Directive 51

^{MIDNIGHT INVADES}

Most of the time, Americans live together like a colony of clams, growing and feeding by tapping into each other’s resources, with nothing much going on beyond the individual level. The whole grows and flourishes because its members grow and flourish. It’s efficient but purposeless unless you regard growth itself as a purpose—which nearly all Americans do.

Cooperation for a common purpose is about as American as sacrificing virgins to the Corn God; Americans have heard of it, but as something long ago and far away, not something they do themselves. When the force of circumstances does drive Americans to common action, usually it looks like a herd of cattle, either milling about until they calm down, or briefly stampeding. An especially urgent need or clear vision can make Americans form up more like a flock of geese, with a few out front pretending to know where they are going, and everyone else honking to keep the temporary, efficient formation together.

At midnight on October 29th, Americans were more like a wolf pack in which the alphas had just been shot: yapping, howling, growling, threatening, whimpering for comfort, barking defiance, and now and then, wheeling to maul each other.

^{WASHINGTON, DC. 12:14 A.M. EST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

At the curb, Heather asked Lenny, “Would you like to split a cab? We can talk while we ride. I had kind of a feeling that we were both having a lot more ideas than we wanted to put out in front of the high-level types in there.”

“Heather, you are high-level—higher than Mark Garren, you’re an assistant secretary and he’s only a deputy under.”

“Yeah, but he’s got a few hundred employees and a budget of mumble-umpty-classified gazillions, and I have nineteen employees and a copy machine. We’re equal according to the rules, but—”

“Ha. This town runs on rules. What do you call all that fretting about the Constitution?”

“A normal day for Cameron Nguyen-Peters.”

“And a good thing, too. But if we’re going to talk about that kind of stuff, let’s do it securely.” He pulled his AllVoice from the outside breast pocket of his jacket and requested a security-cleared limo. “It won’t take any longer to get home, the driver’ll handle my wheelchair better than a cabbie, and in the limo we can talk about anything in the world.”

“Anything?”

Lenny waggled an eyebrow. “You were thinking of talking dirty?”

“You start!”

He snorted. “I may take you up on that. But entirely aside from your being an interesting human being and nearly identical to my idea of beautiful, you said some things I’d like to pick your brain about.”

“Well,” Heather said, “like Woody Allen said, my brain is my second favorite organ.” She risked resting a hand on his shoulder.

He stretched and rolled his neck; he definitely seemed to like it. Well, it has been a while, he’s the only date that’s been any fun in the last couple years, intelligence is sexy, and any guy that thinks I’m beautiful, that’s a major plus right there.

As she helped to move his wheelchair into the limo, he said, “You’ve done this before.”

“My dad, for the last twenty years,” Heather explained. “His spinal cord was severed when an idiot drunk kid broadsided his Harley. It was a blind curve, and between his bike and an all-death-metal musical diet, Dad couldn’t have heard the drunk coming if he’d come with a brass band.”

Lenny laughed. “My mom has a Pod Twenty-One with all the country music ever recorded on it. I guess we can never fix our parents, can we?”

“I’m not sure I’d want to, but you’re right, we sure can’t.” The limo pulled away from the curb. “Actually, I really want to give the old guy a call now that I’ve talked about him. It won’t take long—do you mind?”

“I wish I could call my mother, but if I woke her up at midnight she’d put me in an orange crate and leave me at a foundlings’ home.”

“Aren’t you a little old for that, Lenny?”

“No one’s ever too old where their mother is involved.”

“Pbbbt. You set me up for that one. Okay, I’ll just be a minute.”

Her father picked up on the first ring. “Hey, there, little cop-chick.”

“Been following the news, Dad?”

“Naw, just worked my way up to Level Seventeen in DoomAge, been off in virtual ever since they canceled the Series. Can you believe they did that?”

“Actually, yeah, I can believe they did it. So you haven’t heard about Daybreak?”

“I think you have to be Level Twenty for that.”

“Seriously, Dad. Just for a sec.” She explained it briefly, embarrassed, in front of Lenny, to have to explain it the way she would to a distractible nine-year-old, but that was sort of what her big fuzzy dad was in every way except the physical. “So clean out the motors and electrics on your wheelchair with ammonia, and plan to do that more than once a day, and disinfect your tires. Like they say, this is not a drill.”

“Fuckin’ towelheads. And hippies.”

She refrained from pointing out that her father wore his hair down to his floating ribs with a beard that went beyond it and looked like he had dressed by rolling in a bin of denim and leather scraps. His comeback was inevitably that he’d voted for every Republican since Reagan, so whatever he was, it wasn’t a hippie.

“Just take care, okay, Dad? And if the chair starts to act up, take it down to the VA before it goes dead on you. I don’t want you stranded.”

“Okay, your old man will look after himself, Ms. Cop-chickie. Job going okay otherwise?”

“Yep.”

“Gonna bust the assholes that did it?”

“Working on it.”

“That’s my girl.”

She rung off and shook her head. “I hope that’s enough to keep him out of trouble. He’s not really all that old, but you know what guys like him tend to say, it’s not the years, it’s the mileage, and he’s really piled it on.”

“Where’s he live?”

“San Diego. He’s about five blocks from a VA facility, and they supply and support his power chair, so as long as they have parts and power, he can keep rolling. As long as he doesn’t get all stubborn and think he can fix it himself.”

“Well, at least he doesn’t have to worry about the heat going out,” Lenny pointed out.

“Yeah. Hey, you know, we’ve been out more times than I can count—”

“Seven. Good thing you’re the street cop and I’m the analyst.”

“Pbbt. I was about to say, ‘And I don’t know much about your family.’ That was going to be an invitation to talk about yourself. Serve you right if I only talked business.”

“Oh, no, you’re not getting out of it that easily.” Lenny told her about how, once he was on his own, Mom Plekhanov had gone back to school to become a special-needs teacher; then Lenny heard about life as a six-foot red-haired girl on the suburban edge of East LA. Then she discovered Lenny could be very funny on the subject of having been a Two-Million-Dollar Baby, despite the obvious fact that he had spent his first eight years of life in constant pain. Then he pointed out, “Whoops. We’re about two blocks from your place and we haven’t talked one bit of business yet. What would the taxpayers say?”

She barely thought for an instant. “I don’t know if it’s practical for you, but you could come up to my place, I’ve got a fridge full of leftovers we can eat while we talk, if you want, and then I can give you a ride home—there’s a lift on my car for when Dad visits, it’d be easy—or if it’s too late, you can crash out in my guest bedroom like a gentleman.”

“Assuming I am one.”

“Or trying to fool me into thinking you are.” I’m smiling too much. But then so is he.

“Works for me,” he said. “Definitely works for me.”

The limo driver had no apparent reaction to the change of destinations. Not reacting is probably a job requirement, Heather decided.

At her apartment, she introduced the cats: “The Siamese is Fuss. He’ll periodically yowl like death on steroids about nothing, and now and then he’ll get the rips and run all over the apartment, for reasons that probably make sense to him. He’s hardly ever affectionate with strangers, but once—”

Fuss sniffed at Lenny’s foot with cross-eyed concentration for a moment, leaped into his lap, curled up, and purred like an unmufflered lawn mower.

“Except, of course, I can always be wrong about him. The big lazy wad of fur that waddled in over there is a crossbred Persian and dust bunny, and I call him Feathers. He moves whenever he imagines there’s a possibility of something to eat. The only reason he appears to be alive is that he has a vivid imagination.”

“That’s funny,” Lenny said, “based on the things you always say about your social life, I was expecting about thirty cats.”

“That’s for after I retire. I’m working my way up gradually. Now, how do you prefer to transfer from wheelchair to couch, assuming Fuss ever lets go of you?”

“I’m comfortable in the wheelchair.”

“Yeah, but if I’m going to sit next to you and put the moves on you, I need you on the couch.”

“Oh, well, in that case, if we can just move the coffee table to give me a clear space, and perhaps persuade His Nibs here to relocate—”

“We’ll start with the easy one,” Heather said, scooping the ReadPod, Converse hi-tops, pizza box, and Nestle’s Wine-4-1 box off the coffee table and in one swoop to the kitchen. Classy way to make a good impression, she thought. Oh, well, at least I didn’t have a bra lying on it like I did all last week. She lifted the coffee table over the back of the couch and set it behind.

Lenny rolled forward. Fuss yowled as if his tail were on fire, shot at least five vertical feet, and vanished into Heather’s bedroom in a single gray-brown streak. “Well, that was easy,” Lenny said. “I didn’t know they could levitate.”

“I have to keep the windows closed so he doesn’t fly to the moon every time the neighbors turn on their blender. Can I interest you in a beer?”

“I bet you can.”

As she returned from the kitchen, a cold Corona in each hand, she saw that Lenny had transferred himself to the left end of the couch. Giving me the choice of next to him or at the other end. Maybe this guy’s a little too much of a gentleman.

To avoid towering over him, which she knew annoyed the hell out of her father, she slid onto the couch next to him. As she handed him the beer she brushed her head against his shoulder.

He slipped an arm around her. She kissed him, warmly, slowly, without tongue, or gripping and pulling, or any of the big-production ways of saying, Dude, you are so in.

Though you so are. I just don’t want to send you that message. Yet. She was just hoping that a plain old I like you kiss was what he was in the mood for.

Christ, I bet he’s thinking something just as complicated. This is what happens when you spend your whole life monitoring communications.

After the kiss, he said, “Well, that took care of most of my worries about misreading each other’s intentions. Um, is this the place where I tell you that although we have to be careful about my left arm and my right foot is hypersensitive, most of me moves, and the parts that—”

“We can skip all that till the issue comes up, Lenny.”

“We can?”

She grinned. “Well, if I put you through the full explanation of the mechanics before we got going, I’d have to admit that I did that to you to my dad, and then he’d beat me. And I’d deserve it. He gets so tired of having to do all that talking just to explain to whoever his latest is that he’s capable of having sex and it feels good. Look, I know that no sane man who was incapable would humiliate himself by starting a fire he couldn’t put out.”

“What if I’m not sane?”

“I’ve run into that a few times. Married it once, too. I recognize it when I see it, and you’re not crazy that way. So…” she kissed him again slowly, “as I said, we can discuss any special issues when they come up. Or when anything else comes up. Now relax, forget whatever happened with other women, and give me a chance to misunderstand you for myself.”

This time he kissed back, and she thought the question was settled until he said, “I’m hoping to break whole new territory in miscommunication before you decide you never want to see me again.”

“Are you this smooth with all the girls?”

“Only with the ones who are way too hot and interesting to be in my league.”

“Flattery may not get you everywhere, but it’ll probably get you more than far enough.”

He finally gave her the kiss she’d been trying for, definitely as the guy in charge this time. “And how would you know what my idea of ‘enough’ is?”

“Research,” she said, “starting now.”

^{NINETY MINUTES LATER. OFF THE CALIFORNIA COAST. 12:15 A.M. PST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

“How are we doing for collision avoidance? We’re outside the shipping lanes now, right?” Tracy asked.

She always worried like this, quite unnecessarily, when they were both below and trusting to automated systems, but Grady knew it was no use arguing. “Roll off me, fire us up some more herb, and I’ll see what the satellite says. Have to admit I’m going to miss this.” Grady gave one of Tracy’s fine, firm breasts an extra squeeze—he liked being crass with her because, despite her protests, it turned her on.

She got up—he liked how sticky her thighs were as they brushed over his—and padded over to the table to reload the bong.

Grady sat up, pulled the laptop over, and dialed up his GoogleNavReal-Time, setting it for CENTERHERE, 150 KM, and ALLBANDS so that anything registering infrared, visible light, or radar from any public satellite overhead, anywhere within 150 kilometers, would show up in the composite picture it generated; projected current position was shown in bright green, with the actual positions back along the track shown in progressively paler green as they came from longer ago.

“No danger of collision, no weather to worry about, still good,” he said, “and autowarning is active and working fine. We can sleep whenever you want to.”

“In that case,” she said, “how about I have the oven make us a fresh pizza, with lots of extra cheese, and we switch to a nice mellow red wine and some Gatorade so we don’t get dehydrated, and we start drifting off to sleep? I’m excited about Daybreak too, but it’s been a long day.”

Grady had been thinking about one more good blow job from his pretty wife, but sleeping without having to set a watch was a pleasure that would be gone soon; might as well enjoy it while they could. He stretched and yawned. “We’ll go with your plan. It was still warm last time I checked; want to go up on the deck and look at the stars?”

In sweaters and caps, they held hands, sipped warm green Gatorade from nice heavy china mugs, and savored the taste of the sweet/salty fluid and the cool, moist sea air. They admired the bright lights in the sky, picked out constellations, and even allowed the satellites to be sort of pretty too, before the automatic gizmo down in the galley summoned them to go back below for pizza.

“I won’t miss a lot of things,” Grady said, holding out his glass for her to refill, and pulling over another piece of pizza, “but sailing like this, with the machines to keep us safe and take care of us… well, even that. Yeah. Even that.”

“Even that what?” Tracy got all weird and puzzled sometimes like he wasn’t speaking English.

He let that go. “Even that will be better after Daybreak, ’cause we’ll be able to afford a crew, and they’ll be family—like your nanny or the maid was family when you were a kid. And, and, you know, like, it won’t be like the machines, because they’ll actually care about us. Besides, right now any schmuck with money can have the machines, and too many schmucks have too much money, so it’s like, it’s not special. Like it will be special when we’ve got crew that’s like family.”

“So pro fucking found, baby.”

“Daybreak is like Christmas, you know? You know you can’t really but wouldn’t it be great to have it every day?”

“Not if Daybreak was on Christmas. We’d miss the big dinner with my family.”

“Silly girl.”

At last they curled up like little animals in a burrow. The automated system was silent all night; the few ships in the area had people on watch and collision-avoidance systems of their own.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PUERTO PENASCO. MEXICO. SOMETIME AFTER 1:00 A.M. PST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

Ysabel’s coverall, plainly worn by many people before her, felt dirty, but not as soiled as she felt knowing that she was guilty as shit of helping to assassinate the vice president. She’d even liked Samuelson.

She’d been more a part of Aaron’s infiltration than of Daybreak itself; she’d been totally duped and she was totally bogus, and she hadn’t really been acting for the planet and for the peasants and for her real values; she’d just been a tool for goddam Aaron. If his name was Aaron. Probably that was as phony as his commune and the sympathy she thought she’d seen in his big soft Latin-poet eyes.

She’d fired that missile and risked all this so that Aaron and the other phony Daybreakers could kill one of the most sympathetic, decent politicians the pathetic old US had managed to produce. And it would be blamed on Daybreak.

She felt dirty, but she felt more like a fool. For the first time in her life, her fluent Spanish was a drawback; the federales had already interrogated her. One of them had big kind eyes, and nodded like he understood her, and gently explained about the diversion and Vice President Samuelson being killed in a cloud of dirty chemicals that were smearing all over beautiful desert right now; she could feel how sad that made him.

She’d wanted the kind-smiling, warm-eyed guy to understand that she wasn’t like this, that she’d made an awful mistake, contaminated herself with evil power-people armed-struggle hater macho games. And trying to help him to understand, she’d told the kind-eyed federale more than she meant to.

I swear, if I ever get out of this horrible mess, I will never look a man in the eyes again. I’ll get a big dog with big dark eyes and long, shaggy facial hair, and talk to him all day long. Please God, that’s a serious offer.

She couldn’t back out of the things she’d already admitted. Furthermore, she knew she’d be asked a lot more, soon, because they were just waiting for a truck convoy to take her to Tijuana, where she’d be handed over to the US authorities at the border.

She could see through the cell door to where her pack was sitting; if she just had that, and was on the outside for just a few minutes, she’d so get away.

Unfortunately, not even a body length away from her so-close pack, she could also see the local cop and his gun. Her efforts to engage him in a conversation in Spanish had been met with a curt Callate, fleje. Not a lot of negotiating you could do with that.

She didn’t know where she’d find it in herself to say, Dad, it just seemed like I ought to fire this Stinger missile at that blimp—I mean aerostat. Or maybe Aaron lied about that too and it really was a plain old blimp.

^{ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. RATON, NEW MEXICO. 3:30 A.M. MST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

At four o’clock in the morning, not much moved in Raton, New Mexico; a few lighted signs had been on through the night, and the first few of the morning were just coming on as sleepy workers flipped the switches inside on their way to warm up grills, lay out sales charts, work through the night’s e-mail, or set up chairs.

Jason, sitting in the cold dark in Zach’s passenger seat, lonely, scared, and determined not to show it, watched the first guy at the Greyhound station enter by the orange glow of the all-night lights. The man immediately flipped on the old fluorescents, lighting up the plate-glass window with cold glare; a moment later, the little neon-tube lights that said BREAKFAST SPECIAL, HOT FRESH DONUTS THIS MORNING SO GOOD!, and FRESH COFFEE all flickered to life. The man began loading a coffee urn.

“I guess that’s my cue,” Jason said.

“Wait till he turns on the OPEN sign,” Zach said. “He looks like the mean type that’d leave you to freeze your butt off on the sidewalk till he was good and ready. And besides, the coffee’s not ready, and you’re going to need that. Might as well sit in here till they’re ready to serve your breakfast.”

“Thanks.”

“Hey, it’s been one long crazy twenty-four hours, you know? We’re somewhere between bonded and crazy-glued.” Zach sighed. “This was not how I pictured Daybreak.”

“Me either. You think they’ll catch us? All of the Daybreak people, I mean, or most of us?”

Zach leaned back and considered. Jason liked that gesture, as if something he’d said was valuable. “I think they’ll try. More than we planned on. We figured by the time anyone knew about Daybreak, the Big System would be dead, and they’d have no way to find us or put out the word.

“Now people are going to find a lot more of us than they would have if whoever it was hadn’t murdered the vice president. How did that slip through our filters? Why didn’t the peers stop that? I mean, I personally quashed at least ten stupid, cruel ideas.”

Jason nodded. “I saw a bunch of notes from one guy who thought modern medicine was the biggest, evil-est part of the Big System, and he was trying to find people to help him wreck hospitals. Everyone I knew hug-mobbed the guy to chill him, focus him on acting for living things—but then he drifted away. What if he just found another AG to join, where they were even crazier? Are we gonna hear tomorrow that someone poison-gassed a whole hospital?”

“Peer guidance was supposed to prevent that.”

“Yeah, but every AG got to pick their own peers.” Jason slugged his fist into his palm. “We had the same problem my stupid-ass brother and father did, putting all our faith in procedures and organizations and our own good intentions, which is how Dad and Clayt end up supporting every stupid war and seeing the positive side of every ecocide. Yuck. I thought we were supposed to be different, you know?”

“Yeah. ‘Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help. His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.’”

“I’m guessing that’s your guy Jesus.”

“No, Psalm 146. Big one for Stewardship Christians. But what I meant it to say was, hey, haven’t we all said, all along, we’re animals like the other animals? I wouldn’t expect the dog to do everything perfect, either.”

“Yeah.” Jason thought. “But the real question is still, are they going to catch us?”

Zach said, “Yeah. I know. I was avoiding the question too.”

A bakery truck pulled up, and the man carried two racks into the bus station.

“Just now I bet the doughnuts are warm,” Jason pointed out, “and the guy in there is pouring himself coffee.”

“Yeah, you’re right, it’s time, and I should be getting home to Trish anyway, she’ll be worried silly. Got my number in case of trouble?”

“Yeah, but I’ll be fine. Thanks for the ride, and the company.” He reached for the door handle.

Zach said, “Just one thought, Jason. Don’t stop at home, grab your girlfriend and just take off—don’t stick around to see what your gun-crazy survivalist neighbors do. I have a bad feeling.”

“Yeah. You take care too. Happy Daybreak.”

“Happy Daybreak yourself,” Zach said, not sure why he felt so afraid to drive the three miles to his house.

To Jason, the fluorescent lights on the linoleum and Formica looked cold, but it was a lot colder out here in the dark. To the far, cold stars, he thought, soon, soon. After all, what was more natural than things getting dark and cold, just before Daybreak?

^{ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. JUST SOUTH OF EXIT 19 ON I-75. BETWEEN DAYTON AND CINCINNATI. OHIO. BEGINNING ABOUT 7:00 A.M. EST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

Many of the far-bedroom commuters, who lived twenty or even thirty miles from downtown Cincinnati, in towns like West Chester, Jericho, Bethany, Gano, and Tylersville, liked to leave work early, to return to the big house with a view of a golf course or a jogging trail, in time to go to the kids’ after-school stuff. For most office workers, leaving work at three thirty required starting at seven thirty, so by seven in the morning, southbound traffic on I-75, even here, well north of the city, ran heavy: a mix of sturdy family-friendly minivans, first-good-job new subcompacts, and I’ve-settled beaters. A few bright stars remained, and low in the sky, a crescent moon bowed to the east, pointing to the sun that was still an hour away. The horizon was a line of blue-black, and the trees along the highway, mostly stripped of leaves in late fall, broke the dim twilit sky to the east into myriad panels, slices, and wedges.

Traffic roared by at the speed limit. Trooper Davis appreciated the peaceful order of it all. He waited in a median pullout, not eagerly, for the first aggressive speeder to zip by. His days usually contained many moments worse than this.

He was thinking about the coffee in his thermos when the minivan in the southbound left lane had a messy blowout—the tire totally grenaded, dropping the minivan onto the rim at that corner, and he held his breath while the driver fought it across the right lane; luckily the red Camaro in the right lane behind it was alert and the pavement was dry, so the minivan made it over onto the shoulder—

Shit. Looks like the Camaro blew a tire, too, in the hard braking. The guy behind him, less alert, missed the Camaro by a hair, and only by swinging into the left lane. That sudden change triggered a wave of brake lights. Davis flipped on his bubble and siren and turned up onto the left shoulder to go sort all this out. At least his lights would make people slow down and wake up.

Passing the now-forming traffic jam, he saw half a dozen more blowouts. Crap. That Daybreak stuff they were warning us about at the shift briefing.

Closer to the front of the jam, he found a couple of fender benders. Davis called it in; didn’t look like anyone was hurt, and no air bags had fired, spacing had been good, speeds not excessive, and pavement dry. Nonetheless, this was going to be a major mess. Just behind the original blowout situation, three collided cars in a rough Z stretched most of the way across both lanes; everything in front of them had either made it to a shoulder or was finding a way through and rolling on.

Davis decided that would do for a starting point. He braked, left the flashing lights on to tell drivers behind him that there was an officer on the scene, and walked up to the Z-form collision.

The drivers were two lady office workers in sensible little hybrids, and a sad, frustrated-looking sales type in a cheap washable suit and an obvious by-the-weeker used Kia. Their paperwork was all in order, even the sales-guy’s insurance; the bar code on his license authorized a breathalyzer, but Davis didn’t see any reason to do that. They all had grenaded, torn-off flats; Sales Loser’s tire had blown after his car had stopped.

They agreed to move their cars over to the left, so Davis pulled the patrol car across the lane to block traffic for them, and set up a choke point to keep things slow as he worked out the jam.

He grabbed his electronic pad and headed up the snarl of traffic on foot, talking to dispatch on handset as he went.

At least a third of the cars in the jam had flat tires. An odd stench, not like cow or pig or chicken, but definitely like some kind of manure, hung in the air. Yeah, this has to be that Daybreak thing. From a low rise he saw that he already had a two-mile jam, at least, on his hands, and called in to the dispatcher, asking for another couple of cars “and a Daybreak specialist if there is such a thing.”

With a sigh, he got back to work, moving everyone with a burst tire to one shoulder or the other, clearing a lane for the trapped but functional cars. He flagged down a couple frantic idiots who were trying to zigzag between shoulder and lane to get past, and gave them their well-earned tickets. He noted a plate number on one asshole who shot him the finger and zipped on by, calling it in for an intercept up the road.

The farther along he went, the more tires were blown, at least twenty so far in this quarter mile of stopped cars. He sent up a prayer of thanks; if this had been an icy morning, he’d be looking at real wrecks, deployed air bags, injuries, maybe even some deaths and fires, instead of merely the worst fall day he’d ever had.

He saw the shreds of tire on the front driver side of the next car and leaned over the window. “When this guy right in front of you pulls forward, you can pull forward into the space he’s in, and then left, over there, onto the shoulder. It’s that Daybreak thing from the news last night. The best thing for everyone to do is sit tight, off the road, till we get whatever it is cleaned off.”

“Sure thing, Officer.” The fiftyish woman wore a plain cloth coat and slacks; she looked like an office worker, probably taking the two grandkids in the back to day care. While her daughter works a shift at 7-Eleven or McDonald’s, bet you anything, and not a man in sight anywhere around the place. Oh, well, not my business.

The car ahead pulled forward. Nice Office Lady turned to go left onto the shoulder. With a sound like somebody’d fired a 9mm inside a trash can, something stung his lower leg. He looked down to see the remains of the other passenger-side tire from her sedan, smeared across the pavement and wrapped partly around his leg.

“Oh, no,” she said quietly. “I only have one spare.”

Davis flexed his ankle; it had stung but apparently done no other harm. “Yeah. I don’t know how soon they’ll be able to get help out here and it might just be to evacuate; I’d pack anything you don’t want to leave in your car, if you can.”

“My god,” she said, “What’s that awful smell?”

He bent to shine his flashlight at the damp mess of her tire. It looked wet or greasy, as if it had been splashed with black oil or partly melted. The reek of raw shit nearly knocked him out. “The Daybreak bug,” he told her. “Be real careful pulling over.”

Her other rear tire blew as she parked it; they exchanged helpless shrugs.

As Davis walked on up the line the thuds and bangs sounded like a distant war starting; with a loud report, one tire just behind him flung goopcovered shards across his calves, and he jumped. I wonder if it’s getting worse because it’s warming up. The stench of rotting tires was like putting your head up a sick goat’s ass.

The smell grew stronger, the bangs and thuds more frequent, and some of the drivers were angrier with him, and some more resigned. When the sun came up at eight, and the temperature started to rise rapidly, the remaining tires started to blow in great volleys, and the reek became strong enough so that many of the stranded motorists were throwing up on the roadside.

He had a moment of hope when the dispatcher called to tell him a Daybreak specialist was coming out, but then the rest of the explanation came: “He’s a microbiologist from Wright State. He’s walking out to you—it’s about six miles—and he’ll be taking samples of the rotting tires.”

“Is there anything he can do?”

“As far as we know, he’ll just take samples and start walking back. Might be a day or more before he even gets to his lab, and the power just went off up there, so he might not even be able to study the Daybreak bugs when he gets them there.”

“Great. Well, there aren’t too many cars that can move anymore, so I guess it doesn’t matter if you get me traffic-control backups, or not.”

“They’re all stranded with flat tires. Right now we’re trying to find some way of evacuating, but tell anyone who can walk home they should start, and not waste daylight. Nobody’s going to come into the city today from the north—all those routes are under quarantine. The microbiologist will look for you by your car, so be there in an hour or so.”

It was in perfect keeping with Trooper Davis’s day that when he returned to his cruiser, it rested on four soggy, stinking piles of black goo. Can’t cry in front of the civilians, he reminded himself, and leaned against the cruiser, drinking the coffee from his thermos while it was still hot. All he had left, emotionally, was a small shrug, and an unvoiced Well, shit.

Feeling better for the coffee, and unable to remain passive for long, he started his long walk up the highway, looking for anyone in trouble he might be able to help. He found plenty of people in trouble.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. ON US 64. JUST WEST OF UTE PARK. NEW MEXICO. JUST AFTER 5:00 A.M. MST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

Jason had been walking along 64 for about forty minutes, ever since the bus’s front tires both burst while the guy was trying to slow on a downgrade, and he’d slid sideways into a disabled semi in a runaway lane. That had scared the piss out of Jason, the three old Indian ladies, and the two servicemen on leave—all the passengers on the bus—but it had not been at all as bad as it seemed; the bus had not rolled, and the bump against the semi trailer had been at less than ten miles an hour, just a sort of steel-to-steel kiss really. So after all the fear, there they were, off the road, bus upright, able to take their stuff off, and the bus driver had had a working phone, so he’d called for someone to come and pick everyone up with a van from Taos, not far away.

Except he’d conspicuously not mentioned Jason, and the moment he’d gotten off the phone he’d said, “So you, get lost. You’re not riding with us.”

“What?” Jason couldn’t believe this. “I paid for my ticket like anyone else.”

“Yeah, but you got long hair and a beard and you look like a fuckin’ hippie, kid. And everything was fine all the way from Lubbock, till you got on my bus, and now my tires are gone and they smell like moldy cheese. That might be a coincidence and it might not. So I’m splitting the difference. They said to be alert for Daybreakers, and maybe you are and maybe you ain’t. You look like a hippie and you got on the bus at one weird time. But I’m not turning you in—unless you decide to act like a shithead—but I’m not giving you no ride, either. Argue and go talk to the sheriff, or start walkin’—don’t be around here when the van gets here.”

One of the servicemen, an Army sergeant, had tried to intervene on Jason’s behalf, but Jason could see that all this was going to do was strand two of them, or maybe three if his buddy backed him, so Jason said it didn’t matter, he wasn’t going to ride with people who treated him like shit, and walked off with his pack on his shoulder.

64 was usually pretty empty but tonight it was really-o truly-o empty, like a walk through a pine-scented void with brilliant stars. The crescent moon shed just enough light to silver the east-facing rock cliffs of the mountains and reveal the rest as dark lumpy shadows. It was cold and quiet, a perfect chance to think and reflect, if he’d had enough energy to form an actual thought. He kept putting one foot in front of the other; no sense freezing or giving up when it was mostly downhill anyway.

When he finally heard a truck behind him, Jason didn’t believe it at first, but as the headlights flashed around the bends up the mountain from him, he stuck out his thumb. A second miracle happened; the truck slowed and pulled over into a turnout. Jason ran to the passenger side.

The truck driver, a plump, balding man with aviator glasses, did not look friendly or welcoming.

“How’d you end up out here tonight?”

Jason answered without thinking, “The bus got two flats, and the driver threw me off for looking like a hippie.”

“Hunh. I saw the bus back there a ways. You’ve been walking a while.”

“Yeah.” Jason thought for a second. “I don’t know how to prove I’m not a Daybreaker except, you know, I’m carrying a laptop computer, and they’re supposed to be all anti-tech.”

“That’s a start. What were you traveling for?”

“Following a bunch of coustajam concerts.” It was lame but the only thing he could think of offhand. “I had this idea that I’d pick up enough advertising money by covering them on the net.”

“How’d it work out?”

“Complete flop. I’m living on money my dad sends, and I was planning to go home to Connecticut after the last three big concerts, work for him to pay off all the money he sent, and then go back to college and finish it.”

The man was smiling slightly. “So you’re actually just a classic spoiled rich kid and not a crazy hippie asshole who tried to destroy our country?”

“That’s about it.”

“Well, come on aboard. You and me are gonna wipe down all my tires with hospital disinfectant, which is what the truck is loaded with, and we’ll do that once an hour till you get to—where you going?”

“Tres Piedras. It’s not far.”

“Well, you can help me wipe here, and then just before I let you off, and keep me awake in between.”

Sloshing and scrubbing with the foul-smelling disinfectant, on the dark road, trying to keep up with the speed the driver was working, it occurred to Jason that he’d had worse times. When they climbed into the cab, there was even coffee from the autocafé and the pleasure of sun coming up behind them with the high mountains all around.

I’m really not a bad spy. Jason and the driver traded the little stories that strangers do to stay awake; his cover story gave him a chance to talk about his family. He was surprised that he worried about them and missed them, and hardly had to do any acting at all.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. DUBUQUE, IOWA. 6:44 A.M. CST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

On the first ring, Chris Manckiewicz rolled out of bed, grabbed his phone from the nightstand, saw it was Norcross’s campaign, and achieved enough coherence to accept the call. Press conference in ten minutes, meeting room downstairs, blah blah blah, could he be there?

Also, probably in less than an hour they’d be clearing for a flight to DC—total change of plans—if Chris could come to the press conference with his bags packed, would he like to do an exclusive in the air?

“I’m packed.” He never went to bed without having packed his whole grip and laid out clothes for the next day. “And I’ll be in the press room before your candidate is.”

He even had time to comb his hair, brush his teeth, and message 247NN to open a channel.

^{ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. PALO ALTO. CALIFORNIA. 5:15 A.M. PST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

“Okay, the Internet connection cannot possibly be down here at SRI,” Cicolina said into the phone. “We created the Internet right here back in 1969. We had Internet when it had two terminals worldwide. And we built it to never go down, ever.”

“I know that, sir, I’m sorry, I’m just reporting—” There was a squawk and a hiss, and when Cicolina tried to call back, there was no dial tone.

He turned to face the room of engineers and scientists, many of them in sweatpants, raggy T-shirts, and other night clothing; it looked like none of them had combed their hair, ever, but then they always looked that way. Not a pretty sight, but it was probably the best collection of brains on the planet, and considering Weisbrod had only called him an hour and a half ago, this was pretty damned good. The things we do for our old teachers.

Cicolina said, “All right, this is going to be tougher than we thought. Let’s see what we can do; we always knew we might have to save the world.”

They applauded. He thought, Hey, as a motivational speaker, I guess I’m better than I thought I was. Then the lights went out.

By the time they made it up the staircase to ground level, by the emergency light, the mood was shot; everyone wanted to go home to family and friends.

He thought he’d lost them till they discovered all the flat tires in the parking lot, and that a good third of their cars wouldn’t start, with great wads of nasty white stuff under the hood. For some reason, that pissed them all off, and they started dividing into teams to work on the problem of how to do a “cold start” on advanced civilization.

As he looked at the swarm of men and women bent in little knots around whiteboards and notepads, hastily relocated to the sunny second floor on the south side of the building, Cicolina said, “Reminds me of what the old-timers, back when I was just starting project management, said the Manhattan Project had been like.”

“Yeah,” Roseann, his assistant, said. “Except, you know, they had electricity and phones for the Manhattan Project.”

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 8:25 A.M. EST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

Heather was so much bigger than Lenny that it had been easy for her to position an arm and a thigh to support his different, asymmetric body, and to sleep with his slight weight resting partly on her. When she woke to the soft chime of her phone, she moved Lenny to a more convenient position, careful not to bend anything that didn’t seem like it should bend. He mumbled, and she squeezed his shoulder affectionately.

She made sure the phone was definitely not on video, and whispered, “Yeah, Arnie?”

“Norcross is going on the air any second. Considering the impact he had last night, and the way the media have been running excerpts from that speech all night long, I thought you’d want to tune in.”

Lenny, beside her, was stretching and using his good hand to rub some of his back muscles. “I’m awake,” he said.

She said “Voice identify and open,” and an image of her computer desktop appeared on the room’s ceiling. “Find Norcross press conference today not yesterday soon not past,” she said.

“On forty-six channels.” Icons appeared on her ceiling.

“Select Spanfeed.”

“Hey, we’re both Spanfeed people. We’re even more compatible.” Lenny turned to put his head on her shoulder; she reached over him, her hands exploring his back, working muscles that were tight, and he sighed like Fuss did when she found the right places.

The image on the ceiling was almost life-size, as if they were looking through a glass wall into the meeting room at the Dubuque Radisson; Norcross appeared to emerge prone from a door about forty feet above Heather’s ceiling and walk down the wall to the podium. “At least he’s not walking in over the swimming pool.”

Heather snorted. “Laugh while you can. One more speech like the one last night, and Mr. Jesus is probably the President of the United States.”

Norcross announced his campaign would be aiming to win the presidency by the “shortest possible route,” because it was now his duty to win the election and put matters right, and so he had calculated a pathway of appearances that would take him through the set of states he judged himself most likely to win—all the traditionally solid Republican states plus Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Missouri, Maryland, and Colorado. He admitted how hard it might be, but he added, “We need a President. I am qualified and ready to be one. The other side is not offering that, and we have to have it.”

Simple as Norcross’s message was as a text, the subtext was even simpler: I am religious, not a nut; I would not have done anything so stupid, and stupidity must be punished; I realize that you don’t care for my policies, but I am your alternative, so I will be moderate domestically if you’ll let a grown-up take over national security.

“Phew. He’s the next president, all right,” Heather said, as the network logo popped up with a picture of the Dubuque Radisson and the caption Decision in Dubuque.

“Yeah. Can the Democrats even replace Pendano on the ticket?”

“The ballot slot technically belongs to the party, not the person, in all the states, ever since that Caroline Kennedy uproar. Theoretically, the DNC could just tell everyone ‘a vote for Pendano is really a vote for this other person.’ But who do they have who could possibly win?”

Lenny Plekhanov said, “President Norcross. We’ll have to get used to—”

Her phone beeped, and an ID appeared on the screen on the ceiling. “Confirm no video.”

“Confirmed.”

“Pick up phone.”

“On line.”

“Hey, Cameron,” she said.

“I’m glad you got a chance to sleep,” he said. “We’re having a meeting of everyone working on the Daybreak problem, with Secretary Ferein and several other bigwigs, at one o’clock this afternoon. The meeting before the meeting will be lunch at eleven, and here’s the address. Can you pass that on to Lenny Plekhanov? He’s invited to both meetings.”

“I’ll be there,” Lenny said.

Heather snorted. “You know, some people would object to your tracking our whereabouts? I mean just hypothetically and all. Thought I’d mention that.”

Cam said, “Sorry about the intrusion—”

“I was yanking your chain, Cam, I really shouldn’t do that.”

“You might as well, everyone else does.”

She grinned and rolled her eyes at Lenny; Cameron Nguyen-Peters had been known to everyone at the FBI Academy as “Eeyore.” “Unofficially, how is the real president this morning?” she asked.

“Sedated. Graham Weisbrod had to talk him into that, too. As for the Acting President, and by god that’s a good term, he’ll be at the one o’clock meeting—along with President-Damn-Near-Certain-To-Be-Elect Norcross.”

“Oh, you saw that speech too,” she said, smiling. “Okay, Cam, see you at eleven.”

