The Last President d-3

by John Barnes

  “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?

  So I’as just back from my second stay at Corsicana, and busting my ass to finish a GED and get something else going because I’as through with the street kid crap and the stuck in a small town forever crap and the everybody knows you’re just a piece of crap crap and all the crap in general, and working for this guy Stan Krauss, a horse breeder, ’cause I loved horses, and Daybreak hit and Mister Krauss thought he was gonna be a big old rich guy, and I started working full time for him, ’cause I thought so, too, I mean, engines stop working, people’re gonna want horses, right?

  So I’as doing okay, had a steady job, Krauss’s horse ranch was the most successful business in Grinder’s Hole, Texas, orders backed up five years in advance. There I was coming up in the world for the first time even if the world was going down, and then in the spring last year all these bush hippies started coming around by Mister Krauss’s place and giving us all this, like, threatening shit, like telling us we needed to free the horses for the wolves to eat, because horses were bred by people to make Mother Earth dirty. I think. Ain’t sure I ever got it straight, ’cause they shouted most of it, along with some threats. Well, but you know, that Mister Krauss, he was old school Texas-German, if you know the type, he just told’em to get the fuck off his land.

  So one day I’as out chasing Redstone, who was the biggest pain in the ass you ever saw in a stallion and stallions are born to be pains in the ass, when I heard noise a long way off, and I came back and there was Mister Krauss and Mrs. Krauss and the other three guys that helped on the place, all dead in the yard, and the buildings burning, and the tribals that did it just a dust cloud going over the hill.

  I got all the horses out of the barn—the Daybreakers were just gonna let’em burn alive—and I’as standing in that yard with the horses around me, and me crying like a little kid and talking to Krauss’s body like I was right out of my mind, and Redstone stuck his nose in my back, and he’s standing there like he’s saying “I’m sorry.”

  So I found a saddle that’d fit him, and him and me got the other horses into a string, and we headed into Grinder’s Hole to get the town militia and some help. Got there, and… well, there wasn’t no help. Shit, there wasn’t no Grinder’s Hole. The tribals had left some bodies and some burning buildings and taken off north.

  So I went south, ’cause I had an idea how to turn those horses into some wealth. The government in Austin was gonna be starting the Texas Independent Cavalry, which a lot of guys wanted to be in ’cause it was like a big deal, but it was bring your own horse, so I figured some guys that wanted to join would want to trade for a horse, and sure enough they did, and pretty soon I had me a big account in the Bank of Texas and the only horse I had left was Redstone, which I’as the only one he’d let ride him.

  And I don’t know if I’as drunk or ’cause all us rich guys were doing it, but Redstone and me signed up, and damn if I wasn’t pretty good at being cavalry, made corporal before we even left Fort Norcross and sergeant by the time we’as at Pale Bluff.

  So yesterday the general told us to ride hard and hit’em before the main force of tribals got there. But they got there before us, and unlike your usual Daybreaker hippie dumbshits, these ones had some tricks. Right alongside the other TexICs, we rode in from the creek side. Redstone jumped that breastwork like he had wings. I pulled out two pistols like Buffalo Fuckin’ Bill to get it started.

  But there’as more of’em around me than I could count, mostly with spears, and one asshole with a two-handed ax brung down Redstone with one hard chop to the face, and the rest drug me off and was beating me, and that was the last I knew for a while.

  So I woke up and I’as in a pile of tied up TexICs and they told us we better scream and holler when they put us up on the wall ’cause we’as gonna be human shields. So I made up my mind to keep my mouth shut, but it didn’t matter ’cause next thing I know Goncalves and his Rangers come busting into the building where they had us, and a couple of’em cut us loose and found us guns and knives to help out with, I thought us TexICs were hot shit, but the President’s Own Rangers’re something else, man, something else.

  So it seemed like we’as in that building for a million years, we took charge after charge, and a few’d die, and then a few more, and finally one Daybreaker charge got inside. I shot till I had nothing to shoot, I remember running out of ammo, and then it was hatchet work, and then, boom, something on the back of my head, right where I wear my braid, which I think maybe saved my skull and my life.

  And that’s me.

  ABOUT THE SAME TIME. ABOVE LAFAYETTE, WABASH. 12:00 PM EASTERN TIME. TUESDAY, MAY 5, 2026.

  Nancy Teirson saw her landing field was overrun with Daybreakers and did not begin a descent. She flew on over the Tippecanoe County Fairgrounds, observing guns flaring in the thin open space between the thick double line of people encircling what had been about a third of the army’s encampment. Obviously there was a lot of shit on what remained of the fan.

  Staying high, she put the Acro Sport into a several-mile-wide counterclockwise circle to observe, and to give General Grayson a chance to heliograph to her. There was a garrison, a fuel depot, and a radio transmitter back at Terre Haute; she could report the bad news from there. Meanwhile, she needed to make sure she saw as much of it as she could.

  The hasty tribal fortifications at the Tippecanoe battlefield were empty, but scattered bodies were everywhere.

  She climbed up into the fierce cold, almost to the Acro Sport’s 18,000-foot ceiling, for a better look from a distance. No more big tribal forces moving along the Tippecanoe River, so obviously they had arrived. Circling back over the main battle at the fairgrounds, she estimated 23,000 tribals by a radial count and 27,500 by an area count.

  The forces she had been tracking before had totaled no more than 8,000. Had all these others come down the Wabash?

  Descending to a much warmer 6,000 feet over the camp, she looked for interruptions in the Daybreaker lines, but found none: the army was surrounded.

  As she flew a slow circuit, looking for anything unusual or any clue she could take back with her, a heliograph flashed below:

  SORTIE 9 QEO 15 BRK

  QSE 30 BRK

  They’re going to try to break out in 9 minutes, they expect to have the runway clear in 15, and they want me to land in 30? Grayson must have—no. Not Grayson. He�
��d never give an order that dumb. He’s dead or unconscious, and some real idiot is in command down there.

  She clamped the stick between her knees, got the sun on the positioning spot, sighted the headquarters signal tower down the scope of her own heliograph, and sent,

  DO NOT SORTIE BRK

  QCI 3X BRK

  QSP RECCE B4 QRF TH BRK

  Surely they’d understand do not sortie, whether or not they grasped the Q codes for I will circle three times and I will relay reconnaissance information before returning to Terre Haute.

  They flashed back

  QSL

  which meant only “signal received.”

  Well, whatever they do, I’m not landing here. One good look and back to Terre Haute. She moved the stick gently forward, slowly descending for a last pass across the fairgrounds. On the western side of the fairgrounds, she saw flashes and puffs of smoke from both sides of the line.

  Tribals using guns.

  Has to be the Castle Earthstone heretics, which means—what’s that?

  She turned sharply to the east, flying straight across the camp, toward the strange object on the other side, near where her landing field had been. The thing was perhaps twenty feet across, like a giant quiver of arrows—no, an array of spears or harpoons—rotating and tilting toward her—

  She hauled back and to the right on the stick and opened the throttle wide, avoiding flying over it, trying to climb away. A blue-black cloud appeared where the spear-things had been. She kept climbing, wishing the Acro Sport had a lot more engine.

  Multiple thudding booms sounded behind her, audible even over the roaring engine. For an instant, she could hope she had been out of range.