The Last President (16 page)

For the next hour, Whorf, Ihor, and every other sailor-scholar were far too busy with all the business of taking a sailing ship out of a harbor to look around much; by the time they had a moment to catch their breath, St. Croix was a low, lumpy green line on the horizon behind them.

2 DAYS LATER. PULLMAN, WASHINGTON. 1:00 PM PACIFIC TIME. SATURDAY, MARCH 14, 2026.

“Did they hurt your mouth bad this time?” Thompson asked, as soon as the other guards had gone. He was just outside the door, opening it a bare crack and keeping his foot planted against it.
Not quite ready yet,
Darcage thought,
but still, he asked without being prompted.
He nodded his head, slowly and carefully, as if changing the tension in the straps of the ball gag was hurting his teeth.

His teeth did hurt, but not because he was being beaten in the face, the idea he had been planting in Thompson. It was just that the mouthpiece they gave him could not fully protect him from the Daybreak seizures that they were triggering as a sort of daily ritual. He was not being tortured for the three hours a day he was absent; all that happened, every day, was that they brought him into the padded room, put the mouthpiece and a padded helmet on him, strapped him carefully to the floor, and threatened to force him to repudiate Daybreak. Instantly the world would become dark and confusing; three hours later he would wake up still in the restraints.

But over time he had convinced Thompson that he was being punched in the face for hours. A smarter boy than Thompson might have wondered why his face was never bruised, or why they were injuring a man's mouth if they wanted him to talk, but then a smarter boy than Thompson would never have opened the door or undone the gag in response to Darcage's tears, sighs, and whimpers.

“Skootch on over here,” Thompson said, “and I'll let you out of that gag so's you can rest your mouth a little.”

Making sure it looked like he was aching all over, Darcage crab-scooted on his ass, pushing with hands that he pretended were tender, and pushed his face upward so that Thompson could undo the gag; as Thompson removed it, Darcage stretched and flexed his jaw. He really was tired and sore there; it didn't take much acting.

“I'm just as glad to have somebody to talk to,” Thompson said, “but we got to keep it real quiet. You heard 'bout Norman the Spanker?”

Darcage slowly shook his head, though he had overheard, and waited to see if he could learn anything new.

Thompson's whisper was furious and urgent. “That son of a bitch General Norman McIntyre, a.k.a. The Biggest Fuckin' Fag in the Army, he got this bug up his ass 'cause he figured out some of us that's on half-week duty, we been getting ourselves busted and stockaded just at the end of every shift, so's we wouldn't have to go home to our civilian jobs canning fish or digging potatoes and all that bullshit, instead we'd draw stockade time, and serve that here for a couple days, hell, it's a bed and food and no work, just pushups and shit, and then come round to we got out of the stockade, it was time for us to do regular duty here again. If he'd just let us militia soldiers be regulars when we want to he wouldn't have none of this trouble, but no, he made this big fuckin' deal out of it and so now there ain't no stockade no more. Stead of that it's a caning, like a fuckin' little kid, they just beat your ass with a stick and send you off to work, sore and all.”

Darcage raised an eyebrow; Thompson made a wincing half-smile. “Yeah, I got my ass caught in that,” he admitted. “Fuckin' crazy fuckin' General McIntyre. All them rules and all that bullshit and I can tell you it's just a pain in the ass. Something weird about a gay guy like that, you know, I mean like, there's not nothing wrong with it, I had some bosses and some friends in school, usually it ain't nothing, but some of'em, like McIntyre you know, I think they just like to hurt people. Like tearing skin off my butt for havin' a beer an hour before I was off duty. Like what they're doing to you.”

“Makes sense to me,” Darcage murmured, slurring his speech. “I don't think I can sleep, and it helps to have something to listen to. If you just need to vent, I can listen.”

“Thanks. I really shouldn't be doing this, you know.”

“You have a kind heart. Don't let it get you into trouble, but if you need to talk, I'm sure not going anywhere.”

“Guess you got that right, anyway.” Thompson began his litany of complaints slowly; today it was all reruns, but a lot of them. Darcage agreed sympathetically whenever it seemed reasonable, muttering and slurring to force Thompson to listen more and more closely. After a time he found the man's rhythm and began to reinforce it, fighting down his mounting excitement; he hadn't gotten this far with any guard before.

