The Final Day Read online

  Forrest shifted his gaze to the storm outside as he took one final drag clear down to the filter and let the cigarette burn out. He stood up and went to the window, pulled the flimsy curtain back, looked out, and sighed.

  “When I copped all of this in Afghanistan it was a day like this one.” He motioned again to the eye patch and the missing arm. “It was a freeze-your-ass-off day. Still haunted by the memory of all that pink frozen slush where the rest of my squad lay, blown apart, the crunching sound of footfalls on snow as the bastards who ambushed us came in to make sure we were all dead and loot our weapons and gear. That’s my memory of snow now.”

  John was silent. It was the most detail his friend, who but six months back had been an enemy who had damn near killed him, had yet said about the day he was torn apart in a war all but forgotten now.

  Several minutes passed as they silently sipped their contraband coffee, a gift Forrest would show up with occasionally with a clear “don’t ask, don’t tell” understanding between them. Forrest lit another Dunhill, smoked it halfway down, and then pinched the flame out, sticking what was left into his breast pocket.

  “To what do I owe the honor of your visit today?” John finally asked, for it was a very long trek over the mountains, requiring several gallons of precious gas for Forrest’s Polaris six-wheeler.

  “You’ve heard the BBC reports about Roanoke being pulled in with the government up in Bluemont?”

  “Yeah, I was about to suggest the state council getting together here this weekend to talk it over. It is only prudent to expect we might be next on their list.”

  “I expected an immediate response after the way we trashed their ANR unit back in the spring, and then nothing. But I think something has got to be stirring by this point.”

  “Why I said, ‘Best of times, worst of times,’” John replied, watching as the last wisps of smoke from Forrest’s cigarette coiled toward the ceiling and then disappeared.

  “‘Best of times, worst of times,’” and this time it was Forrest. “I was hoping for a winter of peace after so much crap these last few years.”

  “You think it will go bad?”

  “If you expect shit to happen, John, you’ll never be surprised when it does.”

  “Thanks for that cogent piece of advice.”

  “The price of a good cup of coffee and the offer of a cigarette. Anyhow, beyond bearing potential bad news, I thought I’d hang around here for a few days. With the storm, it’d be a good time to teach some of your kids winter survival stuff.”

  “Good idea. What made you think of it?”

  “Because before it’s done, I think they’ll be fighting a winter campaign, my friend. Up in the mountains of Afghanistan, it was colder than Valley Forge, the Bulge, even the Chosin Reservoir in Korea. The Afghans understood it; more than a few out there with me did not. I don’t want to see that again.”

  “You think it will come to that?”

  “Don’t you?”

  John did not reply. There were far too many other worries at the moment. The harvest was barely adequate to see his rapidly expanding community through the winter, especially with this early onset of autumn snow when there should have still been time to gather in additional forage. Two years ago, his worries extended only as far as Montreat, Black Mountain, and Swannanoa, but in the exuberant days after the defeat of the forces from the government at Bluemont, dozens of other communities had allied in, as far south as Flat Rock and Saluda, north to the Tennessee border, east to the outskirts of Hickory, nearly sixty thousand people in all. A tragic number when it was realized that more than a half million had once lived in the same region.

  The city dwellers who had survived in the ruins of Asheville were of course welcomed, but few came in with any kind of resources, having lived hand to mouth on what could be scavenged from that once upscale new age–oriented community. It was the backwoods communities like Marion, even Morganton, with groups surviving like the one led by Forrest who joined with a quid pro quo of skills and even access to food that really counted in what all were now calling “the State of Carolina.”

  Forrest was usually not the talkative type, and John remained silent. Something else was up with this man, and John waited him out.

  “Someone came into my camp yesterday,” Forrest finally offered. “I think you should come back with me and meet him.”

  “Who is he, and why?”

  “Some of my people found him wandering on Interstate 26. Poor bastard is pretty far gone—several ribs broken, bad frostbite, and coming down with pneumonia. He got jumped by some marauders on the road and took a severe beating. Chances are he’ll be dead in a few days, so we decided he should stay put and you come to him.”

  John did not reply. Forrest was not given to extreme reactions; months earlier, he had come into Black Mountain, leading nearly fifty of his community, after they were hit by an air attack from Fredericks’s Apaches. The man had been gut shot and kept refusing treatment until those with him were treated first. If he judged their refugee to be too sick to travel, John wouldn’t question the decision.

  “Who is he?”

  “Says he’s a major with the regular army. Claimed he served alongside you years ago. Name of Quentin Reynolds. That he was with the army that took Roanoke.”

  “Quentin?” John whispered. The name struck somewhere, but if they had served together, that was close on to a couple of decades ago.

  “Claims he was an adjutant to a General Bob Scales who’s in charge up there.”

  “Bob Scales?” And with that, John sat bolt upright. It was Bob whom he had been speaking to at the Pentagon when the EMP hit. It was Bob who had been his mentor during his army career and who had arranged through the good ole boy network his teaching position at Montreat when John left the military to nurse Mary through her final months in the town where she had grown up. “Bob is alive?”

  “He didn’t say that—just that he served with him.”

