One Year After: A Novel Read online

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  For Congressman Roscoe Bartlett and Dr. Richard Pry, who first sounded the warning about EMP. And for the real “Franklin Clan,” who have become a true blessing in my life.

  PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  When One Second After was released early in 2009, I never anticipated all that would follow. I had actually started thinking about a book regarding the threat of an EMP attack back in 2004, after a congressional committee, chaired by Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, released a report on EMP that should have served as a wake-up call to the nation; a report that the media, and therefore the general public, ignored. In a conversation with that remarkable, brilliant gentleman, he lamented that the core problem was that the issue of a catastrophic “first-strike attack,” using an EMP against the continental United States by a nation such as Iran, North Korea, or a terrorist group backed by them, sounded like science fiction, and therefore it lacked a public constituency to demand a more robust foreign policy and defensive preparedness. Bartlett and others asked if I could write a “fact-based” novel about the threat to try to raise public awareness.

  It took a year for the idea to even begin to jell. For the longest time my thinking ran along the classic (no offense intended) “Clancy-esque” model of a hero racing to stop the disaster. And then it was the students at my college and my daughter who created the inspiration. I am blessed to teach at Montreat College (yes, it is a real school) where, with a student body of five hundred, a professor forms close bonds with his students across four years. Graduation day, therefore, is a special moment, filled with both pride and poignancy as one sees “their kids” moving on. It was yet another graduation day, yet another speaker droning on … I was looking at “my kids,” politely listening to the speaker, but obviously eager to get on with things, and then it struck me—what would happen to them if, at this moment, America was hit with an EMP strike? What would happen to my college, my beloved small town of Black Mountain, to my daughter, to all of us? Two hours later I was at the keyboard and began to write the story that became One Second After.

  It wasn’t until 2009 that the book was published. (Rather amusing that a number of major houses rejected it, to the delight of my publisher and editor who did pick it up, and see it turned into a New York Times bestseller.) At the time of its release, I had no idea what was about to happen. I was actually attending a conference about EMP out in Albuquerque with my good friend Captain Bill Sanders, who wrote the technical afterword for the book, when my agent called with the news that we had hit the best-seller list. I was flabbergasted, and there is no other word for it.

  The full impact really didn’t hit until several months later. I wasn’t even aware, at the time I was writing the book, that there was an emerging movement of people who called themselves “preppers.” A couple in a nearby community had started a business, “Carolina Readiness Supply,” and asked if I’d come speak at a conference they were organizing. “How many do you expect to be there?” I asked and they replied around a hundred or so. On the day I arrived, that wonderful couple was standing in a jammed parking lot to greet me, and I found myself facing an audience of more than five hundred, some coming from as far as Atlanta and Charlotte. Something was definitely happening!

  And thus it has been in the years afterward. Some say that I was a driving force in the creation of the prepper movement, but I beg to differ. Maybe my book helped to serve, but the movement was already “a-forming.” Tens of millions of Americans were again thinking as Americans, that planning for self-reliance before a disaster hits is a smart move. For those new to the concept of “prepping,” I do have to forcefully say, ignore how mainstream media too often portray such people in absurd television programs. Nearly without exception I have found preppers to be decent, honest folks who think not only of themselves but also of their neighbors, community, and nation as well. If “the stuff” ever does “hit the fan,” pray that your neighbors are preppers. And a major thank-you here for the thousands of preppers I have met. All I can say is thank you for your friendship.

  As this book goes to print, it has been more than six years since One Second After was released. Much has changed but, frustratingly, much is still the same. I had hoped that by now there would have been government action at the national level to better secure our power grid, create plans both for defense and for public preparedness, and a more robust foreign policy that makes clear that the acquisition by rogue nations of a weapon that could generate an EMP will NEVER be tolerated. None of this has happened. The historian in me recalls the 1930s. We watched passively as the threats grew, which exploded into our nation’s life on December 7, 1941. We are asleep again, while North Korea tests nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, Iran is not far behind, and ISIS, a movement as brutal and psychotic as Nazism, emerges.

  It had never been my intention to write a sequel to One Second After, but wherever I spoke that was always a question: What happens next? I resisted for five years; my publisher, Tom Doherty, and his senior editor Bob Gleason dropping major “hints” that they wanted more. During those years I did give them a book which I truly enjoyed writing, offering a positive vision of our future in space, and also a couple of books about the Civil War and the American Revolution with my good friend Newt Gingrich, and then a self-published book about the threat of ISIS. Finally, I could no longer say no and decided to pick up the narrative thread of what happens to John Matherson, his family, his village, and his college. Thus this book, and a third one to follow several months after this publication to round out the story.

