A man of honor. Good. And not sticking around. Even better. I’ll miss his gun. Oh well.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. CASTLE LARSEN. (JENNER. CALIFORNIA.) ABOUT 2:00 P.M. PST. TUESDAY. NOVEMBER 5.
Bambi was charmed when, for the uncountable time, Quattro asked, “Do you think setting out the food and all is too much?”
She looked into his eyes and rested a hand on each of his triceps, dragging downward with her fingertips, willing his tense shoulders to descend. “Jenner is a tiny town, and it’s all laid out to be accessible to the road, the beaches, and the hills; nobody would ever have given any thought to defending it, it’s a place meant to welcome people. So they know that they depend on you in case of real trouble. You’ve shown them where they’ll bunk, trained their militia and armed it. It’s your canned fruit and tomatoes that’ll bring them through the winter without scurvy. They’ve gratefully accepted all of that; why would they think you were trying to buy their votes with a few sandwiches?”
“Okay. I’ll try to stop worrying. I just hope they’ll like what I could set out. I wish I could throw a real all-you-can-eat, too, you know, ’cause I’m pretty sure a lot of them are going hungry.”
Larry Mensche smiled. “Hey, truth here, Quattro? Relax and let people enjoy what you’ve done.”
“Yeah. People are just so difficult for me.”
“Just think of us as really fallible machines,” Mensche said. “Can I ask one strange question? Should we let Ysabel vote?”
“Well,” Bambi said, “she’s never been convicted of anything, she’s an American citizen, and her one vote isn’t going to change anything.”
Mensche nodded. “That’s what I think. Quattro?”
“Dude, she’s your prisoner.”
“But it’s your Castle.”
Quattro shrugged. “After all my years of wanting to be the freeholder of my own Castle, I found out I’d rather be an American citizen. Let’s let everyone vote today.”
FIVE HOURS LATER. LINCOLN. NEBRASKA. ABOUT 9:00 P.M. CST. TUESDAY. NOVEMBER 5.
In Lincoln, the governor sat down with her secretary of state and poured a glass of whiskey for each of them. “We won’t have the ballot results from the back corners of the state for at least a week, will we?”
“If we’re lucky. If there’s another big storm, could be two weeks before people on foot carry all the reports in.”
“But the only ones that need immediate reporting are the ones for the presidential race, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.” The Nebraska Secretary of State was a quiet man who generally let people arrive at their own conclusions, but he feared his governor’s nerve might fail her. He said, gently, “Nebraskans are not crazy—it’s going to come in massively for Norcross.”
“But if it takes weeks to report—”
“Well, exactly.” He drew out a sheet of typewritten paper, and said, “We got a radio link working, thanks to the physics kids at the university, but they’re having a hard time keeping it from crusting up, and they think they only have a couple hours in the battery they built before that goes, too. So it’s now or never. As it happens, what I have here is a copy, from a paper almanac, of the numbers from when Reagan carried this state, adjusted upward by either five percent or ten percent per county, re-proportioned to the last census. And if we report it, the only difference is everything that needs to happen can happen a couple of weeks early.”
She played with the pencil in front of her, pushed her glasses up her nose, and finally said, “You know, I don’t believe any of the eight states that have already reported had it any easier retrieving ballots than we did.”
“Rhode Island’s pretty small,” he pointed out.
“They had results half an hour after the polls closed. Do you think anyone can even cross Providence in less than half a day, right now?” The governor stared at him; her old-fashioned black horn-rimmed glasses glinted. “What do you want me to say? ”
“Nothing,” he said. “I want you to say nothing. I suppose I’ve been around long enough to want to be able to say truthfully that I’d told you, and you’d said nothing. I’ll radio these in right now.”
ABOUT ONE HOUR LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 11:30 P.M. EST. TUESDAY. NOVEMBER 5.
“The poor old West Coast isn’t going to matter any more after Daybreak than it did before.” Manckiewicz looked at the whiteboard on which one of the reporters had sketched an awkward map of the United States that afternoon. They had the generator running so there was light, and in an abandoned drugstore someone had found a few calculators whose packaging had not yet rotted.
The signal chimed; he pulled on his headset. “Okay, KP-1, this is Chris, and count me in.”
The engineer in Pittsburgh said, “Five, four”—Chris drew a deep breath—“one, go.”
Chris began. “Hello, this is Chris Manckiewicz, of the Washington Advertiser-Gazette, with a special report for KP-1 News. Latest figures indicate an unprecedented landslide for Norcross. We’re ready to call Ohio and Missouri, again for Norcross, which means he needs only a dozen more electoral votes to become—”
The note in front of him had been sitting there for a while, and he knew what was on it, but he thought a population too long trained to drama would like it better this way. “Wait just a moment, I’ve just been handed a note—all right, then. It’s… all… over! ” (Corny, sure, but corn lifts spirits, and now’s the time for it, if ever.) “Illinois, Nebraska, and Colorado have all tipped over for Norcross. Will Norcross is the next president of the United States.”
He recapped the whole story from the beginning, then signed off and turned to the staff. “Vern, are we preset with the ‘Norcross Wins’ headline?”
“Have been since yesterday. And I’ve been setting in the numbers as they came. Do we do an extra for tonight, or just go with a full story tomorrow? You never did settle on that.”
Chris leaned back. God, I wish Rusty could have seen this. “You know,” he said, “there probably hasn’t been an extra at any American paper in, I don’t know, twenty years? There haven’t been very many paper papers since the big bust in 2012. And an extra just sounds kind of… I don’t know, romantic. Besides, if we wait till morning, Shaunsen’s goons may be back here to smash our press. And there’re a few thousand people milling around on the Mall; I don’t know whether all of them will have canned goods, but there are quite a few living out of their backpacks. If we do half a print run on the extra, how soon can we get it out?”
“Forty minutes, if you’ve got any newsies to carry it.”
“We have five of them pretending to sleep downstairs right this minute, remember? So what the hell. It’s romantic, Rusty would have loved it, and I’ll be damned if we’re going to give those bastards a chance to stop our reporting. Be sure to re-run all the stuff about Rusty’s murder in there, too, and all the Shaunsen corruption stories. Let’s make it hot for the son of a bitch.”
THE NEXT DAY. WASHINGTON. DC. 6:50 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. NOVEMBER 6.