The Last President (39 page)

Objectively the Daybreaker submachine-gunners were poor fighters. They wasted ammunition, often not even aiming. Some of them were blinded, maimed, killed as guns blew up in their hands. But they kept coming, kept shoving in fresh drums of ammunition until the guns blew up, and kept attacking every living soldier they could find around the gate.

Automatic fire at such close range, in such volume, swept Birdsall's forces away from the gates, drove the crews away from their heavy weapons, and opened the gap for a critical few minutes, as ten thousand Daybreakers, spirit sticks, hatchets, clubs, torches, and spears raised high and screaming for Mother Gaia, poured into the orchards and toward the town. Birdsall's thoughts, dying among others on the wall, were first that he didn't think a messenger could get to town with a warning before the tribals did, then that anyway he had no messengers, and finally that his tummy really hurt and he wanted to go home now.

• • • 

When the first tribals with spears appeared at the other end of the field, Quattro, Asanté, and the ground crew had already pulled off the grounding wires and reconnected everything on the Gooney. “I still wish,” the chief began.

“They'll burn it and us with it on the ground here,” Quattro said. “And we don't know that the moon gun shot was even aimed anywhere near us. The last few have been over Pueblo, and the jolt from that might damage a radio, but it won't shut off my ignition. And we only need to fly about forty minutes to reach Paducah and safety. So die for sure here, or try to make it out on the Gooney. Now departing from all gates, dude.”

The ground crew piled in, the chief going last, and strapped down on the benches. Asanté took his place at the gun. Quattro revved up; the sound of the plane apparently attracted more tribals, for suddenly they were running out onto the end of the runway. He gave the engine full throttle and roared toward them, lifting off just in time to clear them by scant feet, and climbing as quickly as the Gooney could manage.

The brilliant flash of light gave him just a moment to realize that the EMP, this time, was right overhead. The spark for the engines stopped, and they coughed on fuel-air mix they could not ignite, the propellers slowing, not even finishing a complete turn. Wires on the plane reached far above their kindling points, but most did not have time to burst into flame; the men in the back were lashed by shocks but the signals from the neurons just under their skin never reached their brains.

In the small airspace in one of the almost-full fuel tanks, a spark touched off an explosion just big enough to rupture the tank and mix the fuel thoroughly into the air in the heated, sparking interior of the plane; there was a moment of terrible light and pain, and then nothing for those within. Outside, in the burning town strewn with bodies, the cheers and drumming grew louder and louder.

2 HOURS LATER. PADUCAH, KENTUCKY. 3:30 PM CENTRAL TIME. SUNDAY, MAY 10, 2026.

He was the sort of guy that Lyndon Phat had always disliked on sight, and always forced himself to be nice to. Somehow, even through the food shortages and the disappearance of most mechanical work-savers in the past year and a half, this guy Davey Prinche had managed to remain pudgy and out of shape; there was something subtly dirty and messy about every aspect of him, from his grimy T-shirt to his crude coat-hanger glasses, and from the dirty dishes scattered among the tools on his workbench to the grime under his fingernails.

But he had invented an EMP detector and direction finder that worked even for a close-in hit like this one, and if listening to him brag about how clever he had been was part of the price of having it, well, so be it. He was nattering away right now. “The big trick was realizing that these old-style recording thermometers were mechanical and wouldn't react to the EMP. So as long as all the loops are identical, the ones that got the hottest are the ones where the plane of the loop was closest to parallel to the wave front coming out of the EMP, and by doing a linear interpolation between the hottest and second hottest pair of loops on each side of the circle, and stretching that string between the points, we can come up with a more exact direction. So, yeah, it was right over Pale Bluff, at least if the topo maps from back before were accurate.”

Phat thanked him and didn't wince while shaking his hand. He raced down the stairs, a couple of aides chattering after him. On the street outside he told them, “Be polite, and she won't be, but have Bambi meet me at the airfield. I'm taking the pedicab.”

He told his pedicabbie, “Airfield, right away.”

Ground crew had cleared the Stearman to fly by the time that Bambi rode up on horseback. “This was their quickest way to get me here,” she said, dismounting and handing the reins to a slightly bewildered lieutenant, who managed to persuade the horse to go with him off the field, but it looked like the deal might unravel at any moment. “Are you going to give me my plane back?”

“You must have felt that EMP even in the shelter—”

“Even in jail,” she said. “We'll stick to right names for things.”

“In jail, then. I am sorry I had to put you there. But the EMP was directly over Pale Bluff, and we have not been able to raise them on the radio. We need to take a look right away, and I'm going to ask you to fly me over—”

“Get in.”

