The Final Day Read online

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  For Robin

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It has been more than seven years since the publication of One Second After. Much has happened in the time since, as it of course does with all our lives. My daughter has matured into a fine young lady and graduated from college. Two and a half years ago, after giving a talk at a “prepper” conference, I met the true love of my life, my “Twin Flame,” and we were recently married. Many new friends have come into my life because of what I write, and a few have drifted away. New lives have joined my world, and some old friends have slipped away, in particular a beloved veteran of Omaha Beach, Andy Andrews. There have been great surprises, the biggest one being that what started out as a relatively unknown book catapulted to the New York Times bestseller list and some even claim it helped to trigger the Prepper Movement. If so, I only see my work as a small part of a phenomena now embraced by millions.

  There have been disappointments as well, and the biggest one is that I wrote One Second After at the behest of close friends in politics who believed that even though it was a novel, it would lay before the American public the existential threat to national survival. I had an optimistic belief that the book would trigger political action to harden our electrical infrastructure and have a far more robust foreign policy to prevent such weapons from getting into the hands of those who would willingly launch an EMP attack. That has proven to be an utter failure and leaves me, and should leave all who read this, asking a most fundamental question: Why have our federal and state governments ignored this threat? In my own attempts to raise awareness and press for a political solution, I have, at times, been met with mocking disdain. It does remind me of the hypocrisy of those who lecture us about guns, and do so while surrounded by professional guards who are indeed well armed, while extolling us to strip ourselves naked. The analogy between those two issues is apt and you can project what I mean from there.

  It is why I now believe that the only response left is for “we the people” to be prepared individually, then turn to neighbors, friends, and so forth until we as an entire nation can indeed take care of ourselves. I write this only days after the tragedy in Orlando, Florida. The casualty list is over a hundred. I fear that soon it could be a thousand, ten thousand, and, in the event of an EMP, into the hundreds of millions. Being truly prepared, individually and as a nation, is the only way we can ever ensure our survival against the forces of darkness and hate.

  Anyhow, this is supposed to be an acknowledgments, and if you have read this far, it is time to get on with my many well-deserved thank-yous. Without the support, trust, and efforts of my friends at Tor/Forge Books, you would not be reading these words. Thirty years ago, when first entering this business, I met Tom Doherty at a conference and decided even then that someday I hoped to work with him. He and his team are the ideal of a publishing crew that every author should hope for. Thanks must go as well to my agent, Eleanor Wood of Spectrum Literary Agency, and her son and daughter, who are now part of the firm. We’ve been together more than twenty-five years, watched our children grow, and she has always been by my side as a friend and advisor. A special thanks as well to my friends with Ascot Media Group. They are a public-relations firm second to none and have played an instrumental role in getting these stories about EMP out to the public and media.

  If I tried to name all the friends who have stood by me, offered advice, and impacted my work, these pages would run on like an Oscar acceptance speech. Those of you reading this bought the book to get to a story! Therefore, as Lincoln used to say, “I shall keep this short and sweet like the widow’s dance.” Thanks must go to my friends, neighbors, and coworkers at Black Mountain and Montreat College. They have accepted and even embraced my setting of a story in our community with grace. Whether a crisis comes one day or not, this truly is the best place on earth to call your home and where I have spent nearly a quarter of a century teaching. Shortly after One Second After came out, I was asked by newfound friends at Carolina Readiness to speak at a prepper conference they were sponsoring. I was expecting fifty guests or so, and I found instead over six hundred packing the room! That was just the start, and across these seven years I have met thousands of preppers … people of common sense, ideals, and faith in their God and their country. I am honored to count all as friends. And finally, the teachers in my life, going back to Ida Singer, then Russ Beaulieu and Betty Kellor, to Gunther Rothenberg, and at my college men like Don King and William Hurt. I hope I have lived up to your expectations.

  In closing, I wrote in One Second After that it was my fervent prayer that thirty years hence my books would be forgotten, and if recalled at all, it would be that the darkness I feared never came to pass and my daughter went on to a life that she would live in peace. I still pray for that. I once believed my government would act to ensure our safety when it came to threats such as EMP and attack by radical groups around the world. I now have my doubts, at least short term, that such will be the case. I now place my faith of a peaceful future in your hands, my fellow citizens, it is up to us to act proactively so that this nation of, by, and for the people does not perish from the earth.

  William R. Forstchen

  June 2016

  PROLOGUE

  DAY 920 SINCE “THE DAY”

  This is the BBC News. It is 3:00 Greenwich War Time, broadcasting to our friends in the Western Hemisphere on this the 920th day since the start of the war.

