Directive 51

by John Barnes

  Just as the sun was coming up, he turned, hugged her, and said, “I think I can sleep now. Let’s go inside.”

  “What do you think about while you’re watching the sky?” she asked, as they dragged their blankets and pillows back into the house.

  “Same as always. That the stars are far away and don’t seem to be interested in us. That there’s got to be a better way than killing people. And that I’m glad I’ve got you and Harris, Chloe, and Bryan. Sometime after the sun comes up, it always makes enough sense for me to sleep.”

  “Yeah. I guess I can see how that would work.”

  They didn’t bother making the bed; they just stretched out and dragged the blankets, still damp from the yard, over themselves, and kept warm by holding each other.

  ABOUT THE SAME TIME. ON US 64. A LITTLE EAST OF TRES PIEDRAS. NEW MEXICO. 6:50 A.M. MST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.

  The trucker had been working his satellite two-way connections, and Jason had been checking the Internet, and all the news was bad. “Buddy,” the trucker said, “I hate to tell a man what to do but if I was you I’d get a haircut and shave real soon.”

  “Planning on it,” Jason said.

  All over the countrythere were reports of vigilante actions;people discovered their cars were dead, their kitchens were not working, the food in their refrigerators was spoiling—in short, that everything was going wrong—and remembered the long-haired guy down the street who nagged them about recycling, or the girl in the long skirt at the coffeehouse who always gave them a little lecture about using sugar instead of organic honey in their morning latte. People like to have someone to be angry with when there are too many small annoyances in life, and the first day of Daybreak comprised myriad small annoyances for which the Daybreakers really were responsible. Most of the people they were catching were not Daybreakers, but punching out the sanctimonious Green neighbor, or humiliating the preachy coworker, were pleasures not to be missed on a day so full of irritation.

  “Hey,” the trucker said, and turned up the volume.

  The news from Tres Piedras was that the local people had thought they had found a nest of Daybreakers outside town, and the sheriff had declared that he didn’t have the resources to deal with the situation. There weren’t many details but a trucker driving through town had said he’d seen a mob with guns heading up the hill.

  Jason knew he must look sick, but he hoped it would look like he was shocked at the news of violence rather than terrified for his friends and Beth. Kindly, the trucker said, “Buddy, if you want, you can stay in the truck—I’m going right through and we’ll go all the way to Phoenix if the tires hold. Or if you really have to be there, maybe we should let you out someplace where you can walk?”

  “I know a trailhead on the highway near town,” Jason said, feeling his mouth moving as if it belonged to someone else. “You can drop me there, and I can walk in, no prob, there’s a trail right to the public park.” But I’ll take the one that goes uphill. Five and a half miles and it’s kind of a climb to the commune, but maybe I won’t be too late.

  ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. RATON. NEW MEXICO. 7:20 A.M. MST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.

  Tiff was shaking him. “Honey, you gotta wake up, I’m sorry, it’s Teddy.”

  Zach sat up in bed. “What’s wrong?”

  “His asthma’s worse than I’ve ever heard it, and the inhaler—” She held it out to him; the plastic cartridge had ruptured; it stank like sour milk. “All our crates of them, they’re all bursting and they all smell wrong—”

  “That biote wasn’t one of mine,” he said, stupidly, feeling like Lord, Lord, if it can just not be my fault . . . He started getting dressed. “The Walgreens we have the prescription at is twenty-four-hour, phone them and—”

  “No phone. Our landline is down, and on the cell the store’s line just comes back with a busy—”

  Louder gasping from Teddy’s room. Tiff rushed back to him; Zach grabbed his wallet and keys.

  In the freezing early mountain morning he thought, Please start, please please start, please still have your tires—

  He blessed the old thing a thousand times in his head as it started on the first try, and drove carefully, not sure what might happen if he pushed it. At Walgreens, he bought five inhalers—the legal maximum—and they all looked all right. On his way home, he used the cell to tell Tiff to scour the medicine cabinet with Drano and rubbing alcohol.

  Harold Cheiron, Zach’s across-the-street neighbor, was waiting in the driveway for him, not letting him pull in—and holding a deer rifle. Something moved in his rearview—Cheiron’s wife with a shotgun.

