Daybreak Zero (50 page)

ABOUT THE SAME TIME. ATHENS, TNG DISTRICT. 12:40 AM EST. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2025.

“Four larks and a wren,” Larry Mensche said, loudly—but not nearly as loudly as the wild laughter from the guards. “Fuck you,” one of the guards said. “We even knew that would be your fucking password, but we ain’t none of
those
guards. You got the
wrong
guards. You stayin’ where you stayin’.”

On the surface of his mind, Chris thought,
I am deranged by this. I am mad. I cannot comprehend the failure of the plot. What do I do?

Deeper down, he thought,
Thank God you couldn’t be in broadcast news without getting some actor training.

Chris drew a deep breath and tightened his vocal cords. Make’em jump. Sound like a gut-shot cougar. He screamed, “Four larks and a wren, four larks and a wren, four larks and a wren.”

The guards roared with laughter. So far so good. He wailed it, sobbed it, chanted it, and kept it coming. “Four larks and a wren, four larks and a wren.”

“All fucking right,” one of them yelled, “that’s enough, you know it ain’t gonna work, you poor stupid bastard, cut it out.”

He stepped up his volume and energy, driving his voice till his throat was raw and his ears rang from his own volume. “Four larks and a wren, four larks and a wren, four larks and—”

The guard burst in, shouting, “Shut up!” and reached for Chris’s collar.

Chris reached over the man’s arm, gripped the little finger, and yanked back, turning the arm over and extending it. His left hand, fingers compressed into a spear-hand, jabbed along the man’s extended arm and over the shoulder to strike his throat with crushing force. Chris grabbed an ear, pivoted forward so that he went up the man’s still-extended arm like a swing dancer coming back in, and slammed his right fist into the man’s already-crushed larynx.

He felt his opponent’s body go limp.
Ecco, Samson, thanks.
Chris pulled the pistol from the guard’s holster.

This wasn’t any weapon he knew, but it didn’t matter; the next guard through the door was still unsnapping his holster when Chris swung the gun by its barrel backhanded into the man’s chin. He followed him down as he fell over, and used the gun like a hammer on the man’s forehead, twice.

Chris backed away on the opening side of the door, and lunged forward when it opened and the third and final man came through. With the gun jabbed against the man’s temple, Chris screamed “Open all the doors now!” like a movie psycho.

The man raised his hands above his head. “The keys are in my pocket, you’ll have to—”

The man was staring at the gun and never saw Chris’s foot sweep; with a startled cry, he fell backward, and Chris raised the gun high and brought it down with all his force on the top of his head, and then on the face.

With the keys from the guard’s pocket, Chris unlocked Larry’s cell, and Jason’s. Behind them, a door clicked open; General Phat came in with his hands up. “Don’t shoot, the irony would be too much for anyone. I thought with all the action going on, it was time to use the screwdriver Cam had smuggled to me last week as a just-in-case,” he said. “I need to grab something and then we need to be on the road west, now.”

Outside, torches and lanterns, whooping and shouting, filled the campus a few hundred yards away. “Wish we knew if that was a good thing or a bad thing,” Larry said.

“If it were a good thing, Cam would already be with us,” Phat said. “That’s either his failed diversion, or he lost his gamble. We’ll have to say our prayers for him while we run.”

“One more thing to check,” Larry said. “Chris, hand me that gun you took off the guard.”

Gingerly, Chris did. “I didn’t feel any safety and I wasn’t sure I could figure out—”

“Yeah. It’s a Newberry .65, bastard child of a horse pistol and a modern automatic.” Larry pointed it into the air and pulled the trigger; it dry-fired. He pulled out the magazine. “Not loaded. So they weren’t supposed to kill us, so Grayson doesn’t expect to hear gunshots.” He darted into the main guard room, rifled the desk, found eight full magazines. “Works just like the Newberry Standard rifle,” he said. “Bigger slug because it’s a smoothbore. Accurate to about arm’s-length compared to anything you’re used to. Massive stopping power if you do manage to hit anything. Let’s go.”

As they hastened along the dark road, Larry said, “Cam said you had the plan.”

“Such as it is,” Phat said. “We’re going to cross this bridge and follow the maintenance road onto the abandoned golf course, out onto a big flat stretch of fairway. Once we are there, I’ll use this gadget in the jar to call in help. Meanwhile, for a bigger challenge, you will be laying but not lighting a triangle of three fires, about a hundred yards apart.”

