The Final Day

by William R. Forstchen

  There was far more to this for John than just the urgency of a question about a garbled message from a dying man. If Quentin was speaking in the present tense, that meant that Bob Scales, one of his closest friends from before the war, was still alive—a prospect that could profoundy impact his responsibilities as a leader of his community. It meant a respected and beloved friend had somehow survived the Day. He had heard about the reports on the BBC that Virginia had been “pacified” by forces of the regular army. Was Bob the general in command?

  Janet was silent for a moment, obviously carefully going over her memories. “Forgive me. I should have had a notepad with me and written it all down as he spoke. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t blame yourself, Janet,” he replied, though inwardly he wished she had indeed done just that, for memory of a conversation with a dying man that one was trying to nurse at the same time could indeed become garbled.

  “There was something.” She sighed. “Again, I’m sorry; I should have written it down as he was whispering to me. He rambled about going to Roanoke. ‘Find Bob there’ or something like that.”

  John looked over at Forrest and Lee, who were taking it all in but wisely were remaining silent.

  “I got to add—maybe call it a perspective—sometimes he was talking as if it was before the war, kept saying he had to get his wife and kids out. When he talked of them, he would cry. It was terrible to see him like that; poor man was such a tortured soul.”

  “Who isn’t?” Lee said softly, gazing out the window.

  “He said something about looking up H. G. Wells’s epitaph, that the guy was right and will be right again.”

  Why would he mention H. G. Wells’s epitaph? John wondered. He had read Wells as a kid, but all he could remember was The War of the Worlds and an old movie, Shape of Things to Come, Wells wrote the script for back in the 1930s predicting the coming of World War II.

  “And you checked over everything he had on him?” John asked.

  “Everything. Forrest and I stripped him down to check for injuries. He was in military fatigues but no winter overcoat, weapons—something about the marauders after taking him had stripped him down and joked they were going to sell him.” She paused. “You know, there are still some hideaway groups out there that won’t hesitate to take someone as food.”

  John nodded. Fragments of groups like the Posse were still out there in remote valleys and on mountaintops. They had learned to stay clear of his communities, but like jackals, they did linger on out on the fringes of a slowly reemerging civilized world.

  “What he still had on was soaking wet. We stripped him down and found no paperwork or anything like that. All we could do then was to bundle him into warm blankets, give him aspirin and a few shots of moonshine, and hope for the best. I told Forrest to fetch you; the poor man kept saying you were the one he had to speak to. Sorry, but that is all that I can tell you. Whatever answers he had rest now with his soul.”

  John stood up and went back into the temporary morgue, respectfully pulling the blanket back to gaze at the battered corpse as if somehow an answer would emerge or, like Lazarus, he might rise up “to return and tell thee all.”

  He sat by the body for several minutes, the others not entering the room, as he gazed at the mortal remains of a major he could barely remember.

  The dead offered him no answers, just silent wondering. He covered the body and returned to the room where his friends waited in silence.

  “Forrest, can we get home before dark?”

  Forrest sighed and nodded.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “So that’s it,” John said, leaning back in his chair after reciting the adventure of the previous day and the mystery it now presented.

  The small office was crowded, representatives of the “Senate” for what they defined as the State of Carolina packed into the room. The body heat from so many people, along with the woodstove, made the room hot, the scent of the air all but overpowering with its warm, musky smell of unwashed men and women.

  The long-ago paintings of the Founding Fathers gathered in debate made them always look all so clean. He now understood far better why old films would at times show an effete French or English nobleman daintily holding a scented handkerchief to his nose. With the onset of winter, even the weekly bath had become a laborious chore. Makala was one of the few who still insisted upon a Saturday-night bath for both of them, and during the summer a skinny-dipping jump into Flat Creek on a near daily basis, even though it was freezing cold throughout the year. But at least in the summer they could lie out in the backyard to sunbathe and wistfully talk about a day to come with electricity restored when they might even scavenge up an old Jacuzzi and somehow get it running again.

  Most had reverted back to the nineteenth-century practice of putting on long johns when the cold weather set in and not taking them off until spring arrived.

  John often wondered if the Founders had smelled as bad; hard to picture the brilliant Jefferson or Washington himself smelling like those gathered in the room, even when at Valley Forge.

  He tried not to breathe deeply, but Makala, who was impervious to such things, noticed his discomfort and cracked a window open, letting a gust of frigid air into the room. A few shifted uncomfortably, but others nodded a thanks.

  “I’ve reached a decision as to what I think we should do—or, to be more precise, what I should do,” John said, “but we are no longer under martial law. It will require significant resources; therefore, it is up to you.”

  “It’s precious little information to make any kind of decision on,” Reverend Black said, starting off a debate that John feared might run for hours. “A stranger who you think you recognize wanders into our region, claims he wants to talk with you regarding something that involves an old army friend of yours.”

  “Yes, that’s basically it.”

