John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

“The Steam Train Chapel, down to the other end of the station there on the right, has a service every half hour, and it’s quick. The reverend there’ll give you a pass that’s as good as any, and his prices aren’t bad.” The clerk winked. “He’s also my brother-in-law.”

The service was a sung doxology, a reading of three Bible verses, a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, singing one verse of “God Bless America,” and a two-minute message in which the preacher urged them all to realize that all the missing good people, especially their friends and relatives, were Raptured, this was the Tribulation, and therefore they needed to get to a “real Christian” church, by which he apparently meant a Post Raptural Church, to be fully slain in the spirit and rebaptized. Then they sang one verse of “Stand Up for Jesus” and the reverend pronounced them blessed.

They purposely maneuvered to be last in line for their coupons, hoping to get a chance to talk alone with the reverend.

“We’re out of Pueblo and just back from a scientific expedition to the Lost Quarter,” Larry explained, “so we don’t really know how things work down here.”

“Well, we know that a terrorist, a Satanist, a Muslim, or a possessed man is not going to be able to bear to hear the word of the Lord,” the man said, pleasantly, as if explaining how an athlete’s foot cream worked. “That’s plain as day in Matthew 18:18, Hebrews 13:15, and Psalm 22. So we bring them in here and I give’em some Bible and hymns and see if they can say the Lord’s Prayer. Like screening them for evil, like they used to screen for metal and stuff at airports. But all that does is make sure you ain’t consciously with Satan right this second. If you’re going to come out of the Tribulation on the right side—and there’s only six years left—you really need to go to a real church.”

“And the people who live here, they go to chapel twice a week, to have the passes?

“Lots go daily. And it’s not just for the passes. With Tribulation on, a man just can’t be too careful.”

They met friendly people everywhere, happy to talk about life in Savannah. The restaurant meals were good but almost identical: fried or grilled fish, cornbread, and greens. One place had a side of two eggs available at an outrageous price, and the other didn’t but expected to the next day.

Polite militiamen stopped them on the street three times, and each time the chapel pass extracted them instantly—though the last of the militiamen, who didn’t look a day over sixteen, with red hair and more freckles than it should be possible to grow on one person, shook his head when he saw where the chapel pass came from. “Next time you hit town,” he said, “go over to the Lord’s Table Chapel—it used to be a house, they just converted it—by Forsyth Park. Your pass’ll cost you half what this one did, and you’ll get a real whole hour service with serious spirit-infused, Bible-based preaching, and you get communion at no extra charge.”

“We’ll keep that in mind,” Larry said. “You wouldn’t happen to be related to that preacher, would you?”

“You mean the way Ed at the railway station is brothers with that clerk Steve? No, sir. But Reverend Earl at the Lord’s Table Chapel is my girlfriend’s dad, and I have seen him at work, and I believe in my heart that you’ll get a better deal there.”

After looking all day, Chris finally found a newspaper just as they were returning to the railroad station; an elderly African-American lady, who had three chapel passes, all from today, pinned on the front of her dress, was selling papers from a crate on the sidewalk. After carefully inspecting his chapel pass, she sold Chris a current Athens Weekly Insight and a three-week-old Pueblo Post-Times . She gave them to him wrapped in a paper bag, the way he remembered his father buying pornography.

On the train, opening the papers, he found that a third of the material in the Post-Times ’s back page, and half a dozen stories in the Weekly Insight , had been painted over with black ink. Jason and Larry had a fine old time teasing him about not having seen that coming.

The conductor came by to announce dinner in the dining car; they pulled out their ration cards, and he laughed. “Steve pulled that one on you, too, didn’t he? The ration cards are a local Savannah thing. You don’t need’em to eat here.”

Chris thought he might burst with smugness as Jason and Larry took turns grumbling all through dinner. It wasn’t bad, for the third helping of fried fish, cornbread, and greens in a day. The few lights of Savannah had vanished behind them, and the old steam train was chugging along, zigzagging from one still-usable track to another. He settled back to read the parts of his paper that he was allowed to see. At least for breakfast in Athens, there probably won’t be fish, and if their paper is censored here , it’s got to be freer there .

“I think some people are starting to wonder if we’re dating,” Cameron said, setting down the picnic basket.

“Well, if we are, then I’m mad because you never take me anywhere.” Lyndon Phat looked down at the pieces of tissue paper that Cam dropped into his lap as he began to unpack the basket. “By the way, I appreciate the chance to eat something good, and your friendship flatters the hell out of me.”

“Glad to hear it, because you’re about the only friend I’ve got locally.”

Phat nodded, looking down. The first tissue contained the simplest message:

The second tissue spelled out the planned extraction, told him to memorize it, and stressed that he might be the only member of the group who knew the plan.

The third was a set of directions for—“And this is for later,” Cam said, handing him a paper bag; in it there was a baguette, and a glass jar of jam (or at least the thin outer layer next to the glass was jam; the instructions told Phat what to do with the thing in the inner jar).

Their eyes met; the two men sighed silently, because they genuinely had enjoyed the conversations, and no matter what, this would be the last.

They had pretended to sleep on the train, sharing a big couch in a private compartment, while Larry briefed them via squeeze code. The essential information boiled down to expect trouble; don’t resist the fake arrest; expect to get the rest of the script from Cameron Nguyen-Peters; and if anything went wrong, make as much noise as possible, improvise, free General Phat, and run.

“That’s a lot of light up ahead for nowadays,” Jason said, quietly, as they neared the Athens station.

Larry and Chris leaned across him to look where he pointed. “Orangey and flickering, so it’s torchlight,” Chris said. “Not good. I don’t think they’re holding a parade for us.”

As the train neared the station, silhouettes swept by on both sides of the tracks, and the train whistle blasted over and over. The dark human shapes, backlit by torches, thickened into a wall of heads above bodies, faces flaring out of it in the flickering, uncertain light, like snapshots of angry ghosts.

At the platform, backs covered with Rorschach camo blocked the view through the windows. “Soldiers standing three deep,” Jason said. “And the crowd sounds like bears.”

Their conductor leaned in. “They said to ask you not to sit too close to the windows, and wait for someone to come to you.”