By the time both fire crews were loading the clean hose onto the hastily-wiped-down truck, the wall of flame whipping westward from Snelling was four blocks long and widening, and advancing at about a block every ten minutes. One truck pumping water from half a mile away wouldn’t have been able to make much of a difference when the fire started; now the whole idea was ludicrous. They evacuated the equipment from the path of the fire; only the haphazard firebreaks formed by freeways and big parking lots stood between the conflagration and downtown St. Paul, and as the wind rose steadily that afternoon, tens of millions of sparks were drifting across them, and some were finding new, flammable homes on the other side.
ABOUT SEVEN HOURS LATER. CASTLE CASTRO. (SAN DIEGO. CALIFORNIA.) 2:09 P.M. PST. FRIDAY. NOVEMBER 1.
“So that’s the story,” Bambi said, very quietly to Carlucci, Bolton, and Mensche. “There’s one radio room here, and it’s Dad’s, and he decides what signals go out. And I know from long, long experience what he’s figuring out at the moment—how far can he push before the Feds push back. Once he has that analyzed, then he’ll either be gentle as a kitten, or look the hell out.”
“It sounds like your father has been preparing for Daybreak his whole life,” Carlucci said.
“Yeah. He’s anything but a Daybreaker—more of an old-fashioned Ayn Rand type than anything else, with a mixture of Robert A. Heinlein and probably Sir Walter Scott too—but you could say Daybreak is fulfilling pretty much every dream he ever had. In five years people will be addressing him as ‘Baron’ or something like it, at his insistence. It’s what he’s really always wanted.
“So, here’s the thing. He’ll create law and order all around Castle Castro, and probably extend it up and down the coast—I doubt he’ll worry about where the border is, let alone the county line. People in his sphere will eat and have somewhere safe to sleep. I don’t for a moment suggest that anyone else ought to take over. But… Roth is the only Daybreaker we’ve captured so far. She’s a priceless source of information. Do we want the Federal government to have to go through my crazy Baron Dad to access the most important witness it has?”
“So what did you have in mind?” Carlucci asked.
“Is there a covert, hidden-inside-the-message code you can send to the Bureau in Washington? Something to tell them that you need to be ordered to move Roth to somewhere else? Because I’ve got a place, and it’s one Dad will accept. Quattro Larsen, who freeholds Castle Larsen up by Jenner, will pretty much do whatever I tell him—no snickering and giggling about why! Dad will be delighted if I’m ordered to go up there because he’s been trying to set me up with Quattro since I was thirteen, and Quattro and I have had a covert code since we were teenagers, so I can set that up with him too.”
“Well, put that way, of course,” Carlucci said. “Hell yes. How will we get her there?”
“It’s going to be a one-way trip, so it probably isn’t we,” she said. “You don’t want to leave your family here, and the same consideration rules out Terry. So it should be Larry and me.”
“Where’s Jenner?” Larry asked.
“Near the mouth of the Russian River, north of San Fran. Plenty of time to explain once we’re on our way.”
Mensche looked thoughtful. “My daughter, Debbie, is a screwed-up drug addict who has never finished any schooling or held a job, and she’s doing three-strikes time at Coffee Creek.”
“Oregon?” How to spot a Fed, Bambi thought. We know all the big state pens.
“Yeah. Up till this week, she didn’t write or call and didn’t want me to. Her mom would go over from Nevada a couple times a year to see her and send me short notes about her, mostly just that she’s healthy, and not getting out anytime soon. I—well, I’m worried, because I just hope someone remembered to do something for the prisoners when things started to crash, even if it was just to leave doors unlocked. I worry about that. I want to know she’s okay—”
Bambi nodded. “And I’ll get you almost halfway to Coffee Creek. And Quattro can give you a lot of help too, and he will if I ask him.” She reached out and touched his shoulder. “We’ll find out what’s happening with Debbie and make sure she’s okay.” She glanced back at Carlucci. “Well, there you have it. Roth goes because she belongs to the Feds, and we can’t leave her here with a Baron of San Diego who intends to be the Duke of California someday. Larry goes because it’s a one-way trip, and it gets him closer to his family.”
“Why are you going?” Carlucci demanded. “And how?”
She smiled at him, focusing her warm Miss Used to Do Beauty Contests Beam into his eyes. “Well, I had enough trouble with the old tyrant when I was just his daughter; I’m not sticking around to find out what it’s like to be his heir and vassal. And somebody’s gotta sail the boat.”
THE NEXT DAY. WASHINGTON, DC. ABOUT 2:00 A.M. EST. SATURDAY. NOVEMBER 2.
Despite what the rest of the country knows in its bones, some of the people in Washington are responsible sorts who are capable of forethought; they began to leave when the electricity stopped coming back up, while some cars and trucks were still running. Their disappearance made things inconvenient and difficult for the less foresighted, who, seeing things deteriorate quickly, left soon after, making things still worse for the remaining people with even shorter time horizons.
Around midnight, a tipping point was passed. National leaders and government personnel had withdrawn into safe places like the DRET compound at St. Elizabeth’s. Ordinary citizens had fled, if possible, knowing what was coming.
At two A.M. the people left were the completely immobile, the stupid, the stubborn, and people without foresight or impulse control.
Crowds in the street were hungry and looking for excitement. The remaining inventories of booze and bling in stores and warehouses were unguarded. Nearly all police had deserted; hardly any of the unlucky people left in ordinary residences were capable of defending them. Some of the boldest and most impetuous of the street crowds broke shop windows; no one stopped them from carrying off liquor and jewelry (white crusts and foul odors around the electronics kept them mostly untouched). Bartenders and bouncers died; doors and windows broke; the cornered innocent died with nowhere to run; recalcitrant defenders burned in their refuges; and authority did not show up.
When the remaining population in the streets fully understood this, like a hot room flashing over when a window breaks, like an auction stampede when the last lot is up, destruction and violence spread through the city.
Washington was still the capital. Federal law-enforcement people and military units moved in and backed up the few surviving city forces; units of the Maryland and Virginia Guard joined them, and not long after dawn, the rioters had been swept into a few large holding areas, fire lanes cleared to isolate the big fires, and a sort of order restored, especially in the area close to the National Mall.
Tens of thousands of bodies lay in the wreckage, or unburied in the streets. Some blocks burned for days, unattended. Countless old people, children, bedridden patients, people whose powered wheelchairs had stopped running, and the few brave people who would not desert them, died buried in rubble, smothered in smoke, or roasted alive. Great scars of tumbled buildings, toppled poles and posts, and broken concrete slashed deep into the heart of the great city. And in a few large auditoriums, stadiums, and office buildings, tens of thousands of people who had formed the mob, or fled one mob and been caught up in another, or just gone out to see what was happening, were held there by the guns of the guards, waiting in hunger and despair for whatever might come. The horror was: nothing did.