One Second After (5 page)

The other gifts were now opened, a card from Bob and Barbara Scales with a gift certificate for a hundred bucks for Amazon, the Beanies he had carried over from the wall and lined up on the table. Jennifer tucked Patriot Bear under her arm and opened the huge envelope, half as big as herself, that John had made up the night before, a collage of photos of Disney
World with a fake “Ticket for Jennifer, Daddy, and, oh yeah, Elizabeth” printed in the middle.

It was indeed a hit and now it was his turn to say, “Hey, don't squeeze so hard; you'll break my neck.”

Finally it was over, past seven, and Pat started down the hill. Jennifer and the dogs walked her home.

“Guess there's no Roundtable meeting tonight,” John said, looking back towards town, as Jen helped him load up the dishwasher, even though they couldn't turn it on.

“What do you think is going on?” Jen asked, and he could hear a touch of nervousness in her voice.

“What do you mean?”

“John, it kind of reminds me of nine-eleven. The silence. But we still had electricity then; we could see the news. All those cars stalled.”

He didn't say anything. There was a thought, but it was too disturbing to contemplate right now. He wanted to believe that it was just a weird combination of coincidences, a power failure that might be regional, and would ground most flights due to air traffic control. Maybe it was some sort of severe solar storm, potent enough to trigger a massive short circuit; a similar event had happened up in Canada several years ago.

A thought hit him.

“Your monster, let's go turn it on.”

“Why?”

“You'll see.”

They went out to the car, John slid into the passenger seat, and she turned the key over, and the car instantly roared to life. The sound, even after but a couple of hours of silence, was reassuring.

He turned on the radio. It really was one of the old ones. With dials to turn, no buttons to push, the slightly yellowed face even had the two small triangles on them marking the frequency of the old Civil Defense broadcast frequencies.

Static, nothing but static from one end of the dial to the other. It was getting towards twilight, usually the time the FCC had most AM stations power down, but the big ones, the ones with enough bucks to pay for the license, should be powering up now to fifty thousand watts, and reaching halfway across the country if the atmospherics were right.

He could remember as a kid making the long drive from Jersey down to
Duke in his old battered 1969 Bug, killing the time by slowly turning the dial, picking up WGN in Chicago—that strange country and western station out of Wheeling, so alien sounding with its laments about pickup trucks and women—and throughout the night, if the atmospherics were just right, WOR out of New York, catching his favorite, Jean Shepherd, in the middle of the night.

Now it was just silence.

“You look worried, Colonel.”

He looked over at her. The way she said “Colonel.”

“Could be nothing. Might be one helluva solar storm, that's all.”

That seemed to scare her and she looked to the western horizon to where the sun was now low, hanging over the Smokies.

“It isn't blowing up or something, is it?”

He laughed.

“My dear mother-in-law. If it had blown up, would we still be seeing it?”

A bit embarrassed, she shook her head.

“Major storm on the sun's surface will send out heavy bursts of various radiations. That's what triggers the northern lights.”

“Never seen them.”

“Well, you're not a Yankee, that's why. Sometimes the storm is so intense it sets off an electrical discharge in the atmosphere that short-circuits electronic equipment.”

“But the cars?”

“Most cars today are loaded with computers. It might explain why yours keeps running and others stopped.”

“People should have kept those old Fords,” she said with a nervous smile.

“Let's do this, though,” he said quietly. “I'm worried about Elizabeth; let's drive downtown, see if we can spot her.”

“Fine with me.”

She shifted the car into gear. At the bottom of the driveway he caught sight of Jennifer, shouted for her to pile in, and she ran over, delighted, climbing over her father and sitting between the two of them. That's the way it used to be forty years ago, he realized. Mom and Dad out for a drive, the kid between them, no bucket seats yet, except in sports cars, Junior not locked up in the back and, of course, belted in.

John just hoped Tom Barker, the town's chief of police, didn't spot them. Although John was now a well-confirmed local, Barker might just lay a ticket on them if in a foul mood.

