One Year After

CHAPTER THREE

“Come on in, John; no more dodging now.”

Richard Weiderman was an old friend from long before the Day—the family dentist who had taken care of his kids and had even belonged to the town’s Civil War Roundtable group. Richard took delight in giving talks on what medicine and dentistry were like back then, and that knowledge had put him into an important position after the Day. Gone were pneumatic-driven, high-speed dental drills and suction tubes, and the mere sight of a Novocain needle always creeped John out.

When John came in for checkups, he used to nervously joke with Richard about a favorite comedy musical that featured an insane dentist who winds up getting fed to a man-eating plant. Everyone had some sort of dark joke about dentists, but on the other hand, all were darn grateful for their existence and took it as an ordinary part of their lives even if it was a few unpleasant hours a year in the chair.

No longer. Richard’s supply of Novocain and other anesthesia had immediately gone into the town’s emergency supply. He had become more than “just a dentist” during the battle with the Posse, helping to patch up facial wounds and repair shattered jaws and agonizing wounds to the mouth. In the year and a half after those dreadful days, he had resumed his practice, using what had been a hobby knowledge of dental history to put himself back into business. In the basement storage room of a long-deceased dentist, he found a foot-powered treadle drill and a variety of dental tools not used in a hundred years. From a hidden reserve in a jewelry store, he snatched up thin sheets of hammered-out gold for fillings. He had moved his office from a posh location in an upscale development at the edge of town into an abandoned jewelry store on Cherry Street, where reluctant patients came for treatment. There was even a hand-lettered sign over the entryway, painted in ornate, nineteenth-century script, complete with the image of a tooth, proclaiming, “Pain-free extraction!”

That at least was no longer just an advertising line. The chemistry teacher at the college had put together a team at Makala’s behest, and they had actually managed to start the production of ether. It had, after all, first been manufactured in the early nineteenth century with supplies and equipment any modern college or even high school chemistry classroom lab could duplicate.

When first discovered in the early nineteenth century and for nearly forty years afterward, ether and nitrous oxide were not used for medical purposes, but instead for what could be called “stoner parties.” The “ether man” traveled from town to town with bottles of ether and tightly woven bags containing the nitrous oxide to be dispensed at two bits a whiff—a favorite form of entertainment. It was finally a dentist in Georgia in the early 1840s who had connected the dots that ether was far more than just entertainment. The Civil War historian in John was always grateful for that realization when he contemplated the agony of the hundreds of thousands of wounded who, if the war had been fought but twenty years earlier, would have gone under the saw and knife wide awake. Ether and chloroform were readily available then, and they were even sent through the lines as a humanitarian gesture if an enemy’s hospital was running short. The tragedy after the Day was that the art of making anesthesia locally had to be relearned, and thus many of the wounded after the war with the Posse had indeed suffered. After that experience, Makala made it a top priority for the college lab to resume manufacturing the precious gas and fumes, along with silver-based antibiotics.

As Richard motioned for John to take a seat in the chair, he looked around the office and felt that it indeed had a Civil War–era look to it. A woodstove in the corner was burning, in spite of the heat of the day, to sterilize instruments in a boiling pot. X-ray readers and a computer screen providing soothing images to divert a patient in the chair were replaced with some old-fashioned charts of the mouth and teeth—gruesome but illustrative when Richard had to point out where a problem was.

John tried to settle back into the chair, Richard gossiping with him for a few minutes about the draft; his oldest daughter was one of those called up. And then the moment came.

“Come on, John, open up; let’s take a look.” Then the dreaded “Ah, I think this is the one.” He tapped the sore tooth with the end of a probe, nearly sending John out of the chair.

Richard sat back, nodding thoughtfully. “In the old days, I’d send you to a specialist for a root canal; I don’t even need an x-ray to tell you this one is bad. I can have it out in two minutes, John.”

John looked at him wide eyed. “I’ll skip it for now, Rich,” he replied hoarsely. “Maybe in a couple of days after things settle down. I got a couple of meetings to attend to later today.”

“Come on, John, I even got ether now. Have you under, tooth out, and you’re on your way an hour from now.”

John shook his head. “I gotta be clear headed—too much going on at the moment.”

“I think you’re begging off, John,” Richard replied with a knowing smile.

“Yeah, well, maybe I am.”

“Open your mouth again.”

“Why?”

“I thought I saw something else. Promise I won’t touch the sore tooth, but John, you and I know that kind of thing actually used to kill people two hundred years ago. It’s an upper molar—gets infected, gets into your sinuses, and then you got real agony that could eventually kill you. Come on; let’s get it taken care of.”

John kept his mouth closed and shook his head, willing himself to think that it really didn’t hurt all that bad and could wait.

“Well, at least let me take a quick look-see at something else. Promise I’ll leave that bad boy alone.”