“Well,” Lenny said, working through the complicated, awkward process to move from bed to wheelchair, “it sounds like you and Cameron have a history.”

Smiling, she came around and knelt beside him so he could use her as a stabilizing rail. With his fused hand braced on her shoulder, and his good hand on the armrest, he easily slipped back into the chair. She said, “Let me make a guess. Does your history happen to include being dumped a lot?”

“Can’t be dumped a lot if you aren’t picked up much,” he pointed out, sullenly.

“Yeah. True. Okay, well, if my love life was a bridge, it would have holes in the deck, towers leaning every which way, and no one in their right mind would venture onto it. Mixture of poor construction and too much traffic, you know? So… I was Cameron Nguyen-Peters’s one and only friend at the FBI Academy because, well, Christ, somebody had to be. A couple weeks before graduation, on the strength of its having been a while, my appreciation for his loyalty, and a few tons of plain old desperation, I went out with him. Once. He made the most gentlemanly and discreet pass I’ve ever seen in my life; the pass was an incomplete, because the receiver was by then not the least bit interested; he did not attempt a punt, end run, or field goal; and the game was called on account of he doesn’t have a damned clue about human beings, and I’ve known warmer snowmen.

“Ever since, whenever we’ve worked together, he has been cordial, friendly, and a good old friend, and he sometimes asks my opinion about things because for reasons not totally clear to me he values my judgment just as if I had any. Oh, and now and then, when he’s doing something really buttheaded, I tell him so.” Still kneeling, she was below Lenny’s eye level, and she leaned forward. “Now kiss me, dammit.”

He did, and seemed to relax. She decided it wouldn’t hurt to drive the point home. “Since that date, which I point out was around thirteen years ago, when he was merely a knee-jerk conservative, Cameron Nguyen-Peters has become a complete right-wing nut of the type that thinks this country is about the flag, God, and the Army, and so I wouldn’t be able to listen to him talk politics for three minutes without strangling him. He is a cold fish emotionally and admits, himself, that he needs massive coaching in order to express the feelings he probably doesn’t have. He is so irritating that every time he swims in the ocean, he causes pearls to grow in oysters a thousand miles away. He has several good qualities, such as being a pretty good sport about being teased, being an Angels fan, regular flossing, and the way he keeps his shoes shined. I’ve honestly dated worse, though not twice.”

Lenny was laughing by that time, and said, “Is it really so terribly obvious how insecure I am?”

“They’re detecting it with obsolete barometers in Maine, dude.”

He kissed her again. Well, at least he kisses like the question is settled.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. MARANA. ARIZONA. 6:45 A.M. MST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

Kai-Anne hadn’t slept very much that night; the back yard was warm enough with her sweatsuit and blankets, but she’d kept waking up to find Greg still gazing up at the sky. Then she’d rub his neck and shoulders, he’d say he loved her, she’d kiss his forehead like she was tucking Bryan in, and then he’d tell her to go back to sleep. She wasn’t sure how many times she did that before dawn; three or four maybe.

Just as the sun was coming up, he turned, hugged her, and said, “I think I can sleep now. Let’s go inside.”

“What do you think about while you’re watching the sky?” she asked, as they dragged their blankets and pillows back into the house.

“Same as always. That the stars are far away and don’t seem to be interested in us. That there’s got to be a better way than killing people. And that I’m glad I’ve got you and Harris, Chloe, and Bryan. Sometime after the sun comes up, it always makes enough sense for me to sleep.”

“Yeah. I guess I can see how that would work.”

They didn’t bother making the bed; they just stretched out and dragged the blankets, still damp from the yard, over themselves, and kept warm by holding each other.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. ON US 64. A LITTLE EAST OF TRES PIEDRAS. NEW MEXICO. 6:50 A.M. MST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

The trucker had been working his satellite two-way connections, and Jason had been checking the Internet, and all the news was bad. “Buddy,” the trucker said, “I hate to tell a man what to do but if I was you I’d get a haircut and shave real soon.”

“Planning on it,” Jason said.

All over the countrythere were reports of vigilante actions;people discovered their cars were dead, their kitchens were not working, the food in their refrigerators was spoiling—in short, that everything was going wrong—and remembered the long-haired guy down the street who nagged them about recycling, or the girl in the long skirt at the coffeehouse who always gave them a little lecture about using sugar instead of organic honey in their morning latte. People like to have someone to be angry with when there are too many small annoyances in life, and the first day of Daybreak comprised myriad small annoyances for which the Daybreakers really were responsible. Most of the people they were catching were not Daybreakers, but punching out the sanctimonious Green neighbor, or humiliating the preachy coworker, were pleasures not to be missed on a day so full of irritation.

“Hey,” the trucker said, and turned up the volume.

The news from Tres Piedras was that the local people had thought they had found a nest of Daybreakers outside town, and the sheriff had declared that he didn’t have the resources to deal with the situation. There weren’t many details but a trucker driving through town had said he’d seen a mob with guns heading up the hill.

Jason knew he must look sick, but he hoped it would look like he was shocked at the news of violence rather than terrified for his friends and Beth. Kindly, the trucker said, “Buddy, if you want, you can stay in the truck—I’m going right through and we’ll go all the way to Phoenix if the tires hold. Or if you really have to be there, maybe we should let you out someplace where you can walk?”

“I know a trailhead on the highway near town,” Jason said, feeling his mouth moving as if it belonged to someone else. “You can drop me there, and I can walk in, no prob, there’s a trail right to the public park.” But I’ll take the one that goes uphill. Five and a half miles and it’s kind of a climb to the commune, but maybe I won’t be too late.

^{ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. RATON. NEW MEXICO. 7:20 A.M. MST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

Tiff was shaking him. “Honey, you gotta wake up, I’m sorry, it’s Teddy.”

Zach sat up in bed. “What’s wrong?”

“His asthma’s worse than I’ve ever heard it, and the inhaler—” She held it out to him; the plastic cartridge had ruptured; it stank like sour milk. “All our crates of them, they’re all bursting and they all smell wrong—”

“That biote wasn’t one of mine,” he said, stupidly, feeling like Lord, Lord, if it can just not be my fault… He started getting dressed. “The Walgreens we have the prescription at is twenty-four-hour, phone them and—”

“No phone. Our landline is down, and on the cell the store’s line just comes back with a busy—”

Louder gasping from Teddy’s room. Tiff rushed back to him; Zach grabbed his wallet and keys.

In the freezing early mountain morning he thought, Please start, please please start, please still have your tires—

He blessed the old thing a thousand times in his head as it started on the first try, and drove carefully, not sure what might happen if he pushed it. At Walgreens, he bought five inhalers—the legal maximum—and they all looked all right. On his way home, he used the cell to tell Tiff to scour the medicine cabinet with Drano and rubbing alcohol.

Harold Cheiron, Zach’s across-the-street neighbor, was waiting in the driveway for him, not letting him pull in—and holding a deer rifle. Something moved in his rearview—Cheiron’s wife with a shotgun.

Then he saw that on either side of him were that couple from down the street—what were their names?—he with a bat, she with a pistol, all of them looking ready to use them.

Cheiron gestured for Zach to roll down the window. “So where are you coming back from?”

“My—my son Teddy, I had to go out and get asthma medicine for him, what’s this about? I have the medicine here—” He held up the Walgreens bag.

Cheiron advanced to the car window and looked at it. “I’ll give this to your wife. You wait here.”

Harold returned and brought Tiff, who was holding Teddy (breathing easily now), and leading Noah by the hand; he was fresh from sleep, dragging his stuffed dog with him.

“She was scrubbing down her medicine cabinet,” Harold said, “like trying to get rid of some kind of germs or something, and inside, they have boxes and boxes of inhalers, which have all rotted, and he’s got a neat little workshop down there where he was building some kind of electronic gadget, it looks like, probably a lot of them, to judge by all the parts he had and the little jigs and marked breadboards. And he came in at about four thirty yesterday morning. And their walls are practically papered with The Earth Is The Lord’s posters. Now, on Good Morning America, they said the things to watch out for were people who came and went at unusual hours yesterday, people whose hobbies seemed to include home laboratories, Green types, and people who seemed to be having troubles with weird germs. I vote that this family ought to go talk to the sheriff; any other votes?”

It was unanimous; Zach and Tiff didn’t get votes. Shortly they were all piled into the back of Cheiron’s panel truck, rolling slowly through the street. Cheiron’s wife drove; Cheiron sat, the shotgun held across his chest, in back with Zach and his family. “You’re lucky we like you around here, and you have kids we’d rather not hurt,” Cheiron said to them, apropos of nothing. “They’re asking people to go to the cops with suspected Daybreakers but there’s all kinds of stories about people taking the law into their own hands. Naturally since it’s mainstream media reporting, they’re worrying more about vigilantes getting out of hand than about what you Daybreak bastards have already done.”

“Harold,” Mrs. Cheiron said. “Their boys are right here.”

“Sorry. Daybreak jerks. Anyway, if you’re guilty, we don’t want you to get away, and if you’re innocent, the sheriff will be a lot more protection than your house was. Don’t bother telling me one way or the other. Once we hand you off to the sheriff, you’re all his problem. If they let you go, I guess I’ll owe you an apology.”

Teddy gasped and Tiff got the inhaler into his mouth again; before she pocketed it again, she wiped it with a Diapie-Wipe. Zach watched her dully, trying to pretend he didn’t understand; Harold Cheiron stared at them, face to face and back again, like a cougar deciding which sheep to jump on; probably he was just trying to remember everything he saw them do for the sheriff.

^{TWENTY MINUTES LATER. WARSAW. INDIANA. 9:30 A.M. EST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

Back when Robert Cheranko was a kid who didn’t talk much because, really, words were kind of a nuisance, his classmates had nicknamed him Silent Bob, after some dumb movie that was already old then. Exactly one guy had ever asked him if he preferred Bob or something else, and he’d immediately said, “Robert,” which Karl Parsoni remembered from then on. As a result, Robert had never even thought about applying to be promoted and getting a truck of his own; he was an assistant lineman for high-tension wires, and he hadn’t done anything more about qualifying or promoting since—at Karl’s urging—he’d gotten his certificate for live-line operations.

Every day, he and Karl cruised back and forth, starting and finishing in the same office in Warsaw, in Kosciusko County, sometimes getting as far as the Ohio or Illinois state lines, now and then getting clear up to the lake or down to the river, just answering calls. Karl would do about ninety percent of the talking, which suited them both, because Robert thought Karl was the most interesting guy he’d ever listened to, and Karl agreed with him. Mostly, Karl, an amateur naturalist, talked about the birds he’d seen along a stream, or habitat for this kind of fish or that kind of shrew, or where the elderberries would be good this year; high-tension lines run through what Karl called “a fair-enough bit of rough-enough country,” which Karl liked to see on a regular basis.

Today, the orders had been “short and smart,” as Karl said, pointing at the paper as he peered at Robert over his reading glasses. In his red Bean chamois shirt, suspenders, and immense white beard, he looked like a slightly and harmlessly mad Santa Claus. “Robert, they haven’t said where, but they just want me to investigate some high-tension lines close to home. There are big increases in line resistance around here and they want us to see what we can find, leaving it up to us to decide where to find it. There’s some lines where if the truck dies it won’t be more than a mile and a half walk from my hunting cabin, but that’s a good fifteen miles out of town. Is there anything in the world that you’d hate to be without for a couple of weeks or so, say back at your apartment? We might be stuck out there that long if things really take a bad turn, but I’d rather be stuck someplace with wood heat and kerosene lamps.”

Robert considered. “Family pictures—my sister and folks are gone, I’d like to have those pictures around. And if I’m going to stay at a hunting cabin, I should get some more warm clothes. Plus I eat the same stuff over and over, and there’s plenty of it ’cause I buy in bulk, might as well bring the can and box stuff along.”

They grabbed the pictures, clothes, and food, and at Karl’s insistence, they brought along Robert’s banjo. “I’m not very good,” he pointed out.

“Yeah, there might be a lot of time to practice. If you’ve got extra strings, bring them too.”

Karl drove slowly down the narrow, cracked blacktop between the cornfields, chattering on, as always, about the way the crows were flocking, about the absence of other traffic, about the way the streams might change if there weren’t so many pumps around to keep pushing the water back onto the land.

Robert savored the hot coffee from the thermos; he knew it all came from overseas, and in case there wasn’t any for a long time, he wanted to make sure he appreciated it. They stopped at the cabin and unloaded the supplies from the truck, then followed the dirt road to where the power lines crossed.

Robert saw it first. “Look at those things hanging from the lines—the bright shiny things.”

With binoculars, they could see threads and strings hanging down from the power lines themselves, some of them as long as two or three feet.

Karl scratched thoughtfully under the huge beard. “Whatever those are, they’re made out of something, and my guess is it’s the power line; they’re stripping metal off it. Either it’s going to break, or they’ll reach the ground and short it out or maybe start a fire. We want to take a couple of those aluminum strings, in a sample bottle, back to look at, and call that good.”

“Sounds right to me,” Robert said. “We could put a jar on the end of a live-line pole and maybe shake one of the nearest ones in, from the tower, if you think it’d be safe.”

“Except the tower probably has some too, that would get on our boots and get loose in the truck.”

Robert scanned to the top of the tower; sure enough, bright strings of metal hung from it as well. “Well, they’re easy enough to reach,” he said. “And I don’t know how they got them up there but they aren’t on the lower parts of the towers, so my guess is they’re still working their way down. They said lye kills ’em?”

“Yeah, and I’ve got some industrial lye in the lockbox.”

“So I put on the spare gloves and apron and booties, go up to the strut below the first string we can see from the ground, and I use the live-line pole and jar to see if I can just take one off. When I do, I bring it down, cap it, and scrub the jar off with lye. We leave the spare gear here, take the jar back, and figure we’ve been about as safe as we can be.”

Forty feet above the ground, Robert spotted a small string he could reach and stopped to take stock for a moment. That was when he realized how quiet it was today; no noise from Indiana 25, though it was less than a mile away; no tractors out turning under the last of the corn and soybean fields; no cars moving, and just a few people walking, in the little crossroads town of Palestine off to the west. He could hear dogs barking, distant cattle, mobs of birds, and the wind. Nothing else.

The cabin had no landline, and their cell phones were dead, so they chanced a trip into Palestine and phoned from the pay phone at the gas station. Karl was on the phone for a long time; when he finished, he said, “Well, I’m supposed to put the jar in the mail to Indy, try turning my cell phone on once a day to check for messages, and if not, they’ll send us out notice by mail, to the hunting cabin. I want to take a little snip of the string for my own interest.”

He got another jar from the car, and working gingerly with tweezers, broke the aluminum string and dropped one end into the new jar. It took a while at the post office to buy a shipping box and send the sample through the mail—the clerk there thought it might qualify as hazardous material—but the truck still made it all the way from town to the cabin.

Karl went in to put the aluminum string under the microscope, and Robert said he wanted to look the truck over first. He washed off the tires, moved it to a dry spot, and decided to take a look underneath.

A good dozen metal threads hung from the undercarriage, anywhere where an aluminum surface was heated by the engine. Robert sat and thought for a time.

When he went inside, Karl said, “Look what I have here.” He pointed to the microscope.

In the circle of bright light, the surface of the string showed as a pitted moonscape; as Robert watched, small square bodies crept along the surface, coming and going to the end, where a spiderlike cluster of squares sat like a nest. “They’re sort of like ants,” Karl explained. “The little square things carve trails in the aluminum as they go along, loading it onto themselves; then when they’re full, they crawl backwards along their trails to find the breeding ball.”

“Breeding ball?”

“That’s what I’m going to call it. It’s a huge knot of square things, maybe a few thousand of them, that dark dot at the end of the aluminum thread, and it appears to be making more square things out of aluminum and, I don’t know, carbon and oxygen from the air, maybe. It keeps making more of them and sending more of them out. Whenever they come back, they deposit the aluminum between the breeding ball and the main piece of aluminum. Then they go out and mine more. Somehow they know not to touch aluminum that was laid down by other square things. So over time they keep building up aluminum under the breeding ball, and that becomes the thread we see, and gradually the aluminum gets turned into square things. I’m betting if you take a square thing and put it on aluminum by itself, it will start a breeding ball, and then start sending out more square things to feed it—”

“Karl,” Robert said. “It’s all right. I know.”

The old guy looked like a flabbergasted Santa Claus.

“I was only at the car five minutes,” Robert said. “You couldn’t possibly have learned that much by looking at them under a microscope in that short a time. And every ‘guess’ you made this morning was dead right. And somehow, when you split the sample to send to Indy, you knew to keep the breeding ball for your side of the sample, and probably what you sent them is just a piece of crumbly aluminum wire, right? By the way, the underside of the truck is being eaten by your square things—you’ve got a couple foot-long threads on the muffler—so I’m guessing it won’t be more than a couple days before the nanoswarm gnaw through to something important.”

Karl smiled ever so slightly, as if he were just about to share the punchline of the best joke in the world. “I guess I’m like everyone else. I underestimate you because you don’t chatter much.”

“Probably. So… how’d you get into Daybreak, Karl?”

“Depends on why you want to know. You going to turn me in?”

Robert hadn’t thought that far. He shrugged and looked around at the cabin; cast-iron, wood-fired, basically 1850s technology, and stocked for a long haul. “You like it quiet too,” he said.

“Well, except for the sound of my own voice. And I like music now and then, acoustic and live. Part of why I recruited a banjo player.”

Robert thought for a few long moments, hard. Back in town he had some clothes, some old porn he hardly bothered with anymore, and some household stuff.

Out here, there was a reasonably comfortable life in the woods—and more quiet than he’d ever encountered before.

“I’m just sad,” Robert told Karl, “that you didn’t invite me in on it. Did you make those little square things yourself?”

“Me, and a couple grad students at Purdue, and one old hobby programmer down in Kentucky, but yeah, they were my idea, sort of; got the idea from a real old poem, by Stephen Vincent Benet.”

“It would’ve been fun to work on them with you. But I think we’ll have a pretty good time out here, anyway. I like quiet.”

Karl stuck out his hand, and Robert shook it, and that was all the more either of them ever said about Daybreak again.

^{TWENTY MINUTES LATER. SAN DIEGO. ABOUT 7:00 A.M. PST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

Bambi Castro slept well on the plane, as she always did, and woke just as the plane descended over San Diego’s gorgeous harbor, crowded with warships, with the pleasure craft of the rich, with cruise ships giving the middle class a taste of luxury, the occasional freighter, the swarm of commercial fishing boats… she’d been away too long, hell, it was always too long. Any excuse to go almost anywhere on the coast south of LA was always welcome, but Bambi had grown up in a big house on the hills, within sight of the harbor, and besides being beautiful, San Diego was home.

The fates were on her side, and she sailed through the rental-car process and was on the highway, heading north, in no time. Locally, the FBI was in an office park up on the mesa to the north. The road rose through the sort of craggy rock, distant sea, and scattered palm, sage, and pine landscape that makes visitors say, Now, this is California. She had her iScribe talking through the car’s sound system, reading her all the stuff Arnie Yang and his team had put together overnight.

A message from David Carlucci, the local FBI chief, said that Ysabel Roth had arrived in Tijuana in a Mexican Army APC—the last running vehicle from the convoy she’d started out in, the others having succumbed to brown and green saline gunk, tentatively identified as soluble chlorides, around their wiring and electronics. A helicopter—carefully wiped down and sprayed with oil internally—had been dispatched to pick Roth up, and would bring her into Montgomery Airfield, near the FBI office, within an hour and a half.

Bambi’s rental car was a nice little Chrysler sedan that handled well on the big, swooping curves of the California four-lane that Bambi had thought must be the best driving in the world when she had learned on it. Since then she had driven on four continents, and now she knew it was the best driving in the world.

No one else out on Aero Drive, perfect weather, beautiful day, and an immensely important case in front of her; it was enough to make her heart sing over the drone of Arnie talking about the affinity group structure resembling New Age book discussions and political activist “flash demo” response nets. She should be more serious, but… well. Look at this morning! For the pure pleasure of it, she swooped across the empty lanes, over to the righthand lane, and downshifted to swing back.

The car pulled hard to the right, toward the rocky wall beyond the shoulder; she heard the harsh scream of a wheel motor loaded far beyond capacity. She fought the wheel, trying to pull the nose back to the left, into her lane.

A loud boom shook the car; she spun out, broadside to the lanes. The four motors de-synched, and the rear passenger-side motor went out completely; she fought for control as the electronic differential tried to counter-spin so hard that she thought the car might roll. It bucked and jolted, and the engine clamped and died as the generator failed to disengage.

Unfortunately, there was still plenty of power in the batteries and capacitors. The car slid backward into the oncoming lane.

Bambi jammed on the brakes to regain control; the ABS shuddered and the car vibrated with the regeneration moans in the remaining motors. The little Chrysler finally stopped sideways on the wrong side of the road, and then leaped about fifteen feet backward, impelled by the front motors, as some electronic control fired too late or at random. The rear bumper slammed into the guardrail so hard that the trunk flew open. She yanked the key to cut the power, slammed on the parking brake, and jumped out, afraid that the car might head over the brink and down the steep slope.

The car held still, but there were arcs and sputters—the quick-acceleration capacitors must be breaching. She clicked the key control, and the hood flipped open. The heavy emergency discharge cable, like a fat black rubber snake, with two thick insulated handles at its neck, flopped onto the pavement. Carefully, she took it by the handles and looked around for a ground post.

God bless California’s damn-the-expense safety-crazed legislature, she thought. However much Daddy rumbles and grumbles about taxes. The guardrail was a modern one, with grounding posts every hundred feet or so; she dragged the cable to the rail, pumped the buttons to open the locking slot, fitted it over the metal edge, and checked to make sure she had continuity. She clamped onto the rail, walked a few steps up the road, made sure she wasn’t touching the rail or any conductor that touched it, and pushed the connect button on the hand control.

A flurry of bangs like rifle shots. Flashes under the hood like welding arcs. Reek of ozone. Up the road, a seagull sitting on a guardrail post squalled and flapped into the air. Sorry, fella, glad I didn’t roast you.

Bambi looked down at her hand control; the small screen said FULLY DISCHARGED.

Very gingerly, she reached into the ruptured trunk and dragged her suit carrier through the broken opening, then reclaimed her laptop and iScribe from the passenger seat. The car’s front end was a foot inside the shoulder, so it was no longer in traffic, and it sure wasn’t going anywhere. Bambi looked out over the steep hillside, between the high hills, down to the Pacific on the horizon. “Shit, shit, shit.”

She popped the hood. Wads of something that looked like spiky snow around the battery, the generator, the capacitors, the front wheel motors, and the cyberrack. With her phone, she shot and narrated a couple minutes of video and sent it to Jim Browder’s mail; he’d know where to forward it.

She phoned Dave Carlucci, the local agent in charge.

He said, “Don’t worry about anything. You’re only a mile and a half away right now, and I’ll just drive out and retrieve you myself; we’ve got a biohazard car with a sealed engine compartment that I’ll be using all morning to retrieve stranded people. You’re not only not late, you’ll be one of the first ones here. And we won’t be starting even close to on time. The helicopter on its way to pick up Roth was forced down.”

“Nanoswarm?”

“Probably the tailored decay bacteria. The crew reported that the engine oil had turned into something that looked like lime Jell-O, smelled like fermented maple syrup, and functioned more like glue than oil; gave them a very dramatic engine seize-up. So the federales are just going to drive Roth up here themselves, since they’ve got one car that seems to be immune to everything for the moment, knock on wood. Everything’s going to start late and it’s all going to be a mess; welcome to the brave new world.”

Carlucci suggested that she walk up the road to an overlook point where there were benches and a drinking fountain, since it might take him a while. She dug out her walking shoes from her suit carrier—normally she favored something with more drama, which she liked to think was all that remained of the spectacularly spoiled wealthy teenage airhead she had once been. With her feet strapped into all-too-practical shoes, the walk was almost nice, too; she waved off a couple of cars that pulled over to offer rides.

While walking, she called up the rental car place and told them the car was probably totaled.

“No surprise,” the rental car guy said. “I hope this was the government’s money and not yours.”

“It is, but it’s my ass that has to get home eventually.”

“I understand. We’ll try to come up with some way to help you out with that, though it might not turn out to be a car. I’ll call you as soon as I know.”

“Unless the phones die.”

“Yeah. Hadn’t even thought about that yet. You have anywhere to go if you’re stranded?”

“If I had to, I could walk from here to my dad’s house.” Which is an ugly extravagant fortress that you probably see every day, now that he’s built it and moved in. “Hope you’re okay too.”

“Well, except for probably not having a job. Jeez. I used to party with these eco-hippie dudes who’d get all mystical talking about how someday there would be Daybreak and things would be great. I’d like to punch a few of them, I think.”

“Officially, citizens should not take vigilante action.”

“And unofficially?”

“Break something that they’d need a modern high-tech prosthetic for.” She appreciated his laugh. “Thanks for trying.”

She’d had a drink of cool water, found a bench with just enough shade, and done more meditative breathing than she’d done in years by the time Carlucci turned up in the biohazard truck.

Bambi asked, “So what’s the deal with Ysabel Roth?”

“She’s just crossed the border. The Bureau people in Washington have authorized me to offer immunity from prosecution, as long as she’s willing to turn over the bigger fish.”

They turned into the parking lot. Bambi said, “Our number one expert, Dr. Yang, thinks there’s no such thing as higher-ups, leadership, or any of that in Daybreak. It’s a brave new pond, and all the fish are equal.”

“Well, then Roth is real, real screwed—but then, so are we.”

^{ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 11:00 A.M. EST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

In the private party room of an Italian sub shop about two blocks from St. Elizabeth’s, Heather cleared a chair and Lenny rolled into the space; she sat next to him. Cam was huddled up at the end of the table with Graham Weisbrod, Arnie, Allie, and Jim Browder; unofficially, he’d told all the DoF people, earlier, that although as a conservative Republican he had thought the Department of the Future was a boondoggle, now he couldn’t live without it. Graham Weisbrod had cheerfully pointed out that they were just doing for the government as a whole what Mark Garren did for the Pentagon—and no secretary of defense in living memory would have tried to function without someone like the DoDDUSP.

“The conspiracy theorists must be up on their roofs and howling at the moon. Washington is one of the few cities where all the cars are running, and most of the tinfoil hat brigade can’t get online to scare each other about that,” Heather observed.

Arnie turned away from the little group at the top of the table and grinned at her. “The few who can get online are making up in creativity what they lack in numbers. New paranoid Daybreak craziness is breeding with old paranoid conspiracy craziness like muskrats downstream from a Viagra plant.”

“You spent a while working on that metaphor,” Lenny commented.

“Guilty,” Arnie said. “Amusing myself in the shower this morning.” Cameron was nodding, and the others were taking seats; apparently his “meeting before the meeting before the meeting” had concluded successfully. Cam said, “It’s not just lunatics that are having crazy thoughts today—and the crazy thoughts aren’t necessarily wrong.” The prearranged food came then, and as everyone ate, Cam reminded them to take any leftovers home and eat them soon—“No telling how much longer your kitchen will function.”

That the warning was given so casually—with everyone just nodding and continuing to eat—told Heather more than anything else how much things were slipping.

They ate quickly. Cam stood. “All right, everyone, thanks for coming. I just wanted to have a quick talk before we present the findings-and-recs this afternoon to the Acting President and the Republican candidate, because that discussion could go off track, so I want to make sure we all stick close to the message.”

Besides the senior people from DoF and OFTA, and Lenny from NSA, Edwards was there from FBI, and Colonel Green from Cyber Command, along with the usual handful of quiet people in uniforms or black suits.

“The quick outline is this,” Cam said. “We have a vital issue that we need to explain briefly to the top-level people, which is potentially extremely distracting, and we must not allow them to be distracted. So with all the speed I can muster, and in language as much like English as Dr. Yang can muster”—even Arnie and Allison laughed—“we’re going to tell you what the issue is, what the sides are, why it doesn’t matter right now, and what we need to focus on. Then everyone will pull together this afternoon to keep focus where it needs to be. Clear?”

Everyone was nodding vigorously, and Cam said, “All right, first what I think, then what Arnie thinks, then Dr. Weisbrod will tell you why it doesn’t matter who’s right. As for me, here’s what I see from the extensive Daybreak decrypts, especially once we found the messages of the il’Alb cell in eastern Afghanistan that ran the Bell group in DC, the rebel raid on Sentani airport, and the seizure of Air Force Two. I see elaborate and sophisticated development of communications, information sharing, and so forth between the global Daybreak organization and il’Alb; at the least, the cell that put together the Air Force Two attack knew when Daybreak would be. To me it just looks too big and complex to be run by anything smaller than a national government. We also have clear-cut interpenetration between il’Alb and ISI, which implicates at least a part of the Pakistani government, and some overlaps with Saudi and Syrian intelligence.

“As I interpret this, we have been attacked by at least one foreign power—probably Pakistan, possibly Saudi Arabia—with a direct assault on the highest levels of our government, and widespread general sabotage carried out by a few fifth columnists and many dupes. Therefore, we are in the opening stages of a military-terror campaign aimed to bring down the United States and probably the West in general. The attack on Air Force Two was supported by domestic saboteurs, not unlike the way an invasion might be supported by rebels or a resistance movement. We are at war with a single, coherent enemy who has hit us with a carefully planned and executed deliberate military attack. We just don’t know who it is, yet.

“And with that, Arnie is going to spin out one of the wildest stories I have ever heard in my life, but I do believe you all have the right to hear it before you reject it.”

Arnie Yang nodded. “I feel handicapped by not being able to whip out the charts and graphs and give you all homework, so let me just explain it this way. Cameron’s interpretation of the material was only possible because he was able to pick out a few hundred needles in a haystack that had, oh, around six billion strands of hay. And the reason he could pick them out was because he was looking for them, and because he had search algorithms that were provided by my methods. So, in effect, he found his conclusion by looking through my telescope. I just want to tell you what my telescope has to say.

“If the whole thing had been coordinated, led, put together by some single guiding intelligence, there are at least fifty different indices and measures that would show an idea pump in the system—and they don’t.”

“Review ‘idea pump’ for us new people?” Colonel Green asked.

“Something that just repeats itself over and over, pumping an idea out into the conversation. Like a TV commercial, or a sacred text, or a politician staying on message, or a spambot. If there’s an idea pump in a communication system, it’s highly detectable, by lots of methods: If we trace chains of repeated ideas backward, they all go back to a small group of places; the same ideas keep coming back as if no discussion had happened; the same ideas come disproportionately out of one small part of the system; whenever conflicting ideas run into each other, the one from the idea pump wins by sheer volume of repetition. There’re lots of ways to measure and count all that.

“Well, not only is there no idea pump in Daybreak, Daybreak has an elaborate, localized system of ideas that first paralyzes idea pumps and then takes them over. Daybreak captures whatever gets near it; for example, I can show you a few thousand small businesses that thought the Daybreak network was going to be their channel into the green market, and instead they became suppliers and safe houses for Daybreakers, often going broke while doing Daybreak stuff that didn’t make them any money. One reason why coustajam stalled out in the last couple years and didn’t take over pop music, like a lot of people thought it would, is that so many of their most talented composers, performers, and bands were putting all their time and effort into Daybreak.

“So I think if an outside force like il’Alb were exerting central control over Daybreak, there’d be at least some evidence that there was a center or some control. I think Daybreak itself was a giant system artifact, a message that doesn’t originate in any one place in the system but is produced by the system as a whole. And I think it was one with a genius for recruiting and suborning other ideas and organizations it ran into.”

“Uh, hold it, a message that recruits and takes things over?”

Arnie shrugged. “Ever had a friend go through a religious conversion? Or develop an addiction? Or get hired into an organization with a tight, obsessive culture? It’s still your friend but don’t you feel, sometimes, that you’re not really arguing with him, but with his Catholicism? Or ‘that’s not really her, that’s her alcoholism’? Or ‘I miss my friend, I wish IBMGUY would shut up and let him talk’? Complex ideas contain instructions on what to do for contingencies—like computer games. Ever notice that the game seemed to be playing against you, or leading you in some direction? Ever known anyone to be led into a new life by Jesus, or have his life changed by a book? Ideas do things all the time; we try to pretend they don’t because when they do, they make us nervous.

“I know Cam thinks a thought requires a thinker, but that’s just wrong. The really big, complex thoughts—like, oh, say, a movie, or a religion, or a philosophy—are much too big to fit into one head, and yet they are thought all the time. In fact I’d say nothing big enough to be important comes from an individual; nobody ever made up a worldview all by himself on a desert island. Important ideas all grow and form in thousands or millions of heads, often over more than one lifetime.

“But you don’t have to go that far with me to see what happened with Daybreak.

“Daybreak was more or less like a cluster of obsessive self-reinforcing thoughts that kept recopying and refining and becoming sharper and clearer while getting more detached from reality, in much the same way that, oh, for example, some of you might be unable to stop wondering whether a coworker doesn’t like you, or a persistent high-school memory might come back to you over and over. That can happen just as easily—maybe more easily—in a group in conversation, as it can in a mind in private thought. Haven’t we all been in a conversation that turned into an idée fixe, where no matter what you tried to change the subject to, everyone ended up talking about the same thing?”

“Marijuana helps induce that effect,” Edwards pointed out.

“It does, to some extent; so does ecstasy, either the drug or the religious experience. There’s a great play where a lunatic came to think he was God because he realized every time he prayed, he was talking to himself. After a while the voice of the conversation can sound like the meaning of the universe. As long as it’s only for a few hours after midnight in a dorm room or a bar, it didn’t matter very much.

“But the modern world improved everything, or at least made it more effective. Internet came along and made it possible for a conversation to go on like that 24-7-365, with thousands instead of a dozen participants, and a lot of the meditation and hypnosis and biofeedback tactics for focusing attention found their way out of Eastern philosophy, and a lot of the tactics for making an idea compelling found their way out of Western advertising, and one bright day, you had a great big idea that was running on so many brains and computers all the time that it was beginning to think itself. Unfortunately, it was an idea that’s been around since Rousseau or earlier—‘civilized self-hatred.’ The modern world created a perfect environment for the growth and flourishing of a general feeling that the modern world had to go.”

“Are you saying that it was… like a suicidal obsession?” Lenny said. “Depressive thinking that got out of hand?”

“Cam asked me the same question,” Arnie said. “Yeah. I always come to the same answer: I think Daybreak was like an immense death wish of, by, and for our whole global civilization. Furthermore, it has succeeded. It self-cured the same way a lot of suicidal obsessions do—it actually pulled the trigger and killed the system it was running on. But that’s just a step on the way to seeing what happened to il’Alb.”

Lenny asked, “Is the idea you’re driving toward that it wasn’t a case of the terror groups infiltrating Daybreak, and turning it to their own purposes, but that Daybreak took over il’Alb?”

Arnie nodded. “Yeah, I’m avoiding saying that because I know it’ll kind of freak people, and you’re right, I need to face up to it. Here’s the thing. One reason Daybreak grew so fast and effectively was its fierce immune response to ideology; it strongly discouraged anyone from talking about why to take down the Big System; the idea was to only to take it down. That let it grow very fast—it never had to fight with most of people’s pre-existing beliefs. Most Daybreak AGs started as separate organizations—little chapters of Earth First or small anarchist parties or Stewardship Christian prayer groups. After a while in touch with Daybreak, they still might have said they believed the same old weird stuff they always had, but their commitments and priorities were aligned to make them operating tools of Daybreak.

“You know how they used to say that the Internet experienced censorship as damage, and just wired around it? Well, what I’m saying is, Daybreak experienced il’Alb as just one more affinity group that wanted to hit part of the Big System, and it subverted them the same way it did any other group, then directed them to the target that best suited Daybreak’s purpose on a given date.”

“And you think this because—”

“Because at every point where I’ve got data, and the processing algorithms to look for patterns, the communications look like that is what is happening—and I don’t see anything that looks like there’s any internal dictator, or any orders coming in from outside. I’ve got ten thousand ducks quacking and waddling, with one deluded chicken that thinks it’s a duck in the middle. I think it’s a flock of ducks; Cam thinks it’s a malign conspiracy of chickens.”

After a long silence, Graham Weisbrod said, “So there you have it. Either we are being attacked by a foreign power using an absolutely brilliant new strategy—I call that the Covert Hitler interpretation—or what has just happened is more like a disastrous storm in the noosphere—call it the Hurricane Daybreak interpretation. And at first glance it would seem that the thing we have to do is figure out which it is. But Cam and Arnie asked me to be the neutral party explaining why we need to be aware of the question, try to answer it, all of that—but we don’t want to get into it today.

“Here’s the deal. Several very large Daybreak affinity groups announced to the rest of Daybreak that they were prepared—but they never activated. And around those groups there were a lot of messages with a single theme— that you can kill a man by giving him a poison that kills all the cells in his body, or by whacking him on the head, but the way to be sure is to do both. That message was all over the Aaron Group, for example. So looking at the situation, we’re reeling from Daybreak and from the Air Force Two attack—two different kinds of massive damage—and those affinity groups seemed to be working on places where it would be more effective to hit us later, when we don’t have the tools to mitigate the attack or defend ourselves.”

“Such as?” Edwards asked.

Cameron shrugged. “Well, right now we could probably still evacuate a big city if we had to. Enough working phones, radios, and vehicles, especially in the so-far-lightly-hit places like DC and Miami. So right now a nerve gas attack in a downtown would be copable-with. But in a week or two, when no one has a radio, a phone, or a car?”

Dead silence in the room.

Weisbrod looked around. “So it doesn’t matter today, or probably even this month, whether it’s Covert Hitler or Hurricane Daybreak that has just walloped us. Whether it’s a foreign enemy or a ghost in the system, it is probably going to strike at us again in the next few days, hard, at least a few more times.

“Strike us hard with what?” Colonel Green said. “Isn’t that the real question?”

