“Doctor—”
“Abrams. You can call me MaryBeth as long as you remember I’m the doctor, not your mom.”
“No problem remembering that, Doctor, I need a doctor. Can I sit up and have some water?”
Hendrix fetched her a glass. After drinking it all, Allie took a deep breath, and another. “Do I remember right, if I don’t sleep, I get about an hour where it’s easier to talk about Daybreak without having a seizure?”
“It seems to work that way,” MaryBeth said. “We don’t know why. But it might still hit you again. It’s not a guaranteed immunity.”
“All right,” Allie said. “Let’s try. I want to finish this. Got a pencil, Mister Hendrix?”
“Ready when you are.”
“My contact calls himself Mister—Mister—Mister Darcage, I have to not say Mister, say Darcage, just this skinny good-looking guy in dreads, and…”
She blurted the whole story into Hendrix’s notepad, weeping and sometimes feeling another seizure creeping toward her. So now I know what Ysabel Roth went through. And why. “Can I have something to eat? Uh, maybe a lot?”
As she finished eating, Heather turned up with a hug, and said she didn’t want to lose Allie, too. It was a while before Graham came in; her husband had insisted on being alone with her, and she hadn’t let the rest of them go until they promised to do things the way she wanted to.
When she was finally alone with him, Graham just held her; she felt like he might do this forever, and that would be okay with her. “I was so worried,” he whispered.
My husband loves me, my friends love me, thousands of good people depend on me, and I am going to hurt Daybreak so—
Not again.
The seizure was fully as bad as the first. As she came out of it, Graham and Dr. Abrams and Heather all looked worried sick, but Allie said, “Let me just sleep and heal,” enjoying the post-seizure luxury of thinking, Daybreak, you have no idea what a big fight you picked, and of looking up at people she could trust, till she drifted off.
2 DAYS LATER. REPTON, ALABAMA. MONDAY, OCTOBER 20. ABOUT 1 PM CST.
Before Daybreak, Repton, Alabama, had been a cluster of houses in the woods where a few hundred working people could afford land to build on. Since then the town had prospered due to the accidents of a hobby printer, who had established a small local paper; three fast-thinking local farmers, who had used refugee labor to put in vine cuttings of sweet potatoes over as much land as they could reach; and an alert local militia commander, who had been able to control and channel the refugee stream on US 84. Now it was almost three thousand people, mostly still in tent-roofed cabins, but eating, building, and gradually becoming a community.
On Monday afternoon, the old church bell rang, the signal for news to be announced at the old gas station that served as a makeshift newspaper office. The Repton Vindicator’s editor stood up on a crate to read the announcement that the government in Athens and the one in Olympia had both declared that whatever was elected in 2026 would be the real government, and enjoining everyone to accept it. She had wondered how people would react to it; the wild cheering answered that, and supplied her with a local angle for her Wednesday headline—
She used her ham set to relay the story to the Athens Weekly Insight. An hour later they called back to tell her that the story would be used and that she would be mailed fifty dollars of TNG scrip. At least I can use that to pay taxes. If they ever get their act together enough to collect them, out here.
THE NEXT DAY. ON THE TRAIN TO ATHENS. 10:30 AM CST. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2025.
Across the hill and prairie country of eastern Nebraska, the train sometimes sped up to fifty miles an hour, when the tracks were clear and in good shape, but it spent much of its time standing still since coal and water were still mostly loaded in by awkward jury-rigs. In 1880, anybody with money and reason could cross the country in about a week, Cam thought. I guess we’re at about 1870, when in a really urgent case we could get a train across the country, now and then, as a stunt. In the still, frosty hour after dawn, plumes of smoke rose everywhere, from thousands of stoves and fireplaces. With the big machines and the banks gone, refugees coached by Amish extension agents were reopening small farms.
Grayson’s drive up the Yough Valley was about our finest hour, Cam thought. I won’t even complain if it makes the son-of-a-bitch president. I’ve worked for worse presidents.
A thin blanket of snow covered the land in front of him; good for the winter wheat, and thank all the gods that WTRC and the Post-Times had screamed since May that winter would start early, go deep, and leave late, so that the winter wheat was already planted. This next year would still be tight, but by next fall they should be past the risk of famine. Jeez, a year ago the Ag Department guy had to explain winter wheat to me; I just knew I liked Wheat Thins with smoked gouda while I watched the Series.
At the knock on the compartment door, Cameron rose from his desk to shake Whilmire’s hand and join him at the table. A staffer carrying breakfast had followed the reverend in. While the two men ate silently, the sun pierced the overcast, sharpening the colors of the rolling brown land with its smears of snow and a few leaves still clinging to the trees.
“It might have looked this way a hundred fifty years ago,” Whilmire said, “with a big slow steam train crossing it. And on Sunday you hear church bells everywhere; we’ve got missions all over. Daybreak was hard, and we’ll miss all the good people that left in the Rapture, but it’s good to see a cleaner, more traditional world coming back.”
“With, I hope, a traditional United States re-established next year,” Cam said. “You said you wanted to talk about that at breakfast.”
“Last night I received a long message from Reverend Peet. We know you won’t come along with us on Biblical prophecy, of course, and you know, to the Church, that is very nearly as serious as that old Jewish professor not thinking we were in a war. So, frankly, Cameron, much as I like you personally, you and your administration will have to go in 2026. As far as we can tell you’re backing General Grayson, is that correct?”
“Just now he’s the most credible conservative candidate—”
“And my most credible son-in-law. I don’t know if he’s told you the offer we made him: we’ll back him if he promises you won’t be any part of his government.”
Poor Grayson. He was so embarrassed when he made himself sit down and tell me. “I was going to retire and start a second career anyway. I already have applications in to either pitch for the Angels or fly for NASA.”
“That’s funny.” Whilmire’s voice and expression were flat. “We need a government to fit our Bible-based culture, a strong military ready for Armageddon—which will be very soon—and because one big part of the country will be ex-Provi, we have to have someone who’s not afraid to say what Weisbrod really is.”
“Oh, is it official that Graham Weisbrod is the Antichrist?”
Whilmire shook his head. “Absolutely not. The preachers who have been pushing that are Bible-ignorant and don’t know crap about prophecy. Weisbrod doesn’t meet most of the criteria in Revelations. I meant we need to call him out as a secular humanist, socialist, anti-Christian—”