  Then he saw that on either side of him were that couple from down the street—what were their names?—he with a bat, she with a pistol, all of them looking ready to use them.

  Cheiron gestured for Zach to roll down the window. “So where are you coming back from?”

  “My—my son Teddy, I had to go out and get asthma medicine for him, what’s this about? I have the medicine here—” He held up the Walgreens bag.

  Cheiron advanced to the car window and looked at it. “I’ll give this to your wife. You wait here.”

  Harold returned and brought Tiff, who was holding Teddy (breathing easily now), and leading Noah by the hand; he was fresh from sleep, dragging his stuffed dog with him.

  “She was scrubbing down her medicine cabinet,” Harold said, “like trying to get rid of some kind of germs or something, and inside, they have boxes and boxes of inhalers, which have all rotted, and he’s got a neat little workshop down there where he was building some kind of electronic gadget, it looks like, probably a lot of them, to judge by all the parts he had and the little jigs and marked breadboards. And he came in at about four thirty yesterday morning. And their walls are practically papered with The Earth Is The Lord’s posters. Now, on Good Morning America, they said the things to watch out for were people who came and went at unusual hours yesterday, people whose hobbies seemed to include home laboratories, Green types, and people who seemed to be having troubles with weird germs. I vote that this family ought to go talk to the sheriff; any other votes?”

  It was unanimous; Zach and Tiff didn’t get votes. Shortly they were all piled into the back of Cheiron’s panel truck, rolling slowly through the street. Cheiron’s wife drove; Cheiron sat, the shotgun held across his chest, in back with Zach and his family. “You’re lucky we like you around here, and you have kids we’d rather not hurt,” Cheiron said to them, apropos of nothing. “They’re asking people to go to the cops with suspected Daybreakers but there’s all kinds of stories about people taking the law into their own hands. Naturally since it’s mainstream media reporting, they’re worrying more about vigilantes getting out of hand than about what you Daybreak bastards have already done.”

  “Harold,” Mrs. Cheiron said. “Their boys are right here.”

  “Sorry. Daybreak jerks. Anyway, if you’re guilty, we don’t want you to get away, and if you’re innocent, the sheriff will be a lot more protection than your house was. Don’t bother telling me one way or the other. Once we hand you off to the sheriff, you’re all his problem. If they let you go, I guess I’ll owe you an apology.”

  Teddy gasped and Tiff got the inhaler into his mouth again; before she pocketed it again, she wiped it with a Diapie-Wipe. Zach watched her dully, trying to pretend he didn’t understand; Harold Cheiron stared at them, face to face and back again, like a cougar deciding which sheep to jump on; probably he was just trying to remember everything he saw them do for the sheriff.

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER. WARSAW. INDIANA. 9:30 A.M. EST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.

  Back when Robert Cheranko was a kid who didn’t talk much because, really, words were kind of a nuisance, his classmates had nicknamed him Silent Bob, after some dumb movie that was already old then. Exactly one guy had ever asked him if he preferred Bob or something else, and he’d immediately said, “Robert,” which Karl Parsoni remembered from then on. As a result, Robert had never even th
ought about applying to be promoted and getting a truck of his own; he was an assistant lineman for high-tension wires, and he hadn’t done anything more about qualifying or promoting since—at Karl’s urging—he’d gotten his certificate for live-line operations.

  Every day, he and Karl cruised back and forth, starting and finishing in the same office in Warsaw, in Kosciusko County, sometimes getting as far as the Ohio or Illinois state lines, now and then getting clear up to the lake or down to the river, just answering calls. Karl would do about ninety percent of the talking, which suited them both, because Robert thought Karl was the most interesting guy he’d ever listened to, and Karl agreed with him. Mostly, Karl, an amateur naturalist, talked about the birds he’d seen along a stream, or habitat for this kind of fish or that kind of shrew, or where the elderberries would be good this year; high-tension lines run through what Karl called “a fair-enough bit of rough-enough country,” which Karl liked to see on a regular basis.

