The Last President

^{THE NEXT DAY. ATHENS, TNG DISTRICT. 7:20 AM EASTERN TIME. SATURDAY, MAY 9, 2026.}

“We bow our heads around here, when we talk to God,” an old man in a ministerial robe said to Jenny.

She ignored him, keeping her head upright and her eyes open. Her father was down front, repeating, “We just want to begin with a little prayer here to kind of unify things, so if you’d all bow your heads…”

“Bow your head for God,” the old man said again.

Jenny turned to him. “God is not asking me to, you are. And because people like you presume to speak for God, I don’t feel safe closing my eyes and looking down, because I can’t trust you. I will talk to God my way; you can do what you like.”

She must have spoken louder than she intended, because she saw her father look up at her, see who was standing next to her, and give a tiny but stern shake of his head. The old minister moved sideways as if he had received an electric shock, and walked down the aisle to join the extremist caucus that sat just right of the aisle. Reverend Whilmire’s lip twitched slightly, as if the incident had amused him, but all he said was, “Let us pray.”

It was a rambling, complicated prayer that verged on being a full-fledged lesson, with many citations in the form of “As you clearly told us in the verse of your word found in the book of…” Jenny smiled to herself. Most of the time when she was growing up, her father had complained about that format for prayers, “as if God hadn’t read the Bible very well and needed footnotes, or like he was the Holy Tax Auditor and you were trying to argue the rules with him.” Apparently Reverend Whilmire had come to the realization that whatever God might like, his followers wanted this.

When the prayer wound down through the last complex footnote and faded out in a burst of HOLYS, ETERNALS, DIVINES, and THEE-THOU-THY-THINES, the Reverend Whilmire announced, “I would now like to present my own daughter, Jenny Whilmire Grayson, who has recently returned from the expedition into the Lost Quarter, for her full report on the tragic situation there.”

Jenny walked down the aisle wondering how many of those billowing black robes concealed pistols. Probably they wouldn’t do anything that overt. At least not right in front of Daddy. Probably.

She couldn’t help noting, when she glanced toward the too-small population of uniforms on the other side of the room, that their holsters were empty. Funny nobody ever mentioned such a useful rule in political science class: in a revolutionary situation, the side of the legislature that has to check weapons at the door is losing.

This was only supposed to be a report and a discussion, but she wasn’t sure how soon that might change. She had heard distant shooting on her way here. It seemed as if in every block, some building had a cross, a fish, a star-stripe pattern, or “1789!” painted on its burned and blackened walls. Jardin had told her, unofficially, that there were anywhere from five to ten politics-connected deaths in Athens per day. A few officers had declined to be part of the Army delegation on the Board because they were afraid of being helplessly disarmed and surrounded by so many National Church people.

She did her best to tell the story absolutely straight, not minimizing the disaster, but also pointing out that the advantages were still mostly with the United States. “In short, there is little hope of destroying tribal power in the Lost Quarter, particularly the Castle Earthstone version, at least not for a year or two, unless they very badly overextend or make other big mistakes, and so far Lord Robert has not been making many mistakes. There is a fairly high chance of another defeat at Pale Bluff, and both symbolically and logistically, that’s much worse. The land routes west are looted and burned out, and the tribes depend on looting to survive, so they’ll almost certainly go down the Wabash and the Ohio for a drive into the middle of the country, probably a mass raid of opportunity, and because Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and Arkansas are lined up with the Temporary National Government, that will hit our particular government and people very hard. They can hurt us, very badly, and we need to fight them wherever we can, but they still take many more deaths than we do in every encounter, and in the long run they don’t do anything to rebuild their strength.”

“Till now.”

“Yes, Colonel Streen, you’re right. Till now. Lord Robert’s heresy is in some ways more threatening, because he’s not trying to exterminate the human race, so he takes some care of his forces. But in other ways, honestly, he’s a plain old conquering tyrant, and he’s not very well armed, as long as no one supplies him, and there’s nobody behind him—he doesn’t have an assistant or a lieutenant worth talking about. When he does make a mistake he won’t have much to recover with; he has an army and a territory that he has to keep together, so there’s something for our armed forces to fight; and anyway, he might be killed in battle or the RRC might arrange something, and that will be the end of that menace. So for the moment Lord Robert’s True Daybreak might get farther and win more battles than, what would you call it? Daybreak 1.0? but you have to keep in mind he’s much more vulnerable too. His castle can be taken and torn down, his army can be defeated and broken instead of just scattering into the woods to fight again, they have crops we can burn and kids they’ll cut a deal to save.”