They arrived to the bottom of the hill and Old 70 was empty except for a couple of abandoned cars by the side of the road. But out on the interstate there was indeed a “bunch of cars” as Jennifer had described it. Vehicles on the shoulders, some stalled right in the lanes. Not a traffic jam though, just as if everyone had shut their engines off at the same time and drifted to a stop. Nearly all the passengers were out, some looking over towards them as the Edsel pulled out onto 70 and headed towards town, driving parallel to the interstate.

“There's Elizabeth!” Jennifer cried, pointing down the road.

Sure enough, it was her, walking with that damn Johnson kid, his arm around her waist . . . not actually her waist but down lower, nearly resting on her backside. At the sight of the approaching Edsel, Ben quickly jerked his hand away. Jen pulled over to the side of the road and John got out.

“Where in hell have you two been?” John shouted.

“Hey, Dad, isn't this weird?” Elizabeth said with a smile, pointing towards the interstate.

She already had on her best con artist smile. Her head was tilted slightly, a bit of an “ah, Daddy, chill out,” look in her blue eyes, playing every angle. She was, of course, a sixteen-year-old spitting image of her mother and she knew that would melt him. At this moment it also was triggering one helluva protective surge.

He turned his gaze on Ben. The boy had been a member of the scout troop that John had helped out as an assistant scoutmaster for several years. From that angle, Ben was a good kid, smart, made it to Life before dropping out because by ninth grade scouting wasn't cool anymore. A nice kid, his dad a member of the Roundtable.

But at this moment, Ben was a young man who had damn near been resting his hand on John's daughter's butt and lord knows where else over the last four hours.

“Mr. Matherson, it's my fault, sir,” Ben said, stepping forward slightly. “Elizabeth and I went into the mall in Asheville after school; we wanted to get something special for Jennifer.”

“Whatya get me?” Jennifer asked excitedly.

“We left it in the car,” Elizabeth replied. “Dad, it was weird; the car just
died a couple of miles west of town, near our church. It was weird, so we've been walking home.”

John glared coldly at Ben and the boy returned his gaze, not lowering his eyes.

The kid was OK, John realized, didn't lower his gaze or try to act like a wiseass. He knew he had been seen and was willing to face an angry father. Elizabeth and Ben had been friends when in middle school, both were in the band together, and now, well, now it was obvious over the last several months he had turned into “something different.”

It was just that as John gazed at Ben he remembered how he thought at seventeen and what the prime motivator in life was. Jen was looking over at John with just a touch of a sly grin.

“Ben, how's your grandpa?”

“Fine, ma'am. We was out fishing together on Saturday on Flat Creek and you should have seen the brookie he reeled in, sixteen inches. Made his day.”

Jen laughed.

“I remember going fishing with him on that same creek. He'd always bait my hook,” and she shuddered. “Lord, how I hated doing that. Tell him I said hi.”

“Yes, ma'am, I will.”

“You need a ride home?” John asked, finally relenting.

“No, sir. It isn't far,” and he nodded to the other side of the interstate. “I can cross right over from here.”

“All right then, Ben, your folks are most likely worried; get home now.”

“Yes, sir, sorry, sir. Hey, shortie, Happy Birthday.”

“Thanks, Ben.” Like most kid sisters, she had a bit of a crush on her big sister's boyfriend. And Ben, being a smart kid but also, John grudgingly realized, a good kid, had a liking for Jennifer.

“Night, Elizabeth.”

There was an awkward moment, the two of them gazing at each other. She blushed slightly. Ben turned away, walked over to the fence bordering the interstate, and in seconds had scrambled up and over it.

John watched him cross. Several people standing around their cars went up to Ben, and John didn't move, just watching. Ben pointed towards the direction of the exit into Black Mountain and then moved on. John breathed a sigh of relief.

“Excuse me. Excuse me!”

John looked over again to the fence that Ben had just scaled. A woman, well dressed, dark gray business suit, with shiny shoulder-length blond hair, was coming up the grassy slope, walking a bit awkwardly in her high heels.