Cam nodded, taking the command of the meeting back from Weisbrod. “Yes, it is. And if Jim Browder here is right, we think we may know what they’ve got aimed at us. So the job for today’s meeting is to make sure that the president—whichever of them is going to be the president—does not get caught up in my suspicions and paranoia, or in Dr. Yang’s charts and equations, but focuses on the scary thing Dr. Browder will be presenting. That’s the message you’ll all be pushing as hard as you can—‘it doesn’t matter, let’s talk about pure fusion bombs.’”

“You want our group to be an idea pump for that,” Edwards said.

“Bingo.” Weisbrod, Cam, and Arnie spoke simultaneously, and everyone laughed.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. OVER EASTERN OHIO. 11:30 A.M. EST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

It was being a morning for superlatives. As he’d ridden in the candidate caravan to the Dubuque airport, Chris Manckiewicz had received a text from Anne telling him he was getting Cletus’s old title and the biggest raise of his career. Plus he’d just finished an exclusive with the now-probable winner one week before the election. Of course, it did happen on board the Low on Taxes, High on Jesus Express, the dumbest name ever come up with for a campaign plane.

Norcross urged him to “ask the tough ones, Chris. My polling people tell me thirty million people will vote for me on election day and hate themselves for it a month later—and hate me twice as much. I have to make them feel okay about this, because it’s their country too, and just their bad luck that they’re getting me for a president. If you don’t hit me with hard questions now, and give me a chance to say the right things, they’re never going to have a chance to give me a chance.”

So Chris had asked about the Christian Bill of Rights. Norcross had said, “Yes, it is my belief that the Christian religion has a special place in American culture and we should codify that, but that is not what people are going to elect me to do, so I won’t act on it while our country is in danger, nor try to slip it in without adequate debate while the country is busy trying to survive.”

He was equally blunt about everything else. Tax cuts? “Of course I want to do that. Everyone in office does. But just now we have no clue what shape the economy will be in or what actions the government will need to take; we’ll just have to see.”

Obscenity? “Well, I’m not for it, but when I’m worried about how nearly four hundred million people are going to make it through the winter, I’d be pretty silly to think the biggest thing we had to cope with was naked ladies. When everyone is warm, has a job, and can eat, then yes, there are spiritual issues I want to address.”

At the end of it, Chris thought, My camera, my editing: the first draft of how a president formed out of an obscure nutcase senator.

He worked quickly and well, slapping camera cuts into place, cutting stammers, nervous laughter, and trail-offs. Someday, people will point at my work and say, that’s why he became President.

Norcross’s media people had given him access via his wireless to the plane’s satellite and roving land links. The box on the screen said it took a full minute, and 81 tries, for the whole transmission to go all the way through and receive an acknowledgment from 247NN.

A moment later Anne appeared in a corner of his screen. “Chris,” she said, “you have one of the best communication platforms still running in North America. We’d use our own planes, but they’re grounded with burst tires and shot electronics.” A burst of scrambled sound, and the picture broke up.

“Didn’t get that.”

“Sorry. Okay, quickly, e-mail from me has addresses of everyone who can receive finished product at all our affiliates. Send that interview direct to them. I’ve e-mailed them all to expect it. We don’t want them to miss it but I don’t know if we can”—another burst—“from here with our”—a shriek and a black screen for a long moment before the picture came back, much grainier. “Did you get—?”

He saw that her e-mail had come in, copied the list from it, and immediately sent out the finished interview again, as she had requested. This time it took 94 seconds and 139 tries, but it still went through. It took his e-mail, a simple short text telling her it had been accomplished, nine tries.

Abruptly, Chris laughed. Norcross, sitting on the other side of the lounge reading his Bible, looked up over his reading glasses. “Someone send you something funny?”

“Not exactly funny. I’ve just done my best interview ever and I got a big raise this morning, and probably the network will be gone before my next paycheck.”

Norcross nodded, turned, and called, “Robbie? We need a plan to deal with the disappearance of electronic money in the next forty-eight hours.”

Robbie, his economic advisor, sitting up from a nap, rubbed his face. “Right. Of course. So you need a plan in forty-eight—”

“No, I mean all electronic money will disappear for good in forty-eight hours. That’s what, ninety percent of the economy?”

“Old figure. Nowadays, more like ninety-seven percent.”

“We’re an hour from Reagan National. Have a plan when we land.”

Robbie groaned, but he sat down and unfolded his laptop. A moment later he looked up, and said, “I’m getting ‘Try again later,’ from all the Internet connections—which is about thirty line-of-sight stations. Better make that ‘our plan for what to do with the money already gone,’ I guess.”

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. NORTHEAST OF TRES PIEDRAS. NEW MEXICO. 9:45 A.M. MST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

Jason stayed low on the ridgeline and watched. He didn’t know why he was so stupid that he had to see what had happened to the commune.

Beth, he thought. Just couldn’t run out on you, babe, not while there was a chance you were still alive.

The main house had been burned to a hollow black shell. There were bodies in the farmyard, but without binoculars, he wasn’t sure who. He was pretty sure the one hanged from the barn pulley was Elton. Two men with rifles guarded the farmyard, so he couldn’t go down to look for clues.

A very soft voice said, “Hey.”

He turned. Beth had streaks of soot on her face and looked pretty sick. She sat down beside him. “We should get away from here. Then can you tie up my wrist?”

“Sure.” They moved cautiously back down from the ridge line, and he found a couple of thick pine sticks and, with some junk line from his pack, lashed together a sort of splint.

“Needs a real doctor,” he whispered, apologetically.

“You’ll do.” She kissed his cheek. “We better walk while I can. If you can find us somewhere warm for the night, that’ll help; I think I’m a risk for shock.”

They crept along the ridge trail, back into the state park. On the broad, well-marked trail, he asked, “How’d you know I’d be there?”

“It’s where you used to take me for sex, hon. About the only place where we could watch the commune to make sure no one was coming and still have some privacy. And if you’d went any place else, they’d’a catch you.”

They filled his water bottle and shared long drinks at the first public pump. “I think they’ll be looking along the roads,” he said, “but we can take this trail over to the camping area in the next drainage; won’t be a lot of hikers out and nobody’s gonna think of it as transportation just yet. Gonna be a long day, baby.”

She shrugged, and winced at how that pulled her wrist. “Then we better get going.”

They walked. After some time he ventured, “Uh, how’d you get away?”

“I fucked the three guys that took me off to kill me, and then cried, and promised no one wouldn’t ever know if they let me go. They didn’t really wanna kill me, I guess. Probably it was like their first lynching, and they weren’t real good at it, you know?”

“How did you feel about—”

“Like I feel about taking a big old painful crap when I really have to. Better’n not having done it. Prolly I’ll have bad dreams and stuff later.”

The sun was still high in the sky when they topped the ridge; Beth looked sick, but she seemed to be bearing up, and after he added a couple more sticks to the makeshift splint, she seemed to do better.

Somewhere, he figured, there’s a place we can blend in and not be looked for. I just hope we don’t have to join a mob and kill any Daybreak people, because I think if she had to, to live, Beth could do that. And I’m not sure I could.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. SAN DIEGO. 9:00 A.M. PST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

Almost everywhere in the world, the first thing a cop does, when bringing a visiting cop into his territory, is to offer coffee, and any visiting cop to whom it is not allergenic death or spiritual anathema had better accept. “So,” Carlucci said, “I didn’t even know we had any future cops. What do you do, arrest crooks before they’re born?”

Bambi ignored the joke she’d heard too often. “I’m one of five DoF employees that have the power to make an arrest. Congress in their wisdom realized it was always possible we might stumble across some present-day crime. You’re lucky all of us didn’t come. This is the first real case we’ve ever had.”

“I guess that—” Carlucci’s phone rang, and he picked up. “Carlucci. Yeah, I—right. On my way. I’ll bring as much backup as I have. See if you can reach anyone en route and re-route them to give us some more backup. I’m on my way.” He asked Bambi, “You reasonable on the G-54?”

“Fully qualified.”

“Great. Follow me.” A few steps down the hall, he leaned into a room where two men sat on desks facing each other. “Terry Bolton, Larry Mensche, this is Bambi Castro, she’s badged with OFTA and coming along; gear up, and set Castro up with a Glock. Now, because we need to be rolling ten minutes ago.”

Bolton pulled on holster, coat, and all in one fluid motion; Mensche arose from a pile of papers, tucking away reading glasses as he went, and was halfway into his coat by the time Bolton was opening the arms locker on the wall. “Can you tell us what it’s about?”

“That number one high-priority suspect we were expecting? She, a couple AFIs, and a few Mexican Army GAFEs are all trapped in a DN-7 with collapsed tires on Imperial Avenue. Big mob that wants them to hand her over for a lynching.” Carlucci sounded no more excited than if he were talking about picking up muffins for a church breakfast.

Bolton handed Bambi the holster, three clips, and the G-54. She checked it out; perfectly maintained, of course. Carlucci was explaining, “—local patriots got wind and barricaded the 805 around exit 12A, which wasn’t too complicated since practically no cars are able to move, so they just dragged a bunch of stuck cars together to form a line across the freeway.”

In the bright sun, they all flipped on shades automatically; Bolton took shotgun in the hazmat Hummer, leaving Bambi next to Mensche.

Carlucci pulled out fast. “Mensche, best route? We need to get onto Imperial south and west of exit 12A, with—”

“Fifteen down to El Cajon, over to 54th Street, south to Imperial, hang a right,” the agent said quietly. “You don’t think there’s going to be anybody blocking alternate routes?”

“Sounds like they’re improvising. They didn’t actually ambush the DN-7—the Mexican commander got a tip-off from a traffic cam and had already end-run the crowd, he’d have gotten away clean but they lost five out of six tires in one big spinout. The mob up on the 805 saw that and ran down and surrounded them.” Carlucci’s eyes never left the road, a good thing at the speed he was driving.

“Anyway,” he added, “the mob can’t really get at them—they’ve got twenty-millimeters on robot turrets, so by way of explaining ‘stand back,’ they shredded a couple of parked cars—but we’ve got to go get them out. Just now, Mexican troops in uniform are having a hard time talking to Americans, especially Americans who think they’re bringing in Ysabel Roth to personally lead the looting and burning.”

They hurtled down the empty freeway, dodging between wrecks and abandoned cars. “This thing has a tank of antiseptic and sprays a mist of it on the tires as we go,” Carlucci explained, “just in case anyone is wondering if I’m trying to kill us all. Siren and light, you think?”

Bolton said, “If they’re going to shoot at us, they’ll do it with or without the sirens, eh? Give ’em a fair shot at doing the right thing.”

Carlucci turned on the noisemakers. Approaching the crowd at a sedate twenty miles per hour or so, they allowed everyone plenty of time to consider.

“We got this,” Mensche said. “Lot of folks doing the old slow fade, they want to be at the back of the crowd when we tell them to clear out.”

A space opened around the armored personnel carrier as people drifted back into alleys, or behind cars, a mob that all wanted to be bystanders—out of the situation but not so far they couldn’t see it.

The DN-7 looked like most APCs since World War II; the triple auto-turrets on top, only ten centimeters high, were remote-controlled, so that the operator watched through cameras and aimed and fired without being exposed to enemy fire. Fly-eye bubbles in the center of the roof and on all the corners meant there would be no blind spots, and the turrets were far enough out to sweep anywhere from next to the wheels to dead overhead. The black and brown glop on the road showed where the DN-7’s foam-cored tires, invulnerable to bullets, had succumbed to the biotes.

“Bold Hammer One, this is Bold Hammer Four, I have you visually and I’m approaching behind the crowd surrounding you,” Carlucci said. I guess we’re Operation Bold Hammer, Bambi thought.

“Bold Hammer Four, this is Bold Hammer One, I copy.” The accent was slight; federales in Sinaloa worked so often with their American counterparts that most were fluently bilingual.

“How you doing in there, Lieutenant?” Carlucci asked.

“Not bad. No injuries. If we could move we’d be fine.”

“What’s the situation with Bold Hammer Two and Three?”

“Could be an hour till they get here.”

“Does the passenger understand that if she tries to run in any direction except into our vehicle, that mob will kill her?”

“Yes, Bold Hammer Four, she understands that. She’s terrified. Let me see if she’s willing to try the transfer.” During the long pause, Carlucci worked the loudspeaker, telling people to go home, explaining that he was the FBI, that they were going to take the prisoner into custody, that it was vital for her to be captured alive and unharmed for interrogation. He reminded everyone that Mexico had been hit hard by Daybreak, too, and that “on this issue we are allies and shoulder to shoulder; this is no way to treat a friend and an ally.” Over and over, he urged everyone to head for home.

The DN-7 had armored extensions around its main troop door that could reach out to the Hummer, but Murphy’s Law dictated that the door would be on the far side. Making a virtue out of necessity, Carlucci drove the Hummer in a slow circle around the DN-7, twice, as if just trying to clear the crowd; more of them faded away, leaving the street almost empty except for a few stragglers.

“Not much of a mob, now,” Bolton observed. “Back to being pain-in-the-ass civilians.”

“That’s the way I prefer them,” Mensche said.

As he finished the second circuit, Carlucci said, “Mensche, I’m going to match your door up to their troop door; the extensions will slam out at you, then you open. Drag Roth in if she isn’t moving fast enough. Castro, try to look friendly and welcoming—as freaked as Roth must be by now, she might bolt in the direction of a woman who looks sympathetic.”

As the armored extensions thudded against the body of the Hummer, Mensche flung the doors outward, and the troop door retracted vertically. Two masked GAFEs in uniform threw a small woman in a baggy green coverall forward; Mensche caught her and turned in his seat, dragging her across his lap. Bambi pulled her the rest of the way in by the shoulders; Mensche slammed the door and shouted “Go!”

They had covered four blocks when the left front tire blew; Carlucci said, “Sniper, hardware store—” before a hole appeared in the windshield and he barked as a slug hit him on the Kevlar vest. He crouched low and zagged into a side street to the left; Bolton and Mensche had lowered their windows and returned fire; Bambi was lying across Roth to protect her.

Another shot clanged harshly off the rear fender.

“Just one shooter I think,” Bolton reported, “and he’s running. Give it a block and hope the rims hold out.”

“They’re supposed to.”

In a residential street, they stopped and Bolton and Bambi jumped out to look at the situation.

The spare was dripping off its rim; it looked like lumpy chocolate pudding. “It was exposed to the biotes and it wasn’t being sprayed with antiseptic.”

“Yeah, the spray for the tires was so the car wouldn’t spread germs—not because anyone ever thought anything would eat it.” Bolton folded out a spray gadget from the roof, sprayed the pavement, stood on it, and wetted himself all over.

Bambi followed his example. “I’d just like someone to know that I’m probably destroying the last good Italian suit I’m ever going to wear.”

Bolton snorted. “I started out in fire and bombs, where you buy the cheapest suit you can ’cause you’re always buying new ones. This thing’s all poly; it’ll probably rot off me by nightfall.”

Every tire on the cars on the street was rotted and flat, but knocking on doors, Bambi found an older lady willing to donate the apparently unharmed spare from a pickup parked in her garage.

They finally returned to the FBI office on Aero Drive four hours after setting out; the Mexican troops got there almost immediately after, having walked the whole way. Only two more of the ten expected observers for the interrogation had arrived; both were local.

Carlucci said, “I vote for showers and food all around; there’s lunchmeat and bread in the fridge, and we might as well eat it since god knows how long the power will stay on. Ms. Roth?”

The girl looked up, dazed; she had said nothing other than that she wasn’t in pain and didn’t need water, on the whole trip in. “Yeah,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“What I wanted to ask,” he said gently, “is if you’d like to clean up. I understand you’re a vegetarian; I’m afraid all we have is a tub of coleslaw and some bottled water, and every shop I’ve seen on the trip had a sign saying ‘No more food.’ But you might feel better if you ate something. You do realize you’re safer here than you would be anywhere else?”

“Yeah.” She drew a deep breath. “Look, I…” She appeared to be trying to pull her mind together. “Um. Okay, here’s the thing. I know this will sound like I’m trying to fake insanity or something, you know? I’m sure it will. But… I feel like I just woke up from some weird, godawful dream, and I remember doing it but I can’t believe it. It just doesn’t make any sense to me, ’kay? ” She looked around. “I’m just think—” Roth went limp. Bambi barely caught her before she hit the floor, and lowered her gently.

Roth’s muscles were cramping hard enough to be visible through her clothing, and her breath was irregular and violent. It was plainly some kind of seizure, but not one Bambi had ever seen, or heard about in any first aid class.

^{ABOUT FORTY MINUTES LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 1:00 P.M. EST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

Norcross was on time, though just barely—one small advantage of Daybreak was that media were having a hard time communicating with home offices, so the spectacular almost-crash-landing at Reagan National had not created a media barricade to force his way through. For the moment, cars continued to run in Washington, and his limo got right through to St. Elizabeth’s, though the blown tires on the Low on Taxes, High on Jesus Express—despite an immediate scouring of the runway with steam and acid—had probably brought the tire-destroying biotes to the city, if they hadn’t already arrived with someone sneaking past the military checkpoints via back roads.

Norcross immediately set about learning everyone’s name and position, and freely admitted it when he didn’t know what a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Information Technology did. This guy not only wants the job, he’s determined to do it, Heather thought. I guess I wish I didn’t feel like I’ d have to take a shower after voting for him. She glanced sideways at Lenny, who looked like he wasn’t quite sure what was wrong with a bite of pickle.

“Definitely knows how to work a room,” she whispered.

“Shhh. I’m trying hard not to like him.”

Shaunsen arrived fifteen minutes late, cheerfully apologizing. He told them all he had a couple of vital meetings on the Hill, so they would still have to finish on time.

Dwight Ferein, the Secretary for Homeland Security, did everything he was supposed to do: He was dignified, concerned, warm, and very brief. “He wears a suit well,” Lenny muttered.

“Cam wears his better.”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t have huge silver hair and a red tie. Who’s gonna trust a skinny young Asian guy when there’s a photogenic old white poop available?” Lenny added, very softly, “Hey, one benefit coming up. Won’t matter anymore how people look on TV. We could elect Abe Lincoln again.”

Cameron cleared his throat; the muttering in the room died; and Cam raced through the foreign-enemy versus system-artifact issue. Shaunsen asked no questions; Norcross made up for it with focused, did-his-homework probes for details, systematically setting appointments between DHS and Norcross staff. That didn’t take much time.

That brought them to Jim Browder’s side of the presentation. “Cameron flatters me that I’m good at pulling the basic science together for this; I’d like to thank Dr. Tyson, Dr. Puller, Dr. Chin, and Dr. Kayan for explaining it to me and for sitting here waiting to pounce on my first error.” Nervous laughter died quickly.

“We had a mystery from Air Force Two, about the plumes of smoke right after the explosion and crash.” His bulldog glare stabbed out between his thick single brow and the reading glasses that perched on his nose like a doll’s glasses on a bear. “They were carrying about twelve tons of pure sodium. There are far better chemical weapons and incendiaries than that and we know they had access to most of the modern arsenal. The only conceivable use for so much sodium was if they were trying to enhance the fallout from a thermonuclear weapon.

“Furthermore, we did find traces of deuterium—heavy hydrogen, the raw material for hydrogen bombs. But instead of the tritium that is usually used to enhance and catalyze the fusion reaction, we found traces of helium-3; a preliminary model shows they might have had as much as a kilogram of helium-3 on that plane, which is superficially insane—any college senior in physics can make tritium with some standard industrial equipment, but helium-3 is hard to extract, hard to work with, much more expensive and scarce—”

Shaunsen nodded. “I know helium-3 is fusible, and I’ve looked at projects to get it from deep ocean vents or the moon’s surface. I’m guessing that if it’s worth going to the moon for, they don’t sell it at the corner store.”

Norcross nodded and said, “Tell us what’s interesting about this.”

“Well,” Browder said, “it’s nonradioactive, so it would be hard to detect, and it’s so scarce and expensive we don’t look for it at all. And a helium-3/ deuterium H-bomb would put out a lot of energy and a lot of neutrons, the neutrons would have transmuted the sodium-23 into sodium-24, and you’d have had a real horror weapon there. But normally a hydrogen bomb needs a regular fission bomb, with uranium or plutonium, as its trigger, and there should have been a lot of fissionable material in the smoke plume or the wreckage or both.”

Norcross nodded. “So your mystery is, why would they use the most difficult to obtain, expensive stuff? And then neglect to have a trigger?”

“Exactly what we’re saying, Mr. Norcross. We think the enemy has a helium-3 source somewhere—a deep ocean vent, a gas well that happens to be rich in it, or maybe a volcano, or just possibly the Iranian-Chinese moon expedition last year did some unannounced experiments with lunar regolith and extracted some helium-3. As for why it looks like they built a pretty good little hydrogen bomb, and then forgot to put a trigger on it, the pieces we found look like they may have at least believed they had a working ‘pure fusion’ bomb.”

“Didn’t we have a treaty to deal with those?” Shaunsen demanded.

“An executive agreement because they didn’t think they could get it through the Senate. The Obama Administration halted our research, and most of the world’s governments agreed not to work on it, because from a peace and weapons-control standpoint a pure fusion bomb is about as bad as it gets: made out of common or nonradioactive materials, so it’s hard to detect; most of what’s in it is off-the-rack industrial stuff. Can be made arbitrarily small—I don’t mean the space one fits into, though that might be very small, I mean that unlike a regular atom bomb, it doesn’t have a minimum blast equivalent to a thousand tons or more of TNT; theoretically they could miniaturize it and use it as freely as gunpowder, but the temperature it creates, right where it goes off, would still be hotter than the face of the sun. So it would erase the line between nuclear and conventional. And it doesn’t require any testing that anyone could detect—you could do little tabletop lab experiments to find out most of what you had to, with no big flashes visible from orbit, or seismograph signatures or messy craters to inform anyone what you were up to. And not least, a lot of little pure fusion bombs would be much more effective at setting a big city on fire than one big ordinary H-bomb. From the standpoint of keeping atomic energy away from human skin, the pure fusion bomb is a complete nightmare—undetectable, mostly made of cheap stuff, scalable, didn’t require testing, probably more effective, what’s not to be afraid of?”

“That was a good agreement,” Shaunsen said. “Too bad the Republicans kept us from making it a treaty, and now we’re stuck with these gadgets.”

“Well, here’s our concern for right now. The only thing that kept pure fusion bombs from making the whole world worse was that we didn’t have the right mix of knowledge and materials till recently. And with Daybreak, we probably won’t have the materials for much longer. But if they managed to build one at all—and with determination and enough computing capacity, it’s just conceivable that they did—there’s no reason to think that Daybreak, or il’Alb, or whoever would have built just one. I’ve been over what we know about the technical skills and resources of the cells and AGs that still have not done their thing, and seven of them might have pure fusion—”

Shaunsen rose. “I just looked at the time. I’ve got a major reconstruction bill to review at the Senate; the country needs to get moving and fixing things. I leave the defense decisions in your capable hands.”

The Secret Service closed ranks around him, and he was gone.

“Well,” Will Norcross said, “I’m free.”

^{THE EASTERN PACIFIC, SOUTHWEST OF LOS ANGELES. ABOUT 11:00 A.M. PST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

When Grady and Tracy finally arose, they carefully removed one of their shortwave radios from its sealed glass jar. The few news broadcasts they could find all told the same story. Grady snarled, “Fuckers. They’re hunting us down.” A whole commune had been massacred near Santa Fe.

“Then we want to be at sea for as long as we can,” Tracy said. “Southwest for the next few weeks; there’ll be somewhere in the South Pacific for us.” They crowded on sail in the fresh breeze and turned their backs on North America. “We’ll come back when it’s on sale again,” she said. “We’re full up on supplies; let’s not go home and be hanged from a phone pole.”

They were still idly talking about the cool new world to come when a phone rang, and they both jumped. Grady went below and found it, ringing away just as if the Big System were not gone. Apparently there was less nanoswarm down here than up on the deck.

Caller ID just showed that it was coming in from an overhead satellite; of course the nanoswarm couldn’t get at the satellites and not all the ground stations would be out yet. Could be anyone with direct satellite on any of the worldnets, even just a wrong number or a solicitation call from a charity. Curiosity overpowered Grady—what if it’s the last phone call I ever receive? “Hello?”

“Hello, Mr. Barbour. This is Nautical Specialties.”

The name was familiar, but Grady couldn’t remember from where.

“Uh, is this a sales call?”

“Customer service. We are calling you to ask about the specialty work you had us do in the hull of your vessel, the Mad Caprice. We wanted to make sure that the secret vault in the false hull is still satisfactory.”

“Uh, yeah, I looked there just before we left on this, uh, vacation, and it was, you know, cool. Everything was dry and everything was there that was supposed to be.” Like hell was he going to talk about that half ton of gold on the phone.

“And just to make sure, you remember the sealed part of the vault, that was to be accessed by our technicians only—you remember that it contains our patented moisture-control equipment, and that it would void the warranty if you were to enter that sealed area?”

“We haven’t touched it, really.”

“We had sort of hoped to inspect it when you came in to Los Angeles in a few days, if you remember—”

“We won’t be—” What the hell? This guy seemed to know too much. Tracy would be all over his case if he told them anything about where he was going, but it couldn’t hurt to tell them where they weren’t. “Uh, look, we changed our minds, sorry, but we’re not going to LA, so if—”

“Well, in that case, we just have one more question and then we’ll be done with you.”

“Oh, okay, sure.”

“Does your snotty, stupid wife still have big tits, and do you still have a tiny brain to match your tiny dick?”

“I—hey, what the—”

During Grady Barbour’s last instant of existence, his brain was signaling his mouth to form the word fuck, but the signal never arrived. Mad Caprice, Grady, Tracy, and several million liters of water vanished in a ball of solar-temperature plasma; across the next few minutes, the fireball rose and cooled, the steam condensed, and the mushroom cloud formed.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. A CAVE IN EASTERN AFGHANISTAN. 12:05 A.M. LOCAL TIME. WEDNESDAY. OCTOBER 30.}

The men watched the screen in some amazement; even from low orbit, a smallish nuclear detonation is still impressive. “The last bit was just at the behest of the Daybreak AG that built the gold vault for him,” the man who had been on the phone explained, in English; the five men at the table had nineteen languages among them, but English was the only one they all had fluently. “The carpenter must’ve guessed something of what I had given him to install behind the vault, and he asked me to give him that message just before I ‘used that thing,’ as he put it. Since the test shot on Air Force Two didn’t happen, we had to use this as an alternate test, so I had to contact them by direct satellite phone to run down their position and buy the time on an orbital camera to watch the test. I had to talk to them anyway, so it didn’t hurt me to do a favor for a friend.”

“Did she really have big tits?” one of the men asked.

“I saw surveillance films,” another man said. “They were okay.”

“I wish we could have blown off the weapon on Air Force Two; it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone that that was a test shot. As it is, we have to hope that the blast wasn’t noticed.”

“There is all of Daybreak going on, so we had to do it before any critical component died, and they were less than forty kilometers off Los Angeles. They may think it was an attack on that city.”

“True. And regret is useless, as the shot has been fired. If there are no more matters for discussion, it’s almost midnight and you have a long way to go in the dark.”

^{FOUR MINUTES LATER. CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN. COLORADO. 12:15 P.M. MST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

“What the fuck?”

That is not standard military protocol for a man watching a computer screen, so the captain moved over to administer a reprimand and find out what he was seeing. “Spy satellite just saw this. About 40 klicks southwest of LA. We’ve been copying on any shot bought on a commercial camera just to see what other people were looking at. Someone pointed the camera right at this. See, this little sailboat, it looks like, just minding its own business, then it gets a phone call—they pick up the side lobes from him talking to an overhead satellite—and then—”

The flash was brilliant; from its post far away, the satellite watched the mushroom cloud form.

“I jumped in on the military satellites and we’re getting more of a look, and Reagan isn’t far away from them and is bouncing up a recon.”

The captain decided no reprimand was warranted.

^{ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 2:45 P.M. EST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

Heather hated to admit it but she was beginning to really like Will Norcross’s game spirit. For forty minutes he’d questioned, probed, and listened—especially listened—as he tried to absorb the whole complex mess of Daybreak, its relation to il’Alb, and why recovery was apt to be so time-consuming and difficult.

The door popped open and an assistant burst in. “Mr. Nguyen-Peters!” She held out a sheet of paper; Cam took it and read.

“Congratulations, Dr. Browder,” he said.

Jim looked like he’d received an electric shock. “For what?”

“Somebody just fired a nuke off about twenty-five miles southwest of LA. Luckily we got the flash on a random recording from a Deep Black satellite and were able to get it to a team with working gear to analyze the recording. No uranium, no plutonium, in fact for some unimaginable reason the only significant heavy element in the spectrography of the flash was gold, but there was a huge amount of that. Reagan was less than 100 kilometers away and scrambled a drone; they got a sample from the mushroom cloud itself. Unusual amounts of helium-3. Lots of tritium and sodium-24, which is what you get when you blow off the helium-3/deuterium reaction in seawater. No trace of polonium or any other hard alpha emitter, and only as much beryllium as you’d expect from batteries and capacitors on the ship’s electrical system, plus what’s in the seawater. Some excess lithium and deuterium, consistent again with a fusion bomb. You were right—they’ve got a pure fusion bomb.”

“Weird,” Browder said. “Very weird. Why would someone waste a bomb on empty ocean? It wasn’t by any chance an enhanced-fallout weapon?”

“Dead on again,” Cameron said. “Preliminary measurements show the plume is hot as hell with induced radioactivity, and the center of it is heading dead on for Los Angeles. We’ve got people scrambling to try to tell everyone to get out of the way, but it’s pretty much hopeless; we’re going to lose the city unless the wind shifts.”

“What’d they jacket it with?” Browder asked. “Sodium, cobalt, potassium?”

“That’s the weird part,” Cam said, shaking his head. “What’s in that cloud, besides the sodium-24 and the tritium from the salt water, is all the hot isotopes of gold.”

“I guess it works,” Browder said.

“Only about as well as cobalt would have. They make their atom bombs with helium-3, and jacket them in gold… I just wonder if we’re facing a bunch of compulsive nuts who have to do everything the hardest, most expensive way they can think of.”

Will Norcross stood. “I’m told there are other briefings I need to get to,” he said. “What I just heard was this: We have established that our enemy, whatever it may be, has pure fusion weapons, which we also know is one of the worst possible things for any enemy to have. Is there anything else I can do here, besides be in your way?”

Heads were shaking all over the room. Norcross gave them that cocky grin that so many liberals found unbearable. “Then do what needs to be done; make the country proud of you.” He nodded and exited.

“Now that was a curtain line,” Lenny said, under his breath.

“I’m scared that the phrase ‘President Norcross’ is starting to sound sort of comforting,” Heather agreed.

Cameron Nguyen-Peters glanced around. “Defense, security, intelligence people, they’re going to want you in your home departments. Law enforcement and everyone in charge of catching Daybreakers, now we know it’s not over yet, we’ve got to round up as many of them as we can, as fast as we can, and you’ll want to go too. Department of the Future, Department of Energy, Department of Peace—all you analysts, brain trusters, think tankers, all you idea people, plus all the liaisons to civil agencies, if you can, go home. If you’re not tracking bombs or tracking Daybreakers, get out of here for now. And…” Cam was obviously trying to find a way to say it gently. “…look, we’re in the national capital here, and we’re facing an enemy with nuclear weapons; I don’t know why we still exist, in fact. So… if you can find a way for your families and loved ones to be out of town—do it. Move your family somewhere safe. Clear? I’m not dismissing anyone, we need everyone here, and you took an oath—but your spouses and kids didn’t, so get them out of the danger zones, and free your mind to concentrate on the mess we have here.”

Heather asked, “How long till the plumes hit the coast?”

“About an hour,” the guy from NOAA said. “Call anybody you have out there and tell them to run if they can get over the mountains, or find someplace to dig in for a couple weeks and hope we can get rescue people out there in that time. But it would be better to run.”

On her way out, she saw that Lenny was scribbling something on his pad; she looked down to see he’d written, If yr cats okay, my place 2night. U lucky sexy bitch.

Night in with my guy. While the power’s still on. Yeah, he’s right, I’m a lucky bitch. Hope he doesn’t expect me to be as sexy as I am lucky.

^{ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 3:30 P.M. EST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

Must’ve been kind of an interesting building back when you could see something besides just the dome, Chris Manckiewicz thought. He’d been inside the concrete and steel barricades around the Capitol many times, but he was thinking of the newsreels from the thirties and forties, when the vast flight of steps had been unimpeded by all the hardware.

Norcross had been summoned to some secret briefing, and Shaunsen was going to hold some big press event in a couple days, but meanwhile Chris had little to do except wipe his gear with lye and rubbing alcohol; if anything “historic” happened, Chris was to shoot it and try to send it, and if it got there, Anne said she’d “probably find a way to use it, and if we do, definitely find a way to pay you.”

So here he was, idly wandering among the historic buildings on the Mall, like any tourist with time to kill.

“You look like a reporter.” The tall woman, her gray hair dyed a fairly natural shade of red, was dressed in knee-high boots and a real old-school jacket/straight skirt/string tie suit, as 1970s as if she’d just walked out of his grandparents’ class pictures. She had a pleasant flat expression. “Am I right?”

“Uh, yeah, how did you know?”

“Because you’re Chris Manckiewicz,” she said. “I’m Rusty Parlotta—I used to work for the Washington Times back when there were still paper papers.”

“You were the city editor,” Chris said. “Some people said you were the last of the greats at that.”

She smiled, this time for real. “Actually, what I wanted to talk to you about is, I plan to be the next of the greats,” she said. “You’re looking at the new editor and owner of the Washington Advertiser-Gazette. I’ve got a buddy who collects and restores old printing machinery. Between what he can make work and what he can build because he understands it, he’s promised me we can put out a paper. Maybe not with photos, even, but a paper. Have you ever written?”

“I write my stories and keep a blog. Yeah, I can turn out a sentence.”

“And are they still paying you?”

“I’ve got cash, if anyone will still take it.” He’d extracted $750, the legal limit, from the one working ATM he’d found, and he had the two grand in hundreds that were all the branch of his bank would give him. Shaunsen had frozen prices, so his money should last a week or so—if the hotel didn’t close its doors, the way most businesses had in the last big price freeze a few years ago. Didn’t even think about needing black-market barter, but it’s gonna be 2017 all over again, bet on it.

“I thought you might need a job that pays in food and rent.”

“I was just thinking that.”

“Well, the Washington Advertiser-Gazette is putting out its first edition tomorrow, while a lot of the higher-tech gear still works. I’ve even got newsboys I’m paying in food for their families, because I grew up Mormon and I have a few months of canned goods and dried beans in my basement. My news staff will be the first eight people to take me up on the offer of a room in my big old wreck of a house—inherited from my folks, and I’m sentimental—plus meals. We’ll go to real money pay as soon as there is real money to pay you with, and you first eight eventually get shares of the biz. Tomorrow morning, there’s going to be kids out on the streets yelling ‘Read all about it in the Advertiser-Gazette !’ Want in?”

Chris laughed.

“Is my offer that funny?”

He thought for a moment. “No, it’s great, and I’m taking it. I’m just thinking, forty-eight hours ago I was so fed up with the network that I was looking for an excuse to quit and drive back from Iowa to California. I told myself that with my resumé, I’d have a great deal from someone else in a day. And I was right.”

“Well, of course you’ll keep your TV job as long as you have an uplink, and they’ll keep sending you money, for whatever that’s worth. But your main job will be turning out words for me. And unlike 247NN, I have fresh cabbage, a cellar full of potatoes, and tons of canned organic tomatoes,” she said. “It was a real good year.”

“It just keeps getting better. How many more staff do you need?”

“Three more staff, but one more trip around the Mall and I should have them—it’s crawling with lost reporters whose gear isn’t working, who don’t know what to do. Or maybe we should look into the Capitol. You’re more current than I am, you’ll recognize people. Look for anyone you know is good.”

“I saw CNN’s military affairs specialist go in a few minutes ago—”

“Perfect, let’s go,” she said. “Walk with me.”

He hurried after her. My god, I watched her covering Bill Clinton on TV when I was a snot-nosed middle-schooler, and she still moves like a missile.

He knew the answer, but he asked, “And am I working tonight?”

“You’d better be or the deal’s off. You’re the national affairs editor. I’d’ve given you police beat or sports, but the guy who wanted both is not only already signed up, he’s an experienced organic gardener himself, and he brought a couple tons of food into the deal.”

“Well, I sure can’t compete with that,” Chris agreed. “National Affairs it is. Are we a Democratic or a Republican paper?”

“Yes, some of the time.”

“I like the way you think, ma’am.”

“Call me ‘ma’am’ again and you’ll be out in traffic yelling ‘Read all about it.’ If there’s traffic.”

The halls of the Capitol were deserted, and Rusty Parlotta shot through them like the ghost of Gloria Steinem, intent on finding her last three staff. Chris, still carrying his TV gear, panted after. Wow, I’m going to like carrying just a notepad a lot better. Wonder if I can buy a fedora somewhere in this town, and if there’ll be a place in the hatband for the press card?

^{ABOUT FOUR HOURS LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. ABOUT 9:00 P.M. EST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

Everything was still working at Lenny’s apartment, so Heather took the chance to make her calls. At FBI headquarters in San Diego, Bambi listened sympathetically. “I’ll call him in half an hour to give you some time to talk to him,” she said, “but this big old town sprawls, you know. He’s at least nine miles away from me. However… you know about my father?”

“What about him?”

“He was one of the early leaders of the Castle movement, back when some of the crazier survivalists thought the Democrats were going to take their guns away and put them in concentration camps. And he was one of the ones rich enough to build his Castle. Plenty of room there—”

“Oh, dear Jesus, your dad is Harrison Castro?”

“Now hiring vassals,” Bambi said, “and there’s always room for a few more, I would guess. I’ll give your dad the password.”

“I don’t know if I want to sell my father into serfdom.”

“Well, it’ll be safe and definitely beat being dead, and I may not be unbiased, but I sort of think my father isn’t such a bad guy.”

