Daybreak Zero (12 page)

ABOUT THE SAME TIME. NEAR PINEHURST, IDAHO, ON US ROUTE 95. 8 PM PST. FRIDAY, JULY 18, 2025.

The sun had already set and the twilight was dimming rapidly; Helen Chelseasdaughter asked, “Will they have light enough to unload all the cargo and still take off again? I don’t want children to see technology.”

“Their last radio message was that they were delayed but plan to complete on schedule. I’m guessing—there.” He’d heard the sputtering, farting roar of the DC-3’s motors, running rough due to crappy biofuel and lye-spray getting through the air cleaners. “Here they come. If you don’t want the kids to see—”

“Children out of here, now!” Helen Chelseasdaughter shouted. Two young women urged a dozen children to come with them over the hill. One stubborn girl and two boys threw tantrums, insisting on seeing the airplane, and were dragged off.

Bambi said, “It’s close to dark. I’d like to take off as soon as the other plane is off the road. Would it be all right for me to taxi over there”—she pointed north of the gate—“out of his way but ready to go as soon as he lands and you see the ransom?”

The gray-haired tribal nodded. “Yes, I want all the machines gone as soon as possible.”

Bambi reached out and clasped Larry’s hand in a centurion handshake, babbling something meaningless about her gratitude. She squeeze-coded
d still w m in cabin
.

Larry thought,
I would like to know what that son of a bitch is doing—actually no; I’d rather just assume, and deal with it accordingly.

The engine thunder loudened and deepened. A brilliant, moving star rose above the hill to the south, then dipped below the horizon again; the Gooney was coming around for its approach.

Micah came back from spinning the prop on the Stearman. The biplane made a slow turn across the gravel before it taxied out the gate, Bambi waving from the cockpit. The plane headed north, down the hill, to turn around and be ready for takeoff as soon as the DC-3 was out of its way.

Michael Amandasson had still not emerged from his hut. “Typical,” a younger woman behind Larry muttered. “He won’t be done with the slave till it’s time to claim his share.”

Susan Marthasdaughter sent a runner for Michael. The tribals were all staring at the southern sky, at the eerie, blazing glow of an arc spotlight, the first electric light they had seen since November, reaching up into the sky from beyond the crest of the hill as the DC-3 touched down and coasted up.

Micah caught Larry’s eye and jerked a thumb toward the path where the runner had gone; Larry nodded. Micah vanished into the dark.

Ryan moved behind Susan Marthasdaughter; Larry stepped quietly to his left, closing distance with Helen Chelseasdaughter.

As the DC-3 crested the hill, the brilliant beam swooped from the purple sky and down US 95 onto Bambi’s bright yellow Stearman. She revved up and began her run up the road as the ninety-year-old airliner, painted in Quattro’s black and yellow personal colors, wheeled about through the gate.

Bambi roared up the road into her takeoff; the DC-3 in the parking lot thundered and rumbled. No one could hear anything else.

Inside his shirt, Mensche drew the razor-sharp commando knife. His left hand gently drew Helen Chelseasdaughter’s elbow down and backwards; as she turned to see what he was doing, his left hand grasped her hair and yanked her head back. His right hand lashed out with the knife in a rising forehand, opening her larynx, and then back through a carotid, cutting to the bone over the collarbone and down the sternum, slipping back upward through her diaphragm into her heart. She tumbled dead at his feet.

Mensche glimpsed people recoiling from where Ryan stood over Susan Marthasdaughter’s body. Mensche spun, slashed the young woman behind him across her shocked expression, and swept her feet. He drove an elbow into the face of the man beside her; under the space that opened, he jammed his blade deep into the man’s guts, ripping it free as he shoved the tribal backward into the people behind him.

The girl on the ground had her mouth open, screaming, and Mensche stamped on her neck as he turned to slash again, cutting at reaching hands, pivoting, kicking, and slashing to get working room.

Against the plane’s lights, Mensche’s targets were silhouettes. He struck again and again, flowing from attack to attack in all directions, trying to start and spread panic, whirling to strike blindly, knowing everyone within his reach was an enemy. The fingers of his empty hand formed a tiger claw; wherever it caught, he struck next to it with the knife, kicking and stamping as he turned to clear a big space around himself. His stiff fingers at eye and throat level, and his blade at gut and groin level, swung around with his torso, hurting whoever they found into screams.

