Daybreak Zero (33 page)

6 HOURS LATER. OLYMPIA, NEW DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA. 11:30 PM PST. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2025.

It was so good to be home and running things again. Allison Sok Banh loved the feel of her familiar desk chair, loved the idea that she was working late at night, loved it all. Tonight it had been easy for her to tuck Graham in and avoid his perpetually attempted conversation about the relationship. He’d passed out at the moment of mattress touchdown.

Allie had Lyle throw an extra bucket of coal into the fire under the hot water tank. From the locked steel box at the back of her bedroom closet, she took pre-Daybreak lavender Castile soap and Wild Turkey, plus Kona that Lisa Fanchion had given her in appreciation of the tax exemption on coffee.

Her scalding shower was at least five times as long as the ration, and in no way “cool and comfortable” as Graham Weisbrod’s housekeeping directive had specified, but more along the lines of “sinfully decadent.”

So
bizarre. Before, she’d never really understood that Graham was serious about this good-gov shit. Allie’s family had “dove ourselves neck-deep in politics as soon as we ditched the boat and got the vote,” she remembered Uncle Sam saying, literally while he was teaching her to work the cash register. “Before you buy a business, buy the cop and the judge so you can keep it, Allie.”

Snug in her thick terry bathrobe, she drizzled the scarce and wonderful bourbon into the pot of Kona, poured a cup, and settled in to work. The drink burned down her throat like hot, slick ebony inlaid with gold; she drew the fumes from the cup into her nose, sighed, and reached for the first memo.

“So the summit was aborted,” Mr. Darcage said. “And you got to see your ex, and, I should guess, impress him. How fortunate all around.”

She put her feet down abruptly, crossing her legs under the desk and tugging at her robe.
Who the fuck lets him in? Lyle? Gotta know!
“Ever think about knocking or maybe showing up in regular hours?”

“My employers would be delighted if you’d meet with me openly and regularly; the tribes
crave
recognition.” He stepped out of the dim shadows in the corner of the office; in the flaring lamplight he seemed more gaunt, his face more lined, almost ancient, but his precisely geometric beard and hair were black as pitch. His eyes bulged slightly, his lips were too thick, and there was a patch of old acne scarring along one sideburn.

“That’s not what I meant. And you know it.” She held her robe closed with one hand, as if afraid it might pop open; her other hand reached under her desk, seeking the pistol—

The space was empty.

Darcage set the pistol down on the desk in front of her. “I don’t want you to keep loaded guns around.”

“I do many things you don’t want me to.”

“You
think
you do things I don’t want you to. You don’t
ask
, often enough, what I want you to do.” He gestured toward the gun lying on the desk. “That’s why I had to unload the gun for you. I shouldn’t have to do that. I shouldn’t have to do that for you.”

His repetition was annoying her, and she said, “I get it.”

“Of course you do.”

“Why did you come here and why am I not throwing you out?” she asked, as much to herself as to him. He sat with one leg running along the edge of her desk, curled against the other, a supported flamingo, and leaned slightly forward, but did not speak.
I could suddenly bite his nose and it would serve him right. I wonder if he’s trying to see down my robe.
She resisted the urge to look down or yank it closed;
can’t let him know he’s bothering me
.
Come on, talk, asshole. This silent act is creeping me out.
“You work hard at telling me what I don’t want.”

“That’s because you’re not always clear about what you
do
want. Don’t you want to make things run smoothly? Don’t you want all the good relations you can possibly get?”

I know what I
don’t
want: to be caught in just my bathrobe, here in the middle of the night, with contraband bribes on my desk and what’s obviously a Daybreaker agent alone with me.
“What did you have in mind?”

The silence lay in the room like a dead cow on the floor, too big to go around, impossible to climb over without admitting that there was something in your way. The lamplight from her desk lamp flickered and danced.
Little kid campfire trick,
Allie thought, wishing she could disdain it.
Shine light up on a face from underneath and it looks scary.

“Don’t worry about seeing Doctor Yang again; he is on the right side and more attuned to your needs than you might think. In fact, he’d like to hear from you; why don’t you write him a letter?”

The light flickered slightly. She looked up. He wasn’t there. Her coffee was now too cool, anyway, the Wild Turkey wasted, the Kona wasted, and she felt sad and lonely. Maybe she’d go down to the main bedroom and curl up with Graham tonight; he always liked it when she did.

She poured her pitcher of Turkey and Kona down the sink, rinsed everything thoroughly, blew out the lamp, and took the back stairs passage down to the main presidential suite.

Darcage had not concealed that Daybreak was more interested in Arnie than they were in her. It bothered her; she didn’t like being second to anybody.

2 DAYS LATER. WAPAKONETA , OHIO. AROUND NOON EST. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2025.

Larry handed Jason a GPO brochure-map from the 1990s,
Scenic Waterways of Ohio and Indiana
. “Look up Wapakoneta.”

“I know that town name for some reason.”

“Yeah, you do, but it’s not the reason I’m interested in.”

“Just look
up
,” Chris said, pointing to the landmark sign forty yards down the road. It was like ten thousand other historic-landmark signs that appeared outside almost every small town in the Midwest, except that this one said:

WAPAKONETA, OHIO.
BIRTHPLACE OF NEIL ARMSTRONG,
FIRST MAN ON THE MOON.

“I’d forgotten that, Larry. Probably hadn’t thought about it since fifth-grade American history. Crap,” Chris said, an odd, desperate strain in his voice. “I remember when the moon was a
good
thing. My dad watched the landing on TV when he was a little kid, I guess along with everybody, and . . . I don’t know, I guess you had to be in that generation, but to a lot of people, it meant a lot. Now . . . we look up at the moon, and we’re
scared
.”

