One Second After

“Zach. If he and Ginger hadn’t of warned us, they’d of had us, two of them. I killed both. Zach got shot by one of the bastards.”

“I just heard a shot a minute ago.”

“I couldn’t do it,” John admitted, and he found himself clutching Zach tighter. “What a piece of shit. Jen had to do it.”

“It’s ok, John; it’s ok,” and Lee’s arm was around John’s shoulder.

Southerners, he thought. Southerners and their dogs, they understand. He could feel Lee shaking a bit; he had been partial to Zach as well, their old dog Max a buddy. Max had disappeared a week ago, most likely poached while wandering in the woods, and Lee was absolutely distraught over him.

John gained control and the two stood there looking at Zach and each knew what the other was thinking.

“Take him, Lee,” was all John could say.

“John, not in a million years did I ever think we’d come to this.” John handed the body over.

“I’ll take him down to Mona. She’ll be respectful as she…” He started to choke up as well and couldn’t speak for a moment. “Thank you. I was getting frantic over Pattie. The damn rations just aren’t enough. John, Zach saved her life, too.”

* * *

John started his drive down to town several hours later. The bodies of the two robbers stretched out on the porch as he pulled away from the house. Bartlett’s meat wagon, as they now sardonically called it, the old VW Bus, could be sent up later to get them.

John felt so cold about their deaths that for a moment he dwelled on the thought that two extra rations would now be spent, the reward for the digging of a grave, in the golf course cemetery. There were fifteen hundred graves there now, another five hundred filling the Swannanoa Christian School’s soccer field.

Kellor had been right. The dying time was now upon them. Deaths from starvation were soaring. Yesterday there had been close to a hundred. Mostly the elderly still and then parents.

As a historian John knew that was the pattern, though a casual observer, an academic sitting in an armchair calculating such things, would have figured the children next. But what parent would eat while their child starved? The ration lines, now five of them scattered around the two communities, had nearly ninety percent of the surviving population showing up, for one distribution a day of soup and either a biscuit or a piece of bread.

That was another “state” secret. The bakery, closely guarded at a local pizza shop where wood heat had been rigged in, was now mixing in sawdust to give the bread bulk, to fill stomachs. It was the same as Leningrad, and actually that had been the inspiration for John to suggest it.

So the parents, many of them working to get an extra ration, were bringing the food home to their children, then dying off, and once both parents were gone it was hoped that neighbors or kin would take the orphans in.

Charlie and Tom had been forced to issue strict orders that personnel receiving extra rations were to eat them on site when the rations were issued, but even so, they’d stash a biscuit in a pocket, some even rigged up plastic liners in their pockets to pour the soup into when they thought no one was watching, then slowly walk home where two, three, four hungry kids might be waiting.

And yet ironically, at the same time, at least according to Voice of America, there were signs that some recovery was going on, down along the coast.

The federal government was reconvened, functioning aboard the carrier Abraham Lincoln, and martial law was still in effect. There were reports that the corn and wheat harvest of the Midwest would be brought in and train lines reopened to move the bulk goods. Headquarters for the southeast emergency government had been established in Charleston and daily reports now issued about the progress of rebuilding, even a claim that a nuclear power plant in Georgia had been brought back online, but it seemed like any progress being made was moving along the coast or slowly edging towards Atlanta. He wondered if someone up the command chain had decided to “triage off” upper South Carolina and western North Carolina.

There had been overflights, though. Fighters several times, a C-17 transport, and Asheville finally admitted that replacement parts for generators for the hospital had been airlifted in.

Asheville was playing its cards close. The phone line that Black Mountain had started had been run into the county office in Asheville, but the communications were rather one-sided, as if the director there resented the showdown over refugees versus water supply.

The thought that some kind of medical supplies had been lifted into Asheville had made John wild, Washington having to nearly physically restrain him from driving straight there and demanding some fresh insulin. He had personally telephoned Burns, who still was running Asheville, and begged for any information on insulin and Burns flatly announced none had come in and even if it had, he would not release any outside of the town no matter what.