She talked to the ground crew chief for less than a minute, until another ground crew member came running up with her flying helmet, scarf, and jacket. “Thanks for taking care of these,” she said. She looked around at the ground crew. “Remember you can always come to California, if anything gets shitty out here, 'kay?”

She hopped up on the wooden step and into the plane so quickly that Phat couldn't think of anything to say; he just got into the front, passenger cockpit. Ground crew wheeled up the magneto cart, connected it to her coil, and cranked it to charge the capacitors.

“Chocks out?”

“Chocks out.”

“Charge?”

“At charge.”

“Coupez!”

They unhooked the magneto cart and rolled it away; Bambi engaged the prop clutch. “Coupez,” the ground chief confirmed, walking around to the prop, and grasping one tip.

“Contact!”

He spun the prop hard and stepped back; with bang and a couple of pops, the engine fired and caught. Bambi disengaged the clutch for a moment to let it rev up to speed; these cold starts with a deliberately dead battery, after an EMP, were always touchy affairs, but the short flight to Pale Bluff should be enough to recharge.

She engaged the prop and taxied around slowly; the engine was still running fine, so she opened the throttle and headed down the runway, into the air, and out over the broad green Ohio River, across into Illinois, and on to the northeast.

80 MINUTES LATER. PALE BLUFF. 5:50 PM CENTRAL TIME. SUNDAY, MAY 10, 2026.

Thirty miles away, they could see the columns of dense black smoke. Bambi circled above the town, taking a look from all angles; the Daybreakers had managed to get the orchards burning despite the damp (the smell like frying oil meant that perhaps they had used fuel from the airfield). Bodies by the hundred lay in the streets and along the walls. Some of the tribals were still in the town, carrying armfuls of whatever had caught their fancy, or dancing in lines behind spirit sticks and drums.

She swooped lower, and then Phat saw what she had seen: the Gooney Express lying on its back, the rear part of the fuselage bent as if with giant pliers, at the end of the runway. A lower pass revealed a great, gaping hole on the bent side; black char covered the old yellow-and-black checkered markings.

She brought the Stearman around and he started to lean back to confer with her, but she shoved his head out of her way, and landed the plane, threading between bodies on the runway as she brought it around and taxied back to the Gooney. By the bigger plane, she locked the clutch down so that the propeller was disengaged and whuffed to a halt. Leaving the engine running, she jumped out and ran to the Gooney.

Phat could not think what to do; they had seen tribals in the town, they couldn't afford to be caught here on the ground, was she out of her mind with grief?

She knelt beside the open door of the overturned, burnt plane, peered inside, and began to keen and wail. Tentatively, Phat climbed out of the Stearman and approached her, trying to think how to tell her that they had to go, afraid to say he was sorry, afraid to sound wrong in any way.

When he was close enough to see the texture of her leather flying jacket, Bambi stood, turned, sighed, and drew a pistol from her jacket. “You are not getting back on my plane,” she said. “Move that way”—she pointed toward the orchard—“or I will shoot.”

He stood without speaking or moving, realizing what this must mean, until she fired a shot into the dirt to his right. He flinched away, and she said, “You know I'm a better shot than that. Next one is into your center. Run.”

He had been stout, back before, and he was in worse shape now, but he turned and ran, an undignified, pumping, fast waddle, for the trees. Before he reached them, behind him, he heard Bambi shout, “I told you it was my airplane!”

The propeller engaged in a deep buzzing roar. When he turned around he saw the Stearman racing down the runway and taking off.

General Lyndon Phat stood and stared at it. From here she could reach St. Louis, Columbia, or Iowa City, easily, and be refueled without question. It would be hours before they were overdue in Paducah. He had a pistol under his jacket, and a reserve knife strapped to his thigh, and nothing else.

The drumming grew louder and closer. He turned around to see a flock of tribal shamans walking toward him, with hundreds of armed men behind them. Reckoning that with four shots in the revolver, he didn't want to take a chance on the last one being a misfire, he took a firm shoulder-width stance, shook out his shoulders (still stiff from the flight that had ended only minutes ago), relaxed, steadied, and shot two of the men carrying spirit sticks. As the rest began to run toward him, he put the still-hot muzzle into his mouth, ignoring the burning because it was just for a moment, pushed far back and up, and pulled the trigger.