  Black sighed. “When a man’s time is drawing to a close, he often drifts back years, decades. A good friend of mine, a colonel during the Second World War, climbed out of bed the night before he died and started to wander about the hospital corridor, yelling at the staff to put their helmets on and get ready because a banzai charge was coming in. The poor guy had to be restrained. He kept yelling and cussing at everyone, this from a man who until his final days you never heard a foul oath from.” Black smiled wistfully. “It was good old soldier cussing at its best.”

  Forrest chuckled softly. “I can teach some new ones any time you want, Preacher.”

  Black gave him a bit of a baleful glance but then smiled.

  “Even the way he was talking, the turns of phrases sounded like something from an old movie rather than the way we talk today. My point, he was back in 1944 up until the moment his last breath slipped out of him with me holding his hand and praying by his side. His last words, though…”

  Black’s voice faded to a whisper, and he was obviously struggling to hold back on his emotions. “His last words: ‘Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.’”

  That put a lump in John’s throat. “Stonewall Jackson’s last words,” he said softly.

  “Precisely my point,” Black replied. “He was in a different time and place, perhaps remembering that quote from a class in West Point when he was still a plebe. I think it might be the same with this poor tragic Quentin. Therefore, John, I have serious doubts as to anything he said.”

  “Tell A. P. Hill he must come forward,” Lee Robinson interjected.

  John looked over at his friend and nodded with understanding.

  “What?” Ernie asked.

  “Some of the last words of both Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson,” John said. “They were back on the battlefield calling for a trusted general to bring his troops into the fight.”

  “So the whole thing could be a hallucination?” Ernie asked.

  “It could be,” John replied.

  “Then take it as such, John. We’ got way too many other things to worry about—that
report that a new band of marauders is camped in what is left of Charlotte, the chatter we’re picking up from BBC and other sources that the Bluemont government is officially ceding all territory west of the Mississippi to China and Mexico, the fact that we have to face the reality that as we incorporate more isolated communities into our state, food supplies through spring are coming up short. Let’s stick with what we know.”

  There were nods of approval from several others gathered in the room, including Makala.

  “Wish I could agree,” John said, looking out the window, a light flurry of snow swirling down outside. First a blizzard and then this so early in the year. He hoped it was not a portent of a hard winter to come. Before the Day, such winters were a source of pleasure for a college professor, usually resulting in a relaxing day off to play with his daughters or just sit by the fireplace and read. Now it was a reinforcement why not too long in the past, hard winters were referred to with dread with names such as the freezing time or starving time.

  “John, there’s nothing new on the BBC,” Ernie announced. “Actually, something of a shutdown with their reporters, all foreign reporters being expelled from Bluemont—or, for that matter, anywhere else within areas controlled by that government.”

  “Precisely why I am worried, really worried. After we beat the hell out of Fredericks and then the far-too-public announcement that we were forming a ‘State of Carolina’ until such time as the nation came back together, you remember the BBC report just a few days after we took Fredericks out, that this entire region was being declared as a ‘Level Five,’ meaning in control of terrorists and rebels? But then after that? I thought they were going to hit us hard and fast as an object lesson. Instead? Zero response from those who claim to be the central government.”

  There were some nods of agreement.

  “I still want to believe the bastards simply gave up on us,” Maury Hurt interjected. “Their failures with trying to make some sort of military force out of their ANR, the way they got the crap kicked out of them in Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, or whatever is left of other cities up there, knocked Bluemont on its heels, and they’ve backed down. And now with winter setting in, I want to believe that we have nothing to worry about, at least until spring.”

  “Want to believe? Or know for a fact?” John replied.

  Maury sighed and shook his head.

  John gestured to the faded map of the United States that adorned the wall to his left. Doing so triggered a memory of Fredericks doing the same to him just six months back with his grandiose talk about a reunited America. “These reports from the BBC are that Bluemont is in negotiations with China and Mexico. They’ve already conceded all territory west of the Continental Divide and south of the Red River.”

  “And word is as well that Texas and others are putting up a hell of a fight about that,” Ernie interjected angrily. “What the BBC might say is one thing, but the reality on the ground?”

  There was a breakdown of any semblance of an orderly meeting as others interjected that it would indeed be a very cold day in hell before those living in Texas or any other state along the Continental Divide would tamely submit to outside occupation.

  “Food and security can often trump any argument about national identity,” Reverend Black finally interjected. “Besides, how many actually survived out there? In the first summer after the attack, chances are more than 90 percent died in Tucson without air-conditioning or any source of water. Where does Denver get its water from? Again a major die-off. Sure, maybe some ranchers know what to do, but fifty raiders like the Posse show up at their ranch to steal cattle, what’s left a day later? Forget about the old fantasies of life out west with everyone a self-reliant cowboy. Sadly, I’m willing to bet chances of survival out there were far less than in our secured valley here.”

  His grim pronouncement silenced the room.

  “Let’s stay focused on what John is talking about here and now,” Black said softly. “I, for one, have to admit I’m changing my views somewhat and seeing his side of the argument.”

  “I might agree,” Makala said, her voice controlled and cold. “But not John this time. Yeah, this is personal for me. We’ve got a baby coming in two months, and I want that child’s father alive and here. Call me self-centered, but I claim the right for it after everything we went through back in the spring.”