“Has it been cold enough to send all the snakes to ground?” Chris asked.

“Not being a snake, I wouldn’t know. I’d avoid sticking your hands down holes or under bushes.”

“Also,” Larry said, “our gear is gone; I don’t suppose you have anything we can light a fire with, assuming you do want them lit eventually?”

General Phat chuckled. “This is the first time since I was twenty-one that I’ve been glad I smoke.”

ABOUT 3 HOURS LATER. ATHENS, TNG DISTRICT. 1:15 AM EST. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2025.

Jenny had never looked more beautiful than she did in candlelight; she had been waiting in his favorite nightie to give him a hero’s welcome, and he’d accepted enthusiastically.

Now he sat cross-legged and upright on the bed, catching his breath. Jenny lay gasping like a trophy marlin.
Pity that the only men I actually killed were those pathetic stooges,
he thought.
I would have liked to see old stone-faced Cam-boy beg for his life. . . .

The thought of Cam screaming, the real memory of his slack dead face, Jenny’s spill of blonde curls across the pillow, and the sheen of sweat on her big breasts, started him again. He sprang onto Jenny, pinned her, pushed her legs apart.

She squirmed and cried out; this was past the point of her pleasure. He knew she was sore, and he knew too that she would not only forgive him but come to treasure the memory, as she had their wedding night and the other triumphant nights when he had been like this. Teenage-boy bragging resounded in his mind:
she’ll walk funny for a week, she won’t be able to sit down—

Her cries of pain and fear brought him to another climax. She curled away from him. “No more, please, baby. I
hurt
.”

Instantly remorseful, he brought her ointment, stroked her hair, soothed her while she cried about how
scary
he was. She clung to him; he rubbed her back. If ever he had really made anything his own—

Pounding, then shouting, at the door.

He rolled from the bed, yanked on sweater and pants, put his boots over his trousers, and threw the door open. Reverend Whilmire and Reverend Peet stood there, escorted by four soldiers with rifles.

Whilmire said, “We have an emergency. The Pueblo spies and General Phat are gone, two of their guards are dead, and the medic doesn’t think the third one will regain consciousness. Did you know anything about their escape plan?”

“Only that Shorty Phat was supposed to be the guy that knew it, and if we kept them all locked up it wasn’t going to matter.” Grayson grabbed his coat from the rack; it was freezing outside. “Are any troops in motion yet?”

“We told the sergeant that brought us the news to alert the officer of the watch. He sent back that he’s bringing Second Battalion to Terrell Hall, and he’s also activated the lockdown plan, so there will be troops at the airport and railway station—and on every bridge, ford, and road—in a few minutes.”

“How long ago?” Grayson was solving the problem already; airport locked up, trains locked up, guarding the roads would slow them down, moonless night so horses couldn’t move much faster than a healthy man could walk. “How long ago?” he demanded, again.

“Sir, the message from the officer of the watch came back eighteen minutes ago, sir,” the sergeant of the escorting soldiers said. “And the situation at the facility was discovered about ten minutes before that.”

Grayson nodded.
They have at least forty minutes’ head start, but not an hour.
The Pueblo spies and Phat had to be within a couple of miles; call it three by the time he had his troops—a long head start, but if they were hiding somewhere to await pickup,
maybe
.

“Two of you men come with me,” he said. “I’ve got to go to Terrell Hall and take command. Reverend Whilmire, go wake up the Board, drag them into a meeting, no matter what the actual numbers are it’s a quorum, and vote in a temporary declaration of martial law. To expire in two weeks—if we haven’t salvaged things by then we’ve lost anyway.”

“I’d only slow everyone down,” the Reverend Peet said. “I’m going home to bed to let younger people cope with this. Reverend Whilmire, you have my proxy.”

Most useful thing I’ve ever heard Peet say,
Grayson thought. “Mine too,” he said. “Good luck.”

As he ran, the sergeant and one soldier at his heels, he thought,
Ask me for anything but time. Supposedly Napoleon said that. For the first time, I really understand him.
He ran down the road, faster and faster as his eyes adjusted to the starlight, everything forgotten but the need to be there now, now, now.

IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARD. ATHENS, TNG DISTRICT. 1:35 AM EST. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2025.