Heather half-chuckled. “Okay, truth is, I’m dreading talking my fuzzy biker dad into it, but he’s also patriotic as all get-out and hates hippies.”

“See, they’re made for each other. I promise, Heather, give me your dad’s number, I’ll call him and set him up with my father, and he’ll be fine. Dad’ll probably send guards out to help bring him in.”

“The world’s getting pretty weird, Bambi.”

“Tell me about it. Any word from Edwards’s psychologist buddies about Roth’s seizure?”

“They said it can be a stress reaction in people who are trying to act contrary to a hypnotic suggestion, especially a long-standing deep one. They also said that goes with an increased risk of suicide and alcoholism. Have fun with the dear tyke.”

“I’ll pass the word along to the FBI here, in case it hasn’t gotten through their channels. Good luck, and if this is the last time the phone works, try not to worry.”

“Same to you, Bambi. Thanks for being on the job.”

It only took about ten minutes to persuade her father to accept a berth in Castle Castro; she had a horrible, sinking feeling that her father kind of liked the idea. Well, at least Bambi won’t have too much opposition to cope with.

While she was talking to her father, the lights went out briefly, and then Lenny’s extensive battery and generator backup kicked in. He wheeled swiftly through his place, turning things off to stretch the emergency systems, but just as Heather hung up with an “I love you, Dad, and you take care of your dumb butt, that’s an order,” the building power unexpectedly returned.

Lenny said, “Hey, it’s a Power Return. Important tradition. Always celebrate Power Returns with sex.”

Afterward, Heather said, “Hey, weren’t they saying power might go on and off three to six times a day for a while?”

“That’s why it’s so important to follow the Return of the Power tradition.”

“And where did this tradition come from?”

“Well, technically, it won’t be a tradition till the next time we do it.”

For a while they just lay together, listening to the reassuring hum of the refrigerator. “You’ve really got strong arms.” She ran a finger along Lenny’s right triceps and smiled. “Good thing too, since you have a thing for women my size.”

“If by thing you mean insane obsessive fetish, I guess you’re right. Mind if I nuzzle that neck?”

“Mind? I insist.” She rubbed his back and arms while he pressed his face to her skin; amused at his deep breathing, she asked, “Are you memorizing my scent, Lenny? Would you like a couple of my old towels to help you track me through the swamp later on?”

“You’ll think I’m silly.”

“Only if you are.”

“Right.” His strong arms wrapped her, his right hand caressing her back gently and his fused left hand touching as light as a feather on her arm.

She leaned forward and kissed it along the ridge of knuckles. “Is this hand sensitive?”

“On the palm.” He turned it over and she kissed the solid flesh there, brushing with her lips. “Feels nice.” He took another breath of her scent.

“Um, do you just really like the way I smell? You said it was silly…”

“And sad. I thought of it when you said that about my arms.”

“Your arms make you think of my smell?”

“I get the arms from lifting weights, and I haven’t missed a workout in years. My wheelchair recharges by plugging into the wall; if the power goes out for good and I lose my generator, I’ve got three manual wheelchairs handy—a track-racing model, a mountain-racer, and a nice big comfy general-purpose one. But none of them will do me any good if I don’t keep my arms and hands in shape, so that’s why there’s a weight room back that way,” he explained, nodding down the hall.

“And exactly what does that have to do with the way I smell?”

He curled against her; she felt dampness and realized his eyes might be tearing, so she just held him and waited.

Finally he raised his head. “Look, um… here’s the thing—”

“Oh, my god, you’ve found another gigantic Amazon woman, but you don’t think you can lift us both at the same time.”

He laughed, but then he said, “Heather, if worse comes to worst, we might only have a week—and I’ll treasure every second of it and try not to be sad—but look, Beautiful, I’m dependent on a lot more gadgets besides the wheelchair. Some of them are implanted and they have surface contacts.”

“I know, babe, I’ve stroked a few of them.”

“Jesus, yeah, you can’t imagine how amazing it is to be rubbed around that little circular plastic spot over my kidneys, the place where my skin grows up to it itches all the time—”

“Well, say so.” She pressed around it.

“I just did. And that feels good—yeah, right where the skin merges into the plastic.” He sighed happily, but then he went on. “See, Heather—if one of my plastic parts starts to decay, or if nanoswarm gets into my body, I won’t last very long. My immune system is pretty fucked up anyway, actually, that’s what destroyed some of the natural equipment, and I don’t think I’m going to develop immunity to any of Daybreak’s little pranks.”

“I’ll wipe you down as much as you need with antiseptic, peroxide, whatever we need. I hope my cats weren’t—”

“Naw. Clean as people, basically, or cleaner. I love cats and as long as the Daybreak biotes don’t breach my seals, I’m fine. And if I have to give up being touched by people to stay alive, I’m taking the next outbound to the other side.”

She shuddered. “You sound way too serious.”

“Well, look, my point is, if I have to leave the party too early, I want to remember how good you smell, because… well, look… this is going to sound ridiculous, I mean we’ve really only been together forty-eight hours—”

“If you’re about to tell me you’re in love with me, you’d better hurry up before I beat you to it.” She disentangled him for just a moment, adjusted her position, and pulled him back to her so that they were face-to-face. “The whole situation makes me feel so dumb. I enjoyed all the times we went out in the last few months, and all those other times we just talked for the hell of it. I kept thinking I should drop you the big hint about sex. I liked that you called after every date, I liked catching you for coffee now and then, I liked the way every so often you’d e-mail me something that made me smile or just phone and we’d talk for an hour and a half, and… crap, Lenny, I just thought we had a lot of time. So if we only have a week, yeah, we should probably get around to saying—”

“I love you.” He smiled. “I wanted to get that in before the world ends.”

“Hey, I love you too. The end of the world can make a person think that maybe there need to be a few less nights eating out of the fridge and talking to the cats. And you’ve made me nervous. Teach me how to clean you, ’kay?”

Heather had just finished rubbing Lenny down with sanitizing wipes, when her phone chimed. The screen said it was Arnie.

“Hey, lovebirds,” Arnie said. “I think Cam was scared to call you again.”

“We were just doing a few specially vile, filthy acts, hoping he’d call,” Heather said. “What’s up?”

“The Acting President is about to go on all channels and apparently give a speech that Cameron Nguyen-Peters, and Secretary Weisbrod, and as far as I can tell everybody, have just spent two hours begging him not to give. Nguyen-Peters called me to tell me he’d like all of ‘the extended team’—that’s what he’s calling us—to catch it and send any observations or thoughts we might have to him, pronto. He asked me to call you, and, yeah, I think he’s afraid of violating your privacy.”

“And you aren’t.”

“Hell, boss, if I wasn’t afraid my car would turn to green smelly Jell-O halfway there, I’d come over, sit on Lenny’s couch, eat Doritos, and comment on the action.” A shriek from the background told Heather that Allison was somewhere around too.

“That won’t be necessary tonight, but we’ll keep you on the list in case we ever sell tickets. Thanks for the heads-up, Arnie.” To Lenny, she said, “The end of the world is not going to leave us alone.”

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 9:30 P.M. EST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

Chris Manckiewicz wasn’t sure how he felt about being the only electronic media with functioning gear at the White House. He had to wonder how many people would ever see it, considering the problems between the availability of working transmitters, televisions, routers, links, and generators.

He stayed simple, keeping the center camera in focus and occasionally cutting to the left or right plan angle camera for visual variety. Since his computer was still working and the battery was still up, having gotten a recharge at Rusty’s house from her windmill-driven charger, he could do the little bit of editing, and the occasional small shifts of focus, with his left hand and a tenth of his mind.

His other hand was scrawling in a steno pad, against the imminent inevitable death of his computer and iScribe. He honestly didn’t see how the old-time guys did this by hand with no electronic backup.

He had always liked making up ledes that were too truthful to run, and he had a great one for this speech:

Shaunsen’s emergency plan suspiciously resembled the budget bill last year that Pendano had killed with arm-twisting in the Senate and threats of veto, calling it “a thousand too many giveaways.” Every big plum was introduced with, “and for all you good people in….” Chris began counting them in his steno pad; at least thirty cities and counties were mentioned in a speech that clocked at less than an hour. He drew an arrow to remind himself that this would be somewhere in his story for the Advertiser-Gazette.

It creeped Chris out. Shaunsen didn’t appear to realize that there was any danger. The Vice President was ash and bone, the President was rumored to be mad, and the Acting President was giving everyone a happy-days-are-here-again, Republican’s-nightmare version of the New Deal. Shaunsen finished out by assuring everyone that a vote for Pendano would result in “getting you the good Democratic president you all deserve. So as the young people say, no biggie, just chill.”

Christ, that was out-of-date when I was in grade school—but then, so was Shaunsen.

The net was up enough for him to file the video; Anne replied that it would be showing immediately on six stations between the Atlantic and the Ohio River, and they’d be able to relay it to a few others in the next few days.

Chris dropped the rags soaked in household ammonia into his gear bag, shouldered it up, and set out for dinner and bed as his counterpart might have in Jefferson’s day—on foot. A three-mile walk would just about give him time to settle on an angle and a lede.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. ON US 285. IN COLORADO. JUST NORTH OF THE NEW MEXICO STATE LINE. SHORTLY AFTER 8:00 P.M. MST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.}

Jason thought, That was one long day. Beth seemed to be better; they’d found a spring pump and some apparently uninfected plastic bottles at the BLM trailhead after crossing to this side of the mountains, and risked an afternoon nap a little way up a slope of sun-warmed scree, out of sight of the trail. Sleep and water helped both of them; they made good time on the little county road west to the crossroads with US 285.

They headed north, away from the Tres Piedras country, keep moving, one foot in front of the other, just cover ground.

285 was an asphalt incision bisecting the magnificent emptiness of the San Luis Valley, shadowed by the immense Sangre de Cristos, winding over a series of rises, visible all the way to the horizon in each direction. The sky’s vivid unmarked blue might have gone on forever.

They walked for hours as the sun went down, and it seemed only time passed; the road was the road, with nothing on it, and that was all.

In the high mountain valleys in the fall, even if the day is warm and summery, the temperature falls well below freezing at night. Jason figured they had to keep moving until they found somewhere warm to sleep, and so far nothing had presented itself; exhausted as he was, he thought he could probably walk all night by the dim starlight, but he was worried about Beth, who might stumble and fall on her broken wrist.

At first he wasn’t sure what the black silhouette against the dim gray glow of the distant mountains was. Closer, and they saw a faint rectangle of red light going ceaselessly on and off. They were almost on it when he realized it was a huge car, one of those monsters his father called “full-sized,” so old it had to be a just-gasoline model; they hadn’t made anything that big in ten years at least. A single red LED slowly flashing on and off had illuminated the back window, creating the red rectangle, dim as the starlight. Wow, it is dark out here.

They had been approaching from upwind, and in the darkness the car was just a silhouette, so he was almost on top of it by the time he smelled the stinking, spoiled tires. The car was stopped on top of the dimly glowing dashes of the centerline; Jason peered inside. The man lay with his seat tilted far back and his head lolling to the side of the headrest, lighted by the slow-blinking red glow from the dash. Jason tapped, knocked, yelled—no response. Finally, he tried the door.

It was unlocked. The dome light came on, and by its light Jason saw the man was dead, his hands still clutching at his chest. The blinking light’s label was ONSTAR ALERTED. Probably the car had pulled itself over—there was a reason they called that a “dead man circuit”—and been calling for help all this time.

Gently, Jason lifted the corpse and reached under the Western State sweatshirt. He found external pacemaker pads on the sternum and behind the left scapula, both thoroughly crusted with nanoswarm. Oh, buddy, I hope those aren’t the ones that I was spreading. I didn’t want to kill anyone anyway, and you’re so about to save our asses.

He dragged the corpse out of the car and over to the side of the road. Now I know why they call it dead weight. But we can’t bury—

“Oh, Jason, come look!”

In the back seat, Beth had found a case of Mountain Dew, a couple of sweaters, and a heavy winter coat, along with a ditty bag of medicines and a gym bag containing a sweat suit. When Jason popped the trunk, they found a bonanza—it looked like the old man had gone to a Wal-Mart to load up on cheap groceries. The bagged frozen vegetables were squishy but still cold, and they had helped to preserve the milk, bread, and lunchmeat—and to keep the beer and pop cold.

“Let’s try something,” Jason said. He turned the keys in the ignition and was rewarded with the creaky grind of the starter, and then the warm purr of the big engine. On the rims, they drove away, making a noise like the metal shop of the damned, putting about a mile between themselves and the body before Jason pulled far over into a slow-vehicle turnout.

“Almost a full tank of gas, too,” he said.

“But no tires, and it sounds like you’ve already wrecked the wheels.”

“Yeah, but now we’re far enough away from the body to not have to meet Mr. Bear or a pack of coyotes tonight. And we wanted the car, even though it’s never going to move again. This thing has a ‘keep-warm’ setting.”

“Keeping warm sounds real good. What’s it do?”

“My dad had one of these old gas-only cars when we lived in Vermont. Some of them for high altitude and cold climates could be set to idle from time to time just to keep the battery charged and the water in the radiator warm, for parking on the street when it was twenty below outside, with a detector for monoxide in case you mistakenly left it on in the garage. So we set it to keep warm, turn on the heater full blast, and every time the battery gets low or the radiator water cools off, it’ll idle a few minutes and warm us up. One long comfy warm night with food.”

“But… Jeez, Jason, aren’t we burning a lot of gasoline, polluting, you know, all that stuff?”

“One car would have a hell of a time polluting the San Luis Valley in one night. The gas is just going to turn into goop in a couple days anyway. And the car is going to die as the nanoswarm eat it, Beth, but for right now enough is working to keep us warm, and there’s more than we can possibly eat in the trunk. I vote we eat ourselves silly and sleep till the sun wakes us up.”

She shrugged. “Well, the way you say, it makes sense and all. I just feel all weird and stuff about sitting burning gasoline and going nowhere in the last running Cadillac. Feels like something my dad would’ve done.”

Beth was vegan, and Jason had always felt a little guilty that he wasn’t, and, of course, both of them were philosophically opposed to plaztatic food, but lunchmeat sandwiches with salsa from a jar, Doritos, Pringles, irradiated chili in a plastic tub, and partly melted ice cream—all washed down with milk, Orange Fanta, and Budweiser—made the most wonderful dinner date they’d ever had, with the big heater keeping the old Cadillac toasty and the brilliant stars shining in through the dark windshield.

Beth switched on the radio; the scan button ran through four hundred channels without finding a signal, but “it’s probably not seeing a working cell tower anywhere, and that cliff behind us is probably blocking the satellites. So—” She leaned forward, peering at the old-fashioned physical buttons by the light of the screen. “Hey, this thing is so old it still has FM and AM besides cell.” She flipped the toggle; there was nothing on FM, but on AM the voice leaped out at them: “—think officially at the moment we are a 130,000-watt station but it might be more if Ernie can find a way. The reason we’re doing this, of course, is that nearly every other station is off the air, but we have working generators, we’ve been able to keep one studio and our transmitter running, and we have a functioning fiber line to Washington; we just have to hope enough of you out there have radios that can pull in our signal.

“Once again, anyone with working recording and broadcasting or net-connected equipment is requested to record this broadcast and pass it on in any form possible, to as many people as you can reach with it; the Acting President has authorized compensation for your time and trouble.

“For those of you who just found this station, you’re listening to Radio KP-1, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, broadcasting at 1020 on the AM band, which is actually KDKA’s transmission facility linked by a fiber-optic line to WQED-TV’s broadcast studio, using partly hand-built tube electronics from Westinghouse Labs. Mark this spot on your dial as we think we’re likely to remain on the air permanently, thanks to technical support from Westinghouse and PPG.

“In a moment, Radio KP-1 will be carrying a live broadcast from Washington of a speech by Acting President Peter Shaunsen, who will be addressing the nation to explain current plans for dealing with the Daybreak emergency. While we are waiting, here are some other announcements that the Department of Homeland—one moment please—yes, the President’s speech is about to begin, so we now take you to the Oval Office, where the President’s speech will be reported by Chris Manckiewicz of The 24/7 News Network.”

Jason took a deep draft of Mountain Dew, and settled in to listen; he didn’t think he’d ever paid this much attention to someone talking before. Beside him, Beth was stone-still and alert.

The engine purred away on idle from time to time; otherwise the night was silent. When the Acting President’s speech was over, and the station had gone back to broadcasting orders (mostly to preserve valuable resources) and requests (mostly to report where useful material was) from Homeland Security, Jason turned the radio off.

“Don’t,” Beth said. “We can leave it on real soft, but don’t turn it off, please.”

“Sure.” He turned it back on. Something about her tone made him reach out to touch Beth, and he found her face wet.

“You okay?”

“No. Yeah. Kind of. I—I liked hearing the president on the radio. And hearing the radio. It was like, the world’s gonna go on, that was what it was like. Like there’s still an America and everything. And I know he was just like making a lot of promises to win an election—”

“Which he won’t.”

“Which he won’t—but you heard him, Jason, he was like reaching out to the whole country, here’s what we’re going to build and do and make, let’s get going, let’s get to work—and it was just kind of… beautiful. I mean I know it’s all a fake and a lie but I was real glad that Chris Whatsisface didn’t start telling us all about how it was all bullshit and all. I just… I wanted to know someone was doing something, I wanted to know the government was trying, and I wanted to hear the radio and know we weren’t the only people left on Earth.”

“Truth?”

“Sure.”

Jason took another delicious sip of Mountain Dew, thought about how long it might be before he had more of it, looked at the night sky swarming with stars around the dim reflection of the radio’s glow. “I wish I’d never fucking heard of Daybreak, and neither had anyone else.”

Beth started to cry, harder, and he reached for her to see if she was okay. She said, “Me too, but I wasn’t gonna say nothing to you.”

He felt queasy and sick from what they’d been saying, and Beth looked like she was in more pain, so he said, “We’d better sack out.”

They fell asleep with the radio still going, under piles of clothes and coats, Beth in the front seat, Jason in the back, to give her most of the heat. The seat leather smelled good and the warmth of the heater and the soft engine turning over every few minutes were comforting; the last thing he remembered before falling asleep was the little insect voice of the announcer reading a complicated post from DHS, asking anyone who had any antique steel puddling tools, and any iron sculptors, blacksmiths, and heritage craft ironworkers to gather at Homestead, Pennsylvania, in three months’ time.

Somewhere well past midnight, the engine suddenly seized and died. Beth cried out and woke up; Jason sat up, breathing hard. Not willing to let cold air into the car, he crawled forward and tried to restart it; the starter cranked without success. He left the heater fan running on battery power, recirculating the warm air from inside the car, to extract the last heat from the radiator. KP-1 was still on the air, reporting that they’d gotten ten-hour-old Internet voice mail from Banff, Alberta, and were passing on a request for the government in Ottawa, dissolving provincial governments till further notice, and asking that local governments report ASAP.

Beth curled up and went back to sleep. Jason eventually did too, but for a while he kept waking from dreams about Elton’s body dangling from the barn’s pulley. Something about the radio creeped him out, as if the old plaztatic world was lunging to get him, and the stars were too far away to save him.

^{THE NEXT DAY. CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND. 7:30 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. OCTOBER 30.}

“Hey, am I crazy, or is there a newsboy down on the street?” Lenny asked.

“Those are not mutually exclusive questions.” Heather rushed to the window beside him. On the sidewalk below, a boy of about ten waved a paper over his head, shouting, “Read all about it!”

“Might as well see if we’re both hallucinating,” she said, strapping on sneakers.

In the street, she asked “How much?”

The boy smiled. “One paper for five dollars paper money or one can or box of food, has to be edible by itself, no fridge stuff, and I don’t make change on food,” proud that he’d remembered the whole spiel.

Heather traded a ten for a five and took the paper upstairs. It felt strangely like the local newspaper she could remember from when she’d been in college and had occasionally read one out of boredom; it was even about as thick as the Costaguana Weekly Courier, and had the same smeary, slightly greasy feel to it.

The front page had a little box:

Three full pages listed all the stores both individually and by chain, noting the few of them that were still open to sell toiletries, cleaning supplies, and so forth. “Probably I can get some deals on disinfectant,” Heather said, “if I hustle over to the Safeway three blocks over.”

“Also check Rite Aid,” Lenny suggested. “Especially home hair-dye kits.”

“Are we going in disguise?”

“They have goopy extra-strength peroxide. We can use it to scrub around the seals on the windows, the air intake for the generator engine, stuff like that. Wonder if the gasoline would be safer if we could add antibiotics to it? Or if that would just spoil it?”

“We could—shit. I was about to say maybe we could Goo-22 antibiotics and gasoline. How the hell did people find things out before the net?”

“Think about when we were kids. Phone books, dictionaries, paper encyclopedias—”

“Well, yeah, when I was a little kid. Mostly I remember the heap of them in the Dumpster when the school got a grant. How long since anything like that’s been produced? 2015?”

“Yeah. I can’t imagine anyone ever thought about gasoline spoiling anyway.” Lenny sighed and ran through the autochecks on the control screen of his wheelchair, which was becoming a nervous habit. “Well, it was a nice thought. I have fuel enough for about a week, but it’ll be infected well before then.”

“And there’s food in the fridge and freezer for about that long. It won’t benefit us at all if it spoils. So we’d better have breakfast today and read the paper to each other like more or less normal people.”

They skipped reading the text of Shaunsen’s speech and agreed that they liked Rusty Parlotta’s editorials calling for everyone to admit that the system was down and act more like a grown-up about it. Lenny thought Chris Manckiewicz’s reporting was biased too liberal, and Heather that it was just liberal enough. “I wonder if they’ll have comics, and sports pages, like old-time papers?” Lenny said, as they were eating the last of the mixed, chopped fresh fruit. “I’d like that.”

“Me too. My dad used to read me Rose is Rose and Heart of the City, and we always went over the stats on the Lakers every Sunday in the Times.” The classified ads were mostly people looking to barter expensive cars and computers for canned food and guns. There were black smears on her hands, just below the little fingers. “On the other hand, the Web was never quite this grubby. There couldn’t be lead in the ink, could there?”

“That little story about ‘local printer-hobbyist finds new occupation’ said he didn’t use lead-based inks, but it doesn’t hurt for either of us to be washing hands constantly, considering.”

While she was scrubbing, the phone rang; she heard him talking for a minute before he wheeled into the bathroom. “Cameron Nguyen-Peters wants us to attend a meeting of DRET at DHS.”

“What’s DRET?”

“Daybreak Research and Evaluation Team; it means ‘Cam’s bunch of smart people that help him figure stuff out.’ They’ve got a biowar-rigged Hummer that sprays its own tires with disinfectant and has an extensive air filter system, coming to pick you up in about half an hour.”

“For me? You said he wanted—”

“I think I’d better not go outside any more than I have to; in here, I’ve got it mostly sealed and as disinfected as I can get it, but out there, I could come down with nanoswarm or biotes, and be just as dead as any transistor radio. I’ll have to work mostly by letter and phone from now until there’s a better solution.”

“I don’t like the idea of leaving you here by yourself.”

She could hear him trying not to snap at her. “And I don’t like being confined to the house, but I think I’ll have to live with it. Meanwhile, I’m moderately well-armed, the place has power on to support me, I can fix most of what will break in here, it’s a lot safer from contamination, and we both have work to do. I’ll be here, you’ll be there, we’ll be fine. I’ll set out a dish basin with some disinfectant at the door; when you come back, be sure you dip your shoes and scour everything else.”

^{ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. MARANA. ARIZONA. 8:30 A.M. MST. WEDNESDAY. OCTOBER 30.}

When Kai-Anne pulled the curtain aside to see what the noise was about, she jumped back; a man with a bat stood in their driveway. She looked again and saw that there were perhaps twenty people with bats and guns. She didn’t know what it was about but she knew she wanted a cop. She checked the landline; no luck. The cell phone was dead too.

“What’s going on, hon?”

Greg’s voice was low, trying not to wake the kids.

“Bunch of people outside with guns and bats,” she said, trying not to sound nearly as scared as she felt.

“Shit. We’re dealing with excessive citizen initiative here; remind me to thank the Acting President and the Moron Stream Media. Answer, but don’t open the door if they get up the nerve to knock. I gotta dress. Don’t go out there yet.”

What’s he mean, yet? He can’t mean he’s going to—

They were shouting at each other out there, arguing about something or maybe nerving each other up. Please let that be an argument. The only person she could distinctly understand was the guy outside the door with the bat; he was yelling at people to calm down, we just gotta ask some questions, just some questions, let’s not guess till we asked our questions.

Greg came out in uniform; he could always be dressed in less than a minute. “My guess is they saw that hippie chick that nobody knows very well going in and out in the middle of the night, and decided there’s a terrorist here. I just need to have a little talk with them.” He looked her up and down for a moment and said, “You’re perfect.”

“I am?”

“Nobody’s going to believe you’re a terrorist in a Winnie the Pooh sweat suit with baby-puke stains. You’ll see. Come on.”

When he opened the door and stepped out, holding her hand, she saw one old guy in the back pointing the rifle, and thought, No, don’t, please listen—

Greg looked over the crowd. “Let me introduce myself. Captain Greg Redmond, U.S. Air Force. I fly an A-10 out of Davis-Monthan. Anybody here want to take a look at my service ID?”

The guy with the rifle lowered it; the crowd didn’t seem to know what to do.

“Anybody?”

Mr. Loud Baseball Bat set the bat down, looked at Greg’s ID carefully, and said, “It’s Air Force, and it’s him.”

“All right,” Greg said, “So we’ve established who I am. This is my wife, Kai-Anne, and the mother of our three children, who some of you have probably seen around the neighborhood. Most of you know it’s not easy being an Air Force wife, I guess, with all the moving and me being away a lot, and even harder being a mother of some little ones.

“Now, I’m just guessing, but I think you might be standing out on my lawn because somebody on the television, or the Internet, or something, said to watch out for people who were coming and going in the middle of the night before last, when our country was attacked. So I thought I’d just tell you all that Kai-Anne was picking me up from the base, because they let me come home for the night, after I was out flying all day because of that whole situation with Air Force Two. And because we’re all pretty worried about our country today, you were concerned that she might have been involved with this Daybreak thing, or maybe with the murder of our Vice President and you came here about that.”

By now all the bats were drooping, the handguns were holstered, and the rifles and shotguns pointed safely at the ground.

Greg nodded politely. “Well, what you have found is one tired Air Force pilot who wants some more sleep, and one Air Force wife with too much to do, who happens to have dreads and a couple tattoos. By the way, her husband likes all those. And three little kids sleeping. That’s all.

“If you’d called the police, they could have come out and looked and made sure it was okay, without all this disturbance for everyone. So I’m betting you’ll hear of other houses where people came and went late last night, because there’s always people that need medicine in the middle of the night, or people who pull a night shift, or even I guess guys sneaking back in after an affair.”

“How would you feel about that, Kai-Anne?” a voice called from the crowd.

“Anything I wanted done to him, I’d do myself,” she said.

There was a nervous, stuttering laugh, and people began to drift away. In a few minutes, the crowd was gone; a couple of older men came forward to thank Greg for his service and assure him they “didn’t mean nothing.”

“Did you recognize any of them?” Greg asked, when they were standing alone on the porch. “Remind me why we moved here.”

“You wanted to be somewhere safe for the kids, and I wanted to be someplace quiet, away from the base, where nobody would bother us or pay attention to how we lived.”

He started to laugh, and hugged her. Maybe life wasn’t all that bad, anyway.

^{ABOUT 45 MINUTES LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 11:45 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. OCTOBER 30.}

For the moment, DRET turned out to be Heather’s Daybreak Working Group, including Arnie and Steve from Deep Black, plus Graham, minus Lenny and Agent Reynolds, plus a promised staff of as many as they needed as fast as they could hire them. They were all queuing up for lunch as Heather arrived. “The crew at your checkpoints looks pretty nervous,” Heather said to Cameron. “Have you had incidents?”

“I woke up once during the night when a drunk got obstreperous at a guard post outside, because he wanted to know why we had lights and he didn’t, and he’d apparently never heard of a Coleman lantern.”

“So you’re sleeping here now?”

“As much as I can persuade people, everyone will be soon,” Cam said. “You and Lenny would be very welcome, Graham moved in this afternoon, Crittenden and his wife will be here before tonight, and I think I’ve got Arnie and Allison talked into it. Jim Browder is insisting on hanging on to his big house way out past the Beltway for three reasons—one, he can’t get over the fact that it’s the house he always dreamed of; two, his wife would never leave it; and three, he’s an idiot.”

“No kidding. But we all are. I think Lenny will want to stay in his apartment until the power fails. And I won’t leave till he does. It’s not easy to adjust to the new conditions, is it?”

“I guess not. I’ll be a lot happier if this facility can serve as a dorm for the emergency management team. There’s a lot of unused space at St. Elizabeth’s right now, with the offices that have left and DHS not yet fully moved in, so we have the room. And it’s relatively easy to protect the grounds.”

“You’re expecting trouble?”

“Should I stop expecting trouble right now, when so much of it just arrived?” Cam permitted himself one of his little, tight-lipped smiles. “Every time we did a simulation or a game-out of any widespread, multiple-path emergency, the Red team always hit us with an assassination, or a kidnapping, or general bad stuff happening to the critical personnel in Blue. And when Red didn’t do that, the refs did—‘the physicist you need is trapped on a collapsing bridge,’ that kind of thing.

“I don’t want to lose anybody. So if you can, see if you can talk your guy into moving down here; I wish we could give him accommodations as good as he has up in Chevy Chase, but he’s going to be losing those within a week anyway no matter what, and we might as well move him while we’re still fairly sure of having some motor vehicles running.”

“Makes sense. I just don’t want to think about trying to persuade Lenny to accept being dependent at all—he’ll hate that so much.”

“Don’t we all?” Cameron asked. “All the—”

His phone rang; he spoke for just a moment and then said, “More mess. The meeting will start late because I’ve got to run to another one; I’ll be back with you in twenty minutes. Meanwhile, enjoy lunch and have brilliant thoughts that solve all our problems.” He trotted away.

Since she was last in line, Heather sweet-talked the lady and got two sandwiches to take home for Lenny.

^{ABOUT THREE MINUTES LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 11:55 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. OCTOBER 30.}

Cameron Nguyen-Peters slipped into the small room and said, “I have just a few minutes but I’m told this is urgent?”

“We think so,” the tall man with narrow shoulders and thick glasses said. “I’m Dan Tyrel, your NOAA liaison. Weather forecasting. This just came in from Navy radiofax; they’ve been loaning us computers and satellite links from the Atlantic fleet, so we can still do some weather forecasting.”

He held up a piece of paper; Cameron looked and saw an immense white pinwheel in the Gulf of Alaska. “Big storm, that’s all I see there.”

“That’s the first major winter storm. We’ve been in Indian summer the last couple weeks. When that comes across it will bring high winds, blowing snow, the works,” Tyrel, the NOAA liaison, said. “A little early this year but not unusually so.”

“We’ve put an alert out on KP-1 and Radio Blue and Gold,” the short black man beside him said. “I’m Waters, your Agriculture liaison, and I bet you didn’t know you needed one.”

Cam nodded. “Well, now that you mention it, it’s obvious. How bad a storm are we looking at here, and what will it do to us?”

Tyrel said, “Snow in the Rockies and maybe the Great Plains, freezing rain in the Great Plains and the Upper Midwest, and cold and very wet wherever the main track exits the continent, on the average that’s the Chesapeake Bay area, but it could exit as far north as Maine or as far south as Georgia.”

Waters jumped in. “With snow over frozen ground, and the farm machinery not running, winter wheat will be a problem; some of it won’t get planted even though we have seed, unless we can maybe get some of the urban refugees out there planting with pointed sticks in the next thaw. The feedlots are so dense that pigs and cattle can probably keep each other alive just from body heat, if they can find enough food for them. Poultry factory systems have to be heated in cold weather, so we’re losing a lot of chickens and turkeys in the Midwest in another day or two. We can put word out for pre-emptive slaughter but they may not have workers to do it, and we don’t have the facilities to can or preserve most of the meat.

“The biggest impact is on range cattle, and that’s huge, because the ranchers in the Mountain States were one of our best hopes of feeding everyone in the next few years. A mild wet winter, that would have helped immensely. As it is—well, there’s just not time to bring all the cattle and sheep in. No way. And we’re going to lose some ranchers, besides some cattle; some of them will get caught out in that, trying to save their stock, and when they do, we lose a skill and knowledge base that took decades to build.”

“How many more storms like this, this year?” Cameron asked.

“Maybe as few as three, maybe as many as nine, winter storms come in on that track every year,” Tyrel said. “Some that just give everyone a cold, snowy day, some that are bad like this, now and then one as bad as the Blizzard of ’86.”

“I don’t even remember that one.”

“1886,” Waters said. “Destroyed the cattle industry for a decade afterward, put an end to the cowboy era. We lived through the one in 1978 because we had helicopters and snowmobiles.”

“What are the odds of anything that bad?”

“This storm, not at all.” Tyrel shrugged. “Not even close for size. The next one or the one after that, god alone knows.”

Cameron stared into space. From now on, I’m going to appreciate every bite of every steak. “And we don’t have anything that can help?”

Waters said, “The carriers don’t have hay and the planes don’t dare touch down on land, so we can see how bad it is but not help.”

“How long before this hits?”

“Idaho and Montana by Friday,” Tyrel said. “The East Coast, maybe as soon as Sunday, maybe as late as Wednesday. You’ll need to have everyone indoors by then.”

Cam shook his head. “I don’t know if we could do that if we had three to five months. Is there anything about this that’s positive?”

“It’s almost certain that no storm after this will kill nearly as many cattle, or sheep, or ranchers for that matter,” Waters said. “But that’s because you can only kill something once.”

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. ON US 285. SOUTH OF ANTONITO. COLORADO. 10:15 A.M. MST. WEDNESDAY. OCTOBER 30.}

The sun through the windows of the old Cadillac was warm and pleasant, and Jason and Beth awoke slowly, stretching and yawning, pushing the piled coats and sweaters off themselves. Jason said, “Good thing we slept long as we did—it’s actually warm in here. Look at that, the sun’s halfway up the sky, must be ten o’clock.”

“Well, babe, I was totally tired. A gang rape and a twenty-mile walk is like, exhausting.” She glanced at him, and said, “Hey. Don’t you start being all sensitive about it.”

“I just figure you’re in some weird kind of denial about things. They also killed all our friends.”

“And broke my wrist,” she said. “I was hanging on to the shed door trying to keep them from dragging me out, and one of them whacked it with a rock. So you think I should just sit down and cry?”

“Just seems… I don’t know, weird… I mean—”

“Jason, babe, I promise that as soon as I stop needing to be on top of shit, I will break down all over the fucking place. In fact I pretty much guarantee it. In fact right now I am doing my fucking level best to not just lose everything and cry the rest of the day curled up in this old car. In fact you’re not helping me get through this shit, and in fucking fact I wish you’d play along and help me out. ’Kay babe?”

“Totally,” Jason said. “Sorry if I—”

“Apology accepted. Now, as my asshole Uncle Billy always said, open an extra large can of shut the fuck up. What’s for breakfast?”

“Let’s see if I can improv us something hot,” he said. “If I can build a fire quick, there’s aluminum foil in our friend’s groceries, and we could just dump some veggies and meat into packages of that and cook ’em Boy Scout style.”

“Okay, you gotta make that happen,” she said. “Because my mouth just started watering, thinking about it.”

Jason was proud of himself; he was able to solve the problem in about ten minutes all told. He began by pulling a respectable heap of deadwood out of the dry wash about fifty yards away from the pullout. Then he went back into the guy’s emergency kit, and sure enough, there was a gas siphon and a set of pull flares. He siphoned about a cup of gasoline into an empty Bud can and sprinkled that over his heap of dry wood; then he pulled the tab on a flare and shoved it into the pile. The dry wood, aided by the gasoline, caught at once.

While the fire burned down to a bed of coals, he dumped the formerly frozen vegetables in heaps on a long strip of the aluminum foil, added three slices of lunchmeat and some plaztatic petroleum cheese-like substance onto each heap, ran down the whole line with ketchup, mustard, pepper, and a dribbling can of beer (all the seasonings there were), and finally tore and folded the foil to enclose each heap and form a cookable package. The packages went directly onto the fire.

“That’s three times what we can eat,” Beth said.

“But I figure we eat a third and take the rest with us,” Jason said. “Even if I have to do it in a cardboard box on my shoulder. And if we don’t open the packets till we’re ready to eat them, they should keep pretty good.”

When Jason fished the packets out with a stick, and used the work gloves from the emergency kit to open two of them, they discovered how hungry they were; of the ten aluminum-foil-wrapped balls of food, they ate five there and then, gobbling down the impromptu gullion with their fingers as soon as it was cool enough to touch, washing it down with plenty of Mountain Dew and Coors. A bottle of Windex and a roll of toilet paper got their faces and hands tolerably clean afterward.

Though it was warm enough at the moment, the big, heavy sweaters from the back seat seemed like something they shouldn’t leave behind, so Jason tied them into fanny packs. Each sweater held two liters of Mountain Dew, plus snack chips, packages of cooked gullion, and a couple of lunchmeat sandwiches, enough to make it to Antonito, they hoped, which a sign said was seventeen miles away.

For a long time they just walked, and now and then Beth would reach out and take his hand with her good right hand. They stopped only once, when the Mountain Dew bottle in Jason’s sweater pack abruptly exploded, giving him a little bit of a bruise on the ass, soaking his back, drenching the sweater, and crushing some of the food. The bottle smelled like spoiling milk; so did the bottle from Beth’s pack, so they opened that and drank as much as they could; the liquid would do more good inside them than in the spoiling bottle. The warm fall sun dried his back fairly quickly, but the sweater still hung wet and cold against his ass, and the food in it was probably a soggy mess. Maybe, if we don’t make Antonito by dusk, I’ll build a fire and recook my packets to dry them out. Don’t know what I can do for the sandwiches; maybe wrap them in the used foil and bake them too?

