“Thank you, Mr. Barber,” Charlie said. “I’m glad you made it home.”
“Look, we’re kind of bushed. Is there any way we can find a ride up to our place?”
“I think we can arrange something special for you,” Charlie said, “for a swap.”
“And that is?”
“We can use your plane.”
“As long as I’m flying it you can,” he said defensively. “I put five years into restoring her, so no one else touches her but me. A little work and I can retro fit her to burn automobile gas. But wherever you want me to go, I’ll do it.”
“A deal.”
Charlie stood up and went to the door, opening it.
“One last thing,” Don said. “On the interstates. They’re swarming with people. Thousands of them. Like an exodus… and they’re coming this way.”
He left the room and Charlie closed the door.
“What I figured,” Charlie said softly. “We talked about it in some of the disaster exercises, the ones centered on a conventional nuclear strike, one or more weapons hitting urban centers. If the crap hits the fan, first there’ll be rioting, people snatching what they think they need to survive; then like a homing instinct people will flee the city and literally ‘head for the hills.’ The same concern with a biological outbreak. Panic, then trying to head for the hills.”
“Why?” Kate asked.
“Why are we here?” John interjected.
“What do you mean?”
“When you get down to the deepest core reasons. Sure I moved here because of Mary. But why were her parents here? There seems to be some sort of instinct, or call it a Mayberry fantasy, that up in the hills things are secure, safe, neighborly. People will help each other. When you think about it, before all this happened, that’s exactly how we were.”
“Well, it sure as hell wasn’t neighborly yesterday,” Tom said.
“How bad did it get?” John asked.
“You didn’t see it?”
John wondered if Tom was making a jab at him, implying that Vern had talked to him about the foray into the Dollar Store.
“I was up nearly all day at home taking care of things. I came down late in the day to Food Lion and it was wiped.”
“Yeah, Vern said he ran into you poking around the Dollar Store,” Tom finally said coolly.
“Jesus, Tom, if I was going to be looting I’d pick a place a damn sight better than that.”
He suddenly wondered if what few things he did pick up would now indeed classify him as a looter. Hell, in Russia and Germany during the war people got shot for a lot less; in Leningrad stealing a slice of bread could get you hung.
“Then why were you in there?”
“Go ahead and arrest me if that’s what you’re implying,” John snapped. “Both of you,” Kate interjected, “cool it.”
“Look, John, it got real bad here,” Charlie said. “My fault maybe. I should have slapped down strict martial law the first day; I didn’t. The night between the second and third days, it was as if a mass panic hit the town. Most people still don’t have it really figured out what happened; all they know is something bad happened.
“First there was the run on the banks to get their money out, but all the banks use electronic records for accounts and digging up the paperwork for each takes time. Not like the old days when we still had bankbooks and they got stamped. They were mobbed, and that’s where Tom had most of his people.
“The banks quickly ran out of money. Before I put a stop to it, one woman was actually trying to pull out fifty thousand dollars from First Charter.”
John almost had to laugh at that one.
“It’s nothing but paper now anyhow,” he sighed.
“I don’t need to hear that,” Kate interjected.
“Sorry, Kate, but you better hear it. Until the federal government truly gets things stitched back together, and with that records retrieved and the same for financial institutions, what little paper money there is floating around out there is worthless. Our entire economy is built now on electronic money. It’s all faith, and if a crack appears in that faith, then what?”
“It’s going to be barter then, isn’t it?” Charlie asked.
John nodded in agreement. “And you set the parameters.”
“How so?”
“I’d suggest impounding anything still out there that has worth for survival… medicine, tools, auto parts that can be used to retrofit, construction materials, especially piping and such, and most of all food. Impound it, haul it up here, set up rationing, and the rations become the medium of exchange for various things.”
“Sounds communist to me,” Tom sniffed.
“Survival,” John replied sharply, “and Tom, you know my politics, so don’t insult me.”
“Well, a lot of what you said is gone,” Charlie replied. “Damn, we were caught flat-footed. Like I said, never a plan in place. The run on the banks triggered it, from there people storming into stores to buy anything and everything. Our people were basically on foot as well, and besides, we were all so used to having radios in our police cars to tell us what the hell was going on. The looting at the Ingram’s was full-blown before one of the two officers stationed down there was able to run the mile up here to tell us. By the time we got people back down there to control it, it was already over.
“Hell, there were even people going through the fast-food places by the interstate waving hundreds of dollars wanting to buy up the burgers uncooked.
“The smart ones, though, they pilled into the three big markets in town, and it went from lines twenty deep to suddenly just people pushing out the door.”
“Did anyone try to stop them?” And he looked at Tom. Tom sighed.
“John, we’re talking about our neighbors here. Damn it all, I saw folks from my church in there, parents of my kids’ friends. Yeah, I tried to stop them, but I’ll be damned if we were going to shoot them.”
“Somewhere around twenty people died anyhow,” Kate said. “Mostly collapses, heart attacks. A display case in Ingram’s was shattered; someone fell into it, and bled to death.”
“John, people just pushed past that woman even as she died,” Tom said quietly.
John looked out the window to Bartlett’s VW as it puttered off, leaving behind a stack of boxes, and headed back up Montreat Road.
“John, it was surreal,” Charlie said. “Everybody on foot, the streets filled with people, I think the most coveted item yesterday was a supermarket shopping cart. Every last one has been looted and people were just walking up and down the street pushing their loads home.”
“That’s why the heart attacks,” Doc Kellor finally interjected.
John looked at his old friend. Kellor, who as a very young general practitioner had brought Mary into the world, was with her when she left. He now tended to Jennifer and usually would drop over to the house once a month or so, to “check on my favorite girl,” and then stay for a scotch and a round of chess. It rankled him that nine times out of ten John won.
“Fear, combined with people actually having to walk more than fifty yards,” Doc Kellor continued. “There’s been something like three hundred deaths since this started.”
“Three hundred?”
“Why not?” Kellor said dryly. “You forget how fragile we really are, the most pampered generations in the history of humanity. Heart attacks, quite a few just damn stupid accidents, at least eight murders, and several suicides. To put it coldly, my friends, all the ones who should have died years ago, would have died years ago without beta-blockers, stents, angioplasties, pacemakers, exotic medications, well, now they’re dying all at once.”
John glared at Kellor for a moment, wondering what else he was thinking.
“It even hit pacemakers?” Charlie asked. “Good God, my mother has one.”