Thompson dropped the like-I-just-saids and the and-anothers and all the other acknowledgments of repetition. He began to repeat himself without knowing he was doing it, and the phrases became more and more alike, as Darcage reinforced them with his rhythmic, almost meaningless murmurs.

Ideally he'd have preferred to spend a week working on Thompson, but he didn't know how soon they would realize what he was and rotate him away. Probably soon; Thompson was probably like this everywhere, with everyone, all the time, whenever he wasn't actually being shouted at or beaten, and therefore he might be noticed and moved at any time.

Darcage pushed his luck and mumbled something about eye contact and a friendly face and just having a sense that they could have a real rapport, talk about the really important things, and Thompson did it: sat right down on the floor in the doorway, with the door partly open.

Fighting down the excitement he was afraid might leak into his voice, Darcage made more soothing and agreeing noises, and in less than an hour, Thompson was deeply asleep.

Darcage stood cautiously, trying not to clink. They had sewn the chains that joined behind his back to the seat of his pants, but with enough squirming, he pushed his pants down, slid the pant legs up the chain, and sat through so that he could join hands in front of himself. He had nothing to cut the chain, but standing on the pants and sawing back and forth, he quickly rid himself of the pants. He looked at the soles of his feet; after months of not walking much, he would definitely need Thompson's shoes.

He kept muttering the rhythmic suggestions so that Thompson barely woke as the chain wrapped his throat. As he pinned Thompson to the floor, tightening the chain to prevent any noise, he looked into the dying man's eyes and caught a miserable expression of betrayal. Darcage laughed so hard he began to fear he would make a noise, but he didn't, not while Thompson died, not while claiming his shoes and soiled but workable pants, not even when he noticed that the strangulation had given the poor dumbshit an erection that wobbled around like a failing flagpole when he gave the corpse a final kick.

2 DAYS LATER. PULLMAN, WASHINGTON. 1:15 PM PACIFIC TIME. SATURDAY, MARCH 14, 2026.

“All right, war crimes are bad, but clearing out tribals really shouldn't be counted as war, it's more of a public service like sewage or trash removal.” Allie was losing all patience with her husband and with Norm McIntyre; she didn't mind the exclamations of outrage but the constant disappointed little winces were getting on her nerves. “Tribals get a chance to surrender, a brief one because they're dangerous and treacherous, and if they surrender we help them through an initial seizure. If they don't come out of it able to talk to us freely, then they don't have enough mind to be set free, so we just put them down like any dangerous nuisance animal. If they do come out talking like people, we send them to re-education camp—at taxpayer expense, mind you. Then either they recover and return to society minus certain rights like voting, owning property, and carrying weapons, or they revert, which proves they can't be rehabbed, and we put them down. I'm not looking to be gruesome but the spike in the back of the head is escape-proof, doesn't waste precious ammunition and powder, and with this etherizing jig that Doctor Jolly has invented, the process is literally fast and painless. So if we catch'em we convert'em or kill'em, and after a while, there are no more tribals.”

McIntyre said, “I don't love'em either, but whether they recognize America or not, they are American citizens, and freedom of belief—”

“Daybreak isn't a
belief
. It's contagious evil that eats your soul. You've seen Darcage—”

President Weisbrod's voice was soft and calm as ever. “And what
are
you going to do with the ones like Darcage?”

“Weren't you listening? Doctor Jolly's neat little device. Which any decent blacksmith can build and which requires only a little ether, which we're already set up to make in industrial quantities.”

Norm McIntyre leaned forward. “Because you intend to do all this to American citizens in ‘industrial quantities'?”

“Well, yes. Mass production is efficient and quick. A few years' unpleasantness and we won't have to do it again.”

Graham Weisbrod slid his wire-rimmed glasses up his nose. “More than seven billion dead, less than a billion left alive, and you think we need more killing?” He watched her like a fencer looking for an opening.

She shrugged. “The percentages are even worse in the US than they are worldwide, Graham. We were more dependent on technology,
and
we had more Daybreakers releasing nanospawn and biotes on Daybreak day,
and
we got hit with two superbombs. Three, really, if you count the way the California radiological bomb killed everything including cockroaches and moss between Irvine and Oakland. The rest of the world lost maybe eighty-five percent of the population, with us and China and Russia it was more like ninety-five, Europe probably ninety-seven. There are places that had worse death rates than us, and places that had much better. So what? You don't win a moral prize either way, and if you did—”

McIntyre seemed to be gaining confidence, and he asserted firmly, “In a country that has lost so many, every life should be precious.”

