by John Barnes
There were tears in the president’s eyes, but he nodded vigorously and his handshake was surprisingly firm.
On his way out, Weisbrod showed the Secret Service man a note folded to leave the top line visible: ABOUT GETTING THE PRESIDENT WELL.
The man took the note and it vanished; Weisbrod just had to hope he had picked the right guy to pass it to. Christ, Christ, it’s more like Imperial Rome than I could have imagined.
At the door, they issued him a .38 police revolver, and made sure he knew how to use it. Pity I didn’t have this, riding over with Shaunsen; I could have done the best thing I ever did for the United States. He checked his watch and the sun; if he pushed himself and if his sneakers didn’t fall apart on the way (he had a spare pair of leather shoes, not as comfortable but more durable in the new world, in his bag), he might make it back to St. Elizabeth’s with daylight left; the worst would be crossing on the Capitol Street bridge, with nowhere to run if he were ambushed.
As he hurried past the Capitol, he saw a familiar figure from many dinner parties and interviews in a long public life. He waved and shouted, “Hi, Rusty! I like the paper!”
“Hey, Secretary Weisbrod! I see you’re using Washington public transit like we all are. I’ll be sure to report the gesture.” He had thought she was walking dogs, but saw she had three goats with her. Seeing his start, she said, “I live close, and laugh all you want, this is a fair bit of cheese right here.” She grinned. “Say something quotable.”
He gestured at the Capitol building. “What better place to find a bunch of old goats supplying the press with cheese?”
“Dammit, you’re the fourth guy who said something like that.”
“We can’t afford just any old future!”
“That’s the Weisbrod I remember. Have a good night!”
He hurried on into the dark canyons between the office buildings, staying in the middle of the street and away from the abandoned cars where someone might jump out, and thought, Goats on the National Mall.
The only lights visible as he crossed the Capitol Street bridge in the dusk, looking up and down the Anacostia, were the Coleman lanterns of the sentries in the Navy Yard and at Fort McNair.
I guess it’s a good night at that. The gun I have to carry in my pocket while on official duties probably works. A bad night would be one when I needed it to and it didn’t.
I wonder if Romulus Augustulus had a futurologist, and what it was like for him to trot through the dark, deserted streets of Rome.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. THE WHITE HOUSE . WASHINGTON. DC . 6:30 P.M. EST. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31.
Roger Pendano looked down at the collection of meds in front of him and thought, All right, last week, I was taking two a day of the green one, for blood pressure. Now there are four of the green one, three times a day, plus two big whites. So that’ll be one green down the hatch, and the rest down the toilet.
He was starting to feel sweaty and sick, and he probably would not sleep tonight. So what? It would make it easier to act groggy and out of it tomorrow, and anyway, I have it coming.
THE NEXT DAY. WASHINGTON, DC. (DRET/ST. ELIZABETH’S.) 7:00 A.M. EST. FRIDAY. NOVEMBER 1.
For a former conference room with a bed from a nearby hotel dragged into it, and a coat of black paint on the interior window for privacy, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it might have been. With no water to spare for showers—there was barely enough for drinking, cooking, and periodic toilet flushes—Cam had lined up enough hydrogen peroxide and baby wipes so that she could thoroughly bathe Lenny and have enough left over to at least wipe herself down. “Cam said not to spare the wipes on yourself,” Lenny reminded her.
“One date fifteen years ago, and the man thinks he can tell me how I smell.”
“Actually, he said—”
“Yeah, I know, babe. It makes sense. I have to stay clean because you’re going to be touching me. I was making a joke.” She ostentatiously took one more wipe from the glass cookie jar and scrubbed herself carefully.
“What was so fascinating about that jar?”
“Oh, just thinking it’s like the ones in a little coffeehouse in Myrtle Beach, where I like to stop when I’m driving south—and realizing I might never travel that far again.”
“I think you’re clean enough down there, and I don’t have any plastic parts that are going to get close to it.”
“Hah. Only because you haven’t seen some of my favorite tricks.”
“Well, whose fault is that?”
She liked his smile a lot, so it seemed like a good time to bring the big subject up. “I’m going to suggest something so stupid that I can’t believe I’m proposing it, so don’t laugh at me. It involves you and me being in love.”
