The Last President (19 page)

The free end of Whorf's flail bounced back as if catapulted off rubber; he ducked sideways to keep it from hitting him, yanked hard and down to get control of its spin, and brought the tip around in a hard slap that opened a third man's forehead in a gush of blood.

He could feel Ihor working beside him, striking in the throw-hip-recover-hip rhythm that they'd drilled endlessly on the deck; in his peripheral vision, two more men were down. The enemy had turned their backs on Polly, who brained one with the bat, dropping him. The remaining two opponents fled, shouting.

“Which way?” Whorf gasped.

“Blind alley down here, back up steps,” Jorge gasped. He was a very unnatural shade of gray. They hurried up, Polly and Whorf in the lead.

When Ruth popped out at them, Whorf almost let her have it with the flail before she shrieked, “Take me with you!”

“Follow us!” Ihor said.

“This way,” Jorge said, and they dropped down another steeply staired alley, Ruth running after them.

They had found the right way this time, because it led them straight to where the ship's company had come ashore and was setting up a perimeter. Glancing behind, Whorf saw that Ruth was still with them.

As the pikemen at the perimeter let them through, one asked, “Her?”

“Maybe a defector, maybe a spy,” Ihor gasped.

Arriving just then, Halleck said, “Let her through. Whorf, Ihor, Polly, bind her. Good job. Jorge, Doctor Park is by the boats.”

Ruth held out her hands meekly for Polly to fasten the cuffs. “Just so you don't leave me here,” she said.

An arrow rattled onto the pavement, not close, and Halleck turned to say something, but two shots had already suppressed the rooftop sniper. He said, “We've got whistles over east, probably near the waterfront or we wouldn't be able to hear them, and no one's gone that way yet. Are you three—”

“On our way,” Ihor said.

“One minute more,” Halleck said. “Corelli! Get these guys a drink of water, carbines and hatchets. Keep it to one minute, less if you can, it's been a while since we heard the whistles—”

Ten minutes later, with three volleys from their Newberry Carbines and some hard flail and bat work, they drove the cheering mob away from the dangling bodies of their fellow sailor-scholar Felicia and Dr. Darcy Keyes, a microbiologist from Sandia; it wasn't obvious in what order they'd been hanged and mutilated.

“Shit,” Polly said. “Shit shit shit.”

It was the first time the reverend's daughter had sworn without apologizing, or being teased for it. The worst of the job was guarding the bodies till a bigger party could come to carry them out; it was almost sunset when everyone was finally back on
Discovery
. “Everyone” included two more corpses, besides Felicia and Dr. Keyes: Able Seaman Tranh had been breathing when the crowd kicking him had fled, but he died as the rescue party carried him down to the harbor. Professor Silmarrison had been killed instantly by a flung dart while he stood guard on the perimeter.

Though they could see many watchers on the cliffs above, nothing was fired at
Discovery
and nothing came out to intercept it. As darkness fell, in Halleck's cabin, they interviewed Ruth. She said that the Verdad del Sol tribe had arrived in a huge sailing canoe flotilla even before December 5, and established themselves as the comfortable and pampered lords of the domain.

“Not exactly Daybreakish, is it?” Whorf asked.

“Read the Jamesgrams.” In one hard gulp, Ihor knocked back the extra whiskey ration that the doctors had prescribed to help them sleep. “Daybreak is splitting and changing and turning into many things. Someday it will just be a thing, like Jesus Christ or Communism or Ukraine or United States. It will mean so many things it won't mean nothing. Anything. Whatever.”

ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PALE BLUFF, NEW STATE OF WABASH (FORMERLY ILLINOIS). 5:00 AM CENTRAL TIME. MONDAY, APRIL 20, 2026.

The MacIntosh Inn, a big old 1920s frame-and-gingerbread house, had been built to display the cider-fueled wealth of its owner during Prohibition. It had successively been the last refuge of his spinster daughters, a real estate agent's cross to bear (and rumored to be haunted), and the retirement project of a chef and her cabinetmaker husband, who had turned it into a highly successful bed-and-breakfast back before. As Pale Bluff had become the key town on the Wabash frontier, they had served increasingly famous and important guests.