  The others looked over at her, and John could not make eye contact with his wife, whose anger he knew was barely contained. When he had first talked with her about his thoughts after returning with Forrest the night before, it had triggered the first real shouting match of their marriage.

  “Just let me go over the facts one more time,” John replied, avoiding his wife’s malevolent gaze. “Someone who apparently is what he claimed to be, a major who either is or was serving with General Bob Scales, tries to reach me with a message. He dies before reaching his goal. He says something about an EMP.”

  “And no one is sure if in his delirium he was talking about what happened,” Forrest snapped. “John, I held a lot of buddies as they died.” He looked off, his already twisted face contorted. “They usually babbled about a woman, a wife, a girlfriend, their children; more than a few younger ones cried for their mothers. Damn all war.” Forrest sighed and then fell silent, withdrawing into memories too intense to show before others.

  “Precisely the point,” Makala snapped. “I’ve sat through many a deathwatch, and so have you, John.”

  He lifted his gaze to her and from deep within that gaze held a warning for her to go no further. Yes, he had done as she said, and a day, barely an hour, did not go by without memory of his daughter dying, whispering to take care of her beloved stuffed animal Rabs.

  Makala fell silent and then silently mouthed, “I’m sorry.”

  Perhaps tragically, her action now firmed his resolve, the paradox of so many loving relationships where when one challenges the decision of another in public, they often become even more determined to see it through, while a quiet word whispered when alone could have so easily worked and swayed the decision in the other direction.

  “I have to go to Roanoke,” John said, and he looked over at her as if anticipating a response. But she was silent, though he could see tears clouding her eyes.

  “Something is up, and we would be foolish not to assume after the way we wiped out Fredericks and his gang that there would not be some sort of response. Throughout the summer and up until this early advent of winter, I dreaded suddenly hearing helicopters coming in. That or just the flash of fuel-air bombs going off as a reprisal. If anything, the lack of response has made me even more anxious, as it should have for the rest of you gathered here.”

  He looked around the room at the representatives from the Asheville City Council and Hendersonville; the storm and need to conserve precious fuel had prevented the other members of the Senate from such outlying regions as Morganton, Weaverville, and Waynesville from attending. An old-fashioned handheld telephone lay on his desk, off its receiver, their definition of a conference call so that those representatives could at least listen in over a crackling phone line.

  “There are only two ways of getting there,” John continued. “The first by road. We have the captured Bradley to do that.”

  “And Lord knows how many landslides, fallen trees, downed bridges, marauders like the ones that poor Quentin ran into, and, for that matter, the government garrison that is reportedly still in Johnson City to block you,” Ernie replied. “And we all know anything beyond Hickory is still a no-man’s-land, so that way is out too.”

  “So the only other way is by air.”

  He looked first at Billy Tyndall, the pilot for their precious L-3, who firmly shook his head.

  “It is 140 air miles to Roanoke. I already looked it up. And sure, give me any open field and I can land, but after this blizzard, who knows? But we’ll have to haul our own gas to get back, and that all but maxes out the weight load. So my vote, no way in hell.”

&n
bsp; “I already figured that, Billy. The L-3 is too precious to risk, its duty tactical to keep an eye on the interstate approaches, and you are doing a magnificent job, my friend.”

  “And I for one am telling you—wait until spring.”

  John shifted his gaze to Maury Hurt, whom he had not apprised of the plan he was formulating and the reasons behind it.

  Maury, who had been leaning against the far wall, stiffened. “You got to be kidding me,” he snapped.

  “Just hear me out, will you?”

  “I already know what you are going to say next,” Maury replied. “We’ve got a captured Black Hawk helicopter that we took from Fredericks, and you want to use it to go to Roanoke?”

  John simply nodded.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Like I asked, just hear me out.”

  “Oh, I’m all ears, John.”

  “As Billy already pointed out, it’s 140 air miles to Roanoke. The Black Hawk has a combat radius of around 350 miles, a ferry range of over 1,000 if we keep the weight load down—which means we can fly up there, scope things out. If we get a clear indicator that my old friend General Scales is there and in command, I would venture a landing to meet with him. If not, we just turn around, haul out, and return without even landing.”

  “And who do you mean by ‘we’?” Maury asked.

  “You’re the designated pilot now.”

  Maury shook his head, laughing nervously. “I had a couple of hundred hours as copilot in a Huey over twenty years ago.” He did not add that his career in the National Guard as a chopper pilot had been cut short by a nasty crash, a few cracked vertebrae among other assorted broken bones, and a lifetime of swearing off flying since then, until this current situation when they snatched one of Fredericks’s Black Hawks in the fight for Asheville.

  “I’ve got a total of ten hours’ flying time in that damn thing, and it scares the crap out of me. Sure, we captured a helicopter, one without any manuals, or servicing routine other than what Billy, Danny McMullen, and I can guess at. Damn it, John, a chopper isn’t like that old plane of ours where you change the oil, do a compression test once a year, and that’s it.”