The Last President Read online

  Grayson nodded. “You’re probably the main reason we haven’t been poisoned yet.”

  “Luther’s patient. Long before he poisons you, Maelene’ll’ve dumped you out an upstairs window. You’ve got to learn she’s not a private and the house does not need to pass inspection. Let’s eat this while it’s still hot.” She pulled her robe back on, wincing more than it really hurt, and ate standing up though she didn’t have to, because she knew he liked to see that.

  As always, Luther had done brilliantly. They ate quickly, enjoying the rare combination of hot, fresh, and plenty. Even the most likely next president and first lady can’t count on a good Christmas dinner, Jenny thought. Not this year. Not since back before. Did I ever enjoy any food this much, back before?

  Grayson laughed suddenly. “You realize that neither of us took off any of all the socks we’re wearing?”

  “Baby, brutality can be fun, in the right mood, but bare toes on this floor is too brutal. If you find some nice girl with a cold feet fetish, you go right ahead.” Before loading seconds onto her plate, she paused to bind up her hair, and noticed she had captured his gaze. “Caught you staring, baby. Now that I’ve taken care of your needs, how about some respect for your little Barbie doll’s mind?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call yourself that.”

  She shrugged. “I know I’m not, and so does anybody that counts—here, or in Olympia or Pueblo or anywhere else. That act is over.”

  “I never liked that act, and good riddance to it. If I’m going to be a monster I’d rather be a real monster and attack a real woman.” Something on the map caught his attention and he leaned across the table to look at it from another angle. He needed information about that state forest south of Bloomington—hadn’t the RRC sent some scouts through there last summer? Maybe—

  Jenny said, “Jeff, why are you putting so much thought into beating up some starving, sickly hippies?”

  He glanced up, smiling. “There’s never enough time before to think and plan, and no time at all once it starts. Sorry I got distracted.”

  “Baby, I don’t believe for one second that bush hippies on a map could pull your attention away from these.” She sat up straight and pulled her shoulders back. Her pouty spoiled-bimbo routine, just because it was so fake, almost always made him smile and often seemed to get him talking, but today he just looked sad, and she was instantly sorry she’d tried it. “Come on, Jeff. You’ve been pesty for rough sex for several days, and staring out the window, and quiet for hours at a time. That means you’re worried; I’ve had ten months to learn to read your tells. Now what is eating at you so bad?”

  He gestured to the map. “Now that RRC agents are penetrating north of the Ohio and east of the Wabash, they’re finding things worse than we thought. The tribal ‘armies’ aren’t really armies—more like mass foot-powered kamikazes. Designed to smash their way through civilization, destroy everything they can’t use right away, and die. It’s amazing how big and fast a force can be if you’re not planning to supply it, or get any of it back.

  “They’ve got it timed so that they’ll hit peak strength just as the ground is dry enough to move, and in each camp if they don’t start to move on schedule, they’ll start to starve within days. So they will move on schedule. And once they’re moving . . . well, an enemy whose purpose is only to kill as many of you as they can before they die—”

  “You spent your career in the Middle East, Jeff—”

  “And back then I had the greatest military power in history on instant call. It looks different from General Braddock’s position.”

  “Have I met him?”

  “Not likely. George Washington’s CO in the French and Indian War. Talented, bright, brave, and unlucky. The Indians trapped his force on a road in the forest. Outgunned, outnumbered, no reinforcements, cut off, four horses killed under him, and he held his force together in a fighting retreat before a sniper nailed him. Terrible reputation, though, thanks to historians who never walked that ground. If you remember the Yough—”

  “I remember, baby—I wrote your memoirs. And we won.”

  “We got the Amish farmers out. That was our objective, so technically we won, but a few more victories like that and we won’t have an army. Exact same kind of country, and very close to, where Braddock went on that expedition. That’s why I was thinking of it.” He gestured at the toy soldiers who pinned down the map. “On this campaign down the Ohio and up the Wabash we have to win eleven times in a row—and win bigger at less cost than we ever did in the Yough. And conditions aren’t any better than they were for Braddock, and I’m not the combat commander he was. Which means I have to be a lot luckier.”

