One Second After (22 page)

Chances now were that people were already looking to that lake as a source of food, and it would have to be stopped.

“We need to mix up a batch of several hundred gallons of clean water, mixture of salt and sugar; it'll keep the electrolyte balance. Then start pouring it down the throats of those poor people. In nine out of ten cases they'll just be damn sick for a few days and then pull through.”

“And the tenth case?” Charlie asked.

Kellor sighed.

“Without IVs, the elderly, children under a year, people already weak from other diseases.” He paused and looked at the ceiling for a moment. “I'll estimate thirty dead, maybe fifty by tomorrow night.”

Charlie folded and unfolded his hands.

“Who will organize the volunteers?” Charlie asked.

John sighed.

“I'll go up to the campus. See if we can roust out some kids.”

“Promise them a damn good meal at the end of it,” Charlie said. “One of my men got a deer last night. I got it hidden. Venison steak dinner in exchange for a day's work.”

“I doubt if they'll be hungry after what we're throwing them into, but I'll see,” John said.

Kellor nodded.

“Have them report to me by noon, right here. I'll have to brief them on their own safety before they go over there.”

John nodded.

“OK, that brings me to something we might not want to talk about,” Charlie said, “but I think we should. Burying the dead.”

“We bury them as we always have, don't we?” Kate asked.

“There's no cemetery within town limits. The nearest one is over two miles away. I'm starting to think long term here, people. Not just this case with the salmonella but across the next several months.”

No one replied.

“I'm thinking the town golf course across the street from the park.”

“What?” Tom replied. “That's crazy. You're talking about the golf course?”

“Exactly. It's within an easy walk of the center of town. There was a lot of grading done when it was built, all of it soil, easy to dig. The approach up to the sixth green, that's all graded soil half a dozen feet deep or more. Remember, there's no more backhoes to dig graves, it's back to shovels, and I want graves dug deep and quick.”

“Damn it, Charlie, that's the town golf course,” Tom interjected.

“As if anyone is going out today to do eighteen holes?” Charlie replied sharply. “Hell, even you only play with an electric cart. I think we need a cemetery and close by, not out on the other side of Allen Mountain.

“Doc, do you agree?”

“Keep it at least a couple of hundred feet back from the creek that feeds into the park. On the slope draining away from the creek. Yes, I agree.”

“Then that's where we take the dead now.”

John remained silent. It was interesting how different things, different changes, shocked in different ways. Tom was a golf addict. Regardless of what was now happening, to turn his favorite piece of real estate into a cemetery . . . it was too much for him to absorb at this moment.

“We should get some of the ministers in to consecrate the ground,” Kate said. “Folks will want that.”

Charlie noted it down on his pad. “I'll talk to Reverend Black; he's sort of heading up the ministers here now.

“Any other health issues?” Charlie continued.

“Four more deaths up at the nursing home last night. They're dying off quick up there.”

John thought of Makala. She had pretty well taken over the running of the place and he had not seen her in two days now.

“Three suicides as well. The McDougals and one of the outsiders.”

“Greg and Fran?” Kate asked in shock.

“A neighbor heard the gunshots. Greg had shot Fran, then himself. They left a note. She had cancer, you know. She knew what she was facing without her twice-weekly treatments up in Asheville, so she asked Greg to end it for her. Then he did himself as well. Note said for us to use her remaining painkillers for someone who still has a chance of living.”

“They sang in the church choir with me,” Kate said softly, and for a moment her features reddened as she struggled to hold back her tears.

No one spoke.

“I'll post the notice about the golf course becoming the cemetery as of today and for the duration of the emergency,” Charlie said, finally breaking the silence.

Several large whiteboards had been dragged over from the elementary school and tacked to the outside wall of the police station. This was now the official emergency notice board.

“We've got dozens of others who I suspect will not last much longer,” Kellor continued. “Those with pancreatic enzyme disorder, the day they run out of pills they start dying. A lot of our severe coronary problems are gone now. Garth Watson dropped dead last night just hauling a bucket of water back up to his house.”

“Damn, he was only forty-three,” Kate said.

“And fifty pounds overweight with cholesterol of two-eighty,” Kellor said. “I warned him. Well, so much for too much fast food.

“We got over a hundred people in town, though, on chemo- or radiation therapy for cancer. Their prognosis . . . Well, we saw what happened with Fran. God forgive her, but a lot might decide to take that way out, especially those on serious pain management. We've forgotten what a nightmare the final months of cancer can be like without readily available morphine.”

He paused and looked around the room.

“I think we have to discuss that right now,” he said. “We have a limited supply of pain meds. Do we impound it and use it only for emergency situations, or do we continue to let those who are terminal anyhow use up what's left?”

“My God, Doc,” Tom interjected. “What in hell are you saying? One of those people you are talking about is my aunt.”

“I know,” Kellor said softly. “God help me I know. But your aunt Helen is going to die soon; we know that. But suppose I get a kid in here that needs major surgery. Shock and trauma kill, and managing the pain might mean the difference between his living and dying. We got to think of that.”

“You're talking triaging the dying off, aren't you, Doc?” John said quietly.

Kellor looked at him and then slowly nodded his head.

“I'm not ready for that decision,” Charlie sighed. “Most of the folks in question still have some meds in their homes. We'll cross that one later.”

“But we'll have to cross it,” Kellor replied, head half-lowered.

No one spoke for a moment.

“Accidents, you would not believe how many we got,” Tom finally said, breaking the silence. “Cars are no longer killers, but chain saws still working, axes, shovels. Joe Peterson damn near cut his own leg off with a chain saw last night trying to cut firewood. We had three accidental gunshot
wounds yesterday, one of them fatal, by idiots now walking around armed.”

“It's food, though, that I think we got to start getting serious about,” Kellor said.

