The Last President

by John Barnes

  “No quarter. No survivors.”

  She beamed at him. “Almost none. Our tribals will be given a window of opportunity for mercy—just not open very far or for very long.” She reached out and stroked his hand with one long nail, polished blood-red, almost hard enough to scratch. “Just tell Heather and James that I insist on giving them more than they asked for.”

  2 HOURS LATER. MANBROOKSTAT. 4:15 PM EASTERN TIME. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2026.

  Huddling around the upper harbor in the ruins of old New York, the puny city-state of Manbrookstat might be headed for great things, but currently they lived by trading usable wreckage for food. Yet to get the Commandant even to look at this message, Heather had had to promise him more and deeper reconnaissance than was usual. Bambi had come in ninety minutes north of the usual mailplane route, swinging much deeper into the Lost Quarter than she liked. At least those hours of anxiety were safely over; now she was flying in over the abandoned zones of Queens and Brooklyn, descending toward the southern tip of Manhattan. At almost any other airfield, she would be looking forward to a good meal, a comfortable room, and some major attention; in post-Daybreak America, a mail pilot was at least as big a celebrity as a Duchess.

  Having flown into Manbrookstat before, she expected to be treated as a nuisance at best, but Heather had emphasized that she was to pick no quarrels with the Commandant.

  The tail wheel touched down. The JNE’s squishy tires grabbed FDR Drive. Now she was rolling rather than flying. At the flagger’s signal she cut the engine and braked the prop. The ground crew chief who came to help her down from the cockpit was Knox, an old friend from the early days just after Daybreak. “Welcome, Countess, we don’t see enough of you here.”

  “It’s good to be back,” she lied, smiling back at him. “Take good care of the Jenny.”

  Knox nodded. “Like always.” Then, so softly Bambi might have missed it, he added, “Keep your eyes open. There’s a lot you oughta see but you gotta look.”

  Bambi listened without expression, remembered carefully, and reacted not at all. She slung up her flight bag and walked toward where the Commandant waited with his entourage. At least the son of a bitch saw fit to meet me himself. Maybe he’s only ninety percent of the asshole I always thought he was. Twenty feet before they were in reach of each other, she extended her hand so he could not bow to extort a bow in return.

  Dinner that night was in the Ritz-Carlton by a southeast-facing window. The deep red sunset, filtered through the haze that still hung over the burned continent, lit the sad stump of the Statue of Liberty.

  “The arm with the torch fell off on Christmas Day,” the Commandant said, following her gaze. “Something about the big electric currents that ran through the steel made it super-vulnerable to rust, that’s what one of my engineers guessed, but I wonder if it wasn’t the ice load that built up on the upper part for a month; it looked like she was holding a big load of cotton candy just before it went.”

  Bambi nodded. “I traveled a lot, back before, when I was a Fed, and now I fly everywhere. I see things like this all the time . . . still, somehow, it’s different when it’s the Lady, isn’t it?”

  The Commandant shrugged. “As soon as there’s less floating ice around the island, we’ll cut up the arm and torch, probably trade it to Argentina for tinned beef. Life goes on and a statue doesn’t need to eat.”

  Bambi changed the subject. “Since you asked me to come in over the Dead Belt and give you some recon, first of all, it’s still dead but showing signs of life.”

  The Dead Belt was the lumpy strip across Michigan, lower Ontario, upstate New York, and New England where the fallout from the Chicago superbomb had killed everything except grass and bugs. The 250-megaton bomb had been a pure-fusion weapon, so its mostly-light-metals fallout had been intensely radioactive but very short lived. For a few weeks after the detonation, it had been enough to kill nearly all vertebrates and trees, leaving only corpses and mud under the deep snow, and forests of mere upright logs; now radiation was almost completely returned to background levels.