One of the reverends growled, “No deals with the Antichrist.”

“I think it would be better to just knock him flat if we can, rather than cut a deal with him—but I don’t think he’s the Antichrist, either. And if we can’t beat him right this minute, better to get a deal and then thrash him later. That’s what I think.” She looked around the room and saw some heads nodding, some arms folded, on both sides of the political divide.

“I’m going to take a moment to mention I’m proud of my daughter,” Reverend Whilmire said. Thanks, Daddy, that felt like a pat on the head. “I suggest we take a few minutes’ break to caucus and consider our options.”

In a large, comfortable room that had probably once been some athletic official’s office, he said, “I am proud of you, you know, and I do admire you. Your role is unBiblical but you are playing it so well.”

“My role is what it needs to be,” she said, “and I believe I already made it clear that I’m no longer giving you a vote about it.”

“You did. Since you won’t take my advice, though, I thought you might be willing to take my offer. The First National Church has adherents in places other than the Christian States of America, and we must never forget that the eventual goal is to have all the old states rejoin under a fully Christianized Constitution. We needed the first President under the Restored Republic to be someone who would work toward that goal, and we still do. And if the arrangements are coming unraveled, then we need the right first president for the CSA even more urgently. And so, even though you and I have some very deep disagreements theologically, it seems to me that with what you have shown you can do—”

“Daddy, are you suggesting you want to run me for president? Has it occurred to you that it’s eight years till I’m eligible under the Constitution?”

“The Constitution was made to serve America, not vice versa. The country needs a popular, effective Christian president—”

“And a woman president? Wouldn’t that be an unBiblical role?”

“It would. But these things can be changed over time—”

“Not if we’re in Tribulation, Daddy. Less than six years left to go before Jesus shuts the whole show down, if you’ve been telling people the truth.”

Whilmire gaped at her; his face was slack, but blood was rushing into it. “You are mocking me!”

“You don’t believe it yourself, do you? You know in your heart that you are going to have to come up with some reason, when it gets to be seven years from Daybreak day, why that wasn’t the Rapture, and it didn’t start the Tribulation.”

“My faith in the Bible is deep, complete, and not the issue here. You will not speak to your father that way.”

“Or are you just hoping it will work out? You want it to have been the Tribulation, you don’t want to be wrong, but at the same time you’re afraid you might be, even if you won’t admit it, so you keep making plans for what to do if the world doesn’t end like you expect, because—”

He shouted; no words, just a cry as if he’d been punched in the stomach, and stormed out.

^{THAT EVENING. PADUCAH, KENTUCKY. 5 PM CENTRAL TIME. SATURDAY, MAY 9, 2026.}

“But you have seen him,” General Phat said, mildly, looking up from the maps spread out on his desk. “Twice since you’ve been here, and we’ve tried to make sure that happens. You just saw him this afternoon when he came to pick up the volley guns. The blackout will last till midnight tomorrow, at longest, and then you can fly over to Pale Bluff. I’m sorry that we’ve needed you and your plane so badly, or if it’s made you feel like my chauffeur.”

Bambi nodded at the apology. “Look, I know you’ve only asked me to fly these missions because they were absolutely necessary, and I know I saw Quattro a couple hours ago. But there’s nothing left on our slate for tomorrow morning and blackout doesn’t start till noon, and there’s more than enough daylight for me to make Pale Bluff easily if I go right now, and the plane’s fueled up and ready. And yes, I just plain want to be with my husband tonight, and I’m not technically under your command, I’m an RRC op helping you out, and for that matter, that’s my airplane.”

Since arriving here on Friday, she had ferried General Phat to half a dozen locations where he had applied some good old-fashioned shaking and desk-pounding to get troops and materiel flowing toward Pale Bluff. She had watched him push the people of Green Bay, New State of Superior, to load a whole supply and troop train and get it rolling in less than a day, persuade a militia regiment from Kentucky into moving a week early, and bring together another locomotive and string of boxcars in the ruins of St. Louis.

If Lord Robert’s horde didn’t hit till Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning, as expected, the reinforcements and supplies would reach Pale Bluff first, and they would have a good chance to break Lord Robert’s horde before it got any farther. Till then, it was a race, and decades of leading troops had taught Phat that nothing caused motion like a demanding superior arriving in person. So they had flown, and flown, and flown again, the general scribbling fresh orders on his pad in the Stearman’s front cockpit, then jumping out the moment they were on the ground, running off to cajole or bellow, whichever seemed to work, coming back almost as soon as Bambi had the Stearman refueled and checked out for takeoff again.

