One Second After

by William R. Forstchen

  John was silent, half-suspecting.

  “He was crying for his mother. I understood enough of the language to know that….”

  His voice trailed off and John could see tears in Dan’s eyes.

  “The kid I shot,” John said, “certainly wasn’t calling for his mother. He died filled with hate.”

  “Perhaps he sees things different now,” Dan replied. “I know it’s not orthodox with some, but I have a hard time not seeing God as forgiving, even after death.”

  John tried to smile. There were some on campus who were rather traditionally “hard-line” in their views of salvation. Dan had never voiced this view before and it was a comfort, for the memory of that twisted kid’s final seconds lingered like a recurring nightmare.

  “Washington told me how you reacted and the kids know that, too. Remember, this is a Christian school and the reaction could have been bad if it seemed you were cold-blooded about it. So a lesson was taught there, John, but it’s what you said as well that resonated.

  “Washington and later Charlie Fuller told me that at that moment we as a community were balanced on a razor. Charlie had made the right decision, but he did not know how to see it carried through correctly.

  “You did. At that moment we could have sunk into a mob or, worse, a mob that would then follow a leader, even a leader of good heart like Charlie, but still follow him with bloodlust and thus would start the slide.

  “You’re the historian; you know that of all the revolutions in history, only a handful have truly succeeded, have kept their soul, their original intent.”

  Though it struck John as slightly melodramatic, Dan pointed to the portrait of Washington kneeling in the snow.

  “I don’t think we are in a revolution,” John said. “We’re trying to survive until such time as some order is restored. Communications up, enough vehicles put back on the road to link us together again as a nation.”

  “But suppose that never happens,” Dan said quietly.

  “What?”

  “Just that, John. Suppose it never happens. Suppose the old America, so wonderful, the country we so loved, suppose at four fifty P.M. eighteen days ago, it died. It died from complacency, from blindness, from not being willing to face the harsh realities of the world. Died from complacent self-centeredness. Suppose America died that day.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Dan, don’t talk like that,” John sighed.

  “Well, I think it did die, John. I think our enemies caught us with total surprise. We should have seen it. I’m willing to bet there were a hundred reports floating around Congress warning of this, experts who truly did know their stuff screaming that we were wide open. It happens to all nations, all empires in history. Hell, you’re the historian; you know that. And at the moment it does happen, no one believes it actually is happening. They can’t comprehend how their own greatness can be humbled by another whom they view as being so beneath them, so meaningless, so backwards so as not to be a threat. You know that, John. Nine-eleven, Pearl Harbor, were like fleabites in comparison to this.”

  “The Mongols hitting Eastern Europe in 1241,” John said softly. “The Teutonic Knights, when they first saw the Mongols at the Battle of Leignitz, supposedly laughed hysterically at the sight of their opponents on horses so small they were the size of ponies. Ponies that would be crushed under the first charge of lancers. They lowered their lances, charged, and at a hundred and fifty yards the Mongols decimated them with their compound bows, unheard of in Europe, each bolt hitting at fifty yards with the kinetic energy of a .38. Thirty thousand Mongols annihilated tens of thousands of Europe’s finest that day.”

  Dan nodded.

  “The French knights at Crecy mocking the English longbowmen. The British mocking us at Monmouth and Cowpens. The Germans disdainful of the Russians in 1941,” John said.

  “And us in Vietnam,” Dan said quietly, “though that was not a war for our national survival, but it certainly was for them. I remember going over there filled with a bunch of crap about how we were going to walk all over the gooks. Well, I’ve not walked right since.

  “Nation makers out there, John. Some of our profs might think I’ve sold this college to the community, but the hell with them. I know a college nearby, one that put out a lot of majors in peace studies, and if there was a protest anywhere against our military, they’d show; it was almost required. If an army recruiter ever showed up there, they’d get mobbed, all in the name of peace of course. Can you imagine you or me ever getting a job there? Diversity worked for them only as long as you toed the line with their views, and now the whirlwind is upon us.” He sniffed derisively. “They’ll never make it now. I bet on that campus, today, they’re sitting around like the French nobles did at Versailles even as the mob swarmed over the gates. I bet they’re singing ‘Give Peace a Chance,’ even as they starve to death.”

  “Well, that’s not going to happen to my kids,” Dan said coldly, “and in our doing so our community will survive as well.”

  “A hundred and fifty for Company A. Another hundred for Company B once we get the weapons in. You take a close look and a couple of those kids are carrying reenactor Springfields from the Civil War by the way. The others are doing community service work or working on other projects. Kids that helped stop the salmonella outbreak, volunteering up at the isolation ward. Already have a crew of kids starting to cut firewood for the winter. Professor Daniels with the outdoor ed department figures we can retrofit a couple of the old oil boilers to burn wood in this building and the library and have steam heat. We’ll need over three hundred cords of wood, though. Professor Lassiter is talking about rigging up a water turbine in the dam at Lake Susan. He thinks we could have it up and running by autumn and have electricity.” John could not help but smile.