  “Eleven times?”

  Grayson shrugged. “There are eleven of those—I don’t like to call them armies. ‘Hordes’—I guess that’s the word—waiting for spring and dry ground to cross the Ohio and the Wabash. If even one of them gets past us and penetrates any distance into civilization, they’ll move faster than we do; living on looting, they have no supply train, and they’ll be killing refugees, not rescuing them. So our slow, overburdened army will have to chase after the invading horde, and meanwhile other hordes will be breaking out at other points. Everything depends on stopping them before they can start.” He looked down at the toy soldiers on the map. “Isn’t it strange how toy soldiers haven’t gotten new equipment since World War Two, more than 80 years ago?”

  One of Jenny’s friends had found a bag of plastic soldiers, unspoiled by biotes, under a pile of cotton fabric in a wrecked Hobby Lobby, and knowing that now that they were uncovered they would rot within a week or so, had buried them upside down in wet sand and poured molten solder into them, creating lumpy, ungainly “solder soldiers.” They had made Grayson laugh when he’d unwrapped them.

  “You’ve been shoving them around on that map all morning.”

  “It’s a way to think. The guys standing at attention represent my reserves; firing from one knee, front line infantry. Bazookas stand for artillery, bayoneters for cavalry. Daybreakers are grenade throwers.”

  Now that she could read it, she saw how grim the layout on the map was. “And if it all depends on stopping eleven attacks all at once, with only one army—”

  “That’s our biggest advantage, that it won’t be all at once—the only good news that Heather O’Grainne’s intel operation had for us. The tribals’re planning to hit first along the upper Ohio, where it’s a shorter distance to better looting, and then unroll the attacks down the Ohio and up the Wabash—the Wabash hordes are farthest away from their own supplies, and will have to travel a long way through country that’s already been looted and burned over, so they’ll start last.”

  “Why don’t they go in random order? You’d never be able to catch them—”

  “If it were me, I might. I think it’s because of their non-command non-structure; ‘go after these guys do’ is a real easy rule. And it does mean that to some extent they support each other, and maybe it’s so the first one to get past me can focus on blocking me while the others get in.

  “But anyway, assuming Heather got the truth out of them, the plan is, I match their schedule, hitting them with spoiling attacks down the Ohio and up the Wabash.” His arm swept over the map in a crooked L shape. “They’ll be most vulnerable just before they’re ready to attack—greatest troop concentrations and smallest remaining supplies. If I beat them to every punch, it can be eleven massacres instead of eleven battles, but they only need to be lucky once, and I have to be lucky eleven times. Luckier than Braddock, at least.”

  “If you need to be very, very lucky, then we’re in good shape, because you are.” Jenny rubbed her hair with a towel again, pretending to dry it while making sure she was disheveled the way he liked; the motion stretched her just enough to slightly open her bathrobe. Jeff’s arrogance is his armor, and I can’t let there be a hole in his armor. “This
time be gentle, ’kay, baby?”

  AN HOUR LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 3:35 PM MOUNTAIN TIME. THURSDAY, DECEMBER 25, 2025.

  The Christmas tree in the corner of Heather’s living quarters hypnotized Leo; he gurgled happily whenever she put him close to it.

  I’ll need to get rid of that fire hazard before the New Year, even though Leo loves it.

  While she waited for James, she redid her master chart, the layout of file cards, slips of paper, thumbtacks, and string by which she tracked her efforts to—

  Leo had gotten a body width closer to the tree by rolling onto his back, the first time he’d ever done that, and was now grabbing for the ornaments just out of his reach. Heather propelled all six-feet-one of herself around the table to her son, who fortunately had not yet acquired or ingested anything. “So,” she said, “you’ve got a new trick, turning over. Wait till I tell MaryBeth. She’ll get such a kick out of telling me that you’re a normal kid and I worry too much.”