Quattro’s last couple of days had been similar. After refitting the Gooney as a gunship/bomber, he had begun flying out children and the disabled from Pale Bluff, and flying in specialty weapons and crews from wherever they could be rounded up, together with experienced officers. With some coordinating and risky overuse of radio, it had been contrived that Quattro and Bambi had been on the ground in the same place for about forty minutes yesterday and twenty minutes today, spending most of the time clinging to each other.

“I know I’m being kind of ridiculous,” Bambi said. “And we’re not quite newlyweds, and sometimes we spend weeks apart, but… maybe it was just the way he reacted when he thought you were going to abandon Pale Bluff, the way he was when he decided to come out here, he just seemed like he’d made up his mind to die here—”

“I think I can understand your feelings.” Phat rested his hands flat on his desk and said, “And if you were going to apologize for Quattro’s impulsive actions—”

“I wasn’t.”

“Well, I was about to say you shouldn’t. He made us try, and it wasn’t till we started trying that we saw it might be possible to win. We need about three days of luck, and then maybe we can pin Lord Robert’s horde between a fortified Pale Bluff and a rebuilt Army of the Wabash and send him back to hell where he belongs.”

Bambi said, “But here’s what’s worrying me, and nobody seems to be answering me. We know that at Lafayette, Lord Robert pulled out a sizable force and let them sleep on the rafts most of the way, then had them run to the battlefield in a long burst and surprise us by getting there early. His forces started landing at St. Francisville this morning. I mean, Quattro flew over and shot up their advance guard, but he said the river was solid rafts and canoes for miles upstream. We had to call back the snag-cutting operation that was supposed to help block them because it was already too late.

“Nobody answers me when I ask, so what’s to stop Lord Robert from just doing it again? What if an advance guard of tribals run all the way and hit Pale Bluff before we’re ready?”

“It’s thirty-seven miles from St. Francisville, which is the nearest point.” General Phat stretched his thumb and index fingertips across the map, not quite reaching all the way between the towns. “That’s a marathon and a half, Bambi, they’re not going to run all that way and then assault the walls—”

“All right, so they’d have to do something more complicated.” She set her thumb on St. Francisville and her index finger a comfortable distance to the west. “They could, that’s the point. Maybe one team runs halfway, carrying supplies, and sets up a camp for the main force that were quick-marching empty-handed behind them.” She closed her thumb up to her index finger. “Then the main force walks in, eats, gets a night’s sleep, eats again, and…” She rotated her hand and brought her thumb down easily on Pale Bluff. “Tomorrow afternoon. It would still be way before we’re ready—and in the middle of the blackout, so our planes will be on the ground and our radios turned off.

“I mean, maybe I’m crazy, but then again Lord Robert is crazy. Being crazy is his major strength. If he can pull something like that off, they might hit Pale Bluff tomorrow afternoon, and if my husband is there for that, I want to be there with him.”

“That was what I thought you might be feeling,” General Phat said. “It’s really very natural and human, isn’t it?” He walked to the office door and opened it slightly. “Mister Lyle, would you come in here, please, as we discussed?” Then he looked Bambi squarely in the eye, with complete sincerity. “I am so sorry for this.”

The moment was so odd that she froze. Before she realized, two men had come through the door, and one was behind her. She started to struggle only as he grabbed her arms, but they knew what they were doing and she was handcuffed quickly.

General Phat sighed. “We are rapidly losing aircraft and pilots. Right now the most advanced working airplane on the continent is being risked in an exposed forward position, but I can’t do anything about that. But I can’t let the situation be worse. I can’t let you take your plane into Pale Bluff until things are less dangerous, Bambi. I thought you’d understand but obviously you don’t.”

“Don’t plan on having me or my plane ever again,” Bambi said.

“It’s a chance I’ll have to take. I can’t lose you—or the plane—right now. You’re under arrest till the EMP or till blackout ends, whichever comes first. At that time I’ll try to square it with you. But for the moment, I’m sure you’ve been through enough arrests from the other side to know that there’s nothing personal and these men don’t want to hurt you.”

^{ABOUT 11 HOURS LATER. PALE BLUFF, WABASH. 4:15 AM CENTRAL TIME. SUNDAY, MAY 10, 2026.}

Quattro Larsen had been awake since the rain had stopped, about half an hour ago, unable to sleep longer because he was so on edge. He always slept badly without Bambi. He had been hoping she’d make it back before blackout, but meanwhile, well, blackout wasn’t till noon, and the last rainclouds now billowed down beyond the eastern horizon, with a wind rising from the west. Pre-dawn twilight seemed brighter than usual, perhaps because there had been so little light the last few nights, perhaps due to the almost-half moon well up in the sky.

