Daybreak Zero

^{LATER THAT MORNING. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 10:30 AM MST. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2025.}

Heather had deliberately been the last to enter; letting the Provi and Temper delegations settle in first, with just her staff to guide them to their chairs and the coffee, might give them a chance to mix informally. No such thing had happened.

Well, thanks to paranoia and a good staff, Heather had plans out to Z and beyond; time for B. “Just to remind everyone,” she said, “this is the first session of the first day and the real purpose is to make sure your chairs are comfy and that we take some photographs of Graham and Cam smiling at each other. Anything beyond that is gravy.” Hunh. No smiles. Allie is making a point of not looking at me, the generals are looking at each other like gunfighters waiting to draw, and Reverend Whilmire could be a mannequin if he had enough expression. “But in the interests of saving time, and not creating barriers, let’s just see if we can agree on this: We will hold a national election on the first Tuesday in November of 2026, to put the United States entirely back in the hands of a regularly elected, fully Constitutional government. In January 2027, we’ll swear in the new government, no matter who or what it is, at some location that is not Olympia and not Athens, and both sides will turn over all authority to it.

“I’ll need to confer with staff,” Weisbrod said, and Cam added, “So will I.”

Not only no smiles. Anger, too, I think, from the staffs; and Graham and Cam looked—embarrassed. That’s it. Embarrassed.

^{20 MINUTES LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 11 AM MST. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2025.}

Leslie Antonowicz had asked, “Won’t they be careful about security in this setting?”

“Some will, some won’t. Cam will be tight as a drum. Both generals will be security-conscious. They’ve all spent their lives in national security and it’s engrained. Allison will be careful when she remembers to, but she’s an old public policy hack and expects to leak things. Graham is a professor, he blabs without thinking; Whilmire’s a preacher, ditto but more so. And the main thing is that we got them to come without staff of their own—except for Grayson’s little Barbie-for-Jesus—on this idea of James’s that if they both agreed to use the same independent research staff, they wouldn’t get into paralysis from only having their own talking points. Very useful bullshit.”

“Thank you,” James had said. “I try.”

Every so often, and she never told him so, James did something to make Leslie wish she was attracted to old, fussy, stodgy fat guys. By carefully stepping out each time that the Temper team started something confidential, and then having to be asked back in to run into the research room and dig up reports, she’d worn them out; they were tired of thinking about her, and now she was furniture when they talked in front of her.

Now General Grayson was on one of his rhetorical rolls. “The whole country could still slide back into the secular swamp, and we can’t afford that. This war could last centuries. We are a Christian nation by origin and long custom, and we need to fight as one.”

Jenny Grayson was the only person who appeared even to be listening, and her expression of adoration for her general was more fixed than would have been ideal.

Reverend Whilmire broke in. “The important thing is that the Constitution is the instrument of God’s will, not the other way around, and to save the true Constitution of this country, when we lost so many good people in the Rapture, God focused the Tribulation to remove the most anti-Constitutional elements—”

“Shall I inform everyone,” Cam had asked, staring at his staffers, “that it is the TNG’s position that the death, in a period of months, of more than three-quarters of our population, was the decision of a just and loving God?”

Whilmire winced. “That’s so unnecessarily harsh.”

“Reverend Peet preaches it every Sunday—”

“To Christians, who understand it in context,” Grayson said. “The point is that in this struggle the cross is as important a weapon as the rifle—”

As she laid out maps of the Lost Quarter on the side table, Leslie struggled for balance. The repetition bored her, so it was hard to listen, but the content infuriated her, so it was harder still to appear indifferent. She wished Cameron Nguyen-Peters would talk more, and less deferentially.

^{20 MINUTES LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 11:30 AM MST. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2025.}

“So the assessments from our other sources”—so close physically to the delegations, Heather did not dare even to speak the code name Red Dog—“seem to be right on target. Grayson plays up to Whilmire to keep the Post Rapturalists in his corner, and Whilmire just recites Post Raptural talking points. Cam doesn’t really have a staff, just a double veto team.”

“The general and the reverend aren’t much of a team,” Leslie said. “Grayson keeps reminding them both about the military expeditions against the tribes he has led. He definitely wants the Post Raptural Church to understand that they are a useful auxiliary to the Army—not the other way round. Whilmire is the exact opposite. And Nguyen-Peters just sits there and asks them if they can agree on anything, when the obvious answer is, they can’t.”

