One Second After (31 page)

Was this now normal? Was this how Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln smelled, so normal that it just was no longer really noticed?

Tom appeared at the door of the police wing of the building, grinning.

“It works!”

A ragged cheer went up from the crowd, which then gradually began
to drift apart, though many pressed up to the doorway and windows to look into the conference room as if what was inside was some sort of miracle.

John edged his way through and into the building.

“We'll start in a few minutes, but for right now, let's enjoy this,” Tom replied.

John stepped into the conference room and had to smile at the sight of the old crank phone attached to the wall.

“Yes, yes, I hear you!” Charlie shouted, earphone in one hand, bending over slightly to shout into the speaker.

“Yes, I understand. It works; now keep setting up the wire. Yes, over and out here. Good-bye.”

He hung up and turned to face the gathering.

“We got a phone system.”

There was a round of applause picked up by those gathered outside.

John looked at the contraption, salvaged from an antique store, as he suggested, a comparable phone now set up in the police station in Swannanoa. It had taken the work of a dozen linemen, older employees of the phone company, several of them refugees allowed in through the gap.

Fiber-optics, modern wiring systems, were out. They had to find old-fashioned copper wire, a hard task, but bits and pieces were salvaged from a variety of sources, a golden find an old abandoned telephone or telegraph line of several miles along the railroad tracks. The wire had to be carefully spliced together, then strung on glass or ceramic insulators, most made out of soda bottles.

It was the first line, the goal now to run it into Asheville. Remarkably, an old-style switchboard had been found in the basement of the granddaughter of a phone operator from the twenties. When the system had been junked back in the fifties, apparently the old lady had her board toted home as a keepsake. A couple of the elderly phone company workers were now trying to remember how to rig it up, an actual switchboard that could handle dozens of phones.

There were other accomplishments. One of the junkyards in Swannanoa had successfully gotten a tractor-trailer diesel from the early sixties running. That had triggered intense debate as to who would get it, the fire department finally winning out, and on a flatbed were now attached hoses,
ladders, and gear. They had even figured out how to use the engine as a power takeoff to run a water pump.

Fire had become a frightful hazard. Those who still had food were cooking with wood, and home fires and brush fires were commonplace. The community still had water pressure for those places lower than 2500-foot altitude, the height of the face of the reservoir dam. But above that, it was hauling buckets, and the potential of house fires turning into out-of-control forest fires kept everyone worried.

Between the two communities there were now over a hundred vehicles running and more coming online every day. Several mechanics had learned to bypass and yank out the electronics, especially on cars that only had minimal dependence on them, slap on some old replacements, and get the engines to turn over again.

A moped shop had become highly successful at getting their relatively simple machines running again, along with older motorcycles.

There were so many vehicles running now that a salvaged generator had been hooked up at Smiley's and the gas from Hamid's belowground tanks was flowing again.

Smiley's had become something of the old “general store.” There was precious little to sell, other than his legendary horde of cigarettes, which were now doled out one at a time in exchange for a dead squirrel, old silver coins, or whatever might capture Hamid's fancy.

John almost regretted his sense of fair play that first day. He should have purchased a dozen cartons. He was down to five packs and rationing himself to no more than five cigarettes a day now.

“OK, everybody, time for the meeting, so let's clear the room,” Charlie announced.

Those who had gathered to gaze at the phone reluctantly left the room. Charlie closed the windows and dropped the venetian blinds.

It was the usual group. Charlie, Bob, Kate, Doc Kellor, and John. Carl and Mike from Swannanoa came down from their end if there was something directly related to them at the moment but today were caught up with a forest fire up along Haw Creek that was threatening to turn into a real inferno.

A ritual John had insisted on was now enacted, the group turning to face an American flag in the corner of the room and recite the Pledge of
Allegiance, and then Kate led them in a brief prayer before Charlie announced the meeting was now in order.

“I hate to jump the gun on the agenda, but I've got something important,” John said.

“What?”

“Outside news.”

