One Year After: A Novel (37 page)

She took another handful of the dried eggs and bacon, started to chew, and then began to shake, stifling back a sob. “Seventy-five here as security for the helicopter pad, a hundred or so downtown, billeted in the county jail,” the other half garrisoned in the county jail downtown,” she began softly. “Nearly all of us came in within the last week by transport to the airport south of town. We thought it strange the way we were moved in at night and forbidden any contact with the locals. Also a tech and support unit from what was supposedly the old army for the four choppers. And finally, a personal security squad for Fredericks. Those bastards, we don’t know where they came from, but none of us liked them, and they were kept separate.”

He patted her on the shoulder as she truly let go.

“Guess this makes me a traitor.”

“A traitor to traitors, Deirdre?”

She looked over at him.

“You did the right thing. Now try to get a little rest. I want you with me when we go in; maybe you can help convince the others not to fight and save lives.”

He stood up, and she curled up on her cot, clutching the open can of dried eggs and bacon.

He walked back over to Kevin, who had been conveniently standing close by.

“You hear all of that?” he whispered.

“Everything.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t turn into a fight; we’ve lost too many already.”

Kevin was silent.

“I need a few minutes’ sleep. Is that okay with you, Kevin?”

“Wide awake here, sir.”

John smiled and patted him on the shoulder. He hated to admit it, but he was pulling rank. Twice Kevin’s age, he was definitely feeling it now. He found a quiet corner, lay down on the bare floor, and slipped into dreamless, exhausted slumber.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

DAY 749 • 6:30 A.M.

“Sir, it’s time.”

Startled, John looked about in surprise. Daylight streamed through the blown-out doors and windows of the store, and he sat up, shocked by—of all things—the smell of coffee.

One of his troopers was kneeling down by his side, smiling broadly, holding out a cup.

“I remember how you used to come into class every morning with a steaming cup—black.”

John nodded a thanks. “Where in the hell did you get this?”

“Sir, they must have a couple of thousand MREs back there and cases of that survival food. Check this out.” He offered John a plastic container filled with something dark red and in slices. “Freeze-dried strawberries. We each got a handful. Just stick them in your mouth; it’s a real treat.”

John tried one and nodded again. It did indeed taste heavenly, and so did the real coffee.
When was the last time?
And then it hit him: Forrest had given him a cup every morning while he was a prisoner. But other than that, coffee had run out within the first month after the Day.

The rush of caffeine startled him, and he was glad when another one of his troops, a sergeant in his late thirties, came over to share a plate of beans and a hunk of cheese. All around him were wolfing down their meals, and then—the temptation of temptations—he smelled cigarettes. Several of the reivers had found a stash in someone’s personal locker. It was such a dreadful siren call, but he resisted it.

His radio operator was sitting up, working the dial on the set that he had taken off from his backpack, the two dials glowing dimly.

“Anything?” John asked.

“Chopper is safely down, wounded are in the hospital, and our observers up along the parkway report a lot of activity around the courthouse—they say they actually have a Bradley Fighting Vehicle parked out front of it. They’ve ringed the place in tight.”

“I’ve monitored a number of urgent broadcasts saying they are about to be overrun by ‘terrorists and rebels.’” The old man sighed. “Us,
we
are the ones branded as the terrorists and rebels even after what they did. They’re sending out an urgent appeal for immediate help from Greenville, South Carolina, and Johnson City, Tennessee.”

“The reply?”

The old man laughed. “Basically, it was ‘You are up the creek without a paddle, and screw you.’ Typical, John. Everyone covers their own turf, and to hell with anyone else. Johnson City claims a fuel shortage but might be able to send a convoy later in the day if Asheville can promise that the Interstate 26 pass over the mountains is secured from the reivers.”

John chuckled.

“Hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of cutting in when they weren’t chattering and said we own the pass.”

“And Greenville?”

“No response. Not a word back.”

He took that in. They could have switched to another frequency. Greenville had good access to the coast; they could move a lot up quickly if motivated to strike back.

