One Second After

John’s worst nightmare was that after a sharp defeat the Posse would pull back to Old Fort, simply spread out a bit, loot, probe, and keep them on guard twenty-four hours a day and wait them out. They’d make a mistake; there’d be a weak spot; the enemy would catch a guard asleep, attack the position at night in the middle of a storm. No, John wanted them over the ridge—let them take the gap—and then to lure them into a classic killing ground.

“The mountains to either side can give us a Cannae, or a classic Mongol envelopment,” he argued, and students who had taken his classes and were now officers sitting in on the planning just the day before instantly grasped it.

“Once in, I want them all in, and then I don’t want one of them to get out alive.”

It was the plan that Washington warned would triple their casualties but John argued in so doing they would annihilate the Posse rather than just drive it back, with the threat of a return.

The tragedy was that the first platoon of Company A, guarding the gap, was cut off in the opening move and not one of them made it out. That had nearly triggered a rout as the survivors of the second platoon gave way too quickly at the second defensive line, the bridge at Exit 66 and the nursing home overlooking it.

It had been near run then, the attackers swarming forward, sensing victory, pushing hard, squeezing in where Route 70 ran within feet of the interstate, the very place where John had first met Makala, her Beemer now upended and piled into the defensive barrier line across the main line of defense, where the interstate curved up on a bridge that crossed the railroad tracks. It was a bridge poorly designed for traffic, every ice storm someone always spun out on that bridge, but if whoever had designed it was thinking of a battle, it was superb. It was like a hill with no flanks to worry about, atop the bridge a clear field of fire for a mile back up the road, behind the bridge a sharp slope up to where the old town water tank was, another superb position, and the flank there protected by a wide cut through the forest for the passage of high-tension lines, thus creating an open killing field against any of the Posse trying to get to the tower.

And then the trap itself. Concealed up on each flanking ridge, back near the gap, Company B, armed with the best long-range weapons the town could provide, high-powered deer rifles with scope mounts. Every house to either side of the interstate, several hundred homes, including his own, and a trailer park were rigged to burn, buckets of gas placed within each. Students who were not trained as soldiers were now pressed into service, so that when the signal was given, the siren on the fire truck sounding off, combined with signal rockets, they were to go into action, moving fast on mountain bikes or mopeds, setting each house ablaze. He had bet on the usual breeze picking up through the gap, as the air farther down below in the Piedmont heated and began to rise, drawing down air from the pass in a cool continual breeze. Luck was on their side as well in that it had been a tinder-dry summer.

The hundreds of fires merged together into an inferno, acting as the blocking force on each flank, flames driving eastward, cutting off retreat except back onto the interstate or the railroad, which were now kill zones.

At the other end of the box, to the west, at the interstate bridge waited what was left of Company A along with them every citizen of the town who could carry a gun, concealed behind the reverse slope.

It had been a bloodbath.

Once his outer defenses fell, the second wave of the Posse swarmed in, hundreds of vehicles pressing over the crest and, as John hoped, undisciplined enough that, sensing victory, they were now just rushing forward to start the looting and slaughter.

The fight at the bridge had almost been like something from the Civil War, hundreds of men and women rising up from concealment, leveling rifles and blazing away, shredding everything in front of them. Posse vehicles crashed into the barrier line and the fighting had turned hand-to-hand. And then along the opposite slopes fires ignited and began to spread, and as the last of the vehicles crossed in, Malady’s team shut the back door, using the two automatic weapons provided by Tom, complete with six thousand rounds of ammunition, backed up by citizens who had produced “illegal weapons” and students armed with a couple hundred of the dangerous homemade grenades.

The force on the bridge had nearly given way, though. For several crucial minutes John had been down, knocked out by an explosion. But someone had rallied the ill-trained backup force, and they were charging forward regardless of loss.