William Forstchen - One Second After

John felt so cold about their deaths that for a moment he dwelled on the thought that two extra rations would now be spent, the reward for the digging of a grave, in the golf course cemetery. There were fifteen hundred graves there now, another five hundred filling the Swannanoa Christian School’s soccer field.

Kellor had been right. The dying time was now upon them. Deaths from starvation were soaring. Yesterday there had been close to a hundred. Mostly the elderly still and then parents.

As a historian John knew that was the pattern, though a casual observer, an academic sitting in an armchair calculating such things, would have figured the children next. But what parent would eat while their child starved? The ration lines, now five of them scattered around the two communities, had nearly ninety percent of the surviving population showing up, for one distribution a day of soup and either a biscuit or a piece of bread.

That was another “state” secret. The bakery, closely guarded at a local pizza shop where wood heat had been rigged in, was now mixing in sawdust to give the bread bulk, to fill stomachs. It was the same as Leningrad, and actually that had been the inspiration for John to suggest it.

So the parents, many of them working to get an extra ration, were bringing the food home to their children, then dying off, and once both parents were gone it was hoped that neighbors or kin would take the orphans in.

Charlie and Tom had been forced to issue strict orders that personnel receiving extra rations were to eat them on site when the rations were issued, but even so, they’d stash a biscuit in a pocket, some even rigged up plastic liners in their pockets to pour the soup into when they thought no one was watching, then slowly walk home where two, three, four hungry kids might be waiting.

And yet ironically, at the same time, at least according to Voice of America, there were signs that some recovery was going on, down along the coast.

The federal government was reconvened, functioning aboard the carrier Abraham Lincoln, and martial law was still in effect. There were reports that the corn and wheat harvest of the Midwest would be brought in and train lines reopened to move the bulk goods. Headquarters for the southeast emergency government had been established in Charleston and daily reports now issued about the progress of rebuilding, even a claim that a nuclear power plant in Georgia had been brought back online, but it seemed like any progress being made was moving along the coast or slowly edging towards Atlanta. He wondered if someone up the command chain had decided to “triage off” upper South Carolina and western North Carolina.

There had been overflights, though. Fighters several times, a C-17 transport, and Asheville finally admitted that replacement parts for generators for the hospital had been airlifted in.

Asheville was playing its cards close. The phone line that Black Mountain had started had been run into the county office in Asheville, but the communications were rather one-sided, as if the director there resented the showdown over refugees versus water supply.

The thought that some kind of medical supplies had been lifted into Asheville had made John wild, Washington having to nearly physically restrain him from driving straight there and demanding some fresh insulin. He had personally telephoned Burns, who still was running Asheville, and begged for any information on insulin and Burns flatly announced none had come in and even if it had, he would not release any outside of the town no matter what.

Insulin, John was obsessed with it. Two days ago Jennifer’s blood sugar was up. She had taken an injection, and it was still up.

He had finally gone for Makala and she carefully examined Jennifer, then took him aside.

“The three remaining bottles. They might have spoiled,” was all Makala would say.

It had finally taken three times the normal dose to bring Jennifer’s level back down.

Her time had been cut by two-thirds.

And help, if it was indeed help, was still as far away as the far side of the moon.

Of the other diabetics in the town, over half were dead, the others dropping off fast.

He turned off the motor of his car, sat back, and lit another cigarette, the sixth of the day… oh, the hell with it and the counting out.

He sat there, smoked, looking at the interstate, cars still stalled where they had died over two months ago.

Somehow we’ve all been playing a game of reality avoidance with ourselves, even on Day One, he realized.

Anyone with even the remotest understanding of EMP and the threat to the nation should have been going insane before it hit. During World War II the entire nation had been mobilized, all the talk of loose lips sinking ships, the scrap drives, the guards on railroad bridges in Iowa. Much of it was absurd when the threat was finally understood, long after the war was over. There were no legions of spies and saboteurs in America, and the few who were in place or attempted to infiltrate were caught within days by the FBI. There was a threat, and though remote, it was at least acted on back then. But this time? The threat was a hundred times worse and they did nothing, absolutely nothing. Angrily he stubbed out the cigarette and lit another.

If everyone had been educated to it, the same way Civil Defense had once been in the curriculum of every school back in the 1940s and 1950s, if people knew the simple things to do on Day One, Charlie already trained to react to an EMP, mobilize his forces and react quickly… if they had but a few simple provisions stocked away, the same way anyone who lives in hurricane or tornado country does, would they be in this mess?

The crime, the real crime was those who truly knew the level of threat doing nothing to prepare or prevent it. Bitterly he wondered if they were suffering as the rest of the nation now suffered or were they safely hidden away, the special bunkers for Congress, the administration, where food, water, and medicine for years were waiting for them… and their families? The thought of it filled him with rage. He knew what he would do if he could but go there now; show them Jennifer and then do what he wished he could do to them.

And he could see his own avoidance of it all since that first day even as he did scramble to at least get insulin. Food, bulk food, just a fifty-pound bag of rice or flour, shoes, batteries, an additional test kit for Jennifer, damn it, even birth control for Elizabeth, dog food, a water filter so they didn’t have to boil what they now pulled out of the swamp green pool… I should have had those on hand.

It was over two months later and people in his small North Carolina town were dying of starvation. I pretty well understood it on Day One, and yet I avoided the worst of it ever since, he thought. Doc Kellor had alluded to it in their meeting of nearly a month ago, when the decision was made to reduce rations for most of the populace, but we did not fully face the horrible realities of it.

America, the breadbasket of the world, which could feed a billion people without even breaking a sweat, was dying now of starvation. The two frequencies of Voice of America were talking daily about the first harvests coming in from the southern Midwest, of cattle being driven, and it all sounded to him like the old Chinese and Soviet broadcasts of the Cold War when they boasted daily about their great strides even while people lived in squalor and indeed did die of starvation.

The food was there, but it would never get here, not to this place, not now. That meant that over twenty percent of the town was dead and upwards of half would die in another thirty days, while food by the millions of tons rotted because they still had no means of moving it in bulk to where it was needed most.