A flare burst. Larry dove prone. The slow heavy thudding of a black-powder Gatling gun drowned out even the engines. Some rounds whizzed over his head; others hit the crowd with wet smacks and thuds.

The engines cut and the Gatling died away in an irregular spasm of bangs.

“You are the prisoners of the President’s Own Rangers. Lie on the ground, face down, extend your arms in front of you. Don’t move.”

Larry complied; a few shots indicated that some Blue Morning People hadn’t been quick enough. “Now,” the voice said, “Agent Larry Mensche, please stand up.” Larry stood up carefully; the beam of a reflector lantern swept across his face. “Glad you’re okay, Larry,” Quattro Larsen said. “Pick your people out of this.”

“Ryan, stand up,” Mensche said, “and Micah, stay down.” The lantern beam picked out Ryan, and Mensche said, “You’d better come over here and join me. Micah, stand up if you’re out there.”

From the surrounding dark, Micah said, “Still back here. I’m going to walk forward real slow, okay?” He emerged into the glare. All around them, the wounded sobbed and gasped; the Rangers sorted them out in a quick, brutal triage—the dead would be left where they were, for some other tribe to find; the wounded would be asked, once, if they wanted rehabilitation, and killed on the spot if they said no; those able to walk would carry those who could not in a forced march to Ontario, to be sorted into “rehabilitation” and “execution” groups.

“Sir? What do we do if we ask and they spaz attack on us?”

“According to the RRC
Field Guide
, that’s a yes, but tie them up tight,” the captain said. “And if they say yes, and then start shouting Daybreaker shit, shoot’em.”

“Seems pretty rough,” Ryan said.

Larry’s shrug was a bare twitch of the shoulder. “Orders from Pueblo. Letting the tribes know we mean business, and this Daybreaker shit is not going to be tolerated.”

“What do they do in rehab?”

“I don’t know, but I hope it hurts. Anyway, we’ve got one prisoner to liberate,” Mensche said. “Let’s go get her. Also, Quattro, let the Rangers know there are some young kids in a cabin over that way.”

On the path, they passed the runner that Micah had killed. “I got her coming back,” Micah said, “she just ran neck first onto my knife.”

He was trembling, Mensche realized, and said, “Was she the first person you ever killed?”

“Yeah.” The young man croaked it out.

“She’d have starved or died of disease before spring; it’s gonna be way worse for the tribals this winter.”

“Yeah, but I still killed her.”

“Yeah,” Mensche said. “I’d never even fired my weapon at a human being, before Daybreak. Like Stalin said, one is murder, and there’s some number where it’s just a statistic.”

The cabin door stood open; the reflector lamp’s flickering yellow-orange beam revealed Michael Amandasson, hanged naked in a bedsheet from a rafter. His leg was still warm to the touch, his ankle supple, blood was only beginning to pool in his feet;
she must have done it
after
the runner told them the plane was coming in—

Mensche borrowed the lantern and swept the beam around the cabin, then out on the narrow, railed porch. Off one end, he found a bare footprint in the mud; five feet farther on was a black patch of turned-over leaf mold. Not far beyond that, on the narrow trail leading uphill out of the camp, a branch was freshly broken on a fir.

“She’s my daughter,” he said. “I think I’m entitled to ask her, Debbie, what the fuck? You know?”

Quattro Larsen said, “Yeah, I understand.” He clasped his friend’s hand and squeeze-coded
WTF?

Larry’s hand moved to Quattro’s arm as he squeeze-coded:

no idea
d marked trail on purpose
must want me 2 follow
tell h 2 impt not 2 follow

Larry sighed, not entirely acting, and added aloud, “This might take a few weeks, I imagine.”

“You have to do what you have to do,” Quattro said. “Thanks for rescuing Bambi, and if you need a ride, the Gooney Express always has a free seat for an old buddy.”

“ ’Preciate it. Give my regards and apologies to Heather.”

20 MINUTES LATER. BETWEEN US ROUTE 95 AND HELLS CANYON NATIONAL PARK, IN IDAHO. 8:38 PM PST. FRIDAY, JULY 18, 2025.

Mensche had hunted and photographed wildlife as his main hobbies for decades before Daybreak, had good night vision, and had a career FBI agent’s knack for following people; he could have followed a trail marked half as prominently. In a saddle of the ridge, Debbie had laid a seven-foot arrow in dead sticks on an old recreation trail.

