The Last President (8 page)

“‘Followed the sea' is right, but that should be something like ‘wasn't just' or ‘wasn't merely.'”

“Sailing
wasn't merely
a hobby to my family. I like ‘merely.' We all followed the sea. We followed it right out of Odessa—you live in Odessa, you figure out real young,
out
is the direction you want to go. And now I'm away from my family. That Captain Halleck, he's strict, right?”

“‘Strict' is the word.”

“But he don't—
doesn't
—hit and he says what it's about. How I know I'm not with my family, eh? I was surprised my old man, he said, go with my blessing. Like he liked me.”

Whorf thought,
If I don't change the subject away from family I'm going to be homesick.
He checked his pocket watch. “We should probably start walking. Some policeman might decide he doesn't care about our uniforms, and decide to notice we don't have a Chapel Pass.”

“Right.” Ihor rose and gazed at the scattered crumbs that were all that was left of the pizza. “The tide'll turn in three hours, and I don't think the Captain will want to bail us out of the slutter.”

“The slut—oh, the
slammer
. I can sure tell where
your
mind is, dude. You
wish
they'd throw us in the slutter.” That was the only area of endeavor valued by young men in which Whorf felt superior to Ihor.

Ihor laughed. “If they were going to do
that
, they should've did it—should have
done
it first thing this week so we'd have time to enjoy it. Anyhow, I don't know English, but I do know tides, and it's time to go, eh?”

The white ship gleamed at the far end of the street like the future itself. “With you all the way.”

3 DAYS LATER. PUEBLO. 12:15 PM MOUNTAIN TIME. THURSDAY, JANUARY 22, 2026.

Back before, Johanna Schrenck had run a diner in downtown Pueblo for twenty years, sold it when her husband retired, and spent ten years working on a fresh-game cookbook by cooking all the things her husband caught or shot. But when the modern world had stopped working, so had Kurt Schrenck's pacemaker.

Johanna had come home from the funeral, hauled up the old hand tools from the basement, paid orphaned kids with food and worked harder than any of them, and in a few weeks had converted her big old house back to a wood-fired kitchen, gravity coal furnace, and candle sconces. Just after the first EMP had destroyed the tech center at Pittsburgh, she had opened Johanna's What There Is.

Since the Reconstruction Research Center had opened half a mile away, “this old frame house has hosted a lot of history,” Heather remarked as she sat down to dinner with James Hendrix and Lyndon Phat. “Today what there is, is elk stroganoff and trout cakes on polenta.”

James beamed. “History and current events in one convenient lunch—”

“Oh, god, you brought the critic,” Johanna said, stopping at their table; she generally waited the exclusive upstairs back room herself.

James protested. “I've never said—”

“You think loudly. When I finally give you what you deserve, your last thoughts will be ‘needs more coriander to balance the strychnine.' First course today is raccoon bisque, coming up.” She hurried away.

“Listen.” Phat held up a palm. Rumble and clatter in the distance. “They started knocking down old buildings for the wall this morning. In a few weeks, I'll be able to go to bed knowing ten guys on horses can't ride in, shoot the watch, and throw a bomb through my window.”

“Except the Daybreakers don't like horses or guns,” Heather said.

“It's not just Daybreakers. Grayson might send someone; he assassinated poor old Cam Nguyen-Peters. I certainly would not put it past Allie Sok Banh. And there are rich men here in Pueblo angry about where I put the wall.”

“But they're
inside
the wall—”

“Once the wall is built, it'll be obvious if it's an inside job. And a rich man without a fall guy is a cowardly thing indeed, as Thucydides could tell you.”

Heather laughed. “You and Graham Weisbrod would have understood each other. He wanted all us policy wonks to be able to debate the tax code by teasing out the wisdom in something Marcus Aurelius said to Socrates—”

“Ouch,” James said.

“What?”

“Marcus Aurelius lived about as long after Socrates as we do after Columbus.”

“Whatever. I'm still thinking about what you guys said about the ancient rhythm coming back. I liked it better when the past was history.”

Phat seemed to be listening to a faint, far away voice, perhaps from the distant mountains. “Maybe the past still is history, but the great joke on all of us is that it is, maybe, not the history it was before.”

