William Forstchen - One Second After

He looked at Elizabeth, all of sixteen and a half. No outward sign yet of the life inside her, still not much more than a child herself.

Jennifer reached the car first and then stepped back.

“Daddy, you look terrible!”

“I’m all right, honey. Just a little singed.”

Elizabeth was beside her now, Ginger up between them leaning in, wanting to lick him.

God, but two months ago this was the way it was. Come home after a lecture and office hours, if a Tuesday or Thursday when he had a 2:30 to 4:00 class the girls home ahead of him. Always the dogs would come piling out, Jennifer with them, his teenage daughter at least still following a bit of ritual and joining them with a hug and kiss.

He was unable to move, to get out of the car.

Jen was now up looking in.

“What happened?”

“We’re ok,” he finally said. “We won; they’re gone.” Jennifer shouted and grabbed hold of Ginger, dancing around. “We won; we won; we won!”

He stared ahead… the victor returning from the wars, he thought. The triumph, the parade, the ovation. The stuff, yet again, of film, but now, this the real reality of it?

“John?”

Jen was leaning in through the window. “You’re hurt.”

“Nothing much. Concussion, some burns, I’ll be fine.”

“Daddy, where’s Ben?” Elizabeth asked. John looked past Jen to his daughter. “Let me out,” he said softly.

Jen opened the door and as they exchanged glances he could see that Jen knew. She could read it in him.

He stepped out of the car and slipped his hand into his pocket.

He remembered that the ring was caked with dried blood. Frantically he rubbed it with his hand.

“Daddy? I asked you about Ben. Did you see him?”

“Yes, honey.”

John walked towards the door, Jen rushing ahead to open it.

“Then he’s ok?” Elizabeth asked. “I knew he’d be ok.” John could hear the wishful strain in her voice.

He walked into the house. Jen had opened all the windows, airing out the stale, musty smell that had greeted them. Sunlight flooded in through the bay windows that faced the creek that tumbled down through their backyard.

It had been Tyler’s favorite place in the house, the bay windows open unless it was freezing cold, the sound of water tumbling over rocks, the deep, comfortable sofa facing it.

John sat down.

“Elizabeth, come here.”

“Daddy?”

She was beginning to cry even as she sat down beside him.

He reached into his pocket and drew out the ring.

“Ben wanted you to have this,” John said, fighting to control his voice, to not let the anguish out.

She took the ring, cradling it in her hands. He had done a poor job of cleaning it. Flecks of dried blood rested in the palm of her hand.

“Someday,” he said softly, “someday you will give that to your child and tell them about their father, what a wonderful man their father was.”

She buried herself in John’s arms, sobbing, hysterical, crying until there were no more tears to give.

The shadows lengthened. He could recall Jen bringing him some soup, saying it was sent down by the chaplain from the college and she had been over to see Ben’s parents, who had moved into an abandoned house. John remembered Jennifer’s voice, in what was now her bedroom, talking to Jen, crying, then saying a prayer, the two of them reciting the Hail Mary together. The sound of Ginger paddling back and forth, then finally climbing up to sleep alongside Jennifer, sighing as she drifted off to sleep.

As darkness settled, Elizabeth came back out, nestled against his shoulder, and cried herself to sleep.

He held Elizabeth throughout the night, and would hold her until the coming of dawn.

There was a ghost-town feel to the village as John drove into Black Mountain and did his new morning ritual of circling through the downtown area to see if anything had happened during the night.

Makala, sitting beside him, silent; most likely, he thought, going over the plan they had for the phone call.

Windows to once proud shops along Cherry Street were streaked and dirty. His old favorite, Ivy Corner, had burned two weeks ago, the fire an accident caused by some squatters. The fire had been allowed to burn since it threatened no other buildings, and John had let the squatters go without punishment.

Bits of paper, dust, leaves, swirled in the street with the autumn breeze. At the corner of State and Black Mountain a teenager had a booth, made up from an oak desk that had been thrown out of the furniture store when it was converted to a hospital. He had two plump squirrels and a rabbit hanging from a pole. “Squirrel seven bullets, rabbit twenty bullets, willing to barter,” read a hand-lettered sign.

As food grew scarcer, the price was going up. But bullets were scarce now as well.

John’s earlier prediction that cigarettes might very well become currency had been wrong. Nearly every last one had been smoked long ago. He still felt the pangs for it. It was bullets that were now the currency of choice, especially .22 and shotgun shells.

In his own hunting he had set the .22 rifle aside, going over to the .50-caliber Hawkins flintlock. One of the reenactors from John’s old Roundtable group had started up a business of making black powder. The reenactor had figured out how to scavenge and process saltpeter and sulphur and the lead for the bullets; that could be found in any old car battery.

John circled past the military hospital. It was empty. The wounded who still needed treatment had been transferred up to Gaither Hall, which was being heated by the retrofitted boiler. Makala now ran that hospital, tending to the nearly forty who were still struggling to survive.

The casualties had indeed been high, over 700 dead, 120 of those students, and 700 wounded, of whom a third had died, and some were still dying, even now.

Nearly a third of the students had thus died in the battle or afterwards, another third wounded. A horrific price. In class, so long ago, when he spoke of Civil War battles where a regiment would lose two-thirds of their men in a battle, it had always been numbers. Now it was real, so terribly real. Both Jeremiah and Phil had died in the fight, and so many others of his kids, as John had once called them.

Just yesterday he had attended another funeral, of the girl Laura who had lost her leg above the knee. She just could not beat the subsequent infections.

The funeral had been a heartbreaking affair. Only a handful showed up, those with the strength to show, and as she was laid to rest, the surviving members of the choir sang the song that somehow had become associated with the college and the battle: “The Minstrel Boy.”

The dead from the battle were all interred in the veterans cemetery at the edge of town, one slope of the cemetery given over to their graves. There had been talk that someday a monument would be erected to them… someday.

Everyone agreed they needed a special resting place and not just the golf course.

There was still the occasional skirmish that needed the militia. A small band of a couple dozen raiders made the trek over the Swannanoa mountains and hit down along old Route 9, and a week later an expedition was led by John down into Old Fort to root out the few remaining members of the Posse, most of them wounded, who had somehow escaped. Six more dead for the college as a result. As for Old Fort itself, barely a civilian was left alive after the treatment the Posse had given them.

Those of John’s troops who were still left were indeed hardened now.