John reluctantly complied. Richard leaned in, tapping John’s lower-left canine, and John winced a bit.

“Yeah, thought so,” Richard announced while still peering into John’s mouth. “Start of a cavity that could go nasty there.”

All John could do was mutter a strangled “Damn it.”

“I can take care of that nice and quick,” Richard continued, sitting back up and rubbing his hands on his apron. Gone were the days of latex gloves and masks, the few in the town’s supply reserved for major surgeries only. “Drill that sucker out in five minutes and pack a filling into it.”

John looked at him wide eyed.

“Compromise with ya, John. Let me fill that before it goes bad, and you get off free until tomorrow with the bad one. Otherwise, I go to Makala, and she lays some mandatory treatment order on you as the public health official.”

John glared angrily at Richard for pulling that trump card and finally nodded a reluctant agreement.

Richard smiled, and whistling, he went over to the boiling pot, tossed in the instrument he had been using to probe John, and pulled out several others with tongs. John tried to look the other way as Richard pushed the foot-powered drill up alongside the chair and clamped a drill bit in.

It was yet another reason why, before the Day, John would shake his head when folks waxed too enthusiastically about the alleged beauty of living in the nineteenth century. They never thought about medicine and sanitation, let alone dentistry.

Richard pulled out a rubberized bag from under a counter. It looked like an oversized balloon with a nozzle on the end.

“I’ll open the tap on this,” Richard said with a grin. “You take a good deep breath in. Nitrous will chill you out for a few minutes.”

Richard stuck the nozzle into John’s mouth and then opened the valve.

“Go for it,” Richard said, and he did have a bit of a maniacal grin as John breathed in deeply.

Within seconds, it hit, and John actually did feel mellowed out, even giddy, as Richard closed the valve, put the bag down, swung the old-fashioned drill around in front of John, and started to pedal furiously. There was a low humming as the oiled cables spun in their sprockets, the drill bit spinning. Richard moved quickly, prying John’s mouth open and pushing the drill bit down on to the cavity.

John felt like his entire head was vibrating, the sound of the drill bit flashing him back to early childhood, a dreaded dentist who had yet to go high tech and used an old-fashioned cable-driven drill, but at least that one was electrically powered.

For the first minute or so, it really didn’t bother him; in fact, he was tempted to crack a joke. There was pain within seconds, but for a blessed moment, he really didn’t care. It was strange how nitrous allowed one to feel pain but not care about it.

And then it hit. The gulp of nitrous was wearing off, the treadle-powered drill was setting up an awful racket, he felt like his mouth was vibrating apart, and the pain was building.

He started to gasp, waving his arm for Richard to stop.

“Hang in there, John, just another minute—almost got it all.”

Gone was the electrical-powered suction tube. John’s mouth was filling up with saliva and drilled-out bits of tooth, and it smelled like something was burning. He began to gag, waving frantically for Richard to back off.

Richard pulled the drill out and held up an old-fashioned spittoon, John gagging, spitting, and cursing.

“Think I got it all,” Richard stated.

“Think you got it all?” John cried.

“Well, you were putting on such a show there.”

“You’re damn right. I swear you’re a sadist, Richard.”

Richard grinned. “I’ll pack it with a filling, and we’re done.”

There was no argument; John couldn’t very well walk out with a hole in his tooth on top of the other one that was throbbing away.

Richard opened a drawer in the old-fashioned, white-enamel-topped table behind him, drew out a tissue-thin sheet of gold, clipped off a small piece, gingerly rolled it up, and then worked it with a miniature-sized jeweler’s hammer, turning it over and over. He finally picked it up with a pair of tweezers and dropped it into a petri dish filled with moonshine that served as an antiseptic wash.

“Now rinse good. Make sure the stuff gets into that tooth, and it’s okay to swallow.”

Richard handed him a mason jar of clear white lightning, and John did as ordered, nearly yelping with pain as the high-test moonshine swirled around his aching tooth as well as the one that Richard had drilled. He so wanted to swallow, but thoughts of the town meeting to come caused him to spit it out into the bucket, though Richard was not above a quick swig for himself before getting back to work, fishing the gold filling out of its antiseptic wash. After another agonizing minute, he had it firmly worked into the drilled-out hole.

“There. All done,” Richard announced proudly. “Don’t chew on that for a few days. If it starts to get infected, get in here, and I definitely expect you back in here in another day so I can get that rotting tooth out of you before it really goes bad. We can’t fool around with those things the way we used to. Remember old man Parker died last month from a tooth infection.”

John could only nod. Now both sides of his mouth hurt.

“How much do I owe you?” he muttered, standing up.

“Let’s see, one drilling, one filling with gold foil… make that a buck in silver; that covers the cost of the gold more than anything else. We’ll say a buck in silver or twenty rounds of ammo—prefer .22.”

