John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

Part of her wanted to object that she didn’t think she ever had, but it seemed that even before she objected, she was already telling him about the positive side of Daybreak, and that she was remembering thinking those things even before Daybreak. It was nice to be sitting here with a guy who understood; Arnie was smiling, listening intently. Just when she realized she was uncomfortable, he poured water for her. “Need a break? Hungry?”

Arnie would get her out of this. She clung to that.

“Leslie.” The voice in the darkness was so soft she thought perhaps she was dreaming. She sat up. “Leslie,” the voice repeated, “come to the door so you can hear me better. Don’t make any noise.”

She rolled off her cot and crawled to the door, feeling ahead of her so she wouldn’t knock over the pitcher.

“I don’t know how long we’ve got,” the voice said. “I’ve got the guards timed, but if I hear them I’ll have to go that second—they vary the timing. If I disappear, don’t call out, just get back in your bunk and pretend to be asleep. I’ll always be back.”

“ James? ”

“Who else?”

Reasonable question. She lay prone to put her mouth and ear by the crack at the bottom of the door. “Can you do anything for me?”

“Working on it. Is Arnie still your interrogator?”

“He’s the only person I’ve seen since I was arrested.”

“Jesus, he’s got things just the way he planned. Leslie, there were three suspects. You were one; I was another. The third was Arnie.”

“Oh, God, James, you’re telling me Arnie Yang is working for Daybreak? We are so fucked, James, so totally fucked up the ass . What can you do? Do you have some evidence to prove I’m not guilty and Arnie is? Are you going to try to break me out?”

“Not right away. If they’re going to torture or kill you, or they hold a secret meeting without me, I have a way to know, and I have a way to break you out right then. Otherwise, though, I’m going to keep working on catching Arnie Yang. He says you’re refusing to talk.”

“I’ve been totally cooperating! I’m answering every question he asks me! He said it was my best chance!” Her rage shocked her.

“I bet he did. Tell me about what he does. He’s already got you framed so he doesn’t need to create more evidence. He could have had you executed by now. So he can’t be after information because he knows you don’t have any, and he can’t frame you any more than you are already framed. So what’s he spend all that time talking about?”

Even there, lying on the dark floor of her cell, and feeling like she owed James her life, Leslie couldn’t help noticing that James spoke in the same tone he did on the drunken lonely evenings when she told him too much about her love life. But he was right, he needed to know this, so she said, “Well, he always tells me to put myself into his hands and trust him, and he wants to talk about Daybreak ideas I had before Daybreak day…” She told James everything she could remember.

He said, “I think I’m recognizing the basic technique for implanting a false memory, but it’s been a long time since I read that circular. FBI thing, I think, about how not to be fooled by things like UFO abduction stories and Satanist conspiracy stories, and how not to lead witnesses into deceiving you. I’ll find it and be able to tell you for sure next time. Meanwhile I guess the main trick is to not believe any thought that might have been his suggestion. So if—gotta go.”

She rolled onto her cot silently, pulling the blanket over herself. She counted six long, slow breaths before a guard came in with a candle in one hand, and a tray holding a dubious meat patty, fried potatoes, onions, and zucchini in the other; as always, there were no utensils, just one wet and one dry cloth. Same thing four times in a row; probably another way to break down my time sense. She ate looking down at her plate, because she never knew when they were watching, or from what angle, and she was afraid they might see her smile. On the last bite, she blew out the candle, wiping her face in the dark.

“How deep is that?” Roger asked.

“After it’s past your neck, it doesn’t make much difference,” Debbie pointed out. “Unless you can’t swim. Last chance to tell us.”

“I can swim. I just hate being wet and cold at the start of a thirty-mile hike in soggy moccasins.”

Samson looked up from where he was lashing the last of the 55-gallon drums together. “I agree. We’re going to do it, of course, but I agree; I hate it too.” Before them, the Ohio River was broad and olive-green.

The flow was faster and deeper than anyone had seen in at least 150 years. Dozens of dams on the Ohio and its tributaries had toppled. A cold early fall was drenching the Appalachians. The Allegheny basin’s forests, dying from fallout, were releasing their grip on thousands of mountain slopes, and the water they once slowed and absorbed poured unimpeded over bare earth, freighted with dead black mud.

Lashed together with hemp line, the empty drums made an awkward raft. They tied their packs on top of two closely bound drums, hoping something, somewhere, might stay sort of dry. Not wanting to lose the last of the daylight, they grabbed handholds on the lashing ropes and walked into the river, beginning to kick with their feet, at Samson’s direction, when it became too deep to wade.

Roger clamped his jaw and pressed his lips together; he’d drown before he let himself swallow what was in the river. How many unburied bodies must there be upstream? Pathogen soup, that’s what it is.

Roger kicked when told to, hung on otherwise, and did his best to keep his head out of the filth. Twice something, a tree branch perhaps, bumped at him; once a floating rag, perhaps a diaper or T-shirt, wrapped over his wrist, and he flung it away in a near panic.

After what felt like a century of cold misery, Samson said, “I’m kicking dirt. Don’t try to stand yet, but kick harder.”

A moment later, Roger felt bottom too, as they passed over a sandbar sheltering the inside of a bend. They entered a slow, steady-flowing channel, kicking the drum raft out of the current upstream of a sloping gravel bank. When they planted their feet and stood up, the water was only waist deep, and they walked their raft aground easily.

They cut their packs free, held them over their heads, and bore them ashore, mostly dry. Samson waded back in, and pushed the empty raft out past the bar. Holding on with one hand, chest-deep in the filthy water, he slashed the lashings with his knife, detaching the drums and setting them bobbing along in the current. Two minutes later, on a narrow gravel road just above the river, Debbie said, “Shit.”

“What?”

“Eaahh, I hate being wrong. Looks like we’ll only be traveling 103 miles since you asked me, including the river. Off by four. Damn, damn, damn.” She muttered about it off and on, until, an hour later, they made camp for the night, not completely out of danger, but safer than they had been in a long time.

“The way Earth’s curvature works,” Larry said, “the horizon on flat ground or water is usually less than five miles off. So all we can say for sure is that it’s mud at least that far out.” From the burned and crumbled docks at Celina, a plain of drying mud, once Grand Lake St. Marys, stretched to the eastern horizon.