One Second After

by William R. Forstchen

  “Doc, do you agree?”

  “Keep it at least a couple of hundred feet back from the creek that feeds into the park. On the slope draining away from the creek. Yes, I agree.”

  “Then that’s where we take the dead now.”

  John remained silent. It was interesting how different things, different changes, shocked in different ways. Tom was a golf addict. Regardless of what was now happening, to turn his favorite piece of real estate into a cemetery… it was too much for him to absorb at this moment.

  “We should get some of the ministers in to consecrate the ground,” Kate said. “Folks will want that.”

  Charlie noted it down on his pad. “I’ll talk to Reverend Black; he’s sort of heading up the ministers here now.

  “Any other health issues?” Charlie continued.

  “Four more deaths up at the nursing home last night. They’re dying off quick up there.”

  John thought of Makala. She had pretty well taken over the running of the place and he had not seen her in two days now.

  “Three suicides as well. The McDougals and one of the outsiders.”

  “Greg and Fran?” Kate asked in shock.

  “A neighbor heard the gunshots. Greg had shot Fran, then himself. They left a note. She had cancer, you know. She knew what she was facing without her twice-weekly treatments up in Asheville, so she asked Greg to end it for her. Then he did himself as well. Note said for us to use her remaining painkillers for someone who still has a chance of living.”

  “They sang in the church choir with me,” Kate said softly, and for a moment her features reddened as she struggled to hold back her tears.

  No one spoke.

  “I’ll post the notice about the golf course becoming the cemetery as of today and for the duration of the emergency,” Charlie said, finally breaking the silence.

  Several large whiteboards had been dragged over from the elementary school and tacked to the outside wall of the police station. This was now the official emergency notice board.

  “We’ve got dozens of others who I suspect will not last much longer,” Kellor continued. “Those with pancreatic enzyme disorder, the day they run out of pills they start dying. A lot of our severe coronary problems are gone now. Garth Watson dropped dead last night just hauling a bucket of water back up to his house.”

  “Damn, he was only forty-three,” Kate said.

  “And fifty pounds overweight with cholesterol of two-eighty,” Kellor said. “I warned him. Well, so much for too much fast food.

  “We got over a hundred people in town, though, on chemo- or radiation therapy for cancer. Their prognosis… Well, we saw what happened with Fran. God forgive her, but a lot might decide to take that way out, especially those on serious pain management. We’ve forgotten what a nightmare the final months of cancer can be like without readily available morphine.”

  He paused and looked around the room.

  “I think we have to discuss that right now,” he said. “We have a limited supply of pain meds. Do we impound it and use it only for emergency situations, or do we continue to let those who are terminal anyhow use up what’s left?”

  “My God, Doc,” Tom interjected. “What in hell are you saying? One of those people you are talking about is my aunt.”

  “I know,” Kellor said softly. “God help me I know. But your aunt Helen is going to die soon; we know that. But suppose I get a kid in here that needs major surgery. Shock and trauma kill, and managing the pain might mean the difference between his living and dying. We got to think of that.”

  “You’re talking triaging the dying off, aren’t you, Doc?” John said quietly.

  Kellor looked at him and then slowly nodded his head. “I’m not ready for that decision,” Charlie sighed. “Most of the folks in question still have some meds in their homes. We’ll cross that one later.”

  “But we’ll have to cross it,” Kellor replied, head half-lowered. No one spoke for a moment.

  “Accidents, you would not believe how many we got,” Tom finally said, breaking the silence. “Cars are no longer killers, but chain saws still working, axes, shovels. Joe Peterson damn near cut his own leg off with a chain saw last night trying to cut firewood. We had three accidental gunshot wounds yesterday, one of them fatal, by idiots now walking around armed.”

  “It’s food, though, that I think we got to start getting serious about,” Kellor said.

  “So what in hell do you suggest that we do different?” Charlie replied sharply, and John could sense the tension, as if this had been argued about before the meeting.

  “By your estimate,” Kellor replied, “we have enough food on hand to feed everyone for another seven to ten days. That means using meat any health inspector two weeks ago would have condemned.

  “Charlie, after that… then what?”

  Charlie sighed and wearily shook his head.

  In spite of the fever and chills, John found himself focusing intently on this man, who after ten days of crisis, ten days most likely with not more than three or four hours’ sleep a night, was approaching collapse.

  “Half rations,” John said quietly.

  Charlie looked at him and then nodded.

  “I don’t know if that will work with some things,” Kellor replied. “Meat that is beginning to spoil, for example, dairy products.”

  “Then pass that out now, use it up, if need be have a gorge feast tonight with the remaining meat that might be going bad. Just make sure it is cooked until it’s damn near like leather. Then anything preserved goes to half rations.”

  “What about those holed up in their houses with food?” Kellor asked. “Charlie. There’s at least half a dozen houses with electricity, old generators that were unplugged and survived. Enough juice to run a freezer. The Franklin clan, for example, up on the North Fork. I bet they’re sitting on a quarter ton of meat in their basement freezer.”

  “And you want that I should go get it?”

  Kellor nodded.

  Charlie looked at Tom.