• • • 

Bambi Castro Larsen, Duchess of California, did not look back, or even think again about the vile little man. He was in the past.
This is my airplane,
she thought.
They'll refuel me on my say-so at Columbia, and again in Hays. Once I'm at Hays, I'll have to decide whether to avoid Heather and fly on to Vernal, or face up to things and fly down to Pueblo. Heather better not expect me to turn myself in, but I feel like I owe her a confession, and an apology for the things that didn't work out. And if she ever needs it, I'll never turn her away from Castle Larsen.

But maybe not. She might try to arrest me or hold me for having gotten rid of General Shithead, instead of thanking me that he didn't end up as our president. And nobody's making me that helpless again. Nobody. I have my airplane and my Castle, and I'm going to keep them. I've already lost my Duke and my country.

3 HOURS LATER. COLUMBIA, MISSOURI. 9 PM CENTRAL TIME. SUNDAY, MAY 10, 2026.

There wasn't much of twilight left as Bambi came in to the field, but unlike so many of the places she flew the Stearman into and out of, Columbia had been a real airport, back before, though a small one, and there was so much room on a jetliner runway that the Stearman could practically have landed crossways. She taxied up to the hangar, shut down, and climbed out of the plane.

“Always a pleasure to have you here, ma'am,” the ground chief said. Bambi couldn't quite remember her name, and it took her another moment to think,
Right, I'm in Columbia, en route to Pueblo.

“Good to be down for the night,” Bambi said. “I'm pretty well ex-hausted. Can I just ask you to fit my plane out, and if there's a carriage to the hotel—”

“We'll have you there right away. You look pretty well worn-out, ma'am.”

She had to be awakened when the carriage came by, almost an hour later. The hotel was just an old religious-retreat facility near the airport, but the staff knew how she liked things, so when she staggered into the only room with a private bath, it was all set up, with the tub already filled with hot water and towel-covered board covering it. There was bread, meat, and cheese on the sideboard. She made up three sandwiches, stripped, ate while she soaked, toweled off, and fell asleep on top of the covers without setting an alarm.

THE NEXT DAY. PUEBLO. 10 AM MOUNTAIN TIME. MONDAY, MAY 11, 2026.

James wished they had met at his home; Heather's office was comfortable enough, and the logbooks and records were there, but it would have felt good to be cooking. Here, he had nothing to do. A review of the facts would have been useless.

All three of them were miserably aware that there had been an EMP over Pueblo, just after Carol May's last fragmentary radio message, in clear, that the tribal horde was inside the walls. About an hour later, Phat had sent the cryptic message from Paducah that he was going to take a look himself with Bambi Castro, and nothing had been heard since. The Army of the Wabash had only reached Terre Haute yesterday, finding everything destroyed, and would not have air reconnaissance that could reach Pale Bluff until Sally Osterhaus reached them in her Piper Cub later this week.

It was what they had known last night, what they had known this morning, what they had known while they pretended to eat breakfast.

So they sat and waited. Leslie was restlessly patting her dog; Wonder had picked up on her nervousness and was whining and nervously licking her. Heather was fussing over Leo much more than usual, and he wasn't happy about it.
The Good Soldier
lay neglected in James's lap.

Something caught the corner of his eye out the window. “Patrick's coming, and he's running hard.”

Heather moved Leo into his crib, opened the door, and called down to the guards to wave Patrick through. She shoved a wad of meal tickets into the boy's hand. “Sorry, guy, urgent and secret, no socializing this time. Take a rest someplace where you can hear us yell from the window.”

Patrick looked—
stunned?
James thought.
No, scared. Because he's never seen us so scared before, and we're the people he depends on to keep the world working. Man, I wish I had someone I could depend on like he depends on us.

The moment the door closed, Heather ripped the envelope open, pulling out an inner envelope on which Ruth Odawa had written
I suggest highest possible security
.

Heather sighed, sat, opened it, read, looked again, and said, “She wasn't kidding. It's from Bambi. Here's the short version: as far as she could determine, everyone in Pale Bluff was killed, though there may still be some survivors hiding out. The city is a total loss. Quattro died on takeoff, and the Gooney Express was totally destroyed. Here's a strange sentence: ‘You may assume Lyndon Phat is also dead.' She's in Columbia, Missouri—or she was, she's in the air now, she'll refuel at Hays and then come here—and she says, full report then. And one last detail: she won't come here to my office, or anywhere in the city. We have to meet her at the airport.”

“What the hell could that mean?”

“We'll probably find that out at the airport,” Heather said. “She's estimating she'll come in about four p.m.”

