Daybreak Zero (48 page)

8 DAYS LATER. SAVANNAH, GEORGIA. 9 AM EST. MONDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2025.

The captain of
Martin Fierro
, a quiet Norwegian with excellent English, was sometimes talkative. Gradually they had learned that he had been trying to find some ship going to Norway to search for his family. They had heard the story of his jury-rigging sails when the engines died on his Polish freighter, and how he had limped into Buenos Aires just a week before the failed nuclear attack. Almost every conversation with him ended with his saying that he took ships where they were supposed to go, trained his officers, and hoped for some strong reason to live.

“The thing I always liked about Savannah,” he said, “was the no-nonsense. They were a great port city but not just because they were sitting in the right place like Buenos Aires or New York. The most modern freight-handling system on this continent and always upgrading, eh?”

“Used to move a lot of freight real fast,” the pilot said, never taking his eyes from the channel.

“But you see they built it all downriver from the city, because it’s faster to unload to rail as soon as you can, so the piers and the docks up in the city, they were for smaller ships and museum pieces and pleasure boats, you see? They kept those in good shape too. And when Daybreak came and everything stopped and rotted where it was, the big modern ships at the big modern facilities just stayed there along the south bank—but they had an open channel up to decent docks in the old city. This will be a big city before Manbrookstat is one again. This and Morgan City, they’re your new America, you know.”

“If the country even looks outward at all,” Larry said.

“I’m a seaman; a country is its ports.”

“How was Daybreak down here?” Jason asked.

The pilot shrugged. “Bad—but we lived. Things were a lot worse, other places. Down here, people coped. ’f they’ad friends or relatives to walk to, they did. Some rioting and shooting from people who I guess didn’ave nothin’ better to do. Lotta rationing, people boarding up their houses and moving to shelters, the Army and Guard ran the place till’bout July. Lost a lotta old people and everyone who depended on modern medicine, and there’s people calling this the Year of No Babies, so many things carried off the little ones. But between us and the military and the Lord, we got through and it’s looking better. Maybe three-quarters of the people that were here on Daybreak day ain’t back yet, ’cause they need hands out on the farms.”

Around the bend, the old city spread out before them. The pilot asked if they’d ever been to Savannah before; only Chris had. “But only as a cameraman for the news, so I never saw anything.”

“Well, people from elsewhere tell me it’s real pretty,” the pilot said. “I’ve never been anywhere else, really, so to me it all looks kind of regular.”

The walk through a functioning city made them all feel like hapless hicks. Savannah had been a rich and beautiful town for 150 years and more before Daybreak, and it had reverted, painfully but effectively, to a real human place. “Like Put-in-Bay,” Jason said, after a while.

“Yeah,” Chris said. “Or Pale Bluff, or Grant’s Pass. One of those places that’s just managed to hang on as a good place. I guess that’s what it’s all about.”

Larry nodded. “Good, then it’s worth it.” He seemed distant; when he spotted the telegraph office, he all but ran to it. Shrugging, Chris and Jason sat down on a park bench to wait for him.

Twice in the half hour while they waited, men in a tan uniform asked them what they were doing, and having established that they weren’t local, took down their names and the fact that they would be leaving town soon. The second time, the man said, apropos of nothing, “You’re not in Olympia, here, you know.”

When he was completely out of earshot, Jason said, “I don’t think I like local law enforcement.”

“I’m not even sure those are cops,” Chris said. “But I’m pretty sure they’re not the Welcome Wagon.”

Larry came back looking grim. “I’m sure you both guessed,” he said, looking down at the ground and speaking very softly, “that there was a secret part of this mission that might or might not be activated?”

They nodded slightly, in unison.

“It’s activated. I’ve been advised to tell you nothing more than to follow me if things suddenly go off plan. They don’t want you to know too much. Your lives could depend on that, if things go wrong. Just stay loose and ready to jump.”

“Right on,” Jason said.

“You bet,” Chris added.

“Okay, now the public, non-coded telegram I have here apparently is our pass onto the train, if we just present it to the FedRail desk in the railroad station. Let’s see how that part goes.”

Finding it was easy. Just south of downtown, Savannah had had a railroad museum before Daybreak, and like the one in Golden, Colorado, having so much old steam-train gear in one place had made this area a center of development. “You must rate,” the clerk said, smiling at them. “First class all the way with all the extras. The train leaves at 3 p.m., none too sharp, but it’ll help us if you’re here waiting, and when it goes it goes, so be here at three unless you want your packs to go to Athens without you. Got your ration cards and chapel passes?”

“A ration card sounds like a good idea,” Larry said, “if we can write you a purchase order on the RRC’s account. How’s the food in the mess halls?”

The clerk had obviously heard that question before. “We don’t have public mess halls here anymore. We got over socialism quick. The thing is if you don’t have a ration card, no one can sell you any food in any form, restaurant or grocery or anything. You don’t legally
need
a chapel pass if you stay less than twenty-four hours, but it helps to have one if a militiaman stops you on the street, and you have to have one to buy printed matter like newspapers or books. And yeah, I’ll take a draft on Pueblo; it’s easier to process than the farmers that come in and give me okra.”

“Well, then, whatever number of ration coupons we need for our meals today, and three chapel passes.”

“You going to eat on the train? Honestly it’s better’n anything local, so you should make that your supper.”

“Thanks, yes, we’ll do that.”

The clerk scribbled on a carbon pad, speaking quickly and without expression, going through a well-rehearsed routine. “Ration coupons coming up. You show it to the waiter or clerk going in, and then they take it from you at the end. Don’t let them grab it before you’ve got your food and paid for it. A lot of them lie and threaten to turn you in for not giving them one. If they do trick you that way, the going price to let you go is four times the price of a ration coupon.

“Now about those chapel passes, you can buy one, good for three days, from the reverend, every time you attend a service, as long as they have the LICENSED NON CULT plate up on the pulpit.

“Don’t pay a door cover, ever, that’s how the cults trick people into coming to service and not getting a chapel pass for it—the Jews and those little African churches are famous for that, everyone says, but in my experience it’s the Mormons who pull that trick every time.

“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
.

EIGHTEEN:

WHISPERED TO THE BRAID

ABOUT THE SAME TIME. ATHENS, TNG DISTRICT. 12:30 PM EST. MONDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2025.

“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:

Extraction party arrived Savannah 1 hr ago
Will be here tonight

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.