The Last President by John Barnes Page A

slaves. Ignoring the thrashing, writhing bodies at their feet, Lord Robert’s officers walked quickly to positions in the courtyard, and stood waiting for the first ones to come out of the seizure.
    Lord Robert walked directly from the rostrum to Roger. “You’ll want to get going before they revive.” His slight smile was barely a twitch. “Tell that fat bitch in Pueblo that we’ll keep talking with you. Central heat, clean sheets, and antibiotics would kind of put the fun back into being a lord, you know?”
    3 DAYS LATER. PORT ST. JOE, FLORIDA. 10:15 AM CENTRAL TIME. THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2026.
    Whorf held his voice low and even. “Doctor Reyes, don’t move.”
    â€œHmm?” she asked, intent on lowering her sampling jar into the pond.
    The cobra reared fractionally higher, intent on her leg. Whorf said, “Don’t—”
    A black-powder pistol roared beside Whorf; the cobra’s head vanished and the body thrashed in the grass. Reyes jumped. Ihor said, “Sorry if I startled you.”
    Reyes was staring at the writhing body in the brush. “Startle all you want.”
    â€œGood shot,” Whorf said.
    â€œJust had to be careful, ’cause I was only going to get one shot. Do we got—
have
—to worry about a . . . wife?”
    â€œ
Mate.
Maybe,” Reyes said. “But everything I know about cobras I got from
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
. I don’t want to stay here, anyway.”
    They watched the brush and their feet all the way back to the crumbling pavement, where Pembrooke, their local guide, arrived huffing and panting. Running in the heat had turned him an even deeper brick red than his normal sunburn, in contrast to his white mustache, eyebrows, and soaking-wet wisps of hair slipping out from under his straw hat. “I heard a shot.” He bent over, hands on his knees, to catch his breath.
    Reyes said, “You said people had seen cobras near that pond? Ihor just shot one that was getting ready to strike me.”
    â€œYou’re sure you got it?”
    Ihor nodded. “These big pistols take the head right off. It was maybe a meter, maybe more—look, he’s got it!”
    An eagle rose from the thicket back by the pond, something black and writhing in its talons.
    Pembrooke nodded. “All fresh and wiggly, yum yum.”
    Whorf asked, “What are cobras doing in Florida?”
    Pembrooke grimaced. “Back before, idiot collectors and dumbasses who wanted a scary pet smuggled them in. Now with Daybreak they’ve gotten loose.
Officially.
”
    Reyes nodded. “But unofficially?”
    â€œWell, walk with me.” On their way back to his house, they walked slowly because of the heat. “Since March, I’ve had eleven dead cobras brought in; Fish and Wildlife doesn’t send me a paycheck anymore but people are used to me being the guy for invasive species. Now, the mayor used to sell used cars, and the city council’s all his cousins, and the big local business was always tourism, so they want me to tell everybody we got two escaped pets out there making babies. But the old print encyclopedia I have says there’s ten to thirty in a litter, they don’t roam far from where they’re hatched, and they’re kind of shy—people would go months or years before finding out they had a pair under the house. Now I’ve seen eleven dead—twelve counting what that eagle was carrying off—and we’ve had two hundred and nine sightings, as much as forty miles apart. And three of my dead ones didn’t have that spectacle pattern on the hood; based on more old paper encyclopedia research, those were Chinese cobras.
    â€œSo the official position, I guess, must be that we’ve got one multispecies litter of exhibitionist cobras who decided to go on tour.”
    â€œWhat do
you
think?” Reyes asked.
    â€œI
would
think it was Daybreak making it hard to