“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 of 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
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.
Insulin, John was obsessed with it. Two days ago Jennifer’s blood sugar was up. She had taken an injection, and it was still up.
He had finally gone for Makala and she carefully examined Jennifer, then took him aside.
“The three remaining bottles. They might have spoiled,” was all Makala would say.
It had finally taken three times the normal dose to bring Jennifer’s level back down.
Her time had been cut by two-thirds.
And help, if it was indeed help, was still as far away as the far side of the moon.
Of the other diabetics in the town, over half were dead, the others dropping off fast.
He turned off the motor of his car, sat back, and lit another cigarette, the sixth of the day… oh, the hell with it and the counting out.
He sat there, smoked, looking at the interstate, cars still stalled where they had died over two months ago.
Somehow we’ve all been playing a game of reality avoidance with ourselves, even on Day One, he realized.
Anyone with even the remotest understanding of EMP and the threat to the nation should have been going