John fished into his pocket and pulled out a well-worn Barber quarter and two Mercury dimes. Over the previous year, silver money, hoarded by more than a few before the Day, had started to slip back into circulation as money that was accepted by nearly all.

“All I got on me. Can I pay you the rest tomorrow?”

“Yup, but that tooth pull, that’ll be an extra fifty cents,” Richard said with a smile. “Only twenty-five cents if you want to skip the ether.”

“Yeah, right.” John sighed. “I’ll be back tomorrow and pay you the rest then, along with the extra two bits for ether when you pull the tooth out. Okay?”

Richard smiled and nodded. “You’d definitely better be back in, John. It’s no joking matter, and you know that better than most. Stupid to die because of a lousy tooth after all you’ve been through.”

John all but fled the office and then turned to walk up Cherry Street, pausing to look in nostalgically at the used bookstore, a favorite haunt before the Day. The owner had died in the battle with the Posse. It had been turned into a borrowing library by his friend’s widow—bring a book in to trade for one taken out—and it thus continued to flourish, but he missed his old friend, the games of chess over coffee, a world where he did not face the situation waiting just around the corner. A sign hung on the door: “Closed for the town meeting. Chess tournament later tonight.”

Nearly half a thousand had shown up in the town square for the hastily called gathering to find out the news about John’s visit to the new federal administrator. The pig roast lent a slightly festive air to the occasion; it wasn’t every day—or even week or month—when an open meal was offered to the town without requirement of ration cards, and more than a few showed for the roasted pork and then wandered off if their families were not directly affected by the draft.

Phil, a favorite in the town where everyone still spoke nostalgically of his legendary barbecue restaurant, had presided over the roasting. He complained that he should have been given a week or so to properly prepare the wild boar, but John had left word with him to do his best and have it ready by six for the sake of all, which he faithfully did. The fire pit had been burning all day, Phil butchering off hunks of meat from the wild boar and just roasting them over the fire, muttering throughout the hot day that if given the time, he could have made the six-hundred-pound boar into a real feast. The meat was tough but at least edible, and any meat, especially in midspring, was welcome after the long, lean days of winter.

There was nearly half a pound of meat for everyone present, and that had settled things a bit. Eventually, though, the meeting degenerated into angry questions, fueled primarily by Ernie Franklin and his extended family of kin and followers. John had no answers to give Ernie other than the fact that the draft had been pushed back to thirty days, that Fredericks had promised that assets were coming in to ensure public safety, and that the federal government was finally started to reach out to their region. It was a bit difficult to speak clearly; his mouth still throbbing from the ordeal with Richard, so it was a relief to announce he had another meeting to get to. He turned things over to Reverend Black and with a sigh of relief piled into the old Edsel with his family for the three-mile drive up to the college campus and Lake Susan to an event John had been looking forward to for a long time.

Paul and Becka Hawkins had arranged for the secret meeting up at Lake Susan long before the crisis over the draft had hit. Paul was one of the IT guys for Montreat College, and Becka was an assistant librarian. Both were students who had stayed on after graduation, found jobs at the college, and then eventually married. After the Day, the library, the place where they hung out together as students, had become their permanent home when they set up an apartment in the basement. Friends familiar with the old Twilight Zone series joked that the couple reminded them of a famous episode starring Burgess Meredith in which a bookworm finds paradise in a library after a nuclear war.

Their shared passion was poking around old books and magazines, looking for anything that might be helpful to the community, such as articles in Mother Earth News on how to identify which mushrooms were safe to eat. Six months before, they had finally hit the mother lode of treasures.

The reason it had taken so long to find this particular treasure trove was twofold. Years earlier, the library had gone over to electronic cataloging. The old card-filing system, once so familiar in all libraries, had finally been carted to a back room and not updated since the turn of the century. Anything that had come in since had simply been entered into the campus database—now long lost, of course.

One of the great weaknesses of the now lost digital age was its total dependence on electronic databases rather than old-fashioned backups with ink on paper. A poignant pastime for some was to gaze at a dust-covered iPhone, trying to remember something called phone numbers of friends and even that of children and parents. Older folks could still rattle off a number and address from a quarter century earlier, but from the day before all systems went down? Where were the addresses, even photographic images of life in the decade before the Day now? It was symbolic of just how much had been wiped out of their lives, most likely never to return. Thus in the library—as in so many millions of other locations, from federal government offices down to iPhones and iPads—nearly all data from the decade prior to the attack had been lost.

The second factor behind the long delay of discovering the hidden treasure was that, every spring, locals emptying out attics and garages would haul thousands of moldering books and magazines into the library for the annual Fourth of July book sale and fund-raiser. Of course, the sale had never happened after the war started, and the hundreds of boxes of donations were all but forgotten in the basement. It took the Paul and Becka prowling around the damp, moldy basement for yet more curios and things interesting to read to find the treasure: a complete set of the Journal of the AIEE—the American Institute of Electrical Engineers—dating all the way back to 1884.