4 DAYS LATER. CASTLE EARTHSTONE (NEAR THE FORMER TOWNS OF PALESTINE AND WARSAW, KOSCIUSKO COUNTY, INDIANA). 11:30 AM LOCAL SOLAR. MONDAY, JANUARY 26, 2026.

Robert had to love it: this time, Daybreak had sent him a chick. The first Council of Daybreak herald, just before Christmas, had been a rude young guy with a bushy beard who came in giving orders like a highway cop ticketing your expired plate. The second herald, a couple weeks ago, had looked and dressed like Gandalf in the movies. And old Karl, who had founded this place, had
looked like fuckin' Santy Claus
.
Wonder why Daybreak hates razors?

But Daybreak-Enchantress-Chickie's red-blonde hair, worn long and loose, looked clean and unratty. The soft white dress underneath her hooded cloak was clean and form-fitting.
And my god, that's a
rack
. Well, let's get the talking part done and move on to the fun part.

They stood facing her at the outer gate of Castle Earthstone, where the barbed wire came up to a spline-curve wooden arch festooned with skulls, capped with a sign:

CASTLE EARTHSTONE
BLESS DAYBREAK
SAVE MOTHER GAIA

Robert was flanked by Bernstein, his chief steward, and Nathanson, who commanded his soldiers; behind them was an honor guard of six soldiers.

She nodded in a snotty who-are-you-anyway fashion that set his teeth on edge, even before she asked, “You are Robert Cheranko?”

“I am Lord Robert of Castle Earthstone. You may call me Lord Robert. What is your name and what is your business?” His thoughts added,
And why don't you fuckin' mind it?

“The Council of Daybreak has charged me with a mission of grave import,” she said. “Word has reached even to the Guardian on the Moon that we have heard nothing from this Castle, Mister Cheranko—”

“Lord Robert,” he said.

There was a long pause. “Lord Robert, then.” She drew a breath and returned to her memorized text. “Two missions have been sent, and neither has returned. We on the Council of Daybreak have heard strange stories since the death of Lord Karl, and so I am sent to demand”—she saw him touch his belt knife—“uh, to ask, uh, Lord Robert to inform us—”

“Walk into the Castle with me,” he said. Carefully not looking to see if she followed, he turned and walked. A moment later, flustered, pretending she hadn't just run to catch up with him, she was walking beside him.

He glanced sideways.
Yeah, make'em bounce, baby.
He wondered how Daybreak decided who to send out. First that bush-hippie cop, then that boogie-boogie wizard man, now this big-tits spirit girl.
I guess they tried discipline, then spookiness, and now what? Sweet mama nature?

He smiled, and saw her notice and relax slightly.
Wait till you find out.

When the bushy-bearded cop type had started right off giving orders, and Robert had told him to shut up, he'd raised his spirit stick and spoken some gibberish, and all of Robert's men had had some kind of spaz attack.

But not Robert. He just threw a straight, hard punch, knocked the herald down, jumped on him, pulled his knife, and sliced the man's carotid. By the time Robert's deputies came out of their spaz attacks, he'd already picked out where to display the herald's head.

Not long after, one of his scouts had brought back a brochure by some Pueblo guy named James Hendrix,
A procedure for the negation of Daybreak-originated deep suggestions
, which apparently they were using in the Provi and Temper states.

He made Bernstein, Nathanson, and the rest of his inner circle practice the resisting-Daybreak tricks daily. By the time old Gandalf came along, and launched into the religious-y spiritualisticalish intoning bullshit like he was going to fucking change Robert into a fucking frog, Robert just said, “Fuck Daybreak, it's a load of shit.” The herald's eyes opened in surprise, the two men escorting him reached for weapons, but Robert's men had already been on them with knives and hatchets.

He really wanted to see how this one would go.

It went
great
. When Little Miss Shamaness saw the heads of the previous heralds on posts by Robert's private drinking patio, she raised the spirit stick, but Robert plucked it from her hand and broke it over his knee. She came out of her seizure nearly mindless, the way the more severe Daybreakers tended to, and lay quietly weeping on the table while they cut her robe off.

When everyone had finished, Robert told his officers, “Give her a blanket and some moccasins and put her out on the road.”

Nathanson looked startled. “We gonna let her go?”