They topped a long rise and looked down to where the road bent between two rock outcrops; there was a group of people down there, and a horse and wagon. Beth’s breath caught for a moment, and she asked, “Should we run?”

“They’ve already seen us and—hah. I think we’re fine.”

The little figure running lickety-split toward them was a girl of about ten, grinning and waving at them like a maniac.

Beth laughed with relief. “Yeah. Hostile people don’t send their children out to meet strangers.”

“Betcha they thought of that too.”

The girl rushed up and said, “Hi, I’m Gretchen Bashore, and I’m here to welcome you to Antonito, Colorado. Do you have any other people in your party or were you forced to leave any injured or disabled people behind?”

“There’s just us,” Jason said, smiling, “and we’re glad to see you.”

“Okay, are there any injuries in your party?”

“My left wrist is broken but I can walk,” Beth said.

“No other members in party, lady—uh—”

“Beth.”

“Lady named Beth has a broken wrist but can walk. Okay. Okay. Uh, material you are bringing in?”

“Just our clothes and a little food.”

“Okay, and the last one is skills you have?”

“We’re hard workers, good cooks, we can both do some fix-it stuff, and we can do organic gardening and raise chickens. Wilderness survival for me, and my name is Jason, and Beth can quilt, crochet, and sew, at least once her wrist heals.”

Gretchen repeated it back twice, and then said, “ ’Kay, back soon!” and rushed away. They were still more than a mile from the little cluster of people. “Might as well keep walking toward them,” Beth said. “We don’t want them to think we’re lazy.”

Shortly, the wagon, pulled by a big brown horse, came clopping up the road to them. Gretchen sat shotgun; the driver was a little, bearded gnome of a man who looked like he had been born to play a Western sidekick.

“Jason, Beth,” Gretchen said, carefully formal, “this is my dad, Dr. Jerry Bashore. He teaches art at Adams State College in Alamosa.”

“Or I did till four days ago,” Bashore said, tipping his straw cowboy hat to them as if he’d walked right out of the movies. His accent was much more Staten Island than Gabby Hayes, Jason thought. “Decided I’d better come out and pick you up; I know you can walk, but if your wrist is hurting, that’ll make you tired. I was just about to take a fresh batch of folks into town, anyway. Gretchen, give Beth a hand getting into the wagon bed.”

In the wagon, they discovered bales of straw, and Jason laughed. “You usually give hayrides in this thing!”

“Yep. Students loved ’em, extra money in tourist season, and it helped my two oat-burning buddies earn their keep. I’d already gotten the straw in for Halloween.”

There were four others waiting for their rides into town, which Bashore—“call me Doc, everyone does”—told them would be about four miles, an hour’s drive, “but you don’t have to work, the horses do. And they know the way better than I do.”

“So this thing is all made out of metal and wood?” Jason asked.

“Yeah, but I nearly had it seize up earlier today. The silicone grease turned to watery, sticky stuff, more like Elmer’s Glue than anything else. We had to take the hubs apart and re-grease ’em with fat from the Dinner Bell Café’s grease can. Also, I had a prairie schooner top for this, which would come in handy, except it was made of nylon with plastic tube ribs, and it turned into brown snot overnight. But there’s nothing electric, and no plastic fittings, on any of the parts that make it go. And I guess we can make another cover for it. Giddup, there, fellas, we have people to deliver.”

As far as Jason could tell, the horses moved no differently; probably that’s just for effect, he thought. That’s okay. Right now I’d take a masked man on a white horse followed by a whole troop of cavalry.

Something was shaking beside him; he turned and saw Beth crying, big wracking sobs, her whole body trembling. He put his arm around her and she buried her face in his shoulder, resting her injured wrist on his thigh. He stroked her, made soothing noises, and looked up at the blue sky, just now being invaded by high cirrus in the late afternoon—a sign that the warm chinook was about to be over and the first big storm of the winter was on its way.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 12:30 P.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. OCTOBER 30.}

“That’s the story,” Cam said, “a big, cold wet storm, crossing the northern US or possibly veering south, within a few days. Bad enough to cause death from exposure. What should we prepare for? Anyone got something to say about the impact of that?”

Steve from Deep Black nodded and pushed his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose. “We’re still getting pretty decent data from reconnaissance drones flying off carriers—not as detailed as we would like because they have to stay high up to avoid catching nanoswarm and taking it back to the carriers. But what we see looks semi-okay. The impromptu evacuation of the cities in the Northeast is going faster than we hoped—lots of people are just walking out, with whatever they can carry in shopping carts and wheelbarrows. Private motor traffic seems to have stopped completely; we think there are probably almost no tires left, and so many biotes around that the few tires there are don’t last long.

“We see high densities of people walking out of the big cities on highways. The flow started early this morning, right after the regular trucks didn’t come in and the grocery stores ran out of a lot of staples. Still a lot of people staying put and hoping it will get better right now, of course, but as they see people streaming out, they’ll probably start to move, themselves.

“That’s the good news. The bad news is, we’re not seeing any evidence that they’re turning off the road and getting indoors much of anywhere; it’s warm enough today for them to keep walking. Most of them have been moving for less than twenty-four hours, so to some extent they may still have scruples, and to some extent the people they’re meeting are in the same situation they are—there’s big parts of the Northeast Corridor where you can’t really walk to a real evacuation area in less than a week—”

“Just for my information,” Graham Weisbrod said, “by ‘real evacuation area’ you mean… ?”

“A place it makes sense to evacuate them to, rather than just the same bad situation farther up the road. If there’s no food, no heat, hardly any shelter, then traveling there isn’t really evacuation—at best it just gets them closer to the real evacuation point later. From well north of Boston to down past Richmond, we’ve got a band of highly populated areas that are about a week’s walk from real evacuation areas.”

“So to live they’ll have to walk for a week without food or a warm place to sleep?”

Cam said, “That’s right. They’ll start to improvise tonight and tomorrow night, when it gets cold and they’re hungry. They’ll start knocking on doors, and then knocking down doors; there’s going to be some violence, and a lot of people will be building fires out of whatever they can find, and wherever there’s something to loot, there’ll be looting.

“Then each successive wave coming out of the deep population centers is going to be worse; by the time the last ones make it out, they’re going to be really dangerous and not especially sane, and that’s what people will be out there as the storm hits. Which means a lot of them will die and solve the problem of themselves for us, but while they’re doing it they’ll tear up the areas they manage to reach pretty badly.”

Steve fidgeted. “I saw some of the pictures a couple hours ago. Take I- 80 across New Jersey and into eastern Pennsylvania—we got some photos from there—pictures from the air show literally hundreds of miles of highways covered with people walking. The highways run through huge suburban areas of single-family housing; once it gets dark, and especially when the cold and the rain hit the refugees, those little suburban houses will be obvious targets, and basically you’ll have a… I mean, I don’t want to sound… but that crowd on the highways, hungry, cold, nobody there to tell them what to do—”

“They’re going to hit that suburban tract housing like a ravening barbarian horde,” Graham Weisbrod said. “Which they’ll be.” His face was drawn and tight as if he were watching it happen already. “Not because they’re bad or even because they’re angry, but because… well, hell, I think about my kids when they were little and helpless, I imagine them hungry, crying, and cold, and yeah, I’d break down a man’s door and maybe kill him just for a can of beans for the kids, especially if I’d had all day to stew and think about the fact that no one was coming to help and how I needed it more than the guy who still had a house, until I rationalized it all. It might be hard to talk myself into that the first time, but by the second time on the third day, it would be business as usual.”

^{ABOUT THREE HOURS LATER. WASHINGTON AND CLEVELAND PARK. DC. AND CHEVY CHASE. MARYLAND. 4:15 P.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. OCTOBER 30.}

Heather was the last drop-off for the biohazard Hummer, and he invited her to move up to the front seat “for two more eyes and one more gun.” He left the scanner running; no signal on any emergency bands. KP-1 was holding on, broadcasting government announcements from Pittsburgh. The midshipmen at Annapolis had hand-built a radio station they were calling Radio Blue and Gold; a young-sounding kid was reading the morning’s Advertiser Gazette over the air. A faint, sputtering station that claimed to be coming from RPI’s physics lab came in for a second, then faded.

I left a mountain of chow on the floor for Fuss and Feathers, and set out five litter pans; they’ll be all right for a week, which is more than you can say for us.

The driver said, “I don’t want to try to go all the way to this address in Chevy Chase. Last reports, an hour ago, there was a lot of bad stuff going down. The minute I drop you off, I’m swinging over west, picking up my family, and heading out, as far and fast as I can. Listening to all the nice people I’ve been driving, I’ve heard about the two-hundred-mile dying zones around the cities, there ain’t gonna be any United States in another week, it seems to me, and I’ve got one of the few vehicles that can keep running, at least for a while, and if I take it right now to haul my family, maybe they can live.”

Heather thought about her sidearm in its shoulder holster; this was a deserter who was stealing a vital piece of government property. Lenny was alone and his apartment block was an obvious target; they could set the building on fire, or just break in from too many sides at once, or maybe just plug an exhaust pipe on his generator. Getting to him was the first priority.

“Look,” she said, “I probably can’t stop you anyway, and I guess in your place I’d be thinking of the same thing, but how far up Connecticut Avenue can you take me? I’ve got a friend who might be trying to hold his place against god knows what; that’s the Chevy Chase address you have. It’s more than twenty miles to his place, so I’d never make it before dark. Take me as close as you feel okay with, please? A few hours, and being there before dark, might be life and death.”

“You got it, lady. But the first time I hear a shot or see a mob, you’re out, and I’m running, clear?”

“Clear,” she said.

They had turned off Connecticut, less than a mile from Lenny’s place, when a big crowd spilled onto the street three blocks ahead. The driver whipped a U-turn and stopped for an instant. “Here’s where you get out, ma’am. Thanks for understanding.”

Heather jumped out, her bag already on her back, and slammed the Hummer door. She zagged left and put a mailbox between her and the crowd in the street.

She’d only really seen looting in training films; it just wasn’t something that likely for her to encounter in her areas of law enforcement, security, or intel. They always told us to go around (how far off a main street? How much delay?) or go past (what’s all the running and yelling about there, anyway? But I don’t see any guns). As she cautiously approached, she saw that the people running in and out were teenagers and younger, and the crowd in the street was overwhelmingly mothers and grandmothers. By the front door, a stack of empty coolers with a HELP YOURSELF sign showed how the manager had gotten rid of the frozen foods the day before.

Now the doors lay thrown down on the sidewalk, and the kids were bringing out the few overlooked items for inspection. Heather saw a couple jars of pickled jalapenos, some store-brand canned sauerkraut, and a few boxes of Hamburger Helper presented to the waiting crowd of women; there were few takers, except one lady filling a backpack. “You are all crazy, you can eat this stuff, and I’m takin’ all I can carry. They don’t have no big pile of steak and Cheerios hid back or nothing.”

Around the corner, Heather found a Rite Aid with its doors wide open; a tall, thin man in a store apron was painting on the window.

“Is there any disinfectant in there?” Heather asked him.

“Lady came by and got most of the rubbing alcohol and I think the hydrogen peroxide, another lady got the bleach,” the man said.

“Got hair-dye kits?”

He laughed. “Oh, man, now there’s a woman’s vanity. You want to stay a redhead while the world ends? Aisle Four D.”

Tearing open the hair-dye kits, dropping the soft bottles of peroxide into her pack, she thought, I must be a good person. I could shoot him and no one would ever know or care. Or maybe I just want to save ammunition.

Still room in the pack. She put a shoulder to the door of the pharmacy section, and grabbed three large jars of pills whose labeled names ended in -cillin.

She went out the emergency door, wishing that ALARM WILL SOUND had not been a lie, and ran past the row of cars with rotting, stinking tires, and a sour odor that she figured was probably gasoline going to vinegar. Okay, Lenny, now I’d sure appreciate it if it turns out you’ve been having the dullest afternoon of your life. She took the last few blocks at a trot.

The door of Lenny’s building was propped open. The doorman’s body lay behind his desk. The exit wound in his back was huge—shotgun blast, from the front, high up by the neck.

Staying drawn and ready, she closed the building door. No sense attracting more scum into the place. Heather ran up the stairs toward Lenny’s apartment, trying not to think about what she might find.

Loud voices through the fire door, but they didn’t sound close.

She pushed it gently, opened it far enough to slide into the empty hall. She crept along the wall toward the turn that led to Lenny’s front door.

Beside her, a broken door gaped; Heather saw a child’s bare, motionless leg sticking from under a sofa. The sight froze her; she had seen violent death, but this was a kid for god’s sake—

She heard a door open, down the hall, and slipped into the apartment. She reached out to touch the child’s leg, hoping—

“He’s dead,” a soft voice said beside her. A young woman, perhaps twenty years old. “My boyfriend’s son. They killed him and his dad. I hid in a closet. I feel bad.”

The voices in the hallway rose to a crescendo, and Heather made a shhh gesture and listened. Somebody named James was loudly welcomed by the group, and the leader, if that was the word, was explaining that “—from a neighbor bitch, she told us so we let her go after we done with her, there’s a cripple guy in there with like a generator and a frigerator and all that good shit, man, we could party the biggest bestest party anybody ever partied.”

“Burn ’im out.”

“Then what happens to all that good shit we goin’ in for, know what I’m sayin’?”

“Then just break the door down.”

“You see that little square in the door, there, just down from that peep-hole? That’s how Michael got shot, trying to take it down with his shoulder, and that cripple guy, he just pop that little square open, bang, shot Michael dead, man. He was our friend and everything and that cripple guy killed him.”

“See, if it was me, in there I mean, I’d just like spray down the whole hallway, and all y’all’d be dead, you know?”

“Maybe he’s low on ammo.”

“He shot back soon as we tried shooting through that door, so he ain’t all that low.”

I wish they’d all talk, Heather thought, because I’d sure like to know how many of them there are. But things won’t get better for waiting, that’s for sure. She turned to the young woman beside her and handed her a table lamp lying on the floor. “Was it those assholes that killed your friends?”

“Yeah.” The young woman’s voice was full of tears.

“’Kay. When my butt disappears through that door, start counting. At fifty, throw the lamp into the hall and scream—loud and a lot.”

“Fifty, throw the lamp, scream.”

“Right.” Heather scrambled through the door and down the hall to wait about three feet short of the turn that led to Lenny’s apartment, silently counting—

The lamp crashed into the hallway and the young woman screamed and wailed fit to fetch the dead. Heather held her pistol in both hands, chest high, drew a breath—

Blur around the corner. She squeezed the trigger, and the body fell sideways. Another man tripped and fell across him, and Heather shot him in the back of the head, then jumped across the hall for a view farther down the corridor. A man stood staring at the bodies of his two friends and Heather shot him in the chest; two more men, yelling “Don’t,” backed up in the hallway.

There was a brief, stuttering burst from behind them; Heather ducked sideways. It would really upset Lenny if he accidentally shot me. After the burst, Heather peeked, and saw the two men trying to drag themselves forward, their backs a bloody mess. She stepped into the short hall and shot each of the struggling men on the floor in the head; no point in their suffering, but no way to bring in a prisoner. She verified that the other men were also dead.

“All clear,” she called.

Lenny’s door opened; he was in his mountain racing wheelchair. She hadn’t realized how neatly the side bracket would hold a machine pistol.

“Glad you got here when you did,” he said. “They’d brought in the intellectual in the group, and he’d’ve figured something out.”

“I had some help—let me get her,” Heather said. She went back to the apartment, where the young woman still sat, stroking the leg of the dead boy.

“We never got along,” she said. “He was jealous about the time his dad spent with me. I wanted us to get along, but…” She was watching something a thousand miles away. “I guess we’ll never get along now.”

“I’ve got to talk my boyfriend into going to a safe place with me,” Heather said. “He’ll argue, but I’ll win. You should come with us. I think they’ll have room for you there too, and even if they don’t, you’ll still be somewhere safer than this building. Please come along?”

“I’d just be a drag on you.”

“You were a big help, setting off my diversion.”

“Because I could tell you were going to kill those guys and I wanted to help.” In the gathering gloom, Heather couldn’t really see the young woman’s face, just the shadow of her shape. “I was in the closet and I heard them kill Stan and Dennis. I heard Stan begging for Dennis’s life. They killed him anyway.”

“You helped me kill them all.”

“Didn’t bring Stan back. Or Dennis. Look, you guys just go. Please. I’ll just sit here till I think of something.” She turned and curled away.

The sun was going down fast. Heather said, “Just let me make the offer one more time—”

“No.”

Hope I have more luck with Lenny. She turned to go; Lenny was rolling into the apartment. “Stay with us tonight and see what you think in the morning.”

The girl looked up. “You’re the guy they were trying to kill.”

“Yeah. I’m sorry Stan didn’t come over to my place and bring you and Dennis. I asked him to.”

“I know. He said you can’t live in fear.”

“So here’s my thought. Heather and I can’t make it to anywhere safe before nightfall, so we’re stuck here for the night. At least do us the favor of not being out here where we might have to hear someone killing you. Come morning, you can come with us or not.”

“I really don’t like the idea of staying the night here,” Heather said. “I know you’ve got the generator, and your independence, and everything, but—”

“I hate to leave,” Lenny said. “But I like living. Now—come on—I think Stan said your name was Sherry?”

“Yeah.” The young woman stood up, kissed her hand, and pressed it to the dead boy’s leg, and led the way out into the hall.

“I thought you’d argue with me,” Heather said.

“If it was just me, I might, but I keep noticing more and more people risking their lives to accommodate me. We’ve all got to get through this with whatever we’ve got, and I know that everyone will have to help and be helped, but I don’t want to cost anyone anything more than I have to.” He rolled ahead of her and Heather followed him around to the door; she’d wondered how he’d gotten through a hallway blocked with bodies. The answer turned out to be that a mountain racing wheelchair rolls over a corpse as easily as a log. “We’ll want to wipe your wheels when we’re inside,” she said. “You’ve probably picked up some nanoswarm or biotes.”

“Now, there’s my practical girlfriend.”

“I still wish we were moving tonight.”

“Me too, actually. But realistically, it’s over twenty miles to St. Elizabeth’s. And except for the White House, no one’s got a secure car they can risk at night to come up here, and I wouldn’t bet on Shaunsen deciding to rescue us. So I’m guessing we’ll end up going under our own power tomorrow. Better to go at dawn, when the predators are sleeping off looting the liquor stores; we can be most of the way there before anyone notices us.”

He unlocked the door and let them in. When he was on the mat with the door closed behind him, he said, “Bleach and rags under the kitchen sink; could you help me clean the blood off my wheels? I know it’s silly, since I’m leaving so soon, but I hate the thought of staining my carpet.”

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. SAN DIEGO. CALIFORNIA. 3:30 P.M. PST. WEDNESDAY. OCTOBER 30.}

Last night, Carlucci had declared Roth to be a cooperative witness, which meant she could have food, water, and sleep at will. No one had asked her about it; she’d still been passed out from her seizure.

Roth had seemed all right but subdued that morning, so Carlucci had tried a low-key interrogation at ten A.M.; by noon, when they broke for lunch, Roth had repeated, many times, that she wanted to cooperate but she didn’t know much and it felt like something was wrong with her mind.

Hoping a younger woman would have better rapport, they’d sent Bambi Castro in from 1:30 to 3:30, but though Roth was less guarded with her, she really hadn’t extracted any more information. Now, it was Larry Mensche’s turn. Maybe his warm and fatherly personal style would work out differently, but Bambi doubted it. She went to treat herself to fresh coffee; she wondered how long it would be before supplies of that ran out.

In the break room, Carlucci was just filling his cup. “Weird, isn’t it? She keeps saying she wants to help, but did you get anything out of her?”

“No, and it was time to give up. I needed some coffee, because I’m getting tired, and I promised I’d bring back a cup of herbal tea for Roth, because she’s been cooperative. I tried to kid with her and told her it wasn’t real herbal organic, just a plaztatic copy, and she started to cry and said a lot of people around the world need plaztatic copies of real stuff, and she never understood that before, and she’s so sorry. But then after that for fifteen minutes she was like, aphasic. Like after a stroke. It’s like she’s dying of guilt and I would swear to god she wants to confess and spill her guts, but when she tries she goes into brainlock.” Bambi swallowed a deep, warming slug of coffee. “I’m wondering if Daybreak protects itself by not letting them talk?”

“I agree. I can’t tell if she’s lying, too out of it to have a clue, or being blocked from talking. Maybe Mensche’ll be—”

“Trouble!” Bolton yelled from the front door; Bambi and Carlucci ran to see.

About 150 people, looking a little like a parade, a little like a charity walkathon, and a lot like a mob, in jeans and sweatsuits and T-shirts, were coming up the road toward them. “The light’s behind them, so they probably can’t see us through the windows,” Bolton pointed out. “Good thing, too. I count four rifles and three shotguns being waved around; handguns would be anyone’s guess.” He handed his binoculars to Carlucci.

“Hunh. KILL THE BITCH NOW. MEXICANS GET FOOD, CITIZENS GET SCREWED. BREAK DAYBREAK. And TERRORISTS SHOULDN’T GET SHOWERS WHEN TAXPAYERS HAVE NO POWER. At least that last one is sort of clever.”

“Can we stand them off?” Bolton asked.

“Yeah. Most of those guns they have won’t work—some wouldn’t have even before Daybreak. A lot of people don’t clean or maintain their weapons. And they’re not that well-organized. Figure it that half the crowd thinks it’s going to a school board meeting and the other half thinks they’re going to storm the Bastille. But I’d rather not shoot American citizens for being outspoken and stupid—it’s kind of what the country’s all about, you know?”

Bolton nodded. “If we run them off, how long before more come back?”

“Well, these guys must have been brought here by word of mouth, so they’re just the first wave… and I’d hate to have to try to hold this place at night…”

“What if we move the prisoner?” Bambi asked.

“Where and how?”

“We take the biohazard Hummer out the back garage exit. My father is Harrison Castro, and I—”

“Wait a sec, the guy they call the Mad Baron is your father? Billionaire, built himself a Castle overlooking the harbor maybe five years ago?”

“Yep. Survivalist nut like Grandpa and Great-grandpa before him. He could hold that place against an army. He’ll take in anyone I tell him to, no prob. He’s got a protected way down to his private pier, he owns too many sailboats to remember all their names, and I’ve been sailing since I could stand up. We take Roth there, rest up, maybe he’s got radio and if he doesn’t he’s building it, we call in to DC for instructions, and we can either keep Roth in the Mad Baron’s Castle, or I can run her up the coast, or for that matter, Dave, trust me on this, I was raised in boats and I could sail her around the Horn to Washington if I had to.”

“Oh, I believe it.” Carlucci raised his binoculars again; the crowd was still climbing the long slow slope of the hill, but they would be there in less than ten minutes. “Bolton, you drive. Take the two meanest-looking GAFEs with you. Wedge Roth between them in the back seat; Castro will bring her to you in a second.” Bolton was gone in an instant. Carlucci said, “Castro, get moving. I’m officially remanding the prisoner to the Department of the Future, as of this second.”

“Thanks. If you need somewhere to be, Dad’s got room for hundreds. Bring your families. Even if I’m gone, he’ll let you in if I tell him to.”

“I couldn’t—”

“You sure could. Your family too, ’kay? If you don’t bring them, Dad will make you go get them anyway. Food, a roof, a safe bed, and plenty of people working to keep it that way. You won’t get any better offer, trust me. Now you go stall, and I’ll go get our terrorist, and I’ll see you at Castle Castro.” Bambi raced down the hall to the interrogation room. “Mensche, sorry to interrupt, but we’ve got to relocate the prisoner, mob on the way, and they’re close, get details from Carlucci.” She grabbed Ysabel by the hand, saying, “This way, now.”

At the Hummer, she pushed the girl into the arms of one GAFE; the second one jumped in immediately, so that they had the prisoner wedged and seated. Bambi hopped into the front seat. She hadn’t had time to grab her bag, but there were probably ten “just in case Bambi comes to visit” closets at Castle Castro.

Bolton said, “No levante su cabeza, por favor.” Ysabel Roth gulped, nodded, and leaned forward so that she was completely below the level of the windows; one GAFE beside her tossed a couple of blankets and a towel in a disorderly heap on top of her. “All right, I hope you know the fastest way,” Bolton said.

“I know the best. Just keep this thing on the road and don’t outrun the sprayers on the tires. We have enough antiseptic juice to make it there?”

“Yep, I filled up when we got back.”

Mensche burst into the garage, waving his arm in a rapid roll: go, go, go, go, go!

Bolton started the Hummer, and they rolled forward; Mensche ran ahead of them and yanked down on the manual chain to raise the door.

They lurched into the drive behind the office park, away from the main public parking area, and Bolton gunned it, turning away from Aero Drive. “It’s near the Harbor,” Bambi said.

“Yeah, I know, I’ll turn back by going another way I know, but I’m hoping we won’t be—”

Something made a clank and a thud; everyone jumped. “That’s a bullet being stopped by the Kevlar curtains under the body panels,” Bolton said. He threw the Hummer in a tight turn around a couple of dead cars and was on a main road, running flat out; another clang-thud! from the rear door announced a second shot.

“Hang on,” Bolton said, and threw the Hummer hard around another turn, down a ramp into a different office-building parking lot; he circled three-quarters of the way around the building, climbed a ramp on the other side, and shot around a long, arcing road. “We were probably out of range, but why take chances? Now I’m going to double us back onto Aero, a nice safe mile and a half from the office, and with a couple rises in the road between us and them. If the tires and the luck hold, we’ll be down to the Harbor in less than fifteen minutes. Castro, can you explain that to our two soldiers? The only Spanish I know is for making arrests.”

She snorted. “Dad has pretenses of Old Californianess. He was too proud of his heritage as a descendant of the conquistadors to let his daughter learn Spanish. I don’t suppose either of them knows French, Russian, or German.”

A muffled voice said, “My Spanish is fine. Can I sit up? It’s hot under here.”

“Wait till we’re on Aero,” Bambi said, “but please explain now for the soldiers. They must be confused as hell.”

Ysabel Roth spoke for a short while and answered a couple of questions. Then one GAFE spoke to her for a couple of minutes, and she translated, “Hey, they say that being in the GAFEs means always being as confused as hell.”

“Our kind of outfit.” Bolton slowed as they approached the Harbor; more and more wrecks and junk lay in the road. “Ms. Roth, get down and stay down; we’re going slow enough to be a good target, and it’s always possible that someone had a working CB or something and we might be ambushed.”

Once, as they passed an apartment block, people ran out toward the Hummer from the driver’s side, but the GAFE on that side lowered his window and showed them his weapon, and they stepped back. “Just need food for the baby,” one of the men yelled. “Just need some help.”

They kept rolling, and Bambi tried to think of anything else they could have done. She couldn’t seem to come up with anything.

Harrison Castro had been careful about not letting anything important about Castle Castro leak into the media, despite a whirlwind of attention while it was being built. The outer surfaces were thin brick-and-concrete facades that looked fake-medieval, with far too much glass to be defensible; inside that relatively fragile box there were what amounted to concrete bunkers, with recessed steel shutters to cover the windows as needed. If anyone tries to shoot the place up, he had often explained to her, all that Hollywood-movie-castle crap will be blown into a heap of rubble, but behind it there’s bunkers you’d need tanks to take. And that’s the point where the asshole taxers, regulators, interferers, and Democrats find out that I’m an arrogant, practical, effective, energetic bastard disguising himself as an arrogant, pretentious, effete bastard.

Brush had been planted to conceal the turnoff, but Bambi had no trouble guiding Bolton into it. They bumped and rumbled up the apparent temporary dirt road to the first checkpoint. The guard was all business until Bolton lowered the window to talk to him, and Bambi said, “Hi, Mr. Duck!”

The guard was beaming. “Glad to see you home, and hope you’re staying. Are these friends of yours?”

“Terry Bolton here is, and I’d appreciate if you gave him an all-areas pass, and let him come and go as he needs. The rest are a case of bringing my work home with me.”

“You remember the way to the Secure Garage?”

“Yep.”

“I’ll let the house know you’re comin’. Mr. Castro will want to come down and say hi.”

“You still have a working radio or something?”

He grinned and shook his head, then pulled two flags from the holster at his side. “Mr. Castro always thought the world could end, and he made us all learn semaphore. Got a mirror for flashing Morse, too, but we’re being careful not to be conspicuous.”

On the way up the road, Bolton said, “Uh, his name is really Mr. Duck?”

“He was the only guy named Donald around when I was little, and I couldn’t pronounce Przeworski-Abdulkashian, but my father was not about to have me calling an adult by his first name, so I couldn’t call him Donald either. Hence…”

“Mr. Duck. He seemed to like it.”

“I was an awful kid but he thought I was cute.”

Bambi directed the biohazard Hummer through a complex, circuitous approach to the house along more than three miles of winding dirt roads. “What are all those branch roads, anyway?” Bolton asked. “Guest houses?”

“Some of them. Some are strongpoints, and some are both. And a lot are dead ends that are easy to cover from the house.”

“This place is a castle, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Did I mention my father is a bit eccentric?”

When they came around the last curve into the parking area in front of the Secure Garage, Harrison Castro was already there waiting for them, his shock of white hair billowing over his high forehead, bandito mustache curled up by his immense toothy grin, and in his around-the-Castle clothes—loose blue tunic and pantaloons, black boots, and an open, cowled red robe that made him look like he had escaped from the set of Star Wars for the Color-blind.

“ ’Scuse my having a warm family-values moment while you stop giggling,” Bambi told Bolton, popping her door and running to her father.

After a long hug, the older Castro said, “Well, I know why you didn’t call ahead. You’d better introduce me to everyone else.”

Bambi explained quickly, and Castro shook everyone’s hand, even Ysabel Roth’s. “Bambi says you’ve come over to our side, and you’re trying to help with information?”

“Yes, sir, I don’t know what—I mean, I sort of—uh, I have been trying to—”

The girl looked as if she’d been punched in the gut, her face pale and sick, and abruptly she fell down in the parking lot. Bambi and Bolton rolled her over. Her pupils were dilated but the same size; her breathing was harsh, deep, and irregular; there were flecks of foam around her mouth, and little twitches in the muscles of her face, but her arms and legs lay still and limp.

“Well, that’s twice,” Bambi said.

“And both times when a stranger said something to her about defecting,” Bolton pointed out. “Maybe Daybreak really does have a mind-control virus or something.”

Harrison Castro turned back from where he’d been giving orders to a servant. “We’ve got four doctors sheltering with us, and I think one of them is a neurologist. And we have a clinic inside. We’ll patch her up.”

“Is there anything you don’t already have here, Dad?”

“No lawyers. Figured I won’t need them. A baron makes his own law.” He had his same old sly smile. It made Bambi edgy; Dad spoke too much truth in jest.

^{THE NEXT DAY. CHEVY CHASE , MARYLAND. 4:30 A.M. EST. THURSDAY. OCTOBER 31.}

“About two hours to dawn,” Lenny said, waking Heather. “Time to get moving.”

They made last use of the generator-driven pumps and auxiliary propane system, taking hot showers and fixing a big, hot breakfast. Sherry ate with them, saying nothing, but when they had finished, she said, “I’ll go with you, if one of you will go with me to get my hiking boots from Stan’s closet.”

Heather went with her, and because it seemed to make sense, she kept her hand on Sherry’s shoulder the whole time, as the young woman stepped around both the bodies and found boots, socks, and a big warm sweater. “Christmas last year,” she whispered, as she pulled it on.

With a half-sob, half-cry, Sherry turned back for a moment and grabbed two pictures from Stan’s desk, slipping them into the big pockets of the sweater. Heather held her for a moment till her sobs subsided, and they went out, not looking at the bodies.

Lenny had packed bags for Heather and himself, and after a last visit to “what’s probably the last working toilet in Chevy Chase, you can say you were here before they put up the plaque,” as Lenny explained it, they folded Lenny’s mountain racing wheelchair.

Down the stairs, Heather carried Lenny—he weighed less than a hundred pounds—and Sherry managed the folded wheelchair. They trotted back upstairs for the packs as Lenny sat in the dark lobby behind the front desk, with a path of retreat through three doorways, and the machine pistol in his hand.

“How’d you find him?” Sherry asked.

“Through work. We’re not in the same office but now and then we had to talk to each other.”

“He’s very cool. You’re so lucky.”

Oh, Christ, I’m no good at this social stuff. Do I ask her about Stan? “Thank you,” she said.

“You both work for the government, for like, the army and stuff, or you’re spies or something?” Sherry grabbed up her own pack and Lenny’s, leaving Heather the single large one she was planning to take.

Heather pulled it on. “Yeah, I guess it shows.”

“Kind of. Not too many people have all those pictures of Republicans on their walls, or quite so many guns, or a big poster of a tank in the front room.”

“Actually it’s an armored fighting vehicle.”

“And very few women—even if they’re Lenny’s girlfriend—would know that difference,” Sherry added, smiling. “I’m glad to have you guys to walk out with, really. Didn’t mean to sound critical. I was just leading up to a question. If you know, and if it’s okay to tell me, you know? Did somebody do this to us, or did it just, like, happen?”

Heather checked one more time; Lenny had accidentally acquired a perfect weapon, a rebuilt M4 with the plastic parts replaced with good wood and metal, and all surfaces plated or anodized, about as Daybreak-resistant a gun as anyone could have made. Of course, there would be trouble later on as so much ammunition was reported to be deteriorating, but at least yesterday Lenny’s H&K had been working just fine.

She just hoped she would turn out, if necessary, to be as good a gun-fighter as this was a fighting gun.

“We should get going,” she said. “The answer to your question is we don’t know if it was an enemy action yet, or something that just sort of happened to happen, but whatever it was, the thing to do is get the country back to functioning.”

“Good enough.”

They went down the stairs quickly and quietly. “Nothing’s moved out on the street since you left,” Lenny said. “I vote for going as quick as we can, all the way south in one fast trip.”

“Makes sense to me,” Heather said.

“I’m just along for the trip,” Sherry said. “You know, you’re the first people I’ve ever seen who just have guns—not like showing them off the way the gangsta wannabes do, just like, it’s a tool is all. Right now, I wish I was that way.”

“There’re three spares in my pack,” Lenny said, “all loaded and ready. That’s why it was so heavy. Heather, when we’re going through open spots, in daylight, maybe you can give Sherry a fast course.”

“ ‘The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Shooting People,’” Sherry said. “Sounds good to me.”

For the hour before the sun came up, they hurried south along Connecticut Avenue, occasionally having to dodge around clusters of abandoned cars but mostly able to just proceed quickly.

“Aren’t you worried about snipers?” Sherry said, after a while.

“Very,” Lenny said. “But I’m more afraid of getting into something hand to hand. Tip me over and I’m fucked; at gunfire distances, it’s at least even, maybe better. And I can always shoot to make them keep their heads down while Heather closes in to rip their heads off with her bare hands.”

“Pbbbbt.”

“Hey, you and I know we’re a couple of scared desk jockeys. Sherry thinks you’re Daniel Boone and I’m Q. This way at least one of us has some confidence.”

The sun found them near a pocket park with good views in all directions; Heather gave Sherry a fast course in using the pistol, finishing by telling her, “Look, it’s really nothing more than this: You point it at people you intend to shoot. Don’t point it at anyone you don’t. Put your finger inside the trigger guard only if you plan to shoot someone. Once they’ve seen you point it at them, they’re going to be pissed, so shoot. If you decide to stick around after this, then we’ll go into exciting subjects like cleaning and maintenance. For one long day in the street like we’re doing here, it’s a magic stick for blowing holes in people, so only point it at people who need holes in them, but if they do, put a hole in them quick. ’Kay?”

“ ’Kay. And thanks.”

When they had all had a rest, a long drink of water, a sandwich, and a well-guarded trip behind the bushes, Lenny said, “Time to get rolling again, I guess,” and they were back at it.

It was about ten A.M., and they were looking for a good place for their next rest stop, when they saw another living human being—an old man in tattered clothes pushing a grocery cart. He waved at them in a friendly way, hollered “They ain’t got nothing at Rescue, I’m tryin’ Salvation Army,” and kept going.

“How much of all this do you suppose he’s noticed?” Heather asked.

“Everything or nothing,” Sherry said, “that’s what most of them are like. Some of them are at the public library all day and are better informed than most congressmen, even if their take on things veers into weird; and some of them, if ten-legged aliens landed at noon, they’d have forgotten it by the time they started looking for their afternoon bottle.”

“You sound like you know your way around.”

“I used to be in social services. Went down into bad places with just my cell phone. Plus, of course, all the police in DC to get my middle-class ass out of there if anything went south. So I spent some time around bums.”

“Aren’t you supposed to call them the homeless?”

“Different beat from mine. I was dealing with the crazy guys that bother pedestrians; mostly the homeless are people and families that are managing in shelters, or relatives’ basements, or cheap hotels. My guys were bums—harder to help but more entertaining, that’s how Stan used to put it.”

She wasn’t crying, and seemed to be all right. Lenny glanced at Heather, then tried, “I didn’t know Stan very well, but we used to visit now and then. He had me teach Dennis some gun safety, because he said there were always guns around and Stan didn’t want Denny to be afraid of them, the way he was.”

Sherry nodded. “That was Stan. Never sure when to be idealistic and when to be practical. I’m going to miss him. I’m glad you guys took me out of there. If there’s a life to come and all that shit, if I’d just stayed there and mourned until someone killed me, Stan’d’ve been so pissed at me.”

“Practical,” Lenny agreed. “We should get rolling.”

They saw children who didn’t seem to have anyone to be with, a young mother with a baby who wouldn’t come close enough to them to talk, and some small groups of armed people who kept their distance.

“Wonder how many of those are out looting and robbing, and how many are preventing it?” Heather said, after a group of three men with pistols and bats had traded waves with them.