“Wow,” Leslie said quietly. “A week ago we thought we were winning the war, worried about getting Phat elected if Grayson ran well or Weisbrod was a spoiler . . . now, there's no Phat, no Grayson, no Graham Weisbrod . . . no Quattro . . .” Her voice cracked. “Sorry, the rest were people I'd worked with and respected, but Quattro was like, like—”

“Everybody's hero. I feel like crying myself. And there's no Pale Bluff,” James said quietly. “We've lost the living presence of almost anything we could build a myth out of, to put the country back together. God, I'll miss Pale Bluff the most. Every issue of the
Post-Times
, you had this little town struggling bravely on, making the new America. I mean, I knew how Arnie Yang was playing those sentimental cards, he showed me before he was turned, and I've been doing it myself for months, now, too, and . . . that story's over, in the worst possible way. Including that when the Army of the Wabash finally gets there, there will be a thousand real horror stories, and within a year ten thousand made-up ones, about the death of that town. You know, neither Leslie nor I ever even visited it before it was gone. And the symbolic value . . .”

Heather stared into space. “And Allie Sok Banh is in a hospital bed and it'll be months before she's up and around, and of course Bambi is going to be some kind of psychological wreck, she was my favorite employee back before, and she was so happy with Quattro, it was like he changed her whole life. . . .” She got up and walked over to her string-and-card chart, which was lying on the table, and raked through it with her fingers, tearing everything out, flinging it over her shoulder. “There is not going to be a Restored Republic, or a United States,” she said. “Everyone is out of action, most are dead, we've lost every useable resource. Texas will secede today. White Fang says that the Commandant is probably never going to make an official declaration, but he's got at least twenty people in jail on suspicion of ‘spying for the United States,' so whether we admit it or not, we've already lost Manbrookstat too. Red Dog reports that Jenny Whilmire Grayson doesn't have the votes and might have to flee here for political asylum. No options left. We've lost. We've just plain lost.”

Very quietly, James said, “I have two arrows left in the quiver, actually. One you'll hate and one that you will never forgive me for.”

Tears were trickling from her eyes, and she said, “Well, let's start with the one you think I will hate. You know me, James. You know if someone tells me there's a chance, I have to know what it is.”

“Graham Weisbrod was technically, correctly, the legitimate President of the United States. Everyone who knows the law admits that now.”

“Now that he's dead and they don't have to put up with him,” Leslie said, bitterly.

“True but irrelevant; the relevance is that everyone agrees he should have been President, and therefore he was, in retrospect. Clear as a bell, actually, a sitting cabinet official appointed by the last elected president and confirmed by a fully legitimate Acting President. The TNG was all the result of a series of mistakes: if Cameron Nguyen-Peters hadn't been so full of doubt, if Norm McIntyre had found some guts, or if Lyndon Phat had thought things through, there'd never have been a Temporary National Government.” James sighed. “The trouble was that Graham was highly partisan and, forgive me, Heather, but kind of a rude jerk, and even people who liked him didn't like Allie, and President Weisbrod would really have meant President Allie in all but name. But now that everyone is dead, if we have a legitimate successor to Weisbrod,
that's
the President of the United States.”

“Doesn't that mean the whole Provi government is?”

He shook his head. “No. Graham Weisbrod was a legitimate President of the US but setting up the Provisional Constitutional Government exceeded his authority by astronomical distances. He was a president who violated the Constitution, but he was legitimately the President; the PCG was never legitimately the government. Now, there's a provision in the Succession Act that an acting or an emergency appointment to the cabinet is in the line of succession, same as one confirmed by the Senate. So anyone Graham appointed to his cabinet—”

“Doesn't that make Allie Sok Banh next in line? They've got her in an induced coma, and she may not be fully conscious for another few days. And you were right in the first place, even her closest friends don't want her to be the president. So the next one is . . . Treasury?”

“I was getting to that. Yeah. Bindel wouldn't make a bad choice, either, but he's naturalized, born in India. But their Secretary of the Armed Forces—which is what Graham renamed the Secretary of Defense—is Norm McIntyre.”

“But Norm is a wreck, you say so yourself. Even if he takes the job—”

“He probably won't,” James said. “Blue Heeler reports that he's despondent, not even in Olympia right now, he's outside the city, pretty much just hiding. But technically speaking, he's the Acting President. He could appoint a Vice President and resign. Then we have a president with at least a fig leaf of legitimacy and some shreds of authority. Then if a new Congress was elected—this year is an election year on the old calendar—they could validate the whole thing. Retroactively we'd be back under the old Constitution with a mess to straighten out, but technically it would be legit.”

