insane before it hit. During World War II the entire nation had been mobilized, all the talk of loose lips sinking ships, the scrap drives, the guards on railroad bridges in Iowa. Much of it was absurd when the threat was finally understood, long after the war was over. There were no legions of spies and saboteurs in America, and the few who were in place or attempted to infiltrate were caught within days by the FBI. There was a threat, and though remote, it was at least acted on back then. But this time? The threat was a hundred times worse and they did nothing, absolutely nothing. Angrily he stubbed out the cigarette and lit another.
If everyone had been educated to it, the same way Civil Defense had once been in the curriculum of every school back in the 1940s and 1950s, if people knew the simple things to do on Day One, Charlie already trained to react to an EMP, mobilize his forces and react quickly… if they had but a few simple provisions stocked away, the same way anyone who lives in hurricane or tornado country does, would they be in this mess?
The crime, the real crime was those who truly knew the level of threat doing nothing to prepare or prevent it. Bitterly he wondered if they were suffering as the rest of the nation now suffered or were they safely hidden away, the special bunkers for Congress, the administration, where food, water, and medicine for years were waiting for them… and their families? The thought of it filled him with rage. He knew what he would do if he could but go there now; show them Jennifer and then do what he wished he could do to them.
And he could see his own avoidance of it all since that first day even as he did scramble to at least get insulin. Food, bulk food, just a fifty-pound bag of rice or flour, shoes, batteries, an additional test kit for Jennifer, damn it, even birth control for Elizabeth, dog food, a water filter so they didn’t have to boil what they now pulled out of the swamp green pool… I should have had those on hand.
It was over two months later and people in his small North Carolina town were dying of starvation. I pretty well understood it on Day One, and yet I avoided the worst of it ever since, he thought. Doc Kellor had alluded to it in their meeting of nearly a month ago, when the decision was made to reduce rations for most of the populace, but we did not fully face the horrible realities of it.
America, the breadbasket of the world, which could feed a billion people without even breaking a sweat, was dying now of starvation. The two frequencies of Voice of America were talking daily about the first harvests coming in from the southern Midwest, of cattle being driven, and it all sounded to him like the old Chinese and Soviet broadcasts of the Cold War when they boasted daily about their great strides even while people lived in squalor and indeed did die of starvation.
The food was there, but it would never get here, not to this place, not now. That meant that over twenty percent of the town was dead and upwards of half would die in another thirty days, while food by the millions of tons rotted because they still had no means of moving it in bulk to where it was needed most.
The medicines. Yes, they were out there, someplace. Some stockpiles overseas perhaps, but the factories that made them were in cities, and the cities had no power, or perhaps a few places here and there, and the people who worked in the factories were hunkered down or scattered refugees, perhaps some of the very people now lying dead below the barrier. And even if the factory did suddenly turn on, the insulin was processed from genetically altered bacteria in labs. But the labs, maybe in New York or Arizona, were a thousand miles away. The bottles it was then loaded into? Perhaps made in Mexico and trucked to the lab a thousand miles away… and then loaded back aboard climate-controlled trucks, and taken to airports and priority-shipped in containers specially designed, those containers perhaps made in Mississippi. And so it went.
IV bags. Nearly all the IV bags in America were made in just a few places. Million a day. And they were boxed in sterile environments and then shipped to other factories that filled them with blood drawn perhaps a thousand miles away, or various solutions mixed in Oregon and shipped to Texas there to meet the bags to be filled.
And so much, so much from overseas that were in containerships offloaded by diesel-electric-powered cranes, then loaded into trucks. Perhaps the plastic to make the IV bag first emerging from the ground as oil in Kuwait, and from there to Texas to be cracked and the appropriate chemicals siphoned off and shipped to Louisiana to be turned into plastics, some of them for plastic bags to come to Asheville.