He laughed out loud. “Deb, I’m the one that taught
you
woodcraft.”

Just behind him, she said, “Yeah, but I’m in a silly mood.”

He turned and hugged her. They could still hear occasional gunshots, far behind them. She asked, “Are the Rangers shooting all of them?”

“Just the ones who refuse rehab, or try to escape.”

“You smell like blood.”

“It’s from Helen what’s-her-face.”

“Good, Dad. I’m glad. She had it coming if any of them did. But actually I’m sorry they aren’t just shooting them all. There’s not going to be any rehab that works. There’s a place up the trail where we can sit if you want.”

“Sure.”

At the base of a low rock cliff, she guided him to a bench by one of the old raised metal firebox grills. He said, “There’s something you want me to do or see.”

“There is,” she said. “It’s important and I realized this was the way to do it.”

“Good enough,” he said, “I’m sure you’re right.”

“You’re not my same old dad.”

“It’s not your same old world.”

“Yeah.” She reached out and threaded her hand into the crook of his elbow, the way she had when she’d been little and he’d been her hero. He just waited.
Being here, in the starlight, with just Debbie, is about as good as life has been in a long time.

“So the runner came to let Michael know the plane was landing. I knew
you
wouldn’t be in an outfit that paid ransoms, and besides Bambi had squeeze-coded me that you were gonna beat the shit out of the Blue Morning People. So at first I thought,
I want a special moment here for just Michael and me.
”

“No one would have begrudged you that. We wouldn’t even have filed an incident report.”

She leaned back in a stretch, extending her feet and wriggling them. “I knew that. But the whole reason I became a frontier scout for the People of Gaia’s Dawn was that I needed to escape in a way that would make a difference. I mean I knew right away I didn’t want to be a tribal—it’s dirty, nasty, and ugly enough now. Eating bark and twigs all winter, once the canned and dry food are gone—gah.”

“How’d you end up there in the first place?”

“A couple of nutty witch-wannabes in the group I broke out of Coffee Creek with ran into some would-be bush hippies, and I was hoping to find the guys with the good drugs. So I was one of the Seventy-Nine Founders of the People of Gaia’s Dawn. I hope you guys clean out all the tribes; I wish you’d just
shot
all the Blue Mornings.”

“Some of us favor that.”

“See, I knew I could count on my dad! And that brings me to the thing that I don’t think you’ll believe till I show you.”

“How about if I just believe you?”

She hugged him, very hard, and he felt hot tears on his cheeks.

After a minute, she whispered, “There’s still a reason why we need to do things my way, check me out and see if you agree, ’kay?”

“I’m listening.”

She sat still. Larry heard only the wind in the pines, and the soft scurry of something small moving through pine needle duff.

Finally she said, “I volunteered as a scout so it’d be easy to escape when the time came, once I figured out what I could take along as proof of what was really going on. And then of all the stupid things the lame-weenie Blue Mornings ambushed me. I must’ve been the only slave they ever took, which is why they were so hard to escape from—it was like being a miser’s last dollar.”

“Bad luck happens to the best.”

“ ‘Along with everybody else.’ I used to hate it when you’d say that to me about my driving and my partying. But here’s the thing. If the tribes were just a bunch of thieving-ass bush hippies with their heads full of prison-paganism and dumbass crystal-worship, I’d figure, hey, they’re just plain old social scum like I used to be. But they’re something a whole lot worse, and if we just went back to Pueblo, and I told my story, nobody’d believe me without investigating, and there’s no time to put an expedition together, let alone find a way for them to see what they need to see. But if you come along and I show
you
, they’ll take
your
word for it without any ‘further investigation’ or ‘more research needed’ or any of that bullshit which there ain’t time for. I just don’t want our side to lose three months we don’t have. That’s what it is.”

“It’s that bad?”

“Whatever ‘that bad’ means to you, it’s worse.” She stood. “We can make it to a Gaia’s Dawn scout post by midmorning tomorrow if we walk through the night.”

“All right. Lead me.”

Shortly after moonrise, she said, “Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for taking my word.”

The moon rose higher. With more light, they made better time, half-sprinting over rises that were almost as bright as day, then plunging into hollows that, from above, brimmed with darkness, but down in them, the stars seemed to shine especially bright.