Daybreak Zero (34 page)

ABOUT 5 HOURS LATER. WAPAKONETA, OHIO. 6 PM EST. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2025.

The old stone church, headquarters for the Wapak Scouts, had a small library with wooden tables and chairs, where Larry, Chris, and Jason were treated to fresh biscuits and venison gravy. This was followed by hot baths (“There aren’t any regular scheduled baths right now so we have plenty of hot water for you”), and a long nap before dinner.

While they were napping, the Wapak Scouts insisted on cleaning and mending their clothing.

“Aw,” Larry tried to protest, “you don’t have to do this.”

Ruth Niskala said, very softly, “Let them do this. This is the day we’ve promised them for a long time, the proof of their faith, and the reason they’ve been good all year. Think of it as cookies for Santa. They need to do something for you.”

When they awoke an hour later, their freshly cleaned clothing was waiting for them. Scott Niskala guided them up the stairs, away from the main meeting hall. “They’re putting something together and they want it to be a surprise. And if you even try to tell the kids that they didn’t need to, I’ll knock you flat. Let’s go to my house across the way here.”

Except for the absence of electric lights in the gathering dusk, the room seemed as it might have been before Daybreak. “The first thing I’ve got to say is that there wasn’t any plan. We just made it up as it happened, and it kind of worked out.”

Larry Mensche said, “I don’t quite see why you weren’t just overrun by the nearest tribe; a few hundred crazy tribals could sweep through this town, burn everything, and slaughter everyone. Even if a hundred of them died doing it, Daybreak’d’ve counted that as a benefit—more burden lifted off Mother Earth. So how are you here?”

“Well,” Scott Niskala said, “that’s kind of a story, but it’s what I wanted to tell you about. Excuse an old man beginning at the very beginning, but it’ll be faster if I don’t try to edit. So to begin with, my father came from Finnish stock, and learned English mostly in school, from the Iron Country up in Minnesota. The Depression drove him out of his home . . .”

. . . and he bounced through crap jobs and work camps till 1942; then there was plenty of work for a healthy young man. In 1945 he got a slot in the Regular Army; in 1947, down in Georgia, he found himself a sweet farm girl who wanted to marry anything but a farmer, and in 1948, there I was.

My old man just assumed I’d follow him into the Army, so he trained me up as a good little soldier. I took to the hiking-camping-hunting, Daniel Boone kinda stuff, but
my
war was Vietnam, and when I got home it was the Hollow Army years. Sorta took the fun right out.

I did college, for the money, and majored in forestry, because it was outdoors. I did Forest Service, BLM, all that, but ended up managing state forests for Ohio. Along the way, when I was doing a stint at Ashley National Forest, I ran into Ruth here, who was a Mormon farm girl that went over the fence. Since we couldn’t have kids ourselves, it came kind of natural to foster.

We’d usually have four or five kids around the house; we adopted four of them in thirty years or so, when it seemed like the right thing to do, but mostly they just passed through, a year or two at a time, and then kept coming back to visit.

Eventually we retired here in Wapak. Ruth and I’d both been scoutmasters for so long, we just kind of went full-time with it. Our troops were closer to each other than they were to the national organizations, ’cause we agreed with each other more than we did with our nationals.

We were weird scoutmasters, I guess, or if you look at it my way, we were the only scoutmasters who didn’t get weird. We skipped out on all the urban crap, excuse the expression, where the kids just went to antidrug lectures and pep rallies and never out in the woods, because what’s the point of being a scout for that? And later on we didn’t let the council and the region ram Jesus into everything we did, either. We covered our asses, excuse the expression, with upper leadership, ’cause my troop turned out so many Eagles, and hers turned out so many Gold Awards.

Well, one thing we did, we found local business people to throw in money so all the County Orphanage kids could be scouts. Plenty of the hard-to-adopt kids end up living in those places, with no money for extracurriculars at school, or anything much else, so getting to be scouts was real big to them, and we had enough donors so our orphans could come on all the trips and camps.

We had our fosters, and most of’em’d keep coming after they moved home or moved on, and later on our old fosters brought
their
kids around. In just a few decades we had a real good bunch of dead-end kids with woods skills. By Daybreak all our assistant scoutmasters’d grown up in our troops, and we even had a few third-generation scouts.

Well, you might remember Ohio tried to evacuate right after the elections last year; this whole area was supposed to try to walk along I-75 down to Dayton to evacuate. Ruth said it sounded like something a couple interns might’ve thought up, looking at a map and counting beans. There
couldn’t
be enough food or shelter at Dayton, and besides the plan bet everything on good weather. Oh, we told them so, but people had been scared out of their minds since Daybreak day. So they didn’t listen to us; they bagged up what they could carry and left.

The room was dark and silent. Chris asked, “Was that the time of that first big storm?”

“Yeah. Three days after they left, freezing rain came down all one night and the morning after, then maybe four inches of snow with high winds the next afternoon. Once the weather cleared, I sent people south to take a look; they found lots of bodies in the highway ditch, especially kids and old people, all within thirty miles, but no survivors. Figure the ones who could kept walking or holed up too far from the road to hear the scouts calling.

“The last we heard of Columbus radio was on the twelfth, when they were begging the counties to send
them
help. Meanwhile the folks in town’d just abandoned the orphanage, so we took those kids in, and our five fosters stayed with us, and some other families just dropped their fosters on us before they walked out. Ruth and I had pritnear all the abandoned kids in Auglaize County, I think, plus around ten families who had stayed. We drew up articles and enrolled 164 Wapak Scouts, which is what we decided
everyone
would be.”