“Yeah.” To the shamaness, Robert said, “Go back to the Council, and tell them what we did to you and what we did to the ones before you. Tell them Lord Robert rules at Castle Earthstone, and Daybreak don't say he do or he don't.” He grabbed her face and pointed it toward himself. “Repeat.”

She did, voice low, eyes shut.

At the gate, when she didn't begin to walk right away, he hit her ass with his walking stick. That got her going; she ran up the mud-and-snow trail, blanket and hair streaming behind her pale nakedness, like a deer that feels the hounds' breath on its flanks.

“Why'd you let her go?” Bernstein asked.

“Do you think
any
of us will ever be forgiven, or allowed to come back into Daybreak, after that?” Robert asked. “Will Daybreak ever stop trying to catch us and kill us?”

Bernstein shuddered. “God, never.”

“Then we're all in it together, ain't we, for good, now?” Robert clapped the shorter, older man around the shoulders. “Walk with me. We have things to talk about.”

3 DAYS LATER. SOUTH OF MIAMI. 6:00 AM EASTERN TIME. THURSDAY, JANUARY 29, 2026.

“Steady, Whorf, but stay alert. The charts are pretty near worthless from Key Biscayne south,” Captain Halleck said. He was comparing the air photo prints taken by the very last reconnaissance planes from USS
Bush
, two months before, with the old paper charts.

At the helm, Whorf was bringing
Discovery
into Biscayne Bay on the last of the high tide, letting it carry them in so that later the receding tide could help pull them back out. Sounding lines brought up so much muck and junk that all they really knew was that about thirty feet below them, thick muddy water became thin watery mud.

Morning wore on; when the wind shifted, the stench from the land was overpowering. Jorge relieved Whorf at eight. Not quite ready for his bunk, he went forward to see what the scientists were doing. Lisa Reyes, from Stone Lab, was fiddling with a microscope, the sort of thing that might have been a toy for a brainy eight-year-old a few decades ago. Satisfied with the light the mirror sent through the slide, she looked up, shoving stray black curls back under her bandanna. “Take a look, Whorf, and please draw.” She opened her record pad beside the microscope.

Whorf stretched his shoulder, a little stiff from four hours at the wheel, and flexed his hand. He bent carefully to look without disturbing anything; one eye saw through the scope and the other saw the page. He barely had to compensate for the rise and fall of the gentle sea. Quickly, he copied the dots, whorls, smears, and blobs his left eye saw onto the pad his right eye saw.

“Beautiful,” she said, as he finished. “Now, do you know what it's a picture of?”

“It's better if I don't think of words while I draw. But that looks like—hunh. Are those E. coli?”

“Well, their ancestors were. I suspect Daybreak used them because they could pass through the human gut and spread rapidly.” She tapped the page. “And these?”

“A filament of pennate diatoms, right?”

“Right. I'm calling them
Phaeodactylum morticomedentis incognans
. I think I have the genus right—it's pretty similar, anyway, to the Phaeodactylum that genetic engineers had been working with for a long time, so there would have been easily available commercial versions for Daybreak to modify. The species name just means ‘unknown dead-stuff-eater.' The one thing we've established in the tanks so far is that coral love them, and that at least partly solves the mystery of what's not here.”

Whorf asked, “What's
not
here?”

“Yeah. Right over the horizon, we have a few million decaying bodies, plus hundreds of square miles of fertilized lawns and burned real estate, plus all those artificial materials that decayed—tires and gasoline, plastics and nylon, all that lawn furniture and all the polyester on the old people. All those nutrients lying out in the rain on soft, shifting soil must have washed down here. Biscayne Bay should be pretty much a brackish sewage lagoon, crawling with conventional decay bacteria and buried under algal blooms. Instead, those nutrients are being snaffled up by these diatoms that fast-track it into coral.”

“You think Daybreak meant to do that?”

“Well, it sure looks like in the next thousand years, Florida is going to get much bigger, as all those dead people and their stuff turn into coral reefs. Doesn't that sound like a Daybreaker program?”

Whorf looked out over the barely-moving green sea. The overpowering reek brought home the realization that there was a thousand-square-mile mausoleum just over the horizon. Almost, he could imagine bony hands reaching out from the land, empty skulls staring out to sea and looking for him. “You sound like you approve.”