  Most of the towns in the area, back a hundred or more years ago, first got their electricity that way. Entrepreneurs would come in, sell the community a generator, show them how to hook it up to a mill dam, string some wire, and the miracle, what was then the miracle, of electricity arrived.

  “Professor Sonnenberg tells me that in our school library are back issues of Scientific American all the way back to the 1850s. Also Popular Mechanics. In those golden pages are plans from eighty years ago, a hundred years ago, to build radios, telegraphs, steam engines, batteries, internal combustion engines, formulas for nearly every advance in chemistry.

  “In our library we got darn near every issue of Mother Earth News, and the Foxfire books.” Dan chuckled at that. “Most of the other profs had viewed such publications with disdain, but on the faculty was a beloved old professor from before your time, now dead, who was definitely, as the kids said, ‘a granola eater.’ That prof left us a gold mine. How to find food, how to preserve it, how to store it up. We got several groups out now, those books in hand, harvesting enough to keep us alive. Hard to believe, John, but rattlesnake shish kebab isn’t all that bad.

  “It’s all at our fingertips if only we look down at our fingertips to see it there.

  “But the kids out there must keep this place secure and, if need be, buy time.”

  “Buy time for what? We have the passes secured.”

  “You know about the fight there, don’t you?” Dan asked. “Yes.”

  “Well, that was a disorganized mob. Word is starting to filter in that groups are starting to come together. Most are just scared people banding together for survival and mutual protection, exactly what we are doing here. But some, John, there’s rumors about cults. A family that was allowed to pass through here yesterday, actually heading east, coming out of Tennessee, said that over by Knoxville there’s a guy claiming this is the start of a holy war.”

  “And let me guess, it’s his vision of holiness you subscribe to or you die.”

  Dan nodded his head.

  “Says that Jesus appeared to him just before the power went off and gave him his mission, that he is the new John the Baptist preparing the way for the final return. And goo
d God, supposedly there are hundreds now following him and killing those who disagree.”

  “Several weeks, that’s all it’s taken,” John sighed.

  Dan rested a hand on his shoulder.

  “Just remember Ecclesiastes, John: ‘A time for war, a time for peace.’”

  “So now it’s back to this. And back to kids drilling on the town green. I want to think that across America, today, there’s a thousand such groups drilling in order to keep civilization intact so that we don’t become a mob where one eats only because he is stronger than others or we kill each other in an insane frenzy of crazed beliefs.”

  “That’s why those kids out there are drilling and that’s why I want you to be in command of them.”

  “Me?” he asked, incredulous at the suggestion. “Hell, you’re the one with the vision.”

  “I’m a college president,” Dan said with a smile. “A one-legged college president.”

  “A wounded war veteran,” John replied sharply.

  “Yeah, a dumb eighteen-year-old kid from Mocksville, North Carolina, so damn stupid I couldn’t see I was in a mine field. But I got the GI Bill, disability checks, and, since I could no longer run or play ball, a realization that I had to be something else. So here I now sit.

  “John, while we work here, I want you to lead in the town. Charlie is a good man, a damn good man, but his focus, it’s on the moment, on survival for the community, and God bless him for it. But we need something more. We need someone with vision who can see beyond, like the song said, ‘to patriots’ dreams…’ You have the respect of everyone in this town now. The kids, the community, the police, Charlie, everyone.”

  “Why?” John said coldly. “Because I fumbled the job of blowing some junkie’s brains out?”

  “No, because of what you said before you blew his brains out, as you now so crudely put it. Maybe that poor devil-consumed kid really did have a purpose in life after all. Maybe it was to give you that moment.

  “For some, the fact that you did shoot him, well, for some that created fear and awe. But for the rest, they heard your words and will not forget them. John, that gives you a power. And you did hold the rank of colonel and were offered a star, which you turned down for Mary’s sake. Mary’s family is an old family here and you tossing over being a general to bring her home was the talk of the town back then, and I think you saw on day one the respect everyone held for you.”

  Frankly, he did not; he was far too focused on Mary and, yes, somewhat bitter as well that the powers that be in the Pentagon had not found a way around his problem, but that was in the past and for so many reasons now especially he thanked God he was here in this place.

  “Dan, my entire combat experience was a hundred hours in Desert Storm, nearly all of it locked up in a command Bradley, one minor jolt when a shell landed a hundred yards away, and that was it. Heck, give it to Washington. He’s the DI; he’s the guy who was at Kha Sanh.”

  “He doesn’t want it and he fully agrees with what I’m saying here now.

  “He explained it to me the other day when we began to plan this unit and the question came up of command. I left it open, at first thinking he’d take it, but he immediately said you should be the one.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He laughed. Said he knew he was the best DI in the United States Marine Corps, but it takes more than that to lead an army. He wants someone with an advanced education, someone who will remain cool under stress, someone who’s studied war and knows the history of it and can thus apply it in a crisis. Of course that means you, John. I think if it ever comes to a major fight it should be Washington on the firing line, but he wants someone like you behind him.”

  “I still think he should lead.”

  “He’s von Steuben out there, John, even though his name is Washington, and he knows that. It’s your job and Charlie agreed that if a crisis comes where a militia is needed, you lead it.”