“And then there was the BBC again. Caught their 5:00 a.m. broadcast before the signal went weak.” The old man sighed.

“Well?”

“China repeated the threat that if any neutron bomb is used anywhere near them in the continental United States or anywhere on a demarcation line that I guess runs down the Continental Divide, they will construe that as an attack upon their homeland and retaliate with a full nuclear strike on Bluemont and a number of other cities, including Charleston. John, it is getting damn ugly out there. There were other reports of global condemnation of the neutron bomb strike on Chicago. BBC is reporting chaos over here, and then I lost the signal.”

Suddenly, the coffee in John’s stomach felt sour, nauseating. No matter how horrid the gangs, mobs, or just plain insane characters that had risen up in the wreckage of those once bustling cities, there was something about hitting them with neutron bombs, slaughtering nearly all that still struggled to survive within the cities who were hiding out from the gangs, that was beyond his grasp of understanding. Hunt down the criminals, yes, and execute those who had turned to the lowest barbarism, such as the Posse, but to indiscriminately kill all in what was left of the cities, claiming that all were now in rebellion against some central authority?

He stood up, shaking off the gloom that this news had cast as Kevin approached, grinning broadly.

“My God, sir, have we got a haul!” Kevin announced loudly. “Thousands of rounds of twenty-millimeter shells, .50 caliber, case after case of .223, grenades, rockets for the Apaches, over a hundred shoulder weapons of military grade, and—as you can tell by the scent—rations to feed this entire army for several days. A case of handheld two-way radios of variable frequencies, a dozen night-vision goggles, cases of various batteries, electrical generators … the list goes on. Six trucks they had stashed down below the old Lowe’s building have yet to be inventoried, along with two fuel bladders—one with jet fuel for the choppers, the other with gas—pure, clean gas! Five hundred gallons’ worth, not counting the topped-off tanks in the trucks.”

“All that for what?” John sighed. “What does it mean?”

“To kick our asses back into the Stone Age.”

“Yup.”

What a fool Fredericks truly is,
John thought as he took in this latest information. All that equipment and helicopters, but positioned out here rather than somewhere deep within the city. Was it that he mistrusted the civilians still trying to survive in Asheville? Regardless, it was a stupid position to take, perhaps motivated in some strange way by a memory of things past—the American shopping mall as a place of comfort, indulgence, and security—even though John had always detested them and went there simply to please his kids. It was Dale’s stupidity and now definitely his gain for the final move.

He stepped outside for a moment to relieve himself while still nursing the soothing cup of coffee. Up along Tunnel Road, some reserve troops were breaking their temporary camp and shouldering up their backpacks, now loaded with extra ammunition and rations. Like any father, he could spot his own child in a crowd of thousands, and he saw that Elizabeth was with the column.

Elizabeth?
With the stress of preparing for the attack, he had tried not to think about her. She had insisted that she fall in with the reserve battalion. John could not veto her demand and had simply nodded agreement, unable to speak.

As he watched them head out, spreading out into combat column spaced far apart on either side of the road, he remembered the legendary story of General Robert E. Lee at Antietam: at the climax of the battle, the Union troops about to break through his center, he had personally ordered in a reserve battery of artillery only to then see his beloved youngest son, not yet eighteen, going into that most deadly of fights. But he did not stop, did not call out to the battery commander with orders to send his child to the rear. He had turned and rode away to other sectors of the line. Only at day’s end, having barely hung on to fight another day, did Lee return to that stricken position, breaking down in tears when he saw that his boy had survived unscathed.

If Elizabeth demanded to serve with the reserves that would now be the main assault force, if an attack was needed to finish this fight, he could not stop her. He recalled as well a much-beloved film, a favorite of his students when he showed it in class, about a Quaker family during the Civil War, the father portrayed by Gary Cooper, who, when confronted by his son’s decision to fight, had replied, “I am only his father, not his conscience.”

