The Final Day

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.”

“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.”

“It is a bit more complex than that,” Billy interjected, “but yeah, Maury’s right on this.”

“Maury, yes or no, can you fly me to Roanoke and back?”

Maury hesitated.

“Yes or no.”

“If I plan to see my grandchildren”—and he paused before the next jab—“or your child that’s coming, all bets are off.”

John sighed with exasperation. “Let’s get down to the bottom of this and why I feel I have to go. I think this Quentin Reynolds was carrying some information way too important to ignore and to let disappear in the frozen ground with his dead body. He died for a reason, and that was to somehow get to me with a message. What, I don’t know, but for him to set off over land to reach me means it must have been damn well important.”

“Or the excuse of a deserter who got jumped on the way—then, delirious, had some made-up story to worm his way into our community.” Ernie sniffed. “You yourself said you still aren’t even sure if he is valid or not.”

“Look, damn it. There is one fact that can’t be disputed. I served under Bob Scales during Desert Storm One. Without his help, I would never have moved here.” He hesitated, looking at Makala. “When my first wife was hit by cancer and wanted to be close to her family in her final months, it was my friend General Scales who networked me into a job at Montreat. If he is still alive, I owe him a hell of a lot. If he is still alive and sent this Quentin fella to find me, it must be important, damn important.”

Makala offered a sad smile of understanding, and he nodded his thanks for that.

“Quentin Reynolds, I believe, just might have been sent by my friend to contact me. Just to know he is alive means the world to me.”

“And you’ll risk your ass and the only helicopter in our entire state to find out?” Ernie interjected.

John wanted to shout yes in reply but thought better of it. If he turned this personal, the council would vote him down, and frankly he could not blame them then if they did.

“The question of why has to be answered and answered now. If it is about an EMP, another one, we had damn well better find out and quick. It might have been the ravings of a dying man remembering the tragedy all of us endured. Or was it a warning that we might get hit again?”

The low murmuring in the room of those he could sense were about to tell him to just calm down, relax, go home with his wife, and take a few days off after the stress of his trip over the mountain now fell silent.

“Are we going to be hit again?” John asked.

“By who?” Again it was Ernie. “Why bother? America is finished as we know it. Sure, we flattened Iran and North Korea. India and Pakistan are turning each other into radioactive wastelands, the same in the Middle East. We still have the nuke boomers at sea. Why would anyone want to hit us again?”

John looked at Forrest, and though he felt the demonstration would be absurd, perhaps it was the only way to get his message across.

“Forrest, you got any of those K-Cups of coffee on you?”

Forrest, who had been listening intently to John, recoiled slightly. “What the hell is this, a shakedown?”

“Just yes or no—you got any on you?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Give me one.”

“Why?”

“Okay, loan me one; I promise I’ll give it back.”

Forrest reached into the side pocket of his battered fatigue jacket and pulled one out and reluctantly tossed it over. John snatched it and looked at the lid.

“Hazelnut, my favorite,” he whispered, and he put it on the desk in front of him. “Okay, my friends, who’s gonna grab for it first?”

“Come on, John, what kind of game is this?” Reverend Black asked.

John could see the hungry gazes of those crammed into his office. His own indulgences with Forrest these last few days he had not discussed with anyone else in this room, Makala and Lee the only ones present who had enjoyed the largesse of Forrest’s secret hoard.

“To my point. You all want it; I know you do. But let me just add this one caveat in.”

“You and your professor’s Latin.” Ernie sniffed, his gaze locked on the small, white plastic cup.

“One chance in ten—no, make it one in a hundred that coffee in there is laced with cyanide poison. A one in a hundred chance it turns into you drinking the Kool-Aid—Jonestown kind of stuff. Some of you remember that insane day. Still want it?”

He could see the confused glances.

“Hell, you might risk it for yourself just for the taste of coffee again. But share it with your spouse, your kids? Who wants to try it?”

No one spoke.

He scooped up the white plastic cup and tossed it back to Forrest, who looked around a bit suspiciously, reminding John of Gollum the way he clutched at the One Ring, and quickly slipped it back into his pocket.

“Point made,” John announced.

“What point, damn it?” Ernie snapped.

“One chance in ten, maybe one chance in a hundred, that the message that Major Quentin Reynolds was carrying was a warning of things to come. Last time we got hit, no one here knew it was coming, and look at us now. Suppose someone somewhere is planning to do it again? Suppose my friend General Scales is still alive and wanted to get a warning to us?”

“Then why all the mystery?” Ernie retorted. “If your buddy is still alive out there and has this big secret he wants to warn you about, just fly in and tell us, or get on the radio and announce it. The whole thing is screwy, John, and you know it.”

“I agree in part, Ernie. Yeah, it is strange, a lone guy claiming to have served with the general showing up half-dead. But we definitely live in a screwy world. Maybe my friend has reasons for not doing what you said. I can think of a dozen of them.”

“Name one.”

“He knows something he can’t let anyone else know for whatever reason and wanted to get word to me. Send it out on a radio and the entire world can listen in. Fly here? That draws notice as well. I could go on, but there’s a couple, for starters.”

Ernie took that in. “Or the whole thing could be a trap to lure you out of this valley by claiming a friend is still alive with some sort of secret message. You take the bait, and Bluemont gets payback for Fredericks with you dangling from the end of a rope.”

John could see Makala go tense over that one, nodding in agreement. It was exactly what she had said within minutes after he returned from trying to see Quentin. It was a setup to entrap him.

“Think about it,” John pressed in, avoiding eye contact with his wife. “We are just starting to get back on our feet. We’ve got electricity back, a lab here on campus making antibiotics and anesthesia; they even think they’ll get one of Doc Weiderman’s old x-ray machines he had packed away down in the basement of his office on the day things hit back online soon. Think of what that would have meant after our fight with the Posse and with Fredericks. We’ve got water pumping again through the town water mains. We are starting to crawl back out of the darkness. But if we are hit by another EMP, again without warning, we might as well just bury the last two and a half years of struggle, dig a grave for the rest of us, and crawl into it.”

