One Second After

by William R. Forstchen

  He looked at her and found he couldn’t respond.

  “Give them your blessings. I know it will be hard. But do it. I know the risk she faces as much, maybe more than you do. Give her that blessing for her to carry with her and give her strength.”

  He saw tears in Makala’s eyes.

  “She’s a good kid, John. You and Mary raised her well. Don’t turn this into a moral question now. They were two scared kids, the world going to hell around them; it was all but inevitable it would happen. If not for this damn war, it’d of been different. But it’s not. And you have to accept that.”

  He nodded. “Tell Ben to come in here.”

  A moment later Ben was at the door, standing straight, eyes wide. John motioned for him to come into his office.

  “Sir. You can do what you want to me, sir. Just don’t blame your daughter.”

  And at that moment John softened. He could see the kid half-expected to see a shotgun or face a damn good thrashing. He had the guts to take it. “You love my daughter?”

  “More than anything in the world, sir.”

  “Well, so do I. Her and Jennifer.”

  “I know that, sir.”

  John nodded. He didn’t want to think too much further about how Ben loved her; no father really would. But John could see that, though seventeen, Ben was trying to be a man at this moment and would have to be a man in the days to come.

  John stood up, hesitated, then extended his hand.

  “Thank you, sir,” and Ben’s voice cracked a bit.

  John nodded.

  “Just don’t call me Dad yet,” he finally said. “I’m not ready for that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He knew Elizabeth, in the next room, had heard the exchange, and she came through the doorway and flung herself into his arms. “Thank you, Daddy.”

  Now he did fill up. Her voice still sounded like his little girl. He saw Jennifer standing in the doorway as well, smiling. “So you’re not going to kill them?” Jennifer asked, and that broke the tension for the moment.

  “No, of course not, sweetie.”

  “Ok,” and she was gone.

  He felt there was some sort of ritual required now, and as Elizabeth slipped out of his arms he took her hand and placed it in Ben’s hand.

  “Once the next few days are over, well, since our priest disappeared, we’ll ask Reverend Black to do the marriage.”

  Elizabeth smiled and leaned against Ben’s shoulder.

  “But we got other worries now. Like I said, we’re leaving this house within the hour. Girls, you better pack what you can fit into the car. Ben, get down to your family and tell them to get out as well; have them come up to the Cove for now. They can stay with us if need be.”

  Elizabeth and Ben looked at each other.

  “You can do your good-byes later; there isn’t time to waste. Tell your folks I’ll drive your family up to the Cove in an hour, so be ready.”

  He hesitated and suddenly it truly hurt, what he was about to say next.

  “Ben. We’re going to be attacked, most likely early tomorrow morning. You’ll have to fall in with the town reserve guard.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Elizabeth started to cry.

  “Daddy, can’t he stay with us in the Cove?”

  “Absolutely not,” Ben replied forcefully.

  She looked at Ben and then back at John, eyes filled with tears.

  “It’s his duty now,” John said softly.

  Ben looked at Elizabeth, hesitated, then kissed her lightly on the lips.

  “I’ll see you later, sweetheart.”

  She couldn’t reply, hugging him fiercely.

  “Elizabeth, go help your grandmother and Jennifer pack.”

  She hesitated.

  Ben broke free from her embrace. “I’ll be ok, sweetheart. Go on now.”

  Crying, she left the room, and Ben turned back to face John.

  John opened his gun cabinet. Scanned the weapons and pulled out one of his best, an Ml carbine.

  “You know how to load and handle this?”

  “Remember, sir, you took me shooting with it last year.”

  John checked the clip, it was full, and there was a box of extra ammunition for it.

  “Take this; you’re going to need it.”

  Ben nodded.

  “Report to Charlie Fuller. Tell him I’ve assigned you to be one of his runners.”

  “Sir, you are not keeping me back, are you?” John lied with the shake of his head. “You’ll be in the middle of it, son.”

  Ben nodded solemnly, hefting the carbine and looking at it. “Let me help Elizabeth first if you don’t mind, sir.”

  “Sure, you got a few minutes.” He looked at John, eyes solemn. “If anything happens to me, sir…” John forced a smile.

  “You’ll be ok, Ben. Now go help Elizabeth.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ben left the room and Makala was standing at the doorway, smiling. “You did the right thing,” she said. “Let me think about it.”

  To his surprise she came up and kissed him on the lips. “I better get up to the conference center and evacuate the folks there. From what I just heard, I assume that will be in the middle of it.” John nodded.

  “I’ll drive you up there. Charlie should be sending up some vehicles to get people out. We’re evacuating everybody from here clear back to the town. Once you get your patients out, report to Doc Kellor. I think you’d be most useful there.”

  “Is it going to be bad?”

  John nodded again.

  “Real bad, I think.”

  She squeezed his hand and went back to help the girls pack up.

  He looked around. What to take? The guns of course. Seven rifles, including the original Civil War Springfield and the replica Hawkins .50 flintlock. Throw them in the trunk of the car for now. He scanned his office. What to take? The portrait of Mary of course, and as he picked it up he thought of Makala in the next room. Neither would mind, he realized with a sad smile.

