One Second After (25 page)

“We were once all Americans,” Kate said quietly.

“Precisely,” John now interjected. “Those that are here stay. We've already made that agreement.”

He looked around to the others. In spite of his speech in the park, he wondered now if views were changing because a food shortage was now clearly evident.

“No different than keeping out those on the other side,” Carl replied.

“Maybe not, God save us,” John replied. “I don't have an answer for that. But those that are in stay.”

He looked to Charlie for support.

“We change that view now and I am off this council. It contradicts what I said at the park and neither you nor anyone else objected then.”

“What about what we did get off the road?” Kate said. “We're forgetting about that. We got six trucks loaded with foodstuffs, enough rations to feed all of them for a couple of weeks. Consider that as their payment.”

John nodded to her, an adroit move on her part.

“They stay,” Charlie finally said, and Carl nodded his head.

“One other thing,” John interjected. “Those passing through. Anyone special, we should allow them to stay if they wish.”

“Like who?” Kellor asked.

“Anyone that can help us survive now, or rebuild.”

“Such as?”

“Military men, police officers for example.”

He knew he'd get immediate nods from Tom and Carl on that. The “fraternal order” definitely looked out for its own, and John realized he was doing the same when it came to the military.

“But others. Farmers, they have skills we need, can help with the cattle, hogs, and what crops are planted. All that fancy machinery is dead and a lot of farming is reverted to backbreaking labor. I think we should grab any electrician we can find, power company guys, people like that, doctors, nurses as well. If they want to stay, we interview them; if they check out OK, they can join us.”

There was a moment of silence again.

“Agreed,” Charlie replied.

“That means their families as well,” Kate said. “I wouldn't give two cents for a man or woman who would grab the chance to stay and walk away from their family.”

“No argument there,” Charlie finally replied.

“John, could you draw up a list of recommended skills you think we should have?”

John nodded.

“Frankly, I'd kill for someone who could build a steam engine.”

There was a round of chuckles at that.

“No, people, I'm dead serious. A steam engine would be worth its weight in gold. Do any of you know how to make one, let alone repair an old one rotting behind a barn and then keep it running?”

Everyone was silent.

The thought started him rolling.

“Get a steam engine and you have power where you want it. To pump, dig, cut, hell, even mount it on the rail tracks and move things.

“I'd like to find some old guy who repaired phone lines forty years ago and could retrofit us. Prowl through the antique stores on Cherry Street and you'll find old crank phones that still might work if we could find someone who understood how to hook them up. It'd link the two ends of our community.”

Several were now nodding.

“The guys I know in my Civil War Roundtable, Revolutionary War reenactors, many of them know skills that are lost to the rest of us. I want people like that. I'd trade a hundred computer-tech heads right now for
one guy who understood steam engines. I'd trade a hundred lawyers for someone who could show us how to make gunpowder from what we can find here in this valley, or which roots we can dig right now and safely eat.

“An old chemist who could make ether or chloroform. Doc, we're going to need a lot of that in the months to come and I'm willing to bet we're short already.

“An old dentist who could get an old-fashioned foot-powered drill running. You folks think about that yet, next time you get a toothache? Care to have the tooth yanked instead and no painkiller while we're at it? Remember the old movies, the ones about a gang of kids and one of them usually had a bandage wrapped around his head to keep his jaw shut because he had an abscessed tooth. If we saw that two weeks ago the parents would have been arrested for child abuse. But I tell you, we'll be seeing that again, and real soon.”

He suddenly realized he was rambling, the room silent, suddenly far too hot.

“Sorry. . . .”

No one spoke and he wasn't sure if it was because they were embarrassed by his rambling monologue or because he had indeed hit home with what they faced.

“I think we have it all for now,” Charlie said. “Let's get to work. Meeting same time tomorrow.”

The group stood up and John felt a stab of pain. Kellor was bent over the table, holding John's right hand down and taking off the bandage. The group looked over at them and he could see concern in Kate's eyes.

“John, I think you better go home. You're running a fever. I'll see if I can dig something up for it and come by later,” Kellor said.

“I told you. That nurse, the tall good-looking one, Makala's her name. She's giving me Cipro.”

“Well, it should have kicked in by now. I don't like this,” and Kellor sniffed the bandage again, his nose wrinkling.

John looked down at his hand. It was swollen, red streaked, the exposed wound red, the edge of the flesh where it had been stitched puckered.

He was suddenly worried. God damn. An infected hand, now? He had images of Civil War era surgery.

“What the hell is it, Doc?” Kate asked, coming closer.

“Maybe staph, but I don't have the lab to test for it.

“Crops up in hospitals, nursing homes. Resistant stuff. Go home, go to bed, I'll be by later today or this evening.”

“I said I was going up to the college to get some volunteers for the elementary school.”

“Last thing I want is you walking around at the college or in the elementary school with that hand. If you got a staph infection, you're a spreader now. So just go home.”

John nodded and stood up, feeling weak.

He headed to the door, Kellor walking alongside him. Starting the car up, John headed for home . . . and as he pulled into the driveway . . . he knew.

Jen was outside, sitting on the stone wall of the walkway leading to the door. Elizabeth was on one side of her, Jennifer on the other. As he got out of the car the dogs came up, but a sharp command warned them to back off.

“It's Tyler, isn't it,” John said.

Jen forced a smile and nodded.

Jennifer started to sob and he put his good arm around her, his little girl burying her head in his chest.

“Pop-pop,” was all she could get out.

Jen put a hand on her granddaughter's shoulder.

“Pop-pop is in heaven now, dear. But it's OK to cry.”

Elizabeth leaned against John's shoulder, forcing back a sob, but then looked up at him.

“Dad, you're burning up.”

“I'm OK,” he said.

He looked at Jen.