  Today, the orders had been “short and smart,” as Karl said, pointing at the paper as he peered at Robert over his reading glasses. In his red Bean chamois shirt, suspenders, and immense white beard, he looked like a slightly and harmlessly mad Santa Claus. “Robert, they haven’t said where, but they just want me to investigate some high-tension lines close to home. There are big increases in line resistance around here and they want us to see what we can find, leaving it up to us to decide where to find it. There’s some lines where if the truck dies it won’t be more than a mile and a half walk from my hunting cabin, but that’s a good fifteen miles out of town. Is there anything in the world that you’d hate to be without for a couple of weeks or so, say back at your apartment? We might be stuck out there that long if things really take a bad turn, but I’d rather be stuck someplace with wood heat and kerosene lamps.”

  Robert considered. “Family pictures—my sister and folks are gone, I’d like to have those pictures around. And if I’m going to stay at a hunting cabin, I should get some more warm clothes. Plus I eat the same stuff over and over, and there’s plenty of it ’cause I buy in bulk, might as well bring the can and box stuff along.”

  They grabbed the pictures, clothes, and food, and at Karl’s insistence, they brought along Robert’s banjo. “I’m not very good,” he pointed out.

  “Yeah, there might be a lot of time to practice. If you’ve got extra strings, bring them too.”

  Karl drove slowly down the narrow, cracked blacktop between the cornfields, chattering on, as always, about the way the crows were flocking, about the absence of other traffic, about the way the streams might change if there weren’t so many pumps around to keep pushing the water back onto the land.

  Robert savored the hot coffee from the thermos; he knew it all came from overseas, and in case there wasn’t any for a long time, he wanted to make sure he appreciated it. They stopped at the cabin and unloaded the supplies from the truck, then followed the dirt road to where the power lines crossed.

  Robert saw it first. “Look at those things hanging from the lines—the bright shiny things.”

  With binoculars, they could see threads and strings hanging down from the power lines themselves, some of them as long as two or three feet.

  Karl scratched thoughtfully under the huge beard. “Whatever those are, they’re made out of something, and my guess is it’s the power line; they’re stripping metal off it. Either it’s going to break, or they’ll reach the ground and short it out or maybe start a fire. We want to take a couple of those aluminum strings, in a sample bottle, back to look at, and call that good.”

  “Sounds right to me,” Robert said. “We could put a jar on the end of a live-line pole and maybe shake one of the nearest ones in, from the tower, if you think it’d be safe.”

  “Except the tower probably has some too, that would get on our boots and get loose in the truck.”

  Robert scanned to the top of the tower; sure enough, bright strings of metal hung from it as well. “Well, they’re easy enough to reach,” he said. “And I don’t know how they got them up there but they aren’t on the lower parts of the towers, so my guess is they’re still working their way down. They said lye kills ’em?”

  “Yeah, and I’ve got some industrial lye in the lockbox.”

  “So I put on the spare gloves and apron and booties, go up to the strut below the first string we can see from the ground, and I use the live-line pole and jar to see if I can just take one off. When I do, I bring it down, cap it, and scrub the jar off with lye. We leave the spare gear here, take the jar back, and figure we’ve been about as safe as we can be.”

  Forty feet above the ground, Robert spotted a small string he could reach and stopped to take stock for a moment. That was when he realized how quiet it was today; no noise from Indiana 25, though it was less than a mile away; no tractors out turning under the last of the corn and soybean fields; no cars moving, and just a few people walking, in the little crossroads town of Palestine off to the west. He could hear dogs barking, distant cattle, mobs of birds, and the wind. Nothing else.

  The cabin had no landline, and their cell phones were dead, so they chanced a trip into Palestine and phoned from the pay phone at the gas station. Karl was on the phone for a long time; when he finished, he said, “Well, I’m supposed to put the jar in the mail to Indy, try turning my cell phone on once a day to check for messages, and if not, they’ll send us out notice by mail, to the hunting cabin. I want to take a little snip of the string for my own interest.”

  He got another jar from the car, and working gingerly with tweezers, broke the aluminum string and dropped one end into the new jar. It took a while at the post office to buy a shipping box and send the sample through the mail—the clerk there thought it might qualify as hazardous material—but the truck still made it all the way from town to the cabin.