“But that's where you're wrong. Every life that makes things better, or tries to, or will try to as soon as they can, or even would if they could, is precious, sure. But we've got a solid couple million or so trying to kill or at least immiserate the rest of us, because they have something the First Amendment was never
ever
intended to cover—a contagious madness—”

Weisbrod shook his head. “Even the most conservative Supreme Court justices ruled that—”

“Under the Old Republic. Nowadays—”

“Ms. Sok Banh!” They all jumped at the pounding on the door.

“Yes, Brianna?”

“Darcage has escaped!”

She rushed through the door and down the hall; she could straighten these two old men out later.

ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PULLMAN, WASHINGTON. 1:45 PM PACIFIC TIME. SATURDAY, MARCH 14, 2026.

The uproar far behind him, toward town, probably meant the little boys in their soldier costumes had found the place on the city wall where Darcage had flipped one of their emergency stairs down. A couple of sentries who had been playing cards in the shade rather than watching from the wall would be bending over for Norman the Spanker, but that was a tiny benefit compared to the sheer pleasure of standing here, bent over, deep in the shade of a wrecked plaztatic little burb-house, sucking in cool sweet free air.

He could catch his breath more safely inside. The window opened at his upward yank. He balled the chain up in his hands and threw himself upward, catching himself on the sill with his elbows. From there, he wriggled his head and shoulders inside. Raising and curling his legs, he toppled head first onto the floor. He rolled over, stood, grasped the sash, and pulled the window closed. Now the only signs of his passage were dented spots in the dirt by the outside wall, and a clean patch on the windowsill where his shirt had rubbed.

He dropped to all fours and crawled to the kitchen, since it was closest, in search of tools.

Shouting close by.

He crawled as fast as he could in his chains, staying low, avoiding windows. Unfortunately the people who had lived here had had artificial fabric drapes and plastic miniblinds, which had all fallen in crusty, rotten heaps, so there was little cover and anyone could look through any window.

The initial burst of yelling had died down, but the searchers still sounded close. At least there was no barking; a trained dog would have been leaping and barking at the window by now.

The kitchen windows faced the back yard, which had a privacy fence, so by staying low, he was able to search through drawers and cabinets. He found only a can opener, which he pocketed in the hope of finding something to open, and a carving knife.

Motion caught his eye; a man rode by the back fence on horseback, but at the angle, Darcage doubted that he could see in through the glass, and anyway he'd been moving too fast for a good look. Nevertheless, he hastily peeked behind the closed doors, all the while watching and listening for any motion near the house, especially outside the kitchen window. He found an already-emptied pantry, a coat closet with zippers and buttons lying in congealed goo on the floor, and stairs to the basement.

Nerving himself, staying on all fours, he slipped through the door and pulled it closed behind him. If they just didn't see the wiped sill and the footprints in the old flower bed . . . as he crept down into the basement, he kept his carving knife in hand, where it comforted him with a promise that if they found him, he had either his defense or his exit.

The basement stank of mold. Striations of water damage marked the walls, but the floor was dry. At the workbench, he found bolt cutters and a hacksaw; pausing to listen every few seconds, he freed himself, and then put the chains and tools under the stairs by the water heater, sweeping with the broom to get the shiny fresh metal swarf under the stairs as well.

As he finished sweeping, he heard distant hoofbeats approach, then recede, then approach again; silence, and then another pass. Apparently they were still riding around, oppressing the filthy destructive horses, human-tainted animals who would make a fine feast for some tribe someday, a cleaner and better use than in suppressing Mother Earth's righteous wrath.

Still, the sentimental little boy he had once been was glad that he would probably not have to hurt a horse to get away; unlike people they were at least pretty, and in a couple generations the survivors could be wild again.

There was nothing to do but stay where he was; the windows were down in wells so unless someone came right up to one, they wouldn't see him. If he could find a corner with no line of sight to a window, he'd curl up there with his knife beside him, and rest while he gave the hunt time to spread out and move farther away.

Meanwhile, what else might be useful?