“Let's go in,” she said.

He followed her into the house, which was all so silent, and into what had been Jennifer's room.

Tyler's features were already going to a grayish yellow.

John remembered the first time they had met, Tyler coldly looking at this Yankee, worse yet from New Jersey, who obviously had but one intent only, and that was to seduce his only daughter and take her away.

John smiled. Oh, I understand that now, Pop, he thought.

And then so many other memories, of the gradual thaw. The first time
they'd gone out shooting together while the “girls” went to the mall to go shopping, Tyler fascinated by the old Colt Dragoon pistol John had brought along, roaring with laughter over the encounter with the local rednecks that had happened but weeks before. That had been an icebreaker, father and potential son-in-law shooting, talking guns, then sitting on the patio and having a cold beer.

And then the grudging acceptance that had turned to friendship and at last had turned to the love a father would have for a son, a son who then gave him two beautiful granddaughters, granddaughters who allowed him once again to relive the joy of raising a child.

He was gone now. War or not, he would have died, but he had indeed died far sooner as a result of the war. In the cold figures of triage, he was an old man, someone whom villages, town, and cities all across America, this day, but ten days after an attack, were being forced to “write off.”

For an old man in the advanced stages of cancer, there would be no medicine. . . . That had to be rationed now to someone who “stood a chance” or who, in a colder sense, could be of use. If the old man were not dying at home his would be a body whose departure would free a bed in a hospital flooded with the sick and injured. In a starving community his would be one less mouth to feed, even though his last meals were from a can poured into a feeding tube . . . but even that can of Ensure was now a meal, perhaps for an entire day, for someone else.

Tyler was dead, and there was a war, though it did not in any sense seem like a war that any had even conceptualized this way . . . and he was dead as surely as millions of others were now dead or dying after but ten days . . . as dead as someone lying in the surf of Omaha Beach, the death camp of Auschwitz, as dead as any casualty of war.

Frightened for a moment, John looked back at Jennifer, who stood in the doorway, clutching her grandmother's side. The last of the ice had given out two days ago, the bottles of insulin now immersed in the tank of the basement toilet to keep them cool. And there was a flood of panic in John. He knew, almost to the day, how much insulin was left.

He caught Jen's gaze; the way he was staring at her granddaughter, she pulled Jennifer in tighter to her side.

He turned back to look at Tyler.

“I think we should pray,” John said.

He went down on his knees and made the sign of the cross. “Hail Mary, full of grace . . .”

 

It
was close to sunset. To the north the hills, so affectionately known to all locals as “the Seven Sisters,” were bathed in the slating golden light of evening. Beyond them was the massive bulk of Mount Mitchell, its slopes green as spring moved steadily upwards towards the summit.

“I think that's deep enough, Ben,” John said.

Ben looked up from the grave he had been digging for the last three hours, helped by John's students Phil and Jeremiah.

Charlie had been right. The golf course was the ideal spot for the new cemetery, the earth easy to dig. Over twenty other graves had been dug this day or were being dug now. The seven who had died in the elementary school during the night, five others who had died during the day . . . and three suicides, though one minister had tried to protest that decision that they be buried in what was now consecrated ground. That protest was greeted with icy rejection from Charlie, who was now a former member of that congregation. There had also been two more heart attacks, four more elderly from the nursing home and perhaps most tragic of all, the Morrison family burying their seven-year-old boy, who had had an asthma attack.

John tried to block out the screams of the mother as the dirt was shoveled into her boy's grave.

Reverend Black drew away from the Morrison's and came over.

“Ready, John?”

John nodded.

Richard Black looked exhausted, eyes bloodshot. The Morrison boy had been part of his congregation, a playmate of his son's.

John looked over at Jeremiah and Phil and nodded.

The two boys went to the car, opened the backseat, and struggled to pull Tyler's body out, wrapped in a quilt. He was already stiff with rigor mortis. They carried him over and stopped by the side of the grave, looking down, and John realized no one had thought about how to put the body into the grave.

Always bodies had been in coffins, concealed mechanical winches lowering them in a dignified manner. Jennifer broke away from her grandmother's side, hysterical, and ran away. John looked at Elizabeth and she turned to chase after her sister.

“I'll help,” Rich said. He eased himself down into the grave, Ben joining him. They took the body from Phil and Jeremiah and maneuvered it down, then pulled themselves out.

John found himself suddenly wondering why the old tradition of a grave supposedly having to be six foot deep existed. Fortunately, this one was maybe three and a half, four feet down and easier for the reverend to get out of.

Tyler rested in the bottom, face covered but bare feet exposed, and it struck John as obscene for him to be exposed thus, but there was nothing to be done for it now.

John looked at Jen, who stood at the head of the grave, almost serenely detached.

“I don't know the Catholic rite,” Rich said. “I'm sorry.”

“I don't think God or Tyler minds,” Jen said. “You've been a friend and neighbor for years. I think he'd want you to do this for him, for us.”

Rich opened his prayer book and started the traditional Presbyterian service for the dead.

Finished at last, he went to Jen, hugged her and kissed her on the forehead, then did something John had seen only once before, at a Jewish funeral years before. Rich picked up the shovel from the pile of earth, scooped up some dirt, and then let it fall into the grave.

The time John had seen that, it had shocked him, the funeral of the wife of a beloved grad school professor. The rabbi had thrown a shovelful in, then the husband, then family and friends, had done so also, filling the grave in while John's beloved professor stood silent, watching the coffin disappear and the earth finally being mounded over. It was such a sharp, hard lesson about mortality, the returning of dust to dust, when compared to the “American way,” of concealing death in euphemisms, with green Astroturf to hide the raw earth, and the backhoe carefully hidden until the last of the mourners had left.

That set Jen off and at last she collapsed into tears.