Nearly anyone else in the world would have consigned the moldy, sneeze-inducing magazines to the kindling pile, but fortunately, not those two. Months earlier, they had burst into John’s office—unlike most in the town, they still called him “Doc” out of memory of his days as their history professor—and tossed a dusty, brittle magazine on his desk without preamble or explanation.

“Doc, this is a gold mine!” Paul cried. “They even got the first edition here from 1884! And check this out—articles actually written by Tesla, Nikola Tesla himself!”

It had been a quiet, snowy day when they arrived, and he had indeed been in a mellow mood after a romantic night with Makala in front of the fireplace and no new crisis to deal with, so he was initially in an indulgent frame of mind. Hardly a day passed without someone presenting a harebrained idea to solve the town’s problems with everything from cold fusion machines to perpetual motion. When Mabel’s husband, George, first walked in with plans for how to run a car off charcoal fumes, he thought the man crazy, but a year later, half a dozen such vehicles were chugging around the community.

As a professor, John had always turned to Paul when it came to the inevitable computer glitches in his classroom, and Becka could always track down some obscure journal via interlibrary loan for an article he was writing, so of course he would listen to them. Within minutes after they dumped the journal on his desk, he was as excited as they were. They brought in a box of the journals and spent a delightful afternoon poring over them. Beyond being the onetime head of this town, he was a historian, and the journals were a remarkable glimpse into a most remarkable time in global history where the world was coming out of the darkness and into the future brilliance of electrical power… and in so doing would set itself up for the greatest disaster in human history since the great plagues of the fourteenth century.

The monthly journals dated all the way back to the first days of the electrical industry. The infamous “current wars”—the conflict between Edison on one side supporting the use of direct current and Tesla and Westinghouse on the other pushing for alternating current—had been fought out for years on the pages of the magazine. Historically, that was interesting enough, but far more important were the details of the genesis of the modern electrical current grid from generating station to transformers to household appliances with detailed plans and patents set out for everything.

It was a time of excitement and new inventions nearly every month. It was also a time of bitter infighting, turf wars, patent arguments, claim jumping on who invented what first, character assassinations, and outright thievery and sabotage.

Becka’s librarian skills came to the fore as she laboriously indexed and cross indexed the material they had uncovered. That was an essential step since the magazines had been printed on cheap, wood-pulp-based paper, and many were as brittle as glass, about to disintegrate if handled more than a few times. The secrets of the past could literally disintegrate in a reader’s hands, and she therefore became their guardian, ensuring the magazines were not pawed over in a frivolous manner. What she was protecting covered the development of the entire industry, from just a few years after the first commercial incandescent lightbulbs and power plants went online up until the 1960s when the AIEE had merged with another organization to include advanced electronics—unknowingly beginning to lay the groundwork for disaster with an increasingly delicate infrastructure.

The library had already proven its worth innumerable times over since the Day. There had been a rush to uncover half-forgotten issues of Mother Earth News and the Foxfire series of books for some retro learning about food gathering and preparation. The college had set up seminars for students and the general public to teach canning, mushroom gathering, hunting, trapping, and folk medicine. But this? It was like some lost tablets had been found by archaeologists that would explain a forgotten language, a language that could unlock one of the great secrets of the universe—how to restore electrical power. More than a few, especially the ham radio operators and a few other hobbyists, understood how it all had once worked, but to see the actual diagrams and patents once written and filed by Tesla and company was undreamed of.

John had called an emergency meeting of the town council that same evening, unable to contain his excitement, and within the hour, the proposal by Paul had been passed with a full allocation of whatever resources were necessary—if and when they could be found—and even a boost in precious rations from the town reserve for those doing the heavy, dirty work for the project.

The proposal: to retrofit the dam at Lake Susan down below the college and turn it into a hydroelectric generating system. The few old-timers still alive in Montreat—John’s mother-in-law, Jen, being one of them—could recall how there actually had been a hydroelectric power plant a couple of miles above Lake Susan that first provided electricity to Montreat until the big power companies had moved in and taken things over in the 1930s, abandoning the smaller mills and letting them fall into ruins. Jen, as a small girl, used to hike up to the abandoned site and prowl around the wreckage.

The day after the decision was made, Paul led an expedition up there to scavenge through the bits of wreckage in hopes of finding abandoned equipment. Some useable pipe, a few rusted gears, and some disintegrating switchboards were dug out, but not much else—other than a rattlesnake, which was quickly dispatched. No matter how hungry he was, John could not stomach the thought as several students quickly skinned the still-twitching snake and made a meal of it.

