John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

Peet shrugged. “It’s the English word for it, and everyone in any Bible-believing church knows what it means.”

“I suppose so. But how can you feel Tribulated on such a nice fall day? The colors so bright, the smells and sounds so sharp, and all you have to do is just walk along and listen to your feet swish, swish, swish in the leaves, swish swish swish…” She whirled, holding up her ankle-length hippie-girl skirt, dancing up and down the path in front of him. “You know I love our conversations. It’s so interesting to meet someone with a different take on Daybreak.”

“I’m glad I can help,” Peet said.

“I’m glad you can help too.” Naomi was back at his side. “And I hope I help you.”

“Certainly you help clarify my thoughts.”

“Here’s a thought I’ve been working with,” she said. “Just a thought. I know that traditionally the idea is that during the Rapture, people vanished because they were good.”

“Not necessarily good, as the world knows it, but Christian and believing and trying to be good,” Peet said, gently. “Real saints are always messier and always falling out of their sanctity, unlike plaster ones.”

“Organic all-natural free-range saints instead of plaztatic saints?”

He laughed. “I would use that in a sermon if ‘plaztatic’ didn’t have such a Daybreak connotation.”

“Oh, honestly—you! Should’ve been an English professor!” She had a provoking half-grin.

He clapped his hand to his chest. “Stabbed through the heart.”

She put her hand gently on his arm. “Anyway, my point was, what if the idea is backwards? It’s not that the people were good and therefore they were taken away; having been taken away, they became good.”

The idea made him feel strangely queasy, as if he’d just swallowed something he shouldn’t. “How so? I’m not following.”

“Notice how quiet and lovely it is here? Notice how soft both our voices can be and yet we understand each other perfectly? Notice how much of the natural music there is in the air, and how much the world is better since Daybreak?”

“Except,” he said, “almost everyone is dead.”

“Except or because?”

Before he could ask what she meant, she had disappeared.

Three small boys came around a bend in the trail. They carried cane poles, slingshots, and sharpened sticks; probably they’d be contributing to their families’ dinners tonight. Swift and silent, they darted around him and were gone into the brush on the other side.

Good or dead, Peet mused. Or good and dead. Or the only good one’s a dead one. He was sorry Naomi had left so quickly. He’d have liked to talk more. He sat down on a rock and watched the river roll by. When a bird’s cry startled him, he sat up with a sense of well-rested contentment. According to his watch, it was past time for lunch.

Whilmire recognized that his chief was not going to be swayed from this. A lifetime as an executive assistant and leader’s gofer had trained him to surrender gracefully. “Does this change imply any new course, politically?”

Peet looked up across his spectacles. “It’s not a change, just a re-emphasis. I don’t believe politics has anything to do with it. We need to say publicly that the new world of the Tribulation is a better place to raise and instruct Christians, and thus by their departure, the Christian loved ones who have gone to heaven before us have paved our way to a planet that will become more and more beautiful during Christ’s thousand-year reign, which we agree will start in six years. Yes, the idea partakes a little of Stewardship Christianity, but honestly, Reverend Whilmire, did you never go walking in the woods yourself? And let’s be honest here too; the tribals have souls as much as we do, and the tribes have been sliding into a weird, crude paganism. We can leave their souls to perish—or we can meet them on common ground, about mutually important concerns, and perhaps get the access to win them for Christ. I have not seen an asterisk next to any of Christ’s promises, with a note at the bottom of the page saying except former Daybreakers . So we will shape our message to the situation; so did Saint Paul and for that matter so did Jesus.”

This one’s going to be a tough sell to Grayson, Whilmire thought, walking back to his quarters. But the old man is right. Grayson may thrash around some, but he’ll slither over to our side soon enough.

“I wish to God that Terry Bolton would knock off the jokes about trick-or-treaters,” Dave Carlucci said to Arlene. “I also wish you’d take a less dangerous position.”

When Arlene had married him, he had already been with the FBI for two years; now, nineteen years later, she knew more than he did about how his mind worked. “Hon,” she said, “do you want to review everything we decided in the last week, or do you want to get ready?”

“You know I—”

“Terry cracks bad jokes, repetitively, when he’s waiting to go into action. You second-guess every previous decision. As for where I’m going to be, I’ll be as far inside the building as is possible, so my chances of getting hit by stray fire are zip, especially since the tribals have spears, slings, and bows and all the gunfire will be going out, not in. If they manage to get into the building it will only be because all of you are dead. I’m a lousy shot but I’ll shoot at them to keep them off my patients, who I wouldn’t leave behind anyway, because I’m a nurse, dammit, and you Feds are not the only people in the world who take your jobs seriously. If I end up dying, I’ll be one of the last to go, and everyone else will be gone too.”

“Annie and Paley—”

“She wants to be called Acey, remember? She’s been telling you for more than a year. They’re good shots, they’ll be high up, they’re smart enough to make something up if something goes wrong, they’ll be fine. Now, go worry about something else, or recheck everything one more time, or make up some new material for Terry.”

“Everything’s ready for our little trick-or-treaters,” Terry said. “Gosh, I hope we get lots of the little rascals.”

“Please,” Arlene added, quietly, to Carlucci, and despite himself, he smiled.

Shadows were short in the bright, overhead moonlight. Acey Carlucci retied her do-rag more tightly, to keep her black curly hair from escaping, and rechecked everything on her Newberry Standard by feel. She lay on a thick old truck cargo pad, under a heavy wool blanket against the chill, and waited, watching the alley directly across the street; the concrete facing, all the way up the first storey, made it a perfect sniper’s backdrop. When the dark silhouette moved across it, her hands found the right places on her rifle as her hands, eye, sight, and target aligned; her breath stopped, the rifle was perfectly still, she squeezed the trigger, and as the smoke cleared, she saw the man lying on the pavement. The next one rushed, low, but she didn’t hurry her shot, and he fell over at a broken angle, dragging himself by his hands.

Really, it wasn’t much different from deer or wild cattle; you pulled a trigger, they went over.

She focused on the alley. Off to the side she could hear Paley’s first shot, and then another. She glanced toward the street he was covering; just one down, crawling toward the shadows. Poor Paley, she thought, he’s an okay shot but it kills him that I’m better. She watched her assigned alley and waited for another target.