William Forstchen - The Final Day

Farther downstream, Paul Hawkins’s team was waiting for the community of Old Fort to finish rebuilding what had been their original dam for a water-powered turbine so that he could set a generator in place and get the small community of survivors down there back online. The villagers of Old Fort, all but wiped out by the Posse attack, planned to run a wire along old Route 70 toward Marion and sell the power for trade items and food.

In this the third year since the Day, an economic trading system was again back in place, and it did include white lightning brewed in remote mountain valleys, but now included much else as well. Those with foresight to stockpile some precious metals found they indeed had real worth again; in fact, by the standards of this terrible new world, they could be counted as wealthy, the silver and gold not just something to be locked away in a safe for “just in case”—“just in case” had indeed arrived at last.

Increasingly scarce was .22 ammunition so that it was hardly on the trading market anymore, worth far more per round than the rabbit or squirrel it could put on the table. The weapons to be valued for hunting were the old flintlock rifles, once the realm of history buffs, reenactors, and muzzle-loading hunters. Lead salvaged from dead car batteries and saltpeter from manure pits provided two of the ingredients. Sulfur came from the old resort spa of Sulfur Springs down in Rutherford County, which long ago had provided the crucial element for gunpowder manufacturing from the colonial period and the Civil War. The Peterson family, old man Peterson once a good friend of John from Civil War roundtable days, had set up the family business, which tragically killed his daughter and grandson, who had made a fatal mistake several months back out in the mixing shed, blowing up themselves and the entire building.

There was even talk of scrounging up enough bronze or brass to make several small cannons for defense, a strange thought given the town had endured air attacks from Apache helicopters and now had a precious Black Hawk in their possession, a world of retro weaponry mixed with surviving remnants of a prior age.

Beyond the trade in gunpowder from Rutherfordton, and networking out to other communities struggling to come out of a dark age, a viable economic system was indeed emerging.

It was not until after Fredericks’s defeat that John had learned that within Asheville, Fredericks had actually attempted to impose a mandatory confiscation of all silver and gold coins that had once been government minted. Unknown to those areas outside of Fredericks’s brief period of control, he claimed a decree from Bluemont had ordered such, with a so-called fair trade of a hundred dollars in printed money for each silver dollar and a thousand dollars of paper money for each one-ounce gold coin. Only those caught with silver or gold on them complied under duress, meaning, “We caught you; give us the coins—here’s your paper, now go and keep your mouth shut, or you are under arrest for illegal trading.”

Those thus caught referred to the paper as being “not worth a damn Frederick” or to a more direct scatological reference as its only real use. Yet another troubling bit of information that had come to light after that vainglorious man’s bloody defeat.

The paper currency was even how those serving with the ANR had been paid. Those who had survived and surrendered after the battle to take out Fredericks were expecting execution and thus were stunned by the offer to stay and join the community.

All of them were young, generally in good health thanks to the rations they had lived on for months, and were then divided up and assigned to different units within “the State of Carolina’s Militia.”

There was some resentment for the first few days on the part of his own people—for, after all, over thirty from the town had been killed fighting against these young men and women. There had been one tragedy when a young man from the college murdered one of the ANR troops, blaming his victim personally for the death of his fiancée in the fight to take the courthouse in Asheville. It proved to be an extremely tense day, the nearly hundred ANR prisoners fearing that they had been lulled by John’s promises and that Fredericks’s warnings that to be taken alive by “those mountain rednecks” would mean torture, rape, and death. Some had gathered together, ready to fight or flee, when more than a few locals supported the young man’s vengeance killing as justice, plain and simple.

It proved to be just about the most difficult day John had ever faced. The community had yet to stand down from a state of military emergency; therefore, John was deemed to be in command under military law. Reverend Black had insisted upon sitting on the tribunal since the accused came from the college where he now served as chaplain, rather than a civil trial since the crime had occurred while the community’s troops were still “in military service.” Reverend Black, when he pronounced his vote with tears streaming down his face, startled everyone, declaring it had to be done, quoting Old Testament verses, that killing in combat was a tragedy that had haunted mankind from the beginning, but this death was cold-blooded murder, using the translation of “murder” rather than “Thou shall not kill.”

John realized he had to carry out the sentence himself as he had done with others; it could not be delegated, though he spent hours praying over it, hoping to find a personal way out. At the end, the young man took it stoically, forgiving John for what had to be done and appealing to the dead man’s friends for forgiveness as well. Memory of it, along with so many other memories, still woke him up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night.

As to the regular army prisoners, especially the helicopter crews that had slaughtered many in Forrest Burnett’s community, there had been outright calls to execute them. But John had had enough of executions, even though many—especially Forrest’s community, which had endured the atrocity of being strafed by the pilot—cried for blood. In the end, John ordered them banished, pushed to the far side of the barrier on Interstate 40 at the top of the mountain and told to start walking. Chances they would survive a week were nil, and it was decided by all that the punishment was just.

The aftereffect? The ANR survivors witnessed something they had never expected, even expressing regret for the entire tragedy and its end result, and thereafter, no mention was made—at least publicly—of having been on one side or the other in the battle for Asheville. The ANR commanding officer, who had grown up near where John originally came from, now served as a platoon lieutenant in the militia, and what she and others had said about life outside of their valley added more fuel to his worries.

All the ANR personnel had told him, along with reports by the BBC, served to fuel his suspicions and concerns about what exactly was taking place at Bluemont, and he was eager to get on the road to Forrest’s community on the far side of Mount Mitchell.

The fire within the stove was now crackling hot, radiating warmth. He remembered an old favorite author who wrote on Americana, Eric Sloane, his works filled with wonderful detailed sketches of life long ago, stating that a wood fire heated you twice—from the labor it took to cut, split, stack, and haul the wood and again when it finally burned as it now did before him.

All well and good, John thought with a smile, if one was young and twenty and had grown up with life being such. There had been offers, which he always saw as little more than attempts at bribes, to provide him with wood and so many other things, but it was a point of honor that he worked and traded for it like everyone else. Before she passed, Jen, almost as if it were an afterthought, had revealed that there was a stash of several hundred dollars of face-value silver filling half a dozen mason jars tucked away in a corner of the basement. When the government had gone over to clad coins back in the ’60s, her husband, George, had denounced it as a damned conspiracy and had taken to emptying out the silver dimes, quarters, and occasional half dollars into a jar on his nightstand at the end of every day and then stashing them in the basement when filled.