One Second After

“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.”

Charlie sighed, rubbing his beard, and then nodded.

“I authorize you to have the authority to declare a person to be mentally deranged and to have them incarcerated, if need be against their will or that of their family. Tom, you will be responsible for arrest. I’ll post that notice later today.”

Kellor nodded.

“I think in at least thirty or forty cases we should move preemptively, meaning now, even if they still have some meds left. As a doctor, I know which of my patients were truly over the edge long before this happened. Patients who had repeated hospitalizations and incidents. Tom, you would know some of them, too, from incidents that led to their going to a psychiatric unit or jail. I think we should grab those people now before it gets bad.”

“One thing,” John said quietly.

“Go on.”

“Keep in the back of our minds how that power was also used to lock up those that neighbors just didn’t like, political dissenters, and, in a darker time, the belief that insanity was satanic and the resulting witch hunts. We got a couple small churches in this community that are already preaching that this disaster is God’s punishment to a sinful nation, and/or that it is now the end-time. I never thought about what Doc here was saying in regards to mass psychosis, but we might see some of these deranged people being seen either as prophets if they have a good gift for gab even though they’re crazy or, on the other side, demonically possessed.”

“Damn, this is starting to sound medieval,” Kate sighed.

“We are medieval, Kate,” John shot back. “If we got people going off the deep end, and definitely if there is prior record of severe mental disorder, yes indeed, we’ll have to lock them up, for everyone’s protection. All we need is a bunch of people following some mad prophet around or a mob stoning a witch and it could come to that, but it’s a fine line and we can’t go overboard on it. We all know the news leaking in from Knoxville about that crazy cult; we don’t want even the beginnings of it here.”

John looked over at Kellor, who nodded in agreement.

“And one other item related to this,” Kellor said. “Alcohol. The rush on the ABC store pretty well cleaned it out on Day One and the looting afterwards finished it.”

John found himself thinking about single-malt scotch, the few ounces left in his bottle behind the desk.

“So the drunks, the hard-core alcoholics, are out by now, and that can get tough. My concern: some will try anything for a drink, trying to distill it.”

“Every ear of corn goes to food,” Charlie snapped. “We catch anyone trying to steal corn to turn into booze and there will be hell to pay.”

“Not that, Charlie. I mean trying to distill out of any potential source, right down to people thinking they can get something out of hydraulic fluid. I’ve already got one idiot blinded because of wood alcohol. That’s going to go up as well.”

“A dry community,” Kate chuckled softly. “We were for a long time after the Depression. Guess we are again.”

“Now down to the harder issue,” Kellor continued. “Food.”

There were sighs around the table.

“With the cutting of rations yet again, we are, at best, doling out little more than twelve hundred calories a day per person. Our reserve stockpiles are down to not much more than ten days. I am going to have to suggest a further cut, by a third or so, to extend that out to fifteen days.”

“What I was thinking as well,” Charlie replied.

“What about the food on the hoof, cattle, pigs, horses?”

“We’ve gone through a third of that stock, and we must stretch that reserve out as long as possible.”

“For how long?” Kate asked.

“The radio, though,” Tom said. “If things are coming back online down on the coast, hell, help might be up here in another month or two. All they need is one diesel-electric locomotive and it can haul ten thousand tons of food and supplies.”