The list of necessary supplies put forth by Paul seemed insurmountable at first glance. So many of the items listed in the journals from the 1880s were readily at hand in that long-ago world. But to find them now? In the world of the 1880s, Tesla and Westinghouse could cook up their ideas about this revolutionary thing called AC current and then turn to an army of men with technical skills—wire makers, steel molders, and lathe operators on down to the sandhogs digging tunnels. The details of how they ventured to harness the power of Niagara Falls for the great megaproject of that time were outlined in the journals in the breathless detail that the Victorians loved to read about. They made it seem easy in comparison to turning tiny Lake Susan into a new source of energy.

It presented the classic paradox of attempting to recover a lost technology when the entire infrastructure had been shattered. Tesla, Westinghouse, and Edison created one of the most significant technological advances in history, the ability to create energy at one location and move it to another to perform myriad tasks as yet undreamed of in the 1880s. They created a system that would lead to radio, television, medical technologies that nearly doubled the average life span from that of the year 1900, and limitless energy at the flick of a switch—everything that the world of the twenty-first century assumed was part of ordinary life until the Day.

As they conceptualized those first ideas regarding the still barely understood thing called electricity, they could turn over their drawings to master tool and die makers, precision lathe operators, smelters running blast furnaces, wire makers, and even blueprint drawers. There was a nineteenth-century infrastructure already in place to make the great wonders of the nineteenth century, not just the generating of electricity but the means to get it out there and keep it running 24-7-365.

As a historian, when he was first looking at the plans that Paul and Becka drew up for the town’s approval, John felt overwhelming despair. Nearly everything they envisioned for their project had to be made from scratch, reshaped from the salvaged refuse of a collapsed national infrastructure, and it would all have to be manufactured locally. As he examined Tesla’s patent application for the essential converters—the precision-made tools that converted the electrical current blasting out of a generator turned by waterpower into 60-hertz alternating current—it seemed nearly impossible to replicate. So to for the transformers, another of Tesla’s near genie-like creations, that could step voltage up for transmission and then step it back down again for final distribution into homes and factories.

Paul shrugged off John’s concerns with a smile. “I helped with rigging up Internet to this campus and kept it running; this is no big deal in comparison.”

The challenge presented to Paul and Becka by their discovery was ultimately to start the rebuilding of a modern community from scratch.

The Day had taught all that electricity was the fundamental bedrock of their entire civilization, so ubiquitous that no one really fully grasped how crucial it was until it was gone. John’s former students, if successful, would begin the long journey back. If they said it was possible, he and the rest of the community could do nothing less than support them, and all had given the go-ahead even as it strained the community resources, taking dozens of workers out of food production—the bare essentials of survival—with the hope that the investment would indeed start the long journey back from the darkness. As John voted to approve their plan and requests for resources, he quoted the old Joni Mitchell song with the refrain “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.”

So the plan had moved forward. Anderson Auditorium, a beautiful old structure that was actually a twelve-sided, three-story-high building—a popular architectural style for conference centers back in the 1920s—was cleared out and converted into a huge workshop. The interior of a day care center next to Flat Creek, which emptied out of Lake Susan, was gutted out to be converted into the town’s new power station. Out along the front of the dam, part of that structure was torn down, the lake was drained, and even during the coldest days of winter and early spring, piping was laid in and the dam face rebuilt.

Lake Susan was a relic of a time when people actually built dams and created lakes for strictly scenic reasons. No one until Paul and Becka came along looked upon the sparkling water falling over the dam’s spillway as representing quite a few megawatts of energy.

When Paul and Becka, now sporting official titles as electrical engineers, presented their wish list of necessary material, John had told them to move forward, but he did wonder if it was all turning into a pipe dream.

The generator would have to be woven by hand with a dozen miles of copper wire. Most of the freestanding, old-fashioned copper wires in the community had literally melted off the poles when hit by the EMP or had been looted afterward for other such uses as the barely functional telephone system. The turbine of welded steel had to be perfectly balanced; if not, within minutes, it would burn out its bearings and either seize up or fly apart. New transformers had to be made, miles of wire needed to be restrung to run the power from the dam clear down to Black Mountain, and all the other intricacies of actually building a power grid from scratch had to be accomplished.

Regarding the copper wire, Paul had uncovered yet another treasure trove that was under their noses: the old electrical substation at the base of the hill where John used to live. It had been heavily damaged by the EMP and further damaged in the battle with the Posse, which had been stopped in the area around the station. Paul began to tear the old transformers apart and pull out the copper wiring within them. Most of it was fused into a solid mass from the electrical overload of the EMP. The answer—and Paul, in his enthusiasm, made it sound simple—was just melt it down and draw new wire out of the molten mass.

It had taken weeks of experimenting, of remastering a common technology of the nineteenth century. One student was severely burned, but they had finally figured it out, and the interior of Anderson Auditorium was now a thunderous, smoke-filled workshop of wood-fired kilns, a foundry, wire works, and lathes powered by a somewhat gasping old VW engine provided by the town’s auto mechanic, Jim Bartlett. Teams were sent out to pull generators and alternators from abandoned cars for their wiring and batteries for the acid and lead inside.