Heather nodded. “How is it over on your side, James?”

“Like our sources said. Allie wants to just call the shots but Graham Weisbrod is old, tired, and passive-aggressive; he won’t do anything she doesn’t like but he won’t take active steps to do anything that might require him to do some work. Norm McIntyre acts less like a three-star general and more like a ten-term Congressman all the time; he thinks about the politics of everything, and all in terms of quid pro quo and deal-making. They’re not going to let Weisbrod move, and he doesn’t want to.”

“So neither of them is just going to overrule the handlers and do the deal,” Heather said. “So much for Plan B.”

James shrugged. “You had to try. If they could do what they did back in April, we’d have the business settled, the country moving ahead, and everything on track. But it was never likely. Back then they had one big overriding danger, of sliding into Civil War Two, to motivate them, and they had the power because they were essentially dictators. Now they’re both losing ground in their own regimes; Allison’s bureaucrats run the PCG, and Grayson’s church-and-army coalition is tightening its grip on the TNG. Graham and Cam are both answering to invisible elephants in the room, and the elephants want the legitimacy of being Constitutional much more than they want the reality of returning to the Constitution.” He shrugged and held up his hands. “I’m not judging, I don’t think. But it seems to me that part of the problem is that nobody in either staff was anybody of real national consequence before Daybreak, and before the new governments formed. They like being important. I understand this. I was an archival librarian in an obscure—”

A tap at the door. “Ms. O’Grainne, the TNG delegation has sent word they’re ready.”

^{10 MINUTES LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 11:55 AM MST. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2025.}

Heather listened while Graham read aloud, and then while Cam did. The brief written statements said only that the idea was interesting and the principle was good, and proposed more dialogue. Not outright rejection. Could be worse.

“Well,” Graham said, “I know that this hasn’t been cleared with my people, but I propose that we break for lunch.”

Cam rarely smiled, but this was almost a grin. “I propose to accept that idea with a friendly modification: a long lunch.”

“Accepted,” Graham said.

The two of them stood, smiled, and shook hands. Heather popped a photo; she’d promised Cary at the Post-Times, in exchange for a no-leaks-printed policy, that she’d take a few candids every day. Smiling and shaking hands like they like each other. Score! Try to erase that one from the history books.

ABOUT THE SAME TIME. CASTLE EARTHSTONE. 3:40 PM EST. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2025.

Finally, after all Robert’s nagging, Karl had shown him how to work the encrypted radio setup, and now because the message wasn’t to Karl’s liking, it would probably be another two weeks before Robert could get any more information out of him. “It’s about time Aaron sent something useful!” the old fat man shouted. “And now it’s still nothing useful, just that his contact is dodging him! He had to get help from Darcage just to get his contact to talk to him! And just look at what he’s telling us! We should have known about this weeks ago; that fat O’Grainne bitch must’ve sent the mission out the day after she heard about Steve Ecco. Why the hell wasn’t Aaron on the job?”

Robert shrugged. “Making a guess, Karl, Yang might’ve been freaked out that Ecco got killed, and if a guy freaks and won’t talk to him, there’s not much Aaron can do.”

“So just tell me what the fuck we’re going to do now?”

“One, let this Roger Jackson kid through; Yang’s still useful and we have to protect him, and you might not’ve noticed, Karl, but Aaron doped out the two-contact decoy system they’re using, there, and basically we can point the finger at either this James guy or this Leslie bitch. All we know about him is he’s an older guy; he might be smart or sneaky or something, so I say, throw the shit on the one with the tits, there’s a better chance she won’t be able to handle it.

“Then we need to trap that deep-secret operation here at Castle Earthstone, where it can look like an unlucky accident. Do it right, and at the end of the day the Pueblo bitch’ll’ve lost six agents and arrested the wrong one from her staff.

“Besides, it’s time to get rid of Bloomington; we were only using it to relay to agents in Kentucky and those have all been rolled up, and the techie people at Bloomington are all too close to the border and know too much. If you say go, soldiers can leave at dawn—”

“Go.” Karl beamed at him. “That was easy. Robert, you are probably the smartest decision I ever made.”

“Love you too, boss. Let me start things rolling; I’ll be back later for a drink and some hanging out.”