  Bambi summed up. “Dead cities, empty land, not one column of smoke horizon to horizon, washouts miles across that cut right through roads and subdivisions. Big drifts of silt in all the rivers, and the rivers themselves are cutting snaky, complicated channels and forming new lakes—everything the Mensche expedition saw a few months ago, but more so after so much rain and snow. Big parts of it won’t be farmable again for thousands of years, it’s going to be some kind of a badlands. But all those empty snowfields did make it easy to see five big Daybreaker trails, and one of your Special Assistants is copying my notes about those; it looks like each trail represents a horde of at least four thousand tribals moving south and west.”

  “None coming this way, though?”

  “No. But remember I didn’t overfly New England.”

  “We have sources of our own up that way,” he said. He snapped his fingers; a young girl, eyes downcast, came and poured more wine for him. Bambi declined. The Commandant ran his finger slowly around the edge of the wineglass. “Would the RRC—and you—like some advice?”

  Since I’ll undoubtedly get it anyway . . . “Always. We listen to anyone.”

  “I wonder. The message Heather O’Grainne sent makes me wonder about the quality of your intel or maybe the wisdom you apply to it. Of course, it’s obvious that the tribals are planning some big raids this summer, so it makes sense for you to attack the tribals, pre-emptively, at a few points, to help their attack fizzle—but don’t you realize it’s going to fizzle anyway? When are you going to consider that you don’t have to have a war unless you want one? The tribals are starving and getting weaker. They aren’t farmers—most of them are trying to end farming, and they only survived this long because canned and boxed food in the Dead Belt stayed edible, the people who would have eaten it were all dead, and the tribes could move in and mine for food. Sure, a horde of twenty thousand people sounds like a lot, but coming out of areas that had how many millions in them, back before?

  “So what if the tribals surge this summer, or even two or three more? They lose thousands on every surge, and more to starvation and disease over the winter. Bribe or talk them into staying put a couple more years, and eventually you can walk back into the empty land, because the tribals will be irrelevant.”

  “Isn’t that pretty hard on the people that will be burned out, looted from, maybe slaughtered, to wait for the tribals to ‘become irrelevant’?”

  “Almost the whole world’s irrelevant already, because it’s dead. And without planes and radio, whatever is left is mostly far away. Which brings me to my advice to you personally. You used to be a Fed, you took an oath, I understand all that, I was a senior at West Point, after all, back before. It’s hard to change old mental habits. But . . . here we are. I own New York Harbor, because of a few things I did right after Daybreak day. You own San Diego Harbor, because of what your father did. For that matter that silly bastard Lord Robert with his mud-hut empire did a couple things right, and he’s at least got the best hut in the whole empire of mud. We’re alike.”

  “You’re suggesting something,” Bambi said. She was watching the last blood-red light fade from the Statue of Liberty; the contrast between the blackened areas and the reflection from the flows of resmelted copper on the lump turned it into a red and black abstraction. She knew what the Commandant’s suggestion would be, but she waited for it anyway.

  “The old world is gone. We’re powerless to bring it back. Most people who would benefit from that are already dead, aren’t they? Do we owe them anything?” He drank deeply, and set his glass down in a prissy way that Bambi realized was probably a twenty-three-year-old’s idea of sophistication. “Someday, at a summit conference, you and I will say ‘United States’ just as we now do ‘Soviet Union’ or ‘Roman Empire,’ and probably no more frequently.”

  “So Operation Fu
ll Court Press—”

  “Although it is regrettable that the tribes are smashing up civilized areas a long way from here . . . well, ‘a long way from here’ covers it.”

  “You’re part of the same country.”

  “That’s the issue, isn’t it?”

  FIVE:

  HOW A GENERAL SLEEPS

  4 DAYS LATER. NEAR THE FORMER MARKLAND, INDIANA. 5:30 PM EASTERN TIME. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2026.

  Jeff’s voice was flat and expressionless, but his hand held Jenny’s arm as if he were afraid she would run. “It smells like that because they were planning to die before summer, so they didn’t see much point in camp sanitation. Besides, all that uncovered crap and piles of corpses will keep pathogen counts high in the Ohio and the lower Mississippi for another year, poisoning more of us wicked Gaia-rapers. We can’t stay a month to cover and burn it all, so we’re just piling the corpses and building an earthen dike around them for now.”