“And how many start out to do one and end up doing the other?” Lenny said.

Just after eleven A.M., a biohazard Hummer turned a corner in front of them and came to a stop. A man in a black suit with well-shined shoes got out. “Cameron Nguyen-Peters sent me out to fetch you,” he said. “And to tell you you could at least have tried a pay phone, or flashing Morse code, or something.”

Those last few minutes were surreal; suddenly the trip that should have taken the rest of the day took less than ten minutes. The air was just the right temperature, there was cool clean water for all of them, and on their way along the parkway, shots were fired at them twice.

“That didn’t happen while we were walking,” Heather said.

The driver shrugged. “When you were walking, you looked like people; now you look like the Man.”

^{ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. PALE BLUFF. ILLINOIS. 10:30 A.M. CST. THURSDAY. OCTOBER 31.}

Carol May Kloster wondered if anyone had even thought, yet, about what they’d do for record keeping when they ran out of pencils, since as far as anyone could tell, every single ballpoint pen in Pale Bluff, Illinois, had turned to goo in the last week.

She also wondered if there was really any point in taking down the report from the Food Committee tonight; surely their own records should suffice, without her taking dictation? Especially when George Auvergne had such a knack for going on.

So far the news was that there were enough apples stored, and they probably would not need to commandeer more basements. They were lucky that Pale Bluff had been an orchard town for a hundred years, and luckier still that forty boxcars of just-harvested apples had been waiting on the siding, not yet off to the national market.

According to Linda Beckham, the town’s one dietician, there were calories enough in all those apples, enough vitamin pills had been salvaged from plastic bottles thanks to a smart pharmacist, and the local hunters and fishermen could bring in enough deer, pheasants, and small game with rifles from the local black-powder club for enough protein; they’d make it through without starvation or significant malnutrition. If the winter was cold, ice fishermen could help out, and they were talking to a Hutterite community up the road about trading apples for cheese.

As the only person in town who still knew Gregg shorthand, and therefore could take accurate minutes (take that, iScribe! she thought), Carol May had job security but she was probably doomed to be the only person who listened all the way through each meeting. She wondered whether what she had done in a previous life had been good or bad.

The Community Kitchen Committee was figuring they could keep everyone fed until June, when early beets and radishes would start coming in. The Planting Committee had located enough seed potatoes and corn. The Poultry Committee reported that there’d be eggs enough around July, and at least some chickens for the table by fall next year. They had a plan for seeing if they could capture and pen wild ducks as well.

The last committee to report was Amusements. Mrs. Martinez pointed out that the candy for the Pale Bluff Community Halloween Party was already on hand, and some children already had costumes; “I was thinking, it’s Halloween tonight, why don’t we just let the kids have a last rampage at the candy? There won’t be any more for a long time, and it wouldn’t be bad to put a little extra fat on the kids for the winter—”

Reverend Walters got up and started yelling about how Halloween and Satan were behind Daybreak. After a moment, Carol May decided to just note down “Reverend Walters objected.” It looked like she’d be eating lunch on the second shift again.

^{ABOUT 45 MINUTES LATER. ST. ELIZABETH’S FACILITY. WASHINGTON. DC. 2:15 P.M. EST. THURSDAY. OCTOBER 31.}

“Mr. Nguyen-Peters,” Mason’s voice said, over the intercom, “the President’s limo is pulling into the driveway.”

Cam’s lips tightened, and he nodded slightly. Heather thought, If I were Cam, I’d be thinking, “There’s about two hundred phones left that work in the whole government, and we have two of them, and Shaunsen can’t call us first?” It seemed of a piece with using the limo; tires survived about a day without peroxide wipedowns, and maybe three days with, yet the Acting President drove everywhere in Washington. He said it was to improve his visibility; to mobs and snipers, I hope.

Well, this is why Cam has his job. With no more than that momentary wince, he stood up, slipped his jacket back on, tightened his tie, and was ready.

Graham Weisbrod looked up and said, “In case we don’t resume soon, are we’re agreed that it’s a priority to get any captured Daybreakers into a secure interview situation with Arnie?”

“Absolutely,” Cameron said. “You’re right that we can’t settle whether Daybreak was a system artifact or a foreign enemy until we can look inside it. Definitely we need to understand Daybreak more than—”

The door flew open. Secret Service and Marine guards moved in, stepping to the side. Then two men in black uniforms with red berets entered, shouting, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States!”

So these were the National Unity Guard that Shaunsen had put together from young Democratic Party staffers and members of some community groups; nice muscles and tats, but they sure look slobby standing next to Marines and Secret Service, Heather thought. As far as anyone could tell, it was a patronage job; presidential cheerleaders, mostly job-needing sons of important supporters. Somehow he’d found the time to do that in the middle of the country blowing to hell. Now that’s time management.

The National Unity Guards turned to flank the doorway and clapped rhythmically as Shaunsen came in. Well, at least the routine didn’t finish up with “Yay, go Prez!”

Shaunsen all but bounded into the room. “Sorry I didn’t call in advance but I was already down at this end of town, and I just happened to have an idea I wanted to run by you all. I think we need to create a new Cabinet secretary post—the Department of Information.”

The silence among the little group of men and women would have devastated a man who was paying attention.

“I just saw the hatchet job that little shit Manckiewicz did on the exclusive interview I gave him, and it seems to me that with media down to the Advertiser-Gazette, Radio Blue and Gold, and KP-1, what we have here is a near monopoly that needs some administration and regulation. Rusty Parlotta was a whiny, complaining, out-of-control hippie when I was first in Congress, and she hasn’t improved one bit since. And Manckiewicz is a fucking Republican, you can tell it. Now if there’s one thing we depend on in the present emergency, it’s the flow of accurate government information to—”

“Mr. President,” Cameron said, quietly, with just enough force to stop Shaunsen. “Radio Blue and Gold is a government outlet, the Advertiser-Gazette is printing every announcement we ask them to even though they don’t have the ad revenue to remotely cover the added printing, and KP-1 runs our announcements constantly. And the First Amendment—”

“Of course we’ll have full First Amendment rights for every licensed media outlet,” Shaunsen said, nodding. “You’re right, that’s very important.”

“What I’m saying, sir, is that Constitutionally—”

“That’s what I have a Solicitor General for. He’s figuring out what I can and can’t do, and if I’ve been breaking the rules, he’ll get back to me in a few weeks. Now, here’s the other big issue I’m worried about. I’m getting concerned about how much power the military is accumulating. Over one of your ham radio links just today, the governor of Alabama, can you imagine that, actually asking for Federal troops to take over Birmingham—”

“Satellite photos show a double row of barricades zigzagging across the city, and bodies lying unburied between them, Mr. President. The governor can’t move the Alabama Guard anywhere even if he could call them out. He was probably just hoping that you could give him some options—”

“Oh, the Pentagon would just love to hear that. They’ve always really wanted to run the country—”

“Nonsense, sir.” Cam, Heather, and everyone else in the room turned to stare at Weisbrod. “DoD like being big. They like expensive toys. They like being busy. They want to feel that they’re the most important thing going. They tend to think everyone and everything else is secondary or unnecessary. But as for running the country, they clearly don’t want the job. In that regard, they’re no different from the Department of Education.”

“Or the Department of the Future?” Shaunsen plainly intended that as a shot.

“Well, except we’ve never been big.”

“But your new buddy here”—Shaunsen pointed at Cameron as if he were a bad dog—“is fixing that, isn’t he?”

Cam said, “Sir, the Department of the Future has been exceptionally helpful and done an exemplary job, so yes, I’ve tended to use them. We’ve got a situation that is way too big, right now. Anyone who can help, helps, and like everybody else, where the armed forces have been able to help, they’ve been great but hopelessly inadequate—just like the post office or anyone else in what’s left of the Federal government.”

“You know,” Shaunsen said, “I had the impression that the job of the NCCC is to hand over the White House to the correct President or Acting President, then get out of the way. That’s what Directive 51 says. And it’s a presidential directive; I don’t need Congress, I can issue a new one any time. I wonder if you haven’t been using a lot of your NCCC powers even though now we have an Acting President.”

Cam stood as stiffly as if he’d been given an electric shock. “I assure you, Mr. President, everything I am doing—everything—is in my role as chief of staff to DHS, and with the full authorization and knowledge of Secretary Ferein.”

“Good. Then let me assure you, I have lawyers, and we’ll make sure it all stays Constitutional.” He looked like he was trying to fix Cameron with a stern, warning glare, but Cameron just stood there, not responding at all, and after a moment it was Shaunsen who turned away. “So Cameron, Graham—and the rest of you—give some serious thought to what the responsibilities for our new Secretary of Information ought to be, and what we need to do to de-involve the military in the post-Daybreak emergency.” He turned to go.

Weisbrod said, “Mr. President, may I ask a major favor? I haven’t been able to look in on Roger Pendano since his illness. If you could give me a lift to the White House, we could talk more about your ideas, and I’d have time to pay my old friend a visit, and still walk back here before dark.”

“Well, I’ve got quite a bit of work to do in the car, of course, but I’ll try to make some time to talk.” Shaunsen went out first, to the rhythmic clapping of the National Unity Guard; Graham followed with the Secret Service and Marines, who closed the door behind the party.

“Has anyone told him he’s the Acting President, not the acting emperor?” Heather asked.

Cam winced. “Don’t make my job harder. You know Weisbrod; what do you suppose your boss was up to?”

“Improvising and seeing if he can improve matters, plus he really is worried sick about Pendano.”

“Well, I wish him luck. When he comes back, if you see him before I do, send him to me; I’d like to hear what’s going on in the White House.” He sighed and looked around the room. “For the record, I am acting as the Chief of Staff for the Department of Homeland Security, and I have not—since Acting President Shaunsen took office—exercised any power as NCCC. If in any of your opinions that isn’t true—either now or in the future—tell me at once. In front of others if you feel it’s necessary, and don’t forget to copy KP-1 and the Advertiser-Gazette on that. We are going to come through this process with our Constitution intact, and so far we have bent it less than Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, or Franklin Roosevelt did, and I regret even as much as we’ve had to do. The Constitution stands. End of message, reply not expected, that’s all folks.”

Heather thought she’d never seen a harsher message greeted with more smiles. Still, this would probably be a bad time to tell Cam he’d make a good dictator.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. CASTLE CASTRO. (SAN DIEGO. CALIFORNIA.) 12:04 P.M. PST. THURSDAY. OCTOBER 31.}

The guard at the main gate was nice and polite even before he saw David Carlucci and Family, and Larry Mensche and Family, on the guest list that Bambi had submitted. “You’ll be glad to know,” he said, “that Mr. Bolton’s family joined us earlier, and of course we’re glad to have all of you—let me just get full names and relationships for everyone—”

Carlucci nodded. “David Ignatius and Arlene Mather Carlucci, we’re married, and these are our son Track Palin Carlucci, and daughter Ann Coulter Carlucci.” The two teenagers looked embarrassed; the boy said, “My friends call me Paley,” and the guard added (Paley) after the entry.

“And they call me Acey,” Ann said, “like the initials but A-C-E-Y.”

“They do not, you made that up, you just want them to—”

“Here at Castle Castro, we will call you Acey,” the guard said, firmly, “since you want us to. And Mr. Mensche, is there just you?”

“Lorenzo Isaac Mensche,” Mensche said. “And call me Larry. Just me, my ex is someplace in Nevada and our grown daughter is up in Oregon. And—uh, excuse my asking, but what the hell do you suppose that is?”

The grinding and squealing sounds from the wheelchair itself were only part of the effect; the tires had been replaced with what looked like a wrapping of old socks, and behind it, a bicycle kid-trailer, with more sock-wrapped wheels, held bottles of beer and cans of Spam piled in a jumble on top of a sleeping bag. Both the wheelchair and trailer sported jaunty American flags, and the man in the wheelchair looked about as much as one can look like a biblical patriarch with a samurai sword on his lap and a shotgun hanging from a strap.

“Hi.” His grin was immense. “My name’s Patrick Lamont O’Grainne, and I believe I have a reservation.”

The guard glanced down, and said, “Another Bambi Castro guest. Of course. Even when she was in high school, Ms.Castro always brought in the most interesting people.” He drew his semaphore flags and began sending to the next station up the hill. “We’re very glad to have you all here.”

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 3:08 P.M. EST. THURSDAY. OCTOBER 31.}

“I really appreciate the ride, and the chance to talk with you privately,” Graham Weisbrod said, pushing his glasses up his nose and peering intently at Shaunsen.

“Well, there’s so much to get done,” Shaunsen said. “We’ve got a crisis here, and if we play it right, it’ll be the New Deal all over again, with a Democratic majority for the next—”

“Mr. President, I’m as loyal a Democrat as you are, sir, and we are not going to win this election—”

Shaunsen shook his head. “Crises come and crises go, Secretary Weisbrod, but Americans always want hope, and we are the party of hope. That’s one of the problems with your whole Department of the Future; it’s unnecessary and trivial. Everything that really matters goes on forever. When things get smashed up, the country rebuilds, and the Democrats lead it. Sure, it’s bad right now. It was bad when the Depression hit, and after Pearl Harbor, and after the Federal Reserve bombings. But times like this are when we show the voters we can make the money move and get things done.”

All right, I’m going to hate myself if I don’t try, so here goes. “Mr. President, do you realize that we can’t reliably deliver mail from here to Richmond, there are now fifteen states from which we have only had satellite photos in the last twenty-four hours, all communication is down with Ottawa and Mexico City, let alone Europe or Asia… and we have people going hungry ten blocks from the White House because there isn’t any food—”

“If Congress acts fast, we’ll have the money—”

“You can create the money, but they can’t eat it.” Good God alive, I feel like his reality therapist. If the National Unity Guards there weren’t giving me the fish-eye I’d slap the son of a bitch, I swear to god I would. “No one in the Northeast urban strip from Boston to Richmond can reach adequate shelter or food in time. Within a week, the first bad storm is going to kill tens of millions of Americans at a minimum. Right now, the best hope we’ve got is that there are little towns all over the country managing to organize things within a few miles of themselves, and we’re only hearing about them from ham radio operators who are just barely managing to keep their stations on the air—”

“Every one of those little towns will see a nice big grant, I guarantee it, for all the good work they’re doing.” Shaunsen reached out and touched his knee. “Graham, you are such a sad worrier, and the public always wants a happy warrior. We’ll make it all work, and the economy is going to take off like a rocket once we get these programs running. You’ll see. I’ve always said, you think about the future so much, you don’t see the long run.”

The limo zigged and zagged past the wrecks on the street; no one came out to look at it, perhaps intimidated by the Secret Service, perhaps just not caring about it anymore.

^{40 MINUTES LATER. THE WHITE HOUSE. WASHINGTON. DC. ABOUT 4:00 P.M. EST. THURSDAY. OCTOBER 31.}

Forty minutes since Weisbrod arrived at the White House, and he’d spent all of it sitting in the Secret Service break room while the people dithered about allowing him in to see Roger Pendano. The Secret Service people were pleasant, polite, and much less formal than he’d ever seen them, but his thoughts were mostly on his old student. What if he’s so far gone in madness, he can’t recognize anyone? What if—

One of the Secret Service returned to the room and said, “Secretary Weisbrod, I’m supposed to take you to see President Pendano now. The doctor wants you to know he’s not in the best shape. He said you should go as soon as the president starts to look tired or sick, because his health is precarious. Okay?”

“You’ve got it. He was my friend a long time before he was president, I won’t do anything to endanger or hurt him.”

“Just passing it along because the doctor told me to, sir. Right this way.” Two years ago Pendano had said he did not want to live in rooms where the First Lady had spent her last few months dying, and that any living space more than a comfortable minimum made him feel like he was “rattling around with no place to be.” He had moved up from the traditional Second Floor to the Third, into a bedroom with space for clothes and bed, with an adjoining sitting room for reading and watching television. They had put in a small kitchen so he could have food without bothering people, and a connecting door to a tiny guest bedroom for rare visits from his grown daughter. The mostly unoccupied floor below him gave him the quiet he craved.

The Secret Service agent escorting him upstairs had told Weisbrod that Shaunsen was already living in the traditional Presidential Quarters on the second floor, taking measurements and sketching. Weisbrod didn’t think he’d ever before heard a sarcastic tone from a Secret Service agent.

Weisbrod had been here a few times before Daybreak. Every so often, during the last couple of years, the president had invited Weisbrod; Peggy Albarado, the Secretary of Peace; Laura Pressman, the Secretary of Education; and Vice President Samuelson up to his sitting room to talk about “ideas and the long run and where everything really ought to go” while they killed a couple of bottles of good bourbon. He had called them his “Liquor Cabinet.”

The Secret Service man led Weisbrod to the door, nodded politely, and said, “Help him if you can, sir. We all want him to get better.”

“Thanks.” Weisbrod knocked. He interpreted the vague grunt from inside as “come in.”

The man who sat on the couch looked more like the mummified remains of Roger Pendano than anything else. God, on Monday he was fine, and it’s only Thursday!

“Roger?” Weisbrod sat next to him, and turned on the lamp.

The president’s skin was a sick tone of gray, the lines of his face seemed to have deepened by a good ten years, and his eyes were half-closed; he hadn’t really even looked up to see that it was Weisbrod. Tentatively, Graham reached out and rubbed a shoulder; slowly, Pendano turned, and then jumped.

“You think I just appeared.”

“Yeah, yeah, I… Graham?”

“It’s me, Mr. President.”

“Am I…” Pendano looked deeply frustrated. “I’m supposed to make sure about my pills. I think that’s after you go. And I took the ones for when you’re here.” His eyes looked desperate.

Weisbrod stood, taking the president’s hand. He led him over to the pill bottles and pointed. The president nodded, and pointed to the bottle of little red pills. “Just had those a little bit ago.” He pointed to the big white ones. “All the time, and supposed to take one right after you go.” He was panting, and sweat beaded on his forehead from the effort of walking to the table.

Weisbrod pulled out his personal notepad and pen, and wrote:

They are giving you very large doses of barbiturates.

They just gave you speed to wake you up.

Dangerous for you?????

→

The president nodded his head vigorously. Next to Graham’s arrow he scribbled, Last EKG worse thn we told press, kidney failure 2…

He stopped to catch his breath; sweat was actually dripping from his forehead. Weisbrod put a hand on his back and helped him stand straighter; bringing the pad along, he walked the president to the couch. Weisbrod cleaned Pendano’s face with a wet cloth from the bathroom, and loosened his belt and tie.

“I feel better,” Pendano said, softly, writing, They started drugs rt after Shaunsen came.

Need to get off them? Weisbrod wrote.

Can palm/spit out. Somthn 4 DTs?

“I’m glad you’re feeling so much better. I’m pretty sure we can do something to help you get well; I’ll try to stop by more often.” He pointed at the note about DTs and nodded vigorously; Pendano extended his hand, and they shook.

They passed more notes, but Pendano was already exhausted. Weisbrod got him to drink as much water as he would hold. So much crap to wash out of him, I don’t know what else we can do.

He made sure all the notes and the pad they’d been written on were in his pockets before he left, after scribbling one more. Firmly, he told Roger, “I’ll be back, tomorrow if I can, but at least every other day and as often as I can. We’re going to get you well, Roger.” He wrapped Roger up in his arms, pressed his mouth to the man’s ear, and barely breathed, “You were my best. You were always my best. We need you again, Roger, do this for us.”

There were tears in the president’s eyes, but he nodded vigorously and his handshake was surprisingly firm.

On his way out, Weisbrod showed the Secret Service man a note folded to leave the top line visible: ABOUT GETTING THE PRESIDENT WELL.

The man took the note and it vanished; Weisbrod just had to hope he had picked the right guy to pass it to. Christ, Christ, it’s more like Imperial Rome than I could have imagined.

At the door, they issued him a.38 police revolver, and made sure he knew how to use it. Pity I didn’t have this, riding over with Shaunsen; I could have done the best thing I ever did for the United States. He checked his watch and the sun; if he pushed himself and if his sneakers didn’t fall apart on the way (he had a spare pair of leather shoes, not as comfortable but more durable in the new world, in his bag), he might make it back to St. Elizabeth’s with daylight left; the worst would be crossing on the Capitol Street bridge, with nowhere to run if he were ambushed.

As he hurried past the Capitol, he saw a familiar figure from many dinner parties and interviews in a long public life. He waved and shouted, “Hi, Rusty! I like the paper!”

“Hey, Secretary Weisbrod! I see you’re using Washington public transit like we all are. I’ll be sure to report the gesture.” He had thought she was walking dogs, but saw she had three goats with her. Seeing his start, she said, “I live close, and laugh all you want, this is a fair bit of cheese right here.” She grinned. “Say something quotable.”

He gestured at the Capitol building. “What better place to find a bunch of old goats supplying the press with cheese?”

“Dammit, you’re the fourth guy who said something like that.”

“We can’t afford just any old future!”

“That’s the Weisbrod I remember. Have a good night!”

He hurried on into the dark canyons between the office buildings, staying in the middle of the street and away from the abandoned cars where someone might jump out, and thought, Goats on the National Mall.

The only lights visible as he crossed the Capitol Street bridge in the dusk, looking up and down the Anacostia, were the Coleman lanterns of the sentries in the Navy Yard and at Fort McNair.

I guess it’s a good night at that. The gun I have to carry in my pocket while on official duties probably works. A bad night would be one when I needed it to and it didn’t.

I wonder if Romulus Augustulus had a futurologist, and what it was like for him to trot through the dark, deserted streets of Rome.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. THE WHITE HOUSE. WASHINGTON. DC. 6:30 P.M. EST. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31.}

Roger Pendano looked down at the collection of meds in front of him and thought, All right, last week, I was taking two a day of the green one, for blood pressure. Now there are four of the green one, three times a day, plus two big whites. So that’ll be one green down the hatch, and the rest down the toilet.

He was starting to feel sweaty and sick, and he probably would not sleep tonight. So what? It would make it easier to act groggy and out of it tomorrow, and anyway, I have it coming.

THE NEXT DAY. WASHINGTON, DC. (DRET/ST. ELIZABETH’S.) 7:00 A.M. EST. FRIDAY. NOVEMBER 1.

For a former conference room with a bed from a nearby hotel dragged into it, and a coat of black paint on the interior window for privacy, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it might have been. With no water to spare for showers—there was barely enough for drinking, cooking, and periodic toilet flushes—Cam had lined up enough hydrogen peroxide and baby wipes so that she could thoroughly bathe Lenny and have enough left over to at least wipe herself down. “Cam said not to spare the wipes on yourself,” Lenny reminded her.

“One date fifteen years ago, and the man thinks he can tell me how I smell.”

“Actually, he said—”

“Yeah, I know, babe. It makes sense. I have to stay clean because you’re going to be touching me. I was making a joke.” She ostentatiously took one more wipe from the glass cookie jar and scrubbed herself carefully.

“What was so fascinating about that jar?”

“Oh, just thinking it’s like the ones in a little coffeehouse in Myrtle Beach, where I like to stop when I’m driving south—and realizing I might never travel that far again.”

“I think you’re clean enough down there, and I don’t have any plastic parts that are going to get close to it.”

“Hah. Only because you haven’t seen some of my favorite tricks.”

“Well, whose fault is that?”

She liked his smile a lot, so it seemed like a good time to bring the big subject up. “I’m going to suggest something so stupid that I can’t believe I’m proposing it, so don’t laugh at me. It involves you and me being in love.”

“Then tell me. You know I won’t laugh.”

“I want to give up birth control.”

“You do remember I might die of plastic rot next week?”

“I can’t forget it. Or that I’m turning forty next year and a whole lot of things they used to be able to do so that a person could be a mother late in life are going to be impossible. Or that I’ve had one lover in my life whose genes I’d be happy to carry.”

He gestured across his whole body.

“Lenny, you told me—I know it’s not genetic.”

“They don’t think. You want to bet on some doctor’s opinion?”

“Shit, yes, and absolutely, Lenny. Now—while the knowledge is still current and you’re alive. You said all the tests show you have normal DNA. If you live—and I want you to, so bad, you know—well, you and I will raise a kid. If you don’t—over the last few thousand years, how many people got started because a soldier had only one more night at home? Or a gun-fighter, or a matador, or anyone in any dangerous occupation? Dad tells me his grandma was a coal miner’s wife, and she never missed a chance with her husband, figuring it could always be the last.” She looked at him a little sideways. “Uh, given how much care you’ve had to take of your health, just to ask—have you ever had the experience unprotected?”

“No, actually. Never had a relationship last long enough—”

“Well, this relationship is going to last the rest of your life, which ought to be long enough.”

“The rest of my life?”

“Three days or forty years, I’m the one that’s going to be there. And you really ought to experience skin-to-skin, more than once, and I’m getting old to start a family but, honestly, Lenny, what the hell? Now watch close, because I happen to love the way you look at me when I’m naked.” She ran her hands up her sides, delighted that he was too distracted to continue arguing.

^{ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. ST. PAUL. MINNESOTA. 7:30 A.M. CST. FRIDAY. NOVEMBER 1.}

Strong winds, running thousands of miles ahead of the storm front that was still crossing British Columbia, blew across the Midwest that morning.

St. Paul died of bad luck. A gasoline truck, its contents not yet turned to vinegar or sewage by biotes, had lost its tires and been stranded in front of a T-shirt shop on Snelling Avenue. The owner of the shop, who had not been making any money for at least a year anyway, had departed around noon the day before, slinging up a pack to walk south toward Rochester, where his sister lived. He had left the door unlocked in the back to let people come in out of the cold.

One family had found that unlocked door; that morning, with no breakfast and the water not running, the mother had smoked her last cigarette down to the filter, pinched it out, and thrown it into the wastebasket, where it had smoldered among damp paper towels, old advertising, and some near-empty cans of fabric paint.

The towels nearest the butt dried, and began to burn. The battery smoke detector, not yet eaten by nanoswarm, wailed for a while, and went out. The burning paper towel spread to an old catalog; the old catalog set off some of the fumes from the fabric paint, and the scraps and paper in the basket acted as wicks for the rest.

Anyone in the shop could have put the three-foot-high flames out by pouring a couple of glasses of water into the wastebasket, but there was no one. Sparks from the wastebasket spread to the hanging T-shirts; hanging fabric is very highly flammable, with its enormous exposure of surface area to available oxygen, but the T-shirts were packed so tightly that only the top surfaces caught, and smoldered slowly in the inadequate airflow. Even now, if anyone had walked in, they would have smelled the smoke, pulled the shirts out of the rack, and stomped them out.

No one came; the streets outside were empty, the workers not at work, the mobile residents long since headed out of the city to find somewhere with food and heat, leaving only those who could not move easily—families with young children, the disabled, the old, the mad, the fatally stubborn.

The fire in the wastebasket had died out by the time that the top of one T-shirt burned through, so that the shirt dropped from its hanger, its fall fanning it to flames that licked at the bottoms of the shirts surrounding the gap it had left in the rack; that formed a small chimney, which enlarged as flames raced up the hanging surfaces.

In less than a minute the rack was ablaze. Flames roared up against the ceiling and along the acoustic tile. The metal block in the sprinkler overhead melted, as it was supposed to do, but only the bare dribble of water left in the pipe came out—not nearly enough.

The flames leaped from rack to rack, now, a new rack every few seconds, till the whole shop was hotter than a pizza oven. It grew hot enough to soften the cheap metal fittings, then hot enough to ignite the posters on the walls by radiative heat. Finally it was hot enough to crack the big front window and let out a jet of the white-hot carbon monoxide and partly burned hydrocarbons extracted from the T-shirts and carpets by anoxic roasting.

That hot gas mixed with the outside air and exploded; the explosion shattered the window. Hot gas and air mixed and exploded. Flames roared three stories high. The back door blew wide open hard enough to rip it from its hinges.

Now air could flow from front to back, and in the aftermath of the gas explosion, it rushed in to fill the vacuum. The draft through the shop, with all the fuel well above kindling and waiting only for the oxygen, worked like a blowtorch. White-hot flame poured over and around the abandoned gasoline truck. In minutes, the heat brought the gasoline to a boil, pressurizing the truck with flammable vapors; the hull of the tank grew hotter and hotter until finally the vapor flashed over, and the explosion sprayed just over thirty tons of gasoline into the air and ignited it; every building for two blocks around began to burn.

The fire watch on the steeple of the big old Presbyterian Church on Ayd Mill saw the explosion and flames, and as ordered, she rang the bell and shouted down to the two boys who were her runners. Neither of the fire stations they reached could help; one had no working fire truck, and the other discovered that the hoses they would need to pull water from the little creek and pond half a mile away were rotted. The boys ran back and forth so that the fire chief with the working truck would know to head for the fire station with the unrotted hose.

By the time both fire crews were loading the clean hose onto the hastily-wiped-down truck, the wall of flame whipping westward from Snelling was four blocks long and widening, and advancing at about a block every ten minutes. One truck pumping water from half a mile away wouldn’t have been able to make much of a difference when the fire started; now the whole idea was ludicrous. They evacuated the equipment from the path of the fire; only the haphazard firebreaks formed by freeways and big parking lots stood between the conflagration and downtown St. Paul, and as the wind rose steadily that afternoon, tens of millions of sparks were drifting across them, and some were finding new, flammable homes on the other side.

^{ABOUT SEVEN HOURS LATER. CASTLE CASTRO. (SAN DIEGO. CALIFORNIA.) 2:09 P.M. PST. FRIDAY. NOVEMBER 1.}

“So that’s the story,” Bambi said, very quietly to Carlucci, Bolton, and Mensche. “There’s one radio room here, and it’s Dad’s, and he decides what signals go out. And I know from long, long experience what he’s figuring out at the moment—how far can he push before the Feds push back. Once he has that analyzed, then he’ll either be gentle as a kitten, or look the hell out.”

“It sounds like your father has been preparing for Daybreak his whole life,” Carlucci said.

“Yeah. He’s anything but a Daybreaker—more of an old-fashioned Ayn Rand type than anything else, with a mixture of Robert A. Heinlein and probably Sir Walter Scott too—but you could say Daybreak is fulfilling pretty much every dream he ever had. In five years people will be addressing him as ‘Baron’ or something like it, at his insistence. It’s what he’s really always wanted.

“So, here’s the thing. He’ll create law and order all around Castle Castro, and probably extend it up and down the coast—I doubt he’ll worry about where the border is, let alone the county line. People in his sphere will eat and have somewhere safe to sleep. I don’t for a moment suggest that anyone else ought to take over. But… Roth is the only Daybreaker we’ve captured so far. She’s a priceless source of information. Do we want the Federal government to have to go through my crazy Baron Dad to access the most important witness it has?”

“So what did you have in mind?” Carlucci asked.

“Is there a covert, hidden-inside-the-message code you can send to the Bureau in Washington? Something to tell them that you need to be ordered to move Roth to somewhere else? Because I’ve got a place, and it’s one Dad will accept. Quattro Larsen, who freeholds Castle Larsen up by Jenner, will pretty much do whatever I tell him—no snickering and giggling about why! Dad will be delighted if I’m ordered to go up there because he’s been trying to set me up with Quattro since I was thirteen, and Quattro and I have had a covert code since we were teenagers, so I can set that up with him too.”

“Well, put that way, of course,” Carlucci said. “Hell yes. How will we get her there?”

“It’s going to be a one-way trip, so it probably isn’t we,” she said. “You don’t want to leave your family here, and the same consideration rules out Terry. So it should be Larry and me.”

“Where’s Jenner?” Larry asked.

“Near the mouth of the Russian River, north of San Fran. Plenty of time to explain once we’re on our way.”

Mensche looked thoughtful. “My daughter, Debbie, is a screwed-up drug addict who has never finished any schooling or held a job, and she’s doing three-strikes time at Coffee Creek.”

“Oregon?” How to spot a Fed, Bambi thought. We know all the big state pens.

“Yeah. Up till this week, she didn’t write or call and didn’t want me to. Her mom would go over from Nevada a couple times a year to see her and send me short notes about her, mostly just that she’s healthy, and not getting out anytime soon. I—well, I’m worried, because I just hope someone remembered to do something for the prisoners when things started to crash, even if it was just to leave doors unlocked. I worry about that. I want to know she’s okay—”

Bambi nodded. “And I’ll get you almost halfway to Coffee Creek. And Quattro can give you a lot of help too, and he will if I ask him.” She reached out and touched his shoulder. “We’ll find out what’s happening with Debbie and make sure she’s okay.” She glanced back at Carlucci. “Well, there you have it. Roth goes because she belongs to the Feds, and we can’t leave her here with a Baron of San Diego who intends to be the Duke of California someday. Larry goes because it’s a one-way trip, and it gets him closer to his family.”

“Why are you going?” Carlucci demanded. “And how?”

She smiled at him, focusing her warm Miss Used to Do Beauty Contests Beam into his eyes. “Well, I had enough trouble with the old tyrant when I was just his daughter; I’m not sticking around to find out what it’s like to be his heir and vassal. And somebody’s gotta sail the boat.”

^{THE NEXT DAY. WASHINGTON, DC. ABOUT 2:00 A.M. EST. SATURDAY. NOVEMBER 2.}

Despite what the rest of the country knows in its bones, some of the people in Washington are responsible sorts who are capable of forethought; they began to leave when the electricity stopped coming back up, while some cars and trucks were still running. Their disappearance made things inconvenient and difficult for the less foresighted, who, seeing things deteriorate quickly, left soon after, making things still worse for the remaining people with even shorter time horizons.

Around midnight, a tipping point was passed. National leaders and government personnel had withdrawn into safe places like the DRET compound at St. Elizabeth’s. Ordinary citizens had fled, if possible, knowing what was coming.

At two A.M. the people left were the completely immobile, the stupid, the stubborn, and people without foresight or impulse control.

Crowds in the street were hungry and looking for excitement. The remaining inventories of booze and bling in stores and warehouses were unguarded. Nearly all police had deserted; hardly any of the unlucky people left in ordinary residences were capable of defending them. Some of the boldest and most impetuous of the street crowds broke shop windows; no one stopped them from carrying off liquor and jewelry (white crusts and foul odors around the electronics kept them mostly untouched). Bartenders and bouncers died; doors and windows broke; the cornered innocent died with nowhere to run; recalcitrant defenders burned in their refuges; and authority did not show up.

When the remaining population in the streets fully understood this, like a hot room flashing over when a window breaks, like an auction stampede when the last lot is up, destruction and violence spread through the city.

Washington was still the capital. Federal law-enforcement people and military units moved in and backed up the few surviving city forces; units of the Maryland and Virginia Guard joined them, and not long after dawn, the rioters had been swept into a few large holding areas, fire lanes cleared to isolate the big fires, and a sort of order restored, especially in the area close to the National Mall.

Tens of thousands of bodies lay in the wreckage, or unburied in the streets. Some blocks burned for days, unattended. Countless old people, children, bedridden patients, people whose powered wheelchairs had stopped running, and the few brave people who would not desert them, died buried in rubble, smothered in smoke, or roasted alive. Great scars of tumbled buildings, toppled poles and posts, and broken concrete slashed deep into the heart of the great city. And in a few large auditoriums, stadiums, and office buildings, tens of thousands of people who had formed the mob, or fled one mob and been caught up in another, or just gone out to see what was happening, were held there by the guns of the guards, waiting in hunger and despair for whatever might come. The horror was: nothing did.

Midmorning of the next day, when he was briefed on the situation, Peter Shaunsen, Acting President of the United States, asked three questions: Was anyone interested in being on the rebuilding commission? Could some of the fire lanes be cleared and paved into boulevards or malls to beautify the city? And what was being done to ensure that everyone who was not dead was able to vote?

A Secret Service man who was at the meeting skipped his next shift to walk over to see Chris Manckiewicz at the Washington Advertiser-Gazette. He expected to be fired when he returned, but no one even asked about his absence, so he just picked up his gear and went to his post.

^{SIXTEEN HOURS LATER. OFF THE CALIFORNIA COAST. ABOUT TWENTY MILES WEST OF THE MOUTH OF THE RUSSIAN RIVER. 2:30 P.M. PST. SATURDAY. NOVEMBER 2.}

Ysabel was “not what you could call a natural sailor,” Bambi said, not for the first time, to Mensche. The Pacific is choppy in the fall, but nonetheless, most people got some kind of sea legs after a day on the sea.

Bambi had adjusted to the constant retching noises from the girl hanging over the railing. As they had worked their way north, the waves got a little bigger, heralding a storm forming far up toward Alaska, but the prisoner seemed no worse, or at least she had no more to expel.

“At least she’s not a flight risk right now,” Larry Mensche pointed out. He had turned out to be a natural sailor; she’d taught him to hold a course by the compass, allowing her to get long naps all along the way, so that she was in much better shape than she had expected to be.

“I can see why people like this,” he observed. “But I’m guessing this is perfect weather, right?”

“About as perfect as it gets in the fall, yeah.”

A strange urking noise from the rail made Mensche scuttle forward and slap Ysabel’s back a couple of times, clearing something that hadn’t quite come out right, then wipe her face with a damp cloth, surprisingly gently. When he returned, Bambi said, “Considering how much of a pain in the ass to the whole world she’s been, you’re pretty nice to her.”

“She looks a lot like Debbie,” Mensche said. “So… even if it doesn’t make any sense—”

“Naw, it makes all the sense in the world.” Bambi squeezed his arm, and he nodded, appreciating the support. One more point for the man, he can tell the difference between the pretty chick being his buddy and copping a feel. “Hey, chances are that if your daughter needs the help, someone’s taking care of her. Remember that’s half the stories on KP-1—people looking after each other, communities banding together to make it through, all that. She’s probably swinging a shovel on a road crew and getting one big bowl of soup a day, but she’s got somewhere warm to sleep and she’s safe, bet you anything.” It sounded lame to Bambi even as she spoke it; she had to think, If the guards just locked them down and walked away, how long before—

“Yeah,” Mensche said, “but I can’t help worrying. Anyway, so how’d this guy end up with a name like ‘Quattro,’ and how’d your dad decide he was the man for you?”

