The Last President (40 page)

“Hey,” James said, smiling, “I didn't recognize you with your head down over the machinery, Melissa. How are things for the new Watch Captain?”

“Considering I'd never been a school crossing guard before, and now I've got the Graveyard Company, I don't think I'm doing too badly,” she said. “Still a little surprised to be promoted, but at least the job is easier than it was, now that the general's got his wall built.” She hesitated a moment and then said, “The rumor is all through the crypto section here. Is it true? Is General Phat dead?”

“It's true,” James said. “Public announcement is probably tomorrow morning.”

Melissa was wiping her eyes. “Who's going to be president, then?”

“We're working on that right now,” Heather said.

“It's just, the general was such a down-to-earth guy. He walked to work, you know? We guarded him a lot, my squad and me. He knew our names, and he asked us to show up at City Council to put the pressure on to get us the city wall built, and . . . well, he was just good for the place. I know we'd've been losing him to Springfield, anyway, but I'm sorry to see him go. They say he was killed at Pale Bluff?”

“Probably. We don't know all the details. Can you encourage your co-workers not to say too much till it's official?”

“I can try. Most of'em are even bigger blabbermouths than me.” She looked at her carefully restored old railroad watch, and said, “Ninety seconds.”

Norm McIntyre sounded old and tired even through the wails and clicks of the encryptor. “So Shorty Phat is gone, and so is Jeff Grayson. I always thought I was lucky to be managing people who were better at their jobs than I was.” He coughed as if fighting for air.

“General Phat spoke highly of you,” Heather said, only lying slightly.

“I was a good administrator. I could get stuff to them when they asked. They were the fighters, and a general should fight.” He sighed. “You heard that they're going to purge Graham's cabinet while Allie's out of action? Our little Congress up here was a lapdog till now, but they see a chance to get rid of everyone who did anything at the national level, and make the Congress of the PCG something more like the Tacoma Sanitation District Board, which is where most of these guys should be. And I guess I'll probably just let them, there just doesn't seem to be any point in it any more.” No mistaking the whine in his voice; this was a man who wanted things to be over.

James and Heather looked at each other, and Heather said, “General, there's a fact that you may or may not be aware of, and something we need you to do for the country because of it. The fact is, you are the President of the United States. James, if you'll explain—”

Understanding did not make McIntyre any happier. He pointed out that he had had a chance to put matters right, right after the superbombs, and had not taken the chance. “Heather, if you really need me to, I'm willing to be the last President, like the last guy in a game of hot potato who gets caught holding it, that's fine. Kerensky, Pu Yi, and the Kaiser all found something to do with their time, and nobody bothered them because they clearly weren't going to do anything. But you're decades younger than I am, and the type that does things. Nobody'll leave you alone. Are you sure you wouldn't rather leave the whole mess in my hands?”

Heather sat very quietly for a long time before she said, “No, actually, I'm not sure. But I think I would rather have tried than not.”

They made the arrangements quickly; as far as they knew, the verbal appointment was enough, but they had him arrange for an encrypted Morse transmission, and he promised to handwrite a letter with the same text, dated today, and send that along as well, as soon as there was a train or plane headed for Pueblo.

ABOUT THE SAME TIME. RUINS OF PALE BLUFF. 3:00 PM CENTRAL TIME. MONDAY, MAY 11, 2026.

“It's a good thing you're not worried about sanitation,” Bernstein said, gesturing at the corpse of General Phat, which lay on its back, stripped naked, with flies crawling in a dense black wad like a shower cap covering the missing top of the general's head.

“Oh, I am worried about sanitation. Worried as can be. I want to make sure it's bad, so bad that this little tight-ass all-American pull-together-and-bring-back-the-old-world town, this little boil on God's ass, ain't coming back, ever. Reminds me too much of where I came from, you know? Places like this are the seeds of that whole plaztatic thing, and even if I'm not a dirty hippie asshole like
some
Daybreak people”—he looked pointedly at Glad Ocean, but she had her eyes closed and was humming, hands folded in the prayer position in front of her—“I don't want that old world back either. That's why we had to make sure the orchards burned, and before we go we'll get every house going good, that's why we've been stuffing bodies down the wells, and leaving them out arranged to upset their dumbass soldiers when they get here.”