  This is supposed to be a preface and an acknowledgments page, and it is time I get into that. I feel like someone at an award’s ceremony who is admonished to keep it to a minute or less, but has a list ten minutes long! So here goes:

  Special thanks to Newt Gingrich, Roscoe Bartlett, and others who have, for decades, worked the political front of this issue. In an age of such bitter partisan infighting, how I wish both sides of the aisle, both houses of Congress, and the executive would realize that this is a national threat that if not addressed, will indeed result in a government in exile in some underground bunker far outside the ruins of D.C., struggling and perhaps fumbling to put the pieces back together again, like Humpty Dumpty’s horsemen and soldiers.

  As always, my special thanks to Tom Doherty, Bob Gleason, and the wonderful team at Tor/Forge. As a fledgling writer thirty years ago, when I first met Tom Doherty, I hoped that someday I could actually be part of “his team.” We’ve done half a dozen books together, and there is no one else in this business I hold in higher regard. On the business side as well, eternal gratitude to my agent, Eleanor
Wood; my film agent, Josh Morris; the ASCOT media publicity team and my near daily contact there with Monica Foster. A book is a team effort.

  When I first showed a draft of the book to my college president, Dan Struble, he asked why I just didn’t name things for real rather than give fictional names for my town and college. Thank you, Dan, for that suggestion. It gives a “real place” to the books that otherwise would be lacking. I am blessed to be living in Black Mountain, North Carolina, (yes, a real place!) and Montreat College. The permission to use the real names helped me with the writing and apparently has helped many a reader to have personal association with the story as well. Most of the names in the books are fictional, but some are real, and those “real” characters are drawn on how I see them as my friends. I hope they take delight rather than offense.

  And finally, a very personal acknowledgment: A couple of years ago, I was speaking at a prepper conference and afterward signing books. Robin Shoemaker stepped up to the table, there was eye contact … and well … that once in a lifetime moment hit. I think the line in The Godfather is that we were hit by the “Sicilian Lightning Bolt.” The best reward of my life for writing a book.

  It’s time to close this acknowledgments and get on with the tale. If you are like me, I tend to skip the acknowledgments stuff. It is usually a lot of names I don’t recognize and definitely not the reason I purchased the book in the first place! But since my publisher is paying for the ink and paper, at least for old-fashioned printing rather than electronic, I do feel compelled to close with one final thought. The books are fiction, but the scenario could be real. It might very well be real. Our parents and grandparents of the “Greatest Generation” allowed their leaders to close their eyes to the growing threats around the world saying “it will never touch us here,” and a terrible price was paid. History has a hundred such examples. Do we read this as a novel or as a warning? If it is a warning, do we act or fall back upon “someone else will make sure this doesn’t happen?” I pray that thirty years hence, these books are forgotten as dark tales of warning that never came true. If so, I will be happy and content for my daughter and grandchildren. I pray that I never one day hear, “Bill, you were right.”

  That, my friends, is undoubtedly up to you. The issue is in our hands to, as Abraham Lincoln once said, “nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope on earth.”

  William R. Forstchen

  Black Mountain, North Carolina

  September 2015

  PROLOGUE

  730 DAYS SINCE “THE DAY”

  This is BBC News. It’s 3:00 a.m., Greenwich War Time, and this is the news for today.

  This day marks the second anniversary of the start of the war that saw the detonation of three EMP weapons over the continental United States, another off the coast of Japan, and a fifth weapon believed to have veered off course and detonated over Eastern Europe. The effects of this attack—never fully confirmed but believed to have been an act between Iranian-supported terrorists and North Korea—continue to reverberate around the world. It is estimated that upwards of 80 percent of all Americans, and more than half the population of Japan, Eastern Europe, and what had been western Russia and the Ukraine have died as a result. China has been seen as the new superpower in the wake of the attack, with significant Chinese forces, defined as humanitarian, now occupying the West Coast of the United States and Japan. Western Europe and our own United Kingdom, though spared the direct results of the attack, are still feeling the profound economic impact as the world attempts to reestablish economic and political balance. In south Asia, intense fighting continues in the wake of a limited nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India.

  The second anniversary of what most now call “the Day” was commemorated today by the king, who attended a memorial service at Westminster Abbey. After the service, a renewed pledge was made by the prime minister to help our European neighbors with their rebuilding efforts and to extend continued aid to the United States.

  More on that memorial service and the lasting impact of the Day, but first, this report from the provisional government of the United States capitol at Bluemont, Virginia. The administration’s announcement two weeks ago of the mobilization of a million men and women for the Americans’ Army of National Recovery, or ANR, is now in full swing with draft notices having been sent out in a move unprecedented since the Second World War. The majority of America’s armed forces, which were based overseas on the day of the attack, have now been deployed to the western and southern borders to contain further expansion by foreign powers.