Abner Peet had waved off the offer of a soldier to see him home safely. Whilmire and Grayson, he thought, without real disapproval, had certainly fallen for their own act. It was true, of course, that there were dangerous, violent people afoot in the capital tonight, but it seemed to have slipped the general’s mind, and Whilmire’s, that
they
were the dangerous, violent people, and the enemy were hunted fugitives.

There might be material for a sermon in that idea, though of course he could not use that particular example. The tendency to become obsessed with . . . well, of course, it was all in the Bible, just as everything else was, motes and beams, and—

“I came as soon as I knew you needed me,” Naomi said, falling into step beside him.

And
that
was why I sent the soldiers with Whilmire,
Peet thought, things making sense at last. “It’s a frightening night,” Peet agreed.

“What are you afraid of, Abner?”

He was startled that she called him by his first name, but it seemed more comforting and familiar than presumptuous. She asked again what he was afraid of.

After a moment he said, “That it will all come back. That I’ll wake up and the Rapture won’t have happened, the cities will be full of crime and evil, all the good work we’ve done will be undone.”

“Is there someone out there trying to do that tonight, Abner? Our scouts heard shooting and explosions and saw fires, and we didn’t know what it was, so I came in to find you and see if we could help.”

“We thought we had caught some of the worst of them, we thought . . . we thought we had them locked up—”

Her breath hissed in. “What were they doing? What has happened?”

As he explained it to her, he had the strangest sensation that he was surrounded by a crowd of warm, dirty bodies, all listening intently, but when he finished telling her everything (
should I really have told them about who killed the Natcon and why?
) they didn’t seem to be there anymore. There was only Naomi, resting her hand on his arm and saying, very gently, “You have done the right thing, you’re helping to bring about the final triumph, you have served your Lord well.”

He felt lost but happy; bewildered but safe. He drank in the frosty air that reminded him that Thanksgiving was only two days away, and Christmas just around the corner after that, and in the glow, something made him ask, “Are you an angel?”

But there was no answer. He opened his eyes fully; he was standing in a windswept deserted street, and except for the stars and a few flickers of distant flames, in the deepest darkness. The shouts far away had nothing to do with him, he knew, so he went home to sleep.

3 HOURS LATER. ATHENS, TNG DISTRICT. 4:45 AM EST. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2025.

General Phat took the radio from his ear and sat up straight. “Jason, is your stick still burning?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Time to light the fires; they’ll be here in about twenty minutes.”

Jason pulled the smoldering stick from the little heel-dug trench where he’d kept it under wet leaves, leapt to his feet, and waved it overhead, shaking off the ash, bringing the embers to a bright red glow. On his third swing, flames showed again; a few more swings and it was blazing. By then Larry and Chris, at the two other fire points, were showing bright flames too.

Jason slid the burning stick under the little teepee of kindling. For tinder, he’d come up with a dried-out bird’s nest and pine twigs fuzzed with a steak knife from the guards’ kitchen, to eke out the crumpled pages of Thucydides. The blazing stick set it all off in a yard-high eruption of flames, engulfing the small teepee of deadwood sticks within the larger teepee of broken pine branches.

Jason looked up to see that Chris’s fire was jumping up even higher; Larry’s was ignited, but burning low and smoky.

“That’ll be enough fire to bring’em in,” Phat said.

In a few minutes, Larry and Chris joined them; this was the upwind fire, the easiest one for the helicopter to pick up from.

The war leaders of six tribes squatted on the hillside. Every few minutes, a scout came back from crawling down to where the four men built had three fires and now waited to light them. All night they had been telling their followers,
wait, wait, of course we will kill the men, but we can also destroy whatever is coming for them, have a last glorious chance to smash some of the old plaztatic technology.
Grumbling, the soldiers listened, obeyed, and continued to prepare for the attack.

One torch blazed up; two more answered; the fires themselves were lit. “This is it,” the senior war leader said, and they all stood up to give their war cries.

Before the last whoops and shrieks from the leaders were over, the hillside was dense with the silhouettes of fighters rising from their hiding places, and the cat-screams and bear-roars of a human wave gathering to pour down the hill toward the three fires.

Grayson looked out from the roof of Terrell Hall with some satisfaction; he didn’t know if they’d succeeded yet but he’d done all he could. At least now he had competent troops. He saw the three fires blaze up, marked their place on the map, and by the time that he reached the bottom of the stairs, he could hear the distant helicopter. In the quad, he shouted, “Major!”

“Sir!”

“Form up! We’re going to the old golf course north of campus, we’re running, and we might have to fight when we get there.”