  He took the picture out of its frame and slipped it into his pocket. He then checked the loads in the Glock and the shotgun and shouted for his family to get moving.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The entire mountainside north and south of the interstate was burning. He gazed at the inferno, feeling nothing, even though his home was somewhere within that blaze.

  Scattered shots still rang out. A holdout band of the Posse was barricaded inside a single-story house facing the interstate on a side road a couple of hundred yards back from the gap. It was a key position because it looked down on both the interstate and the flanking approach of the abandoned paved road and the railroad.

  Two of his militia sprinted towards the building, approaching it from a blind spot, where a truck was parked. They crawled under the truck, came out the other side, and rolled up against the side of the building. One opened her backpack; the other took out a Zippo, flicked it to life, and touched the fuse.

  Inside was a ten-pound charge of black powder, packed into three-inch PVC pipe, nails mixed in. The girl stood up and threw it through the smashed window, then collapsed backwards, shot in the chest.

  He could hear screaming inside the building, someone standing up, trying to throw the backpack out, a fusillade of fire dropping him.

  The explosion seemed to tear off the side of the house.

  With harsh, guttural screams a dozen militia were up, charging, pushing through the wreckage and into the smoke-filled house.

  Seconds later several Posse poured out the front door; none made it more than a dozen feet.

  Two more houses to go at the top of the ridge. A couple of dozen holdouts within, surrounded now on all sides. A barrage of Molotov cocktails rained onto the buildings; from within one there were bursts of automatic weapons fire.

  The assault teams waited. In just eight hours they were veterans, no dumb-ass heroics, no “follow me” charges. One of the buildings finally started to burn, and then the seco
nd, suppressive fire pouring in through every window to keep those within down.

  It took ten minutes, a dozen more Molotovs tossed against the side of the wooden structure to feed the flames, which finally went into the eaves of the house. It was ablaze now. Screaming from inside. The front door burst open and the militia was waiting. Half a dozen were gunned down as they came out. The last two out were women, falling to their knees, hands up.

  No one fired and they crawled away from the inferno, then fell on their faces, crying for mercy.

  One house left, the one with the automatic fire. John, watching the fight, had a gut sense of who was in there.

  He picked up a megaphone.

  “I want prisoners from that house!” he shouted.

  The house was ablaze.

  “Come out and we won’t shoot!” John shouted.

  Seconds later the door burst open and six men and a woman staggered out, throwing weapons aside.

  “Down on your knees, hands over heads!”

  They did as ordered and the student militia circled in around them.

  The thunder of the battle was dying away now, a burst of shots from down near the second railroad tunnel, a volley from up on Rattlesnake Mountain, the louder sound now the forest fire sweeping both sides of the interstate, driven by a westerly breeze.

  He looked around, some of the militia coming out from cover, standing up cautiously, looking around, most ducking when a sniper round zinged down from the ridge atop the pass. It was greeted seconds later with an explosive roar of fire and then silence. One of the militia then standing atop the ridge, rifle held high, waved the all clear.

  John rose up from the side of the bridge over the interstate, walked around to the side, and slid down the slope and onto the pavement of the interstate, his action almost a signal that the war was over. Dozens more were standing, dazed, silent.

  He looked up the road to the pass but a hundred yards away. It was a road paved with horrors. At nearly every step there were bodies twisted into the contortions that only the dead could hold, rivulets of blood pouring off the road into the storm gutters. It was a seething mass as well, hundreds of wounded.

  He turned and looked back down the highway towards Exit 66 and raised his megaphone.

  “Medics! Bring up the medics now!”

  They had been waiting several hundred yards to the rear while the last of the Posse were wiped out from the ridge, which they had successfully seized in the opening round of the fight.

  There must have been someone local with them, either willing or unwilling. Two hours before dawn fifty of them had emerged on the little-used Kazuma Trail, known only to hikers and mountain bikers, a path that led from the Piedmont below to the highest point on the crest overlooking the interstate and the flanking roads.

  Seizing the half-dozen houses up there, wiping out the defenders in a matter of minutes, they had enfilading fire down onto the gap itself, with the defenders there pinned, unable to fire back.

  Minutes later the main assaults came in, fifty vehicles up the flanking road, men and women on foot going through the railroad tunnel, and a column of nearly two hundred vehicles roaring up from Old Fort, led by a diesel truck with a snow plow mounted to the front.

  The forward barrier fell, and then the next fallback position, where he was standing now, the bridge over the highway, since the houses above were perfect positions to fire down on it.

  Though they were caught off guard by the surprise seizure of the houses and ridge above the gap, the rapid retreat had been part of his and Washington’s plan all along.

  Washington was a superb marine, a superb trainer and leader, but John did realize now that all the crap about his being colonel .. . Washington had been right on that, too.

  Washington’s plan was a classic defense on the high ground and John had vetoed it.

  “Almost as bad as losing would be our winning too easily,” he had said. “We repulse them at the crest, they’ll take losses, retreat, and then do one of two things: either head off somewhere else or wait until the time is right and get us, and I think it would be the latter. Whoever is leading that band cannot afford even a single defeat; his own people will turn on him, kill him, and then come back yet again.”