“Well, for God's sake, man, why didn't you say something when you came in?” Charlie asked.

“Everyone was excited about the phone, and well, frankly, some of it isn't all that good.”

“Go on; tell us,” Kate said.

“There's a station on the radio now. Voice of America.”

“Wow. When?” Kate cried.

“I was driving last night, fiddling with the dial on the car, and it came in clear as day.”

“The radio?” Charlie shouted. “Tell us about it. My God, we got radio again!”

“The old radio in the Edsel. I don't know, I was just fooling with the dial and suddenly it came in loud and clear, frequency at the old Civil Defense band. We sat there listening to it for a half hour or so, then atmospheric skip and it faded.”

“We?” Kate asked.

He didn't reply. Makala had come down to join them for a meal and check on Jennifer and he was just driving her back to the conference center, which was now the nursing home and isolation ward for incoming refugees who were allowed to stay.

“So what the hell is going on?” Tom asked.

“They're broadcasting off the aircraft carrier
Abraham Lincoln
, part of our fleet stationed in the Persian Gulf when things started. They beelined it back here. They said the carrier was somewhere off the coast of the United States and was now the command post for relief and recovery operations.

“They said that help is on the way. Kept repeating that every five minutes. Said the nation is still under martial law.”

“No news there,” Kate said.

“What kind of help?” Tom asked.

“Didn't say, other than relief supplies are coming from Britain, Australia, and India and China.”

“India and China?” Charlie asked.

“Yes, struck me as strange. That earlier report about a weapon detonated over the western Pacific.”

“Who we fighting?” Tom asked.

“Didn't say. Just that allied forces are fighting, in Iran, Iraq, Korea. Good news is that Charleston, Wilmington, and Norfolk have been declared emergency restructuring centers.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Kellor asked.

“I guess it means if we have some kind of functional assets overseas that didn't get hit, ships that can provide electrical power, aircraft, trained personnel, they'd be coming back here and those are three local places.”

“Charleston is the nearest, two hundred and fifty miles away,” Charlie sighed. “That won't help us a damn bit.”

“I know,” John said.

“What about the war?” Tom asked.

“Anything beyond the three cities?” Kate interjected.

“Nothing else. Oh yeah, the president is the former secretary of state. She's in charge.”

No one spoke at that news.

“Apparently the president died aboard Air Force One; they got him up in the air and the plane wasn't hardened sufficiently to absorb the pulse. They didn't say what happened to the vice president or Speaker of the House.”

“Nothing really that affects us directly,” Charlie said, and no one replied. Strange, the death of a president and now we say it doesn't affect us, John thought.

“That was it. Then they played music.”

“What?” Charlie cried. “Music?”

“Patriotic stuff. ‘God Bless America,' it faded out with the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.' ”

John looked around the room.

“At least we know they're out there.”

“The legendary ‘they,' ” Kellor replied coldly. “Doesn't help us here and now with what I've got to talk about.”

“Go on,” Charlie said. “In fact, what you just told us, John, depresses the hell out of me. The thought that they're so close. Hell, a month and a half ago a C-130 loaded with medical supplies could have flown here in an hour from Charleston. Now it's like they're on the far side of the moon.

“Doc, why don't you go ahead.”

“Only thirteen deaths yesterday,” Doc said, and there was a murmur of approval, the lowest number since they had started to keep count. “Two were heart attacks; two, though, were our dialysis patients. I think that is the last of them. Everyone in our communities who was on dialysis is now dead.”

No one spoke.

“We also lost one of our diabetics.”

Again no one spoke, but John felt eyes turning towards him. Of course they knew. He stared straight ahead, saying nothing.

“And we had a birth.”

“Who?” Kate asked.

“Mary Turnbill. A healthy six-pound baby girl. Named Grace America Turnbill.”

“Damn, that's good,” Tom said out loud.

“Eight births so far, and only one lost child and mother. Not much of a statistical base yet, but still it's better than average compared to a hundred and fifty years ago.”

“Good work, Doc,” Charlie said.