“Ma'am?”

“Can you tell me what's going on?”

As she approached John, half a dozen more got out of their stalled cars and started towards the fence as well.

“I'm sorry, ma'am, I think I know just about as much as you do.”

“I was just driving along,” and she pointed back to the stalled BMW 330 on the westbound side, “and the engine just went off, the same with everyone else out here.”

“I don't know for sure,” John said, now choosing his words carefully as he watched more people approaching, four of them men in their late twenties, maybe early thirties, big guys, looked like construction workers. Some sort of instinct began to kick in as he watched them come up behind the woman.

“Hey, buddy, how come your car's running?” one of them asked. The man speaking was nearly as tall as John, stocky and well built.

“Don't know why it's running; it just is.”

“Well, it seems strange, don't you think? All these cars out here dead and that old junker still running.”

“Yeah, guess it does seem strange.”

“What did you do to make it run?”

“It just turned on, that's all,” John said quietly, fixing the man with his gaze and not letting it drop.

“Sir, can you give me a lift into town?” the woman asked.

He looked at the fence that Ben had scaled with such ease. John caught a glimpse of Ben going over the chain-link fence on the far side of the highway and then trotting up the road towards his house.

More and yet more people were approaching, an elderly couple, a woman leading a child of about six, a couple of teenagers, an overweight man in an expensive business suit, collar open and tie pulled down. A trucker over in the eastbound lane was out of his rig, slowly walking towards John.

“Ma'am, I don't see how you'll get over that fence,” John said, nodding to the chain-link fence that separated them. “It's just over a mile to Exit
64,” and he pointed west. “Don't get off at Exit 65; there's just a convenience store there.”

He pointed to the lane for Exit 65 just a couple of hundred yards away that arced off the interstate just before the road curved up over a bridge spanning the railroad tracks.

“Go to Exit 64. You can walk it in twenty minutes. There's two motels there, one of them a Holiday Inn with a good restaurant as well. You should be able to still get a room till this thing clears up.”

“John?” It was Jen, standing behind him, whispering. “Help her.”

He let his hand drift behind his back and put his hand out forcefully, extended, a signal for Jen to shut up.

In many ways, eight years here had indeed changed him. Women were addressed as “ma'am” and doors were held open for them, no matter what their age. If a man spoke inappropriately to a woman in public and another man was nearby, there would be a fight brewing. The woman in the business suit looked at him appealingly. To refuse her went against a lifetime of thinking and conditioning.

Hell, there was even a touch of something going on here that he never would have dreamed of but ten minutes ago. Since Mary had died, there had been a few brief flirtations, even one brief affair with a professor at the state university, but down deep his heart was never in it; Mary was still too close. The woman on the other side of the fence was attractive, professional looking, early to mid-thirties; a quick glance to her left hand showed no ring. An earlier incarnation of himself, before Mary . . . he'd have cut the fence down to get to this woman and act as the rescuer. John was almost tempted now to do so.

But there was that “something else” now. A gut instinct that ran deeper. Something had gone wrong, what, he still wasn't sure, but there were too many anomalies, with the power off, the cars stalled, except for the Edsel, no planes. . . . Something was wrong. And at this moment, for the first time in a long while, his “city survival senses” were kicking in.

Growing up in a working-class suburb of Newark in the sixties and seventies he had learned survival. He was only seven when the big riots hit Newark in '67, dividing off for a generation any thought of what some called diversity. Italians stuck to their neighborhoods, Poles and the Irish to theirs, Hispanics to theirs, blacks to theirs, and God save you if you got
caught in the wrong neighborhood after dark, and usually in daylight as well.

The interstate, at this instant, had become the wrong neighborhood. The way the four construction workers stood and gazed at him and the car—the one car with a motor still running—was triggering a warning. One of them was obviously drunk, the type that struck John as a belligerent drunk.

Something was changing, had changed, in just the last few hours. If alone, John might have chanced it, and chances were nothing at all would go wrong, but he was a father; his two girls and his mother-in-law would be in that car.