  Later in this program, we will provide an in-depth report about the tragic aftermath of the full-scale nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, followed by a report about the situation in the Middle East where the conflict continues to rage between Israel and its neighboring states—except for Jordan, which today reaffirmed its alliance with Israel against the Caliphate and its allies.

  But first the news from the United States:

  Today the self-declared federal government based in Bluemont announced that the former states of Virginia and Maryland have been brought up to what the government defines as “Level One” status, meaning that all forces allegedly in conflict with the “Reconstituted Federal Authority in Bluemont,” as it now describes itself, have been pacified.

  The Bluemont government announced earlier in the year that it has abandoned its plans to establish the Army of National Recovery, more commonly referred to as the ANR. Today’s announcement of the completion of establishing stabilized status in those two mid-Atlantic states has been attributed to actions waged by the traditional armed forces of the United States. The Bluemont government declared that the victory was achieved by units withdrawn from confrontation with China’s occupation of states in the West and other units that were in ser
vice overseas on the day the war started.

  After our reporting of other news of the day, a panel of experts will discuss the apparently changing status of the situation in North America.

  But first, this message for our friends in the western provinces of Chinese-occupied Canada: “The chair is against the door.” I repeat, “The chair is against the door.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  DAY 920 SINCE “THE DAY”

  “Do you remember the opening line of that book by Charles Dickens, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’?”

  John Matherson whispered the famous line with hands wrapped around a warm mug filled with, of all things, coffee—real coffee. He looked over at his friend Forrest Burnett, who had arrived bearing the precious gift. Where it had been looted from John had learned never to ask.

  Forrest’s crooked face, twisted up by his old Afghan wound, left eye socket covered with a patch that certainly gave him a pirate look, smiled in reply.

  “Wasn’t that from the movie where the guy gets his head cut off by the French mob at the end?” Forrest replied.

  John chuckled. “Yeah, something like that.”

  “That guy was crazy, stepping in to take his friend’s place at the guillotine, and to top it off, the guy who gets rescued escapes with the girl. Never did like that movie. Why mention it?”

  John sighed, standing up and walking over to the window of his office to look out.

  The first snow of late autumn had arrived early this year, blanketing the Montreat College campus with half a foot or more. Old-timers prognosticating over woolly caterpillars and nut-gathering squirrels had predicted this was going to be a tough one, and this early November snow appeared to be the first proof.

  Before the Day, a first snow, for John, was a time of relaxation and happy memories. Classes were usually canceled, forewarned by the Weather Channel on the Internet. He would have stocked in extra firewood, and it would be a long day of reading by the fire, Jennifer and Elizabeth outside playing, coming in soaking wet for some hot chocolate, and later in the day board games like Clue or Monopoly. If the power went out, so what? It added to the cozy feel, at least for the first few days, camping out by the fireplace and watching the woods fill up with snow.

  Before the Day …

  Jennifer is dead. His eldest daughter, Elizabeth, all of nineteen years old, was a mother with a two-year-old son and had finally taken a further step away and moved out of the house in Montreat. She had married Seth Robinson—the son of his old neighbor and close friend Lee—and was living with her new husband, and they were already expecting a child.

  How that as well had changed after the Day. Only a few years back, the line had become that twenty-five was the new eighteen. Most kids were expected to go to college, get a degree, start their first job on the career ladder, date for a while, at last find the right partner, settle down, and around twenty-eight to thirty finally start a family. It was again like the world at the time of the Civil War—to marry at sixteen, seventeen. An unmarried girl at twenty-one was seen as already becoming an old maid.

  No longer, and the historian in John read it as something that was primal, that after a tribe, a city, an entire country had lost so many lives in a war, the paradigm shifted to marrying young and starting families young—the so-called baby boom of the late ’40s and ’50s a recent example.

  At the other end of this age spectrum, Jen—dear old Jen, mother-in-law of his first marriage to Mary—was gone. Perhaps in a different time, her life might have gone on for another five, even ten to fifteen years. But gone now as well were all the hospitals and medications that extended life, and thus something primal occurred with the elderly. Once they had seen too much tragedy, the will to live for so many was simply extinguished.

  She had quietly slipped away in August. He had seen it far too often after the Day—the elderly one day calmly saying that they had experienced enough of life with all its vicissitudes and it was time to leave. He found her one evening sitting “alone” out on the sunporch, happily talking with her husband, young Jennifer, and her daughter—his wife, Mary, who had died long before the Day. She was talking to ghostly presences. He stood silent, eavesdropping as she talked and laughed softly to replies that were silent, at least to his ears.

  Makala had slipped up to his side, listened as well for a moment with tears streaming down her face. Makala then guided him to the far end of the house, telling him to leave her be, that, as a nurse, she had often seen such, a clear sign that the beloved who had already crossed over were gathering to help in the final journey.