  John’s worst nightmare was that after a sharp defeat the Posse would pull back to Old Fort, simply spread out a bit, loot, probe, and keep them on guard twenty-four hours a day and wait them out. They’d make a mistake; there’d be a weak spot; the enemy would catch a guard asleep, attack the position at night in the middle of a storm. No, John wanted them over the ridge—let them take the gap—and then to lure them into a classic killing ground.

  “The mountains to either side can give us a Cannae, or a classic Mongol envelopment,” he argued, and students who had taken his classes and were now officers sitting in on the planning just the day before instantly grasped it.

  “Once in, I want them all in, and then I don’t want one of them to get out alive.”

  It was the plan that Washington warned would triple their casualties but John argued in so doing they would annihilate the Posse rather than just drive it back, with the threat of a return.

  The tragedy was that the first platoon of Company A, guarding the gap, was cut off in the opening move and not one of them made it out. That had nearly triggered a rout as the survivors of the second platoon gave way too quickly at the second defensive line, the bridge at Exit 66 and the nursing home overlooking it.

  It had been near run then, the attackers swarming forward, sensing victory, pushing hard, squeezing in where Route 70 ran within feet of the interstate, the very place where John had first met Makala, her Beemer now upended and piled into the defensive barrier line across the main line of defense, where the interstate curved up on a bridge that crossed the railroad tracks. It was a bridge poorly designed for traffic, every ice storm someone always spun out on that bridge, but if whoever had designed it was thinking of a battle, it was superb. It was like a hill with no flanks to worry about, atop the bridge a clear field of fire for a mile back up the road, behind the bridge a sharp slope up to where the old town water tank was, another superb position, and the flank there protected by a wide cut through the forest for the passage of high-tension lines, thus creating an open killing field against any of the Posse trying to get to the tower.

  And then the trap itself. Concealed up on each flanking ridge, back near the gap, Company B, armed with the best long-range weapons the town could provide, high-powered deer rifles with scope mounts. Every house to either side of the interstate, several hundred homes, including his own, and a trailer park were rigged to burn, buckets of gas placed within each. Students who were not trained as soldiers were now pressed into service, so that when the signal was given, the siren on the fire truck sounding off, combined with signal rockets, they were to go into action, moving fast on mountain bikes or mopeds, setting each house ablaze. He had bet on the usual breeze picking up through the gap, as the air farther down below in the Piedmont heated and began to rise, drawing down air from the pass in a cool continual breeze. Luck was on their side as well in that it had been a tinder-dry summer.

  The hundreds of fires merged together into an inferno, acting as the blocking force on each flank, flames driving eastward, cutting off retreat except back onto the interstate or the railroad, which were now kill zones.

  At the other end of the box, to the west, at the interstate bridge waited what was left of Company A along with them every citizen of the town who could carry a gun, concealed behind the reverse slope.

  It had been a bloodbath.

  Once his outer defenses fell, the second wave of the Posse swarmed in, hundreds of vehicles pressing over the crest and, as John hoped, undisciplined enough that, sensing victory, they were now just rushing forward to start the looting and slaughter.

  The fight at the bridge had almost been like something from the Civil War, hundreds of men and women rising up from concealment, leveling rifles and blazing away,
shredding everything in front of them. Posse vehicles crashed into the barrier line and the fighting had turned hand-to-hand. And then along the opposite slopes fires ignited and began to spread, and as the last of the vehicles crossed in, Malady’s team shut the back door, using the two automatic weapons provided by Tom, complete with six thousand rounds of ammunition, backed up by citizens who had produced “illegal weapons” and students armed with a couple hundred of the dangerous homemade grenades.

  The force on the bridge had nearly given way, though. For several crucial minutes John had been down, knocked out by an explosion. But someone had rallied the ill-trained backup force, and they were charging forward regardless of loss.

  All that was left then was the killing, the closing in of the box, and when cornered their opponents knew their fate and fought with a mad frenzy. This was not the type of fight where surrender was a way out, and they knew it. There would be no escape for them, no pulling back to wait and to then lunge back days or weeks later. They were all going to die this day, and tragically, for Black Mountain and Swannanoa, it was going to cost dearly to do that killing.

  Washington had warned of that before the battle, suggesting a false escape path for the routed who could then be hunted down later in a second killing zone farther down the mountain, but there was no other way, John realized. If they left an escape valve, a sound idea with a well-trained force but risky with the assets he now had, the surviving Posse just might break through and indeed escape, and then it could be months of a bitter guerilla war against the vengeful survivors.

  It had turned into seven horrid hours of taking ground back, a step at a time, a bloody step at a time.

  The medics were coming forward at the double. Wounded from earlier in the attack who had managed to hide and not get murdered, those wounded in the relentless push back, lay by the hundreds along the road. From up on the south side the fire was rolling eastward and screams could be heard, those trapped up there and now burning to death. It made John think of the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864. One could read of that fight in the history books and feel remote somehow. Not now. Even if they were all Posse burning up there, it was horrific.