For the past week it had been Grayson's main headquarters, and maps, lists, and charts covered every available surface in the main dining room, except for the places at the table where Grayson and Phat ate silently, sharing reverence for hot meals indoors off of plates. By firelight and candlelight, the room was cheery enough, even though the curtains were drawn and the sun had not quite come up yet.

The day before, at Grayson's insistence, Phat had reviewed intelligence, plans, and decisions exhaustively. Once breakfast was cleared and they were savoring the privilege of hot coffee, he said, “Jeff, from everything I can see, you've got it right. You've already shown you're a better general than I am, frankly, at least in this new world; I wouldn't have done nearly as well in the Yough campaign and I am really not sure I could have managed the Ohio Valley at all.”

“That wasn't a campaign, that was a series of massacres.”

“Sun-Tzu, Jeff. Best way to win is without fighting. You did so well they never had much of a chance to fight. And if they'd had as big an advantage over you, you know they'd have used it, and for what. Now, as for your attack up the Wabash, I stand by my assessment. If there's anything you're missing, it's beyond me to see it too. We both know there's no guarantee of success and no guarantee against surprise, but if things go wrong it is not going to be your fault, and if things go right it will be very fairly to your credit. If anything I say can boost your confidence, consider it said, really, with my whole heart.”

Grayson had nodded and extended his hand. Shaking it, Phat thought,
People think that weird little smirk of his is contempt or not taking them seriously, but he does that because he thinks he's a fraud and he's fooled us, and he's ashamed. I wish I'd realized that years ago.

It might have been a mutual dismissal, but instead the two men sat next to each other in armchairs, huddled close to the fire, holding their coffee cups surrounded by both hands, as if already out in the cold wet field.

Grayson finally said, “I don't know whether to thank you more for coming or more for making such a public show of support for everything I did and said. You've certainly been more than fair and supportive.”

“The country needs you to succeed, and you needed the support, and most importantly, as far as I can tell you have been right about everything.” Phat gulped at his coffee as if afraid it might be his last cup ever. “One thing that hasn't changed, and you'd think would have: we leaders live in an insulated world. Even in the worst of Daybreak, I don't think any top officials ever went hungry, or even were at risk of going hungry.”

“Do you think we should have? For solidarity with the common people, or whatever you would call it?” Grayson's expression was hard to read; he seemed to be seeing something a thousand miles beyond the fire. “I've given specific orders so that I'll never eat if any of my troops have to go hungry.”

“Like any sensible man,” Phat said. “Of course you do that. No, I was just thinking. The world came to an end, people were hungry and cold and scared, they turned to the institutions that they were used to counting on—armies, churches, businesses, the government—and
mostly
we all
did
rise to the occasion, some individuals screwed up, of course, but
mostly
the armies set about creating order and safety, and the businessmen tried to get the wheels turning again, and cops and preachers and leaders of every kind got onto the job as much as they could. But one thing's for sure: it has consistently been more comfortable to be one of these leaders people are counting on, than it has been to be one of the people counting on us. For good or ill we take care of ourselves first.”

Grayson nodded. “Remember airplanes? ‘If you are traveling with children, put your own oxygen mask on first'?”

“Unh-hunh. That's part of it. Another part is like my old man always said, it's good to be king.”

“Yeah, that too.” Grayson finished his coffee. “Most of my troops got up to big pots of venison-sausage and noodle soup, all the apple fritters they could eat, and beans-and-rabbit, which they've had so much that they have new lyrics for ‘Caissons,' a cheerful thing called ‘The Bunny-fart Boogie.' But as far as they were concerned, the soup made it a treat and the fritters were a trip to heaven. If O'Grainne and her wizards are putting the numbers together right, then if we get a decent harvest in this year, we'll finally be growing as much as we eat in a year.”

“So you think about that too,” Phat said.

Grayson shrugged. “Have to. Bet you it's Graham Weisbrod's last thought before he goes to bed and his first when he gets up, too. We're the three people most likely to be president, and our thoughts can't get too far away from food.” Grayson stood. “Well, at least we had coffee at breakfast.”