  “I doubt that will work with the Franklins,” Tom said, shaking his head. “At least with them and all my men being alive once we got the meat. Up in these hills we have more than a few of the old survivalist types, the kind that were real disappointed that the world didn’t go to hell with Y2K. They’re just waiting for us to come up and try.”

  “Let it go for now,” John said. “If we start turning into Stalinist commissars hunting out every stalk of grain and ounce of meat for the collective, you know the fragile balance we have right now will break down and it will be every man for himself.

  “And like any collectivization, whether true or not the rumors will explode that we took the food, but now some animals are more equal than others.”

  “What?” Tom asked.

  “You slept through Mr. Quincy’s ninth-grade English class, Tom,” Kate said. “Orwell, Animal Farm, read it some time.”

  “Besides,” John continued, “even if we looted the Franklins clean, that would be enough food to maybe give six hundred people one meal. It isn’t worth the blowback, and in my opinion is a dangerous political and legal precedent. We don’t want to be turning on each other at a time like this. Hell, if anything we want people like that Franklin clan working alongside of us. If they’re survivalists like you say and we don’t threaten them, maybe they got skills they’ll teach to us.”

  Tom breathed a sigh of relief.

  “I think it’s fair that food we salvaged from the stores now belongs to the community. But what people have in their homes, whether it’s one day left or six months’ worth, that’s theirs.”

  John looked around the table and there were nods of agreement.

  He only wished that Charlie had acted faster, or for that matter that he had thought about it and pushed him to seize control of all food in the town on Day One. If they had done so and it was rationed out correctly, it might have been enough to stretch at half rations for two months or more. But that was too late
now.

  “What about farms, though?” Kate said.

  “I can tell you right now, Kate,” Tom said, “and you grew up here, too, and should realize it, the old farms are nearly all gone. When something like this hits, everyone seems to think people living in rural areas are up to their ears in food ready to be given away. But even the farmers now are dependent on the supermarkets at least until harvesttime. Up in the North Fork we have half a dozen small farms, one with about sixty head of cattle on it. Maybe a couple of hundred pigs. The usual mix of chickens, turkeys, some geese.”

  “Still,” Kate said. “Stretched, that could be another month or so of food.”

  “I think we have to take that,” Charlie said. “It’s different from what’s in people’s basements.”

  John sighed and realized he had to agree even though it wasn’t much different from his commissar imagery of a few moments ago.

  Sixty cattle, two or three a day turned into soup, stew, could stretch things. But far more pragmatic, how to keep control, to prevent someone else from rustling them, from raiding the farm one night, killing the owners, and then just slaughtering what they could drag away quickly, leaving the rest to rot?

  Again a film image, from Dances with Wolves, the Indians finding the hundreds of buffalo slaughtered by white hunters who just took their hides and tongues, leaving the rest to rot. It could be the same here, and yet again it caught him how movies had so defined so much of the country’s image of self and now the screens were blank. A movie about us fifty years from now, if there are movies, what will it show?

  “Charlie, we have to make a deal with the few farmers in this valley. We just can’t go marching up there, take their cattle, and ride off. A deal. We protect their food, they get more than a fair cut because they are sharing with the rest of the community. In exchange we protect them, their herd and crops. And Charlie, we have to keep some stock alive.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “For next year. A couple of males, enough females. We might be looking at next year and we’re still in the same boat. We got to keep breeding stock alive even if it means we go hungry now. In the old days, eating your breeding stock was the final act of desperation.”

  “John,” Kate said. “I don’t need to hear this now. Are you saying this will still be going on a year from now?”

  “Maybe. And if we don’t plan now, there won’t be a next year for any of us.”

  “Ok, John,” Charlie said. “We’ll go up the North Fork later today and start talking.”

  “And suppose someone up there, shotgun in hand, tells us to go to hell and get off his land?” Kate asked. “You said I grew up here. I did and I know some of these folks. They’re good people, but they don’t hold much truck with someone telling them what to do.”

  “Then maybe you should be the one to go talk with them,” John said quietly.

  “Me?”

  “Exactly. Everyone in town knows you, Kate, even more than they know Charlie or Tom here. You going first would be nonthreatening.”

  “Because I’m mayor or because I’m a woman?” she asked sharply.

  “Frankly, Kate, it’s both. Tom shows up, gun on his hip, it’s commissar time. You show up, sit down with the family, have a chat, I think you can help folks with these small farms to see reason. They have to strike a deal because if they stay on their own, sooner or later someone will go for them and take what they have. We promise to post twenty-four-hour guards on their places, we offer protection, they trade some food back to the commu-nity.

  “Sounds a bit like where you come from originally up in New Jersey,” Charlie said with a trace of a smile. “Protection racket.”

  John tried to smile in spite of his light-headedness.

  “Like it or not, that’s the way it is now. I’m dead set against people’s homes being cleaned out, but I think we can agree that farms have to be protected but something given back in return to help the entire coramu-nity.

  She nodded in agreement. “Ok, I’ll go.” Charlie looked down at his notepad. “Transportation. Anything new?”

  “We got three more cars running,” Tom said. “Actually I should say that Jim Bartlett down in that Volkswagen junkyard of his did. Beetles, another van.”