Larry sighed. “Yeah, but what I wanted Jason to read was this.” He pointed at the old map-guide.

Jason read aloud. “
The Auglaize River is canoeable from Wapakoneta, a small town pronounced Wop Ock Kuh Net Uh. (Many Ohioans shorten it to Wapak, pronounced Woppock.) The Wapakoneta Canoe Trek Company, just downstream of the Hamilton Street Dam, has canoes and kayaks for rent from mid-June to mid-October. May not be accessible in low-water years.
Shouldn’t be a problem, it’s rained like a real booger for an hour or two almost every day since we landed. And, okay, Larry, I see where you’re going with your idea. It says,
The Auglaize River flows north to the Maumee at Defiance, down which canoes can continue nearly to Toledo.
”

“Unh-hunh, and Toledo’s a port on Lake Erie, and there are Provi garrisons on the western side of Lake Erie—Put-in-Bay, Kelleys Island, Port Clinton, and Sandusky.”

“You’re figuring that if we can get canoes—”

“
Never walk when you can ride
, son, stay in gummint service and you’ll learn that’s a rule.” Larry grinned. “Along with
always patronize anybody with less time-in-grade than you have
. Anyway, that’s my thought. And looking up ahead, at least it looks like the town hasn’t been burned.”

In the warm midday sun, intact roofs peeked through the bright red and orange leaves. Larry said, “This road’s as good as any for going into the town, I guess. That little thumbnail map seems to show Hamilton Street, and the Auglaize River, right in the middle of town.”

A mile farther on, a sign pointed off to Auglaize Street. “You don’t suppose they put Auglaize Street anywhere near the Auglaize River?” Larry said. “It leads into town, anyway.”

Half an hour later, after passing a number of intact but empty houses, Jason said, “Weird. The tribals usually burn towns on general principles. But I haven’t seen a burned house, or any sign of fighting, or even any human remains.”

“But if this place were well-defended,” Chris said, “you’d think we’d have met a patrol or run into a sentry by now.”

Beyond an overgrown cemetery, a wide, placid stream, perhaps a hundred feet across, appeared below them.

“All right, found the river,” Larry said.

In town, most of the big old twentieth-century frame houses and little nondescript brick storefronts still had all their glass; where they did not, they were boarded up. No doors were broken down. Larry said, “This feels like we walked into a Ray Bradbury story.”

“Who are you?” a voice asked.

They formed up into a triangle with their backs together.

“I’m waiting,” the voice said.

Larry shrugged slightly. “We are Federal agents reconnoitering this area for the Reconstruction Research Center.”

“Please wait here and be comfortable. You are among friends. I must alert other people. It may be fifteen minutes before anyone else contacts you.”

“We can wait that long,” Larry said, slipping his pack off and sitting on it.

There was no answer; apparently the mysterious voice’s owner had gone off on his errand—her errand?

“What do you think?” Chris asked, his voice barely a murmur, pointing his face down into the ground between his feet to hide his lips.

Jason muttered, “I think that was a kid’s voice, reading from a card.”

“I’m trying not to think,” Larry said. “Whatever’s here, it’s not like anything else we’ve found. Did you both notice, no cars? Not even the muck from the rotted tires?”

“Yeah, and the boarded windows that must have gotten broke,” Chris said, “they’ve swept up the glass around them.”

Jason looked around. “They’re not tribals. No downed wires, no wrecked refugee carts, so many things that just aren’t here.”

Larry nodded. “So often what’s
not
there is what police work depends on.”

“News reporting too,” Chris said. “Congratulations, Padwan Jason, you have achieved the level of consciousness in which old poops pat you on the head.”

Jason grinned. “My head lives to be patted, oh master. So who
is
here? The tribe of the Extremely Tidy People?”

“Close, but not quite,” a deeper voice said, seemingly from nowhere.

Larry said, “You’re not as invisible as the first person was. Part of your shadow is visible just beyond the corner of the laundromat. Does that mean we get six more weeks of winter?”

High-pitched laughter broke out all around them.

The deeper voice joined it. “Well, I don’t suppose there’s much point in keeping this up. Are you guys from Pueblo?”

“That’s where we started from but it was a while ago,” Larry said. “I’m Federal Agent Larry Mensche, mission commander; we’ll be reporting back to RRC eventually. My younger teammate here is Jason Nemarec, and the big bear of a guy is Chris Manckiewicz, who you might remember from when there was net and television—”

“And radio,” the voice said. “We heard you on KP-1 and WTRC, Mister Manckiewicz. And if I’m not mistaken you’re also the narrator on
Orphans Preferred
and on
A Hundred Circling Camps
. You’re a celeb here.” A tall, rangy man walked out from the corner of the laundromat. “Although the biggest news this month, if not this year, is going to be that you caught me with my shadow showing, Mister Mensche.”

He might have been sixty, or eighty. His face was grooved, more eroded than sagging. His full head of hair was iron-gray flecked with white, he stood straight as any ex-soldier, and his muscles bulged and knotted over thick bones; he looked like the barely covered skeleton of a giant. His khaki pants and faded plaid shirt were neatly pressed. “My name is Scott Niskala. I’m the scoutmaster of Troop 17. Everyone, you can step out of cover.”

About twenty kids seemed to appear in a single motion. An instant later one tiny old lady in thick glasses stood beside Niskala. He said, “This, as you can probably guess, is Mrs. Niskala, who is—”

“—quite capable of introducing herself, thank you. Ruth Niskala. Scoutmaster of Troop 541. The outfit that shows the boys how to do things. We were thinking you might like to have a good meal and a good rest, and then maybe we can talk about what we might do for you.”