He went back into the Sears building where his troops where strapping on gear, gulping down the last of their cups of coffee, and forming up to move out. They truly did look like combat veterans, youth with old eyes, a sense of perpetual weariness at age twenty. But regardless of their weariness, they were ready to go into the next fight.

“The mortar position and their outposts?” John asked Kevin, forcing his thoughts away from his daughter.

“Took them out nearly an hour ago, though not sure we have all the outposts. But we did capture the mortar intact with fifty rounds.”

“Our losses?”

“Two dead, one wounded,” Kevin replied.

“Prisoners?”

He shook his head, and John did not ask. The fight was getting ugly, and after the outrages committed against the reivers and his own town, unless he was present to enforce discipline as he knew it, the passion of the moment was bound to take hold. He had come dangerously close to it himself with the Apache pilot.

He stood up, stretched, and nodded to the door. “Time?” he asked, gulping down the last of his coffee.

“Five minutes to go.”

John nodded. “Saddle up.”

Out the door of the Sears building, he started the long walk up Tunnel Road, passing the collapsed sign of the Old Mountaineer Motel, a favorite diner of his from before all of this started across the street. It was a walk he wouldn’t have thought of doing three years earlier when one had a car to go from parking lot to parking lot. But now? Though far more fit, he was feeling his age, and his cracked rib hurt like hell. Within a few hundred yards, he felt a bit winded as his far younger troopers, support units, and personal security squad kept sprinting ahead while his fractured rib throbbed with every step. The radio crackled with a report from an observer that she could see black-clad troops running down from the tunnel entrance and into the twin courthouses and the county jail alongside it, with positions manned behind heavy concertina wire. Dale had played it as he had hoped—pulling all his assets back into that complex of buildings, most likely assuming his Alamo could hold out until help from the outside finally arrived.

Not a shot had been fired so far as he paused for a moment to catch his breath at the entry to the tunnel that passed under Beaucatcher Mountain and emerged on the far side with the courthouse complex straight ahead. Several squads were running through it, their footsteps sounding hollow while the main assault force pressed through the gap of I-240, flanking wide before infiltrating into the center of town above the courthouse center.

He followed the lead elements, flanked by Lee Robinson, still ready to haul him out of harm’s way, his radio operator, security team, and message runners squinting from the morning sunlight as they emerged on the far side and gazed down at last on Asheville. It was once a vibrant, bustling city of a hundred thousand. At last estimate, there were fewer than five thousand still alive in its abandoned buildings and streets, most huddled along the French Broad River on the west side of town—and hopefully well clear of a fight if one was about to happen.

The skyline was still essentially the same, though shortly after the Day, the old Battery Park Apartments had burned to the ground. The BB&T building was somewhat intact, though a number of windows had been knocked out, a perfect place for a heavy-weapons squad to set up on an upper floor—a position that Kevin Malady, leading a unit burdened down with captured armaments along with a dozen reivers toting deer rifles and high-powered scopes, was racing to secure. He heard a distant humming that grew louder, and then he saw the L-3 passing overhead, Billy Tyndall at the controls, undoubtedly far more comfortable in his old plane after the experience of flying in a helicopter with Maury. The radio with John crackled to life.

“Bravo Xray online and overhead. I’ll call it as I see it.”

Unlike Don Barber, who had come in far too low during the fight with the Posse, John had ordered Billy to stay at least fifteen hundred feet above the fray and to get the hell out if any fire came up his way. He had not even considered the prospect of putting Maury and whatever helicopter they were lucky enough to capture into this one. He’d either crash out of sheer amateurish piloting or get shot down within five minutes. That asset was to be cherished for some future use.

He looked at his watch. It was a quarter to eight. Fifteen minutes more to let his far more fleet-footed young troops sprint to the far side of the courthouse, enveloping it from the north and south and cutting off retreat, while some of the captured heavy weapons were moved up for the assault from the east.

The minutes clicked off. There was an occasional explosion of small-arms fire, either a sniper taken out or trigger-happy troops on his side reacting to a shadow in the window.