  “He’s become a regular friend of yours,” Kate said, and there was, at least for a moment, a touch of a smile.

  “Yeah, damn old hippie. Though I’m not buying his line that we should be using pot for medicine.”

  “I might agree with him now,” Kellor said.

  “It’s breaking the law,” Tom replied sharply.

  “The cars, Tom,” Kate interjected. “Let’s stick with that.”

  “All right, other garages say they can get ten or fifteen more old junkers up and going, including an old tractor trailer down at Younger’s.”

  “We’ll have forty or fifty within the week,” the policeman from Swan-nanoa said quietly.

  No one spoke, looking at him.

  “You folks up here in Black Mountain always kind of looked down on us in Swannanoa. Maybe because we was poorer, but that poorness makes us worth more now.”

  John smiled at that and knew it was true. He could remember Tyler calling Swannanoa a “poor white trash” town with its trailer parks, auto junkyards, a town that had essentially gone to hell ever since the big woolen and blanket mill closed down years ago. What had once been a thriving small downtown area in Swannanoa was all but abandoned, especially after the big mill burned several years ago. Route 70, which went straight through Swannanoa, was lined with aging strip malls, thrift shops, and repair shops. It was finally starting to turn around, at least until last week, as more and more “outsiders” came in looking for land with the spectacular views the region offered. The area north of the town was developing, with high-priced homes, but that was now a tragic loss; half a dozen old farms had been chopped up into “McMansion estates” over the last few years.

  In the old trailer parks there were a lot of cars that a week before anyone in a Beemer or new SUV would have given a wide berth to on the interstate. Some of those rolling heaps were now worth a hundred Beemers.

  “Folks, this is Carl Erwin,” Tom interjected. “Chief of police for Swannanoa. I invited him here today to talk about a proposal we have.”

  Everyone nodded politely. Carl definitely had their attention with Tom’s last statement.

  “And the proposal is?” Kate asked.

  “An alliance.”

  John smiled. Again the historian in him, picturing kings of the ancient world, riding to a meeting in chariots to discuss water rights, the exchange of daughters, to band their armies together.

  “Carl and I have been talking about this for days,” Tom interjected. “It’s ok with me.”

  “What’s ok?” Kate asked.

  “That we band our towns together for the duration of this crisis.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “Defense,” Carl said. “We hold the door to the west; you have the one to the east. We cooperate, we survive; we don’t, we are all in the deep dip.” Charlie stood up and pointed to the county map pinned to the wall.

  “We have the bottleneck for I-40 and Route 70 in our town on the east side; that’s up just past Exit 66. Just west of Exit 59 there’s another bottleneck where the Swannanoa Mountain range has a spur that comes down. The two highways, the railroad, and the creek are practically side by side over there in Swannanoa. A defendable position only a couple of hundred yards wide. We have the front door; they have the back door.”

  “Maybe it’s the other way around,” Carl said, a bit of an edge to his voice. “Remember, we’re closer to Asheville and they’re still trying to force us to take five thousand for my town and five thousand for yours. I’m holding them back and it’s getting ugly real quick. We’ve had half a dozen deaths at the barrier the last two days.”

  “From what?” Kellor asked.

  “Gunshot, that’s what,” Carl replied sharply. “There’s pe
ople that walked down here told they’d find food, we’re telling them there ain’t none, it’s getting bad. I understand it’s chaos on Old 70 and the interstate back towards Asheville.”

  “Why in hell didn’t those idiots in the county office just tell people to stay in place?” Charlie snapped bitterly. “They just started this move even when we told them not to.”

  “Because they want to survive,” John said, “and the numbers are not adding up.”

  “It’ll be a die-off,” Kellor interjected. “A bad one, and Asheville wants it to rest on us, not them. Can’t blame them really.”

  “I sure as hell do,” Charlie said coldly.

  “Well, if you want to keep them out of your backyard,” Carl said, “then we better get cooperating real quick.”

  “A smart move,” John said.

  “That sixty head of cattle you folks was talking about. If Asheville comes in here, they’ll be gone in a day, and then what?” He paused and smiled.

  “Besides, we’ve counted over a hundred and twenty cattle in our town and three hundred pigs.”

  In spite of the horrifying severity of the crisis, John smiled. It truly was like ancient kings negotiating.

  Carl looked around the room and all were silent. He had played his trump card and just won with it.

  “There’s one other back door,” Carl finally continued, “that’s up by the

  Haw Creek Road, but we can seal that off as well. Our numbers, you have about a thousand more people here than we do, not counting all those that already wandered in.”

  “Will you share the cattle?” Charlie asked.

  Carl hesitated, looked over at his companion.

  “You have three pharmacies in your town; we only had one. You open up your medical supplies to us, we’ll consider a transfer of some cattle and pigs.”

  “Consider?” Kate asked, and suddenly there was a shrewd look in her eye.

  Carl looked at Charlie.

  “Ok. We’ll share them out, as needed,” Charlie said. “But it’s full sharing on both sides, medicine, food, weapons, vehicles, manpower.” Charlie looked around the room and John caught his eye. “Governance,” John said.