It was light, he was awake and dressed, and he really wanted to know what the hell was going on over east. He stuck his head into the ground crew quarters and said, softly, “Cup of coffee in it for anyone wants to be door gunner for me.”

Caleb made it to the door first by carrying his shoes rather than trying to put them on, and only vaguely stuffing his shirt into his pants. Quattro felt a slight pang at having lured the guy with coffee, but on the other hand, he didn’t seem to be complaining.

“Take a sec and put your shoes on, Caleb, the job is yours. Nice clear day, maybe a little windy.”

“I can’t sleep anyway. It’s getting near, isn’t it, sir?”

“We’re going to fly out and find out how near. I’m hoping they’re still sorting things out at St. Francisville, and if they are, we’ll just take a quick pass around and remind them that real Daybreakers are not supposed to like Mister Gun. At least not Mister Gun in the Gooney. And maybe lay some bombs where they’ll make people nervous and slow them down. If we find them on the way here, it’s the same program but more urgent, and we get back here as fast as we can.”

He’d been sleeping in the DC-3, partly as a guard, partly for a quick takeoff if he had to, mostly because it was home, and so his little oil stove, percolator, and coffee stash were there. As they huddled around the hot pot for a few minutes till the coffee was ready, he gave Caleb a lightning review on how the Gatling worked, how to clear it, and most importantly, “now, you leave that locked down, ’cause I’ll aim it with the plane and we don’t want you shooting holes in the plane or yourself on your first mission. You keep your seat belt on and your feet on the braces. Crank when I holler crank, stop when I holler stop, and yell ‘Jam!’ when it does, which it will. Then wait for me to yell that we’re level and clear before you try to unjam it. We are going out with a crew of two, and we are coming back with a crew of two, and if you fall out that door, I’m a pretty awesome pilot, but swinging around and catching you might be more than I want to try, ’kay? All right, now about the bombs—”

As he poured the coffee, Quattro explained the basic mechanics of lightly screwing together the three glass jars that formed the shape of the bomb: the big piece with fins, filled with turpentine, the nose piece filled with strong acid, and the little sealed vessel that went into the nose tip, with a blob of mercury in it. “Never tighten down hard, always remember it’s thin glass meant to break. Put them in the ready rack with the fins facing you. If one of them starts to sputter just toss it out the door. You hand load them one at a time into the bomb rack, tail toward you, so they roll down and come out pointed nose first. Never, never-ever, don’t load another bomb till the first one clears, and if you have to push a stuck one through, holler so I know, and wait till I take the plane up high and level it off, because you’ll have to kind of hang partway out the door and poke it with the mop handle that’s on the bracket there. The one rule about that is poke the fins, not the nose.”

Caleb’s eyes widened. “Uh, yeah.”

“I know it’s obvious but you’d be surprised how many obvious things people get wrong. And with bombs I don’t like surprises.”

Caleb clearly enjoyed the coffee, taking it with enough sugar and powdered milk to make it something of a meal in its own right, but he also seemed at least as eager as Quattro to get into the air. Probably the same damn silly romantic streak I’ve got. He’s gonna be able to tell people he was the door gunner for the Duke of California, I guess, and if there was any place much left to dine out, he’d be dining out on that. Next to that, what’s a hot cup of aristocratic privilege? “Now, let’s make sure you know how to strap in, since I won’t be able to help you with it when it’s time to rock and roll. But till I need a gunner, you might as well ride front seat. It’s mostly a reconnaissance flight, and two sets of eyes will see more.”

The takeoff was smooth, and they gained altitude in a wide swing to the west, staying high in hopes of seeing before they were seen. Quattro angled a little north to pick up the Little Wabash River, following it for a few miles till turning east along the bullet-straight county roads.

Mornings and evenings were good times to see detail, but the immense swarming camp that suddenly appeared below them would have been impossible to miss.

“Holy crap,” Caleb breathed.

“So right, dude. And we’re only—I’m gonna set it to circle and see if I can read a mile marker through the binocs—”

“No need, I’m from around here, man, that’s where County 13 takes a bend and becomes County 9. They’re only sixteen and a half miles from Pale Bluff. And look at all that smoke rising; they’re cooking already this morning.”

“Probably fixing a meal for the guys that are supposed to run in and kill us,” Quattro agreed. “All right, I’m going to circle once to get my bearings and see if I can figure out where the leaders are sleeping. You might as well go back and get ready on the bombs.”

