2 DAYS LATER. CASTLE EARTHSTONE, IN THE LOST QUARTER. NEAR THE FORMER VILLAGE OF PALESTINE, KOSCIUSKO COUNTY, INDIANA. 7:44 AM EST. SATURDAY, JULY 12, 2025.
Robert figured,
What the hell, today might as well be the day
I ask, Karl must be in a good
mood. The soldiers behind them carried two big strings of
bluegill, bass, perch, and walleye. Nine months after Daybreak, a
whole spring hatch hadn’t been fished except by Karl and Robert;
they’d caught all these in the hour around dawn. There’d been
plenty of ducks and geese too, but Karl’d said to let them go till
fall, give’em a chance to raise one family without
interference.
The sun lay blood-red
on the treeline; their shadows stretched far ahead. A deep red
sunrise no longer meant a storm; sunrises and sunsets were always
blood-colored now by the soot in the air. Robert inhaled the cold
damp of early summer morning, delicious before the broiling
afternoon heat and humidity.
It was a good
morning. Did he want to risk spoiling it by maybe setting Karl off?
As assistant lord or whatever he was—Karl had never given him a
title, he was just “Robert” to all their people—Robert was the only
person at Castle Earthstone who could say “Karl” and not “Lord
Karl,” and the only survivor who knew they’d both been linemen for
the electric company, or that their comfortable house in the inner
compound of Castle Earthstone had been Karl’s hunting cabin last
year.
Two soldiers walked
at point. Karl followed, with Robert one polite step behind, and
the half dozen soldiers of the honor guard (a pretty grand title
for fish-gutters, boat-rowers, and hook-baiters) four or five steps
behind Robert. The ground, maybe two notches of damp away from
being mud, was pleasant on his bare feet; dew from the tall grass
brushed his lower legs.
The trail joined the
main, dirt road to Castle Earthstone by a burned farmhouse. The
skulls on sticks along the driveway were already being obscured by
weeds breaking through the macadam; Robert had put that dent in
Cindy’s himself, when she’d acted like just because they’d been in
high school together he couldn’t do what he wanted with her and her
dumbass stuck-up family.
I always thought they were stuck up with sticks up their
butts, and now here they are. Stuck up with
sticks.
Robert glanced back.
The soldiers struggled to keep two big strings of fish from hitting
the ground; Robert’s string was carefully three fewer fish than
Karl’s. Yeah. Good fishing, nice morning, he’s
ahead of me on everything, he’s gonna be in a good
mood.
“Uh,
Karl?”
The bulky, older man
glanced back at him, one bushy white eyebrow up, a grin showing
white teeth between his red lips in the middle of the white beard
that covered the lower half of his sunburned baldness. Rings of red and white, Robert thought,
like a bull’s-eye. “Yeah, Robert, come
on up and walk with me.”
Good mood for sure. “Got some questions. Just
wanted some time to talk privately.”
“Yeah, we can make
some time, and we should do it today. How ’bout over our breakfast
beer? If I get snakebit and die, there’s a raft of things you need
to know, and I’ve been neglecting that.”
“Thanks.” Robert
dropped back a pace to his usual position.
“No, walk with me the
rest of the way. It’s good for them to see us talking, it helps
remind them that you’re not one of them. How d’y’think we’ll do for
corn? I never grew any before, but that field looks pretty healthy
to me; what do you think?”
The barbed wire fence
was interrupted by an arch of two-by-fours in a spline-curve
pattern. From that, a neatly painted plank sign hung:
CASTLE EARTHSTONE
BLESS DAYBREAK
SAVE MOTHER GAIA
On each side of the
arch, four posts held up heads at face height. Inside the barbed
wire enclosure, the way bent ninety degrees around the outside of a
double wall—two cinderblock walls, four feet apart, the outside
about twelve feet high, the inside about eight, filled with trash
and dirt between, and with a board floor over the
trash.
The only opening in
the outer wall was into a double-Z of corrugatediron-on-plywood
walls screwed into posts, to create a narrow, dark passage with two
blind corners. The passage had sliding firing windows every few
feet and holes for trip sticks at ankle height.
The slaves had worked
all day long as soon as the dirt was soft in the spring, every day,
as grateful as if the water and canned food doled out by Lord Karl
and Master Robert was divine manna, and singing Daybreak songs
while they worked.
