Daybreak Zero (42 page)

3 DAYS LATER. ATHENS, TNG DISTRICT. 2 PM EST. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2025.

Lyndon Phat’s face was bent down into the chessboard to make it hard to read his lips, and he barely murmured, “So no more than a month at most. I’ll miss these chess games.”

“I’m hoping to come with you.”

“If we both make it out, we’ll both be busy. Neither history nor Heather will let us sit on the sidelines.” Phat sighed. “Yes, the answer to your question is yes. Find a way, and I’ll go along, and I’ll run for the office. I don’t see how I can possibly be the popular guy that you say I am, out there. Not considering how I screwed the pooch when I had the chance. But if I am, I’ll run, and if I win, I’ll do my damnedest.” He finally moved his rook, still staring down at the board. “The minute you said Graham wasn’t fit to be president because he didn’t agree with us, I should have stuck to my oath like glue and said, like hell, he’s the only lawful successor.”

“That was
my
mistake. You just went along with it.”

“And Norm’s mistake too—he should’ve kept his job and made you do the right thing, not gone off to jail with Weisbrod. The only person whose mistake it
wasn’t
was Grayson. He doesn’t have either the brains or the balls to make a real mistake.”

“He did all right up in the Yough.”

“Grayson’ll do all right most of the time. Hell, nearly every time, he’ll do fine. He’s got talent, charisma, energy, and medium-good humility about his own limitations. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, he’ll do a good-to-exceptional job. He knows that the best way to succeed is to help others succeed and he has the smarts to see how to help them. Many people who have served with him adore the man.”

“I hear a big hanging
but
waiting to crash down.”

Phat shrugged. “It’s the thing that there’s bad blood about, between us. It was a long time ago. I found out, back when we were both absolute nobodies, that Grayson’s only got two problems. One, his definition of ‘success’ is much too close to his definition of ‘what Grayson wants,’ regardless of whether it’s what it would be good for him to have. Two, although he knows what the
best
way to succeed is, and usually does it that way—which is why there are so many people who’ve had a good experience with him—well, he
knows
what the best way to succeed is, but if he can’t succeed the best way, he’s willing to succeed in ways that are . . . not the best. Which is why there’s also some human wreckage, here and there, near his trail.”

“You don’t want to tell me what it was, I guess.”

“I promised people I respected that I would not talk about it. I shouldn’t have. But not talking about it got to be a habit. I guess if I start to think he might make it to president, I’ll
have
to talk about it, because there’s a level where you can’t have a man with a . . .” His hand waved as if seeking the word in the air in front of his face. “Moral crack? Defect of the soul? Can you call it a character flaw if it only comes out a few times in decades, under the worst kind of pressure?” Giving up on the question, he said, “Well, whatever you call it, an officer shouldn’t have it and a president can’t. There’s a Buddhist proverb I like—or at least the guy I heard it from, when I was little, was Buddhist. ‘If you want something bad for you in the worst way, that’s exactly how you’ll get it.’”

“So . . . uh, if we’re talking flaws here, why should two guys like us, who already made huge mistakes—”

“A mistake is not what I’m talking about. Mistakes happen to everybody. And there’s no reason it shouldn’t be us; Graham has made about as many mistakes, about as big. The voters can decide which mistakes they like better. But Grayson has a rotten core to him, and the one thing a big job always finds is the core. And what he does when that happens won’t be a mistake; he’ll mean to do it, no matter what it does to everyone else, or even to himself. So here’s to honest blundering.” He raised his wineglass; Cam tapped his against it. “By the way, you’re in check.”

1 HOUR LATER. ATHENS, TNG DISTRICT. 4:30 PM EST. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2025.

Crossing the lawn to Terrell Hall, Cam saw Billy Ray Salazar, and waved; the colonel waved back and came over, loudly saying, “Sir, just wanted to thank you for the weekend, I think it’s the best thing you’ve reinvented.”

Cameron said, “You’re welcome. Headed up to the lake for some fishing?”

By now his hand was in Salazar’s hand, and as they shook, without moving his lips, Salazar asked, “Anything to tell our mutual friend?” In a normal conversational tone he said, “Yeah, well, it’s protein. They’re biting. I have a smokehouse by the fishing cabin, too, so I’m laying in tons for the winter. You wait till January and you’ll wish you’d gone with me.”