They had circled twice when Caleb screwed the last fuse into the last nose, lowered the bomb rack out the door, and announced, “All ready!”

“All right, going in, put the first one on the bomb rack and don’t let him roll till I yell ‘now!’”

It was not a steep dive by any means, but it felt strange and Caleb clung to the locked-down bomb rack until, as the plane leveled off, zooming low over the tribal camp, Quattro shouted, “Now!”

Caleb let the first one roll; it was about as long as his torso, holding three gallons of turpentine besides its fuse. He turned, hugged the other, set it on the bomb rack, looked down to make sure it was clear, and saw the flash of the first bomb bursting below. He kept hugging, lifting, and letting them roll, as fast as he could, and shouted “fifteen!” as the last one went.

“Hold on!” Quattro put it into a climb; through the open door, Caleb could see that there were fires blazing up from a couple of tents, people running around, and arrows and rocks flying ineffectively into the air.

The plane leveled off as they drew away and higher. “Strap in.”

Caleb did, checked the Gatling, and waited to turn the crank. This time the enemy knew they were coming, and scattered before the stream of bullets that Quattro walked down one long aisle of tents and up another; twice, Caleb cleared jams, but for a Newberry Gatling, this thing really hadn’t worked badly at all. As they climbed up for another reconnaissance circle, Quattro said, “Well, that was pretty much just spite. They know we saw them and a few of them are hurt or dead, and some more had a bad scare. It won’t slow them up even five minutes, but at least they know we don’t like them.”

During the ten minutes or so it took to return to the airfield, Quattro dictated and Caleb scribbled. “The second I brake the props, run and wake up the ground crew and tell them to get out here; won’t need any more fuel but if I can get some reloading I might be able to get in a few more bomb-and-shoot runs before we’re in blackout. But don’t wait around for an answer; just wake’em up, get’em moving, and then run to HQ with that note. Tell them it’s extremely urgent, and from me, and that your orders are to only put it in the hands of Colonel Birdsall.”

They had been in the air such a short time that the linen tires had not begun their usual deflation; the plane touched down almost as well as it would have on the old rubber. Quattro taxied around to the arsenal end of the hangar, killed the engine, and yanked the prop brake. The props had barely thudded to a stop when Caleb jumped out and ran across the gravel toward ground crew quarters.

Quattro had shoved the ramp against the door and was rolling another load of bombs up when the ground crew rushed in to take over and begin loading; that gave him a moment to check his watch. Not quite 6 a.m. yet; it had already been a busy morning. Someone handed him a sandwich and a mug of chicory; he gulped it down without tasting while the crew ran through the checklist. By that time Asanté Collins, his regular gunner/bombardier, had scrambled there from the barracks, and they were ready to go again. “We’ll get that turnaround down to five minutes next time,” the chief assured him.

“Seventeen minutes from just waking up to ready to go isn’t too shabby as it is,” Quattro said, “but yeah, they’ll be running toward us for about four hours to come, and that’s nearly all before blackout, so we can fly against them all that time.”

Collins nodded. “Is it going to do much good? Bunch of guys running through a field, I can spray but I don’t know that I’ll get many hits.”

“Yeah, and it’s way too wet to get a prairie fire going in front of them, too, at least this morning. Mostly we just do what we can and hope to slow them down a little, but most of the effect will probably just be to scare them and make them lie down for a minute or two while we’re right overhead. I wish we could do more but I don’t see how.”

“Yeah, well, I think you’re right. At least we help them understand that they are not wanted, and it’s always possible we’ll hit a leader or something, if they have leaders now. I’m ready when you are, Your Dukeliness.”

Quattro laughed and switched hats back to his flying helmet. The two of them ran the checklist one more time, and took off.

When they heard the plane coming in, the tribals running at the front of the group scattered into the ditches beside the road and lay down; Quattro circled to strafe and bomb along the ditches. “Too wet to get a grass fire going,” Asanté shouted.

“You still got some ammo left?”

“About ten-fifteen percent reserve—”

“When I say use it, do it.”

As soon as Asanté was strapped in again, Quattro climbed steeply up and away, as if departing, and said, “Hold on tight, I’m going to come in out of the sun, fast and low, once I loop around.”

This worked somewhat better; Quattro flew virtually as if doing a touch-and-go parallel to the road, keeping his speed up but flying only about ten feet off the abandoned, grassy field. The road was raised a couple of feet, just enough for Asanté to be able to rake it chest high, and because the running tribals had not been ordered to take cover, and were bunched up like the main pack in a marathon, many more bullets hit bodies; when Quattro circled around one final time, they could see that there were dozens of people lying on the road.

