One Second After (36 page)

Dear God, but one planeload of supplies into Asheville, but one, and my worst worry is gone.

“Would you talk to her?” he asked, looking back at Jen.

“Coward, and yes, I already have. But I think you as a dad better talk to both of them as well.”

“OK, later,” he said a bit too quickly.

Looking at Zach and Ginger, John went to the gun cabinet. He pulled out the 20-gauge and headed out the door, the two dogs slowly trotting along behind him, knowing that today there just might be some food if their master and provider got lucky.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He awoke to the dogs barking and instantly knew . . . someone was in the house.

They had drilled the plan after the murder of the Connors last week, their home at the top of the road, all four of them, parents, two kids, the house then ransacked from one end to the other for whatever scraps of food they might have.

He didn't hesitate, shotgun up as he stepped out of the office crouching low.

The two dogs were barking madly, snarling, and then he heard the crack of a gun and a high-pitched, yelping scream.

He stepped into the living room. The back door into the kitchen was wide open. Two men, at least it looked like two men.

So this was the moment and he did it without hesitation.

The first blast nearly decapitated the man by the door. The second turned; one shot fired wild and the second blast caught that one in the guts, flinging him back against the kitchen counter.

The girls had been drilled; if there was an intruder they were supposed to get on the floor behind the bed. The water bed where they now slept together was an excellent barrier. . . .

After several seconds Elizabeth started screaming “Daddy!”

“Stay put!”

Crouched down low, he came around the turn into the kitchen. The one
man was definitely dead; even in the dark moonlight John could see that, the other whimpering, kicking spasmodically. By his side was Zach, crying pitifully, Ginger, with hackles raised, snarling at the wounded man.

There could be someone outside, John realized, but first he crawled over to the wounded man, grabbed his pistol, which was on the floor, a .22 revolver from the feel of it, and stuck it into his belt. The other man didn't have a gun, just a machete, and John took that with his free hand.

He headed back to the wide-open door, was about to step out, then thought twice, doubling back through the house, coming in low to first Jennifer's room and then Elizabeth's to make sure there wasn't a third intruder.

Past his old bedroom he looked in for a second.

“I'm all right. Now don't move!” he hissed. “Elizabeth, you have your gun.”

“Yes, Daddy,” and her voice was trembling.

“If I come back to this room, I'll call out first. If anyone else comes through, you shoot and don't hesitate.”

“Yes, Daddy.”

Back out through his office and then the front door, which he slipped open, circling back around the house.

No one else. He slipped through the rear door into the kitchen and touched the basement door; it was still locked. Then once more, down low, sweeping Jennifer's and Elizabeth's rooms yet again, nervously popping the closet doors open, both rooms still empty.

He went back into the kitchen.

“Jen, light a candle and get out here.”

A minute later the flickering light illuminated the kitchen. Jen recoiled at the sight of the first man, face gone. The second was crying louder now, curled up. And then there was Zach.

John went over to his old buddy, his friend of so many years, who had saved their lives with his warning. He was shot in the top of the back, just behind the shoulder blades.

“Oh, God, Zach,” John sighed. And like so many dogs, so desperately hurt, Zach licked John's hand as if by doing so he'd feel better.

John looked over at Jen, wide-eyed.

“You got to help me.” It was the wounded man. “Please help me.”

John actually felt stunned with how quickly he reacted. The Glock he
kept strapped to his side even when he slept was out, round already chambered.

“John?” It was Jen.

He squeezed the trigger, the discharge of the 9mm round an explosion that set Elizabeth and Jennifer to screaming again.

“It's all right!” John shouted. “It's all right, girls, but stay put.”

John looked at Jen, who stood stock-still, horrified.

“I'd have shot him in town if he lived that long.”

John had executed five in the last week. Two of them locals, who had stolen a pig, killed it, and were gorging themselves up in a mountain hollow when finally tracked down, the two pathetic fools never fully realizing that hungry men could now smell meat cooking from half a mile away. The other three caught raiding a house, just like the two on the floor now.

“Jen, you'll have to help me drag them outside. I don't want the girls to see this mess.”

Zach's whimpers made John turn around. Ginger was lying by Zach's side, licking her old friend.

John filled up. The execution-style killing had bothered him not in the least. Washington Parker was right. After the first one, it starts to get easier, and in this case, the men invading his home, threatening his girls, it didn't bother John in the slightest.

It was Zach, though. Zach and Ginger were down to skin and bones, ribs showing through their once sleek coats. Regardless of the ban on letting dogs run wild, John had let them out to forage since their old stomping grounds had been up in the woods that became Pisgah National Forest not a hundred yards away. Though he worried that others out hunting would bag them, so far they had been lucky.

He knelt down by Zach's side. Zach lifted his head and again licked John.

“Thank you, old friend,” John sighed. “Thank you for everything.”

“Do you want me to do it?” Jen whispered.

Startled, he looked up at her.

“No, he was our dog, Mary's and mine.”

He pulled out the .22 taken from the dead man, cocked it, and put it behind Zach's ear. Ginger stood up, sensing something, whimpering loudly now . . . and John couldn't do it, dissolving into tears.

“I'll take care of him,” Jen whispered. “You go outside, take Ginger with you. You don't want her to see it either. Now go on.”

Jen left the room and was back seconds later with the last pack of cigarettes and the bottle of scotch that held a final precious ounce.

“Girls, we're safe, but you are to stay in your room, on the floor!” Jen shouted.

John looked at Zach and felt at that moment like a coward, completely unmanned. He knelt down and kissed Zach on the forehead. He was bloody, panting hard. He stood back up and then went outside, dragging Ginger by the collar, and let her loose. He lit the cigarette and uncorked the bottle.

“There, there, Zach,” he could hear Jen in the kitchen. “Tell Tyler I love him. You remember our dog Lady. Its time to play with her now. . . .”

The muffled crack of the pistol had John leaning over the deck railing, crying, Ginger whimpering and nuzzling against his legs.

There was such a surreal sense of disconnect. I just killed two men, executing one without a second's hesitation. But this? Sobbing over a dog?

Jen came out the door a moment later bearing Zach, wrapped in a blanket.

“He's so light,” she said softly. “He's better off now.”

“I'll bury him once it gets light,” John said.

“No, John.”

“What?”

And then he realized. No, not Zach, no, he couldn't.

“I'd vomit. The girls, too. We can't.”

“Take him down to the Robinsons. It won't be the same for them. Besides, poor Pattie is starving to death.”

“They're on rations. Any food hoarding by getting something additional they lose their cards. According to the law we can eat him, but they can't. I'm supposed to turn him in to the communal food supply.”

“Damn it, John. You are so cold-blooded logical in some ways and an idiot in other ways. Take him down to the Robinsons now. They can trade us something for him later.”

John finally nodded.

She handed Zach's body to him.

“I'll get Lee to help with the bodies. You keep the girls out of the living room and kitchen.”

“You'll tell them?” John asked.

She nodded.

John slowly walked over to the car.

“Don't move another goddamn inch.” a voice hissed in the darkness.

He froze, cursing himself as an idiot. There had been a third man, maybe a fourth or fifth. John prepared to drop Zach, shout a warning before they got him, give Jen and Elizabeth time to be ready.

“John, that you?”

And now he recognized the voice; it was Lee Robinson.

“Jesus, Lee, yeah, it's me.”

“I heard shots, came up to help.”

“Thanks, Lee.”

He stepped out of the shadows and drew closer.

“John, what are you carrying? Oh Jesus, not one of the dogs.”

“Zach. If he and Ginger hadn't of warned us, they'd have 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.