  “Ah!”

  She moved him farther from the tree, and returned to her chart.

  A knock. “Heather, it’s James, they’ve apparently decided I can be trusted to climb stairs by myself.”

  “You must feel practically human.” She opened the door.

  James unloaded a bulging pack onto her table. “Eggnog, made with the last of my pre-Daybreak Jack Daniel’s, and I wrapped the jar so it’s still warm. Also quiche, trout bisque, and some appalling Mesa County wine, pre-Daybreak, that someone must have given me as a joke.”

  “James, this is why you’re perfect.”

  They sat and enjoyed the warmth and the company, as the sun sank into the mountains, just visible from this high window, in a spectacular burst of reds and golds. “I can almost forget,” Heather said, “that those colors are the dust of billions of people, thousands of cities, all of civilization—”

  “Eggnog,” James said. “Warm eggnog.”

  They clinked cups. “Merry Christmas. And that’s not a rebuttal, oh chief advisor.”

  “There’s truth in warm eggnog, too, and the colors are beautiful, however they got there.”

  Sunset was a streak of vivid purple with a deep red egg half nested in it, behind the black teeth of the mountains, when they heard the group of people singing “Adeste Fidelis.” “That hymn must have accompanied some bleak Christmases since the Romans first sang it,” Heather said.

  “It’s not nearly that old,” James said. “They were still writing hymns in Latin down almost to 1900, because Latin sings better than English.”

  “How did you—don’t tell me the government had a pamphlet on that?”

  “You bet. Recreating historic holidays, a teacher’s guide, 1950s booklet from the Park Service’s history guides series. ‘Adeste Fidelis’ would be okay for a grade-school production of Christmas at Valley Forge, but not much earlier, and even for Christmas at the Lincoln White House, only snooty Episcopalians would know it. If you want common soldiers singing it, go to the Bulge or Chosin.”

  “I was visualizing Roman Britain, brave old legionaries and half-trained boys surrounded by Saxons, you know. Anyway, it sounds brave against the darkness.”

  “‘Brave against the darkness’ probably counts more than archival-librarian accuracy.”

  She nodded and they sat quietly until she asked, “James, are we expecting too much, too soon, for putting the country back together? There’s so much to do in this next year.”

  He squatted by the fire, surprisingly agile, held his hands to the warmth, and seemed to listen to some voice. At last he said, “Right now, a few million loyal Americans—not Daybreakers, I mean good people who do their jobs and who we need—have just begun noticing that a restored United States might not be so good for them.”

  Taken aback, Heather blurted, “Who wouldn’t it be good for, besides Daybreak? Why not?” She could hear indignation in her own voice and wasn’t sure she intended it.

  James spread his hands. “Lots of people. The guy who created a business out of property that was just lying around, who has never paid taxes, and doesn’t want to start. The teacher who teaches what she likes, how she likes. The farmer who has access to all the land he can plow.

  “Right now, if people put resources back into productive use, good enough, and we let them keep it; the real owner is almost certainly dead and if not, unable to get back to the property. But what if the roads and the courts re-open, and people can come back and prove they’re the old owners? Then add in that once it’s set back up, there’ll be taxes again. And that old folk figure of evil, The Book-Smart Man From Washington That Don’t Know Shit, will begin to reappear at the doors of hardworking people.”

  “There’s no more Washington. There’s a lake where it was.”

  “You know what I mean. And you can bet that if we do carry out our plan and get a Federal government going again, ‘Springfield’ will mean pretty much what ‘Washington’ used to, well within our lifetimes. We’d have some people losing things they’ve worked for, and many people remembering things they didn’t like. So some of them are catching on, right now, that the Restored Republic of the United States is a nice idea but it’s not necessarily the best thing for them.”

  “But, James, who?”