“Well, I wouldn't have wanted Norm before, to tell the truth, and if he's hiding in a cabin in the woods, I guess he'd better keep hiding. But what good would it do to have a President with no government?”

James said, “This is the part you'll
really
hate. Then the President calls a summit meeting of state governors and everyone else controlling former American territory—even Lord Robert—and demands that they plan for a national election. Kharif, that guy the PCG just appointed. Jenny Whilmire Grayson if she can get in. Bambi. Governor Faaj down in Texas. All of those would probably go for it. Others, we'd have to campaign over the leadership's heads, stir up trouble for them with their own people, because we know most Americans
do
want to put the Constitution and the Republic back together, even if it's just out of pure sentiment. Get all the little governments and alliances to play as much as we can. Elect the Congress, we already have a President, start setting up, pretend that the last couple of years didn't happen.”

“So whoever we made the president that way would have to serve out the rest of the term?”

“For stability and legitimacy, yeah. So it can't be just a figurehead. It has to be somebody who can actually run a government putting the country back on its feet, and play by the rules, and while we're at it, if we don't want guerrilla uprisings, it'll have to be someone that most people in the country have heard of and trust. Someone who already has contacts everywhere and that people think of as wielding some power in her own right.”

Heather O'Grainne stared at him; she had seen it. “You are working your way around to saying that it has to be me.”

“I told you you'd hate it.”

“That's why you're my main advisor, you're so good at predicting.”

“Then you know I've already thought through the rest of the list of possibles and I'm not suggesting this just to be mean or because I want my boss to move up in the world, or anything of the sort. Is there anyone else
you'd
pick?”

“Doesn't mean I want to do it. Wouldn't it make more sense to just let the Republic quietly fade out, and give up? I can find something useful to do somewhere, so can everyone else, and, well, we tried to keep our oaths, kept them as long as we could, but there's no more America.”

“You could do that.” He looked down at his hands. “I hate to bring this up but there's another kind of trouble we might head off if you were willing to be President for a day or two. If we don't do this now, when Allie Sok Banh recovers, she's much too smart and ambitious not to realize that she is the President.”

“Ouch. That would tear the country apart.”

“If we do this now, your appointment would supersede her position. And while we're at it, it also shuts off half a dozen other minor people, various deputy undersecretaries and so forth, who might be able to contend that since they were legitimately the acting secretary of something or other, they are now legitimately the president. If you read your Shakespeare or you know the Wars of the Roses, you know that there is only one good number of legitimate successors, and that's one. Any more than that is an invitation to civil war, and we've been close to that a few times already, in fact you could pretty much say the Lost Quarter Campaign was a civil war—just one we lost. So one clear succession would be good to establish even if you decide you don't want to do anything more than that.”

“And it would have to be now, wouldn't it? Who knows how long till Allie recovers and tries to take power? Much as I love the lady, personally, I don't want to see if she can make a bigger mess than Jefferson Davis did.”

“So . . .” Leslie said, “has James talked you into this?”

Heather sighed. “I might have known you were in on it.”

“And Wonder. And he agreed with us too.”

“Well, then, I guess it's unanimous, and it does make sense. Set up a voice encryption, and let's get hold of Norm McIntyre and see if he'll go along with it. He probably will, because he has enough sense to be terrified of the idea of being stuck as president. And promise me that I'll be the president for the shortest possible time that works.”

2 HOURS LATER. PUEBLO. 1:00 PM MOUNTAIN TIME. MONDAY, MAY 11, 2026.

“We haven't been using the voice encryptor much,” Heather observed. “They seemed kind of surprised that we wanted to. A few months ago they pretty much had staff on it all the time.”

James sighed. “A few months ago, we were actively conspiring with Cameron Nguyen-Peters, Graham Weisbrod, Allie Sok Banh, Bambi Castro, and half a dozen other people that were important in various places around the country. Now we get our reports from the few spies we still have in place and there's nobody working on our side in most of the other capitals on the continent. The gadgets still work but nobody wants to talk.”

The operator was going through the complicated process of encrypting a request to the Olympia voice encryption room, sending it by Morse, and getting back an acknowledgment that included a time check so that they could synchronize the big wooden cams that controlled the encryption and decryption process, and in between stints at the headset, jumping up to make sure that the recently-disused machine was back in shape: camshaft turning freely, locking screws snugly in place, contacts clean and free of crusty white nanospawn, and the handbuilt jelly-jar vacuum tubes warm and ready to go. After one more trip around the machinery, she looked up at them and said, “All right, we'll start running in seven minutes.”