One Second After

by William R. Forstchen

  He walked around them, barely noticing.

  “Colonel, damn it, we won!”

  He didn’t even bother to look back at who was speaking.

  His old Edsel was parked in front of the town hall. A crowd was gathered round. Someone had written on the bulletin board but one word: “VICTORY!!!!”

  Some began to ask questions as he approached, others asking for orders, others asking what they should do now.

  He did not reply; he simply got into the car. The keys were in the ignition, the engine turned over, and he backed out.

  The radio was on. Voice of America.

  “This morning, a containership from Australia docked in Charleston. Our allies have sent us over a million rations, a thousand two-way radios, six steam-powered railroad locomotives—”

  He switched it off.

  The barrier was still up at the gate into the Cove, two students guarding it. He rolled to a stop. “What’s the news?” He looked at the girl holding a pistol. “Sir, are you ok?”

  “We won,” was all he could say.

  The girl grinned and saluted, motioning for the other student to move the Volkswagen that blocked the gate back.

  John drove through and turned onto Hickory Lane, rolling to a stop at number 12, Jen and Tyler’s house.

  As John pulled into the driveway, all four of them were out the door, Jen, Jennifer, Ginger wagging her tail… and Elizabeth.

  He sat in the car, unable to move as they came running down to him.

  He looked at Elizabeth, all of sixteen and a half. No outward sign yet of the life inside her, still not much more than a child herself.

  Jennifer reached the car first and then stepped back.

  “Daddy, you look terrible!”

  “I’m all right, honey. Just a little singed.”

  Elizabeth was beside her now, Ginger up between them leaning in, wanting to lick him.

  God, but two months ago this was the way it was. Come home after a lecture and office hours, if a Tuesday or Thursday when he had a 2:30 to 4:00 class the girls home ahead of him. Always the dogs would come piling out, Jennifer with them, his teenage daughter at least still following a bit of ritual and joining them with a hug and kiss.

  He was unable to move, to get out of the car.

  Jen was now up looking in.

  “What happened?”

  “We’re ok,” he finally said. “We won; they’re gone.” Jennifer shouted and grabbed hold of Ginger, dancing around. “We won; we won; we won!”

  He stared ahead… the victor returning from the wars, he thought. The triumph, the parade, the ovation. The stuff, yet again, of film, but now, this the real reality of it?

  “John?”

  Jen was leaning in through the window. “You’re hurt.”

  “Nothing much. Concussion, some burns, I’ll be fine.”

  “Daddy, where’s Ben?” Elizabeth asked. John looked past Jen to his daughter. “Let me out,” he said softly.

  Jen opened the door and as they exchanged glances he could see that Jen knew. She could read it in him.

  He stepped out of the car and slipped his hand into his pocket.

  He remembered that the ring was caked with dried blood. Frantically he rubbed it with his hand.

  “Daddy? I asked you about Ben. Did you see him?”

  “Yes, honey.”

  John walked towards the door, Jen rushing ahead to open it.

  “Then he’s ok?” Elizabeth asked. “I knew he’d be ok.” John could hear the wishful strain in her voice.

  He walked into the house. Jen had opened all the windows, airing out the stale, musty smell that had greeted them. Sunlight flooded in through the bay windows that faced the creek that tumbled down through their backyard.

  It had been Tyler’s favorite place in the house, the bay windows open unless it was freezing cold, the sound of water tumbling over rocks, the deep, comfortable sofa facing it.

  John sat down.

  “Elizabeth, come here.”

  “Daddy?”

  She was beginning to cry even as she sat down beside him.

  He reached into his pocket and drew out the ring.

  “Ben wanted you to have this,” John said, fighting to control his voice, to not let the anguish out.

  She took the ring, cradling it in her hands. He had done a poor job of cleaning it. Flecks of dried blood rested in the palm of her hand.

  “Someday,” he said softly, “someday you will give that to your child and tell them about their father, what a wonderful man their father was.”

  She buried herself in John’s arms, sobbing, hysterical, crying until there were no more tears to give.

  The shadows lengthened. He could recall Jen bringing him some soup, saying it was sent down by the chaplain from the college and she had been over to see Ben’s parents, who had moved into an abandoned house. John remembered Jennifer’s voice, in what was now her bedroom, talking to Jen, crying, then saying a prayer, the two of them reciting the Hail Mary together. The sound of Ginger paddling back and forth, then finally climbing up to sleep alongside Jennifer, sighing as she drifted off to sleep.

  As darkness settled, Elizabeth came back out, nestled against his shoulder, and cried herself to sleep.

  He held Elizabeth throughout the night, and would hold her until the coming of dawn.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  DAY 131

  There was a ghost-town feel to the village as John drove into Black Mountain and did his new morning ritual of circling through the downtown area to see if anything had happened during the night.

  Makala, sitting beside him, silent; most likely, he thought, going over the plan they had for the phone call.

  Windows to once proud shops along Cherry Street were streaked and dirty. His old favorite, Ivy Corner, had burned two weeks ago, the fire an accident caused by some squatters. The fire had been allowed to burn since it threatened no other buildings, and John had let the squatters go without punishment.