“Did Nathanson tell you about their old Town Hall? Rows and rows of heads on the tables in their meeting hall, bodies in a pile leaned up against the door, and then they climbed out the window to leave it that way. First soldier to open that door, avalanche of bodies without heads, and when they get through that, all the heads are facing the door.”

“Nice work.”

Glad Ocean opened her eyes and nodded enthusiastically. The slim, older woman was a senior shaman. Her eight-foot spirit stick was encrusted with so many decorations that she had a slave carry it for her most of the time. She was supposed to be Robert's liaison to the Daybreaker leadership, to the tribes who had come with him, and to the moon gun, which she insisted on calling the Guardian on the Moon and referring to as “he.” “Absolutely right,” she said. “We can't let the plaztatic world have places to grow back. I'm so glad you're being thorough here, Lord Robert.”

He nodded slightly, just a slight dip of the head, which, as usual, she took for agreement. Even though Glad Ocean was old and scrawny, nothing like the hot chick that Daybreak had sent him to play with before, he thought about that one every time Glad Ocean favored him with her smug little tight-ass morally-correct smile.
You have something in common with Pale Bluff,
he thought at her.
You are completely in my power. The only difference is, Pale Bluff has already found out what that means. But I'm still looking forward to you finding out.

He turned back to Nathanson and Bernstein and said, “Don't call anyone away from the party right now. I know they're still finding stuff and still finding dumbshits who are trying to hide or sneak away, and they'll want to have time to play with all the new toys and pull out all the good parts before they burn it all. But around sundown, we're having a little bit of . . . oh, I guess you'd call it a bonfire here tonight.” He pointed down at the corpse at his feet. “Tar the general here the way we did Ecco's body last year, and nail it to a nice tall post. We'll start with a little ceremony raising it up. You realized this was the last guy that really might have been the president? They are
so fucked
.”

ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PUEBLO. 2:15 PM MOUNTAIN TIME. MONDAY, MAY 11, 2026.

“Wish we'd had a Federal judge living here, at least,” Heather said. “But James assures me that Calvin Coolidge took the oath from a Vermont notary public, and it counted. Let's get this done.”

Michelle Trevor had been a Colorado Court of Appeals judge back before; her term had not expired, but the court hadn't met since Daybreak day. Nowadays she worked in the general labor pool (usually cooking in the town mess hall), moonlighted as a waitress at Dell's Brew, and taught history in the night school. Patrick had managed to locate her within fifteen minutes of James's thinking of her, and she'd come over to the Old Pueblo Courthouse as soon as she had finished cubing a large elk steak and washed her hands. She seemed to be mildly amused. “Are you sure you don't want me to make you the Pope, crown you queen of France, and marry you to somebody, as long as I already came over here?”

“Oh, I guess President is enough for one day,” Heather said. “You're the history teacher. What do we need to make this legal?”

“Three witnesses is a good number,” she said. “It's better if they're public officials. That's covered with James, Leslie, and Dr. Odawa. There's no rule against a witness being a minor, so Patrick and Ntale, you count too, and Leo might, though he'd have a heck of a time giving testimony. Wonder, I'm afraid this country does not extend full civil rights to dogs yet.”

Wonder wagged his tail slightly. “He's not big on irony,” Leslie said.

“Oh, well. Anyway, the text of the oath is prescribed in the Constitution, which I have here. The Bible is traditional, not required, but I think it's a good idea given the politics of the southeastern part of the country. As for my authority, as you said, I'm at least a couple jumps up from a notary public. Coolidge retook the oath from the Chief Justice, on the sly, when he got back to Washington, just in case there was any question, but there never was. I guess you could do the same if you're ever around a Federal judge. And that, my friends, should cover all the issues. Shall we get back to swearing in the President?”