  Therefore, the purpose of this Army of National Recovery, according to the administration, was reiterated today: to establish security in those regions within the United States still ruled by lawlessness, to restore domestic tranquility, to aid in reconstruction, and—when necessary—to augment the military presence along those borders claimed to be in dispute. Our panel of experts will discuss the implications of the creation of this new military force within the United States later in the hour.

  And this message for our friends in Montreal: “The chair is against the door.” I repeat, “The chair is against the door.”

  Now for other news from around the world …

  CHAPTER ONE

  DAY 730

  “Daddy, I’ve been drafted.”

  John Matherson, who had endured so many shocks in life, sighed, wearily sat back in his office chair, and looked up at his daughter Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s eyes revealed an aging far beyond her eighteen years, as did the eyes of nearly all of her generation. As a boy, John would gaze at the photo books about World War II; how hard it was to believe that the “old men” in the pictures really were just eighteen and nineteen … their eyes, however, revealed the inner torment of all that they had endured, features haunted and remote. They were no longer kids that should still be in high school or freshmen in college … they had aged a lifetime, often within a matter of days, and as one author described them, they were “forever aged far beyond their precious years of youth.”

  “Sit down, sweetheart.” He sighed, motioning to the far side of his desk in the town hall of Black Mountain, North Carolina, of what he hoped was still the United States of America. His desk was piled high with all the paperwork he had to deal with as the town administrator, all of it handwritten or punched out on an old Underwood typewriter.

  In the terrible months after the Day, he had finally taken on something of a dictatorial position under martial law. As some semblance of stability finally returned within the last year, he gladly surrendered those powers back to a town council. Regardless of the loss of electricity and a national infrastructure, one thing did appear to hang on—paperwork—and as town administrator, he was stuck with the job. He often looked longingly at the dead computer in the corner of his office, a relic of a bygone world that now simply gathered dust, just as the Underwood typewriter—half forgotten in a closet for years—had before their world was turned upside down.

  His former hyperclean world of daily or twice-daily showers on hot summer days, starched white shirts with clean collars, and dress shoes instead of worn boots had been replaced by once-a-week baths in a kitchen basin on Saturday night with a once-weekly, slightly bloody shave using a straight razor scavenged from an antique store to prepare for church on Sunday. Clothes were washed by hand in the creek that trickled down behind his house, and the collars of all his shirts were beginning to fray and were permanently stained with grit and sweat.

  John’s brave new world had a grimy, battered edge to it. As a historian, he used to wonder what life 150 years earlier actually did smell like, look like, feel like. He was living it now, where a crowded room during a meeting on a warm spring evening had a distinctive musky, gamy smell to it, and folks who once wore jackets and ties or neatly pressed dresses now showed up in worn jeans and wrinkled, faded shirts. Sunday was the one day of the week when people did try to scrub up, though unless someone in the household was handy with an old-fashioned nee
dle and thread, most wore suits and dresses several sizes too big. Their appearance made him think of the old daguerreotypes of a bygone era. It was rare to see someone overweight in those old photographs. Most had a lean, sinewy look, and their clothing, on close examination—except for the wealthy—a well-worn look.

  His office in the town hall had that same worn feel to it. Gone were the scents of antiseptic scrubbing and buffing, brilliant fluorescent lights on day and night, fresh coffee from a machine that would take a dollar bill, air-conditioning in summer, and electric heat in winter. All of it gone ever since the Day.

  Elizabeth still struggled to maintain some semblance of freshness with a semiclean college T-shirt and jeans and a red ribbon tied to her dark, nearly black ponytail. Her wiry frame was typical of everyone, her jeans belted tightly around her narrow waist. What little extra weight she had put on when carrying Ben a year ago was long gone

  She put a crumpled piece of paper onto his desk and pushed it across to him. He opened it up and spread it out, quietly rubbing his jaw.

  He, like everyone else, had heard rumors about an impending draft to be issued by a remote and seldom-heard-from national government that had evacuated Washington, D.C., and now functioned out of an old Cold War bunker system in northern Virginia. The vague rumors had become true with this single sheet of paper his only surviving daughter placed on his desk.

  He looked up at her again. She was eighteen, had seen war and starvation, and was already a mother, the father of her child killed in the fight against the invading Posse that had attacked their community a year and a half earlier. In so many ways, she did look like those long-ago photographs of eighteen-year-old veterans of Normandy and Iwo Jima, aged far beyond their years. But this was his daughter, his only child. He could still see the face of the newborn, the eyes of her long-deceased mother, the eyes that would well up with tears when she came for comfort for a skinned knee, the sparkling eyes of a laughing twelve-year-old, the knowing gaze of a sixteen-year-old who knew that with a glance and a smile she could still con her “daddy.” Like all parents who across the years had gazed into the eyes of their children, whom the government suddenly declared were old enough to fight and to die, his heart was filled with fear. They were taking his child away, most likely never to return.