“I already do,” Cameron said, adding softly, “the Red Queen is in,” before letting his volume come up for, “and I don’t even fish, but it must be great to be out in the quiet.”

“It is, and you don’t have to fish, sir. I’ve got a spare bed and you’re welcome anytime.” And softly, “I’ll communicate that. Are you taking advice?”

Murmuring at his shoes, as if too socially awkward to accept a friendly invitation (not a hard thing for him to fake), Cam said, “I already know it’s dangerous, if it fails
everything
will unravel, and the longer I delay the worse it’ll get.”

“That’s all the advice I had. I’ll be on the line to our friend early tomorrow,” Salazar said quietly. “Really. I wish you’d reconsider, and I’m inviting you because I like your company. Though if it means you’ll come, I promise to do some career-booster upsuckage too.”

Cam shook his head. “Not this time.”

“Well, have a good weekend in town then, sir.”

Walking away, Salazar noted that they’d managed to hit the center of a big open space, more than enough protection because the other side didn’t have any surviving long-range directional mikes.

As he saddled up, he thought,
I could set up and transmit tonight, then sleep in tomorrow. I haven’t seen any reports that anyone has even noticed a sporadic beep-radio transmission from outside town yet, let alone put direction finding on it. But this would be a hell of a time for a first. Stay on the path, even when no one is watching.

5 DAYS LATER. SYLVAN BEACH, ON ONE IDA LAKE, NEW YORK. 10 AM EST. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2025.

The big cache of canned goods came to them at the end of a real run of good luck. They had paddled and poled for a few days, then spent three tiring days walking along the bank, two men each towing a canoe, the third man keeping the lines clear, pushing the canoes out from the bank with a pole, doing much of the observing, and staying alert against attack. They had not expected to be able to keep the canoes all the way to Oneida Lake; once they reached the western lake port of Brewerton, though, a makeshift sail on each canoe had been enough to carry them all the way across the lake to Sylvan Beach before 3 p.m., traveling farther in half a day than they had just done in three.

A big cache of canned goods in an empty, clean house with a woodstove was an opportunity to enjoy warmth and food, and a chance to mend, clean, and thoroughly dry everything; they decided to lay over for at least a day.

When they rose, at least half a foot of fresh snow covered the ground. More was still coming down—big, wet, soft flakes that stuck to everything and turned to slush at a breath. They had stashed the canoes under a pier and carried everything up into the house, and the previous occupants had left behind a large pile of firewood, some oil candles, and three big cans of olive oil that burned in a smudgy and dirty way in oil candles with cloth wicks.

Everything was clean and fixed up by early afternoon. They decided to eat another couple of big meals here and sleep warm for one more night, especially since the coming descent of the Mohawk was likely to be rough.

Larry had reports to write, Chris had his diary and his articles, but for Jason, the shelves held no paper books or magazines, no musical instruments, not even a Parcheesi set. One large cabinet drooled a brown jelly that had probably once contained millions of songs, movies, books, games, and so forth, but now it was too gooey even to make decent modeling clay.

Jason pulled on his coat and went to look for a bookstore or library somewhere. Snow was falling thick and fast; the gray half-light swallowed up the house behind him in less than two blocks. He turned right as he came into the business district, five blocks from the house by his careful count. Four blocks later, he found a senior center, and broke in at the back door.

The building was lighted only by high windows, but he could make out the mummified remains in chairs around the big tables, on cots along the walls, or on rotted blankets. Massive-dose radiation sickness is horrible but quick. Lumpy fans of crusted gunk lay by the mouths and anuses of most of the mummies. No animals had survived to come in here, and the windows were unbroken, so the dead lay where they had died; only the first few had been lined up in a storage room, covered with sheets.

Two mummies in a corner were holding hands with a cup beside them; the sitting one must have been bringing water for the lying one. He hoped they’d both lost consciousness at the same time.