She shrugged. “Our parents knew each other, very well, actually. When I was a lonely teenage girl, and he was a miserably lonely geek of an engineering student, we corresponded all the time, inventing codes to keep the old man baffled. It was years before I realized how much I’d encouraged the old bastard, since he thought Quattro and me must be hiding our love affair. Quattro was my lifeline; I needed someone to agree with me when I said that all the kids in my high school were stupid and worthless and superficial, especially because I was pretty and popular and a brat and a half, so I didn’t have the loser support network that so many alienated kids do. Dad’s plan for me to fall in love with the dashing older man and unite two Castles and two Castle-movement families, however, foundered on the fact that I’d sooner have married one of my pet llamas at the time.

“Quattro’s not attractive? Nice guy but no spark?”

“Nowadays he’s a damn handsome Howard Hughes type, he’s only seven years older than I am, and I occasionally think about seeing whether any sparks might happen. But back then, give me a break, he was old, not to mention a weird geek, despite being my best friend ever—which wasn’t hard back in those days, all you had to do was like having me for a friend. Hardly anyone else did.

“Anyway, so about his name. Quattro’s parents were chronic jokers. They noticed that a lot of dumbasses didn’t know that Mercedes was a girl’s name and that the car was named after a major investor’s daughter. That particular ignorance led, later on, to people naming their kids P-o-r-s-c-h-e instead of P-o-r-t-i-a, and even lamer baby names like Lexus and Avante, because the same dumbasses thought it was all classy and shit to name their daughter after an expensive car.

“So apparently the Larsens, being even more eccentric than my father, and maybe slightly richer, decided to sarcastically name their children after cars, figuring that all the friends they wanted to keep would get the irony. Hence Quattro. He says it was a compromise between Prius and Thunderbird.

“Anyway, Quattro was raised as one of those heroin-in-vending-machines libertarians, and they gave him his own Castle for his twenty-first birthday. I guess a Ferrari would have been too humdrum. So now he has a fortress outside Jenner that’s damned near as elaborate as Dad’s. You’ll like him, he’s pretty much post-political, good heart, nice guy… hunh. I might have to check the spark thing.”

“I really appreciate your taking me along—I know you didn’t have much choice, but I guess I’m glad it’s me. I don’t think the Federal government will last much longer.”

“Dad would agree with you.”

“Yeah, but he’s working on it, I’m just assessing. Anyway, if they dismiss me… well. Just a few hundred miles to walk to Coffee Creek and see what happened to Deb, or if I can’t find out there, maybe I can walk over to Reno and see if my ex knows anything. Something to do, you know?”

As they sailed on, clouds gathered to the north, and the sea rose a little every hour. Late that afternoon, the sea breeze started to blow inland. She headed the boat in toward the coast. “How exactly will you find where we’re going?” Mensche asked. “Without GPS I mean? I’m assuming that weird telescope and the windup clock have something to do with it.”

“I don’t really need to know longitude, because we’ve been sticking close to the coast. Latitude is a piece of cake with an accurate clock—like the chronometer from Dad’s collection, here—and this little gadget that you call the weird telescope is used to measure the angle between the sun and the horizon, or where the horizon would be if the water would hold still—that’s what the level on the side here is for. So I’m sailing along a line about five seconds of latitude south of the mouth of the Russian River. That should bring me in someplace along the state beach; once I spot land, I just sail north till I see the mouth of the Russian, and in we go—Quattro’s Castle is just west of Jenner, on the river, so it’ll be the first Castle on our left.”

“It’s weird how fast people got used to ‘Castles’ in America.”

“The Castle movement didn’t start till some of the fringier rich people freaked out that Obama was president, so yeah, it’s less than twenty years. Though really the house I grew up in, before Dad built the big one above the Harbor, was a Castle in all but name. Some rich guys have always built fortified big houses in isolated spots; Dad’s is only noticeable because he decided to build it so close to a big city.”

The weather held, and they enjoyed the last of the sandwiches and apples before they saw the coast, savoring the warmth of the sun and the crispness of the air. The late-fall-afternoon sun was still painting the coast in rich golds and deep blues as they turned north; it was not quite sunset on the river when Mensche said, “So, I guess this is where I say, ‘Castle, ho!’?”

“Not advisable to call me a ho, but otherwise, yeah.”

The man who met them at the pier looked like he was trying to dress as something between the Crocodile Hunter and the Veteran Surfer: khaki safari shirt, baggy knee-length shorts with too many pockets, old-style leather boots. He wore an immense hogleg of a revolver on one hip and a huge belt knife on the other. The effect was somewhat spoiled by his camo strap cap held together with a piece of shoelace where the plastic strap had been, and by a straggly brown-and-gray ponytail that would have been more in keeping with an old-school software developer or a trustafarian venture capitalist.

“Right when I thought you’d be,” Quattro said, smiling. “How was the trip, Bambi?”

“Not too different from the usual except for having to dust off a tiny bit of my celestial navigation skills. This is Special Agent Larry Mensche; and this is Quattro Larsen. And this is our prisoner, Ysabel Roth.”

“Kind of a harsh introduction, isn’t it? Young lady, can we parole you while you’re on the grounds here? Will you give your word and keep it that you won’t run away?”

Ysabel gasped, “Promise me that the world will stop bucking and rolling, and I’ll do whatever you say.”

As they walked up the pathway to the big house, Bambi noted dugouts, trenches, and walls to cover troops moving out from the house; two garden sheds that would make good blockhouses; and a wide-walled patio with a loopholed wall that would allow small artillery to cover the mouth of the Russian River. “You’re a lot less public about your Castle than Dad is about his.”

“Remember the silly commercials when we were kids? He’s a PC, I’m a Mac. His fortress looks like a fortress and it’s all built around its fortress-ness. My fortress just works.”

Larry stopped dead and whistled. “Is that your airfield?”

“Yeah. Cool, hey?”

“I loved classic planes when I was a kid. Pre-jets, I mean. So, yeah, I built models of several of those. But aren’t they falling apart just like everything else?”

“Parts of them are, and avgas is going to be a problem. But the really old birds are less electrical and less plastic than present-day airplanes, and their engines were built for unreliable cruddy fuel. I’ve had that DC-3’s engines up and running on biodiesel, even long before Daybreak, because I thought regular fuel sources might be cut off. And the only thing electrical in that engine is the ignition, and I think I’ll be able to replace the plastic and rubber with wood, glass, and metal. Back before there was vulcanized rubber, when they needed airtightness, they used different kinds of shellacs and oils on silk and linen, and there was the stuff called goldbeater’s fabric that was basically treated gut. And as of last night, when Arcadia made it back here safely, I’ve got a couple materials scientists from Cal Poly, who are very glad to have their families safely out of the chaos, working on what we can make tires out of. I really want it for the planes, but I’m not opposed to the idea that being the re-creator of the pneumatic tire might make me richer than God.”

“I can see the viewpoint,” Larry said. “I don’t suppose, while we’re here—”

Quattro grinned. “Hey, my inner teenage geek always needs other guys’s inner teenage geeks to hang out with. First chance, you and me are doing the extensive hangar tour—starting with that DC-3, and I’ve got about almost all of a Lockheed Electra 10, most of the guts in boxes. That one’s kind of iffy for getting to fly again. I’ll probably never have the shops and tech to refit my P-51 from the Dominican Air Force for post-Daybreak, and I’m not sure how much I can knock together from one fairly complete DC-6, three spare engines, and one DC-6 airframe. The real thing I’ve got my hopes pinned on is that I have—brace yourself… ta-da! Most of three Stearman Kaydets, one of them that I actually had flying before Daybreak.”

“I think our inner ten-year-olds are going to be best buddies,” Mensche said, “especially if yours likes to hear mine say, ‘Wow.’”

^{THE NEXT DAY. CAMBRIDGE.MASSACHUSETTS. SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT EST. SUNDAY. NOVEMBER 3.}

Building a radio station out of things you could find in the kitchen or the hardware store, plus scrap parts from everywhere, was the sort of interesting problem that MIT students enjoyed; it was a way to take their minds off the mess that surrounded them. Digging through the old paper library was fun in a nostalgic way, the trip out to off-campus storage with ROTC armed guards was a romantic adventure, and when finally they had a voltage controlled oscillator, built around five tubes that had been hand-built into test tubes and pickle jars, up and running, it felt like a major victory.

The crystal receivers for AM radio had been pulling in stories from KP-1 and Blue and Gold for a couple of days, so they had plenty of material for rebroadcast, and a couple of student reporters from the Tufts newspaper had managed to put together a local news report as well. FM radios that hadn’t been turned on or plugged in typically had not attracted many nanoswarm, and as word went from neighbor to neighbor, people dug out batteries and long-unused radios, wiped them with Drano and hydrogen peroxide, and heard the first news in several days.

So a surprising number of people were tuned in at two A.M. on Sunday, listening to the rereading of the day’s news, when the west wind began to rise. The hand-built anemometer at the improvised weather station on top of MacGregor jammed when nanoswarm from its bicycle-generator sensor penetrated the main bearing; two engineering students who climbed up to the roof to wipe and lubricate the anemometer looked southwest and saw the flames in Brookline.

The student announcer at WMBR broadcast the news immediately; within an hour, citizen volunteers were clearing fire lanes along Fisher Avenue and Lee Street, dragging wrecked cars out of the space, wetting down storefronts with water from the reservoirs, dousing the sparks that crossed the line, and helping fleeing residents find shelter.

Dawn came and the volunteers worked on in greater and greater numbers; at midmorning it began to snow, and the fire retreated.

By noon, the fire lanes were secure. Most people drifted away, but many lingered because of a rumor that they might all be paid, in food, or perhaps in a bus ride to a better location, or in an allocation of an abandoned house that had a woodstove—with something, at least, for their hours spent saving the city, sweating and hungry in the icy dark. Someone said that since the radio station at MIT had spread the word, probably the people who would pay them were there, and although most people didn’t want to walk that far, a few hundred made the trip, all the way across Harvard Bridge, marching in the thick snow, gaining determination to demand payment as they went.

The fighting may have started with nervous or overzealous ROTC guards, or perhaps the crowd, by the time it got there at around four in the afternoon, was simply too far gone into its desire to smash something. But by the time the so-called Battle of MIT was done, a dozen buildings were wrecked, much of the library had been carried off for fuel or burned in bonfires, and the radio station was off the air for good. When the National Guard arrived in the early hours of Monday morning, the campus was deserted, and there wasn’t much to do except catalog the damage.

^{LATER THAT EVENING. WASHINGTON. DC. PITTSBURGH. PENNSYLVANIA. AND MOST OF THE UNITED STATES. 7:00 P.M. EST. SUNDAY. NOVEMBER 3.}

Chris Manckiewicz’s introduction for the radio presidential debate stressed that despite everything, voting would still take place on Tuesday, and added, “Because our Republic is stronger even than this.” He went on to explain Vote Where You Are, the system Shaunsen had worked out for people to vote on a simple honor system: find any State, Federal, or local official on election day, no matter where you were, give them your address and as many preferences as you could, and the votes would be passed up the chain, exchanged around among the states, until every vote came home to its proper roost.

“It’s the only thing about him that doesn’t make me gnash my teeth. It’s sort of weirdly magnificent,” Lenny said. “Shaunsen is a corrupt old idiot, but he’s so much a politician that he can’t imagine canceling an election. Heroic lack of imagination.”

“Shh,” Heather said, adjusting to hold him closer. “Shut up so I can hear the history getting made.”

His good hand ran gently down her flank, and she thought, Well, there’s something even more distracting. But she focused her attention and waited to hear the two candidates, sharing a moment with the rest of the country.

KP-1’s Tech Tips had broadcast directions on making workable crystal radios using Christmas LED bulbs as the crystal, which allowed you to add amplifying power from a battery, so it was hoped that a majority of surviving Americans would find a way to hear this broadcast; after all, it wasn’t as if there was a lot of competing entertainment.

Norcross spoke first, and surprised them by not mentioning religious faith at all; he simply said that he wanted the job of putting the country back on its feet, and he knew what a big job it would be.

Shaunsen repeated his long list of something for everyone, suggested that Norcross was apt to impose religious tyranny, and gay-ron-teed! that everything would be back to normal in two years; he reminded everyone to simply hand whatever public official they could find on election day, “Your name, your address, and the big bold words STRAIGHT DEMOCRAT!”

Manckiewicz asked about several subjects; the answer from Shaunsen was always a list of where they were spending money, and “Be sure to vote STRAIGHT DEMOCRAT!” After the third such conclusion, Lenny muttered, “Wonder how many gay Democrat votes he’s losing?”

“About like everyone else, straight, gay, male, female, black, white. Everyone with a brain who hears him,” Heather said.

“And same question, Mr. Norcross?”

Norcross said, “Well, it just seems to me that we can be balanced about this. No, the experts really don’t agree yet on whether we were attacked by what they call a ‘system artifact,’ meaning sort of a mind-virus that just kind of grew in the Internet like termites in the baseboards, or whether it was an actual act of war by some nation or terrorist outfit. But common sense says a reconstructed nation can fight better, and a secure nation can reconstruct better.”

“Isn’t it amazing what having a big, important job does to some people?” Lenny said. “Norcross went from Jesus nut to almost-statesman; Shaunsen went from third-rate to tenth-rate.”

“Yeah, I almost feel good about voting for Norcross. Where did he get all that system artifact stuff?”

“Oh, Cam told both of them about it at a briefing; Norcross listened, I guess. Or maybe Shaunsen listened but didn’t care; probably he just figured that whether we’re being attacked by self-aware malware, or an international terror network, or for that matter Satan or freakin’ Monaco, why worry which? Shaunsen’s solution will always be to spend money.”

^{THE NEXT DAY. WASHINGTON. DC. JUST BEFORE 7:00 A.M. EST. MONDAY. NOVEMBER 4.}

That morning, the price for a copy of the Advertiser-Gazette had gone up to “thirty-two ounces of canned food or forty-eight of dry,” according to the masthead, but Heather had still had to struggle through the crowd around the newsboy for a copy; the kid looked like he was standing in a food-drive donation bin. Back at St. Elizabeth’s, where the power was on temporarily, she paged through it quickly under an ultraviolet spotlight, and then rolled it up, ran it through a degausser, and finally let them put it under a salvaged dental X-ray machine for about ten times the dose a human being should take in a year. That was the new procedure for documents that had been exposed outside, since yesterday they’d lost a satellite uplink to biotes that had probably come in on some paper maps from USGS.

It was worth it all, though, for the experience of being able to have powdered eggs, instant mashed potatoes, and freeze-dried coffee in their little makeshift bedroom, especially since, with the power on again in this wing for the moment, they had light enough to read to each other. Heather took a turn reading the rightmost column on the front page, which carried the basic information about the Vote Where You Are program.

While Heather ate, Lenny read the roundup story on the post-Daybreak disasters around the country: the big fires in St. Paul and Boston, the rioting and looting in DC, the weather disasters unfolding across the northern states.

They switched again for Lenny to have his toast while it was warm. Heather read Chris Manckiewicz’s editorial about the already-appearing corruption of many reconstruction projects, Shaunsen’s non-answers and attempted demagoguing during the debate on KP-1, the creation of the unneeded and threatening National Unity Guard without Congressional authorization, and finally the symbolism of the limo issue: that Washington’s scarce and vital supply of tires and gasoline had been depleted “so that the Acting President may wander around glad-handing and trying to persuade people that he is fit for office. We call on the voters to elect Norcross, and because the country cannot afford more of Shaunsen, we believe that we cannot wait for Norcross to take office in January. We urge the House to impeach Acting President Shaunsen and the Senate to remove him.’ You know, I am getting to like Chris Manckiewicz and Rusty Parlotta more than—”

There was a knock at the door. “Heather O’Grainne, please report immediately to Mr. Nguyen-Peters in his office, and he requests that you bring a day bag and a firearm.”

“On my way.” She bolted the last of her eggs and potatoes, gulped the last of her coffee, and kissed Lenny tenderly; nowadays she kept a packed day bag, including a weapon, by the door.

^{IMMEDIATELY AFTER. WASHINGTON. DC. 8:15 A.M. EST. MONDAY. NOVEMBER 4.}

Cam looked up from his desk as she came in; he looked stressed-out, overworked, and relieved to see her.

“What would you say,” he said, “if I reminded you that you have taken an oath—several times—to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic’?”

“I’d say ‘well, duh, Cam,’ and ask if I was being accused of treason.”

“Good. Would you say that a President—or an Acting President—who deputizes members of his staff, arms them, and sends them out to arrest someone is acting Constitutionally?”

“I think that would be a job for the Supreme Court to decide. What’s that idiot done?”

“Doing. We have about three hours. He’s sending his National Unity Guard to go arrest the whole staff of the Advertiser-Gazette at their morning meeting. We’ve got it straight from a Secret Service informant, confirmed by another inside source.”

“Christ. How can he arrest them? On what charge?”

“He just plans to hold them through the election. Supposedly he’s preventing unfair private interference in a Federal election.”

“Well, at that point he’s raped the shit out of the First Amendment, and he’s violated that oath he insisted on taking, Cam. You want me to go stop him?”

“I want you to arrest all the National Unity Guard he sends. There’s an excellent argument that he can’t appoint law enforcement officers on his own hook and all by himself, which we’ll find some good lawyer to argue for the Supreme Court. But what I really want is to catch people acting upon his orders, subverting the Constitution, arresting without warrant or charge, and several other good phrases that come right from Madison and the Federalist Papers as grounds for impeachment. Per Speaker Kowalski’s request I’m assembling a file to use in impeaching our Acting-Out President. Incidentally, how do you feel about the theory that the NCCC is responsible for making sure we have a qualified Acting President during an emergency, and that when an Acting President disqualifies himself during an emergency, the NCCC can take it back and give it to the next choice in line? ”

“Wow. Ask me again if you ever have to do that. I figured you’d just impeach Shaunsen.”

“I’d rather do it by impeachment, but if Kowalski can’t find the votes to impeach, or the Senate won’t remove, we still have to have a functioning president, ASAP. So this latest little escapade looks like one more length of rope to hang him with, and I want someone I trust to handle it. If you make it to Rusty Parlotta’s place, before the Acting Presidential Bozo Brigade shows up at eleven, and bust their asses—ideally if you can swear that you saw them try to make the arrest—I will appreciate the hell out of it, Speaker Kowalski will make great use of it, and the country will be a lot better off.”

“Not to mention we’ll both have kept our oaths.”

“I like that part too.”

“So why did you send for me?”

“Because in all of DRET, you’re the only person with Federal power to arrest who I’m willing to have improvise.”

^{ABOUT TWO HOURS LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. ABOUT 11:00 A.M. EST. MONDAY. NOVEMBER 4.}

“All right, that’s got to be them,” Heather said, watching from the window. Two young women and two young men in the black uniforms with red berets, walking like they were auditioning (unsuccessfully) for the role of the determined sheriff in a community theatre. God, it looks like “when Guardian Angels go bad.” “Rusty, Chris, are you sure you want to do this? Let me remind you, once again, I could just meet them at the door.”

“You’re asking us to throw away the best story we’ve had yet, Ms. O’Grainne,” Rusty said. “Not to mention that Mr. Nguyen-Peters is absolutely right. If they actually say they’re arresting us on the Acting President’s orders—with Betsi inside here taking notes, so we’ll have their exact words—then we can get that asshole out and a real president in. So what the hell.”

“Uh, what the boss said,” Chris said, grinning.

“All right, then, go on out, and move away from the door quick in case I need to come through fast.”

Rusty went through first, then Chris, and they moved down the front porch to the left, clearing a path for Heather immediately. She rested the door on her hand, ready to fling it open.

“Can we help you?” Rusty asked.

One of the young women stepped forward, nervously brushed her hair away from her face, and began to read from a card. “By order of the Acting President of the United States, this company is to cease publication immediately and all staff present on the premises are to come with us. You are also to turn over all materials, supplies, and equipment to us; you may petition to have them returned when the present emergency—”

“On what charges?” Rusty asked. “And do you have a warrant?”

“We don’t need a warrant, we’re not cops, we’re here from the President,” the taller and more muscular of the two young men said. “And it’s a National Security Emergency. And you’re under arrest.”

“Read your Constitution. You don’t come onto this porch without a warrant, and if you’re going to arrest me, you have to tell me what the charges against me are—”

“Fucking Republican, it’s not your fucking Constitution,” the man said, and drew his gun.

Heather burst through the door, crouching into firing position and shouting, “Freeze, Federal police!” in one swift motion.

The young man may have just started and accidentally pulled the trigger; he may have intended to shoot Rusty Parlotta all along; for whatever reason, his gun barked, and Heather shot his head—practically textbook combat handgun, she thought, as she bellowed, “Throw down your weapons! I am a Federal agent, and you are all under arrest now. Throw down your weapons!”

Stunned, bewildered, the two young women and the surviving young man dropped their guns; Heather ran forward, bellowing, “Lie down, lie down on your faces, hands behind your backs,” and was putting the ties on the second one as she recited, “You have the right to remain silent…”

It was only as she tied the third one that she realized someone else had been shouting, and she turned to see Chris bending over Rusty, cradling her in his arms in a sort of Pieta as he tried to hold her so that she could breathe. Beside Chris, ineffectually, a man tried to stop the still-flowing, bubbling chest wound. Heather rushed to join them, but even as she did, the blood flow from the gushing wound diminished, and the dim recognition left Rusty Parlotta’s eyes; they kept trying to revive her while a runner fetched a doctor, but they all knew she was dead long before it was official.

^{THE NEXT DAY. BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS. BEGINNING AT 7:00 A.M. EST. TUESDAY. NOVEMBER 5.}

Election day wasn’t anything anyone had expected: It was surprisingly smooth and dull.

In the burned-out areas of Boston, soldiers walked down the street with notebooks and megaphones, asking people to come out and vote. Many of the people who came out were disappointed to find out that it wasn’t about food, or about rides out of the area, or heated shelters. But once they understood what it was about, they almost all wanted to vote. Since the printed ballots had been mostly destroyed, the soldiers hand-copied the correct spellings of the names and parties from the blackboard at headquarters, then each carried a clipboard with that sheet on it, so that voters would have something to copy correct spellings from.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PALE BLUFF. ILLINOIS. 6:00 A.M. CST. TUESDAY. NOVEMBER 5.}

An hour behind Boston, in Pale Bluff, they all voted right on the dot of six in the morning, in the interest of giving Freddie Pranger the maximum daylight for the trip to Springfield. An old mimeograph had been found, along with a still-sealed package of mimeo sheets. A long-retired schoolteacher had figured out how to make it all work, using a turpentine/ethanol mix for fluid. They had printed up a set of ballots, and everyone promised not to peek; in the same community hall where they had all listened to a radio pulled from a sealed box and switched on just before the debate, 681 adult inhabitants and 104 adult refugees cast their ballots, sitting next to each other, filling them out all at once, careful to keep their eyes on their own ballots.

The township clerk shuffled them in a big cardboard box and started counting. An hour later, a landslide for Will Norcross was announced, and the results for local elections were written up on a whiteboard and recopied onto a sheet of lined notebook paper. While they waited, they’d all had a pancake breakfast.

Then Freddie Pranger, who had been in the Special Forces and was still a good shot, packed the results total in a small bag. He figured he’d make Springfield in three days, and depending on what he found, might be back in a week. He also carried a letter from the mayor of Pale Bluff offering to secure the roads and operate a postal service within ten miles of the town; that offer had been ratified by unanimous voice vote just before Freddie left.

They stood in the street, waving good-bye to Freddie; then people returned to their homes and jobs, with plenty to do, and nothing more about elections for the next two years.

^{ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. ANTONITO. COLORADO. ABOUT 10:00 A.M. MST. TUESDAY. NOVEMBER 5.}

An hour behind Pale Bluff, election day in Antonito was sort of a half-holiday by common consent, with everyone taking either the morning or the afternoon off to vote, and incidentally just to enjoy having time to themselves, or to chat with the neighbors.

Voting was by secret ballot at the town council secretary’s office. She had a big sign out front:

The older lady behind the desk, whose nameplate said she was SUZEE B., wore a gray beehive and glasses that made her look like she had escaped from The Far Side. She looked gray and sick, and the empty ashtray beside her probably explained it. The tobacco supply had run out, and many of the local folks were going through withdrawal.

“Here to vote?”

“Uh, yes, and we had a question—”

“Just ask when it comes up. Let’s start with your names.”

When it got down to address, Beth and Jason couldn’t very well use the commune’s old address, not knowing whether any of their old neighbors might someday come this way. Jason said, “Um, we’re refugees and the last we saw of our home—it’s not going to be there if we ever go back.”

Suzee B. looked up, nodding in sympathy, her mouth skewed a little to one side. “That sucks, don’t it?”

“Yeah,” Beth said, and her voice was choking with tears. Jason never knew when that would happen to her; most of the time she insisted on pretending nothing much had happened, but every now and then, some little kindness or attention from anyone—Jason or a stranger, it didn’t seem to matter—would completely undo her.

The lady looked at Beth, glanced at Jason, and said, “Bad getting here?”

“Bad starting out.” That was as honest as seemed safe. “Uh, what we wanted to ask was, we just rented a garage from Dave Wilson, over on Third Street? And could that be our address? So our votes count here where we’re going to make our home, instead of back where we—”

“We don’t never want to see it no more,” Beth said, wiping her eyes.

“Honey, you’re making sense to me, and I’m as much authority as there is. Dave’s at 442 Third Street, there ain’t no 444 or 446, and you’re closer to Dave than you are to the laundrymat at 448. So your garage is now officially 444. Are you a Mister and Missus yet?”

“Not yet,” Jason said, “though the thought has crossed my mind, and we’ve talked about it.”

“We been kinda busy,” Beth volunteered.

“I know how that goes. But look, just now, the whole government record system is me, so while you’re here, want to get married? I’ve got the registry right here.”

It seemed like a good time to do it, so they voted, married, and were put on the list for jury duty. “You could be caught in the draft, too, Jason,” Suzee warned. “There’s some idiots around here talking about the town needing a militia.”

“And there probably won’t be enough paper to make a card for me to burn,” Jason said.

She laughed. “Glad to have two more liberals in town,” she said. “That makes three of us.”

^{THREE HOURS LATER. CASTLE CASTRO. (SAN DIEGO. CALIFORNIA.) 12:00 P.M. PST. TUESDAY. NOVEMBER 5.}

Harrison Castro looked over the assembled population of his Castle, everyone except the sentries who had voted earlier. He drew a deep breath, reminded himself that he had no mike and had to project, and began. “We have formed a bond, you and I. I am feeding and housing you; you live by my protection; you have brought your families in here to live, and I am the freeholder of our Castle here. In the last forty-eight hours you have all helped me turn away mobs who would have destroyed everything. By now we all understand—we are in this together. We are engaged in a titanic struggle to make a new civilization. I hope that a fully Constitutional, free, and sovereign America will be part of it, but I know for certain that a strong and free Castle Castro will be, because together, you and I will make it be.”

Loud cheers broke the silence; Castro noted that his four selected claques had all hit their cue perfectly, and almost everyone else had followed. He was not particularly displeased that Special Agents Bolton and Carlucci were among the few not cheering wildly; that was their privilege, and owing to their occupation, they were thoughtful men, not easily swayed and very inclined to consider things for a long time. Besides, many things would be easier if the Feds departed sometime before spring; they were handy men with weapons, and good counselors, but next summer would be easier without Federal eyes watching.

“So,” he said, “as the freeholder of Castle Castro, I would prefer that you vote in the following way…” He read off his list of intended votes, beginning of course with Norcross for president. “But again, it is your ballot. Let me offer you two options: Vote your way, if it disagrees with mine. Keep your ballot secret, if you wish. Place completed ballots in the red box to my left, and I swear upon my loyalty to my country and my family that I will report your votes faithfully and accurately to the California Secretary of State in Sacramento.

“Or, I would take it as a personal favor if you do this: Sign your name to your ballot but do not mark on it otherwise, and place it in the blue box to my right. In other words, acknowledge that because you have freely taken my protection and given your loyalty, you owe me your political allegiance, and you give over your political power to me for my use, just as you give me your bodies to use in fighting to defend Castle Castro and doing the work that must be done to house and feed us all.

“If you choose to give me your unmarked ballot, with your name on it, I will fill out your ballot for you and report it, with the others. And I will enter you into a list of people I will give preference to in any appointments or openings that may come up, because loyalty should be rewarded. All right—” He saw Carlucci trying to get his attention; the man might decide to be difficult, so Castro hurried somewhat at the last, spoiling some of the effect. Damn Carlucci anyway. “All right, all right then, now everybody vote!”

Later, as he sifted through the blue box, he discovered that Carlucci and Bolton had each signed their names, and rather than put an unmarked ballot in for him to mark, they had voted exactly opposite his desires on everything. Carlucci had added, “I do not think you understand what it is to be an American, sir, and I will leave your protection tomorrow, grateful for your help but unwilling to further give you mine.”

A man of honor. Good. And not sticking around. Even better. I’ll miss his gun. Oh well.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. CASTLE LARSEN. (JENNER. CALIFORNIA.) ABOUT 2:00 P.M. PST. TUESDAY. NOVEMBER 5.}

Bambi was charmed when, for the uncountable time, Quattro asked, “Do you think setting out the food and all is too much?”

She looked into his eyes and rested a hand on each of his triceps, dragging downward with her fingertips, willing his tense shoulders to descend. “Jenner is a tiny town, and it’s all laid out to be accessible to the road, the beaches, and the hills; nobody would ever have given any thought to defending it, it’s a place meant to welcome people. So they know that they depend on you in case of real trouble. You’ve shown them where they’ll bunk, trained their militia and armed it. It’s your canned fruit and tomatoes that’ll bring them through the winter without scurvy. They’ve gratefully accepted all of that; why would they think you were trying to buy their votes with a few sandwiches?”

“Okay. I’ll try to stop worrying. I just hope they’ll like what I could set out. I wish I could throw a real all-you-can-eat, too, you know, ’cause I’m pretty sure a lot of them are going hungry.”

Larry Mensche smiled. “Hey, truth here, Quattro? Relax and let people enjoy what you’ve done.”

“Yeah. People are just so difficult for me.”

“Just think of us as really fallible machines,” Mensche said. “Can I ask one strange question? Should we let Ysabel vote?”

“Well,” Bambi said, “she’s never been convicted of anything, she’s an American citizen, and her one vote isn’t going to change anything.”

Mensche nodded. “That’s what I think. Quattro?”

“Dude, she’s your prisoner.”

“But it’s your Castle.”

Quattro shrugged. “After all my years of wanting to be the freeholder of my own Castle, I found out I’d rather be an American citizen. Let’s let everyone vote today.”

^{FIVE HOURS LATER. LINCOLN. NEBRASKA. ABOUT 9:00 P.M. CST. TUESDAY. NOVEMBER 5.}

In Lincoln, the governor sat down with her secretary of state and poured a glass of whiskey for each of them. “We won’t have the ballot results from the back corners of the state for at least a week, will we?”

“If we’re lucky. If there’s another big storm, could be two weeks before people on foot carry all the reports in.”

“But the only ones that need immediate reporting are the ones for the presidential race, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.” The Nebraska Secretary of State was a quiet man who generally let people arrive at their own conclusions, but he feared his governor’s nerve might fail her. He said, gently, “Nebraskans are not crazy—it’s going to come in massively for Norcross.”

“But if it takes weeks to report—”

“Well, exactly.” He drew out a sheet of typewritten paper, and said, “We got a radio link working, thanks to the physics kids at the university, but they’re having a hard time keeping it from crusting up, and they think they only have a couple hours in the battery they built before that goes, too. So it’s now or never. As it happens, what I have here is a copy, from a paper almanac, of the numbers from when Reagan carried this state, adjusted upward by either five percent or ten percent per county, re-proportioned to the last census. And if we report it, the only difference is everything that needs to happen can happen a couple of weeks early.”

She played with the pencil in front of her, pushed her glasses up her nose, and finally said, “You know, I don’t believe any of the eight states that have already reported had it any easier retrieving ballots than we did.”

“Rhode Island’s pretty small,” he pointed out.

“They had results half an hour after the polls closed. Do you think anyone can even cross Providence in less than half a day, right now?” The governor stared at him; her old-fashioned black horn-rimmed glasses glinted. “What do you want me to say? ”

“Nothing,” he said. “I want you to say nothing. I suppose I’ve been around long enough to want to be able to say truthfully that I’d told you, and you’d said nothing. I’ll radio these in right now.”

^{ABOUT ONE HOUR LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 11:30 P.M. EST. TUESDAY. NOVEMBER 5.}

“The poor old West Coast isn’t going to matter any more after Daybreak than it did before.” Manckiewicz looked at the whiteboard on which one of the reporters had sketched an awkward map of the United States that afternoon. They had the generator running so there was light, and in an abandoned drugstore someone had found a few calculators whose packaging had not yet rotted.

The signal chimed; he pulled on his headset. “Okay, KP-1, this is Chris, and count me in.”

The engineer in Pittsburgh said, “Five, four”—Chris drew a deep breath—“one, go.”

Chris began. “Hello, this is Chris Manckiewicz, of the Washington Advertiser-Gazette, with a special report for KP-1 News. Latest figures indicate an unprecedented landslide for Norcross. We’re ready to call Ohio and Missouri, again for Norcross, which means he needs only a dozen more electoral votes to become—”

The note in front of him had been sitting there for a while, and he knew what was on it, but he thought a population too long trained to drama would like it better this way. “Wait just a moment, I’ve just been handed a note—all right, then. It’s… all… over! ” (Corny, sure, but corn lifts spirits, and now’s the time for it, if ever.) “Illinois, Nebraska, and Colorado have all tipped over for Norcross. Will Norcross is the next president of the United States.”

He recapped the whole story from the beginning, then signed off and turned to the staff. “Vern, are we preset with the ‘Norcross Wins’ headline?”

“Have been since yesterday. And I’ve been setting in the numbers as they came. Do we do an extra for tonight, or just go with a full story tomorrow? You never did settle on that.”

Chris leaned back. God, I wish Rusty could have seen this. “You know,” he said, “there probably hasn’t been an extra at any American paper in, I don’t know, twenty years? There haven’t been very many paper papers since the big bust in 2012. And an extra just sounds kind of… I don’t know, romantic. Besides, if we wait till morning, Shaunsen’s goons may be back here to smash our press. And there’re a few thousand people milling around on the Mall; I don’t know whether all of them will have canned goods, but there are quite a few living out of their backpacks. If we do half a print run on the extra, how soon can we get it out?”

“Forty minutes, if you’ve got any newsies to carry it.”

“We have five of them pretending to sleep downstairs right this minute, remember? So what the hell. It’s romantic, Rusty would have loved it, and I’ll be damned if we’re going to give those bastards a chance to stop our reporting. Be sure to re-run all the stuff about Rusty’s murder in there, too, and all the Shaunsen corruption stories. Let’s make it hot for the son of a bitch.”

^{THE NEXT DAY. WASHINGTON. DC. 6:50 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. NOVEMBER 6.}

The breakfast meeting for that day was set an hour earlier, to give everyone a chance to eat before whatever might come. There had been no word from the White House after the election had been called for Norcross the night before; not even when Manckiewicz had walked up to the White House gates at three A.M. and asked if a concession speech was forthcoming.

The phone from the White House rang. Cameron looked at the clock. “Five minutes early. This won’t be good.” He signaled the transcriptionist standing by to get on the other headset, and picked it up. “Yes, Mr. President.”

“What kind of a stunt do you call that?”

Cameron kept his voice even. “I beg your pardon?”

“More than half those radio links to state Secretary of State offices were military,” Shaunsen said. “And a bunch of the ones that weren’t military were Republican. And nobody reported on any congressional or Senate races, just on the presidential race. And more than that, they’ve been telling me for days that they can’t get a message anywhere faster than a man can go on foot, yet somehow they all had counts within hours of when the polls closed. This is the biggest voter fraud and stolen election there’s ever been. This makes W Chimpface Shrub look like an amateur. And I don’t know any way they could do this without your being in on it. And who the fucking cunting hell’s idea was it to route everything direct to the news media?”

“If you mean the Advertiser-Gazette, sir, and KP-1, the election results were broadcast in clear—per your instructions—and they just listened in like anyone else could do and put the numbers together.”

“Eat shit.”

“Sir, have you been drinking?”

“That’s none of your business!” The phone slammed down.

Cameron looked over at Weisbrod. “Did you get that?”

“I could hear him through your head,” Weisbrod said. “The question is, does he realize we’ve got him beaten, or does he drag it out even further? ”

“He wouldn’t be able to drag it out if we could just take some Twenty-fifth Amendment action. What’s the situation with the Secretary of State?”

Weisbrod shook his head. “I have all but three Cabinet votes lined up your way, but Randolph is not one of them, and without him, there’s no Twenty-fifth Amendment case. He won’t budge. He doesn’t want to make history, he doesn’t want to be part of a coup. He doesn’t want to do anything, actually, other than try to get home to Mississippi. He’s worried about his family.”

It had stymied them for more than a day. The problem was that the Twenty-fifth Amendment requires both the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet to certify that the President is unfit. Their little cabal of responsible people at St. Elizabeth’s was already on shaky ground, for there was no actual Vice President and Congress had never provided for the position of Acting Vice President; the Secretary of State was the next eligible person in the line of succession, which might or might not count as the same thing as “the Vice President,” depending on what Chief Justice Lopez thought.

“Maybe if the Secretary of State resigns,” Weisbrod said. “And if—”

The presidential line rang again, and Nguyen-Peters gestured to the transcriptionist, who slipped on his phones and bent to his work.

The gist of the tirade was that Cameron Nguyen-Peters had been fired, both as Chief of Staff for the Department of Homeland Security and as NCCC. As Shaunsen ran down, Cameron said, very quietly, “Sir, that is not a lawful order.”

“I’m the damn president!”