  “Still, I got to talk with him,” John said excitedly. He looked back out the window; the storm was picking up. “Think we can make it now if we left today?”

  “If it’s like this down here, I wouldn’t want to venture crossing over Craggy Gap and the Mount Mitchell range with night setting in. It was really blowing in as I came over this morning. Best let it settle down first.”

  “Damn it.” John sighed. “This Quentin, think he’ll make it?”

  “Can’t say, to be frank. Just had a gut sense I should come over and tell you. Anyhow, who is this Bob Scales?”

  “I served with him years ago and thought he had died when things went down. If he is in charge of things up in Roanoke, my God, I got to find out.”

  John’s worried thoughts were interrupted by the sight of Paul Hawkins running across the commons, head bowed low against the storm. Paul barged into the room, bringing with him a cold blast of air, Forrest cursing for him to close the damned door.

  “John, you gotta come see something now!” Paul cried, features alight with a broad grin, made rather comical by the mantle of snow dripping from his broad-brimmed hat.

  It was Paul and his wife, Becka, who had discovered the nineteenth-century journals of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, known as the IEEE, in the college library’s basement, the trade magazine for the new industry of electricity. Filled with discussions and debates about the new science of electrical engineering, complete with detailed patent applications by the likes of Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse, it was a discovery that ignited the plan to restore electricity, a “blueprint,” to bring their community back online.

  “What is it, Paul? I’m kind of preoccupied at the moment with some news Forrest brought in.” He nodded to his friend sitting in the corner.

  “Can’t explain it; you just got to see it now. You too, Forrest.”

  John looked over at Forrest.

  “You sure we can’t go back over the mountain today?” John asked anxiously.

  For
rest shook his head. “Maybe first light tomorrow.”

  John knew better than to second-guess Forrest, and he sighed. It would have to wait. He looked over at Paul, forced a smile, and nodded.

  “Well, let’s go see what has you all fired up.”

  If Paul thought there was something worth going out into a blizzard for, it had to at least be interesting.

  The two pulled on jackets and, with heads tucked down, followed Paul out into the gale, Forrest cursing all the way as they followed Paul on the walkway that led up to the old library. The storm was of such intensity that John realized Forrest was right; to cross over the six-thousand-foot-high mountain range in this weather, no matter how urgent the mission, would be suicide.

  The library, a building that architecturally had never fit into the classic native stone construction of most of the other buildings on campus, had always been a source of woe. It had leaky ceilings, and even before the Day, it had been sealed off for a semester because of the dampness and mold.

  Once into the building and his hat and scarf removed, John took a deep breath and knew his allergies would soon nail him. The main part of the building was dark, the sound of dripping water echoing. A single light shone through the swinging doorway leading into the back office, where Paul and his young wife had taken up quarters, preferring to live there rather than in so many of the well-built and now-abandoned homes and cabins that surrounded the campus. At least this part of the cavernous building was warm and cheery, a large woodstove providing heat. Becka was there, balancing a newborn twin on each arm, and John smiled at the sight of them, going up to kiss Becka lightly on the forehead.

  “How you doing, young lady?”

  “Feeling better thanks to Makala’s attention and help.” As she spoke, one of the newborns stirred, whimpered slightly, and then nuzzled back in against her mother.

  As is too often common with twins, they had been a month premature. There was a time when that was not much of a concern with nearly all hospitals providing intensive care neonatal centers. But now? The babies had come into the world in what was the community’s local hospital in the old hotel, the Assembly Inn, on the far side of campus. John’s wife, who was due herself in another two months, had taken charge, and rather than let them return to their makeshift home in the library, she had ordered the three to stay at their home, setting up a nursery in the sunroom and hovering over all three during the first crucial weeks.

  It had been an emotional experience for John, his home again echoing with the late-night cries of newborns, the sight of a very pregnant Makala up with them every night, in the morning holding one of the girls while an exhausted Becka nursed the other.

  The sunporch had been the final sickroom for his daughter, Jennifer, who died there. It was also where his mother-in-law, Jen, had slipped away. He had tried to balance all, death and new life in the same room, and in some small way, it had helped to ease his grief and heartrending memories.

  John fought down the temptation to ask to hold one of the twins for a moment. Makala had repeatedly warned that in this now heavily germ-laden world, the less exposure they had to others over the next few months, the better. Paul, after a quick kiss to Becka’s forehead and a fond look at the girls, was already pointing the way to the basement door.

  John and Forrest followed him down into the darkness, and at the bottom of the stairs, Paul flicked a switch and a single fluorescent light flickered to life. It was definitely something John and Forrest were still not really used to—a flick of a switch and a light comes on. The town’s electrical grid was still slowly expanding from its first base at Lake Susan, and half a dozen other hydro projects were under way across the State of Carolina, but electric was still strictly rationed to public facilities and even then only ran for half a dozen hours each day. Paul and Becka had a special exemption for the cavernous library basement, able to illuminate their work area by recharging old flashlights while the power was on and suspending them from the ceilings so they could continue what they called “mining the past,” and from the way Paul was acting, he must have hit pay dirt again.