But even as Quattro pointed the nose homeward, Asanté pointed out, “They’re just stepping right over their dead and wounded and coming right on,” and Quattro noted that they had been almost two miles closer than their night camp.

When they landed again, Pale Bluff was awake. Troops were moving through the streets and out into the orchards, toward their positions along and behind the outer walls. The reserves were mustering in the town park by the Civil War memorial. Civilians carried bags and boxes to their support stations. “They might not win but they won’t be unprepared,” Quattro said quietly.

“Ready now,” the ground chief said. “Four twenty-two. And we topped up your fuel and lye. We’ll get it under four next time.”

This time they flew very low and crossed the T on the enemy column, shooting up the avant garde (but most of them made it safely into the ditch), raking back along the road until they were out of ammunition, then bombing their way back up to the head.

This attack had no more effect than the previous one. The advancing Daybreakers had already flung the corpses into the ditch and were back at a run. Quattro made a low pass at full throttle, scaring them back into the ditch with the roar, but Asanté, looking back through the main door, saw them standing up as soon as the plane had passed.

As they descended toward the airfield, Quattro noted that the brush windrows on the east-side roads were growing quickly, and that damming the drainage ditches and opening the irrigation gates upstream was rapidly flooding the cornfields. “There’ll be some pretty effective sniping for the last few hundred yards,” he said.

“Has to be a lot, to make them care,” Asanté said. “Tell you two things right here, Your Dukeliness; one, I’m scared, more than I’ve ever been, and two, I’m glad my family’s not here with me.”

They flew sorties for the rest of the morning, and each time the distance to the oncoming Daybreakers was shorter. “Do you think we’re accomplishing anything?” Quattro asked.

“Man, worrying about stuff like that is a Ducal issue. Me, I work the gun, I load the bombs, and I figure I don’t like these guys and I don’t want them to think I do, and this definitely makes sure I get that across to them.” Asanté sighed. “Getting tired?”

“Yeah. You must be exhausted.”

“I can keep going as long as I have to.”

“Yeah. Well, up for another?”

This time, the Daybreakers were not even over the horizon, and since there was no other air traffic, Quattro just whipped the plane around in a steeply banked turn, dove to almost ground level, and headed straight up the road at full throttle. He had guessed right; the tribal horde was now between overflowing ditches, and some of them hesitated at the brink of the water for an instant too long; Asanté’s gun cut them down.

As they pulled up from the shooting run, over the thundering engines, Asanté shouted, “Quattro, I got an idea!”

“Good, ’cause I haven’t had one in a while!”

“All those guys further back with backpacks, gunpowder maybe?”

“Or just food or loot.”

Asanté climbed carefully forward and leaned in close so Quattro could hear him. “What if we bomb a bunch of big-pack-people between ditches? I mean, fly in a tight circle and keep dropping the bombs there? If it’s gunpowder they either burn or take it into the water. If it’s anything else, no big diff.”

“Worth a try. Let each one roll when I shout release!; if we’re going to try to put fifteen bombs on one small target, we’ll have to make fifteen passes, and we probably have to stay under a thousand feet to have any hope of hitting something we’re aiming at. I’m going to sort of cloverleaf or figure-eight it so we don’t become too good a target. Be ready in five; I’ll go looking for a backpack group.”

Quattro flew in a sort of meandering S along the two-mile long column of Daybreakers. Man, another place where we were stupid, way back, Arnie Yang was telling us to make poison gas. If I could have laid about a ton of that down on their camp and kept hosing them with it all morning, these guys would be about whipped by now. Sometimes it pisses Bambi or Heather off that James talks about how dumb it was to kill him, but James is damn well right. Or at least we should have listened to his advice. There’s—ah-hah. Below him, a couple hundred tribals were flinging themselves along the road, heavy packs reaching from their beltlines to a foot over their heads. Behind them about twice their number trotted; probably they spelled each other to keep moving at the same pace as the rest of the horde. Maybe those packs held the mattresses for Lord Robert’s sacred orgies, maybe looted jars of peanut butter, but this was worth a shot. “’Santé, how we doing?”

“Ready when you are.”

“All right, here we go.” He put the DC-3 into a shallow dive across the pack-bearers, and trying to visualize how long it took a bomb to drop, shouted “release” when he thought it should work.

This first shot went way over, landing and bursting into flames on the other side of the ditch without doing more than startling the runners, but to judge by the reaction, they had reason to fear flame; they bunched and huddled. Quattro threw the Gooney into a tight turn, almost standing on its wing, came in at another angle, and shouted “release!”

