“Jen, she’s a remarkable woman. Tough as nails. Of course she misses Tyler terribly, I could hear her crying at night, but at the same time is able to accept it and then focus on those she loves that she feels responsible for. Actually, I think she was a bit upset that I moved in here for several days to see after you. Said she could handle it herself.”
“You moved in?”
“Only temporary, John,” she replied with a smile as she put the bowl down in front of him and sat to resume her meal. “Doctor’s orders actually. Kellor and Charlie were damn worried about you. Said they wanted you alive and back on your feet, so I sort of got volunteered.”
“Reluctantly?” John asked. She smiled. “Not exactly.”
“I really don’t remember that much.”
“Well, you damn near had your brain fried. Temp up at one-oh-five, hand swollen like a balloon. Three weeks back and you’d of been in isolation in an ICU, ice packed, IVs. It got a bit rough there. Kellor thought he’d have to go to amputation to save you if the antibiotics didn’t get the infection under control.”
“Just from a cut in a stupid fight.”
“I warned you,” she said, half-waving her spoon at him. “Staph in a hospital is a twenty-four-seven fight. That nursing home, three days without cleaning, sanitation, you had a hundred different microbes floating around there and you just so happened to pick one of the worst.”
“How?”
“How? You had an open wound damn near to the bone. Touching a counter, a patient, remember, John, the old days are gone; hospitals are more dangerous now than just staying at home.”
“How is it up there?”
“Twelve left of the original patients.”
“What? There used to be over sixty.”
“Thirty-one dead. Six just disappeared.”
“What do you mean, disappeared?”
“Alzheimer’s that were still mobile. Remember, no security alarms. They just wandered outside, into the woods. Poor souls, most likely died within a day or two from exposure. We decided yesterday to abandon the place, move those who are left up to a dorm in the conference center. Without all the electronics you can’t keep an eye on the Alzheimer’s. I never thought I’d see such a thing again, but we have them restrained, tied to their beds.”
She sighed.
“Sounds horrible, John, but it will be best when they’re gone. We need at least four people staffing them around the clock. At least at the dorm there’s only two doors in and out, and frankly, it’s cleaner.”
“What else?”
She sighed.
“It’s been bad.”
“How so?”
“A fight at the gap two nights ago.”
“How bad?”
“More than two hundred dead on both sides, several hundred injured.”
“Jesus, what happened?”
“Well, we were letting folks through a hundred a time, again your suggestion, good professor. It was going slow, though, and now the refugees from Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Greensboro, even some from as far as Durham were piling up on that road. God, John, it’s positively medieval down on that road. Squatters’ camps, people fighting for a scrap of food. Disease breaking out, mostly salmonella, pneumonia, a nasty variant of the flu.
“Well, a group was being escorted through and they broke. Started running to get off the interstate and into the woods. Two of them had concealed pistols, shot the two policemen escorting them. Shot them dead on the spot. And then they just started scattering.
“Tom ordered them rounded up, Doc Kellor was having a fit as well that they might be carrying something. It turned ugly. Most were too weak to get far, but some of them did put up a fight. About twenty are unaccounted for, disappeared up into the hills. Most are harmless, but a few, the ringleaders, they’re out there and Tom is hunting them down.
“That triggered the riot back at the barrier. Charlie ordered it shut down until the mess was straightened out and they just rioted. I mean thousands of them just pushing against the barrier of cars and trucks. Tom did have some tear gas to push them back, but then they came back in….”
“So we opened fire?”
She nodded.
“You could hear it all over town. Sounded like a regular war. Tom had a couple of men with automatic weapons posted up on the side of the pass firing down. John, I never dreamed we’d be doing this to each other.”
She fell silent, poking at a piece of hot dog at the bottom of her bowl.
He looked at her, realizing how random fate had played out in her life. If she had not come to Asheville for a meeting that day, she’d have been in Charlotte when everything shut down. Maybe she’d be secure, given her job at a hospital. Then again, she could have been one of the refugees storming the barrier, desperate for a piece of bread, half a bowl of the soup he and she were now eating.
“I could have been on the other side,” she said quietly. She looked up at him and for a moment there was rage in her eyes, as if they actually were from opposing camps, two enemies sharing a meal under a temporary truce before the killing started again.
“You weren’t, though. You’re here and you’re safe.”
“For how long, John? Some might say I’m still an ‘outsider.’”
“Damn it, Makala, don’t say that word again.”
“Well, you should have heard some of the people talking after that fight. Twenty-seven locals were killed in it, a couple of them police officers, and there were more than one standing around the town offices yesterday talking about kicking out anyone who didn’t belong.”
“That’s bullshit. Scared talk by scared people.”
“Amazing, isn’t it?” she said, shaking her head. “Three weeks ago we were all Americans. Hell, if somebody said an offensive word, made a racial or sexist slur, my God, everyone would be up in arms and it’d be front-page news. Turn off the electricity and bang, we’re at each other’s throats in a matter of
He couldn’t reply. He feared that it just might be true, but still, he couldn’t believe it, in spite of what had just happened.
“We’re still Americans,” he sighed. “I need to believe that. We’ve turned on each other in the past. Remember, we once fought a war against ourselves with six hundred thousand dead. As a kid I remember the riots in Newark, the hatred that created between us, how that still lingered years afterwards. And yet, when it really counted, we did band together as one.”
“But now?”
“People are hungry, scared. We were spoiled unlike any generation in history, and we forgot completely just how dependent we were on the juice flowing through the wires, the buttons doing something when we pushed them. If only we had some communication. If only we knew the government still worked, a voice that we trusted being heard, that would make all the difference.
“My grandfather used to tell me how back during the Depression the banks started to collapse; there was panic, even the scent of revolution in the air. And then FDR got on the radio, just one radio talk, reminding us we were all neighbors, to cooperate and help each other, and though the Depression went on for seven more years, the panic ended.
“Same thing on nine-eleven. I think it’s the silence that is driving people crazy now. No one knows what is going on, what is being done, if we are indeed at war, and if so, who we are fighting and whether we are winning or losing. We are as isolated now as someone in Europe seven hundred years ago and there is a rumor, just a rumor, that the Tartars are coming or there is plague in the next village.”
He sighed, motioning for another bowl. She refilled his and hers.