Such a vast, intricate, beautiful, profoundly complex web, the most complex in history, and all along a few enemies, enemies whom Americans had for years ignored, and then in one day had come to hate, and that hate had slowly changed, as it does with Americans, to remoteness, disdain, and a smug sense of ultimate victory, perhaps even victory by the simple fact that they made a wish that the enemies were no longer there. For ultimately, what did 9/11 do in the coldest sense? It killed three thousand. Did the economy collapse the next day? Did John’s Jennifer miss an insulin shot? Did the workers in a factory that made insulin scatter in panic on 9/11? No. And in spite of outrage, people’s tears of empathy, unless it was a friend or one of their own blood lost that day, their world really did not change other than the annoyance of getting through an airport.
The web of our society, John thought, was like the beautiful spiderwebs he’d find as a boy in the back lot after dawn on summer days, dew making them visible. Vast, beautiful intricate things. And at the single touch of a match the web just collapsed and all that was left for the spider to do, if it survived that day, was to rebuild the web entirely from scratch. And our enemies knew that and planned for it… and succeeded.
He tossed the second butt out the window, lit another, and drove into town to report the attack on his house and get Jim to bring up the meat wagon.
The soup line at the elementary school was already forming up, even though distribution of the day’s rations wasn’t until noon. The carcass of a hog was trussed up to a tree, actually barely a suckling, already stripped down to the bones, which would be tossed into the pot as well.
The people on line were skeletal, their weight really falling away now. Many could barely shuffle along. Kids were beginning to have bloated stomachs. Out along the curb half a dozen bodies lay, dragged out for the meat wagon, no longer even given the dignity of a sheet to cover them. A man, three kids, most likely their parents dead and no one to truly care for them, and a woman, obviously a suicide, with her wrists slashed open.
It made John think of the woman on the road…. Carol, that was her name. Most likely dead by suicide long ago.
The refugee center was starting to empty out, people beginning to move into the homes of locals who had died.
In the short drive he could sense the collapse setting in. The bodies in front of the elementary school, the fact of just how dusty and litter-strewn the streets were. Without the usual maintenance, storm drains had plugged up with debris; several trees had dropped and were then cut back just enough to let a single vehicle through. One of the beautiful towering pines in front of the elementary school had collapsed across the road, smashing in the Front Porch diner across the street. Enough of the tree had been cut away to clear the road for traffic, the rest just left in place.
Nothing had been done to repair the diner’s crushed roof, the inside now left open to the elements, the building itself broken into repeatedly by scavengers who were now willing to scrape the grease out of the traps as food.
That broke his heart every time he drove past it. The diner had been his usual stop on many a morning long ago. Mary would have freaked on his breakfast of bacon, eggs, and hash browns, but he so loved the place, the owner a man he truly respected, hardworking, starting from a hole in the wall a block away to create a diner that was “the” place in Black Mountain for breakfast. Truckers, construction workers, shop owners, and at least one professor type. How many mornings had John spent there, after dropping the kids off at school, for a great meal, a cigarette, the usual banter, playing one of the games the owner carved out of wood, trick puzzles, and then going on to his late morning lecture?
“What a world we once had,” he sighed.
The parking lot of the bank at the next corner was becoming weed choked, though that was being held back a bit by children from the refugee center plucking out any dandelions they saw and eating them. The bank had been one of the last of an old but dead breed, locally owned, the owner’s Land Rover still parked out front, covered in dust and dried mud.
John turned past Hamid’s store. A few cars out front, a VW Bug and a rust bucket of a ’65 Chevy, a couple of mopeds. Hamid had traded some smokes for an old generator, traded some cigarettes to someone else to get it fixed, and now he actually had some juice. It had been quite the thing when he fired it up, and the lights flickered on dimly. He had diverted the juice into two things: a fridge and one of the pumps for his gas tanks. John had instantly thought of asking Hamid to take the vials of insulin he still had, but Makala had vetoed it. The generator- driven power was variable, shutting down, fired back up again. Better to keep it at a steady fifty-five than at forty
