John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

“Don’t be.” He turned up the oil lamp on the side table. The orange light bathed both their faces and etched the shadows into high contrast. “You’re still one of the most powerful and important people on the continent. We would have to talk to you even if Heather didn’t like you and worry about you.”

“You’re blunt. Is that why Heather sent you instead of coming herself?”

“She said it would get too personal if she did.”

“Close enough. All right, obviously you have a message to deliver and you’re supposed to take back an answer. I’d better hear the message.”

Hendrix nodded, and said, “We found a note from you in Arnie Yang’s pocket. It was, um, intimate, though not explicit. Now, we have no great concern with whether it was a love affair or just the two of you sharing loneliness, but there seemed to be a strong Daybreaker element in the note—”

“Why do you think it was from me? I don’t remember ever writing him a note—”

“Your personal stationery and handwriting—”

“Do you have it with you?”

“I do. We have a copy, by the way—”

“I’m not going to destroy evidence in front of you. Give me some credit.” She held out her hand, looked at the note, and felt as if she’d been kicked in the belly. Darcage. During one of those blackouts he induces, he must have told me to write this.

Allie had read the RRC’s top-secret, unredacted report on Arnie. She knew Hendrix would believe her if she—

The whole universe rolled down a stony slope, bouncing and spinning from stone to stone, and she fell onto her side on the bed. Hendrix was bellowing for a doctor, and then she felt strong hands pushing her out of the fetal position, soothing her, a warm voice. “Mom?”

“Wish I was, I could help you better.”

Allie looked up; it was Heather’s doctor, maybe the RRC’s doctor or Pueblo’s, they were pretty scarce and the world was pretty small. She was sitting next to Allie on the bed, smoothing her hair and face; it felt good. “Was that a Daybreaker seizure?”

“If it wasn’t, you’re a hell of an actor. You’ll want to sleep for a while, maybe, unless there’s something you want to say while you can.”

“Doctor—”

“Abrams. You can call me MaryBeth as long as you remember I’m the doctor, not your mom.”

“No problem remembering that, Doctor, I need a doctor. Can I sit up and have some water?”

Hendrix fetched her a glass. After drinking it all, Allie took a deep breath, and another. “Do I remember right, if I don’t sleep, I get about an hour where it’s easier to talk about Daybreak without having a seizure?”

“It seems to work that way,” MaryBeth said. “We don’t know why. But it might still hit you again. It’s not a guaranteed immunity.”

“All right,” Allie said. “Let’s try. I want to finish this. Got a pencil, Mister Hendrix?”

“Ready when you are.”

“My contact calls himself Mister—Mister—Mister Darcage, I have to not say Mister, say Darcage, just this skinny good-looking guy in dreads, and…”

She blurted the whole story into Hendrix’s notepad, weeping and sometimes feeling another seizure creeping toward her. So now I know what Ysabel Roth went through. And why. “Can I have something to eat? Uh, maybe a lot?”

As she finished eating, Heather turned up with a hug, and said she didn’t want to lose Allie, too. It was a while before Graham came in; her husband had insisted on being alone with her, and she hadn’t let the rest of them go until they promised to do things the way she wanted to.

When she was finally alone with him, Graham just held her; she felt like he might do this forever, and that would be okay with her. “I was so worried,” he whispered.

My husband loves me, my friends love me, thousands of good people depend on me, and I am going to hurt Daybreak so—

Not again.

The seizure was fully as bad as the first. As she came out of it, Graham and Dr. Abrams and Heather all looked worried sick, but Allie said, “Let me just sleep and heal,” enjoying the post-seizure luxury of thinking, Daybreak, you have no idea what a big fight you picked , and of looking up at people she could trust, till she drifted off.

Before Daybreak, Repton, Alabama, had been a cluster of houses in the woods where a few hundred working people could afford land to build on. Since then the town had prospered due to the accidents of a hobby printer, who had established a small local paper; three fast-thinking local farmers, who had used refugee labor to put in vine cuttings of sweet potatoes over as much land as they could reach; and an alert local militia commander, who had been able to control and channel the refugee stream on US 84. Now it was almost three thousand people, mostly still in tent-roofed cabins, but eating, building, and gradually becoming a community.

On Monday afternoon, the old church bell rang, the signal for news to be announced at the old gas station that served as a makeshift newspaper office. The Repton Vindicator ’s editor stood up on a crate to read the announcement that the government in Athens and the one in Olympia had both declared that whatever was elected in 2026 would be the real government, and enjoining everyone to accept it. She had wondered how people would react to it; the wild cheering answered that, and supplied her with a local angle for her Wednesday headline—

She used her ham set to relay the story to the Athens Weekly Insight . An hour later they called back to tell her that the story would be used and that she would be mailed fifty dollars of TNG scrip. At least I can use that to pay taxes. If they ever get their act together enough to collect them, out here.

Across the hill and prairie country of eastern Nebraska, the train sometimes sped up to fifty miles an hour, when the tracks were clear and in good shape, but it spent much of its time standing still since coal and water were still mostly loaded in by awkward jury-rigs. In 1880, anybody with money and reason could cross the country in about a week, Cam thought. I guess we’re at about 1870, when in a really urgent case we could get a train across the country, now and then, as a stunt. In the still, frosty hour after dawn, plumes of smoke rose everywhere, from thousands of stoves and fireplaces. With the big machines and the banks gone, refugees coached by Amish extension agents were reopening small farms.

Grayson’s drive up the Yough Valley was about our finest hour, Cam thought. I won’t even complain if it makes the son-of-a-bitch president. I’ve worked for worse presidents.

A thin blanket of snow covered the land in front of him; good for the winter wheat, and thank all the gods that WTRC and the Post-Times had screamed since May that winter would start early, go deep, and leave late, so that the winter wheat was already planted. This next year would still be tight, but by next fall they should be past the risk of famine. Jeez, a year ago the Ag Department guy had to explain winter wheat to me; I just knew I liked Wheat Thins with smoked gouda while I watched the Series.

At the knock on the compartment door, Cameron rose from his desk to shake Whilmire’s hand and join him at the table. A staffer carrying breakfast had followed the reverend in. While the two men ate silently, the sun pierced the overcast, sharpening the colors of the rolling brown land with its smears of snow and a few leaves still clinging to the trees.