  “Thanks, as if I wanted it.”

  “John, if you really did want it, I don’t think your name would have been in the hat. We wanted someone who would see it as a service and, above all else, even while defending this community would be thinking ahead to afterwards.

  “John, we dream of America. We want America to come to us. But I think it never will. The America we knew died when those warheads burst. If so, then it is up to us to not wait, but instead to rebuild America as we want it to be.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  DAY 35

  There was an air of celebration in the crowd that gathered about the town hall as John pulled into what was now his usual slot in front of the fire station.

  The fire trucks, which had been rolled out over a month ago to make room for the emergency supplies stockpiled inside, were still in place, still motionless, no longer sparkling, somewhat dusty. Horses were tethered to the bumper of one of them.

  The crowd stood around expectantly and many, seeing him approach, stepped back slightly, nodding greetings respectfully.

  All were showing signs of the effects after thirty-five days. Faces were thinner, pinched on some. Clothing in general was dirty, sweat stained; hair, greasy, many of the men beginning to sport beards. And all of them stank. He wondered if this was indeed how people really smelled a hundred years ago, the scent of a crowd of unwashed bodies, or was it that thirty-six days ago people were used to sterility, terrified if their deodorant failed and they “offended,” nearly all taking a shower at least once a day, many twice a day in the summer?

  Was this now normal? Was this how Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln smelled, so normal that it just was no longer really noticed?

  Tom appeared at the door of the police wing of the building, grinning.

  “It works!”

  A ragged cheer went up from the crowd, which then gradually began

  to drift apart, though many pressed up to the doorway and windows to look into the conference room as if what was inside was some sort of miracle.

  John edged his way through and into the building. “We’ll start in a few minutes, but for right now, let’s enjoy this,” Tom replied.

  John stepped into the conference room and had to smile at the sight of the old crank phone attached to the wall.

  “Yes, yes, I hear you!” Charlie shouted, earphone in one hand, bending over slightly to shout into the speaker.

  “Yes, I understand. It works; now keep setting up the wire. Yes, over and out here. Good-bye.”

  He hung up and turned to face the gathering.

  “We got a phone system.”

  There was a round of applause picked up by those gathered outside.

  John looked at the contraption, salvaged from an antique store, as he suggested, a comparable phone now set up in the police station in Swannanoa. It had taken the work of a dozen linemen, older employees of the phone company, several of them refugees allowed in through the gap.

  Fiber-optics, modern wiring systems, were out. They had to find old-fashioned copper wire, a hard task, but bits and pieces were salvaged from a variety of sources, a golden find an old abandoned telephone or telegraph line of several miles along the railroad tracks. The wire had to be carefully spliced together, then strung on glass or ceramic insulators, most made out of soda bottles.

  It was the first line, the goal now to run it into Asheville. Remarkably, an old-style switchboard had been found in the basement of the granddaughter of a phone operator from the twenties. When the system had been junked back in the fifties, apparently the old lady had her board toted home as a keepsake. A couple of the elderly phone company workers were now trying to remember how to rig it up, an actual switchboard that could handle dozens of phones.

  There were other accomplishments. One of the junkyards in Swannanoa had successfully gotten a tractor-trailer diesel from the early sixties running. That had triggered intense debate as to who would get it, the fire department finally winning out, and on a flatbed were now attached hoses, ladders, and gear. They had even figu
red out how to use the engine as a power takeoff to run a water pump.

  Fire had become a frightful hazard. Those who still had food were cooking with wood, and home fires and brush fires were commonplace. The community still had water pressure for those places lower than 2500-foot altitude, the height of the face of the reservoir dam. But above that, it was hauling buckets, and the potential of house fires turning into out-of-control forest fires kept everyone worried.

  Between the two communities there were now over a hundred vehicles running and more coming online every day. Several mechanics had learned to bypass and yank out the electronics, especially on cars that only had minimal dependence on them, slap on some old replacements, and get the engines to turn over again.

  A moped shop had become highly successful at getting their relatively simple machines running again, along with older motorcycles.

  There were so many vehicles running now that a salvaged generator had been hooked up at Smiley’s and the gas from Hamid’s belowground tanks was flowing again.

  Smiley’s had become something of the old “general store.” There was precious little to sell, other than his legendary horde of cigarettes, which were now doled out one at a time in exchange for a dead squirrel, old silver coins, or whatever might capture Hamid’s fancy.

  John almost regretted his sense of fair play that first day. He should have purchased a dozen cartons. He was down to five packs and rationing himself to no more than five cigarettes a day now.

  “OK, everybody, time for the meeting, so let’s clear the room,” Charlie announced.

  Those who had gathered to gaze at the phone reluctantly left the room. Charlie closed the windows and dropped the Venetian blinds.

  It was the usual group. Charlie, Bob, Kate, Doc Kellor, and John. Carl and Mike from Swannanoa came down from their end if there was something directly related to them at the moment but today were caught up with a forest fire up along Haw Creek that was threatening to turn into a real inferno.