“And no dishes to wash.”

“Amen. Thank you for coming, and for the support.”

“We have differences, and we are not friends, but I have never doubted your competence.”

“Isn't that strange? I doubt it all the time. If you're willing, I'd like to go out to meet the others arm in arm, smiling, and looking like the best friends in the world. Really, nobody's ever been able to do much for my confidence, but perhaps we can do something for theirs.”

ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PALE BLUFF. 6:00 AM CENTRAL TIME. MONDAY, APRIL 20, 2026.

The warming sun was burning off the last mist, and the view down Chapman Avenue was lengthening by the moment from a gray void into the deep greens and frothy whites of the blossoming orchard. Carol May Kloster, hurrying back with reports from headquarters so that she could read them over breakfast and include the information in her morning report to Heather, stopped to admire the town where she had lived all her life. When people read and wrote history, would they ever just see the nice little town? There must have been people who knew Lexington or Gettysburg this way, for whom they were just “home.”

The thought made her feel like welcoming people here, and two young soldiers in the uniforms of Provi militia were shuffling up the street, looking bored and lonesome, so she stopped to say hello. One minute of pleasant conversation established that the scrawny redhead was Jimmy, the small dark East Indian boy was Neville, and they were both now farther from Pullman, Washington, than they had ever been in their lives.

Jimmy attempted to tell a tale of their particular courage and being selected for the mission based on that, but Neville made a disgusted face. “We were playing cards when we were supposed to be guarding the wall, and a Daybreaker prisoner got away because of that,” he explained. “And not just any old prisoner, either, some high-level guy they were actually holding on the Allie-train.”

“The Allie-train is—”

Jimmy smirked. “The train the First Lady takes around to different towns when she wants to be treated like she's important. She was in our part of the country to impress some tribes and get treated like a queen by the town governments. It kind of worked out embarrassing, and we got stuck holding the bag.”

“Because we were away from our posts and playing cards on duty,” Neville pointed out, stubbornly.

“Well, yeah, but you keep forgetting, we did real good last summer, especially during the siege, so there was kind of a balance—”

“Yeah, they decided not to drum us out and to only give us a light spanking,” Neville said, stubbornly sticking to the truth in a way Carol May was beginning to like. “Just enough so our chocolate and vanilla butts have some strawberry stripes that are never coming off, which eventually stopped hurting, but we realized we'd never be trusted again, and as long as we were in our local militia, we'd be those two assholes—'scuse me, ma'am, can you make that ‘jerks'? My mom reads that paper you write for, Mrs. Kloster—those two jerks that screwed up and let the high-level prisoner escape. So when there was a chance to volunteer to come out here and serve with General Grayson's combined army, it looked a lot better than spending the rest of our lives in the militia peeling potatoes and painting barracks. And here we are, all set to serve our country, save civilization, distinguish ourselves heroically, and meet girls.”

I suppose I could've found their equivalent at Normandy, or Shiloh, or for that matter at Jericho,
Carol May thought.

Half an hour later she was standing on the roadside where Delicious Road led out of town to the east, watching the army pass, with a painful sense that this was more history than she'd ever wanted to see.

“Aunt Carol,” Pauline said beside her, “is it wrong that all this is giving me the creeps?”

“War's never been nice, Pauline.”

“Not that so much, I mean, I kind of look at the weapons and I think, cool. Kill us some Daybreakers. Go to it, guys.” Two improvised caissons, hauling steel-pipe cannons, rolled by on iron-rimmed wheels. Pauline shifted her weight on her cane—though she was only twenty-two, a Daybreaker arrow had ensured she would need it for the rest of her life. “Maybe I just can't help remembering what happened to me over there, even though I thought I was the toughest little bitch that ever lived. Or what happened to Steve Ecco, and he really was strong and tough and brave, but you know, he never came back at all.”

The TNG Regular Army regiment going by in Rorschach jammies was carrying four American flags—the plain old fifty-star ones, not the Cross and Eagle TNG flag or the nineteen-star-double-circle of the PCG. Carol May put her hand over her heart; seeing that, so did Pauline.