knocking him back over. Bill said nothing.
“Good luck, Bill,” John said, extending his hand, shaking Bill’s. John reached into his pocket, pulled out the rest of his pack. Two cigarettes left, he handed the one to Bill.
Again, a flash thought of the Second World War. A GI with a pack of cigarettes was a wealthy man, to share one with another man, or even a captured or wounded enemy, a significant gesture.
“We’re out of here,” Charlie said, coming up to the car, gasping for air.
Phil turned the engine over, got out from behind the wheel, and John piled in.
“I’ll take shotgun,” Washington said, getting into the passenger seat. Charlie nodded and climbed into the back with the two boys.
John went into reverse, swung around, then drove back down the on-ramp, feeling strange driving on the wrong side of the highway, moving fast.
Washington took the two pistols he now had, the .45 and the Glock, and placed the Glock by John’s side. He kept the AR-15 at the ready. “What happened back there?” Charlie asked. “Oh, we made peace,” John said, “and you?”
“Jesus Christ, it’s a madhouse in the county office. Ed Torrell is dead.”
“What?”
“Collapsed about four hours ago, dead in a couple of minutes. That really got people panicked. Ed was a good man, tough, but fair.”
“Fair like with our car?”
“I’m doing the same thing.”
John looked up in the rearview mirror.
“Like with me?”
Charlie hesitated, then shook his head.
“Course not, John. As long as you help out like this. I know I can count on you when we need it.”
John relaxed.
“OK, what’s happening?”
“That Black Hawk was from Fort Bragg.”
“Yeah, we heard about that from one of the cops.”
“Well, it’s bad, real bad. There is no communication anywhere yet. They say they had some radios stored away that were in hardened sites and will start getting them out, but nothing prepositioned. Plans as well to see if any ham radio operators have old tube sets, maybe Morse code.”
“Sounds like that movie
“You’re right, and almost as desperate.”
“But news, I mean news from the outside?” John asked.
“State government’s moving to Bragg. Some assets there did survive. Plus it’s damn secure.”
“Are we at war?”
“Nobody knows for sure with who. At least at this level. Rumors that we nuked Tehran yesterday and half a dozen cities in Iran and just blew the shit out of North Korea.”
“So they did it?” Jeremiah asked.
“Like I said, rumors.”
“How can we do that?” Phil asked.
“What?”
“I mean hit them when we can’t get anything moving here.”
“It must have been an event limited to the continental United States. Our assets overseas are still intact, at least for the moment. “Oh yeah, there’s a rumor the president is dead.”
“What?” John exclaimed.
“Someone said the White House got word about fifteen minutes before the blast. Got the president airborne on Air Force One… and the goddamn plane wasn’t hardened sufficiently, and went down.”
“I can’t believe they didn’t harden Air Force One,” Washington interjected.
“Yeah, we can’t be that dumb,” Charlie interjected, his voice bitter with irony.
“Here. Right now. What is going on?” John asked.
Even as he asked, it felt strange. At any other time in the nation’s history, the word that the president might be dead froze the nation in place. John could still remember the day Reagan was shot, the incredible gaffe by Alexander Haig at the press conference when he said, “I’m in charge here.” That mere misstatement had nearly set off panic with some about an attempted coup.
Air Force One went down? Horrible as the realization was, John felt at that moment it didn’t matter to him. It was survival, survival here, at this moment, his family that counted, and he drove on, weaving around a stalled 18 -wheeler, a truck that had been hauling junk food, potato chips, corn chips, and it was picked over like a carcass lying in the desert, hundreds of smashed-open cardboard shipping boxes littering the side of the road, bags of chips smashed and torn open lying along the side of the road. An old woman was carefully picking over the torn bags, emptying their meager contents into a plastic trash bag.
“They did get lucky with some vehicles in Asheville,” Charlie said. “A scattering of cars parked in underground garages. Their big problem is water. At least we’re gravity fed, but part of their downtown has to have the water pumped over Beaucatcher, though down by Biltmore, and on the east side of the mountain they’re still getting supplied from the reservoir. They’re badly screwed in that department; that’s why there’s so many fires.”
He hesitated.
“Therefore Asheville is trying to organize an evacuation.”
“To where?” Washington asked.
“Well, to Black Mountain for one. The new guy in charge, I don’t even know him, he told me we’re supposed to take five thousand refugees from the city. Didn’t ask, no discussion. An order like he was now the dictator of the mountains.
“Almost the first words out of his mouth when I reported in to him. They want to spread their people out all over the region, as far west as Waynesville, north to Mars Hill, south to Flat Rock.”
“Why?”
“Because they think we have food, that’s why. The water thing is just an excuse. Hell, they’re right on the French Broad River. I heard they even have a tank truck that can haul five thousand gallons at a clip. It’s just an excuse. It’s about the food.”
“Do we have as much on hand as they do?” John replied.
Charlie shook his head, features angry.
“They got lucky with the stalled trucks on the interstates. A fair number with bulk food on board them, also the rail yard. Two trucks loaded with a hundred hogs even. They were roasting one right behind the courthouse. Dozens of railcars packed with bulk stuff as well down in the Norfolk and Southern rail yard. Got that from the assistant police chief, a good friend.
“I tried to raise with this new tin-plated idiot that the county should pool all resources and he wouldn’t even talk about it, just kept ordering me to prepare to take five thousand refugees starting in a couple of days.”
“Hell, it should be us moving in with them,” Washington said.
“Why then?” John asked, a bit incredulous that control had so completely broken down that even on the county level there was no cooperation.
“He’s planning ahead,” Washington said bitterly. “Far ahead. Get rid of half the people and you have food enough for twice as long and let someone else worry about the rest. And I’ll bet more than one of the inside crowd, some of the political heels up in that office and their cronies, will still be eating good six months from now.
“Besides, it’s like all city folk, they somehow think there’s more food out in the country.”
John sighed. Scale of social order, he thought. The larger the group, the more likely it was that it would fragment under stress, with a few in power looking out for themselves first. Five thousand might be convinced to share and cooperate. A hundred thousand, self-interests, them and us, would begin to take over, especially with the breakdown in communications.
That had always been the power of media in the hands of a good leader. To get individuals to feel as if the leader was speaking directly to them, Churchill in 1940, Jack Kennedy in 1962, and Reagan in the 1980s. A single voice like that now could break the paradigm, but there would be no such voice and a few cronies of an old political