  “How many people with a spending problem sleep better at night because their debt is gone, with no one to extend more credit to them and nothing to buy with it? Why would they want to bring back the world of consolidation, bankruptcy, and foreclosure, especially if they have to work at it? How many people played dead, and got a fresh start, by just walking away from lovers or families in the chaos? How many people were in jobs they hated back then and have lucked into jobs they like, now?”

  “Oh, there are some like that, I’m sure, but come on, James, what about an ex-desk jockey who’s shoveling mud? Won’t he—”

  “Everybody doesn’t have to be better off for there to be a movement. Think how many big causes in history turned out to benefit nobody. And the benefits of the new world are not illusory, Heather. Re-creating the Federal government is going to be a net cost to a lot of people who won’t want to pay that bill.”

  “Then should we just give up? Are we too late already?”

  “I think we’re still in time, but only just. Right now, I think most people haven’t yet admitted how much they have to lose if the United States comes back.

  “But if we give them a year or two, they’ll see all kinds of practical reasons to put off the Restored Republic for another year, or another decade, or their grandchildren’s generation. My advice as your consigliere is now.” He stirred the pot, the red glow bathing his bald spot and sagging cheeks, making him look a thousand years old. “All in the timing. Like the moment for this bisque, and the moment to just enjoy Christmas with company, and every other moment that matters. Hold out your bowl and no more gloomy talk till we’ve finished.”

  TWO:

  WE ALL FEED OFF THE WRECKAGE

  2 WEEKS LATER. ATHENS, TNG DISTRICT. 2:30 PM EASTERN TIME. THURSDAY, JANUARY 8, 2026.

  Jenny Whilmire Grayson thanked the crowd and left the rostrum on the steps of the First National Church (the former University of Georgia chapel) knowing that she had given one of her best speeches, ever: just Christian enough so that her father’s disciples would not feel deserted; heavy on Army, patriotism, and honor for Jeff’s home crowd; enough quotes about restoring the Constitution for the Provi audience that would read the speech in the Pueblo Post-Times next week. And she’d written some good catchy phrases, and delivered them well.

  Her father’s expression brought her up short. “Honey, I’m proud of you, of course—”

  “But . . . ?”

  “As we move deeper into the Tribulation, we also move the saving remnant of America toward its union with the Lord, and—”

  “Daddy, I can tell you’re not speaking as my father, you’re
intoning as the Chief Bishop of the Post Raptural Church—”

  “Jenny, I am your father. You were always my smart, beautiful daughter, and I love you, but if you are going to be our First Lady, you have to be more than smart and beautiful.”

  “What else did you have in mind?”

  “America needs a First Lady who is a model Christian woman, because the President and First Lady, in a very important symbolic way, are the national mother and father—”

  “Daddy, Jeff has had a vasectomy and nowadays there’s no way to reverse it.” Sorry about lying to Daddy, Jesus, but we will just have to wait for the ten-year shot that Mama got me when I went off to college to wear off, because there’s no counter-shot anymore. I guess once it does wear off we’ll say we’d been praying and the Lord saw fit to reload Jeff’s musket.

  “I don’t mean literally, physically parents, I mean that you represent motherhood and fatherhood, in the same way that the President himself represents not just fatherhood but our Father in heaven, too. Ever since Kennedy, America has responded to filth in the White House like the boy who saw his father with a prostitute—”

  “And you think I’m behaving like a prostitute around the National Daddy?”

  It was a calculated tantrum; before he could gather himself to protest that he hadn’t meant that, she had pushed past him, and the guards had waved her into her husband’s inner office.

  Jeffrey Grayson looked up. “Well. Your speech was brilliant, and you look unhappy, so I guess you talked to your father.”

  Her chuckle was humorless. “Do you want me to be more of a good National Mommy?”

  He shook his head. “I want you around. And in love with me. That’s first and second. Third, I want to know I’ve done my duty as an officer. And then, way down the list, but still on it, I want to be president.”

  “And you think all that might conflict?”

  “I think you’re already angry and I didn’t cause it.”