“Well, I better go from that to the downside of things. In one sense we are in what I would call the grace period right now, the calm between storms. Our initial die-off in the first days, those needing major medical intervention, the first round of food poisoning, those woefully out of shape, as you know, approximately twelve hundred deaths out of ten thousand, five hundred total here in Black Mountain and Swannanoa. We still don't have an exact figure on those who got in the first few days, but it had to be well over a thousand, so let's put our total number at twelve thousand, now back down to roughly ten thousand or so.”

“That doesn't count the casualties from the fighting at the gap, and refugees dying outside the barrier,” Tom interjected.

“No, I'm only counting those who died of natural causes at the moment. What I'm saying is that those who would die quickly have pretty well died off. Across the next fifteen days or so the numbers should be fairly low as long as we keep the community stable and nothing exotic sneaks in on us, but then, I hate to say, it's going to start sliding up again and within thirty days be far worse than anything we've seen so far.”

Kellor hesitated, looking at John for a moment. Kellor knew his secret regarding the stash of insulin.

“Nearly all our type one diabetics will die this month. The pharmacies, in general, allocated one bottle of a thousand units per person. That supply is now running out for them. So we can expect all of them, approximately a hundred and twenty in our communities, to start dying.”

No one spoke.

“Other deaths in the coming month: severe asthmatics running short on their rescue inhalators, severe heart arrhythmia patients running out of beta-blockers, so I expect we are in the middle of the lull before the next wave hits.

“There is another issue as well, though, that I don't think many of us thought of, but Tom, you better start gearing up for it and we might have to start thinking about taking over a building as another isolation ward.”

“What for?” Kate asked.

“Severe psychosis.”

“You mean insanity?” Tom asked. “Hell, we're already seeing enough crazies coming in at the gap. And the suicides as well over the last month. I think we're all half-crazy now.”

“Well, it's going to get a lot worse within a matter of days,” Kellor said.

“Why within days?” Tom interjected.

“About a quarter of the population was on antidepressants or antianxiety agents. Prozac, Xanax, Lexapro, even just plain old lithium. Most of those people rushed to the pharmacies and stocked up, but even then, on average a person got at best a thirty-day supply.

“They're running out now. Withdrawal for some won't be too bad; for others symptoms will be quite severe, including hallucinations. Compound that with the stress we are under already. As an old-time doc I'll be the first to tell you quite a few on these meds were just mildly neurotic, living in a very pampered society where it was almost obligatory to have some sort of disorder. But seriously, roughly five percent of the population do have severe disorders, and one to two percent dangerous disorders that include severe paranoia and potential for highly aggressive behavior.”

“In other words, expect a lot of insanity,” Tom said.

“You'll be the one dealing with it,” Kellor replied, “and I think your people better be briefed on it. Not too long ago in our past families suffered with it, keeping their crazy uncle Louie restrained or locked away, or shipped them to state hospitals which were indeed snake pits. Where do you think the word ‘bedlam' came from? It was the hospital for the insane
in eighteenth-century England and, if you saw the old prints, a true hellhole.

“We haven't dealt with this ever since all the modern meds started coming out in the sixties and seventies. That and the changing of laws that pretty well stopped involuntary commitment except in extreme cases emptied the hospitals.

“If it was back fifty years ago, at least a hundred of our fellow citizens would be already under some form of restraint, either at home or in a state institution. Now they are with us and the medications that kept them somewhat stable are gone. Hundreds more are in varying degrees of instability as well. What I'm trying to get across is that we'll have upwards of a thousand people in our community who are in varying degrees of psychological unbalance, not related at all to the crisis but instead to their forced withdraw from medications. And at least fifty to a hundred will be extremely dangerous, to themselves or to others. Severe paranoids, schizophrenics, delusional personalities, several living here with criminal pasts but who were declared insane, treated, then released back into the community. I think, Charlie, you are going to have to authorize me to be able to declare people to be mentally unstable and to then incarcerate them by force. We'll need then to find people to tend to them, and also decide how we deal with food distribution to them.”