“So what in hell do you suggest that we do different?” Charlie replied sharply, and John could sense the tension, as if this had been argued about before the meeting.

“By your estimate,” Kellor replied, “we have enough food on hand to feed everyone for another seven to ten days. That means using meat any health inspector two weeks ago would have condemned.

“Charlie, after that . . . then what?”

Charlie sighed and wearily shook his head.

In spite of the fever and chills, John found himself focusing intently on this man, who after ten days of crisis, ten days most likely with not more than three or four hours' sleep a night, was approaching collapse.

“Half rations,” John said quietly.

Charlie looked at him and then nodded.

“I don't know if that will work with some things,” Kellor replied. “Meat that is beginning to spoil, for example, dairy products.”

“Then pass that out now, use it up, if need be have a gorge feast tonight with the remaining meat that might be going bad. Just make sure it is cooked until it's damn near like leather. Then anything preserved goes to half rations.”

“What about those holed up in their houses with food?” Kellor asked. “Charlie. There's at least half a dozen houses with electricity, old generators that were unplugged and survived. Enough juice to run a freezer. The Franklin clan, for example, up on the North Fork. I bet they're sitting on a quarter ton of meat in their basement freezer.”

“And you want that I should go get it?”

Kellor nodded.

Charlie looked at Tom.

“I doubt that will work with the Franklins,” Tom said, shaking his head. “At least with them and all my men being alive once we got the meat. Up in these hills we have more than a few of the old survivalist types, the kind that were real disappointed that the world didn't go to hell with Y2K. They're just waiting for us to come up and try.”

“Let it go for now,” John said. “If we start turning into Stalinist
commissars hunting out every stalk of grain and ounce of meat for the collective, you know the fragile balance we have right now will break down and it will be every man for himself.

“And like any collectivization, whether true or not the rumors will explode that we took the food, but now some animals are more equal than others.”

“What?” Tom asked.

“You slept through Mr. Quincy's ninth-grade English class, Tom,” Kate said. “Orwell,
Animal Farm
, read it some time.”

“Besides,” John continued, “even if we looted the Franklins clean, that would be enough food to maybe give six hundred people one meal. It isn't worth the blowback, and in my opinion is a dangerous political and legal precedent. We don't want to be turning on each other at a time like this. Hell, if anything we want people like that Franklin clan working alongside of us. If they're survivalists like you say and we don't threaten them, maybe they got skills they'll teach to us.”

Tom breathed a sigh of relief.

“I think it's fair that food we salvaged from the stores now belongs to the community. But what people have in their homes, whether it's one day left or six months' worth, that's theirs.”

John looked around the table and there were nods of agreement.

He only wished that Charlie had acted faster, or for that matter that he had thought about it and pushed him to seize control of all food in the town on Day One. If they had done so and it was rationed out correctly, it might have been enough to stretch at half rations for two months or more. But that was too late now.

“What about farms, though?” Kate said.

“I can tell you right now, Kate,” Tom said, “and you grew up here, too, and should realize it, the old farms are nearly all gone. When something like this hits, everyone seems to think people living in rural areas are up to their ears in food ready to be given away. But even the farmers now are dependent on the supermarkets at least until harvesttime. Up in the North Fork we have half a dozen small farms, one with about sixty head of cattle on it. Maybe a couple of hundred pigs. The usual mix of chickens, turkeys, some geese.”

“Still,” Kate said. “Stretched, that could be another month or so of food.”

“I think we have to take that,” Charlie said. “It's different from what's in people's basements.”

John sighed and realized he had to agree even though it wasn't much different from his commissar imagery of a few moments ago.

Sixty cattle, two or three a day turned into soup, stew, could stretch things. But far more pragmatic, how to keep control, to prevent someone else from rustling them, from raiding the farm one night, killing the owners, and then just slaughtering what they could drag away quickly, leaving the rest to rot?

Again a film image, from
Dances with Wolves
, the Indians finding the hundreds of buffalo slaughtered by white hunters who just took their hides and tongues, leaving the rest to rot. It could be the same here, and yet again it caught him how movies had so defined so much of the country's image of self and now the screens were blank. A movie about us fifty years from now, if there are movies, what will it show?

“Charlie, we have to make a deal with the few farmers in this valley. We just can't go marching up there, take their cattle, and ride off. A deal. We protect their food, they get more than a fair cut because they are sharing with the rest of the community. In exchange we protect them, their herd and crops. And Charlie, we have to keep some stock alive.”

“What do you mean?”

“For next year. A couple of males, enough females. We might be looking at next year and we're still in the same boat. We got to keep breeding stock alive even if it means we go hungry now. In the old days, eating your breeding stock was the final act of desperation.”

“John,” Kate said. “I don't need to hear this now. Are you saying this will still be going on a year from now?”

“Maybe. And if we don't plan now, there won't be a next year for any of us.”

“OK, John,” Charlie said. “We'll go up the North Fork later today and start talking.”

“And suppose someone up there, shotgun in hand, tells us to go to hell and get off his land?” Kate asked. “You said I grew up here. I did and I know some of these folks. They're good people, but they don't hold much truck with someone telling them what to do.”

“Then maybe you should be the one to go talk with them,” John said quietly.

“Me?”

“Exactly. Everyone in town knows you, Kate, even more than they know Charlie or Tom here. You going first would be nonthreatening.”

“Because I'm mayor or because I'm a woman?” she asked sharply.

“Frankly, Kate, it's both. Tom shows up, gun on his hip, it's commissar time. You show up, sit down with the family, have a chat, I think you can help folks with these small farms to see reason. They have to strike a deal because if they stay on their own, sooner or later someone will go for them and take what they have. We promise to post twenty-four-hour guards on their places, we offer protection, they trade some food back to the community.”