“Then tell me. You know I won’t laugh.”
“I want to give up birth control.”
“You do remember I might die of plastic rot next week?”
“I can’t forget it. Or that I’m turning forty next year and a whole lot of things they used to be able to do so that a person could be a mother late in life are going to be impossible. Or that I’ve had one lover in my life whose genes I’d be happy to carry.”
He gestured across his whole body.
“Lenny, you told me—I know it’s not genetic.”
“They don’t think. You want to bet on some doctor’s opinion?”
“Shit, yes, and absolutely, Lenny. Now—while the knowledge is still current and you’re alive. You said all the tests show you have normal DNA. If you live—and I want you to, so bad, you know—well, you and I will raise a kid. If you don’t—over the last few thousand years, how many people got started because a soldier had only one more night at home? Or a gun-fighter, or a matador, or anyone in any dangerous occupation? Dad tells me his grandma was a coal miner’s wife, and she never missed a chance with her husband, figuring it could always be the last.” She looked at him a little sideways. “Uh, given how much care you’ve had to take of your health, just to ask—have you ever had the experience unprotected?”
“No, actually. Never had a relationship last long enough—”
“Well, this relationship is going to last the rest of your life, which ought to be long enough.”
“The rest of my life?”
“Three days or forty years, I’m the one that’s going to be there. And you really ought to experience skin-to-skin, more than once, and I’m getting old to start a family but, honestly, Lenny, what the hell? Now watch close, because I happen to love the way you look at me when I’m naked.” She ran her hands up her sides, delighted that he was too distracted to continue arguing.
ABOUT AN HOUR LATER . ST. PAUL . MINNESOTA. 7:30 A.M. CST. FRIDAY. NOVEMBER 1.
Strong winds, running thousands of miles ahead of the storm front that was still crossing British Columbia, blew across the Midwest that morning.
St. Paul died of bad luck. A gasoline truck, its contents not yet turned to vinegar or sewage by biotes, had lost its tires and been stranded in front of a T-shirt shop on Snelling Avenue. The owner of the shop, who had not been making any money for at least a year anyway, had departed around noon the day before, slinging up a pack to walk south toward Rochester, where his sister lived. He had left the door unlocked in the back to let people come in out of the cold.
One family had found that unlocked door; that morning, with no breakfast and the water not running, the mother had smoked her last cigarette down to the filter, pinched it out, and thrown it into the wastebasket, where it had smoldered among damp paper towels, old advertising, and some near-empty cans of fabric paint.
The towels nearest the butt dried, and began to burn. The battery smoke detector, not yet eaten by nanoswarm, wailed for a while, and went out. The burning paper towel spread to an old catalog; the old catalog set off some of the fumes from the fabric paint, and the scraps and paper in the basket acted as wicks for the rest.
Anyone in the shop could have put the three-foot-high flames out by pouring a couple of glasses of water into the was
tebasket, but there was no one. Sparks from the wastebasket spread to the hanging T-shirts; hanging fabric is very highly flammable, with its enormous exposure of surface area to available oxygen, but the T-shirts were packed so tightly that only the top surfaces caught, and smoldered slowly in the inadequate airflow. Even now, if anyone had walked in, they would have smelled the smoke, pulled the shirts out of the rack, and stomped them out.
No one came; the streets outside were empty, the workers not at work, the mobile residents long since headed out of the city to find somewhere with food and heat, leaving only those who could not move easily—families with young children, the disabled, the old, the mad, the fatally stubborn.
The fire in the wastebasket had died out by the time that the top of one T-shirt burned through, so that the shirt dropped from its hanger, its fall fanning it to flames that licked at the bottoms of the shirts surrounding the gap it had left in the rack; that formed a small chimney, which enlarged as flames raced up the hanging surfaces.
In less than a minute the rack was ablaze. Flames roared up against the ceiling and along the acoustic tile. The metal block in the sprinkler overhead melted, as it was supposed to do, but only the bare dribble of water left in the pipe came out—not nearly enough.
