William Forstchen - One Second After

Though it struck John as slightly melodramatic, Dan pointed to the portrait of Washington kneeling in the snow.

“I don’t think we are in a revolution,” John said. “We’re trying to survive until such time as some order is restored. Communications up, enough vehicles put back on the road to link us together again as a nation.”

“But suppose that never happens,” Dan said quietly.

“What?”

“Just that, John. Suppose it never happens. Suppose the old America, so wonderful, the country we so loved, suppose at four fifty P.M. eighteen days ago, it died. It died from complacency, from blindness, from not being willing to face the harsh realities of the world. Died from complacent self-centeredness. Suppose America died that day.”

“For heaven’s sake, Dan, don’t talk like that,” John sighed.

“Well, I think it did die, John. I think our enemies caught us with total surprise. We should have seen it. I’m willing to bet there were a hundred reports floating around Congress warning of this, experts who truly did know their stuff screaming that we were wide open. It happens to all nations, all empires in history. Hell, you’re the historian; you know that. And at the moment it does happen, no one believes it actually is happening. They can’t comprehend how their own greatness can be humbled by another whom they view as being so beneath them, so meaningless, so backwards so as not to be a threat. You know that, John. Nine-eleven, Pearl Harbor, were like fleabites in comparison to this.”

“The Mongols hitting Eastern Europe in 1241,” John said softly. “The Teutonic Knights, when they first saw the Mongols at the Battle of Leignitz, supposedly laughed hysterically at the sight of their opponents on horses so small they were the size of ponies. Ponies that would be crushed under the first charge of lancers. They lowered their lances, charged, and at a hundred and fifty yards the Mongols decimated them with their compound bows, unheard of in Europe, each bolt hitting at fifty yards with the kinetic energy of a .38. Thirty thousand Mongols annihilated tens of thousands of Europe’s finest that day.”

Dan nodded.

“The French knights at Crecy mocking the English longbowmen. The British mocking us at Monmouth and Cowpens. The Germans disdainful of the Russians in 1941,” John said.

“And us in Vietnam,” Dan said quietly, “though that was not a war for our national survival, but it certainly was for them. I remember going over there filled with a bunch of crap about how we were going to walk all over the gooks. Well, I’ve not walked right since.

“Nation makers out there, John. Some of our profs might think I’ve sold this college to the community, but the hell with them. I know a college nearby, one that put out a lot of majors in peace studies, and if there was a protest anywhere against our military, they’d show; it was almost required. If an army recruiter ever showed up there, they’d get mobbed, all in the name of peace of course. Can you imagine you or me ever getting a job there? Diversity worked for them only as long as you toed the line with their views, and now the whirlwind is upon us.” He sniffed derisively. “They’ll never make it now. I bet on that campus, today, they’re sitting around like the French nobles did at Versailles even as the mob swarmed over the gates. I bet they’re singing ‘Give Peace a Chance,’ even as they starve to death.”

“Well, that’s not going to happen to my kids,” Dan said coldly, “and in our doing so our community will survive as well.”

“A hundred and fifty for Company A. Another hundred for Company B once we get the weapons in. You take a close look and a couple of those kids are carrying reenactor Springfields from the Civil War by the way. The others are doing community service work or working on other projects. Kids that helped stop the salmonella outbreak, volunteering up at the isolation ward. Already have a crew of kids starting to cut firewood for the winter. Professor Daniels with the outdoor ed department figures we can retrofit a couple of the old oil boilers to burn wood in this building and the library and have steam heat. We’ll need over three hundred cords of wood, though. Professor Lassiter is talking about rigging up a water turbine in the dam at Lake Susan. He thinks we could have it up and running by autumn and have electricity.” John could not help but smile.

Most of the towns in the area, back a hundred or more years ago, first got their electricity that way. Entrepreneurs would come in, sell the community a generator, show them how to hook it up to a mill dam, string some wire, and the miracle, what was then the miracle, of electricity arrived.

“Professor Sonnenberg tells me that in our school library are back issues of Scientific American all the way back to the 1850s. Also Popular Mechanics. In those golden pages are plans from eighty years ago, a hundred years ago, to build radios, telegraphs, steam engines, batteries, internal combustion engines, formulas for nearly every advance in chemistry.

“In our library we got darn near every issue of Mother Earth News, and the Foxfire books.” Dan chuckled at that. “Most of the other profs had viewed such publications with disdain, but on the faculty was a beloved old professor from before your time, now dead, who was definitely, as the kids said, ‘a granola eater.’ That prof left us a gold mine. How to find food, how to preserve it, how to store it up. We got several groups out now, those books in hand, harvesting enough to keep us alive. Hard to believe, John, but rattlesnake shish kebab isn’t all that bad.

“It’s all at our fingertips if only we look down at our fingertips to see it there.

“But the kids out there must keep this place secure and, if need be, buy time.”

“Buy time for what? We have the passes secured.”

“You know about the fight there, don’t you?” Dan asked. “Yes.”

“Well, that was a disorganized mob. Word is starting to filter in that groups are starting to come together. Most are just scared people banding together for survival and mutual protection, exactly what we are doing here. But some, John, there’s rumors about cults. A family that was allowed to pass through here yesterday, actually heading east, coming out of Tennessee, said that over by Knoxville there’s a guy claiming this is the start of a holy war.”

“And let me guess, it’s his vision of holiness you subscribe to or you die.”

Dan nodded his head.

“Says that Jesus appeared to him just before the power went off and gave him his mission, that he is the new John the Baptist preparing the way for the final return. And good God, supposedly there are hundreds now following him and killing those who disagree.”

“Several weeks, that’s all it’s taken,” John sighed.

Dan rested a hand on his shoulder.

“Just remember Ecclesiastes, John: ‘A time for war, a time for peace.’”

“So now it’s back to this. And back to kids drilling on the town green. I want to think that across America, today, there’s a thousand such groups drilling in order to keep civilization intact so that we don’t become a mob where one eats only because he is stronger than others or we kill each other in an insane frenzy of crazed beliefs.”

“That’s why those kids out there are drilling and that’s why I want you to be in command of them.”

“Me?” he asked, incredulous at the suggestion. “Hell, you’re the one with the vision.”

“I’m a college president,” Dan said with a smile. “A one-legged college president.”

“A wounded war veteran,” John replied sharply.

“Yeah, a dumb eighteen-year-old kid from Mocksville, North Carolina, so damn stupid I couldn’t see I was in a mine field. But I got the GI Bill, disability checks, and, since I could no longer run or play ball, a realization that I had to be something else. So here I now sit.