Undershot this time, but not by much; the bomb splashed into the ditch. Around again, and now they were clearly bunching up, trying to find some way to get away from the plane. He aimed, he visualized, he let things be, and said, “Release!”

This one burst among the packs, and the panic was immediate. Whatever was in them was flammable, if not explosive, and fire blazed up from the road below. Two more bombs created a panic and an apparent riot.

“Let’s try two more of those backpack bunches,” Quattro shouted. They flew farther down the line, and the results were identical; whether that was fuel, ammunition, sapper’s supplies, or whatever, the stuff in the square white backpacks was obviously a bad thing in a fire. As they turned away from the last bomb, Quattro felt some grim satisfaction; he wished he had learned earlier, but now he finally knew how to hurt them from the air.

Something thumped and Asanté shouted “Incoming!”

“Hold on!” Quattro threw the DC-3 hard to the left, righted it, and opened the throttle into as much climb as the old plane had with far less engine power than it was designed for. To his right, he saw broad-headed spears passing, trailing long pieces of wire; same gadget they’d killed Nancy Teirson with. He heard two clanking thuds from the rear. “Did those penetrate?”

“Nope!” Asanté took the seat next to him. “Sounded like someone throwing a brick against a garage door, but nothing came in.”

At first he thought they’d gotten clean away, but then he noticed that the rudder wasn’t responding. “Probably there’s a spear jammed in the rudder, or maybe they cut a control line. No big one, I can land this without it. But we’ll have to get the ground crew right on it and we might not get it fixed before we have to shut down for blackout.”

“Damn. You and me could end up mere ground-pounders.”

“You know it, dude.” Quattro glanced sideways at his gunner, who was grinning at him; he grinned back. “Actually that scared the piss out of me, you know.”

“Yeah. Well, they didn’t get us.”

On touchdown the loud bang-thump made them both jump, and the tail wheel felt draggy. Sure enough, when they climbed out, they found a spear butt wedged in the rudder, and the tail tire was a torn cloth bag around the wheel. “Thirty minutes,” the ground chief said. “Go get yourselves something to eat. Might be a chance for one more mission before blackout starts, or we might have to start grounding and shutdown as soon as it’s finished, but either way, we can do it, you’ve trained us more than well enough, and having you tired and impatient and pissed off and worried about your goddam baby here is not going to help a bit. Now go eat, breathe, maybe get a dump, we have work to do here.”

“You know,” Quattro said to Asanté as they gulped down bland, bean-laden chili that ordinarily he’d have thought a disgrace, “that guy was fixing lawnmowers and snowblowers three years ago. Now he’s as high tech as it gets.”

Asanté nodded. “It ain’t a very nice world anymore but it makes more sense.” He tore off a chunk of bread from the loaf between them, dipped it in the almost-chili, and gobbled hungrily from it. “At least I know how everything works. And I haven’t had to look for work. How’s that Duke job working out?”

“Better than I wanted it to,” Quattro admitted. Huddled over the little table in the corner of the improvised hangar, which had been a boarded-up church before its steeple was commandeered for a tower, they watched crew scurrying in and out, and let the food warm and hearten them. Part of his mind feared that he would look like the idle aristocrat eating while others did urgent work, but everyone here knew how they had spent their morning.

It was a quarter of twelve, almost an hour later, when the chief said, “You’d be good to go if we didn’t have to ground it right this minute, for blackout. We’ve got—”

A clatter of gunfire from the east.

They all turned.

Smoke was rising high into the sky from the blazing brush windrows that were supposed to bar the roads and force the enemy into the flooded fields; the gunfire grew in intensity, and half a dozen donkeys and mules towing Gatlings and volley guns appeared on the far end of the airfield, headed for the noise.

The road east ended in fire, and on each side it was surrounded by water. The soldiers on the low earthen wall were out of range of the tribals’ weapons, so a great deal of their time was spent merely watching closely. A group of a hundred or so tribals would pop out from behind the burning windrow and splash into the muddy, ruined cornfields, trying to charge at the wall; the soldiers would shoot them down. Another group would emerge; sometimes a group from each side of the windrow; sometimes as many as four groups at once.

The Gatlings and the volley guns arrived, and then the reserve troops who waited behind the wall, plus snipers who climbed into the apple trees, and every few minutes there would be another massacre in the muddy field, until it was a wide scattering of corpses on mud.

Messages went back and forth to Colonel Birdsall for an hour.

No, no trace had been seen of the one-shot muskets that had done so much damage at Lafayette.