  The heap of bodies in front of them was a congeries of gray faces with livid lips and white staring eyes, reaching hands like driftwood branches, swaths of wadded hair, rag-wrapped feet black with mud and blood; the pile came about up to his chest. From the other side, lines of men were passing corpses in a grim bucket-brigade, flinging them along hand to hand onto a taller mound in the center. “Most of them probably didn’t join Daybreak till they’d been enslaved, and we just killed them all for having a contagious mental illness.”

  “Are you going to do anything—”

  “We put down a layer of brush and scrapwood, and some coal from rail cars, under that pile. When the dike is finished the engineers will try to light it, but good luck with that in all this mud and snow. Probably be next year before anyone can come back here to do something about it.” He squeezed her arm tighter. “We’ll have to keep doing this about once a week, well into summer.” She could feel the tremor in his grip.

  Jenny closed her notebook, put it into her pack, and took Grayson’s hands. “Let’s get you away from all this for a little while. You have good officers and they’ll take it from here.”

  “I just keep thinking how we’d have them surrounded, and be chopping into the crowd with poleaxes, and then I’d see so many of them just drop their weapons and stare around them, like they wanted to ask, ‘Where am I? How did I get here?’ And then they’d go into seizures. They couldn’t have surrendered to us even if we had been taking prisoners.”

  “This way, dinner, bed.” She clamped her hand on his wrist and turned at the waist, tugging him away from that pile studded with faces, feet, and hands. “Dinner, bed, I’m gonna take care of you.”

  He stumbled, found his balance, and trailed along, holding her right hand in his left, constantly returning salutes, nodding when people said things to him. She wasn’t sure whether he saw or heard anything; as soon as she got him to bed she’d write down everything important she could remember.

  The sun was setting as they reached their tent. Towers said, “I’ll tell the cook to bring around your meal.”

  “Thank you. Get some rest and food yourself.”

  “My relief should be here any minute,” the guard said. “And your father and his people don’t have access tonight.”

  “You’re the best, Mister Towers.”

  “Just remember that when you’re calculating my next raise, ma’am. Take care of the general.”

  “Count on it.”

  Jeff sat motionless on their folding bed, by the woodstove. She pulled off his boots, made him put on slippers, and had him sitting at the table when an orderly brought dense, warming pot pies and a thick soup with rice.

  They ate silently until he seemed to wake up abruptly, halfway through the meal, began to wolf it down in great messy slurps, and finally caught himself, looking up from his plate, dabbing at his face with his napkin. He took another bite of pot pie, sipped at his water, and looked straight into her eyes. “Massacre is so different from battle. And it sounds stupid, but I wish this had been a battle.”

  3 HOURS LATER. OLYMPIA. 6:30 PM PACIFIC TIME. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2026.

  “How often do you think about back before?” Allie asked Graham, as they sat by the warm fire in the New White House.

  “Are you asking your husband, your old professor, or the President of the United States?”

  “I’m not sure. How about you identify which one you are when you give the answer?”

  He stretched, hands over his head, twisting with surprising vigor.

  Right now it’s hard to believe he remembers Vietnam and the moon landings, but catch him in another hour and it’ll be hard to believe he’s still alive. He comes and goes so unpredictably.

  “You’re staring at me that funny way again,” he said. “The main thing I think about ‘back before’ is that the words are revealing. For almost a year after Daybreak there was no one standard way to say, ‘In the time before Daybreak.’ Now everyone says, ‘back before’—”

  “Very professorial and not what I meant. I was thinking how, if we’d caught Daybreak and stopped it, right now you’d be working on figuring out your post-Washington life.”

  “If this new era is anything, Allie, it’s post-Washington.”

  She froze. “My whole family disappeared with Washington.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “Shit, shit, sorry, I was enjoying just getting some time together and then I had to go and snap at you. Forgive?” She grasped his arm as if he might bolt.