  Karl went in to put the aluminum string under the microscope, and Robert said he wanted to look the truck over first. He washed off the tires, moved it to a dry spot, and decided to take a look underneath.

  A good dozen metal threads hung from the undercarriage, anywhere where an aluminum surface was heated by the engine. Robert sat and thought for a time.

  When he went inside, Karl said, “Look what I have here.” He pointed to the microscope.

  In the circle of bright light, the surface of the string showed as a pitted moonscape; as Robert watched, small square bodies crept along the surface, coming and going to the end, where a spiderlike cluster of squares sat like a nest. “They’re sort of like ants,” Karl explained. “The little square things carve trails in the aluminum as they go along, loading it onto themselves; then when they’re full, they crawl backwards along their trails to find the breeding ball.”

  “Breeding ball?”

  “That’s what I’m going to call it. It’s a huge knot of square things, maybe a few thousand of them, that dark dot at the end of the aluminum thread, and it appears to be making more square things out of aluminum and, I don’t know, carbon and oxygen from the air, maybe. It keeps making more of them and sending more of them out. Whenever they come back, they deposit the aluminum between the breeding ball and the main piece of aluminum. Then they go out and mine more. Somehow they know not to touch aluminum that was laid down by other square things. So over time they keep building up aluminum under the breeding ball, and that becomes the thread we see, and gradually the aluminum gets turned into square things. I’m betting if you take a square thing and put it on aluminum by itself, it will start a breeding ball, and then start sending out more square things to feed it—”

  “Karl,” Robert said. “It’s all right. I know.”

  The old guy looked like a flabbergasted Santa Claus.

  “I was only at the car five minutes,” Robert said. “You couldn’t possibly have learned that much by looking at them under a microscope in that short a time. And every ‘guess’ you made this morning was dead right. And somehow, when you split the sample to send to Indy, you knew to keep the breedi
ng ball for your side of the sample, and probably what you sent them is just a piece of crumbly aluminum wire, right? By the way, the underside of the truck is being eaten by your square things—you’ve got a couple foot-long threads on the muffler—so I’m guessing it won’t be more than a couple days before the nanoswarm gnaw through to something important.”

  Karl smiled ever so slightly, as if he were just about to share the punchline of the best joke in the world. “I guess I’m like everyone else. I underestimate you because you don’t chatter much.”

  “Probably. So . . . how’d you get into Daybreak, Karl?”

  “Depends on why you want to know. You going to turn me in?”

  Robert hadn’t thought that far. He shrugged and looked around at the cabin; cast-iron, wood-fired, basically 1850s technology, and stocked for a long haul. “You like it quiet too,” he said.

  “Well, except for the sound of my own voice. And I like music now and then, acoustic and live. Part of why I recruited a banjo player.”

  Robert thought for a few long moments, hard. Back in town he had some clothes, some old porn he hardly bothered with anymore, and some household stuff.

  Out here, there was a reasonably comfortable life in the woods—and more quiet than he’d ever encountered before.

  “I’m just sad,” Robert told Karl, “that you didn’t invite me in on it. Did you make those little square things yourself?”

  “Me, and a couple grad students at Purdue, and one old hobby programmer down in Kentucky, but yeah, they were my idea, sort of; got the idea from a real old poem, by Stephen Vincent Benet.”

  “It would’ve been fun to work on them with you. But I think we’ll have a pretty good time out here, anyway. I like quiet.”

  Karl stuck out his hand, and Robert shook it, and that was all the more either of them ever said about Daybreak again.

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER. SAN DIEGO. ABOUT 7:00 A.M. PST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.

  Bambi Castro slept well on the plane, as she always did, and woke just as the plane descended over San Diego’s gorgeous harbor, crowded with warships, with the pleasure craft of the rich, with cruise ships giving the middle class a taste of luxury, the occasional freighter, the swarm of commercial fishing boats . . . she’d been away too long, hell, it was always too long. Any excuse to go almost anywhere on the coast south of LA was always welcome, but Bambi had grown up in a big house on the hills, within sight of the harbor, and besides being beautiful, San Diego was home.