The Last President (27 page)

“I'm even hungry.”

“I've got some bread and cheese left, let's try you on a little of that and see if you hang onto it.”

Roger seemed to have no problem with food, other than getting enough of it; when he had eaten, he said, “Freddie, my leg hurts but not too bad. Why don't you tighten up your splint, and see if I can maybe move with a crutch or something?”

A little experimenting showed that Roger could hop with a driftwood board under his arm and his leg held mostly out in front of him, but climbing back to the bridge looked difficult even with Freddie's help, and it didn't seem likely he could travel either far or fast on his own.

“Don't want to start moving till I know where we're going,” Freddie said, “and I don't. No idea where the war is now, and it can't be going well. That black smoke coming up from Lafayette seems more like something that would be happening if
they
were winning than if
we
were.”

“Maybe you should leave me here for a while and take a look over toward Prophetstown, even see if you can get to the battlefield. There might be survivors we could link up with, and I'm fine with water and a rifle right in reach, and can move myself around a little if I need to change where I'm hiding or find another angle. You can leave me a couple hours.”

Freddie nodded. “Guess you're right.” He made sure Roger was as comfortable as possible, and said, “Hey, thanks for not telling me to just abandon you here and go on without you.”

Roger snorted. “Thanks for not just deciding to, bro.”

ABOUT THE SAME TIME. RUINS OF LAFAYETTE. 9:00 AM EASTERN TIME. TUESDAY, MAY 5, 2026.

Jenny thought,
These people look sick and worried. Bet I do too.
“All right,” she said, “my only authority for calling this meeting is that I was here and everyone else was dead. Anything I ordered you to do that was obviously wrong, I certainly hope you did something else instead. Who's the senior officer here?”

Everyone looked nervously at the two surviving captains. Harris, his face still powder-stained and his shirt blood-spattered, said, “Probably me. I don't want the job.”

“No one here does.” She remembered that back before, Harris had been a state legislator in Idaho, and had joined the National Guard so he could call himself a veteran if he ran for Congress. “But someone's got to do it and your name's at the top of the list.”

He rubbed his face. “I can put myself on the sick list and declare I'm not fit to command.”

“If you would do that,” she said, “I'm sure you're not.”
Wow, way to win him over Jenny,
she thought, then decided,
oh, what the hell, it's true.

Podlewski, the other captain, said, “Ma'am, back before I was a township constable; I've never been—”

“I understand that.
My
previous job was political wife. But we are in the middle of a battle, and we owe it to the troops that trust us to—”

Something roared outside. Metal screamed against bricks.

“What the Jesus fucking hell was that?” Jenny said, shocked at how level her voice was. They all looked stunned, and she said, “Never mind. Back to your units,
now
. Hold the line or if it's broken close it up and retake it. Send me a situation report as soon as you can. Now! Move!”

They ran out of the office, leaving her alone with her father, who looked at her with an expression of polite, puzzled horror. “You said . . .”

“If they are going to force me to be a soldier, Daddy, I am going to fucking talk like one. I'm just lucky I have the benefit of a modern college education so I already know how.” She took two steps toward her father, and looked around the room at the still blood-spattered maps and charts, where she had been marking known positions and recording that she was apparently out of contact with all the President's Own Rangers, the TexICs, her scouts, and one whole battalion of the Missouri militia. “Daddy,” she said, “I am so far out of my place. But I haven't given up, and those officers—”

“They were all the rotten branches, Jenny. Daybreak killed all the worthwhile senior officers. Daybreak
knew
. I don't know the army, but I know people and I know administration. Daybreak drew a quality line through the organizational chart and cut off everyone above—”

A man burst in. She read his shirt and realized with relief that she had a real, not post-Daybreak militia, second lieutenant here. He started to salute, shook his head as if to clear the impulse, and said, “Ma'am, the Daybreakers have attacked our whole western line with what's basically a one-shot musket. Piece of pipe with gunpowder at the closed end, jammed down with ball bearings or fishing weights. They light it with a fuse. It's a shitty weapon but our men were used to those lame little bows and thrown rocks, and weren't properly under cover. First volley carried off a lot of our people, lots of serious wounds, and while everyone was screaming and thrashing, the tribals charged. Luckily we had two backup companies in rear enfilade, where you put them, and they moved in, held off the human wave, and we're okay, but we're pretty bashed up. Same report applies all along the western side of camp. I sent runners all around to warn the other sides of the camp.”

