William Forstchen - One Year After

Seconds later, every window in the hardware store shattered from the minigun bursts, and for a few terrifying seconds, John thought his worst fears were true. He crouched down low and was suddenly covered with green sludge from an exploding can of latex paint stored in the room, glass shards covering him. If they had put a rocket into the room, he now realized his folly for being here—he and his friend would be dead.

The two Apaches thundered past. He could hear the shifting of the rotors, the changing tempo as they arced up, breaking left and right and preparing for another strafing run.

“John, I suggest we abandon this place!” Maury shouted. “Once they’re just past us, we break out the back door, head farther down Cherry Street, and hunker down there until this storm has passed.”

John nodded agreement, peering up over the shattered windowsill to watch as the Apaches did another southwest-to-northeast strafing run. The hospital was going up in flames. Fortunately, all had been evacuated along with the precious supplies the evening before, and for the sake of their souls, he hoped the two pilots flying this mission knew that fact, because otherwise they deserved to be damned as three rockets slammed into the extensive array of buildings, and a fourth, going a bit high, took out the post office.

By the time they had passed, John and Maury, dragging the portable two-way radio, had retreated through the back door of a favorite old haunt, the used bookstore. The next strike strafed the length of State Street, incendiary rounds igniting several fires. The second helicopter followed, curving down along Cherry Street, such a beloved lane of their community, shattering windows, and then there was a distant explosion. John assumed they were hitting the empty Ingrams’ market and the warehouse next to it where the L-3 had been stored. During the night, Billy had hurriedly taxied the precious plane along the interstate highway, concealing it within the cavernous remains of one of the buildings in the abandoned conference center at Ridgecrest.

The sound of the Apache rotors receded, and after several minutes, John ventured out onto Cherry Street, heart filled with a cold rage. Cherry Street. What threat did it ever represent? It was the heart of the old tourists’ center, made up of antique shops, several restaurants, art shops, quaint and welcoming to him when he had first come here years earlier with Mary and two small girls. It was the street he had walked on bearing a dozen Beanie Babies for Jennifer’s twelfth birthday on the Day—a remnant of all that his country had once been in a far distant, far more innocent age. Why tear this apart other than for the sake of willful destructiveness, piled on top of all the destructiveness of a nation collapsing, perhaps collapsing even before the Day?

Rather than tears, he felt nothing but cold rage and anger now.

“The Black Hawks!” Maury cried, pointing straight up.

They were indeed up, far up above any hope of ground fire, circling a thousand or more feet over the ever expanding flaming destruction of downtown Black Mountain.

“Observing, just observing for now,” John said. Then he saw one of the two peeling off, heading north and then turning east for the valley of Montreat.

“No, not that.” He sighed, but a moment later, he could hear the distant echo of gunfire and explosions.

“Try the back roads with the Jeep?” John asked his friend.

“I ruined the paint job last night, splashed it with a lot of camo. It’s parked at my house.”

“Let’s go, then,” John said bitterly, and the two set off at a jog up the three blocks up to Maury’s house, which overlooked the park and Lake Tomahawk.

Minutes later, they faced a risky decision. For several hundred yards, there was only one road, devoid of overhead canopy, the final approach to the Montreat stone gate from Black Mountain. Once past the gate, they could dodge up a side road and again be under cover.

There was definitely gunfire coming down from above, and he could hear staccato bursts of fire in return. Smoke was rising up, and his heart raced. Jen’s old home in the once peaceful valley was just a short walk from the campus. Dale had knowledge of exactly where he lived. Had he gone so far as to target it? He had ordered Jen to go to the communal shelters, tucked into the basements of various campus buildings, and Elizabeth was to leave Ben with her and report to her unit. Makala was in the basement hospital in the Assembly Inn, and unless the helicopters were carrying Hellfire missiles, all should be safe there. But then again, if they had Apaches and standard air-to-ground missiles, might they have some of the deadly Hellfires, as well?

“Hang on to your ass!” Maury shouted, and he was half laughing as he shifted into low gear and peeled off the road, dodging through the kids’ summer camp just below the gate, sprinting up torturous dirt roads, and splashing through a mountain rivulet. For the first time, John saw that there was indeed more than one road into Montreat, but one would have to be insane or desperate and in possession of a good four-wheel-drive Jeep or all-terrain vehicle to survive the passage. They dropped down at last onto a paved road, John shouting to just drive past his home. It was still intact, though an old cottage—as the locals called it—was in flames, and John wondered if the incendiaries poured into it had been misaimed and intended for his dwelling instead.

His heart sank as they came down Louisiana Street and saw plumes of smoke rising from the campus, and then they ducked low as a Black Hawk roared overhead, heading back down the valley.

The sound of its rotors receded, but off in the distance and high above, he could hear the other one still circling, indeed like a hawk waiting to pounce.

Strange how memory plays, he realized as the thought came of cartoons he had seen as a kid, where a hawk or other bird would suddenly transform into a World War II plane as it dived—if a bad guy, a Stuka, if a good guy, usually a twin-tailed P-38. Were the Black Hawks now indeed the bad guys? His heart rebelled at the thought. They were the tools of a bastard out of control.

As they turned onto the campus and raced past the small power station, which had been the source of so much hope and inspiration just a few weeks earlier, representing the best of what he believed his country would again be, he saw the roof of Gaither Chapel ablaze.

He cried out in rage as Maury raced them up the hill, swerving into the drive in front of the building. A score of his old students were up on the roof, armed with axes, and crowbars tearing back the shingling, buckets of water laboriously passed up along several ladders. Others stood guard, scanning the sky, weapons of every sort raised. Several observers with binoculars watched the horizon or focused in on the observation helicopter circling high overhead, and John just had an instinctive feeling that Fredericks was high up there, watching, and well out of range of ground fire.

Grace, carbine over her shoulder, ran up to him and saluted, face blackened from obviously having helped to fight the fire.

“Report. First off, any casualties?”

“Three dead, sir.” She started to choke up.

He put his hand on her shoulder. “Focus, Lieutenant. Work with me. Who are they?”

She rattled off a few names, one of them an elderly professor who collapsed inside the chapel when it was hit and started to burn.

“Focus on now, Grace. That’s your job, remember? Focus and go back to it.”

“Sir, the command post down in the basement is still running. They asked for you to report in.”

His admonishment to his young lieutenant of the college troops now reflected back on him. Again that nagging doubt. Was it the concussion of a couple of weeks back, or was he indeed losing his edge? Of course, after being out of touch for at least forty-five minutes, he should get a situation report and plot his next move. This first strike was a softening up; by this time, a ground assault could have rolled over his outpost on the interstate and be heading straight into town.