  Bits of paper, dust, leaves, swirled in the street with the autumn breeze. At the corner of State and Black Mountain a teenager had a booth, made up from an oak desk that had been thrown out of the furniture store when it was converted to a hospital. He had two plump squirrels and a rabbit hanging from a pole. “Squirrel seven bullets, rabbit twenty bullets, willing to barter,” read a hand-lettered sign.

  As food grew scarcer, the price was going up. But bullets were scarce now as well.

  John’s earlier prediction that cigarettes might very well become currency had been wrong. Nearly every last one had been smoked long ago. He still felt the pangs for it. It was bullets that were now the currency of choice, especially .22 and shotgun shells.

  In his own hunting he had set the .22 rifle aside, going over to the .50-caliber Hawkins flintlock. One of the reenactors from John’s old Roundtable group had started up a business of making black powder. The reenactor had figured out how to scavenge and process saltpeter and sulphur and the lead for the bullets; that could be found in any old car battery.

  John circled past the military hospital. It was empty. The wounded who still needed treatment had been transferred up to Gaither Hall, which was being heated by the retrofitted boiler. Makala now ran that hospital, tending to the nearly forty who were still struggling to survive.

  The casualties had indeed been high, over 700 dead, 120 of those students, and 700 wounded, of whom a third had died, and some were still dying, even now.

  Nearly a third of the students had thus died in the battle or afterwards, another third wounded. A horrific price. In class, so long ago, when he spoke of Civil War battles where a regiment would lose two-thirds of their men in a battle, it had always been numbers. Now it was real, so terribly real. Both Jeremiah and Phil had died in the fight, and so many others of his kids, as John had once called them.

  Just yesterday he had attended another funeral, of the girl Laura who had lost her leg above the knee. She just could not beat the subsequent infectio
ns.

  The funeral had been a heartbreaking affair. Only a handful showed up, those with the strength to show, and as she was laid to rest, the surviving members of the choir sang the song that somehow had become associated with the college and the battle: “The Minstrel Boy.”

  “The minstrel boy to the wars is gone,

  In the ranks of death you will find him…”

  The dead from the battle were all interred in the veterans cemetery at the edge of town, one slope of the cemetery given over to their graves. There had been talk that someday a monument would be erected to them… someday.

  Everyone agreed they needed a special resting place and not just the golf course.

  There was still the occasional skirmish that needed the militia. A small band of a couple dozen raiders made the trek over the Swannanoa mountains and hit down along old Route 9, and a week later an expedition was led by John down into Old Fort to root out the few remaining members of the Posse, most of them wounded, who had somehow escaped. Six more dead for the college as a result. As for Old Fort itself, barely a civilian was left alive after the treatment the Posse had given them.

  Those of John’s troops who were still left were indeed hardened now.

  Regarding Kellor’s prediction about another epidemic, he had been right. Days after the battle, what some were now calling the plague month began.

  There were nearly three thousand new graves at the golf course, one of them for Doc Kellor. The medical staff had been particularly hard-hit; there were only two doctors and one vet remaining. It had indeed been like the plague in years of old, most physicians heroically standing to their duty until they were felled, but one had just fled, hiding in his cabin, and was now an outcast, the town pariah.

  The simple combination of disease and starvation had created a death rate as terrible as that of the Black Death of the fourteenth century. Added in were hundreds with hepatitis A, others carrying B and C, which would kick in later, the usual injuries, the minor cuts that led to amputation and death.

  It was the dying-off time and by yesterday’s count just over forty percent of the two communities, which had been alive little more than four months back, were still alive. As a war, it was the most horrific since the Middle Ages. The legendary twenty-five million dead in the Soviet Union during World War II had been but one-seventh its population.

  And yet now briefly they were swimming in food. The carefully guarded cornfields had yielded a bumper crop. Every apple orchard was striped of its fruit, even the wormy ones. Pumpkins had fleshed out to fifteen, twenty pounds or more, and would not just be used this year for carved decorations. The college scavengers were bringing in bushel baskets of nuts, pinecones, sunflowers, and in some places finding remains of orchards up in the woods where a homestead had been a hundred years ago, the long-forgotten trees stripped clean.

  But the food had to be carefully counted, for it would need to last until the coming of spring. And what seemed like a bounty was, in fact, barely enough, actually not enough, for all to get through the winter.

  As for meat, there was now almost none, still the occasional squirrel, rabbit, raccoon, or possum, but deer, bear, even wild boar had been hunted to near extinction. Yet again, the false memories of the supposed life on the frontier or up in the mountains now, that all one needed to do was get a gun, walk for a few hours, and then drag back a hundred pounds or more of meat. But when thousands were thinking the same thing, in an area even as extensive as five hundred square miles, and hunting season was now 365 days a year, the game was all but gone.

  Hunting parties from the college were going up into the high mountains for three and four days at time and, more often than not, coming back empty-handed. The forest had been hunted clean.

  So there was food, but there was no balance to the food and the dying continued, even as apples were carefully hung to dry, corn stacked up in dry sheds, all covered by armed guards twenty-four hours a day. The few elderly in the community still alive were pressed into service to teach the now all but forgotten art of canning. The problem was, there were hardly any proper canning jars and gaskets, which sealed them, to be found.

