One Second After

Vitamins, John thought. My God, so American. Something good from a small bottle. It lifted him even more than the food. Elizabeth had come through her time but just barely. The vitamins for her and the baby would be lifesavers.

“This column must depart in one hour for Asheville, but I swear to you as a soldier of the United States of America, we are here to stay. By next week another supply column with more food and medicine should arrive.”

He handed the microphone back to the sergeant and jumped down, returning to John, while the sergeant started to direct the crowd to move, the troops with him helping. John watched them go, a medic already up to Elizabeth, stopping her, looking at her and the baby. The mere sight of that again filled John with tears. Soldiers were already passing out single sticks of chewing gum to children, who upon learning about the treats were swarming round.

As the crowd flooded past, the general motioned for John to walk with him.

“How bad was it here?”

“Very bad,” John said.

“Yeah, I saw your greeting card at the top of the pass.”

John suddenly felt embarrassed. The corpse of the Posse leader had hung there throughout the winter, bones picked clean in a matter of days by crows. Part of the skeleton still dangled there. The ravine below had been a feasting place for scavengers for weeks, nearly a thousand bodies dumped there.

“We followed the wreckage of their trail clear from Statesville to here. You did a hell of a job wiping them out.

“I saw the ashes of the fire on both sides of the interstate. It burned clear down to Old Fort, or what was Old Fort. You did that to trap them.”

John nodded.

“Good plan, Colonel.”

“History teaches something at times.”

“How many survivors here? One of the first things we’ll need done is an accurate census; then ration cards will be issued out.”

“I already have cards issued.” Wright smiled.

“These will be for federal rations.”

“Right,” and John nodded, wondering if he was suddenly feeling a resentment that he had just lost control after so many painful months of struggling to keep his town alive.

“What percentage survived here?”

“Around twenty percent, maybe a bit less if we count those who came in after it happened.”

Wright shook his head.

“Is that bad?” John asked nervously, wondering now if he had failed. “Bad. Christ, it’s incredible up here. Places like the Midwest, with lots of farmland and low populations, more than half survived, but the East Coast?” He sighed.

“Here in the East, it’s a desert now. Estimates are maybe less than ten percent still alive. They hit us at the worst possible time, early spring. Food would run out before local harvests came in, and a lot of crops, especially farther north, had yet to be put in the ground.”

He looked off.

“They say in all of New York City there’s not much more than twenty-five thousand people now and those are either savages or people hiding and living off scraps of garbage. A thermonuclear bomb hitting it directly would have been more humane.

“Cholera actually broke out there last fall and the government decided to abandon the city, just isolate it, and no one was allowed in; the few in were not allowed out. A friend of mine stationed there on duty said it was like the Dark Ages.”

He sighed and forced a smile as if realizing he was rambling, talking about something best left unsaid.

“You did good, Colonel Matherson, real good. We ran into a few refugees on the road, bitter that you wouldn’t let them in, but one old guy, a vet, said he admired you folks, that word was you actually stuck together while the rest of the country went to hell.”

He nodded, unable to speak.

Wright stood silent, then lowered his head, his voice a whisper. “They say nearly everyone in Florida is dead. Too many people, too little land devoted to food.”

“What about all the oranges and cattle land?”

“Everything broke down. People killed the cattle for a single meal, and in that heat by the following morning most of the meat was rotting and swarming with flies. So they ate it anyhow and you know what then happened.”

“The ocean? All the food out there.”

“Incredible as it sounds, pirates made it all but impossible for any kind of serious fishing. It was like something out of the seventeenth century. The coast is riddled now with pirates; the navy is hunting them down. A couple of small towns, especially along the keys, set up good defenses, only one road to block, and their own navies to guard the fishing boats, so they got through relatively ok, but the hurricane last fall knocked them over pretty hard.”

“Hurricane?”

He had all but forgotten that natural catastrophes that had once riveted the nation and caused massive outpourings of aid would still continue and if striking but a hundred miles away be all but unheard of.

“Another Katrina, bull’s-eye right on Miami, a smaller one Tampa-Saint Pete a few months later.”

He fell silent for amoment, looking off.