William Forstchen - One Second After

The medicines. Yes, they were out there, someplace. Some stockpiles overseas perhaps, but the factories that made them were in cities, and the cities had no power, or perhaps a few places here and there, and the people who worked in the factories were hunkered down or scattered refugees, perhaps some of the very people now lying dead below the barrier. And even if the factory did suddenly turn on, the insulin was processed from genetically altered bacteria in labs. But the labs, maybe in New York or Arizona, were a thousand miles away. The bottles it was then loaded into? Perhaps made in Mexico and trucked to the lab a thousand miles away… and then loaded back aboard climate-controlled trucks, and taken to airports and priority-shipped in containers specially designed, those containers perhaps made in Mississippi. And so it went.

IV bags. Nearly all the IV bags in America were made in just a few places. Million a day. And they were boxed in sterile environments and then shipped to other factories that filled them with blood drawn perhaps a thousand miles away, or various solutions mixed in Oregon and shipped to Texas there to meet the bags to be filled.

And so much, so much from overseas that were in containerships offloaded by diesel-electric-powered cranes, then loaded into trucks. Perhaps the plastic to make the IV bag first emerging from the ground as oil in Kuwait, and from there to Texas to be cracked and the appropriate chemicals siphoned off and shipped to Louisiana to be turned into plastics, some of them for plastic bags to come to Asheville.

Such a vast, intricate, beautiful, profoundly complex web, the most complex in history, and all along a few enemies, enemies whom Americans had for years ignored, and then in one day had come to hate, and that hate had slowly changed, as it does with Americans, to remoteness, disdain, and a smug sense of ultimate victory, perhaps even victory by the simple fact that they made a wish that the enemies were no longer there. For ultimately, what did 9/11 do in the coldest sense? It killed three thousand. Did the economy collapse the next day? Did John’s Jennifer miss an insulin shot? Did the workers in a factory that made insulin scatter in panic on 9/11? No. And in spite of outrage, people’s tears of empathy, unless it was a friend or one of their own blood lost that day, their world really did not change other than the annoyance of getting through an airport.

The web of our society, John thought, was like the beautiful spiderwebs he’d find as a boy in the back lot after dawn on summer days, dew making them visible. Vast, beautiful intricate things. And at the single touch of a match the web just collapsed and all that was left for the spider to do, if it survived that day, was to rebuild the web entirely from scratch. And our enemies knew that and planned for it… and succeeded.

He tossed the second butt out the window, lit another, and drove into town to report the attack on his house and get Jim to bring up the meat wagon.

The soup line at the elementary school was already forming up, even though distribution of the day’s rations wasn’t until noon. The carcass of a hog was trussed up to a tree, actually barely a suckling, already stripped down to the bones, which would be tossed into the pot as well.

The people on line were skeletal, their weight really falling away now. Many could barely shuffle along. Kids were beginning to have bloated stomachs. Out along the curb half a dozen bodies lay, dragged out for the meat wagon, no longer even given the dignity of a sheet to cover them. A man, three kids, most likely their parents dead and no one to truly care for them, and a woman, obviously a suicide, with her wrists slashed open.

It made John think of the woman on the road…. Carol, that was her name. Most likely dead by suicide long ago.

The refugee center was starting to empty out, people beginning to move into the homes of locals who had died.

In the short drive he could sense the collapse setting in. The bodies in front of the elementary school, the fact of just how dusty and litter-strewn the streets were. Without the usual maintenance, storm drains had plugged up with debris; several trees had dropped and were then cut back just enough to let a single vehicle through. One of the beautiful towering pines in front of the elementary school had collapsed across the road, smashing in the Front Porch diner across the street. Enough of the tree had been cut away to clear the road for traffic, the rest just left in place.

Nothing had been done to repair the diner’s crushed roof, the inside now left open to the elements, the building itself broken into repeatedly by scavengers who were now willing to scrape the grease out of the traps as food.

That broke his heart every time he drove past it. The diner had been his usual stop on many a morning long ago. Mary would have freaked on his breakfast of bacon, eggs, and hash browns, but he so loved the place, the owner a man he truly respected, hardworking, starting from a hole in the wall a block away to create a diner that was “the” place in Black Mountain for breakfast. Truckers, construction workers, shop owners, and at least one professor type. How many mornings had John spent there, after dropping the kids off at school, for a great meal, a cigarette, the usual banter, playing one of the games the owner carved out of wood, trick puzzles, and then going on to his late morning lecture?

“What a world we once had,” he sighed.

The parking lot of the bank at the next corner was becoming weed choked, though that was being held back a bit by children from the refugee center plucking out any dandelions they saw and eating them. The bank had been one of the last of an old but dead breed, locally owned, the owner’s Land Rover still parked out front, covered in dust and dried mud.

John turned past Hamid’s store. A few cars out front, a VW Bug and a rust bucket of a ’65 Chevy, a couple of mopeds. Hamid had traded some smokes for an old generator, traded some cigarettes to someone else to get it fixed, and now he actually had some juice. It had been quite the thing when he fired it up, and the lights flickered on dimly. He had diverted the juice into two things: a fridge and one of the pumps for his gas tanks. John had instantly thought of asking Hamid to take the vials of insulin he still had, but Makala had vetoed it. The generator-driven power was variable, shutting down, fired back up again. Better to keep it at a steady fifty-five than at forty degrees that might suddenly climb to sixty or seventy before plunging back down below freezing.

But still his old friend had come through for him, a debt he could never repay, and he felt like a beggar every time he wandered in.

“For my favorite little girl,” Hamid would say as he pressed a small package into John’s hands, a piece of newspaper with a pound or two of ice inside. Ice, a precious pound or two of ice to try to keep the temperature of the remaining vials down a few degrees.

“I still owe you twenty bucks,” John would always say, and Hamid would just smile, for he had little girls, too, and he knew, and he was proud to be an American helping a friend.

Makala. Funny, John hadn’t thought of her these last few days. My own starvation, he thought. The unessentials of the body shut down first and after four years of celibacy after the death of Mary he had grown used to it. He knew Makala was interested in him; in a vastly different world they would definitely have been dating, but not now. Besides, he did not want to upset the delicate balance of his family. Jen had been Mary’s mother; how would she react? The girls? They might like Makala as a friend, but as something more? For Jennifer, her mom was already becoming remote, but for Elizabeth, the death had hit at twelve, a most vulnerable of times, and her room still had half a dozen pictures of the two of them together and one that still touched John’s heart, a beautifully framed portrait from Mary’s high school graduation, the color fading but Mary very much the girl he had met in college.