Once Robert had learned that Karl was afraid of being alone, he had lost his fear of him. I am going to run this place so much better than you. Robert caught a whiff of broiling deer liver, and contemplated which bitch he’d bed that night. From assistant lineman to about-to-be-lord in ten months. How could anybody not love Daybreak?

^{20 MINUTES LATER. THE BRIDGE ON COUNTY ROAD 250 BETWEEN THE FORMER WINAMAC, INDIANA, AND TIPPECANOE RIVER STATE PARK. 8:20 PM EST. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2025.}

“All right,” Larry said. “Time. Jason, ready?”

“Ready.”

Jason crouched to spring up onto the bridge; he’d rechecked his gear a dozen times and knew nothing was loose. He looked at deck level along the bridge to where a Budweiser truck sat crosswise in the black puddles of its rotted tires, a bulky, dark shadow in the twilight.

Gaze locked on that truck, he felt but didn’t see Larry moving into a comfortable firing position on the bank beside him. He heard Chris roll up onto the road and plunge across to the far ditch.

“Chris, ready?” Mensche’s voice seemed too soft to carry.

Chris’s voice came back soft and clear as one of Jason’s own thoughts. “Ready.”

“Jason. Go.”

The run to the beer truck was not quite as far as the hundred meters Jason had regularly run in high school track, but he had not run it wearing a full pack, or in heavy rawhide moccasins—or worrying about catching an arrow. He seemed to run forever until he bounded up into the truck bed, dropped to his belly against the steel plates and board floor, rolled over once to place his shoulder gently against the truck wall, and swung his black-powder rifle around. He whistled the bobwhite sound, the signal to Larry.

With the hummocks covered, Larry raced across the bridge, his steps soft slaps and scrapes, till a faint thud indicated he was in position behind the concrete abutment. He chirruped like a squirrel with a nut.

Chris rushed across the bridge, surprisingly quiet for a big man, and continued beyond them to the place they’d picked out, a U-haul trailer tipped on its side; Jason rushed to an overturned bread truck as soon as Chris was in place.

The alternation continued until finally they were all at a shed deep in the trees, with the Tippecanoe just a whispering splash and gurgle behind them. After the moon rose, by its dirty blue light, they moved on. Jason thought, Back when I believed I was a poet, I’d have made such a deal about the soot in the stratosphere and the bomb launcher on the moon. Now… meh.

Concentrating on the roads, trails, woods, and prairie, if Jason had another poetic thought before they camped at dawn, he didn’t notice.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PUEBLO. 10 PM MST. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2025.}

Arnie Yang had mostly decided that Allie wouldn’t be coming. He’d only casually mentioned that he sometimes grabbed a beer. Probably she hadn’t picked up the hint.

She appeared at Dell’s front door like a vision of pre-Daybreak—linen dress, high-heeled pumps so pricey that there were no synthetic materials to fall apart, and she was even wearing some lipstick and eye shadow—how’d she get that? I guess if anyone could…

She squinted in the dim lamplight till she spotted Arnie, then strode between the old picnic tables and wooden office chairs; the mostly male crowd fell silent as she passed, more startled by the vision than anything else. Glenda, the waitress, followed her, carrying a mug and pitcher.

When Allie slid into the seat across from Arnie, Glenda set the mug in front of her and poured. “Thank you,” Allie said.

Arnie reached for his scrip pad and Glenda shook her head. “Dell’s gonna name this the First Lady’s Table; you drink free tonight, Ms. Sok Banh, and feel free to bring the president by any time you like.”

“That’s so nice, thank you, and it’s just Ms. Banh.” When she had gone, Allie cautiously tried a sip. “Oh, thank God, it’s good.”

Same old Allie. “You don’t want to be grateful for anything that you don’t actually like.”

She did the old shrug and head toss that used to disarm him completely. “Exactly. I hate to waste graciousness.” She took a deeper drink of the dark brown brew. “Definitely not wasted here. Well, so here we are a year later, and it’s really a different world, isn’t it? I mean we used to say that all the time, that it was going to be a different world, but now… well, look at us.” She held her glass up in a toast; reflexively, he clinked with her.

She’s got a hell of an act going, but I don’t seem to fall for it the way I used to. Disconcerted by the thought, Arnie blurted out, “Well, more of what we do matters more.”

