In the warm midday sun, intact roofs peeked through the bright red and orange leaves. Larry said, “This road’s as good as any for going into the town, I guess. That little thumbnail map seems to show Hamilton Street, and the Auglaize River, right in the middle of town.”
A mile farther on, a sign pointed off to Auglaize Street. “You don’t suppose they put Auglaize Street anywhere near the Auglaize River?” Larry said. “It leads into town, anyway.”
Half an hour later, after passing a number of intact but empty houses, Jason said, “Weird. The tribals usually burn towns on general principles. But I haven’t seen a burned house, or any sign of fighting, or even any human remains.”
“But if this place were well-defended,” Chris said, “you’d think we’d have met a patrol or run into a sentry by now.”
Beyond an overgrown cemetery, a wide, placid stream, perhaps a hundred feet across, appeared below them.
“All right, found the river,” Larry said.
In town, most of the big old twentieth-century frame houses and little nondescript brick storefronts still had all their glass; where they did not, they were boarded up. No doors were broken down. Larry said, “This feels like we walked into a Ray Bradbury story.”
“Who are you?” a voice asked.
They formed up into a triangle with their backs together.
“I’m waiting,” the voice said.
Larry shrugged slightly. “We are Federal agents reconnoitering this area for the Reconstruction Research Center.”
“Please wait here and be comfortable. You are among friends. I must alert other people. It may be fifteen minutes before anyone else contacts you.”
“We can wait that long,” Larry said, slipping his pack off and sitting on it.
There was no answer; apparently the mysterious voice’s owner had gone off on his errand—her errand?
“What do you think?” Chris asked, his voice barely a murmur, pointing his face down into the ground between his feet to hide his lips.
Jason muttered, “I think that was a kid’s voice, reading from a card.”
“I’m trying not to think,” Larry said. “Whatever’s here, it’s not like anything else we’ve found. Did you both notice, no cars? Not even the muck from the rotted tires?”
“Yeah, and the boarded windows that must have gotten broke,” Chris said, “they’ve swept up the glass around them.”
Jason looked around. “They’re not tribals. No downed wires, no wrecked refugee carts, so many things that just aren’t here.”
Larry nodded. “So often what’s not there is what police work depends on.”
“News reporting too,” Chris said. “Congratulations, Padwan Jason, you have achieved the level of consciousness in which old poops pat you on the head.”
Jason grinned. “My head lives to be patted, oh master. So who is here? The tribe of the Extremely Tidy People?”
“Close, but not quite,” a deeper voice said, seemingly from nowhere.
Larry said, “You’re not as invisible as the first person was. Part of your shadow is visible just beyond the corner of the laundromat. Does that mean we get six more weeks of winter?”
High-pitched laughter broke out all around them.
The deeper voice joined it. “Well, I don’t suppose there’s much point in keeping this up. Are you guys from Pueblo?”
“That’s where we started from but it was a while ago,” Larry said. “I’m Federal Agent Larry Mensche, mission commander; we’ll be reporting back to RRC eventually. My younger teammate here is Jason Nemarec, and the big bear of a guy is Chris Manckiewicz, who you might remember from when there was net and television—”
“And radio,” the voice said. “We heard you on KP-1 and WTRC, Mister Manckiewicz. And if I’m not mistaken you’re also the narrator on Orphans Preferred and on A Hundred Circling Camps. You’re a celeb here.” A tall, rangy man walked out from the corner of the laundromat. “Although the biggest news this month, if not this year, is going to be that you caught me with my shadow showing, Mister Mensche.”
He might have been sixty, or eighty. His face was grooved, more eroded than sagging. His full head of hair was iron-gray flecked with white, he stood straight as any ex-soldier, and his muscles bulged and knotted over thick bones; he looked like the barely covered skeleton of a giant. His khaki pants and faded plaid shirt were neatly pressed. “My name is Scott Niskala. I’m the scoutmaster of Troop 17. Everyone, you can step out of cover.”
About twenty kids seemed to appear in a single motion. An instant later one tiny old lady in thick glasses stood beside Niskala. He said, “This, as you can probably guess, is Mrs. Niskala, who is—”
“—quite capable of introducing herself, thank you. Ruth Niskala. Scoutmaster of Troop 541. The outfit that shows the boys how to do things. We were thinking you might like to have a good meal and a good rest, and then maybe we can talk about what we might do for you.”
ABOUT 5 HOURS LATER. WAPAKONETA, OHIO. 6 PM EST. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2025.
The old stone church, headquarters for the Wapak Scouts, had a small library with wooden tables and chairs, where Larry, Chris, and Jason were treated to fresh biscuits and venison gravy. This was followed by hot baths (“There aren’t any regular scheduled baths right now so we have plenty of hot water for you”), and a long nap before dinner.
While they were napping, the Wapak Scouts insisted on cleaning and mending their clothing.
“Aw,” Larry tried to protest, “you don’t have to do this.”
Ruth Niskala said, very softly, “Let them do this. This is the day we’ve promised them for a long time, the proof of their faith, and the reason they’ve been good all year. Think of it as cookies for Santa. They need to do something for you.”
When they awoke an hour later, their freshly cleaned clothing was waiting for them. Scott Niskala guided them up the stairs, away from the main meeting hall. “They’re putting something together and they want it to be a surprise. And if you even try to tell the kids that they didn’t need to, I’ll knock you flat. Let’s go to my house across the way here.”
Except for the absence of electric lights in the gathering dusk, the room seemed as it might have been before Daybreak. “The first thing I’ve got to say is that there wasn’t any plan. We just made it up as it happened, and it kind of worked out.”
Larry Mensche said, “I don’t quite see why you weren’t just overrun by the nearest tribe; a few hundred crazy tribals could sweep through this town, burn everything, and slaughter everyone. Even if a hundred of them died doing it, Daybreak’d’ve counted that as a benefit—more burden lifted off Mother Earth. So how are you here?”
“Well,” Scott Niskala said, “that’s kind of a story, but it’s what I wanted to tell you about. Excuse an old man beginning at the very beginning, but it’ll be faster if I don’t try to edit. So to begin with, my father came from Finnish stock, and learned English mostly in school, from the Iron Country up in Minnesota. The Depression drove him out of his home…”
…and he bounced through crap jobs and work camps till 1942; then there was plenty of work for a healthy young man. In 1945 he got a slot in the Regular Army; in 1947, down in Georgia, he found himself a sweet farm girl who wanted to marry anything but a farmer, and in 1948, there I was.
My old man just assumed I’d follow him into the Army, so he trained me up as a good little soldier. I took to the hiking-camping-hunting, Daniel Boone kinda stuff, but my war was Vietnam, and when I got home it was the Hollow Army years. Sorta took the fun right out.