The flames leaped from rack to rack, now, a new rack every few seconds, till the whole shop was hotter than a pizza oven. It grew hot enough to soften the cheap metal fittings, then hot enough to ignite the posters on the walls by radiative heat. Finally it was hot enough to crack the big front window and let out a jet of the white-hot carbon monoxide and partly burned hydrocarbons extracted from the T-shirts and carpets by anoxic roasting.
That hot gas mixed with the outside air and exploded; the explosion shattered the window. Hot gas and air mixed and exploded. Flames roared three stories high. The back door blew wide open hard enough to rip it from its hinges.
Now air could flow from front to back, and in the aftermath of the gas explosion, it rushed in to fill the vacuum. The draft through the shop, with all the fuel well above kindling and waiting only for the oxygen, worked like a blowtorch. White-hot flame poured over and around the abandoned gasoline truck. In minutes, the heat brought the gasoline to a boil, pressurizing the truck with flammable vapors; the hull of the tank grew hotter and hotter until finally the vapor flashed over, and the explosion sprayed just over thirty tons of gasoline into the air and ignited it; every building for two blocks around began to burn.
The fire watch on the steeple of the big old Presbyterian Church on Ayd Mill saw the explosion and flames, and as ordered, she rang the bell and shouted down to the two boys who were her runners. Neither of the fire stations they reached could help; one had no working fire truck, and the other discovered that the hoses they would need to pull water from the little creek and pond half a mile away were rotted. The boys ran back and forth so that the fire chief with the working truck would know to head for the fire station with the unrotted hose.
By the time both fire crews were loading the clean hose onto the hastily-wiped-down truck, the wall of flame whipping westward from Snelling was four blocks long and widening, and advancing at about a block every ten minutes. One truck pumping water from half a mile away wouldn’t have been able to make much of a difference when the fire started; now the whole idea was ludicrous. They evacuated the equipment from the path of the fire; only the haphazard firebreaks formed by freeways and big parking lots stood between the conflagration and downtown St. Paul, and as the wind rose steadily that afternoon, tens of millions of sparks were drifting across them, and some were finding new, flammable homes on the other side.
ABOUT SEVEN HOURS LATER. CASTLE CASTRO. (SAN DIEGO. CALIFORNIA.) 2:09 P.M. PST. FRIDAY. NOVEMBER 1.
“So that’s the story,” Bambi said, very quietly to Carlucci, Bolton, and Mensche. “There’s one radio room here, and it’s Dad’s, and he decides what signals go out. And I know from long, long experience what he’s figuring out at the moment—how far can he push before the Feds push back. Once he has that analyzed, then he’ll either be gentle as a kitten, or look the hell out.”
“It sounds like your father has been preparing for Daybreak his whole life,” Carlucci said.
“Yeah. He’s anything but a Daybreaker—more of an old-fashioned Ayn Rand type than anything else, with a mixture of Robert A. Heinlein and probably Sir Walter Scott too—but you could say Daybreak is fulfilling pretty much every dream he ever had. In five years people will be addressing him as ‘Baron’ or something like it, at his insistence. It’s what he’s really always wanted.
“So, here’s the thing. He’ll create law and order all around Castle Castro, and probably extend it up and down the coast—I doubt he’ll worry about where the border is, let alone the county line. People in his sphere will eat and have somewhere safe to sleep. I don’t for a moment suggest that anyone else ought to take over. But . . . Roth is the only Daybreaker we’ve captured so far. She’s a priceless source of information. Do we want the Federal government to have to go through my crazy Baron Dad to access the most important witness it has?”
“So what did you have in mind?” Carlucci asked.
“Is there a covert, hidden-inside-the-message code you can send to the Bureau in Washington? Something to tell them that you need to be ordered to move Roth to somewhere else? Because I’ve got a place, and it’s one Dad will accept. Quattro Larsen, who freeholds Castle Larsen up by Jenner, will pretty much do whatever I tell him—no snickering and giggling about why! Dad will be delighted if I’m ordered to go up there because he’s been trying to set me up with Quattro since I was thirteen, and Quattro and I have had a covert code since we were teenagers, so I can set that up with him too.”
“Well, put that way, of course,” Carlucci said. “Hell yes. How will we get her there?”
