THE NEXT DAY. CASTLE EARTHSTONE. 6:20 AM EST. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2025.
The long, deep
sunrise shadows reached out from the blood-red sun. Jason, watching
from thirty feet up in a tree, had been seeing the first torches,
lamps, and cookfires inside the main compound of Castle Earthstone
for about an hour and a half.
More than forty
skulls decorated the gates and walls. The just-rising sun revealed
a person tied face-on to a post in front of the main gate; more
light revealed a welted back.
A guard came out and
threw water over the prisoner, untied the wrists, and let the body
fall to the ground. He kicked the body to turn it over—turn
her over, they saw—and she cried out
and moved; he yanked her to her feet by her hair and pushed her
toward the gate.
For the next few
hours, they circled Castle Earthstone, slowly working their way
from one vantage to another. Patrols were slow, apathetic, and
rare; workers in the fields were few, far between, and seemingly
dazed. The corn and bean fields were tended but not
well-tended.
In a clearing in the
creek bottom, they found the burial ground. Bodies were half-out of
shallow graves; animals had been at them. One large heap of dirt,
tunneled by foxes or raccoons, was littered with tiny bones. “Where
they put the newborns,” Larry said.
Jason said, “That’s
what the plan always was, all the Daybreak poets worried about how
to keep people from breeding back. Did you notice how many women
are pregnant and how few kids there are? We used to say that our
goal was not just to be the best generation but the last. So . . .
Mother Earth needs our help. Babies are the enemy.”
“It explains why a
place this big doesn’t have more crops growing,” Chris said.
“They’re not planning to keep all their slaves alive through the
winter.”
When they took a
break, creeping back to share some venison jerky and dried
apricots, Chris asked Jason, “Doesn’t it seem weird that the slaves
they’re killing off are mostly women? Weren’t these guys supposed
to be goddess-worshipping feminists?”
“That was the warm-up
in the Daybreak sales pitch to women,” Jason said, thinking how
much that sounded like his father or brother. “Some women love the
idea of being all Earth-mothery, I am woman, I
give birth to the world, I am the mother the world needs—I
used to riff on phrases like that all the time for my Daybreak
poems. But if human beings are a blight on the face of Mother Gaia,
and getting rid of them is the paramount goal, you’ve got to get
rid of women.
“Men breed too,”
Chris pointed out.
“A hundred men and
one woman can turn out about one baby
per year. A hundred women and one man can turn out about a
hundred babies per year. If you want to
get rid of people, you get rid of mothers,” Jason said. “But that
wasn’t what we said to them, not at first. Our first message was,
‘You are Woman and the world depends on you.’” He wasn’t looking up
from his food, lost in thinking about home and his pregnant wife.
“That’s what got Beth into it; she was from a dirty-ass pack of
urban white trash scum that was trying to pretend they were ghetto
gangstas because for them it was an upgrade. Daybreak was the first
time anyone said they wanted her for something besides her boobs. A
lot of women didn’t see where it was going till too late. A lot of
men, too.” He seemed to be a thousand miles inside
himself.
“Why don’t they
rebel?” Chris asked.
“Some do. Beth and I
walked into Pueblo and volunteered. I don’t know why more
ex-Daybreakers don’t.”
“But why don’t they
rebel here?”
Jason shrugged. “Why
do you think there’s a whipping post and a boneyard?”