“Thank you,” she said. “And forgive me, you're Lieutenant—”

“Marprelate, ma'am, Calvin Marprelate, used to be of Tenth Mountain back before, spent most of my time after Daybreak as the TNG military liaison for Pale Bluff, long story short your husband assigned me for liaison to the Fourth Washington Militia. With your permission, no one else appears to be willing to do the job, so I'm assuming command.”

“You don't need my permission and I'm delighted,” she said.

He nodded, and shouted, “Messenger!” Two quick sentences sent the messenger galloping off to bring in a platoon to guard headquarters. He turned back to Jenny and her father. “You two, and Chris Manckiewicz when they bring him in—”

“I'm here,” Chris said, bustling in, still tying back his shoulder-length hair and finger-combing his bushy beard. “I was able to pry open a dormer window on one of the livestock barns and get a view up the river. It's solid boats and rafts as far as I can see. At least five, maybe ten times as many tribals as General Grayson expected. I take it you're acting CO, Lieutenant Marprelate?”

“For want of anyone else. Did you get a look toward the stretch of road we've been using for an airfield?”

“Hiatt Drive. Yeah, it's now way outside our lines, the eastern side of the fairgrounds was pretty well overrun before they stopped them at a line of barns, so you've got a big stretch of chain-link fence in the middle of the Daybreakers between you and the runway. Hiatt Drive is like everything else for half a mile around, packed with Daybreakers—”

Marprelate barked again. “Messenger! Word to all units not on the line: I need a platoon of volunteers to retake the landing field.”

The messenger saluted and ran out.

To Jenny, Chris, and the Reverend Whilmire, he said, “I'm going to lead that sortie personally. We can't lose our advantage in having command of the air.”

“But we don't have to have that landing field,” Chris pointed out, “she can fly out of Terre Haute for now, and heliograph to us—”

“That'll be all. While I'm gone, reports will be coming in. Prepare me a set of options for a breakout and a counterattack, and a situation summary.” He strode decisively from the room.

Chris said, very quietly, “I don't know whether I'm more afraid that he's doing this because he didn't listen to my report and he's a fool, or because I'm a major newspaper publisher and he's a show-off.”

“Quite a choice,” Jenny said. “Let's get to work on that situation summary. If Marprelate comes back, he'll want it, and if he doesn't somebody will, even if it's me again.”

ABOUT THE SAME TIME. TIPPECANOE BATTLE GROUND, WABASH. 11:00 AM EASTERN TIME. TUESDAY, MAY 5, 2026.

Freddie Pranger had seen the pile of dead children in the McDonald's by Deer Creek Run. He'd seen the dozen bodies hanging from the bridge by Pierce. He'd found the barely covered pile of newborns in the ravine below Castle Greenwood.

This wasn't worse, objectively, he told himself. Just another bad thing as they tried to restore civilization.

But more of this pile were people he knew.

It looked like Goncalves and the President's Own Rangers must have taken the visitor center and held it for a while. Dead Rangers lay by every window, hole, and door, some hacked by blades, a few with arrows protruding, some with big holes in their backs.

Freddie knelt, looked, turned the body over, and swore. No mistaking the small, almost round entry wound and the exit wound you could put a fist into; it had been a slug from a heavy firearm. Apparently the Daybreakers were willing to compromise their religious objections to Mister Gun.

Good sweet jesus, if the tribals surprised the army with
guns
—

Even if the army had more and better guns, that first shock after almost a year of never having to face anything worse than those lame-ass homemade wooden bows, and those silly little-David rock-and-slings, to be hit with musket volleys—just before the human waves hit—
His heart felt cold and heavy. He would have to push Roger—

Again, he froze: there in the center of the improvised fort, a circle of bodies splayed outward to the compass points from the grim hedge of head-topped spears at the center. Walking forward, he recognized Goncalves and some others.