“Oh, I always treated any job I had like it mattered. That’s how you keep good jobs and get better ones.”

“Me too, I hope, but nowadays the job matters to other people, not just to me.”

“Arnie, that was always true too. If you’d had better luck or seen what was coming sooner, maybe we could have done something about Daybreak before it happened—and if you had, I’d have been the one who had to carry out whatever the plan was. Nothing’s changed, Arn, lives still depend on us, and so do our ambitions.”

“I guess in the old days lives did depend on us, but it didn’t feel like it, it was all kind of removed. Nowadays, when I need data, I don’t tell an intern to look it up and email it to me, I send a man out with a pack and a gun, and he goes because he trusts me that it’s important, even though he and I know he might not come back. I really have to count the cost.”

“Things got more expensive,” Allie said, “but that still doesn’t really matter if you can pay the price.” She drained the glass; before it touched the table, Glenda was back to refill it. “Or if someone else does.”

^{THE NEXT DAY. ON THE I-64 BRIDGE ON THE WABASH, JUST SOUTH OF GRAYVILLE, ILLINOIS. 7:15 AM CST. TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2025.}

The Wabash is immense—the French explorers originally thought of the Wabash as the main stream and the upper Ohio as a tributary—and the twin bridge over I-64 was more than half a mile long; both bridges were choked with wrecked cars and trucks. Roger had started to cross with an hour of darkness remaining, but the sun had been full up for a while and he was still working his way forward from hiding place to hiding place, trying to stay away from the visible edges of the bridge.

Now that he could see the rest of his way, he hated to come out from cover, but there were just a few more rows of cars to go to the jackknifed semi that, on the morning of October 29, 2024, had blocked two lanes of traffic when its tires all burst, leaving hundreds of cars stuck on the bridge to wait for a state trooper who never came, their tires rotting and bursting, gasoline fermenting into unburnable vinegar, electrical systems encrusted with nanoswarm.

There was a crunching sound under his feet, and splashes in the river below; he darted away from the place where the sealant between the steel web deck and the crumbled and dried blacktop had decayed and broken away, sending a mass of gravel into the Wabash below.

He crouched beside an old rusted Honda Citiscoot; a half dozen bumper stickers, their glue rotted, lay by its rear bumper.

When nothing moved or made a sound after fifteen minutes, Roger rose to take a look around.

Pressed against the passenger-side window, inches from his face, a mummified child looked back at him. The lips had pulled back from the teeth as it had dried, and the eyes had fallen in, but the Spider-Man T-shirt still hung from the bony shoulders, and the hand stuck in the rotting plastic of the door sill seemed about to reach for Roger.

The driver-side window had a bullet hole in it. The long-haired mummy slumped on the wheel was draped in a partly decayed sweatsuit. A tiny shriveled body lay in a puddle of pudding-like slime, which must once have been a baby carrier, in the back seat.

Roger charged down the highway at a dead run; terrible tradecraft, and he wasn’t sure what he was running from, but nothing pursued him, and in a minute or so, he was among the trees, beside a ditch full of water, watching minnows and listening to the birds. He ate some jerky, drank from his canteen, and lay back to look at the sky.

Had someone been shooting at the bridge at random? Crazy guy walking through the traffic jam with a pistol? Her ex-husband seeing his chance? Stray round from a gunfight between two stranded drug dealers over a briefcase of money?

With Daybreak remains, you could break your brain, and your heart, trying to understand how someone had happened to die that way.

He slept for an hour or so, woke feeling better, and cautiously advanced along the ditch, still headed east.

^{ABOUT 2 HOURS LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 9 AM MST. TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2025.}

As James was laying out the copies of all the available Castle charters, at the request of the Olympia delegation, his knack for invisibility seemed to be holding: they weren’t waiting for him to leave to start the argument.

“Graham,” Allie said, “this has to be your dumbest ever. You should have said no when Cameron proposed it. Didn’t it even occur to you that the TNG is militarily far superior to us, and if we ally with the California Castles, maybe even support some Castles in Temper territory, we can balance—”

Norm McIntyre shook his head. “No, no, no. Too high a price. The TNG is right on this one, and it’s more important for us than it is for them. The only thing we’ve got over the Tempers is a better claim on the Constitution, and the Constitution says the United States has no hereditary nobility, period. No recognition for the Castles.”