“Right, sir. Bravo Company, up in the van; Delta Company, rearguard; Alpha, Charlie, and Echo, in that order, main body. We move in
one
, weapons ready.”

It was much less than one minute. With Alpha Company, in the lead of the main body, Grayson raced north along the old brick walkways, across the street, and into the abandoned part of town.

“What are we going to find, and what are we going to do, when we get there?” the major running beside him asked.

“We’ll get there about the same time as a helicopter from the
Bush
lands—I hope. There are some dangerous people, menaces to national security, who are there. I’m not sure what side the helicopter is on; the plot reaches very high up into our military. We don’t want to fight our own men—we’ve had enough of that already—but we can’t let the men on the ground get away, either.”

“Are they the spies from Pueblo, sir, the ones we busted last night?”

“Some of them.” Inspiration struck Grayson. “One of the reasons I want them is to question them about the Natcon’s murder. I don’t think they did it but I think they witnessed things that might give us a clue. So we can’t let them leave for Pueblo even if they’re innocent.”

“I’ll pass the word along, sir.”

Grayson continued at a swift jog; the cold bit at his toes and seared his lungs.
Don’t slip and bust a leg on the bridge,
he thought,
that would be one irony too many.

“What the fuck is
that?
” General Phat blurted.

“Tribals, close, coming this way,” Larry said. “We can’t stay by the fires, we’ll be silhouetted.”

“The helicopter—”

“Talk to them if that gadget still works, but come
on
.”

Chris and Larry dragged Phat, almost by main force; Jason backed a few steps away from the fire, trying to put it between himself and the oncoming wave. “I’ll be along in a minute,” he yelled.

I think I owe this to the cause,
he thought.
Could have been me out there howling like a nut and dying just to kill other people; as Daybreaker poet I was all set up for it. Instead I got a nice clean comfy world, if you don’t mind the company of so many billion corpses.
He hoped he was far enough back not to be readily visible; black-powder pistols made nearly as much light at night as they did smoke in the day, but he wanted to get off at least one shot before they knew where he was.
Besides, I want to try something.

Dark shapes swarmed on the far side of the fire. “Mister Gun!” Jason shouted at the top of his lungs. “Mister Gun lives! Mother Gaia is a lie, Mister Gun lives!” Chanting, the tribals had entered the firelight in a solid wave. Jason pointed into the thickest part of the crowd and pulled the trigger.

In the split second of silence, he let the Daybreak poet he had once been merge with what Larry and Debbie had brought back about
The Play of Daybreak
, and shouted, “Mister Gun rises from the dead! Slay them all, slaughter them, Mister Gun is mightier than Mother Gaia!” He fired again, then bellowed, “Mister Gun!” as he fired again.

The crowd faltered, whimpered, tried to raise its chant, and that gave him a moment to swap out magazines. “Mister Gun!” a voice cried behind him—
Larry,
of course
, he saw what I was doing!
—and another shot lashed into the milling Daybreakers. One with a spirit stick stumbled and fell.

“Mister Gun slays your spirit stick!”
Blam.
“Mister Gun shits on your spirit stick and breaks it!”
Blam.
“Your spirit stick is dead!”
Blam.
Jason fired at the end of each scream.

Now Chris was shouting about Mister Gun, too.
I swear,
Jason thought, reloading with his last magazine,
if I somehow get home alive, I am organizing the First Church of Mister Gun.

It had delayed the human wave, made it falter when it might have swept across and killed them all, but they had only had forty rounds to begin with, and those were almost gone. “Jason,” Larry said, quietly. “Back up with us. Phat’s got the chopper coming into the center of the triangle. It’ll be here soon. We just have to hope—
Mister Gun! Mister Gun, feed on the tribes, rape Mother Gaia, Mister Gun!
” He shot into the crowd; Jason used up his last magazine doing the same, and then fell back with Larry and Chris. Chris was almost shaking with laughter. “I didn’t think humor was called for here, but my dear sweet
God
I wanted to shout that Mother Gaia swims out to meet troopships.”

“Not long now,” Phat murmured, as they joined him. “The chopper—Right!” he held the little radio to his ear. “Yes, in the center, that’s us!”