They leave us their dead because we want life to go on, so we have to bury or burn them. The tribals don't want life to go on, so to them, usually these corpses are just a bioweapon against us, or a burden we have to bear. But these bodies meant . . . well, shit, I can't leave them this way.

Pranger wasn't normally a praying man; alone in the forest he often felt a presence in the loving silence, but seldom saw any reason to spoil that with yakking.

Nevertheless, when he gently lifted Goncalves's head by the chin and occiput, letting the blood-matted gray beard stick to his palms like a rag from a butcher's table, he said, “I'm sorry,” and when he set the head carefully beside the big man's corpse, he murmured, “Be at peace” to Goncalves and added “Take care of him,” to the presence.

As he placed the last head by the last body, he said, “Help me get this right, Lord, they deserve—”

“Shit,” a voice said.

Freddie drew his hatchet and wheeled. No one. Nothing moved.

He turned slowly around, scanning methodically. Among one pile of bodies, an arm flopped away from a face. A Daybreaker? The face was tattooed in a domino mask joined to a spiderweb pattern—

But the torn, bloody shirt was fringed, with three stripes on the sleeve, and the shoulder patch was a star behind crossed lances: a TexIC. He knelt by the young man. “Scout Freddie Pranger, RRC, attached to Army of the Wabash. You look like you could use some help.”

“All I can get, Scout Pranger. I'm Dave McWaine, Sergeant, Texas Independent Cavalry.” Something about the tautness of McWaine's brownish-bronze skin, or his innocent, stunned expression, implied he wasn't more than twenty. His deep black hair was bound in a single blood-soaked braid. He rolled over, looking around. “Shit, not again. This
can't
be happening
twice
.”

“Water?” Freddie asked, sticking to practicalities. “No abdominal wounds?”

“Yes water, no ab wounds, just the worst headache in the history of everything.”

Freddie gave the young man his bottle. “I just filled it at the pump, there's plenty.” He let McWaine drink while he checked for broken bones and for wounds he might not be feeling yet.

Bad contusions, but no deep wounds. That gash across his scalp probably bled so bad they didn't bother to make sure he was dead. With those dark eyes I can't see his pupils well enough to check for a concussion.

“I gotta get back to camp sometime soon and I already have another wounded guy to take with me. Can you walk?”

The TexIC nodded. “I'm banged up, but not broke nowhere.”

“My other wounded man is a scout lying under a bridge with a broken leg a couple miles from here. Come with me, and tell me your story on the way.

“I don't know if nobody gonna believe me.” The young man's accent was strange, a hint of border-state south like Pranger's own, but slightly flattened and guttural.

“Probably I will, if it's true.”

“True as death, Mister Pranger. True as death.”

Freddie approved of the way Dave McWaine told his story while looking around constantly, never letting his voice rise in volume, pausing frequently for them both to listen. Before they reached the bridge, Freddie had heard it all.

• • • 

I'm an enrolled Tonkawa; my mom made sure I'as enrolled. But she didn't get along too well with her folks, and I didn't exactly have a dad except biologically, so I didn't grow up near any other Tonkawas, and the little bit that Mom remembered, she remembered all kinda-sorta and scrambled up. On my own later, I learned some of that tribal ways stuff off Goo-22 and Wikimondo on the Internet, but I didn't always know what I'as reading.

Like, first time I got sent up to Corsicana, I had a guy do this tattoo on my face here. They said it was self-mutilating behavior and gave me another two months; I just thought I'as being traditional Tonkawa 'cause there was this thing on a web page about how they had lots of tattoos all over their upper body and face. I didn't even
think
that the tattoo might be, you know, some certain exact thing, or that maybe somebody besides you decided what you should wear, or that maybe they didn't all do that anymore. It was right there on the Internet, you know?