  John looked around the storage area in wonder. The air was heavy with the disquieting scent of mold, mildew, mouse droppings, and tens of thousands of slowly decaying magazines and books. He paused to look at one pile that Becka said she was sifting through, a vast stack of Life magazines going back to the 1930s. The sight of it triggered memories of when he was a boy down with a bad case of the flu when his mother would come home from the library every few days with magazines from the Second World War era and the ones from the Civil War centennial of the early 1960s, inspiring his lifelong interest in the subject.

  Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post, Newsweek, Time, even a pile of Mad magazines created a nostalgic smile and also a sadness for the lost world—not just of his childhood but for everyone’s loss.

  “It’s back here, you guys!” Paul cried, pointing the way, and John felt pulled away, resolving that someday, if there ever was a someday without all his worries and concerns, he’d come back down here and perhaps just spend that day with Mad and the zany artwork of Don Martin, or dig through the stack of Boys’ Life for short stories by Ray Bradbury, or just look at the cover art for Saturday Evening Post and the lost world of Norman Rockwell. He looked over at Forrest, who was smiling as he thumbed through an aged copy of Playboy. John wondered why anyone would ever donate that to the college library book sale.

  Forrest shrugged. “I used to get it for the articles,” he said a bit defensively, and John laughed. A pleasure since laughter was now so rare in his life. “Really, I loved Jean Shepherd—you know, the guy who wrote that Christmas movie about the kid with the BB gun. Here’s one of his stories.”

  John looked over Forrest’s shoulder, a bit disbelieving, only to see it was indeed a story by “Shep,” whom he used to listen to on the radio when he was a kid and had once used the identical excuse when his mother had found his stash of the infamous magazines hidden behind his desk.

  “Come on, you two, and leave that magazine there.” Paul stood, pointing the way farther back into the rabbit warren of the basement.

  John followed him, going past a table stacked with educational tools discarded decades ago: old Dukane machines, which were thirty-five-millimeter projectors rigged to a record player, the slide changing every time there was a high-toned beep from the record—students were forever trying to imitate the sound of the beep to throw the projector off for some show for health class; overhead projectors, abandoned when PowerPoint came along; stacks of eight-track music cartridges; old classical 33 RPM records, which were useless, though older 78s were sought after thanks to those who had found hand-cranked record players in their attics and basements; mimeograph machines, which even he had tried to fiddle with after the Day, but the copying solution with its unique alcohol smell was nowhere to be found or reproduced. Just the sight of those old machines triggered a memory of the smell when a teacher handed out an assignment or bulletin, the blue ink smearing at times if still wet.

  There were IBM Selectric typewriters, a dozen or more; John had looked those over as well after the Day, hoping that maybe the ribbons could be looted for his long-ago worn-out Underwood manual typewriter. There were several Singer sewing machines, from back in the days when the college was a female-only institution and students were most likely taught home economics. Of all things, a grandfather clock caught John’s eye, something that might be worth salvaging until he saw that the weights and pendulum were fake, an electrical cord draped up over the top of the machine. And back in a corner, of all things, a pinball machine, a classic Black Knight, which he remembered was still in use in the student lounge when he had first come to teach at the college.

  Paul had stopped at a workbench in the far corner of this moldering gold mine of lost memories and lost technologies. He was smiling like a guide in a cave who was obviously proud of his domain as if he himself had created it.

  He was pointing at a tan
box, the corporate logo just above the keyboard—a more than thirty-year-old Apple IIe computer.

  “You found an antique computer and…?” John asked, voice trailing off.

  “Behold,” Paul said, still grinning, and with a flourish, he clicked the On button for the fourteen-inch monitor and then the computer.

  The screen flashed to life, the room filled with light as the screen warmed up and came into focus, displaying the Apple logo in glorious RGB color.

  John actually stepped back in amazement, almost feeling like some tribal primitive, a flash memory of the teddy bear characters in one of the Star Wars episodes, which he hated since militarily it was so absurd, going near crazy with wonder and then worshipful awe at the sight of C-3PO, floating around the tribal gathering thanks to Luke using the Force.

  “My God, it works?” Forrest gasped.

  “Hell yeah, it works!” Paul cried. “Watch this!”

  He put an old five-and-a-half-inch floppy disk into one of the disk drives; it started to whirl and click, and all three stood silent as the seconds passed, and then a tinny familiar tune barely audible echoed from the monitor’s speaker and the logo for Pac-Man flashed on to the screen.

  “Oh my God,” John whispered in awe, a deep, almost tearful nostalgia filling him. When Elizabeth was five and recovering from a long bout of the flu, his wife, Mary, had pulled their old Apple computer out of the attic, set it up by Elizabeth’s bed, and entertained her for a long rainy spring day with Mary’s favorite games the two of them had played while they were students at Duke.

  He had written his master’s thesis on that computer, needing over twenty floppy disks to store his paper on proto-computers created for gunnery control prior to World War I. He was the envy of many students and even some of the professors who were still on electric typewriters or just beginning the transition to the first IBM Micros, as they were then called. Just running the final spelling check had taken several days, which at the time seemed like a miracle versus having to pay some English major to manually check your work one final time and then hand type it yet again.