William Forstchen - One Second After

“John, people just pushed past that woman even as she died,” Tom said quietly.

John looked out the window to Bartlett’s VW as it puttered off, leaving behind a stack of boxes, and headed back up Montreat Road.

“John, it was surreal,” Charlie said. “Everybody on foot, the streets filled with people, I think the most coveted item yesterday was a supermarket shopping cart. Every last one has been looted and people were just walking up and down the street pushing their loads home.”

“That’s why the heart attacks,” Doc Kellor finally interjected.

John looked at his old friend. Kellor, who as a very young general practitioner had brought Mary into the world, was with her when she left. He now tended to Jennifer and usually would drop over to the house once a month or so, to “check on my favorite girl,” and then stay for a scotch and a round of chess. It rankled him that nine times out of ten John won.

“Fear, combined with people actually having to walk more than fifty yards,” Doc Kellor continued. “There’s been something like three hundred deaths since this started.”

“Three hundred?”

“Why not?” Kellor said dryly. “You forget how fragile we really are, the most pampered generations in the history of humanity. Heart attacks, quite a few just damn stupid accidents, at least eight murders, and several suicides. To put it coldly, my friends, all the ones who should have died years ago, would have died years ago without beta-blockers, stents, angioplasties, pacemakers, exotic medications, well, now they’re dying all at once.”

John glared at Kellor for a moment, wondering what else he was thinking.

“It even hit pacemakers?” Charlie asked. “Good God, my mother has one.”

Everyone looked at him.

“She’s in Florida; I don’t know how she is… .” And his voice trailed off.

“I’m sorry, Charlie,” Kellor said, “but I’ve got to be blunt. Some yes, strangely, are still working, but how long the batteries will hold, well, I guess that’s a countdown for them. But some died within minutes or hours.”

John looked back at Charlie.

“You’re going to have to take control, Charlie,” and John said it sharply, a touch of the “command voice,” in his tone, to shock Charlie back to the reality of the meeting. “Clamp down hard or it’s going to get worse. So far we’re just in the first stage of panic here.”

“What do you mean?”

“People grabbing what they think they need, but not many thinking yet about a week from now, a month from now.” He paused. “A year from now. Have you held a public meeting to discuss with people what happened and what to do?”

“What a disaster,” Kate sighed. “Yeah, last night. Five or six hundred showed up; it was hard to get the word out. It almost made it worse. The moment Charlie started talking about EMPs and nuclear bursts, some folks just heard ‘nuclear’ and went crazy, saying they were going home to dig shelters.”

“Same as in Charlotte, according to Don Barber,” John said. “When the realization finally hits that this is the long haul, people will start looking at each other, wondering if a neighbor has an extra can of food in their basement.”

“Or an extra vial of medicine hidden in a cooler,” Kellor said quietly, and John knew he was talking about him but didn’t react.

“That’s when either we try to pull together and keep order or it will go over to complete anarchy.”

“That old Twilight Zone episode,” Kate said. “The one where a bunch of polite middle-class types are having a friendly social, the radio announces nuclear war, and by the end of the half hour they were killing each other trying to get into the shelter one had in his basement.”

Funny how we think in terms of film and television now, John thought. The Twilight Zone. Last evening he’d been dwelling on the episode where the aliens started flicking lights on and off in different people’s houses and soon everyone was in a panic, ready to kill one another, the aliens sitting back and laughing.

What would Rod Serling say about this now? “Presented for your consideration, America disintegrating when the plug is pulled…”

“To hell with The Twilight Zone for the moment,” Tom said, “Refugees. We’re starting to get swarmed with outsiders. That has me worried the most now. At least we know our neighbors who we can count on, but all these outsiders, who knows what they might do? And if too many come in, we’ll all be starving in a matter of days.”

“There’s a million or more in Charlotte,” Charlie said. “Even more in the Triad. If one in a hundred decides to make the trek, that means twenty, thirty thousand mouths to feed.”

He fell silent and no one spoke for a very long minute.

“We’ll have to have a plan,” Kate said.

“Sure, a plan, what plan?” Charlie sighed. “We had a plan for everything else, but never for this one. Never once for this one.

“And that’s why I got caught so off balance,” Charlie said sadly, shaking his head. “I was waiting for someone to call, to do something. I’m sorry.”

“Charlie, anyone would have been overwhelmed,” John said, not altogether truthfully, but still he could see Charlie’s thinking. Like the military preparing for combat: disasters were something they drilled for. No one had ever drilled for something at this level, had a master plan up and ready to go, and therefore the precious first few days, when so much could have been done, were lost.

“Maybe someone in Asheville is getting a handle on it,” Tom said. “We all saw that Black Hawk go over. He was beelining straight for Asheville. Maybe they got some kind of link up there.”

John was silent. Asheville. Exit 64 to Exit 53, eleven miles. A day hardly went by without Elizabeth trying to figure out some excuse to go to the mall. A week didn’t go by when he didn’t drop into the Barnes & Noble to browse the military history shelves and then have a coffee, or take the kids downtown to their favorite pizza joint, the Magic Mushroom, where all the weirdos and hippies, as Jennifer called them went, much to the kids’ delight as they enjoyed a meal and “people-watched” the street scene.

Eleven miles, across unknown territory, it seemed like a journey filled with peril. My God, in just four days have we already become so agoraphobic, so drawn in on ourselves?

“I think we should go into Asheville tomorrow and see what the hell is going on there,” John finally ventured.

“Agreed,” Charlie replied.

John looked around and realized he had put his foot into it. “Ok, I’ll drive.”

“This is impossible,” Charlie announced, and John grunted in agreement.

Just past Exit 55, heading west, the interstate was completely blocked with scores of abandoned cars. During rush hour, it was this stretch of road where backups usually gridlocked, and when the EMP did hit, all the traffic had simply stopped, blocking the road across both lanes and the shoulder, where so many had drifted over as their engines stalled.

He went into reverse, weaving around the roadblock of cars back to the exit, swung around, and got off the road, then went down to Route 70, which paralleled the interstate on the north side.

“I wanted to go this way anyhow,” Washington said, sitting in the backseat of the Edsel. “Maybe the veterans hospital has some sort of connection.

Flanking Washington were two of the boys from the college ball team, Phil Vail and Jeremiah Sims. At Washington’s recommendation, which Charlie had agreed to, the two had come along “for the ride,” and concealed down by their feet were two shotguns and in Washington’s hand a Colt .45.