The fact that a meeting and a demonstration had been planned for the evening after the meeting with Fredericks actually came as a welcome diversion after dealing with the crisis of the day, and it was a good excuse for John to keep the open community meeting from turning into an hours-long, dragged-out debate.

A small crowd, the team of students and elderly workers who had once labored in the heavy industries of a long-ago industrialized America, was gathered outside the old children’s day care center, rechristened “Montreat Power Station #1,” and actually applauded with enthusiastic delight as John and his family pulled up in the old Edsel.

In a way, it was simply a publicity show and test run; the real turbine and generator were still several weeks away from final placement. What Paul and Becka had set up for the evening’s demonstration was a one-sixth-scale test model housed off to one side of the main floor where the main generator was still under construction.

The pipe from the dam face snaked downslope to the powerhouse, thus adding a dozen more feet of elevation drop from the dam face and thus more energy.

It was obvious that Paul, Becka, and their workforce had been waiting excitedly for his arrival. Elizabeth, her worries of the moment forgotten, bounded out of the car with young and very sleepy Ben in her arms. Makala gently helped John’s aged mother-in-law, Jen, ever the elegant lady even at eighty, as she braced herself and slowly walked down to where the crowd waited, exchanging greetings with old friends and neighbors. Makala fell in behind her, John by her side, both ready to leap forward and grab the fragile woman if she should start to totter. The previous two years had aged her ten, and no one needed to be told that in this terrible new age after the Day, a fall resulting in a broken hip was a lingering and most painful death sentence.

“So how are the wizards of electricity?” John asked cheerfully as he approached the waiting crowd in the gathering gloom.

There were warm smiles and handshakes all around. John suggested that the two who first cooked up the idea offer a brief explanation of what they had accomplished. Paul was eager to go into a tech-laden lecture, but after a few minutes, Becka simply leaned up, kissed him on the cheek, and lovingly put a hand over his mouth.

“He’ll go on all night like that,” she said with a laugh. “He even does it in his sleep. Doc, we got a good head of water coming through the pipe; all we need to do is open the valve that feeds into our model turbine. Would you do us the honors?”

John shook his head and smiled. “You guys built it. You turn it on.”

They hesitated, and he sensed they were nervous. They had actually resisted testing this out until now, so no one was sure all those old diagrams and their months of hard labor actually would amount to something. They were fearful a premature test run might blow apart all they had labored for so far. The two looked at each other and the several dozen who had worked with them throughout the winter and into the spring. The crowd laughed and urged them on. Together, they stepped into the powerhouse, and a joke was shouted that now was not the time to make out in the dark but to get to work.

“I’m not sure how long she’ll run, so here goes!” Paul shouted through the open doorway, and together he and Becka first opened a valve that diverted water from the overflow pipe, shifting it to run against the turbine blades of their test model. All could hear a vibrating rumble as the turbine began to turn faster and faster, coming up to speed, as Paul watched an old-fashioned gauge monitoring the RPMs. He said something to Becka, the two barely visible inside the gloomy exterior of the control room. Together, they took hold of a switch that John thought looked like something straight out of a Frankenstein movie and forced it down to connect the generator and bring it to life.

A gasp erupted from the small crowd. Light! Electric light!

Electric lighting, not seen in their valley for over two years, shined forth from a community power station. Old hundred-watt bulbs inside the power station instantly flashing into brilliant darkness-shattering life. A string of bulbs along the roofline of the building began to glow as Paul and Becka threw a second switch, and even a salvaged string of Christmas bulbs draped along the eaves of the small power station, the same lights that had once decorated the campus tree every winter, sparkled in their multicolored hues.

“Ben, look at the lights, the lights!” Elizabeth shouted as she hugged her squirming toddler, who was now awake and pointing at the multicolored Christmas lights, squealing with laughter.

John pulled Makala in closer, hugging her. He looked over at his grandson’s shining face, and tears came to his eyes. The child, for the first time, was seeing what half a dozen generations before him had experienced from their first seconds of life and knew throughout their lives. And now those around him were laughing and cheering. And then, as an added thrill to it all, music! An old-fashioned boom box Becka had mounted on a windowsill came to life, blaring out an old song—“Blinded by the Light.” Within seconds, all were dancing to the music, laughing and cheering like wild children, some of the elderly in the crowd showing the college kids how to form up for a line dance.

Then the music seemed to go slightly out of beat, slowing down and then speeding up, reminding John of when he was a kid and he and his friends would put 45 RPM records on and crank the player up to 78 RPM and think it wildly funny. The hundred-watt bulbs glowed with hot intensity. One winked off, and another actually burst, and before Paul could throw the switch off, the Christmas lights shorted out.