A back room with immense windows and the remains of several couches and armchairs contained shelves of military history; the old-fashioned kind of chick books, where it was always just the turn of the century, everybody hooked up constantly, and everyone was always about to have a great career; bios of forgotten actors, singers, and athletes; and some of the classics. Jason pocketed half a dozen paperbacks, figuring Chris and Larry might want to read and the added weight wouldn’t be much if they did manage to keep the canoes all the way down the Mohawk.

Shadows passed by the window. Silently Jason took one long step backwards into the arched doorway of an open bathroom, letting the darkness hide him. Huddled human forms, hugging themselves and stumbling, wrapped in blankets over multiple sweaters and hoodies, passed by the window in rows six abreast, with an armed guard every eighth row; the guards wore heavy red wool coats and earflap hats, and carried steel yardsticks, which they sometimes swung full force against the backs of the stumbling slaves. For more than twenty minutes, he watched an army of wraiths in rags go by, herded by these frightening parodies of hunters.

You come to me as hunters, but I will make you hunters of men,
he misquoted to himself. It did not seem funny.

Counting rows, Jason guessed that about three thousand blanket-wrapped slaves and just over a hundred guards passed by, southward, along the edge of the lake, with no sound except when a guard cursed or hit a slave. After the slaves, a loose formation of about three hundred tribal soldiers passed by, followed by twenty rulers or chiefs or whatever they called themselves, another group of a hundred soldiers, and ten minutes later, a rearguard of about fifty soldiers, weapons at ready, moving as if they expected trouble.

Jason timed off an hour by his watch before emerging to look at their tracks.

Their trail bent around the lake, away from the house where Chris and Larry were; no one had turned off where Jason’s faint tracks came in.
Didn’t see them or didn’t care, I guess, and the fire probably wasn’t putting out any smoke you could see through the falling snow.
Taking a roundabout way, wading briefly along the icy canal, he finally reached the little house just as the sun was setting. The snow was still falling.

They banked the fire and spread his clothes and moccasins before it. When Larry awakened Jason for his watch, his clothes were dry but no longer warm.

THE NEXT DAY. SYLVAN BEACH, ON ONE IDA LAKE, NEW YORK. 7 AM EST. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2025.

It was still snowing heavily. They’d found kids’ sleds hanging in the attic space, and each of them pulled a sled-load of canned goods. Their muscles were already aching by the time they had tossed the sleds in and loaded and launched the canoes, paddling along the lakeshore to the canal entrance; slush an inch thick floated on the lake’s surface, and on the canal.

All that day, they paddled to each successive lock dam, unloaded and portaged the canoes, sledded their packs and supplies down to the canoes, and resumed paddling; Jason guessed they were spending twice as much time portaging as paddling, but in the empty, dead country around them, they didn’t want to abandon the supplies that only the canoes could carry.

It was still snowing as it began to get dark, less than twenty miles beyond Oneida Lake. At the public access where they stopped, Larry said, “Now that we know whole armies of Daybreakers might come by, I don’t think we can risk a fire tonight.”

They pulled the two canoes almost face-to-face on a ground cloth, threw a camo tarp and some loose brush over the top, and crawled under to wolf down a can of beans and a can of salmon each; huddled as closely as they could, they went to sleep.

THE NEXT DAY. A LITTLE WEST OF DEERFIELD, NEW YORK. 6:50 AM EST. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2025.

Dawn crept under the canoes, and the men fidgeted, waking each other. The sun was an orange disk through the morning fog. They knocked snow off a picnic table, and risking a small fire in a grill, they fried Spam, heated canned potatoes and green beans, and warmed water from the hand pump to mix with condensed tomato soup.

“I hate to admit how good this is,” Jason said.

Larry rose from the table. “That well water is probably cleaner than anything we’ve seen in a while, and this fire will last a while; let’s dump our old containers, and boil enough water to refill them with clean, hot water, and then, unless you all want to do a little yoga or maybe linger over the sports page, I think there’s not much to do but get going.”

When they pushed off and paddled eastward the fog on the canal was so thick that they could not see the banks twenty feet away. Later that morning, the fog turned suddenly golden as the sun broke through. Not long after they slipped out of the rapidly dispersing fog. In front of them, dead trees clawed at the sky beyond the crooked silhouettes of burned buildings, and three naked bodies dangled by their necks from a pedestrian bridge, on which someone had painted

PLAZTATIC = DEATH