The inner courtyard
of Castle Earthstone was a simple chain-link enclosure with towers
at the corners, surrounding Karl’s old cabin and an array of
canvas-roofed cabins for the soldiers and improvised tents,
lean-tos, and crates for the slaves. At the gate to this, Robert
told the soldiers, “Take these fish to the kitchen bitches, tell’em
clean’em and build a fire in the big barbecue. We’ll have’em for
lunch.”
In the old hunting
cabin’s living room, Karl and Robert stretched out on old leather
sofas facing each other, and opened pre-Daybreak beers chilled in
the springhouse. “Nothing like a cold brew before breakfast,” Karl
said.
Robert laughed and
took a chilly swig. He wasn’t about to say he missed
coffee.
After reviewing the
morning’s fishing and deciding which field to hunt this afternoon,
which slaves to bed this evening, and which creek to fish tomorrow,
the two men were quiet, until finally Karl said, “I know you hardly
ever talk without being asked, and I know you’re thinking, Robert,
so what’s on your mind?”
One thing Robert
liked about Karl: most people thought because you didn’t talk, you
didn’t think, but Karl knew Robert thought all the time. Robert
asked, “Who do you talk to late at night over that hidden
radio?”
“Daybreak,” Karl
said. “I am Daybreak, and I talk to the rest of
Daybreak.”
“And what is Daybreak
really?”
“That’s like asking
who God, or you or I, or anything that took a long, long time to
grow is really, or what made it the way it is.”
“But it wasn’t just a
back-to-nature club? And it’s not all gone now that the plaztatic
world is down?”
“No more than the
Catholics are just a wine-and-bread club that folded up after the
crucifixion. We knew all along Daybreak couldn’t be a one-time
thing. Too damn many asshats out there who want their plaztatic TVs
and Wal-Marts and cars and stuff back, too many bastards that think
they’re more important than the Earth so they get to crap all over
it, too many shitheads that want to be warm in the winter and fill
the world with little shitheads that grow up and want houses too.
So Daybreak’s not more than half over, even now. Maybe half of what
was planned before Daybreak day has not even activated
yet.”
“That’s how a couple
thousand slaves turned up in early spring to build all this stuff,
and as soon as it was built a battalion of soldiers showed up to
move in?”
“That’s how. Castle
Earthstone was made for a purpose, Robert, and that purpose is
still ahead of us. For right now we drill the soldiers, build the
castle, and work the slaves.”
“I kind of like
drilling slaves, too.”
“Me too, and I love
hunting and fishing and living in a world that’s going to be clean
and free. But this place has a purpose. That’s how I knew to go
loot those warehouses the week before the Chicago bomb went
off.”
“A couple dozen
slaves died in the storm coming back, though. I guess even Daybreak
doesn’t know everything.”
“Daybreak knows
everything we need to know, Robert. The slaves mostly gave their
lives over to Daybreak a long time ago. They’re here to help
Daybreak root out the last stems and shoots of the Big System. Then
they’ll die, mostly. The soldiers too. Good, clean, Daybreak people
are here to kill the Big System and its servants, then die. We
needed supplies for the people coming, because Daybreak needed them
to stay alive. After that, when we didn’t need as many slaves, they
died.”
“Is that why we kill
the babies?”
“Unhhunh. And that’s
why we neither of us and none of the soldiers gets a bitch all to
himself; nobody can get too worked up about whether any particular
little pink monkey is his little bundle
of Gaia-raping evil. We’re going to be the last generation, Robert.
But we’re going to have a grand time while we do it.” He tossed him
another cold beer. Spraddled on the couch, in his long red T-shirt,
suspenders holding up his baggy pants, Karl looked more like Santa
Claus than ever. “Now, cold beer, hot lunch, straightening out the
soldiers and the construction, and then more shooting, fucking, and
fishing. Daybreak doesn’t need us just yet.”
“Karl, I don’t know
enough yet to take over if you die.”
“We’ll talk more,
later today, tomorrow, in a month I’ll have you all briefed. No
need to rush unless there’s something important right
now.”
Robert thought,
taking his time, sipping his beer and watching Karl sip his. “So,
Karl, why’d you take me along on Daybreak day?”
“Well, I like to talk
and you like to listen. That’s a flaw in our whole species, always
figuring crap out and sharing it and making more of our stupid
selves, just because we’re too scared to be really alone and
quiet.”
“Alone and quiet.”
Robert held his bottle up in a toast, and Karl beamed and
reciprocated.