Chris listened hard. “An H-92. It’s a distinct sound. Jocking a camera in Eritrea, you couldn’t mistake them for anything else. I always followed that sound, it meant Navy, and that far inland, Navy meant Marines—”

Phat was shouting instructions into the radio; they heard “Mister Gun” a few times before the helicopter roared over them. Its searchlights swept outward, revealing hundreds of tribals milling in confusion.

“They’re not afraid of guns,” Jason said. “Not out in the real world. They’re afraid of Mister Gun. Mister Gun lives in the part of them where Daybreak lives.” Phat repeated that into the radio, loudly. The searchlights swept a second time.

“The light hasn’t touched us,” Jason pointed out.

“No need,” Phat said, “they have us on IR, and why show anyone where we are? They just have to look around for a second first.”

“What are they looking for?”

“Trees, bad ground, bad guys,” Phat said. “If I was flying what’s probably the last working chopper in the world on what’s probably its last mission ever, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to get ambushed—let alone run into a tree, or sink in a swamp.”

The helicopter crept forward toward the milling tribals. Its loudspeaker thundered, “You have not respected Mister Gun! Mother Gaia cannot save you! Mister Gun must punish you!”

The machine guns blasted into the tribals, who had been staring into the searchlights. Some fell; the rest fled. The searchlight winked out.

The helicopter descended to ground height, and the four men ran to it, diving forward, letting the crew drag them in by the arms. “That everyone?” the crewman shouted, as he pulled Jason aboard. “How many of you?”

“Four.”

“Got the last one, sir.”

The door slid shut behind him, the crewman pushed him into a seat, and the helicopter went up the way Jason had imagined a rocket might. “The skipper isn’t about to lose this thing to ground fire at this point,” the crewman said, apologetically. “We have every luxury we could snag from the
Bush
that wasn’t too big and heavy. How about coffee and ice cream cones?”

So the rendezvous had been the old golf course; Grayson had been able to put watchers on every road, on the railroad tracks, and at the airport, but there had simply been too many open, grassy areas to cover on foot, and he hadn’t been willing to risk the few trained cavalry ponies trying to cover the territory. And honestly, he couldn’t have imagined that
Bush
would be in league with Pueblo; just one more proof that you could never trust those Navy bastards.
Rum, sodomy, and the lash,
he quoted to himself.
Especially sodomy. Which is what they’re doing to me and the whole TNG.

He heard gunfire ahead, and shouting. Ahead of them, above the low rise, he saw the helicopter against the stars, descending beyond the hill. Then brilliant electric light, unintelligible shouting and loudspeakers, and machine guns—real ones, firing fast and without the slow hollow claps of hand-turned black-powder guns.

“Pick up the pace and expect a fight,” he told the major.

They had covered only about two hundred yards more when Grayson saw the helicopter rise vertically and fly away to the northwest.

“Did they get away, sir?”

“I don’t know, Major. I think we’ve got to go take a look. But—”

Gunfire from the van.

The main body plunged into the ditches on either side, all in the dark shadows of the trees in starlight.

A messenger was at Grayson’s side. “General, Bravo captain says we plowed into the flank of a big party of tribals, and Second Platoon, out front, is fighting them; First and Third are moving to flank. He thinks they were going somewhere else and we just ran into them—”

Grayson was shouting again, sending forces around on each of his flanks, firming up his center with his rearguard, and driving them forward to find and massacre the tribals. Frustrated by failure and betrayal, he exulted in the volleys and single shots and the screams in the dark.
And either these tribal fuckers stopped Phat or they didn’t, but I was too late and too slow, and that makes me mad, and by Christ I’m going to make them pay for making me mad.

When Athens was tiny, winking red fires far behind, Chris asked, “I don’t suppose anyone would care to tell us where we’re going?” He had consumed his ice cream cone with more reverence than he had ever shown the Host as an altar boy.

The Marine captain said, “Well, they told me to get you to anywhere with a runway, and take all the fuel I wanted because
Bush
was dying of nanoswarm, and didn’t have biotes yet, so we’ve got an extended-range Superhawk II here. Theoretically I could run all the way to Columbia, Missouri or so, but to be safe, we’re just going to Pale Bluff, Illinois, which should be friendly and has an airfield.”

“My ex-wife and my son Sam still live there,” the pilot added, “which is why I volunteered for this mission, it’s my chance to get back there. You might have heard about it if you ever read that Pueblo paper, or listen to the radio stations that read it on the air.”

“I might at that,” Chris said.

“So poor old
Bush
is gone, and that’s the last carrier, isn’t it?” Phat said.