“Who would be crazy enough to do that again?” Maury asked.

John shrugged. “Who was crazy enough the first time? After the fact, we finally figured out it was North Korea and Iran handing off nukes to terrorists who launched them from container ships in the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific. There are still terrorist cells out there, maybe wanting to this time provoke a full-scale global nuclear war. Could be China wanting to push us down even further but stand there looking innocent and then suggesting we need more aid east of the Mississippi. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter who.”

He paused for a moment.

“Did it ultimately matter who did it last time? The result was the same; it took us to the edge of extinction. If it might happen again, and there is a chance we can get a forewarning, I want that chance for all of us.”

“There’s one other reason now,” Ernie said.

John looked over at him, ready to let fly with an angry burst for him to remain silent but then realized the secret would soon be out anyhow, and laying it on the table could help with his argument.

“Okay, this is classified, and I mean strictly classified; it has to stay in this room.” John paused, looking at the telephone receiver on the table in front of him, tempted to hang it up. But those listening in were now part of the government as well. “Do we all understand each other? What I say next can go no further.”

There were nods of approval, all now obviously filled with curiosity.

“We’ve managed to get a few computers back up and running.”

“A few computers?” Billy said. “So what? Play Pac-Man, or some dumb-ass flight simulator on them? The Internet is gone forever, at least here, and unless linked up, they’re useless.”

“Didn’t AB Tech in Asheville once offer a course on aircraft maintenance?” Ernie asked.

“Yes, why?”

“How did they teach it?”

“Computers, of course, and anything hooked into the net and plugged in for power got fried.”

“Maybe the maintenance manuals for the L-3 and the Black Hawk were on CDs. I got another old PC up and running over in the library yesterday while our hero John and company were trying to kill themselves going over the mountain. Give me a computer, give me data stored on a CD, and I’ll get the machine to run it. You want it?”

Billy could only nod.

“And fiber optics, my friends, were not cooked off. They’re dark now, but give me enough machines and the juice to run them, and I’ll get a network—at least local—up and running again.”

“So we can play games and send those damn tweets,” someone snapped.

“No, damn it. Data transfer was the lifeblood of what we were. Medical libraries, technical data beyond the magazines moldering in the school basement… find a way to hook me in, and we can even eavesdrop on Bluemont.”

Though John was growing increasingly frustrated with Ernie taking the topic off the point he was trying to close in on and talking about more than he should, this did catch everyone’s attention.

“After I left IBM back in the late ’80s, that was the business my wife and I set up. We wrote the software and provided some of the hardware for those big array dishes. Not the crap units you all started to get with your televisions; I’m talking about the big stuff used by governments. Chances are the LEOs were most likely taken out in the war, but the geosynch stuff I bet is still definitely online.”

“Translate, please?” the Asheville rep shouted from the back of the room.

“Oh, jeez. LEO, low-earth orbit. Companies like those direct television networks, their satellites were high up, twenty-three thousand miles up, what we called geosynch. The comm sats up there were heavily proofed against any kind of electromagnetic pulse. Had to be in order to survive solar storms, or coronal mass ejections, as we called them. Chances are Bluemont and other surviving governments are still using them for chatter and for encrypted stuff as well. You give me enough juice, some fairly recent computers that some rich kid tossed into his basement when Mommy and Daddy gave him an even faster unit for his damn stupid games, and I know how to start listening in.”

“You mean hacking?” Maury asked.

“Yup. Hell, my wife is a pro at that. Some years back, we installed the tracking software for a Middle Eastern country to link into a geosynch satellite.”

“Which Middle Eastern country?” John asked.

Ernie just smiled and replied, “Classified.”

No one interrupted as Ernie smiled expansively, pleased that he had obviously taken over the meeting for at least a few minutes.

“Well, the bastards welched on the last half of a payment of around a million bucks. Figured they had the system we installed, so why bother to pay some Americans once they had it in place?” Ernie started to laugh.

“They hadn’t counted on my wife, Linda. She sent them the usual notices and finally a warning, and they basically told us to screw off. Anyhow, they didn’t reckon on her. She had a Trojan in the software, hacked into it on day 121 of overdue payment—after all due proper notice and warning, of course—and fried their entire system off. We lost a million bucks but laughed our butts off.” Ernie chuckled at the memory of it.

“We have another resource as well,” John chimed in. “This college was starting up a cybersecurity major just before we got hit. We have some kids here that were getting top-notch training in how to keep systems secured from hackers.”

“Which means that in order to stop a hacker, you have to know how to hack,” Ernie interjected. “Put those kids to work doing something useful rather than having them dig for roots and who knows what we might find out, not just about this rumor regarding an EMP but a lot of other stuff we haven’t even considered. It’s out there; it’s time we started listening in, and if there is another EMP that hits without warning and the machines I’ve got up are running when the hit comes, we’re back in the Stone Age, this time with no hope of return.”

“What Ernie told us is another reason I have to go to Roanoke,” John quickly announced. “We are coming back online. Ernie, if another EMP is popped today, or a few months from now, what happens to your work?”

Ernie looked at him and finally nodded. “I change my vote, John, even though it will eat up a hell of a lot of our reserve fuel for that chopper. I say go and get your answers.”

John looked around at the others. “Let’s say Ernie’s statement is a motion. Those in favor?”

All but two raised their hands—the pilot who would have to take him… and Makala. And he knew there would be hell to pay once back home, but like it or not—and though the thought of a helicopter flight did turn his stomach over—it had to be done.