“It’s going to be a one-way trip, so it probably isn’t we,” she said. “You don’t want to leave your family here, and the same consideration rules out Terry. So it should be Larry and me.”
“Where’s Jenner?” Larry asked.
“Near the mouth of the Russian River, north of San Fran. Plenty of time to explain once we’re on our way.”
Mensche looked thoughtful. “My daughter, Debbie, is a screwed-up drug addict who has never finished any schooling or held a job, and she’s doing three-strikes time at Coffee Creek.”
“Oregon?” How to spot a Fed, Bambi thought. We know all the big state pens.
“Yeah. Up till this week, she didn’t write or call and didn’t want me to. Her mom would go over from Nevada a couple times a year to see her and send me short notes about her, mostly just that she’s healthy, and not getting out anytime soon. I—well, I’m worried, because I just hope someone remembered to do something for the prisoners when things started to crash, even if it was just to leave doors unlocked. I worry about that. I want to know she’s okay—”
Bambi nodded. “And I’ll get you almost halfway to Coffee Creek. And Quattro can give you a lot of help too, and he will if I ask him.” She reached out and touched his shoulder. “We’ll find out what’s happening with Debbie and make sure she’s okay.” She glanced back at Carlucci. “Well, there you have it. Roth goes because she belongs to the Feds, and we can’t leave her here with a Baron of San Diego who intends to be the Duke of California someday. Larry goes because it’s a one-way trip, and it gets him closer to his family.”
“Why are you going?” Carlucci demanded. “And how?”
She smiled at him, focusing her warm Miss Used to Do Beauty Contests Beam into his eyes. “Well, I had enough trouble with the old tyrant when I was just his daughter; I’m not sticking around to find out what it’s like to be his heir and vassal. And somebody’s gotta sail the boat.”
THE NEXT DAY. WASHINGTON, DC. ABOUT 2:00 A.M. EST. SATURDAY. NOVEMBER 2.
Despite what the rest of the country knows in its bones, some of the people in Washington are responsible sorts who are capable of forethought; they began to leave when t
he electricity stopped coming back up, while some cars and trucks were still running. Their disappearance made things inconvenient and difficult for the less foresighted, who, seeing things deteriorate quickly, left soon after, making things still worse for the remaining people with even shorter time horizons.
Around midnight, a tipping point was passed. National leaders and government personnel had withdrawn into safe places like the DRET compound at St. Elizabeth’s. Ordinary citizens had fled, if possible, knowing what was coming.
At two A.M. the people left were the completely immobile, the stupid, the stubborn, and people without foresight or impulse control.
Crowds in the street were hungry and looking for excitement. The remaining inventories of booze and bling in stores and warehouses were unguarded. Nearly all police had deserted; hardly any of the unlucky people left in ordinary residences were capable of defending them. Some of the boldest and most impetuous of the street crowds broke shop windows; no one stopped them from carrying off liquor and jewelry (white crusts and foul odors around the electronics kept them mostly untouched). Bartenders and bouncers died; doors and windows broke; the cornered innocent died with nowhere to run; recalcitrant defenders burned in their refuges; and authority did not show up.
When the remaining population in the streets fully understood this, like a hot room flashing over when a window breaks, like an auction stampede when the last lot is up, destruction and violence spread through the city.
Washington was still the capital. Federal law-enforcement people and military units moved in and backed up the few surviving city forces; units of the Maryland and Virginia Guard joined them, and not long after dawn, the rioters had been swept into a few large holding areas, fire lanes cleared to isolate the big fires, and a sort of order restored, especially in the area close to the National Mall.
Tens of thousands of bodies lay in the wreckage, or unburied in the streets. Some blocks burned for days, unattended. Countless old people, children, bedridden patients, people whose powered wheelchairs had stopped running, and the few brave people who would not desert them, died buried in rubble, smothered in smoke, or roasted alive. Great scars of tumbled buildings, toppled poles and posts, and broken concrete slashed deep into the heart of the great city. And in a few large auditoriums, stadiums, and office buildings, tens of thousands of people who had formed the mob, or fled one mob and been caught up in another, or just gone out to see what was happening, were held there by the guns of the guards, waiting in hunger and despair for whatever might come. The horror was: nothing did.