Ruth’s eyes flashed behind her glasses. “And we had to wreck the whole country to do one simple thing, let everyone be a scout! Look at what it took to get rid of the sexist barrier and the ageist barrier and all the rest! How old do you have to be, after all, before you’re too old to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, and all the rest of it? Or how does having two X chromosomes let you out of keeping yourself ‘mentally awake’? So, anyway, you are now at the home base of the Wapak Scouts, which is still one hundred fifty-seven people, about two-thirds of us under twenty. Our youngest is four, our oldest is Scotty here, and we’re still here.”

“You still haven’t told us
how
you’re still here,” Larry said. “There’re at least three tribes within a day’s walk; how come they haven’t wiped you out?”

It was too dark now to see Niskala’s features, but he sounded smug, or maybe amazed. “That started as an accident, and then just sort of developed.”

By February, we’d dragged all the cars into one common area for salvage, boarded up every broken window, picked up the downed wires, all that stuff you noticed. Originally we did it to keep the kids busy and not to have to look at all that wreckage. By then the big bombs had gone off, and we’d lived through the fires from that big EMP that took KP-1 off the air—that made us feel pretty smart about having picked up all those wires.

Because Ruth’s a thinker, the minute she heard about biotes, way back on October 29, she went to the hardware store here in town and made them put all the ammo into mason jars. We lost some ammo to spoilage but not much. There were some older guns, crude enough to be almost all wood and metal: the single-shot bolt-action rifles for the Rifle Shooting merit badge, a bunch of old deer rifles, my personal handguns. We had a couple kids who’d gotten their metalworking badge build replacement parts for the plastic over the winter.

Between some surviving food stocks from grocery stores, and rigging up a grinder for the corn and wheat from elevators nearby, and hunting and fishing, we were feeding everyone. We were pritnear on top of things.

So one day early in March, three guys who looked like a real shitty, pardon my French, imitation of American Indians came walking into town shouting that we all had to obey the high tribe of Booga-Booga. Harry Blenstein, commanding the town watch, sent a runner for me—I was ice fishing.

Meanwhile Harry got
quite
the tribal lecture. Now, he was a pretty serious Christian and I guess they laid on that Mother Gaia horseshit, sorry, French again, real thick, and well, they must’ve said something to set off his bad temper. He apparently told’em what he thought, and it must’ve offended’em, because one of them whacked Harry on the forehead with an ax—no warning at all.

Luckily, I’d been paranoid enough to insist there were always snipers covering any visitors coming into town. The two girls on duty for that, Hannah and Meg, did what they were supposed to do—pow-pow, two dead tribals, clean head shots, and the third got two steps before Meg had reloaded and hit him in the spine.

Harry’s backup, Jim, tied up that survivor, neat as you please, and started first aid.

The tribals weren’t stupid, not even really careless; we just lucked out. They had two men with bows watching from up there on the hillside, with a girl runner ready to go back to a main party a couple miles off. But by pure luck, we had hunters out there that day. Their two bowmen had set up right in front of our deer blind, so my hunters were already watching those creepy guys, and when they heard shooting start, they hit them from behind while they were still reaching for their bows.

More luck was that one of my hunters was a big, strong, fast kid, he’d been a running back for the Wapak Redskins—I mean the Warriors, they had to change that a while back—and he just chased their runner down, knocked her flat, gagged her, and dragged her back. If he hadn’t had the presence of mind to do that, I don’t know what would’ve happened.

We lucked out one more way. Trying to get the bullet out of that poor tribal’s spine, we made a mess of it—we weren’t exactly what you’d call skilled surgeons and we didn’t have any anesthesia but whiskey. Between being drunk and in agony, he started crying for his mom, and yelling that he hated Daybreak and wanted his world back. That caused one of those seizures Daybreakers have, and we tried to hold him down but he thrashed so hard he knocked off a hemostat, and bled to death before we could put it back on.

Meanwhile that runner was a thirteen-year-old girl, half out of her head from getting knocked down so hard, being held in the next room. When we went in to talk to her, she was sure we’d tortured that boy to death, and started babbling. We learned how they did their approaches to towns, that those first “representatives” were just there to estimate the population. If any town surrendered to their outrageous demands, great, they’d just take everyone as slaves, but more often they’d all go back to their tribal leaders or council or whatever it was called, and return in a massive surprise assault. The first group was supposed to be just a big enough force to make sure someone always came back.

We also learned that the tribals’ main body allowed the “representatives” forty-eight hours to come back, since sometimes a town would extend hospitality and they’d need the time before they could leave without arousing suspicion.

She also told us about what they did when they took over. Some little girls are sensitive about massacres. She was having seizures every few minutes, but she got it all out. Though she still has seizures, she’s sworn to the articles now, and one of us.

By that time it was three hours till dawn. She’d told us where their main body was camped.

Ruth had the key idea. We put together a team of our best bow hunters to go in first. The tribals were mostly city people, not many soldiers and probably no hunters, before Daybreak. It was nasty and grim, but their sentries died without making any sound, and then all of us rushed and killed the rest in their beds. Horrible, but better than the other way around.

Ruth’s genius idea was that we cleaned up their campsite, carried all those corpses back here, and put the bodies all in one deep basement, and filled in with dry dirt.

We’ve filled two more basements since. So far they always do things the same way. I’m guessing it’s—well, not exactly written out, of course, because they’re anti-literate, but it might as well be part of the
Daybreaker Handbook
, if there was one.

So locally, they are too afraid of us to try again—we’re the place where everyone disappears without a trace.

Chris asked, “That’s why you keep blackout, and why you don’t farm, too, right? You can’t let them have a way to count you. But in the long run, how are you going to keep eating?”

Scott seemed very pleased with the question. “We have a plan for that too, and in fact—”

“I wish you hadn’t told us so much,” Larry said. “What if one of us is captured?”