“But in six months when we need the help of the Castles—,” Allie began.

“If that’s ever the case, it will be time for us to go out of business,” McIntyre said. “If we cut a deal with the Castles… what’s next, recognizing the tribes?”

“That was just brainstorming an idea!”

“Okay, we’re settled,” Graham said. “Allie, I note your objections, I’m just overriding them.” He picked up the paper. “Read fast. If there’s some trap in here, we need to see it in within two minutes.”

“Maybe I can propose a compromise?” Allie said. “Let’s say we need another day or two to go over our exact response. That way if we need something to trade, we have it. Then instead of just agreeing, we can make giving them what they want a big favor. I mean, isn’t that more practical, doing the same thing we were going to do anyway, but getting something for doing it?”

Reluctantly, Graham nodded. “All right, we’ll do it your way.”

As they filed out, James was still laying down papers. He waited till they closed the door before shaking his head. Not that it mattered, but this was the third straight time they’d asked for research on a subject, and then argued it out and decided without ever consulting the materials he’d brought them. James smirked at himself; it had actually hurt his feelings that the invisible man was being treated like he wasn’t there.

^{THE NEXT DAY. CASTLE EARTHSTONE. 6:20 AM EST. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2025.}

The long, deep sunrise shadows reached out from the blood-red sun. Jason, watching from thirty feet up in a tree, had been seeing the first torches, lamps, and cookfires inside the main compound of Castle Earthstone for about an hour and a half.

More than forty skulls decorated the gates and walls. The just-rising sun revealed a person tied face-on to a post in front of the main gate; more light revealed a welted back.

A guard came out and threw water over the prisoner, untied the wrists, and let the body fall to the ground. He kicked the body to turn it over—turn her over, they saw—and she cried out and moved; he yanked her to her feet by her hair and pushed her toward the gate.

For the next few hours, they circled Castle Earthstone, slowly working their way from one vantage to another. Patrols were slow, apathetic, and rare; workers in the fields were few, far between, and seemingly dazed. The corn and bean fields were tended but not well-tended.

In a clearing in the creek bottom, they found the burial ground. Bodies were half-out of shallow graves; animals had been at them. One large heap of dirt, tunneled by foxes or raccoons, was littered with tiny bones. “Where they put the newborns,” Larry said.

Jason said, “That’s what the plan always was, all the Daybreak poets worried about how to keep people from breeding back. Did you notice how many women are pregnant and how few kids there are? We used to say that our goal was not just to be the best generation but the last. So… Mother Earth needs our help. Babies are the enemy.”

“It explains why a place this big doesn’t have more crops growing,” Chris said. “They’re not planning to keep all their slaves alive through the winter.”

When they took a break, creeping back to share some venison jerky and dried apricots, Chris asked Jason, “Doesn’t it seem weird that the slaves they’re killing off are mostly women? Weren’t these guys supposed to be goddess-worshipping feminists?”

“That was the warm-up in the Daybreak sales pitch to women,” Jason said, thinking how much that sounded like his father or brother. “Some women love the idea of being all Earth-mothery, I am woman, I give birth to the world, I am the mother the world needs—I used to riff on phrases like that all the time for my Daybreak poems. But if human beings are a blight on the face of Mother Gaia, and getting rid of them is the paramount goal, you’ve got to get rid of women.

“Men breed too,” Chris pointed out.

“A hundred men and one woman can turn out about one baby per year. A hundred women and one man can turn out about a hundred babies per year. If you want to get rid of people, you get rid of mothers,” Jason said. “But that wasn’t what we said to them, not at first. Our first message was, ‘You are Woman and the world depends on you.’” He wasn’t looking up from his food, lost in thinking about home and his pregnant wife. “That’s what got Beth into it; she was from a dirty-ass pack of urban white trash scum that was trying to pretend they were ghetto gangstas because for them it was an upgrade. Daybreak was the first time anyone said they wanted her for something besides her boobs. A lot of women didn’t see where it was going till too late. A lot of men, too.” He seemed to be a thousand miles inside himself.

“Why don’t they rebel?” Chris asked.

“Some do. Beth and I walked into Pueblo and volunteered. I don’t know why more ex-Daybreakers don’t.”

“But why don’t they rebel here?”

Jason shrugged. “Why do you think there’s a whipping post and a boneyard?”