William Forstchen - The Final Day

He glanced back at the couple in the snow, definitely behaving like a young couple in love, ignoring the coldness of the snow for a moment, this next glance telling him it was definitely time to move along.

A wisp of a sad, understanding smile creased his features as he pushed on, leaving the secluded park behind, reaching the road bridge over Flat Creek, walking up the steep slope past what was now the community’s source of electricity. To his right was Anderson Auditorium, converted into the town factory for turning out turbines, generators, and wire, the fundamental building blocks of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century technology.

He felt he should drop in to at least say hello, but he realized those working away inside the factory might see it as some sort of inspection tour and be thrown off their routine, and he therefore pressed on.

The road steepened for fifty yards or so, memories flooding in of one icy day when classes were dismissed early and he wound up driving down it sideways, laughing students helping to push him out of the ditch where he had finally come to a stop. It was distressing to realize now that this short walk, up a slope, trudging through nearly two feet of snow, left him so winded that he had to stop for a moment to catch his breath.

As he rested, he turned to look around at his valley. After a snowstorm, all sound was all so muffled. When still living near Ridgecrest, he delighted in the fact that the distant rumble on Interstate 40 ceased for a day or so during and after a storm. From childhood, there were memories of the sound of the few cars still on the road, tires wrapped in chains for traction, rattling by, and, blessing of blessings, days off from school. Now, except for the distant sound of hammering from Anderson Auditorium, all was silent. Whoever had penned “Silent Night” knew and understood it, as did Robert Frost when he wrote about stopping in the woods on a snowy evening.

It used to be his favorite time of year. It no longer was with all the worries about survival to spring for his family and community. The worry was compounded by the unanswered questions. Was Bob Scales still alive? Had Bob indeed sent one man on a desperate journey to reach him, and if so, why? And overarching all were Quentin’s dying words about EMPs. The obsessive question haunting him. Were they ramblings of a delirious man slipping into death or a dire warning?

The thoughts of that terminated his moment of peaceful contemplation, and with breath somewhat back to normal, he turned to climb the last few hundred yards to the library.

Rounding the corner of the road by the chapel and the library, he was amused to see some of the students out sledding. Beyond their work schedule and rotation periods as community guards with the militia companies, the fact that they still had energy to enjoy such a beautiful winter day was, to him, a testament to the resilience of youth.

Going through the darkened entryway to the library, he was greeted by the musty scent of tens of thousands of books that for the last couple of years had been exposed to no temperature control and runaway moisture. The Hawkinses’ living quarters in the back corner were blocked off with several layers of plastic sheets, and once through the swinging doors to the rear office, he was greeted with cheery warmth. Becka looked up at him, smiled, and put a finger to her lips. He looked over to the cribs where the twins were tucked in, fast asleep.

She smiled and offered him a chair by the woodstove that they had installed, which was giving off a cheery warmth. “Just got the little ones down at the same time for once,” she announced, and without asking, she scooped a ladle of soup from a kettle on the fire, dipped it into a bowl, and offered it to John, who politely took it. Old Southern customs of greeting a guest with food still held, even now. The soup was watery thin; there was a hint of some kind of meat in it, wild onions, and he wasn’t really sure what else.

They chatted for a few minutes about the babies, who were thriving, John remembering to pull from his jacket the canned peaches, which she clutched with gratitude. Finished with the soup, he asked about “the guys,” and laughing, she pointed to the staircase to the basement.

“Those computers and all the other stuff have nearly turned me into a widow. Do me a favor and order Ernie to get the heck out of here at day’s end and for Paul to remember he has a wife.”

“Will do,” John replied with a smile, and he headed for the basement, which had been renamed “the Wizard’s Workshop.” A joke that few caught was that long ago it was the name for Tom Edison’s lab in Menlo Park, where he developed the incandescent lightbulb and helped trigger the electrical revolution of the nineteenth century that they were struggling to restore.

As John opened the basement door, he was surprised by the profligate use of electricity. The room was now brightly lit with fluorescent lights. He had always hated that type of illumination, but it used less juice than a standard incandescent bulb. A woodstove had been rigged into the basement, so it was no longer a damp, bone-chilling room, and, indeed a wonder, a dehumidifier was humming away. The stench of mold had at least abated somewhat as a result.

Six-foot stacks of magazines still cluttered most of the room, but a work area had been cleared in the far quarter, additional workbenches dragged over from classrooms and offices around the campus. Piled up around the benches were several dozen old computers—half a dozen more Apple IIes, early PCs, Commodore 64s, old Gateways, Dells, and half a dozen other models. Ernie, with Paul by his side, was hunched over a green computer board, and as John came up behind them, Ernie grunted out a curse and tossed the board to one side.

“Cooked, damn it. I would have liked to have had that one.”

“How’s it going?” John asked the two, obviously so intent on their work they had not heard him approach.

“Good and bad,” Ernie grumbled without bothering to look back at John as he picked up another board from a pile on the table and started to examine it.

“We’ve got half a dozen machines cobbled together,” Paul offered in a far cheerier voice.

He pointed to the restored computers off to one side, and John went over to examine them. Three were Apples, one of them an early Mac with its ridiculously small blue-screen monitor, beside them a couple of 1980s PCs and a Commodore 64. The 64 was turned on, the old television it was hooked to flickering, a popular fantasy adventure game of the ’80s running, little stick figures being chased by a stick-figure dragon.

While in college, John remembered, he had splurged on buying an Atari 2600 game machine, he and his friends consuming endless beers while driving two tanks around an obstacle field and shooting at each other. It had triggered the first fight with Mary, who became fed up that he was spending more time on “that damn game” than with her.

He hated to disturb the two at what was obviously an obsessive task, but he felt he had to. Paul had been absent from the factory ever since the discovery of a functional computer. It was at least keeping Ernie busy and out of his hair, but still, Ernie’s skills could perhaps be better devoted to working with the ham radio operators or helping as well with the production of generators and alternators to provide power to their ever-expanding State of Carolina.

Ernie and Paul were both hunched over a computer board, wearing magnifying glasses, absorbed with testing the board, quietly arguing whether it was fried or just one chip was bad.

“Mind if I interrupt?” John finally asked.

“In a minute,” Ernie replied without looking up, overriding Paul’s objections as he pried a chip off the board, fished a replacement out of a plastic tray, and snapped it in.