  With his free hand he brushed her hair to the side and looked into her eyes. “I could tell that demonstration this afternoon was getting on your nerves.”

  “Yeah. ‘This is America—no genocide!’ This is why there should be an IQ test and a current events quiz before people are allowed to have demonstrations. Don’t look at me that way, Graham, I’m kidding, but still, I mean, come on, what the Khmer Rouge did to my people was genocide. What we’re doing is necessary. I don’t want to commit genocide. I just don’t want there to be any more tribals.”

  “‘Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious—’”

  “I read the Solicitor General’s report too,” she said. Whereas you just skimmed the executive summary and then fell asleep with your head on it. “Even if you call that made-up shit a culture—and I sure as hell don’t, I call it a mishmash of heavy metal, comic books, and New Age—it can’t be a heritage, they haven’t had time for anybody to inherit it since they made it up,” Allie pointed out. “Anyway, what they are is, is . . .”

  “People.”

  “All right. People. So regrettably, killing them is murder. But not genocide, Graham.”

  He drew a breath as if to shout, then let it flow back out. When he spoke his voice was soft and even. “We’re both products of the old Washington; we worry too much about what to call things. Allie, it just looks to me like this is your revenge on Daybreak for having infected you, and it’s like this passion for revenge is taking over your personality—”

  “Not like Daybreak did. Don’t you dare say that.”

  “I wasn’t going to.” He sounded angry for the first time. “I just meant, I put a lot of work into getting you back, and, hell, I love you—you okay?” He was staring at her strangely.

  She reached up and touched her own cheek; it was wet with tears. “Aw, shit.”

  “You hardly ever cry.”

  “Yeah.” She wiped her face, hard. “Graham, you just might be the first guy who acted like he loved me, not just valued me as an asset or a trophy. The whole time I was recovering from the Daybreak infection, I never once heard anything about you needing me to be your secretary of state, or your chief of staff, or the way things were falling apart in the White House without me—”

  “Oh, boy, were they, though. I just didn’t want to worry you about it.”

&nb
sp; “See? That’s what I mean.” She took a handkerchief and dried her face. “Love can sure do weird shit to a person. Anyway, I guess I brought all this up and then bit your head off for talking about it because I wanted to know if you were pining for back before—”

  “Back before I didn’t have you? Never.”

  They sat and watched the fire until time for bed. Allie stayed pressed close against him, relishing how far away she felt from everything.

  8 DAYS LATER. JEFFERSONVILLE, INDIANA. 3:25 PM EASTERN TIME. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2026.

  Even across the Ohio, the burned smell from the ruins of Louisville filled Jenny’s mouth and nostrils and squeezed her throat. Louisville had burned even before the giant bombs, one of the first big fires after Daybreak. Nanospawn had turned off the electricity to pump water. Biotes had eaten the hoses, tires, and fuel for the fire department. When a fire had broken out in the industrial area around Camp Ground Road, there had been nothing to stop its upward climb till it spewed burning debris on the helpless remainder of the city. The eastward flow of blowtorch-hot flames had blasted across the city to the Ohio in less than an hour, killing tens of thousands.

  Two cold wet winters had washed away soot and toppled building frames, leaving heaps of rust on a plain of vitrified soil, but the smell lingered anyway.

  Here, on the Jeffersonville side, residents and refugees had saved the town with four days of nonstop bucket chains and shovel work, only to be overrun by the Shine Forth Gaia People last May. The Louisville side looked like Hiroshima; the Jeffersonville side, like Beirut.

  Although scouts had turned up relatively few tribals in their path, Jeff had chosen to follow the river road on the Indiana side, hoping to tempt the Daybreakers to break their discipline and come out and fight in smaller, less organized, more numerous groups. “If we can make those big hordes melt away before we reach them, so much the better.”

  “But we haven’t had a quiet night since we crossed,” she pointed out. “I’d like to sleep through a night without waking up to screaming and shooting.”