The music and dancing stopped, and the scent of ozone filled the air. Becka raced back inside the power station to switch the water back to the outflow pipe. A grinding sound came from the turbine housing as its blades clattered to a stop. The crowd outside stood silent, not sure how to react.

John quickly stepped forward, breaking the tension, clapping his hands. “Bravo, you guys! Magnificent!”

The two engineers peeked out nervously from the power station building, ready with excuses and explanations about this being a test run, that the real turbine would be far more finely tuned and that they still had to get more precise with Tesla’s alternating generator system, but they were drowned out by the enthusiastic applause and hugs from their coworkers, the uproar growing even louder when Becka let slip that she could not be picked up and tossed around because she was expecting. The promise of any new life in their so tragically depleted community was greeted with laughter, cheers, and more than a few ribald jokes about what had been going on in the library basement other than research.

John and Makala worked their way through the crowd, and the act took on something of a ritual as John warmly grasped Paul’s hand, congratulating him first on the good news with Becka and then for their miraculous achievement with the power plant.

Makala warmly embraced Becka. “First thing in the morning, I want you to stop by so we can talk over your diet, and Paul, let this lady rest for a while. If need be, the power plant can wait; your baby is far more important to us.”

Far too many pregnancies had been lost in the first year after the Day, and more than a few mothers actually died due to malnourishment. The entire community now gave top priority to expectant mothers. For John, there was a flash memory of the sacrifice he had decided on for Elizabeth, the death of their beloved golden retriever, Ginger, a decision he had made without hesitation and which still filled him with tears.

John sensed it was time to leave the electricity wizards to their celebration; it had already been an exhausting day after a sleepless night. Returning home, he slipped off to be by himself while the rest of the family went to bed.

A half hour later, he sensed a presence behind him and turned to see Makala standing in the moonlight. He didn’t say anything other than to slip over on the bench by Jennifer’s grave so that she could join him.

Makala offered him a glass of blackberry wine, the last of half a dozen bottles that had been a Christmas gift from one of his old students. Makala took a sip from her glass and remained silent.

“You know, there are times I still crave a damn good cigarette.” He sighed, finally opening up. “And this is one of them.”

“One of the few benefits of what happened, it made you kick that loathsome habit,” Makala offered, leaning in against his shoulder.

He struggled not to let her know that he had been crying, but he could not hide it. It still hit him at times when he came out at night to sit by his daughter’s grave for a few minutes for silent thought and a prayer before going to bed.

“I should be at least somewhat over it all.” He nodded to the grave. Nightmares still haunted him, her last words coming back to him, whispering that she wanted to be buried in the yard so she could remain close to him and for him to take good care of her beloved stuffed animal Rabs, whom he now held whenever he visited with her.

He finally sat back, coughing, embarrassed, wiping his face with a soiled handkerchief, Makala kissing him on the cheek again.

He nodded an embarrassed thanks even though she had witnessed moments like this scores of times, but he was glad to feel her close by his side. “And now they want to take Elizabeth away from me,” he gasped, struggling for control. “If she goes off, she’ll never come back.”

Makala remained silent as she always did at such moments to give him room to finally let his feelings out, a luxury he could not indulge in when in front of others who expected his stoic leadership.

“There are times I am so sick to death of the role I have to play,” he said. “The rock-solid leader, the one that everyone else comes to for strength. I can’t bear the thought of her going, but I have to stand by silent and let her go if that is the way this plays out. To do otherwise is pure hypocrisy. I have to tell her to go if others are forced to go.” He sighed, looking off. “When we went in on the attack against Iraq, I wanted to be on the front line, not stuck a couple of miles back in a well-armored command vehicle. When several of my men were killed, I had to take it in calmly, reassure the other troopers, tell them to push on, even though I wanted to scream with frustration and pain, since I knew those kids well. When we came back to the States, I went to see their families; one was married with two kids. The whole rest of the country was celebrating what they thought was an easy win, but it still cost hundreds of lives. What could I tell those who had lost a son or husband? They died in a good cause? They were heroes?

“The three in my unit who died? Their Humvee took a rocket-propelled grenade, and there was no heroism about it. One second, they were alive—the next second, dead. And they left behind families that will never really heal no matter what the platitudes and honors.”

He looked up, gazing at the moon. “And so now I will be the parent that stands by and waits, with my gut instincts telling me she’ll not come back. Part of me wants to race back to Fredericks tomorrow and take the deal I know he’d give me to exempt Elizabeth. Then what? Frankly, it’s not how the town will react that bothers me, though I know I’d be a pariah. You and Jen would understand, but I think the respect of both of you would be gone if I did.”

He fell silent, and she did not reply.

