John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

Ruth’s eyes flashed behind her glasses. “And we had to wreck the whole country to do one simple thing, let everyone be a scout! Look at what it took to get rid of the sexist barrier and the ageist barrier and all the rest! How old do you have to be, after all, before you’re too old to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, and all the rest of it? Or how does having two X chromosomes let you out of keeping yourself ‘mentally awake’? So, anyway, you are now at the home base of the Wapak Scouts, which is still one hundred fifty-seven people, about two-thirds of us under twenty. Our youngest is four, our oldest is Scotty here, and we’re still here.”

“You still haven’t told us how you’re still here,” Larry said. “There’re at least three tribes within a day’s walk; how come they haven’t wiped you out?”

It was too dark now to see Niskala’s features, but he sounded smug, or maybe amazed. “That started as an accident, and then just sort of developed.”

By February, we’d dragged all the cars into one common area for salvage, boarded up every broken window, picked up the downed wires, all that stuff you noticed. Originally we did it to keep the kids busy and not to have to look at all that wreckage. By then the big bombs had gone off, and we’d lived through the fires from that big EMP that took KP-1 off the air—that made us feel pretty smart about having picked up all those wires.

Because Ruth’s a thinker, the minute she heard about biotes, way back on October 29, she went to the hardware store here in town and made them put all the ammo into mason jars. We lost some ammo to spoilage but not much. There were some older guns, crude enough to be almost all wood and metal: the single-shot bolt-action rifles for the Rifle Shooting merit badge, a bunch of old deer rifles, my personal handguns. We had a couple kids who’d gotten their metalworking badge build replacement parts for the plastic over the winter.

Between some surviving food stocks from grocery stores, and rigging up a grinder for the corn and wheat from elevators nearby, and hunting and fishing, we were feeding everyone. We were pritnear on top of things.

So one day early in March, three guys who looked like a real shitty, pardon my French, imitation of American Indians came walking into town shouting that we all had to obey the high tribe of Booga-Booga. Harry Blenstein, commanding the town watch, sent a runner for me—I was ice fishing.

Meanwhile Harry got quite the tribal lecture. Now, he was a pretty serious Christian and I guess they laid on that Mother Gaia horseshit, sorry, French again, real thick, and well, they must’ve said something to set off his bad temper. He apparently told’em what he thought, and it must’ve offended’em, because one of them whacked Harry on the forehead with an ax—no warning at all.

Luckily, I’d been paranoid enough to insist there were always snipers covering any visitors coming into town. The two girls on duty for that, Hannah and Meg, did what they were supposed to do—pow-pow, two dead tribals, clean head shots, and the third got two steps before Meg had reloaded and hit him in the spine.

Harry’s backup, Jim, tied up that survivor, neat as you please, and started first aid.

The tribals weren’t stupid, not even really careless; we just lucked out. They had two men with bows watching from up there on the hillside, with a girl runner ready to go back to a main party a couple miles off. But by pure luck, we had hunters out there that day. Their two bowmen had set up right in front of our deer blind, so my hunters were already watching those creepy guys, and when they heard shooting start, they hit them from behind while they were still reaching for their bows.

More luck was that one of my hunters was a big, strong, fast kid, he’d been a running back for the Wapak Redskins—I mean the Warriors, they had to change that a while back—and he just chased their runner down, knocked her flat, gagged her, and dragged her back. If he hadn’t had the presence of mind to do that, I don’t know what would’ve happened.

We lucked out one more way. Trying to get the bullet out of that poor tribal’s spine, we made a mess of it—we weren’t exactly what you’d call skilled surgeons and we didn’t have any anesthesia but whiskey. Between being drunk and in agony, he started crying for his mom, and yelling that he hated Daybreak and wanted his world back. That caused one of those seizures Daybreakers have, and we tried to hold him down but he thrashed so hard he knocked off a hemostat, and bled to death before we could put it back on.

Meanwhile that runner was a thirteen-year-old girl, half out of her head from getting knocked down so hard, being held in the next room. When we went in to talk to her, she was sure we’d tortured that boy to death, and started babbling. We learned how they did their approaches to towns, that those first “representatives” were just there to estimate the population. If any town surrendered to their outrageous demands, great, they’d just take everyone as slaves, but more often they’d all go back to their tribal leaders or council or whatever it was called, and return in a massive surprise assault. The first group was supposed to be just a big enough force to make sure someone always came back.

We also learned that the tribals’ main body allowed the “representatives” forty-eight hours to come back, since sometimes a town would extend hospitality and they’d need the time before they could leave without arousing suspicion.

She also told us about what they did when they took over. Some little girls are sensitive about massacres. She was having seizures every few minutes, but she got it all out. Though she still has seizures, she’s sworn to the articles now, and one of us.

By that time it was three hours till dawn. She’d told us where their main body was camped.

Ruth had the key idea. We put together a team of our best bow hunters to go in first. The tribals were mostly city people, not many soldiers and probably no hunters, before Daybreak. It was nasty and grim, but their sentries died without making any sound, and then all of us rushed and killed the rest in their beds. Horrible, but better than the other way around.

Ruth’s genius idea was that we cleaned up their campsite, carried all those corpses back here, and put the bodies all in one deep basement, and filled in with dry dirt.

We’ve filled two more basements since. So far they always do things the same way. I’m guessing it’s—well, not exactly written out, of course, because they’re anti-literate, but it might as well be part of the Daybreaker Handbook , if there was one.

So locally, they are too afraid of us to try again—we’re the place where everyone disappears without a trace.

Chris asked, “That’s why you keep blackout, and why you don’t farm, too, right? You can’t let them have a way to count you. But in the long run, how are you going to keep eating?”

Scott seemed very pleased with the question. “We have a plan for that too, and in fact—”

“I wish you hadn’t told us so much,” Larry said. “What if one of us is captured?”

“One of you won’t be captured unless all of us are,” the old man said. “Ruth’s got a whole worked-out plan.”

“My plan,” Ruth said, “isn’t much more complicated than to get out while the getting is good; I worked out logistics in detail but the strategy is, run fast and be too tough for any tribe to take on. You brought me the last piece of the puzzle, just by telling us where you’re headed. Your plans fit beautifully with ours.”

“See,” Scott said, “the three tribes around us are the Miami Morning-stars, which ought to be the name of a football team, over to the east and southeast; the Day’s Glorious Dawn People, due south; and the True Gaia People, who are north and west. You went right through the True Gaias and they didn’t mess with you because they’re pretty weak and disorganized, after taking some poundings from other tribes around them. Now, we’ve got more than enough canoes—there were three canoe liveries in this town before Daybreak. We just go down the Auglaize to Defiance, and then on down the Maumee. If we go that way we’d only have to run through the True Gaias, and although they’d have the numbers to stop us, they’ll probably be too disorganized.”