“Sure.”

Heather followed the instructions and said the words. Afterward, she said, “You know, that's probably the first all-hugging inauguration.”

“I shook your hand,” James pointed out.

“History is always open to revision,” Judge Michelle said. “Give him a good hug before we go, Heather. And I do have to go; I have an afternoon shift at Dell's and papers to grade.”

30 MINUTES LATER. AUSTIN, TEXAS. 4:15 PM CENTRAL TIME. MONDAY, MAY 11, 2026.

Big cumulus clouds piled across the deep blue Texas sky, and Governor Faaj Tong-George read faster than he would have liked, afraid that there might be rain before the end of the ceremony. When he read fast, he could sound too much Kennedy School, where he had been a professor, and not enough Brownsville, where he had grown up, and that could be very bad for re-election.

Yet though his words were coming out softer and faster than he intended, the crowd was still cheering wildly at each point. When he began his paragraph about the pride every Texan felt in the TexICs and pain of their irreparable loss, the cheering became so heated that he had to start that part again. Without microphones or loudspeakers to quiet the crowd, he finally had to ask them to keep it down so he could finish. At last, he went on:

. . . yet the loss of so many of our most valued citizens of the Texas Independent Cavalry might have been a sacrifice we would willingly have made for the larger nation, and even now we must remember and honor that they died in the hope of saving the United States of America. But remembrance and honor are a debt to the past, and the graver and more serious debt is the one we owe to our children. We cannot ignore that the states, agencies, and powers seeking a Restored Republic, however noble their cause, however unrelenting and brave their efforts, have suffered a series of grievous defeats from which they cannot be expected to recover.

We cannot now, or in any reasonably near future, responsibly place our trust in a power so broken and so defective, when our country and our children's lives depend upon it. Having therefore concluded that our security is best entrusted to our own hands, with affection for our former brethren of the United States, with renewed effort against our shared enemies, but without reservation, condition, or any offer, explicit or implicit, of reconciliation, we hereby declare that the Union between the State of Texas and the United States of America is dissolved, and of a right ought to be, and we resume our full and equal place among the nations of mankind.

He still wasn't sure how much the crowd heard, or cared whether they heard, over the rising roar of their own cheering.

At the visible end of the speech, they gave up all restraint and cheered madly for what the words did, whether or not they knew what they said.

He put his speech text carefully into its leatherbound folder. His aides were to take it to a frame shop immediately, and within a few days it would hang next to the first Texas Declaration of Independence, in the Capitol building behind him.
Funny. Weird. Hunh. There'll never be a recording of this; kids in school won't complain that they can't understand my old- fashioned accent or make fun of my weird olden-days clothing.

Governor Faaj nodded at the honor guard, which hauled down the Temper Cross and Eagle and the Provi nineteen-star double-circle Stars and Stripes from the two flanking poles where they had been flying. As soon as they were down, the Lone Star flags went up, and the cheering became deafening.

Faaj felt an ocean of sadness surge within him when he nodded again, and the crew pulled down the old fifty-star flag from the high center pole.
Not quite 250 years. Missed by less than two months.

Something of that feeling must have been there in the crowd. There had been cries of “Shame!” from some demonstrators, and another bunch had been singing “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead” and still another group was bellowing a Carlene Redbone hit from a few years ago, “Don't Let That Door Hit Your Ass,” and here and there people were trying to start up “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “The Eyes of Texas” but being drowned out by their neighbors. One very old man in the front row, tears streaming down his face, was trying to sing “You're a Grand Old Flag” but couldn't seem to recall it past the first couple of lines, and kept starting over and over.

In different parts of the crowd, people were enthusiastically waving the Stars and Bars, the rattlesnake, the pine tree, and one lone Jolly Roger.

But when the old flag had descended a couple of feet, the crowd plunged into a hush, like the moment when a casket is lowered into the grave, and you could hear the creaking of the pulleys as it came down. In the rising wind of the coming storm, it snapped and rippled as if it were trying, one more time, to get back into another fight.