When he opened one closet door, he suppressed a gasp of pure joy; ranks of cans filled the shelves on one side, and there was room to sit in the closet itself, completely out of sight of all the windows.

A moment later he was laughing at his own hopes; the rest of the shelves were piled with the glass and metal parts of home wine- and beer- making equipment. All the cans held wine-making grapes. Still, it was food, and he was hungry. He stepped forward and his foot found a rolling bottle.

When he looked down he saw the corpse.

The floods and the mice had stripped the face off the skull. The shirt had been artificial-fiber and had decayed into slime over the rib cage and the emptied abdomen, but the denim jeans, and the pile of gray hair remained in surprisingly good shape. The leather belt had been gnawed through and lay in pieces.

At least a dozen empty bottles lay around the body. Probably he or she had sat here and drunk till it was all gone, and then died in any of the ways a really drunk passed-out person dies: choking, alcohol poisoning, diabetic coma, stroke.

Darcage pushed the mostly skeletal corpse up to lean face-first against the door; if anyone opened that, they were in for a surprise and would probably make some noise, giving him time to react. At the back of the closet, he sat on a metal stool, and opened one of the big cans of grapes, then held it aloft in a thankful toast.
I'm not sorry for what happened to you at all, but I appreciate your being my guard, and I am glad that you found an exit via something you love.

ABOUT 2 WEEKS LATER. ON LAKE ERIE, NORTH OF LONG POINT, ONTARIO. 3:30 PM EASTERN TIME. SUNDAY, MARCH 29, 2026.

“We're here,” Rosie said. “That's Pottohawk Point on the horizon, across the big ice sheet, just like the escaped slaves described.” He handed his field glasses to Scott Niskala, shivering beside him in the crows'-nest of
Kelleys Dancer
.

Niskala looked, adjusting the binoculars for his eighty-year-old eyes. The moon, a couple of days short of full, was low in the western sky, silhouetting the tribal camp around the old marina. He counted three of them patrolling, and two groups of soldiers around fires.

The partly smashed and sunken dock led down to a sheet of ice which reached a full mile toward them. On the ice, Niskala counted more than a hundred wooden structures, each about the area of a small house, and maybe a third the height. “Give me and the guys till dawn, but be ready to run as soon as we get back.”

• • • 

Their canoes moved through the water without sound until they scraped on the pebbles of the beach. They dragged them between two big bushes to be easy to find and hard to see.

“Reminders,” Niskala whispered. “Kill two. Plant four. Come back.”

The three boys all nodded and slipped into the darkness; Niskala slipped quietly through the darkness towards the tribal encampment. Being out on a night raid-and-rec was as familiar as an old sweater. He had grown up in the Iron Range, where venison was a staple and a rifle was a tool for acquiring it; his father had pushed a military career so hard that Niskala had done most of a tour in LRPs before he'd really considered doing anything else, and even then, he'd gone straight into the Forest Service and spent his life in the woods, often carrying a weapon.
Wonder if I'm the only Vietnam vet currently serving in the US Armed Forces?

Wonder if the Wapak Scouts Company of the Stone Laboratory Militia Battalion counts as US Armed Forces?

Wonder if it's still the US?

Shut up, old man.

That last thought was by far the most comforting.

His first kill was easy; the man was bent over a frying pan on the little fire, poking at his dinner with a stick. Niskala slid in beside him and hatcheted the back of his head so hard that the blade went in up to the shaft. Letting the body lie facedown across the fire, he planted a foot on the neck and wrenched the hatchet back out.

The second was almost trouble; he glimpsed motion on the far side of a tent, crept around slowly, and looked into the wide, white eyes of a man squatting to crap on the ground. His hatchet lashed out in a hard backhand, knocking the man over sideways, but embedding itself in his jaw.

The tribal screamed through his shattered mouth, a bubbling inarticulate sound, and Niskala stepped over the thrashing body, pulled a garrote from his pocket, and wrapped the man's neck, but not before his target moaned again. “That's right,” Niskala said, loud enough to carry. “Take it all the way, bitch, take it
all
the way.”

He heard laughter from the surrounding tents.
Weird thing about tribals, they're communal but there's no community spirit. I guess people that are all planning to die anyway don't get so attached.
He tightened the garrote more, hampered a little by the hatchet handle still sticking sideways out of the man's jaw. A moment later his victim went limp. The damp night air reeked of warm shit and blood.