  Jen insisted upon going to sleep that evening not in her own bed but out on the sunporch that looked out over young Jennifer’s grave. They found her there in the morning, as if just gently asleep.

  They buried her next to Jennifer. Yet another thread that connected John to a former life severed that day.

  Even his old familiar office was gone, burned out in the fight with Fredericks back in the spring. It was decided to move what was left up to the Montreat campus and set up a new town office in the basement of Gaither Hall, a logical decision after it had served as the backup command post during that fight. It had been suggested to actually move it into the now-empty office of the college president, but John could not concur.

  That office complex held for him a deep symbolic significance. When a special meeting involving representatives from across the ever-expanding “State of Carolina” took place, he would unlock that room for use. Centered on the office wall opposite the desk of the college president was the famed painting of George Washington kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge. It was a reminder of his friend Dan Hunt, who once occupied that room and died in the first year after the start of the war.

  His own office downstairs in the basement of Gaither was an easy walk from his home and just down the slope from the college was the new “factory,” christened “the Dreamworks.” Within the walls of what had once been Anderson Auditorium, full-scale production was under way, assembling new electrical generators complete with wirework for drawing out copper wire for the generators and the stringing of power lines.

  The electrical light that illuminated his office regularly flickered as power fluctuated up and down; the system was, after all, jury-rigged, very much a learn-as-you-go process.

  The snow was picking up again, swirling around the small campus commons below Gaither, the tattered American flag that had flown during the air battle with Fredericks’s Apache choppers standing out stiff in the northeasterly blow.

  Watching such moments with the first snow of autumn falling had once indeed been the best of times, and he tried to not let melancholy take hold. He was actually drinking real coffee, the room was illuminated by an actual electric lightbulb, and the woodstove that students had installed in the room was radiating a pleasant heat the way only a wood-fired stove could.

  “Why so depressed, John?” Forrest asked.

  John heard a match striking and looked over his shoulder and saw Forrest leaning back in his chair and of all things actually lighting a cigarette. Merciful God, how he now longed for one as well, but the promise to his dying daughter and the potential explosion from Makala if she ever detected the scent on his breath was enough to restrain him, even though he did step closer and inhale the drifting smoke.

  “Just the snowfall triggering a lot of memories this morning,” John replied, settling back into his office chair, his gaze still lingering on the snow dancing on the wind. The sound of laughter echoed, and he caught a glimpse of a couple of his students sliding down the slope on a makeshift sled. Kids, long ago hardened by war and backbreaking labor to repair the damage of the spring battles to Gaither Hall before the onset of winter, were taking a break and again being kids. Their unit commander, Kevin Malady, would soon be out with a shout for them to get back to work, but for the moment, he was glad to see them enjoying themselves.

  “Yeah, same here,” Forrest said, gaze drifting off as he absent
ly reached over with his one hand to scratch the stump of his missing arm.

  “Feeling it again?” John asked.

  “Ghost limb, they call it,” Forrest said with a chuckle. “Yeah, it feels like it’s still there and itchy as hell. Memories of snow for me get all screwed up by this.” He motioned toward the missing limb with his good hand and then up to the eye patch.

  “I loved to hunt as a kid; we always got a lot more snow over on the north side of Mount Mitchell than you did here. Easy to track deer, fox, bear. Friends and I would even camp out in it, get a deer, and then just stay out in the woods for days living off the venison and some potatoes and corn we packed along.” He smiled wistfully. “And more than a few mason jars of shine and a bit of homegrown weed as well. A lot better than sitting in a damn boring history class in school, and given the way the world is now, a better education for our futures as well.”

  “For someone who apparently hated history classes, you sure know a lot about it,” John said with a smile.

  “Oh yeah, you were once a history professor. What good did that do you when it came to surviving in this mess?”

  “It helps at times, Forrest.”

  “Okay, I guess it did when it came to running things and getting that ‘Declaration,’ as you folks call it, written. Lot of good that will do, though, if the BBC reports are true.”

  “Gave me the idea for how to face off against the Posse.”

  “You mean you used Hannibal’s plan for the Battle of Cannae?”

  John smiled at that and nodded. “Seems you know more history than you let on, Forrest. Often the mark of a good leader, which you sure as hell were and still are.”

  “And it should have told me not to volunteer for that extra tour of duty in Afghanistan. The way it was being fought by the time I shipped there, it had turned into another Vietnam. Build laagers, hunker down, can’t shoot even when shot at, and the bad guys own the rest of the countryside while we wandered around like fools trying to win ‘hearts and minds.’”