“Acting President, sir. You can order my boss to fire me, though he won’t. You can fire him and try to make his successors fire me; they won’t. You can’t call me up and dismiss me directly.

“Furthermore, as NCCC, it is my job to ensure that the acting presidency is in competent and legally qualified hands, and I don’t feel I can say that with you in office; to leave now would be to desert my post during a crisis, and the President can’t lawfully order a Federal official to neglect or act contrary to his duty. So I’m not fired, sir. Thank you.” And he hung up. He turned to Weisbrod. “Graham, if you have one good idea right now, you are my hero.”

“Don’t let your toast get cold, and let’s talk through this thing one more time.”

“That’s two good ideas. Got any more?”

“Well, President Pendano… when I talked to him on the phone on Sunday, because I was worried they’d move him with the rioting going on—he sounded much better than he did when I visited on Friday and on Saturday. I think he’s off the barbiturates and through the withdrawal, but I couldn’t chance asking when there might be some National Unity Goon listening in. So suppose he’s better. What if he were to transmit a letter to Congress certifying that he’s ready to resume his duties?”

“Could he do that? I mean—I know, Amendment Twenty-five, Section Three, he can always send the letter, but could he be president?”

“That’s not what I have in mind, Cameron. No, I don’t think Roger Pendano could be president again. I don’t think he’s even going to live very long, or if he does, it will be as a wreck in a nursing home. If he were going to rise to the need, he’d’ve done it the first night. But he might be able, for a very short time, to be a figurehead. And I think he’ll do that if we ask him. If we got Kowalski on it for the House and whoever it’s going to be for the Senate, and Roger Pendano were to appoint a Vice President and then resign—”

“I see what you’re saying, it scares me, and I don’t like it.”

Weisbrod pressed on. “Twenty-fifth Amendment, Section 3, he resumes his duties if he sends a letter that says he’s fit and a majority of the Cabinet agrees. No agreement from the VP required. If we all vote that he’s fit, and the Senate and House confirm as soon as Shaunsen protests, then Roger is the President again. Between DRET and the Cabinet, we could take care of everything, just have him read announcements and maybe wave from stands. It’ll be easier to hide than Roosevelt’s wheelchair or Wilson’s stroke were. And if he appoints a successor right away, and the House and Senate confirm immediately, we won’t have to keep the act going for much time at all.”

Cameron nodded. “Who did you have in mind for the successor?”

Weisbrod smiled. “Frankly, I was thinking you.”

“God no. I have zero charisma and I’m unknown outside policy circles and it would look like a coup. Same reason we can’t use any generals. But I do have a thought, which I’m swiping from all the stuff I’ve been reviewing about irregular successions and possible irregular successions in the past.”

“There’s a precedent for this?”

“There’s definitely a precedent, even if it’s 108 years old. Back in 1916, just before he was re-elected, Woodrow Wilson thought the country might reject him, and elect Charles Evans Hughes. The main issue of the campaign was Wilson’s policies about the war going on in Europe. If Wilson lost, especially back in those days when a new president was sworn in on March 4th, it would have been five months till the new policies came in, at a time when there were decisions to make every day. Wilson thought that was way too long for the country to stay with a foreign policy it had rejected, so he planned that if Hughes won, Wilson would appoint him Secretary of State, the Senate would confirm, and then Wilson and Vice President Marshall would resign, making Hughes the President under the 1886 Succession Act, the rules at the time.

“So I suggest that Roger Pendano pick Senator Will Norcross as his Vice President. The country voted for Norcross, so he has immediate legitimacy. And we don’t have to go through a whole additional succession on January 20; we can put Norcross in, in a perfectly Constitutional, regular way.”

“And Norcross at least grasps that the situation is desperate, and he’ll act rather than weasel around it,” Weisbrod said. “I see the logic. But Will Norcross still scares me. Do you think he understands that if we do this for him, he owes us a more middle-of-the-road, national-unity sort of administration than he campaigned for?”

“I think that you and the Cabinet should put that question to him directly, in your first meeting with him after President Pendano reassumes office.” Cameron was nodding now, liking the thought more as he considered it. “Yes, extract promises from Norcross that he’s not going to treat this as a mandate for the Christian Right—by all means. Insist that he say it in public, not just to you. Please. Because we need the country to pull together. Now—you’re the guy to talk to Pendano, and you know it—do you think he’ll be okay with it?”

Graham sat still for a long, long moment. “I think it’s what Roger would prefer, if he can be coaxed into it. But we’ve both got to be clear about what the deal is. So, here’s what I think we’re agreeing to: Pendano can never function again as President—but he has the power to eliminate Acting President Shaunsen, and the country needs that. If Will Norcross commits to being a national-unity president for all the country, and leave his religious views to his re-election campaign if he has one, then he’s the best man for the job. Therefore, we are doing this because the country needs a functioning, full-time, national-unity president, right now. Have I forgotten anything?”

“Not a thing,” Cameron said. “Ditto, as some of my colleagues on the right used to say.” He extended a hand and the two men shook. “And I’m glad we’re friends.”

“Ditto,” Graham said. “All right, well, nothing will be improved by delay. I’m going to grab Heather O’Grainne and head over to the White House.”

“Excellent. I don’t think we can count on Shaunsen to give up without a fight, when push comes to shove, and I mean that pretty literally. Bringing a big man, especially military or security, into the White House would look suspicious; Heather’s a good, inoffensive alternative.”

“You know, that may be the first time she’s ever been called that.”

^{ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 10:00 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. NOVEMBER 6.}

“All right,” Chris said, opening the morning meeting, “what do we have for prospects for tomorrow’s paper? What’s everyone working on?”

“Got a roundup,” Hayley said. “Hunger riots all up and down the East Coast.”

George Parwin looked up, and added, “Bad news in all the major cities—roundup or bunch of shorties, no details on any of them. According to a ham in New Hampshire, thousands of people died of exposure after walking out of the Boston metro area looking for food, when a freezing rainstorm caught them. Confirmed for sure, two days ago half of Chicago burned because there was no way to put it out—must’ve gone not long after St. Paul, actually. My DoD-intel source let me look at aerial photos of street barricades and armed men splitting the black and white neighborhoods in St. Louis.”

Brown said, “Food story—satellite pictures show that early blizzard might’ve killed a quarter of the cattle in Montana.”

“Okay,” Chris said. “And of course, metro and local, Shaunsen is pledging good government jobs for everybody, and plans to sue to get results thrown out in some states where he lost, because of the ‘unfair advantage’ Norcross—”

“Hey!” The shout was from Don Parmenter, up in the cupola, where they tried to maintain a watch with binoculars. “Troops moving out of Fort McNair and Fort Myer.”

“Where are they going?”

“This way. Too soon to tell otherwise, but they’re definitely not heading out of town.”

“Right,” Chris said. “Okay, everyone, the story ideas sound fine; George, write them up as separate shorties, we can always stick them all back together if we need the space for anything else. Brown, yeah, go with that, on the Montana story. And I better run, because odds are those troops mean something’s going on.” He shouted. “Hey, Don, want to come and see if we can get caught in a battle?”

“You know that’s why I took the job,” Parmenter said, hurrying down the stairs. “Let’s not miss it.”

^{ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. THE WHITE HOUSE. WASHINGTON. DC. 11:00 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. NOVEMBER 6.}

The Secret Service ERT at the plywood barrier in front of the White House entrance had his machine pistol wrapped in a plastic garbage bag. He looked exhausted, but smiled when he saw who it was.

“Hey, Dr. Weisbrod. Gonna make the future better?”

“Doing what I can. They only deliver it one day at a time. Heather, Karl; Karl, Heather.”

Heather asked, “Isn’t that garbage bag going to rot like all the other plastic?”

“That’s the idea. When it starts to, I know the gun oil and the bullets are suspect, and I turn it in to the armorer; he tears it down, degreases it, sterilizes all the surfaces, reloads with ammo from sealed boxes, and puts it in another bag. It will work till we run out of sealed boxes, I guess.”

“How soon is that?” Heather asked.

“Everyone I know is scared to ask. Don’t tell me if you find out.” Karl looked the bagged weapon over, apparently seeing no signs of slime, fuzz, melting, or rupture. “Can’t believe how heavy these all-metal-and-wood things are—makes me respect the old-timers from when I first joined.” He turned and waved a distinctive signal to the man inside the doorway. “Just letting him know you don’t have me at gunpoint. Go on through.”

They were passed from guard to guard up to the third floor. The Secret Service smiled at them; the NUG-thugs didn’t.

To Heather, Roger Pendano looked like he’d aged twenty years, developed anorexia, and taken a bad beating that morning, but at least the president’s eyes had a little light and fire in them.

They sat down in the cluster of leather armchairs surrounding a low table, and Pendano launched at once into a rambling monolog about college days that made Heather’s heart sink, especially since he seemed to be drawing on a pad, until he flipped the pad over and showed them:

Heather withdrew a jelly jar from her bag and put on rubber gloves from a sealed bag; she unscrewed the top of the jar and took out a BugSweepR, turned it on, and took a tour of the room while Pendano and Weisbrod talked about how good the tollhouse cookies used to be across the street from campus. Following the “warmer/colder” indicator and the point indicator, she discovered two bugs (under the table and behind the headboard of the bed), a TV remote (behind a bookcase), and an old digital watch (under one couch).

The remote or the watch, of course, could also be a disguised bug, so she put them all in a screw-top metal can half-full of nanospawn crystals, shook them vigorously, and tied the can to the faucet in the bathroom with bare copper wire. A scan with the BugSweepR revealed no signal coming from any of them. She emerged from the bathroom and nodded at the men.

Graham began to explain. “Mr. President, Norcross won; the country is starving, freezing, and burning; and Shaunsen seems to be groping his way into some kind of bass-ackwards coup. The number of impeachable offenses he’s committed this week alone is beyond counting.”

“I’ve been painfully aware about those,” Pendano said. “Scott Jevons, one of the Secret Service men, has been smuggling me the Washington Advertiser-Gazette, but he wasn’t on duty this morning, so I hadn’t seen the election results. I can’t say I’m surprised.”

Heather tilted chairs against the doorknobs of both entrances to the main room, then dragged a couch around to provide some cover between the men and the doors. Best improvisation I’ve got. She crouched behind the couch. Come on, Graham, get to—

“Roger.” Graham’s voice was soft, gentle—and as intense as Heather had ever heard. “Roger, I wish I didn’t have to ask, but we’ve got to get rid of Shaunsen, and—”

“I thought that might be what you were here for. Amendment Twenty-five, Section Three; I figured Randolph was too much of a wuss and too old to do anything.” Pendano groaned, shaking his head as if he’d been punched. “I don’t know what will happen if I try to resume my office. I… I’m not the man I was a couple weeks ago. I’m not sure at all who I am, now.”

“It would only have to be a for a few days,” Graham said. He explained quickly.

Heather said, “We probably have five minutes before they react to the bugs being dead,” she said. “Let’s get moving.”

“So we put Norcross in early and he’s promised to act presidential?” Pendano stood. “That solves the problem, all right. But you get me out of office fast; I’m ashamed enough of what I’ve become without having it paraded in public.” Pendano moved to his private correspondence desk, pulled out a sheet of paper, and scrawled:

“Who did Shaunsen put in as Pres Pro Tem at the Senate?”

“He refused to do that, and he hasn’t resigned his seat, either, even though the Twenty-fifth Amendment says he has to,” Weisbrod explained.

“Great. Crap, Graham, I’m sorry I cracked up on you all. All right, then.” Anger seemed to straighten and steady him, and he bent to write, quickly and in a surprisingly firm hand:

“That last one is giving Cam the power to straighten this mess out if necessary,” Pendano explained. “He may be a crazed right-wing nut and the coldest man in Washington, but if Shaunsen does any more damage to the Constitution, it will be over Cam’s dead body, and I don’t think that’ll be easy to achieve. One of my best appointments, I think.”

“Absolutely,” Weisbrod said.

“The lawyer in me says we’d better have both of you witness it,” Pendano said, extending the pen. Graham signed, WITNESSED NOVEMBER 6, 2024 and his name; below that Heather signed, her eyes never leaving the doors.

Weisbrod said, “Heather, just in case, I’d feel better to have you carrying this.”

She folded it and placed it carefully, thinking, Not everybody gets to have the fate of the nation stuffed into her bra. “Now I’ll just put the dead bugs back and—”

Pendano shook his head. “We’d better just run for it.” Unselfconsciously, Pendano shucked off his robe, turned to his closet, and pulled out an old white shirt and a pair of jeans. “Please forgive the lounging-around clothes, they’re all I have right now.”

“I don’t quite follow—” Graham said.

“I do.” Heather felt sick. “This letter has to be officially received by Kowalski and Shaunsen, and they have to admit they got it, or receive it in front of witnesses. If President Pendano were to die before it’s delivered—”

“Shaunsen would succeed in his own right,” Pendano said, “and then you’d be good and well shit up the crick, as one of my favorite voters used to say. And there’d be a lot of stories they could tell to explain my death—I’m in poor health, I’m insane and died struggling against restraints, I could be found with a big load of sedatives in my belly—given the moral character of our Attorney General, I could be found with an ax in my head, and he’d rule it suicide. I need to put myself out of their reach, now, or make them damn well get my blood on their hands in public.”

He had dressed while he was talking, and now he slipped his feet into loafers. “Secret Service outside—black man, shaved head, short and solid, mustache?”

“Right.”

“Good, that’s Scott Jevons. Ask him to come in.”

Pendano explained the situation in a few swift, brutal sentences, not hesitating to say that Shaunsen was in the process of a coup and would murder him if he could. “I know it’s a lot to ask of you to make the decision.”

Jevons shrugged. “The President and a Cabinet Secretary have just told me that the President is healthy and taking back over. The President looks good to me. My job is to protect the President. That’s how my outfit will see it.” He pulled a cell phone from his jacket pocket, untied the condom in which it was bagged, and dialed. “Big Fox, this is Bravo. President Pendano has just signed a letter, witnessed by the Secretary of the Future and the Assistant Secretary for… uh…”

“Future Threats.”

“…Future Threats. The letter says he’s well again, and he looks like it to me. He believes some people here in the White House may pose a threat to his safety. In the, um, present circumstances I recommend we move him to DRET at St. Elizabeth’s, with a stop at the Capitol to present the letter to Speaker Kowalski. Standing by for—”

The door crashed open; Jevons shot first, hitting the NUG in the head. Heather got the one who came in after him. Gunshots rang in the hallways below; Heather and Scott Jevons moved to cover the elevator and stairs.

Scott had been shouting into the phone; he looked up from it, his face streaked with tears. “Mr. President, the Secret Service are being killed, the NUGs jumped us—”

Graham clapped Heather on the shoulder. “Can you climb down from the balcony behind us?”

“I probably—”

“Yes or no.”

“Yes, or whatever else—”

“Deliver that letter to Kowalski. Now. It’s effective as long as neither of you knows that Roger is dead—so go before you see anything.”

Heather dropped hand over hand down a fire access ladder and plunged down a folding fire escape onto the South Lawn. Gunfire was rising to a crescendo inside; Shaunsen’s forces were probably rushing the last few Secret Service holdouts and getting ready to storm the Third Floor. When I last saw Roger Pendano, she reminded herself, preparing to be a good witness, he was alive and totally sane.

As Heather burst through the open, unguarded gate, she still heard a few gunshots behind her, but she put all her effort into the race along the Mall toward the Capitol. On morning runs, she’d sometimes gone this way. This would be one great time for a personal best. She ran.

^{ABOUT TEN MINUTES LATER. THE WHITE HOUSE. WASHINGTON. DC. 11:26 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. NOVEMBER 6.}

The only sound was Pendano’s labored breathing, and Graham Weisbrod saying, “Easy, easy, easy,” as he sat on the floor, cross-legged, holding his old student’s head in his hands. Scott Jevons cut Pendano’s shirt and pants away, finding the small wound in the front and the big one in the back, trying to find a way to stop the terrible flow of blood.

“Prof?”

“Yes, Roger.”

“I don’t feel good.”

“You’re hurt. We’re taking care of you.”

“It hurts.” Pendano’s body went limp.

The old professor and the young Secret Service agent were still sitting silently with the dead man when a voice from downstairs proclaimed, “This is Major Block, commanding the National Unity Guard. Surrender the former president or—”

“He’s dead,” Graham said loudly. “One of those rounds you were firing up through the floor got him. We won’t shoot if you come up.”

The National Unity Guard did not look military or even at all professional, to Graham’s eye, but there were certainly a lot of them; probably Shaunsen had promised them all good pay and fast promotions. Probably hired more of them from the crowd they swept up during the riots—that would be Shaunsen, all over.

After a while, Shaunsen came in, squeezing through his guards, with several young aides in tow. The Acting President looked hard, once, at the body.

Then he told the NUG behind him, “Get the Chief Justice over here, right now. And Kowalski, too. And a doctor to confirm the death.”

Weisbrod said, “Sir, this is a crime scene. We don’t even know officially who fired the shot, or on whose orders, or—”

“That’ll be enough, Weisbrod. I’m going to fire you right after the swearing-in. Meanwhile, you might as well come along and be in your last Cabinet picture. Make any trouble, though, and you’re going straight to jail.”

They hauled Weisbrod to his feet. His shoes, socks, and trouser legs were soaked with the dead president’s blood, and he could still feel the warmth of Roger Pendano’s head where he had cradled it on his thigh.

Shaunsen was bellowing orders to go get the Chief Justice, go get the Speaker, wasn’t there a lawyer in the house who could swear him in, or did it have to be a judge? No matter, get him a damn judge this minute.

Weisbrod let them cuff him and hustle him awkwardly down the stairs and into a chair in the Secret Service break room, with a dozen or so captured Secret Service. They weren’t allowed to talk. He lost himself in trying to trace the patterns in the carpet.

He heard a great deal of running and whispering in the corridors, and occasional shouting, but he didn’t bother to sort out any words. Eventually six NUGs came in and let the Secret Service and Weisbrod have some water, and uncuffed each in turn long enough to go to the bathroom; the light from the windows suggested it was late afternoon, and his growling stomach agreed. This is probably not the time to ask for a sandwich, all the same. Weisbrod thought about how many reasons Shaunsen might have to keep him alive and came up with zero. Probably they’ll wait till dark, but maybe not even that long.

^{ABOUT THREE HOURS LATER. THE WHITE HOUSE. WASHINGTON. DC. 4:47 P.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. NOVEMBER 6.}

Weisbrod started awake. He had no idea how he had fallen asleep. The NUG who had kicked his leg to wake him also gave him a drink and uncuffed him to piss, then recuffed him and led him down the hall and into the Oval Office. The Secretaries of State, Defense, and Treasury were bunched together in the corner, all looking embarrassed. The Attorney General stood apart from the others not meeting anyone’s eye. Chief Justice Lopez was quarreling loudly with three presidential aides, and it wasn’t clear whether she was a guest or a prisoner, but it was very clear that she thought she had been tricked into being there. There were more National Unity Guards than he could easily count.

Shaunsen looked around the room with a satisfied smile. “Now,” he said, “first of all, let’s establish that the President of the United States is dead. Dr. Brunner?”

The woman who stepped forward was small and square-built, with white hair and deep lines on her face. She shrugged as she read a statement out loud that she had examined the body, determined that it was Roger Pendano, and determined that he was indeed dead, the cause of death being a gunshot wound through the lower abdomen which had, among other things, torn the abdominal aorta, leading to an uncontrollable hemorrhage and death from loss of blood.

“Good,” Shaunsen said, “Now according to Amendment Twenty-five, U.S. Constitution, as well as Article II, and the Succession Act of 1947—”

“Everybody down.”

Graham knew instantly by the authority in the voice. Handcuffed, all he could do was fall over on his side. He caught a glimpse of a man leaping over him. The White House echoed with gunfire and low whumps and thuds that Weisbrod assumed must be some other weapon; from Weisbrod’s perspective, the Oval Office filled up with the boots and camo pant legs of a swarm of soldiers.

Whatever was going on in the rest of the White House, it sounded like it was happening pretty fast. The National Unity Guard were mostly street-kid activists and Democratic Party organizers deputized and given guns, probably their most seasoned fighters were some old gangbangers. It took more than a hundred of them to overrun about twenty Secret Service, Weisbrod calculated, and they had surprise and the Acting President on their side. They’re no match for these professionals—wonder where we got them?

“Your attention please,” a voice said. Everyone turned and stared at Speaker Kowalski, who stood in the doorway with Will Norcross. As Kowalski and Norcross came in, Heather O’Grainne popped out to flank them on one side and Cameron Nguyen-Peters on the other.

“As of 3:38 P.M. today,” Kowalski said, “Acting President Peter Shaunsen is under impeachment by a unanimous vote of the House of Representatives. I have a copy of the bill of impeachment with me to present to Chief Justice Lopez. And since both law and the Constitution prohibit anyone under impeachment from succeeding to the office of the President, he is not and cannot be the President.”

Will Norcross looked more like a confused junior clerk than ever; his voice was soft but firm. “Furthermore, as of 4:12 P.M. this afternoon, I have been elected President Pro Tempore of the Senate, and at the request and direction of the NCCC, acting under Directive 51 to locate and emplace the succeeding president of the United States—”

“If I have to,” Shaunsen said, “I will tie the whole government in knots for the next hundred years. I was not under impeachment at the time of the President’s death, I was still Acting President and had not resigned my position as Senate President Pro Tempore—”

Lopez cleared her throat. Her expression was surprisingly gentle but left no room for questioning, like a mother saying absolutely not to a recalcitrant child. “If I have anything to do with it, every case you bring will be dismissed out of hand and at once. As for grounds, you may refer to such doctrines as paramount national survival and the phrases ‘If the President is suspected’ to be found in Madison’s notes on impeachment. Less officially, the game is over.”

In ten minutes, Norcross was sworn in, and Heather had had the distinct pleasure of being the arresting officer for a former president (or acting president, at least). Shaunsen, demanding to speak to “the unbiased national media,” was taken to an FBI holding area; they uncuffed Graham and found him a chair, a cup of hot coffee, and a sandwich in a kitchen alcove. “Never mind feeding me,” he said to Heather and Cameron. “I can’t eat right now anyway. That was a photo finish. Where’d you get the troops from, and how’d you get them here so fast?”

“It’s the Old Guard,” Cameron said. “First Battalion, Third Infantry Regiment. The same outfit President Washington would have called for if he’d had a riot or a coup attempt to cope with. The battalion has a company at Fort McNair and the rest at Fort Myer. As soon as you and Heather started for the White House—since nowadays that’s a two-hour trip—I had our signalers sending to the semaphore station on top of the Pentagon, and they relayed to both McNair and Myer. Just a precaution at that point, because I thought we might need them, and it takes a while to start four companies of infantry moving, and even longer for them to walk as far as they did today.

“Meanwhile, like every really paranoid or crazed president we’ve had since World War II, Shaunsen had the White House bugged everywhere, as much as he could with the nanoswarm and biotes eating the bugs. Lenny had brought in some talent to hack the White House listening system, so we knew when you went in to see Pendano, and we heard Scott’s call to the Secret Service, and this guy Block, the National Unity Goon in Chief, yelling ‘Plan J now!’”

“What’s Plan J?” Heather asked.

“The National Unity Guard code message for ‘kill or capture all the Secret Service you see, and then go upstairs and kill President Pendano.’”

Heather shuddered. “That’s why the Secret Service got clobbered—they walked out into the halls to secure them and probably most of their deaths were in the first half minute, and by then they were down to a few guys trapped in rooms.”

“Surprise wins a lot of things,” Cameron said. “It did for us too. The National Unity Guard didn’t set much of a watch. I think they were all busy figuring out which ones of them would be getting which patronage plums for having been such good little thugs. We pretty much just walked openly to our assembly point on the GWU campus, put the intel we had together, sent a runner over to Congress, and we were ready to go as soon as Kowalski and Norcross were ready. All standard Army doctrine: pre-position overwhelming force and grab the whole show all at once.”

“So we have a functioning president again. Is it bone stupid or what that Kowalski couldn’t have been the president all along?”

Cam shrugged. “The Constitution was intended to be hard to change—and we’ve still done things as stupid as Prohibition. When it only rains every hundred years, it’s a miracle that any hole in the roof ever gets fixed. There’s at least twenty little bombs waiting to go off buried in our Constitution, and if I ran Congress, I’d appoint the equivalent of a bylaws committee, put through a Cleanup Amendment, and stump the states for it like a madman. But that’s my weird perspective; it’s my job to worry about all those little Constitutional bombs, and it’s the nature of things that they hardly ever go off. But since you asked, that’s what I’d do if it were up to me.”

“If anything more goes wrong,” Weisbrod pointed out, “it might be up to you.”

Cameron grimaced. “Don’t even speak of it. The NCCC office has just been as important as it ever needs to be, and Directive 51 is now safely back in the attic of history. They can dust it off sometime after 2200, if they’re too stupid to fix the Constitution before then.”

Graham nodded. “This is like watching the magician show you the trick bottom and saw slot in the box. I take it there was no problem explaining the matter to Kowalski.”

“In that briefcase he was actually carrying two sets of papers—one for if Pendano was alive and the other for if Pendano was dead. We had a runner ready to go back to the Senate; they were sitting there waiting to vote for cloture, and then convict Shaunsen without debate. We had him. It looked scary but nobody was getting sawed in half.”

Graham Weisbrod cupped his hands around his coffee and savored the warmth, the smell, and the last wonderful sips. “Nobody vital, you mean. You’d have gotten Norcross in and Shaunsen out, somehow, pretty soon. But speaking as the guy in the box… well, I still think that was a little close.”

^{ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. THE CAPITOL STREET BRIDGE. WASHINGTON. DC. 6:30 P.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. NOVEMBER 6.}

Alpha Company was walking back to McNair that evening, which would be most of the way back to St. Elizabeth’s, so Heather, Graham, and Cameron traveled with them. At the Capitol Street bridge, five men volunteered to escort them the rest of the way.

On the bridge, looking out into the dark city with just a few flaring lights here and there, and the many campfires in the distance, Heather asked, “Graham, did you really think they’d kill you? I mean, I know they killed Roger Pendano, but that was a stray round—”

“Well. Um, well. Uh, for the last few days I’ve been thinking a lot about early Imperial Rome. Isn’t that just like an old prof? But I have been. Just consider this: If you figure Roger Pendano was effectively President again as soon as he signed that note for you to take to Kowalski, then so far, today, we’ve had four presidents—Shaunsen, Pendano, Shaunsen again, and now Norcross.”

“That’s pretty Roman,” Cam agreed.

“Well,” Weisbrod said, “what used to happen to the people close to the emperors, during the power struggles?”

Cameron said, “Hunh. Yes, I see your point. And look right here and now. In the capital city that supposedly governs the continent, three of the key powers behind the throne—who just put the fourth leader of the day on the throne, I like that touch, Graham—can’t walk home at night without an escort of armed men.”

“Interesting,” Graham said. “I had that Roman thought, the first time I can remember having it, right here on this bridge. And look around you. Doesn’t it look like the Dark Ages?”

The wind picked up, and the handful of little flames in the darkness all danced and bobbed. They were glad to get off the bridge, and back to St. Elizabeth’s, but all of them lay awake that night.

^{THE NEXT DAY. WASHINGTON. DC. (DRET/ST. ELIZABETH’S.) 11:00 A.M. EST. THURSDAY. NOVEMBER 7.}

Norcross had set the meeting for 11:00 A.M. and specifically ordered them all not to schedule anything before it. He’d said he’d make sure civilization didn’t fall apart while they caught up on sleep. It seemed like a very unfortunate phrasing.

Norcross arrived at St. Elizabeth’s in a well-scrubbed biohazard Hummer, not a limo, and in a suit without a tie, “like a guy who is here to work,” Heather commented to Lenny.

The room was buzzing; when he smiled at them and said, “Thank you all for being here,” people applauded reflexively.

“Here’s my first news for you all. I’ve spent a couple of hours reviewing this operation. Plainly you’re the key to everything we’re doing. I know I said some ambiguous things about the Department of the Future on the campaign trail, but honestly, I can’t see any reason to break up a winning team at this point. By the same token, Homeland Security’s task force here has done exceptional work, and the many liaisons from other Federal departments have as well. So first off, good job, and I want you to keep doing what you’re doing.

“But there’s one big change I do have to make. I have become uncomfortably aware that there is a real possibility of a new and different kind of nuclear weapon, one we probably could not have detected even before Daybreak, which we are completely powerless to detect now, and which might be pre-emplaced anywhere the enemy could reach—the pure fusion bomb. Of course, if they do have pure fusion bombs, Washington would be Daybreak’s first and foremost likely target, and I can only guess why they have not yet hit us with it.

“Therefore, I am scattering all critical Federal operations away from Washington, to secure areas where it is less likely that there are pre-emplaced nuclear weapons, and where there are enough local resources to support the relocated Federal offices. All of that is bureaucratese for everybody’s going to military bases in the boondocks.

“I’m ordering you to move immediately—and by immediately, I mean the people who’ve been bunking here or can gather up their families fast enough will move this afternoon—to Fort Benning, Georgia. For those of you who don’t know, because the people at Benning were on their toes and worked ceaselessly, they’ve managed to keep a few transport planes running. Right now ground crews are burning scrapwood on the runways at Reagan National, and following up with caustic soda, and a boiling-water rinse; hopefully it will be as biote-free as they can make it just at the time the planes land, turn around, pick all of you up, and take off again—that fast, if we can do it, to minimize exposure time on the ground.

“I want all of you in a place that is unlikely to be destroyed; we can’t lose one of our most useful nerve centers. And the odds of our enemy—if there is one—having sneaked a weapon onto the home base of several of our elite units is much smaller than their chances of having concealed one in an open civilian city like Washington.”

He waited out the chaotic upsurge of chatter.

“Make sure you take every scrap of paper with anything important on it, and all your paper books and maps and so on. Those communication gadgets you’ve jury-rigged too, of course.

“Priority for personnel is this: First regular Federal personnel without families in the area. Then the volunteer assistants, who’ve been doing such great work here, the ones without local family first. Then families of Federal personnel from the area; then families of assistants from the area. Everyone boards at Reagan National in five hours, at four thirty. We expect most of you to walk so that the biohazard-capable vehicles can be used to move books and papers.”

“Sir?” Graham Weisbrod asked.

“Dr. Weisbrod. I don’t know if I told you officially that I de-fired you this morning, but if you’re asking, then, yes, I want you to go on this.”

“That wasn’t my question, sir. I was just going to ask why we’re not relocating the whole Federal government to secure bases. I can understand why you might send us in the first wave, but it doesn’t sound like you’re going to move yourself.”

“Excellent question.” Norcross sat down on the desk behind him and looked around. “This is an issue on which I’ve overridden many of my advisors. Here’s why I’m staying put, and so is Congress, at least for the foreseeable future.

“One, we need to have plenty of people near one of our most precious resources—the paper archive of the Library of Congress. We’ve got no way to move it before next spring at the earliest, it’s essential that we not lose all that knowledge, and it’s essential that we don’t just preserve it but use it. You realize that somewhere in there, on paper, is how to make pretty much every gadget and chemical that civilization needs? Including the ones that can be biote-resistant and nanoswarm-resistant? I’ve already got a dozen guys on their way here from JPL who will be sifting through early rocketry material, because we’ll need to be able to get things into orbit again sometime in the next few years; my science advisor tells me that it will be a lot easier to harden tube electronics against nanoswarm, and there are literally miles of shelves about tube electronics in there.

“Aside from that, you realize we could potentially have thousands of books about all of the useful arts that we can reprint and distribute? How to navigate by the stars, how they used to survey for rail lines and canals before lasers and computers, all sorts of skills we’ll need for the next century, because, ladies and gentlemen, if nobody’s told you yet or you haven’t figured it out, undoing Daybreak will be a work of generations. Knowledge is power, and that power is here, and while it is, we need to be here.

“Then there’s the psychological side. Much as I’ve always criticized relying on Washington to solve our problems, the fact is, when things get really bad, we do. It should not look like the Federal government is running away.

“And the risks may be smaller than they appear. Pure fusion bombs require fast computers and high-powered lasers. Maybe the reason no bombs went off in Washington is that the nanoswarm ate them.

“For all those reasons, I’m willing to take the chance, and take my stand right here. You might say I’m betting my life on it.

“And no, you are not going to argue with me about this one today. You can argue with me sometime next spring, when I will visit Fort Benning. Meanwhile, I have nine other stops to make today, and you need to get packing.” He nodded and smiled as they applauded, and was out the door before anyone could raise any further dissent.

“Well,” Lenny said, “at least we get one more airplane ride before the end of the world.”

^{ABOUT FIVE HOURS LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 4:30 P.M. EST. THURSDAY. NOVEMBER 7.}

Chris Manckiewicz saw the plane taking off from Reagan National late in the afternoon and trotted over to the White House. In Norcross’s open administration, all he had to do was ask: DRET had gone to Fort Benning.

That night, at dinner, after people read their stories aloud and everyone voted and argued about what should go in at what length, just at the dessert course when people tended to miss Rusty the most, he said, “All right, new business—big new business. Let me lay this out for you. Our new president has sent one Cabinet Secretary, the NCCC, and his most-consulted, most-used, working-on-the-most-important-stuff group of advisors to one of the best-functioning surviving military bases. Does anyone besides me see what this probably implies?”

“Favors for his strong constituency down South,” George Parwin said, in his usual tone of dismissal.

“Not the way I read it, George. Will Norcross is not purely venal and he’s smart enough to know he can’t afford to be perceived that way. So I don’t believe he’d severely inconvenience himself by moving his key advisors out of easy range just to rake in graft or pick up votes in elections that might never be held. I think what he’s doing is sending a continuity team outside the city.”

“You mean he thinks he might lose Washington?”

“Put it together. He’s sending one guy in the line of presidential succession, the guy whose job would be to make sure that the succession goes in an orderly way, and the team of advisors behind our present policy—to one of the best-defended sites on the continent.”

“You read a lot of stuff into things,” Hayley said. “My turn for dishes, and my vote is we don’t change anything we’re doing.” She stood and gathered plates.

Man, I miss Rusty. I’d’ve made her see sense and she’d’ve made them see it, I just know that. “Here’s what I was thinking. I think some of us should go down to that area to establish a new paper there. One linked to the Advertiser-Gazette, of course, and sharing stories, but I think they’ve just made Columbus, Georgia, an important city—”

“Where’s that?”

“It’s where Fort Benning is,” Chris said, trying not to think you idiot loudly enough to be heard, “and we need a bureau there, and that bureau should be self-supporting—meaning it puts out its own paper. So I was wondering if anyone wanted to volunteer?”

The stares at him were blank. “We’re barely weeks old, Chris,” Don Parmenter said. “We’re just getting people to read papers again. That just sounds to me like spreading ourselves too thin.”

Okay, Plan B. “What if I were to turn my interest in the paper over to you all—we can figure out who gets what shares—and keep maybe five percent, not enough for control or to matter much, and then go set up my own paper down in Georgia? With some kind of guarantee that you’d pay me for any stories I sent you, that you used, and I could buy content from you? ”

“I think you’re re-inventing the AP.”

“Well, it’s gone, and we’re a newspaper. Shortly to be two newspapers, with more to follow. We need an AP. It makes some sense, you know?”

“It does,” George conceded. “What worries me is that you’ll get a hundred miles south, realize how crazy you were, and come home and want your paper back.”

“Word of honor, I won’t do that. If I get a major attack of regret, I’m going to want to keep moving toward Georgia, anyway, because I’m sure not going to want to come back here and face you guys. You’re not the nice types who would give me my newspaper back and never say anything about it, you know?”

“You bet we’re not.”

That night’s production work was combined with a sort of farewell party. Chris had more to drink than he intended and gently fended off a couple of friendly offers from staffers who thought they might not mind a good-bye tumble with the ex-boss. He shook Parwin’s hand, and they drafted documents that everyone witnessed, and the next morning, for the first and only time, he was privileged to be the last one up; most of them were already out on assignment by the time he arose.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. REAGAN NATIONAL AIRPORT. WASHINGTON. DC. 4:30 P.M. EST. THURSDAY. NOVEMBER 7.}

Because she was with Lenny, Heather was able to hook a ride on a biohazard Hummer to Reagan National, and they had more time to go through the antiseptic scrubs and degaussing, and for Lenny and the technicians to figure out how they could kill any nanoswarm that might be on him without destroying internal electronics that kept him alive. Eventually Heather claimed a bench inside the transport, next to where Lenny tied down his wheelchair, and they napped and cuddled, holding hands and occasionally muttering “I love you,” or “I’m glad you’re here” at each other.

“Wake up, sleepyheads.”

Heather sat up; Arnie and Allie were there, with Graham, and Sherry, who was practically beaming. “Hey, you’re not getting rid of me that easily. You’re who I want to be when I grow up.”

“Oh, god, I don’t even know who I’m going to be when I grow up. So did they get all the volunteers and assistants onto the planes?”

“Yep,” Graham said. “And all the families for everyone. Tight squeeze, but we’re all making it. It’ll probably smell way too much like us by the time the flight is done, but we’ll all be there, and apparently the commanding general at Benning, Norm McIntyre, is some kind of old buddies with Cameron and going out of his way to make us welcome.”

Lenny stretched and yawned, then put his hand on Heather’s arm. “To tell you the truth, I’m probably a coward or something, but I’ll be just as glad to get away from DC. It does feel like living in a bull’s-eye, and I’m not convinced the serious rioting is over with.”

“Not to mention Benning has occasional electricity and better access to hot water,” Allie said. “And compared to DC, a lot less freezing our asses off this winter.”

They set their newly decontaminated gear down and packed in close, making room for the many other little knots and balls of coworkers, families, and whatever other ways people had assorted themselves for the trip.

Flying through the early night, they all took turns at looking out the window to see America by night, from the air, with only candle, bonfire, and lamp light. Probably fewer than a thousand people had ever seen such a thing; and very likely, not many more would, perhaps ever.