  Every day he had been terrified for Makala, who was in the thick of it, but she had survived untouched. She had avoided their house during the dying month, only coming down to check when John was finally hit by it and then Jen, though through luck, or good nursing, the flu symptoms had run their course in a few days. Elizabeth had caught it as well, and John did not feel uncomfortable that, being pregnant, she was entitled to the now very rare antibiotics and additional rations to see her through. Fortunately, it had not touched Jennifer.

  But for her, the risk of flu was no longer the concern.

  It was Jennifer all were focused on now. The remaining insulin had finally lost all potency two weeks back, more than a month earlier than John had planned for. With the final bottle Makala risked several injections that finally totaled 800 units to bring Jennifer’s blood sugar level back down from 520 to 145. It was now back over 600, climbing, and six days ago she had collapsed. All the symptoms that Kellor had long warned John about were now full-blown. Extreme thirst at first, nearly uncontrollable urinating, a simple scuffed knee that had never really healed over now raging with infection, red streaks up nearly to her groin, her fever soaring to 103. Her immune system had failed, kidneys were failing… her precious little body was shutting down.

  He knew he should drive up to the gap to check on the guard there, but that had to wait. The drive around town had fulfilled John’s duty for the moment, though as he turned the corner past the ruins of the Front Porch he could see, up the street, two bodies lying out along the curb, waiting to be picked up, and made a mental note to call Bartlett.

  John pulled into his usual slot in front of the town hall and got out, Makala joining him.

  Judy was actually the person who was the center of the town as the switchboard operator, having risen from the quiet role of a secretary. She knew every call coming in and out, lived at the office, and at night monitored the battery-powered radio, pulled out of the blue Mustang, listening for news from the outside, which she would then post each morning on the whiteboard outside town hall.

  As he walked in he could see the latest, a report that Asheville supposedly had a reliable two-way radio link with Charleston. Four emergency supply trucks had arrived in Greenville, South Carolina, and one was promised to Asheville by the end of the week. She had not posted the news, though, when she had called into him just after dawn, that a helicopter had landed yesterday evening at Memorial Hospital, reportedly carrying a load of medicines.

  That knowledge would trigger an attempt by those still capable of moving to get into Asheville, and he knew that Asheville would not let any of them through the barrier near Exit 53 that was now a permanently fortified position, definitely payback for their defiance regarding the refugees back in the spring. The few refugees from outside trying to get farther west were allowed through, but anyone from Swannanoa or Black Mountain seeking to cross the line to barter was blocked.

  He walked into the office, Judy looking up from her switchboard.

  “Hi, boss.”

  “Judy, connect me to Memorial Hospital. Put it through to my line and the line in the conference room.”

  “I’ll get on it.”

  John went into his office, the office that had been Charlie’s. John had not changed it all that much, the only addition a framed Polaroid picture of the survivors of what was now called the First Battalion, Black Mountain Rangers. Eighty-one soldiers, standing in front of Gaither Hall, the picture taken a week after the battle. They looked twenty years older than the kids in another picture beside it, the annual graduation photo of all the seniors, taken just two days before “The Day.” Some were in both photos. The kids in the graduation photo looked fresh, ready to go out and take on the world with enthusiasm and joy. The rangers, they looked as if they could take on the world, by killing. The picture always made him think
of a painting by Tom Lea, a combat artist of the Second World War, of a shell-shocked marine at Peleliu called The Two Thousand Yard Stare. “Boss, I got a line open. Pick up.”

  John lifted the rotary phone off the cradle and there was a crackling hum.

  “Memorial Hospital.” The voice sounded faint, distant.

  “This is Black Mountain calling,” Judy said. “Can you connect a call to the hospital director, Dr. Vance, from Dr. Matherson, director of public safety in Black Mountain?”

  Makala had advised Judy to use John’s old title. Doctors of the M.D. kind looked down on doctors of the Ph.D. kind, but still, it would help to get through.

  “Please hold,” came the voice from the other end.

  John looked across at Makala, who was standing at the crank phone in the conference room.

  Five minutes passed, then ten. He sat on his desk, waiting nervously, heart racing, the only sound static and then a distant voice.

  “Vance here.”

  “Dr. Vance. This is,” he hesitated, “Matherson, director of public safety for Black Mountain.”

  “What do you want?”

  He could hear the exhaustion in Vance’s voice. John looked over at Makala and nodded. He was afraid if he continued, emotion would take over, and the man on the other end had no time for emotional appeals.

  John had sat in the same spot now since Charlie’s death. Decisions about who got rations and who did not. The condemning to death by execution of twenty-two people for looting of food, in one night fifteen of them had killed off two head of cattle, and, horrifyingly, one for cannibalism. Fortunately, he was now able to delegate that terrible deed to someone else, three people, one from Swannanoa, one from Black Mountain, and a professor from the college.

  John had listened to so many appeals, and always he had to judge based upon what was fair, and fairness was who might be able to make it through to next spring and who was now triaged off.