation, his knack for invisibility seemed to be holding: they weren’t waiting for him to leave to start the argument.

“Graham,” Allie said, “this has to be your dumbest ever. You should have said no when Cameron proposed it. Didn’t it even occur to you that the TNG is militarily far superior to us, and if we ally with the California Castles, maybe even support some Castles in Temper territory, we can balance—”

Norm McIntyre shook his head. “No, no, no . Too high a price. The TNG is right on this one, and it’s more important for us than it is for them. The only thing we’ve got over the Tempers is a better claim on the Constitution, and the Constitution says the United States has no hereditary nobility, period. No recognition for the Castles.”

“But in six months when we need the help of the Castles—,” Allie began.

“If that’s ever the case, it will be time for us to go out of business,” McIntyre said. “If we cut a deal with the Castles… what’s next, recognizing the tribes?”

“That was just brainstorming an idea!”

“Okay, we’re settled,” Graham said. “Allie, I note your objections, I’m just overriding them.” He picked up the paper. “Read fast. If there’s some trap in here, we need to see it in within two minutes.”

“Maybe I can propose a compromise?” Allie said. “Let’s say we need another day or two to go over our exact response. That way if we need something to trade, we have it. Then instead of just agreeing, we can make giving them what they want a big favor. I mean, isn’t that more practical, doing the same thing we were going to do anyway, but getting something for doing it?”

Reluctantly, Graham nodded. “All right, we’ll do it your way.”

As they filed out, James was still laying down papers. He waited till they closed the door before shaking his head. Not that it mattered, but this was the third straight time they’d asked for research on a subject, and then argued it out and decided without ever consulting the materials he’d brought them. James smirked at himself; it had actually hurt his feelings that the invisible man was being treated like he wasn’t there.

The long, deep sunrise shadows reached out from the blood-red sun. Jason, watching from thirty feet up in a tree, had been seeing the first torches, lamps, and cookfires inside the main compound of Castle Earthstone for about an hour and a half.

More than forty skulls decorated the gates and walls. The just-rising sun revealed a person tied face-on to a post in front of the main gate; more light revealed a welted back.

A guard came out and threw water over the prisoner, untied the wrists, and let the body fall to the ground. He kicked the body to turn it over—turn her over, they saw—and she cried out and moved; he yanked her to her feet by her hair and pushed her toward the gate.

For the next few hours, they circled Castle Earthstone, slowly working their way from one vantage to another. Patrols were slow, apathetic, and rare; workers in the fields were few, far between, and seemingly dazed. The corn and bean fields were tended but not well-tended.

In a clearing in the creek bottom, they found the burial ground. Bodies were half-out of shallow graves; animals had been at them. One large heap of dirt, tunneled by foxes or raccoons, was littered with tiny bones. “Where they put the newborns,” Larry said.

Jason said, “That’s what the plan always was, all the Daybreak poets worried about how to keep people from breeding back. Did you notice how many women are pregnant and how few kids there are? We used to say that our goal was not just to be the best generation but the last. So… Mother Earth needs our help. Babies are the enemy.”

“It explains why a place this big doesn’t have more crops growing,” Chris said. “They’re not planning to keep all their slaves alive through the winter.”

When they took a break, creeping back to share some venison jerky and dried apricots, Chris asked Jason, “Doesn’t it seem weird that the slaves they’re killing off are mostly women? Weren’t these guys supposed to be goddess-worshipping feminists?”

“That was the warm-up in the Daybreak sales pitch to women,” Jason said, thinking how much that sounded like his father or brother. “Some women love the idea of being all Earth-mothery, I am woman, I give birth to the world, I am the mother the world needs —I used to riff on phrases like that all the time for my Daybreak poems. But if human beings are a blight on the face of Mother Gaia, and getting rid of them is the paramount goal, you’ve got to get rid of women.

“Men breed too,” Chris pointed out.

“A hundred men and one woman can turn out about one baby per year. A hundred women and one man can turn out about a hundred babies per year. If you want to get rid of people, you get rid of mothers,” Jason said. “But that wasn’t what we said to them, not at first. Our first message was, ‘You are Woman and the world depends on you.’” He wasn’t looking up from his food, lost in thinking about home and his pregnant wife. “That’s what got Beth into it; she was from a dirty-ass pack of urban white trash scum that was trying to pretend they were ghetto gangstas because for them it was an upgrade. Daybreak was the first time anyone said they wanted her for something besides her boobs. A lot of women didn’t see where it was going till too late. A lot of men, too.” He seemed to be a thousand miles inside himself.

“Why don’t they rebel?” Chris asked.