One Second After (49 page)

 

“
Oh, say can you see, by the dawn's early light
. . .”

 

Within seconds it was picked up by all, and all wept even as they sang.

The general stood with head lowered, and there was no acting as he brushed the tears from his face.

“I have been assigned to be military governor of the region of Western North Carolina. My headquarters will be established by the end of the day.”

“You're not leaving us?” someone cried.

“No. Of course not. I'm asking you now to move to the rear of this column and please line up patiently. Each of you will then receive three rations, what the army calls meals ready to eat.”

Another wild cheer.

“We have a medical team with us who will try and lend a hand with any serious cases of the moment. All children, expectant mothers, and mothers of infants will also receive a three-month supply of vitamins.”

Vitamins, John thought. My God, so American. Something good from a small bottle. It lifted him even more than the food. Elizabeth had come through her time but just barely. The vitamins for her and the baby would be lifesavers.

“This column must depart in one hour for Asheville, but I swear to you as a soldier of the United States of America, we are here to stay. By next week another supply column with more food and medicine should arrive.”

He handed the microphone back to the sergeant and jumped down, returning to John, while the sergeant started to direct the crowd to move, the troops with him helping. John watched them go, a medic already up to Elizabeth, stopping her, looking at her and the baby. The mere sight of that again filled John with tears. Soldiers were already passing out single sticks of chewing gum to children, who upon learning about the treats were swarming round.

As the crowd flooded past, the general motioned for John to walk with him.

“How bad was it here?”

“Very bad,” John said.

“Yeah, I saw your greeting card at the top of the pass.”

John suddenly felt embarrassed. The corpse of the Posse leader had hung there thoughout the winter, bones picked clean in a matter of days by crows. Part of the skeleton still dangled there. The ravine below had been a feasting place for scavengers for weeks, nearly a thousand bodies dumped there.

“We followed the wreckage of their trail clear from Statesville to here. You did a hell of a job wiping them out.

“I saw the ashes of the fire on both sides of the interstate. It burned clear down to Old Fort, or what was Old Fort. You did that to trap them.”

John nodded.

“Good plan, Colonel.”

“History teaches something at times.”

“How many survivors here? One of the first things we'll need done is an accurate census; then ration cards will be issued out.”

“I already have cards issued.”

Wright smiled.

“These will be for federal rations.”

“Right,” and John nodded, wondering if he was suddenly feeling a resentment that he had just lost control after so many painful months of struggling to keep his town alive.

“What percentage survived here?”

“Around twenty percent, maybe a bit less if we count those who came in after it happened.”

Wright shook his head.

“Is that bad?” John asked nervously, wondering now if he had failed.

“Bad. Christ, it's incredible up here. Places like the Midwest, with lots of farmland and low populations, more than half survived, but the East Coast?”

He sighed.

“Here in the East, it's a desert now. Estimates are maybe less than ten percent still alive. They hit us at the worst possible time, early spring. Food would run out before local harvests came in, and a lot of crops, especially farther north, had yet to be put in the ground.”

He looked off.

“They say in all of New York City there's not much more than twenty-five thousand people now and those are either savages or people hiding and
living off scraps of garbage. A thermonuclear bomb hitting it directly would have been more humane.

“Cholera actually broke out there last fall and the government decided to abandon the city, just isolate it, and no one was allowed in; the few in were not allowed out. A friend of mine stationed there on duty said it was like the Dark Ages.”

He sighed and forced a smile as if realizing he was rambling, talking about something best left unsaid.

“You did good, Colonel Matherson, real good. We ran into a few refugees on the road, bitter that you wouldn't let them in, but one old guy, a vet, said he admired you folks, that word was you actually stuck together while the rest of the country went to hell.”

He nodded, unable to speak.

Wright stood silent, then lowered his head, his voice a whisper.

“They say nearly everyone in Florida is dead. Too many people, too little land devoted to food.”

“What about all the oranges and cattle land?”

“Everything broke down. People killed the cattle for a single meal, and in that heat by the following morning most of the meat was rotting and swarming with flies. So they ate it anyhow and you know what then happened.”

“The ocean? All the food out there.”

“Incredible as it sounds, pirates made it all but impossible for any kind of serious fishing. It was like something out of the seventeenth century. The coast is riddled now with pirates; the navy is hunting them down. A couple of small towns, especially along the keys, set up good defenses, only one road to block, and their own navies to guard the fishing boats, so they got through relatively OK, but the hurricane last fall knocked them over pretty hard.”

“Hurricane?”

He had all but forgotten that natural catastrophes that had once riveted the nation and caused massive outpourings of aid would still continue and if striking but a hundred miles away be all but unheard of.

“Another Katrina, bull's-eye right on Miami, a smaller one Tampa–Saint Pete a few months later.”

He fell silent for a moment, looking off.

“This time around, though, no outside help to come pouring in like in New Orleans. It was a death blow for those still alive.

“Add in the heat without AC. Few houses down there today were designed for living without AC. Add in twenty percent of the population as elderly, so many dying in the first days that they say that in some of the retirement towns the dead carpeted the streets, again like something out of the plagues of old. Disease just exploded in that climate; that's what killed most of them before starvation even set in . . . food poisoning, heat exhaustion, bad water or no water, then malaria, West Nile, they say typhoid and dysentery ran rampant in the Miami area, even reports of bubonic plague. . . .” He paused.

“Cannibalism even, like your Posse types . . . but also a lot of people driven mad with hunger. Cults sprang up, one damn near like the Aztecs, into human sacrifices to atone for the wrath of the earth spirits, others some weird play on the Last Supper and Communion, that this was now God's will and it was OK to eat the dead. Others, well, just wackos.”