No, where guards still patrolled the walls facing the unflooded land, there was no sign of a flanking maneuver.

No, it was not possible to see anything beyond the burning brush; 150 yards of dry deadwood, piled four yards high, was too big a fire to see what lay beyond it.

Yes, everyone was staying ready.

Through binoculars and spyglasses, some of the officers on the wall were able to observe that at the far end of the fire, there was occasional movement. Their best guess was that the tribals there were slowly dragging or knocking the burning brush into the overflowing ditches, perhaps advancing into the fire by throwing buckets of water ahead. It might take an hour or two for them to clear the fire; then they would have to come straight up the road, and the heavy weapons were already trained on it and waiting.

Birdsall himself came out to that stretch of wall. “We haven’t seen five percent of their force,” he said. “But from the steeples and the trees, we can see for miles all around. The nearest place they could hide a force that big would be on the other side of the bluff itself, three miles away, and at least on the map, I don’t see how they’d get there.” His officers all nodded. “This Lord Robert is smart; possibly much smarter than I am. There’s some reason he would keep launching these futile attacks, but it doesn’t seem like a diversion for a flanking attack, because I don’t see any way he can get at the flanks. And as for—”

Shouts from the watchers on the wall and in the trees.

When everyone looked, they saw that tribals had become visible, through the flames and smoke, beyond the burning windrow. So big and hot a fire could not have lasted in any case, but it was clear now that Daybreakers had simply attacked it with shovels, buckets, and sticks, putting it out, shoving burning matter to the side, and splashing water to cool the road. Snipers took shots at some of the clearing crew, but it was clear that in a few minutes, the road would be open again.

Birdsall looked around at his officers again. “What did this Lord Robert character want us to focus on instead of—”

Drums began to boom, and from each side of the dwindling fire, many hundreds of tribals swarmed across the field of corpses, led as always by spirit sticks, in long, thin lines. Gunfire rattled and banged from the wall and the trees, and the defenses were shrouded in their own black smoke; the Gatlings and volley guns swept the field, adding to the smoke and noise.

There were so many of the oncoming tribals that a few lucky ones almost reached the wall before two and three soldiers in a group would shoot them down.

Birdsall tried to see through the smoke; then he realized there was no longer a plume above the burning windrow, that the Daybreakers had at last cleared the road, and though he didn’t know what was coming, he suddenly knew what they had to do. “Reload!” he shouted. “All weapons! Now! Reload now!”

A dark shape moved through the blue-black smoke of that immense volley, on the road, and a few soldiers shot at it; it was big, perhaps the size of an old-style two-car garage, and rested on enormous spoked wheels, something from some strange museum piece. The shots screamed off it in a shower of sparks; it was armored with pieces of sheet metal on it every which way, several thicknesses of them—there must be fifty or more people pushing it—

Birdsall realized, “It’s a bomb! Shoot, shoot, we can’t let them push it here!”

The troops who had reloaded shot at whatever they could see or find; as the juggernaut rolled in toward them, with the pushers now actually running, some pushers went down clutching a shattered knee or ankle, or fell out of the pack where a lucky shot had found a way through the armor.

Behind the juggernaut came a sort of huge metal turtle; men running with corrugated metal sheets held out to the sides or over their heads, and something in between and under. Birdsall shouted for someone to take some shots at whatever that was, as well, but in the din of gunfire he couldn’t be heard, and most of the troops who could fire were concentrating on the onrushing bomb.

As it rolled up to the thick log gate that closed the road into town, Birdsall screamed, “Down! Take cover!” Most of the soldiers did; the explosion that knocked the log gate flat killed very few of them. They were deafened and stunned, but on their feet. There had been a carnage, but it was of the Daybreakers pushing the wheeled bomb; their remains stained the road red.

“Reload and fire on that next target!” Birdsall shouted, again, but he could not hear his own voice; when he touched his ear, he found blood running down. The metal turtle came on; when shots felled one shield carrier, someone else within grabbed the shield and closed the hole.

Birdsall shouted to them to shoot low, to try to get under the shielding metal, and he shot there himself, but the defenders had simply been overwhelmed, first by the suicide rush, then by the bomb cart, and now with this. Many were fumbling to reload, some were trying to clear jams, and most were deaf from the blast and blind from the smoke. So the turtle was almost at the gate when the metal sheets were thrown aside, and from beneath it, almost a hundred tribals rushed—each clutching a Newberry submachine gun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Get in.”

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

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

“Chocks out?”

“Chocks out.”

“Charge?”

“At charge.”

“Coupez!”

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

“Contact!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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