John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

Castro rolled over, brought his ankles up, and grasped the rope; the knots came apart in his hands and he kicked them from his feet. When he looked, just a moment later, no one was there, just black rope beside the bed and great wads of feathers scattered everywhere.

Kelleys Dancer crept through the dark; even under black sails, with the moon not yet up, and no lights on shore as they approached, they couldn’t be sure they weren’t being watched.

And then once we’re on the canal, it will be worse, Larry thought. Painting the canoes black won’t help much there.

They sat murmuring together in the bow, while Rosie took the helm.

“I’m thinking your problem won’t be rapids, but mud,” Barbara said. “The water from all those broken dams is long gone. But Stone sent us to investigate the Canadian shore, ’cause they wanted us to find out if pure-fusion fallout behaved like they thought it would. Well, it did—the Geiger counter hardly made a noise, so there wasn’t much lasting contamination, but practically everything was dead except grass and bugs. No plants or trees to hold the soil; upstate New York was on that same wind path, so lots of streams and small lakes will be silted up.”

Kelleys Dancer crept slowly south and east, aided by the slow current in eastern Lake Erie that pulled toward Niagara. After a while Barbara took the helm and Rosie went forward and began sounding with a bob on a line. Whenever they tacked, he’d scramble to adjust the triangular foresail.

At quarter of four, off to starboard, a dim, low urban skyline appeared, with a small knob that had to be the lighthouse, their landmark. The sun would follow less than an hour behind the moon; they needed to move.

The last they heard of Rosie and Barbara was a whispered “Good luck” as Chris and Jason climbed into their black canoe and followed Larry, paddling slowly across the dark harbor. Behind them, they could hear the creak and thump of Kelleys Dancer tacking to head back to the western end of the lake.

The canal entrance loomed in front of them like a concrete-scabbed wound. Paddles came up dripping scum, black at first, but as the sun came up the color of a bloody bruise, climbed, and turned the gold color of old chicken fat, the slime was a deep blue-green, in long yarns and strands.

Two hours later the land they paddled through was still urban, though empty and dead. The green scum smelled like fresh horse manure when the paddles turned it over. Chris, in the bow of the lead canoe, saw a headless corpse still wearing a bra and panties; a swollen hair-covered lump that must have been a dead horse or cow; and scattered human bones, including two small skulls, around the black smear where a rubber raft had rotted.

“Kids trying to get out of the city that way?” Jason asked.

“Or kids looting somebody’s abandoned raft, killed by something bigger and meaner than them,” Chris said. “Or maybe feral dogs got them and it just happened to be near a raft. The amount of really sad shit that happened is just plain impossible to imagine.”

Apart from the green slime, nothing lived; the trees that leaned over the canal had no leaves, the clay and stone banks eroded without plants growing on them, no fish jumped in the water, no bird flew overhead, nothing scuttled in the dead brush. Skeletons of humans and dogs lay on the banks; probably for a while the bodies had swarmed with beetles and worms, but now those were gone.

By noon they were well into suburban areas. Jogging trails and little decorative shopping malls bordered the canal at intervals between long stretches of factory yards and common dumps. Hearing booming and thundering ahead around a bend, Larry had them pull over and tie up; Jason drew the short straw. He came back to report an old landfill seething with fires and explosions. “Probably the biotes that infected it are methanogenic,” Jason said. “And lightning or something started the rising gas burning.”

Not wanting to give up the canoes, they walked along the bank opposite the landfill, towing the canoes on long ropes. “‘I got a mule, her name is Sal,’” Jason said. “Except I don’t. I got me.”

“But we can probably do better than fifteen miles today,” Larry said, “and right now, every mile is looking like a blessing.”

After relaunching the canoes, they paddled till twilight. The sun crawled down behind them, turning from mucus-yellow to gory red again; they slept under the beached, overturned canoes that night, taking turns sitting watches.

“Yes, even in Pueblo,” James said, looking at the crowd of excited people jumping and waving as the Gooney Express came in low to verify the FUEL CLEAN, NO NANOSWARM white flag with the blue slash. One bunch of young, clean-scrubbed kids of both genders had been singing praise songs while waiting to see Reverend Whilmire, but much the larger component of the crowd was young women in their best clothes, and old men in veterans’ organization caps, clutching small Cross and Eagle flags and whooping it up for General Grayson. Nobody was cheering for Cameron. “Maybe one in ten of our people are Post Raptural. What’s it like up in Olympia?”

“About the same,” Allie Sok Banh said. “But we’ve been putting some more pressure on the Pus Rupturals, telling them to be less overtly political or they can kiss the tax exemptions and parade permits good-bye.

Norm McIntyre added, “Plus twice we’ve raided the Piss Wrapper Church of Olympia for arms caches.”

“Did you find any?”

“Yes and no. So many of those assholes pack all the time that if you raid their services you’ll always find personal weapons. But we didn’t find any arsenals under the altar. Yet.”

“We’re a little more laissez-faire here,” James said, noncommittally.

Allie shrugged. “Typical Heather. More important to follow the rules than to win, and even after Daybreak she won’t admit an idea can be dangerous.”

“Oh, I’ll admit an idea can be dangerous,” James said. “Though having spent a good part of this summer teaching in our night school here, I’ve also noticed that ideas aren’t terribly dangerous to very many people.”

The Gooney rumbled to a stop. Reverend Whilmire emerged first, waving as the crowd cheered; the cheering became overwhelming when Grayson came down the stairs, holding hands with his wife, Jenny. “You know,” Allie said, “if I were a spiteful, jealous person I might be annoyed that you and I didn’t make anything like that kind of splash when we arrived.”

“It’s not obvious yet that we’re going to run for president,” Graham Weisbrod said. “Perhaps we should put out word?”

Allie gave her husband a broad grin. “On five minutes’ notice the whole country can know.”

“Let’s talk soon.”

As Allie resumed watching the Athens team coming out, she was leaning back against Graham with a happy little smile. James thought he was probably meant to see that.

Whilmire and Grayson each gave a short speech to their cheering crowd. Meanwhile, Quattro shut down the Gooney, and came down the steps with Cam and a couple of aides. The party headed over to join the Olympia delegation and James. “Leo was fussing, so Heather deputized me. I’m supposed to deliver you—”

Cheering from the runway, heavily laced with “Praise the Lord!” drowned out James for a moment. It didn’t last long, but immediately after, even louder whooping covered Grayson’s short speech.