Niskala pulled out the hatchet and set about planting his four “little bottles of surprise,” as Fred Rhodes, back at Stone Laboratory, had called them. Each was a bottle of wood alcohol; to set them, Niskala inserted a test tube into the neck, filled the test tube with acid from the flask he carried, dropped in a gelatin capsule of whatever it was that Fred had brewed up, inserted the narrow part of an oversized cork into the test tube, and pushed the tube and cork down into the bottle till the outer edge of the cork seated.

When the acid ate through the gelatin, an hour or two from now, there would be a small hot explosion to set the alcohol on fire and scatter it around. For the last half hour before detonation, the thinning gelatin capsule would be less and less stable, so that a light touch might set it off; if they found it right away, the Daybreakers might disarm it, but after half an hour it would be on a hair trigger until it blew spontaneously.

Keeping to shadows, Niskala crept down to the old pre-Daybreak buildings, figuring they would have been reserved for something important. They were up a couple of feet on pilings, so he rolled a bottle in under the first one; he realized there were people sleeping under the second, so he crawled in and wedged the bottle into the brace of a floor joist, less than a yard from a particularly dense huddle; when the blazing liquid hit their blankets, with them trapped in this low space, that ought to be good for plenty of chaos and panic, which was what the mission was all about.
Like I tell the boys, try to exceed specs on the core mission.

Following the marked path to the nearest raft on the ice, he found it was sitting up on concrete blocks.
Sort of clever. Bottom and sides don't get frozen in. Then when it thaws, it just settles into the water, and the blocks sink away.

A snore alerted him; peering over the gunwale cautiously, he saw that several of them were bunched together in an open-fronted cabin, piled onto each other like stacked cordwood.
Probably the crew-to-be.
He felt along the gunwale and found several oarlocks.
All right, and they're planning on rowing. Enough intel, let's go to ops.

Rather than chance climbing in, after preparing his bottle, he reached over the gunwale and wedged it into the external corner of the aft cabin.
That'll make another wakeup call.

That left one bottle and plenty of time to go. He thought about it for a moment, and decided to leave it in the sailboat with the tallest mast, moored in the pool of kept-open water by the pier. Quietly, he crept out on the pier; by the moon, he still had more than an hour.

Something was subtly wrong. A dark smear on the deck led his eye to a hand stretched outside a doorway.

His shoulder was gently squeezed with the Morse for
73
—“friend.” He turned.

It was Kyle, who pointed at the boat and drew a finger across his throat. Niskala held up the bottle; Kyle gestured that there was already one aboard the boat.

Lying prone and leaning out, with Kyle holding his feet, he planted it on the crossbeam closest to shore under the pier; if the pier itself burned, it might take several boats with it.

Still not having spoken, they crept in the shadows of the trees by the shore back to the canoes, where Derek and Marty were already waiting. As they pushed off and glided away, Niskala thought,
I really ought to do something about getting these boys their Eagles. This is one hell of a service project and I think we can waive a merit badge or two.

• • • 

The moment they had swung their canoes aboard
Kelleys Dancer
and tied them down, Rosie whispered, “Ready? Everyone back aboard?”

“Yep,” Niskala said. “Went real well.”

“Need two of you on the lines and two working the anchor winch.”

In less than a minute, they were moving, with Rosie going aft to take the tiller from Barbara. The wind was light but steady. In an hour the rising sun would raise a land breeze against them. “We might have to make you all row, so stay dressed,” Barbara warned. “Meanwhile I've got some hot broth and not-too-awful biscuits.”

The biscuits were delicious and abundant. As they finished wolfing them down, Barbara leaned in to say, “Rosie says something you should see on deck.”

The bruise-red sun rose from the lake in front of them, turning the snow-covered ice a dozen shades of crimson, pink, and orange. The dim peninsular shore to their south, shrouded in dense mist, bent around west behind them, and Niskala watched that way, waiting for sounds or light.

After a little while, the low clouds were lit with orange flickers, and sounds of screaming and shouting came to them through the fog. Abruptly, flames reached above that black horizon.

“The ground at Pottohawk would've been just out of sight from the crows'-nest about now,” Rosie observed. “So the flames are about that high, which is forty-nine feet. One of you sure hit the jackpot.”