John sighed. The Prozac nation on withdrawal, he thought, remembering Kellor's warning.

“The only ones left there now the barbarians and a few small communities with good tactical positions, like yours, and a good leader, like you.”

There was something about the way the general spoke that caught John. Why was he focusing on Florida?

John looked at him, felt he shouldn't but had to ask.

“Sir, your family. Are they OK?”

The general looked back at him, eyes bright.

“I was with Central Asian Command. You know our stateside command is in Tampa—Saint Pete. I shipped over to Iraq month before we got hit.”

He sighed.

“Wife, three kids, daughter-in-law, and two grandkids lived in Saint Pete. Haven't heard a word since it happened.”

“I'm sorry, sir.”

“Yeah, we are all sorry now.”

John could not speak.

“Voice of America never said anything about that.”

The general shook his head.

“Did you think we'd actually tell you the truth?” he sighed.

John bristled.

“So what the hell is the truth?”

“We had our asses handed to us, that's the truth. Just several bombs, and we had our asses handed to us. With luck there might be thirty million people still alive in what was the United States.”

“What do you mean, was?”

The general shook his head.

“Course you wouldn't know; we're not talking about it on Voice of America. You can write off the Southwest, including Texas, unless we can dig up another Sam Houston and Davy Crockett. During the winter, Mexico moved in. Claimed it was a protectorate to counter the Chinese.”

“What?”

“China. Oh, they came with aid, plenty of aid for the few survivors after sixty days of anarchy and disease. And now there's five hundred thousand of them on the West Coast, California to Washington State, clear up to the Rockies.”

“Who?”

“Chinese troops. Here to help us of course,” Wright said, his voice bitter. “Oh, they're giving out aid, even helping with some rebuilding, but there's no sign they ever plan to leave.”

“So it was them?”

The general shrugged.

“We'll never know, most likely.”

“What?”

“John, three missiles total. One launched from a containership out in the Gulf of Mexico and burst over Kansas, Utah, and Ohio. The cargo ship, typical, had Liberian registry and had docked at half a dozen places, including Oman. We think the weapons might have been loaded aboard there, a medium-range missile capped with a nuke inside an oversized container. That ship, by the way, blew up right after the launch, no one survived, so it fits the terrorist model. Another over Russia, launched from another containership from near Iceland, same scenario, the ship blew up right after the launch. We don't know why over Russia rather than over Central Europe. Maybe its guidance was screwy, but that did mean England and parts of Spain were spared. Last one burst lower, but still high enough to knock out Japan and Korea.

“Some say it was China, others North Korea, which by the way is now
a glowing slag heap, others the terrorist cells, others Iran, a fair part of that glowing as well. Maybe it was all of them; maybe it was none of them. Maybe it doesn't matter now; they did it, and they won.”

“What do you mean, won? Damn it, Voice of America kept saying we were winning.”

“Sure, there's a lot of rubble heaps around the world where once there were cities, us lashing out, maybe rightly, maybe just blindly. But did that change things here?

“I was deployed back here, from Iraq. The entire navy is here as well on the East Coast at least. Nearly all our overseas military is now back here, trying to sort things out, rebuild, and defend what's left.

“John, I saw Baltimore and Washington burning in the night, the smoke a pillar visible a hundred miles away,” and he spoke now in almost a monotone.

“My God, it was like something out of the Bible. It was medieval.”

Washington, and for the first time in months John thought of Bob Scales in the Pentagon.

“Remember General Scales? Commandant of the war college while you were there?”

Wright nodded his head. “The bastards lucky enough to be assigned the government emergency relocation sites, some of them got out, the rest . . . Well, Washington like I said turned medieval. I don't know what happened to your friend. I'm sorry, but he's most likely gone unless he was assigned to the bunkers out in Maryland and West Virginia.”

Wright looked off again.

“There's a cult that has taken over parts of three states in the Rockies. Their leader claims he's the Messiah and when the world is saved all the lights will come back on, and tens of thousands now follow him.

“The Posse you faced? There's one like it ten thousand strong that still rules Pittsburgh and raids a hundred miles out in every direction. We're getting set to stamp it out, but it will be as bad as anything we faced in Iraq several years back . . . and my God, these were once our own people. I lost eight, killed wiping out a nest of them in the ruins of High Point three days ago.

“Oh, we might of gotten even, John, but America a world power? They won; we're finished. We've retreated from around the world, trying to save what's left, and for those that hated us that's victory even if we flattened
their country in retaliation, and John, frankly, we might never know who really did it to start with.

“There were no red meatballs, swastikas, or red stars on planes dropping bombs this time. Just three missiles launched from freighters out in the ocean, which then were blown up.

“My God, there's maybe two hundred and fifty million dead in America alone, as bad, maybe worse than any
Dr. Strangelove
nightmares we talked about during the Cold War. We were so damn vulnerable, so damn vulnerable, and no one did the right things to prepare, or prevent it.

“We're back a hundred and fifty years.”

“No, not a hundred and fifty years,” John sighed. “Make it more like five hundred. People alive in 1860, they knew how to live in that time; they had the infrastructure. We don't. Turn off the lights, stop the toilets from getting water to flush, empty the pharmacy, turn off the television to tell us what to do.”

He shook his head.

“We were like sheep for the slaughter then.”

The general reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. They were English, Dunhills.

Wright offered the pack and John fought hard, then remembered the last one he had smoked.

“I quit.”

“I haven't,” and the general lit up.

He blew the smoke out, and though it smelled so good to John, he didn't ask. He thought of Jennifer, who always nagged him about it. No, don't think of that, he realized.