He continued, “It’s that I know Elizabeth will tell me to go to hell and enlist anyhow, because she believes it is her duty, even though it means being torn away from her child.” His gaze returned to Jennifer’s grave. “Damn this world. Damn what we allowed it to become.”

“We had nothing to do with what happened,” Makala began, but he cut her off with a glare.

“We did have a lot to do with it. We had all grown so fat, so complacent, and we always let someone else worry about such things, even though we knew that those we allowed to be in charge were far too often incompetent—or worse, self-serving and blind in their arrogance.”

There was no reprimand in his words, only a deep sadness. “I feel like a balled-up knot, becoming the archetype of the way it is in all wars, of old men pointing to the front lines and telling the young to go out and die. But this time, it is now my daughter, her friends, the ones who fought and saved this town a year ago.”

He sighed again, absently petting the well-worn fabric of Jennifer’s stuffed animal.

“When Dale made that first offer, of course I refused; it was so damn insulting. But now, after hours of thinking about it, it does tear at me even as I know I have to resist it.”

“I don’t trust that son of a bitch as far as I can spit,” Makala snapped back in reply. “He tried to bribe you right up front with offering a deferment to Elizabeth and not the others. He knew what he was doing.”

A bit taken aback, John said nothing, just looking at her for a moment.

“What do you think of him?” she finally asked. “You’re the ex-military type, not me.”

“My first reaction today was not good. I mean, the guards out front… you could see it in his eyes; he’s a thug. That type has always been a plague since pharaoh first organized an army. They get in a uniform, and God save anyone who crosses them. A good unit commander weeds that type out quick or at least keeps them on a really short leash. So that was a bad first impression. But I’m not going to judge Fredericks solely on that. He explained why he made what you call a bribe. He just thought I was there only for Elizabeth. The guy most likely is swamped with hundreds of families, each asking for special treatment. At least my war in the Gulf and the ones after it were fought by an all-volunteer force. No one likes a draft, but there is some logic to it here and now if we are to resecure our borders and start rebuilding the entire United States as it once was.”

He wearily shook his head. “So now I am hoisted up on the spike of my own ethics and convictions.”

“Look at it cynically and him far more cynically, John. You want to believe that the motivation of this leader is good, along with those behind him all the way up to those in Bluemont.”

John was silent for a long time.

He gazed at Jennifer’s grave, moonlight casting a shadow from the ceramic golden retriever placed at the head of the grave in memory of Ginger, whom Jennifer had loved with all her heart and whom John had actually killed the day after Jennifer died in order to feed Elizabeth, struggling with her pregnancy. That memory nearly choked him up again.

It was all too much. He stood up, stepping back into the sunroom to place Rabs on his perch where he kept watch over Jennifer. Makala followed him.

“I just don’t know,” John whispered. He looked appealingly at Makala. “Give me a couple of days to sort this one out. See what Fredericks comes back with. Okay?”

His tone indicated he was worn down with the conversation and needed some what he called “introvert time,” to just think things through. She kissed him on the cheek, whispered a good night, and left his side.

He returned to the sitting room and sat down at the old rolltop desk that had once belonged to his father-in-law. Mounted to one side was a true luxury.

One of the ham operators had shown up at his doorstep several weeks earlier with a small multiband shortwave from the 1960s dug out of an abandoned antique store. He also gave John a solar-powered battery charger, and though the batteries were wearing down after hundreds of recharges, they did allow him to tune in for a half hour or so before having to charge them back up again. He settled down by the radio and clicked it on, the old-fashioned analog dial glowing and fine-tuned into a familiar voice… the BBC. The timing was good—late in the evening here, three in the morning over there. There was the familiar, comforting chime of Big Ben marking three and the always-so-well-modulated voice of the news broadcaster.

It is 3:00 a.m., Greenwich War Time, and this is the news of the hour.

Heavy fighting was reported today in Chicago, Illinois; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Fort Wayne, Indiana. The American government in Bluemont announced an offensive against a gang controlling that region, deploying troops from the newly formed Army of National Recovery, or ANR. The government spokesperson stated that the offensive is a clear first step to eliminate lawlessness and restore national unity. There is an unconfirmed report, transmitted by a former BBC correspondent in Ottawa, that American federal forces have taken heavy casualties not only in this action but in others in Cleveland and other cities bordering Canada along the Great Lakes.

The federal government also announced that it will bring whatever forces, and I quote, “up to strategic level if need be into this fight to bring about unification,” end quote. There was no specific answer as to what is implied by this statement when asked about the definition of “strategic level.”

A message now for our friends in Quebec: “The chair is against the door.” I repeat, “The chair is against the door.”

Here in England, the government announced that, contrary to earlier promises, the rationing of petrol must continue for the foreseeable future. The prime minister stated…

Strategic forces? He shook his head. Surely that did not mean what he feared. “Damn it.” He sighed, putting his head down on the desk and closing his eyes.