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  A ritual John had insisted on was now enacted, the group turning to face an American flag in the corner of the room and recite the Pledge of

  Allegiance, and then Kate led them in a brief prayer before Charlie announced the meeting was now in order.

  “I hate to jump the gun on the agenda, but I’ve got something important,” John said.

  “What?”

  “Outside news.”

  “Well, for God’s sake, man, why didn’t you say something when you came in?” Charlie asked.

  “Everyone was excited about the phone, and well, frankly, some of it isn’t all that good.”

  “Go on; tell us,” Kate said.

  “There’s a station on the radio now. Voice of America.”

  “Wow. When?” Kate cried.

  “I was driving last night, fiddling with the dial on the car, and it came in clear as day.”

  “The radio?” Charlie shouted. “Tell us about it. My God, we got radio again!

  “The old radio in the Edsel. I don’t know, I was just fooling with the dial and suddenly it came in loud and clear, frequency at the old Civil Defense band. We sat there listening to it for a half hour or so, then atmospheric skip and it faded.”

  “We?” Kate asked.

  He didn’t reply. Makala had come down to join them for a meal and check on Jennifer and he was just driving her back to the conference center, which was now the nursing home and isolation ward for incoming refugees who were allowed to stay.

  “So what the hell is going on?” Tom asked.

  “They’re broadcasting off the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, part of our fleet stationed in the Persian Gulf when things started. They beelined it back here. They said the carrier was somewhere off the coast of the United States and was now the command post for relief and recovery operations.

  “They said that help is on the way. Kept repeating that every five minutes. Said the nation is still under martial law.”

  “No news there,” Kate said.

  “What kind of help?” Tom asked.

  “Didn’t say, other than relief supplies are coming from Britain, Australia, and India and China.”

  “India and China?” Charlie asked.

  “Yes, struck me as strange. That earlier report about a weapon detonated over the western Pacific.”

  “Who we fighting?” Tom asked.

  “Didn’t say. Just that allied forces are fighting, in Iran, Iraq, Korea. Good news is that Charleston, Wilmington, and Norfolk have been declared emergency restructuring centers.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Kellor asked.

  “I guess it means if we have some kind of functional assets overseas that didn’t get hit, ships that can provide electrical power, aircraft, trained personnel, they’d be coming back here and those are three local places.”

  “Charleston is the nearest, two hundred and fifty miles away,” Charlie sighed. “That won’t help us a damn bit.”

  “I know,” John said.

  “What about the war?” Tom asked.

  “Anything beyond the three cities?” Kate interjected.

  “Nothing else. Oh yeah, the president is the former secretary of state. She’s in charge.”

  No one spoke at that news.

  “Apparently the president died aboard Air Force One; they got him up in the air and the plane wasn’t hardened sufficiently to absorb the pulse. They didn’t say what happened to the vice president or Speaker of the House.”

  “Nothing really that affects us directly,” Charlie said, and no one replied. Strange, the death of a president and now we say it doesn’t affect us, John thought.

  “That was it. Then they played music.”

  “What?” Charlie cried. “Music?”

  “Patriotic stuff. ‘God Bless America,’ it faded out with the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’.”

  John looked around the room.

  “At least we know they’re out there.”

  “The legendary ‘they,’” Kellor replied coldly. “Doesn’t help us here and now with what I’ve got to talk about.”

  “Go on,” Charlie said. “In fact, what you just told us, John, depresses the hell out of me. The thought that they’re so close. Hell, a month and a half ago a C-130 loaded with medical supplies could have flown here in an hour from Charleston. Now it’s like they’re on the far side of the moon.

  “Doc, why don’t you go ahead.”

  “Only thirteen deaths yesterday,” Doc said, and there was a murmur of approval, the lowest number since they had started to keep count. “Two were heart attacks; two, though, were our dialysis patients. I think that is the last of them. Everyone in our communities who was on dialysis is now dead.”

  No one spoke.

  “We also lost one of our diabetics.”

  Again no one spoke, but John felt eyes turning towards him. Of course they knew. He stared straight ahead, saying nothing. “And we had a birth.”

  “Who?” Kate asked.

  “Mary Turnbill. A healthy six-pound baby girl. Named Grace America Turnbill.”

  “Damn, that’s good,” Tom said out loud.

  “Eight births so far, and only one lost child and mother. Not much of a statistical base yet, but still it’s better than average compared to a hundred and fifty years ago.”

  “Good work, Doc,” Charlie said.

  “Well, I better go from that to the downside of things. In one sense we are in what I would call the grace period right now, the calm between storms. Our initial die-off in the first days, those needing major medical intervention, the first round of food poisoning, those woefully out of shape, as you know, approximately twelve hundred deaths out of ten thousand, five hundred total here in Black Mountain and Swannanoa. We still don’t have an exact figure on those who got in the first few days, but it had to be well over a thousand, so let’s put our total number at twelve thousand, now back down to roughly ten thousand or so.”

  “That doesn’t count the casualties from the fighting at the gap, and refugees dying outside the barrier,” Tom interjected.

  “No, I’m only counting those who died of natural causes at the moment. What I’m saying is that those who would die quickly have pretty well died off. Across the next fifteen days or so the numbers should be fairly low as long as we keep the community stable and nothing exotic sneaks in on us, but then, I hate to say, it’s going to start sliding up again and within thirty days be far worse than anything we’ve seen so far.”

  Kellor hesitated, looking at John for a moment. Kellor knew his secret regarding the stash of insulin.

  “Nearly all our type one diabetics will die this month. The pharmacies, in general, allocated one bottle of a thousand units per person. That supply is now running out for them. So we can expect all of them, approximately a hundred and twenty in our communities, to start dying.”

  No one spoke.

  “Other deaths in the coming month: severe asthmatics running short on their rescue inhalators, severe heart arrhythmia patients running out of beta-blockers, so I expect we are in the middle of the lull before the next wave hits.

  “There is another issue as well, though, that I don’t think many of us thought of, but Tom, you better start gearing up for it and we might have to start thinking about taking over a building as another isolation ward.”

  “What for?” Kate asked.

  “Severe psychosis.”

  “You mean insanity?” Tom asked. “Hell, we’re already seeing enough crazies coming in at the gap. And the suicides as well over the last month. I think we’re all half-crazy now.”

  “Well, it’s going to get a lot worse within a matter of days,” Kellor said.

  “Why within days?” Tom interjected.

  “About a quarter of the population was on antidepressants or antianxiety agents. Prozac, Xanax, Lexapro, even just plain old lithium. Most of those people rushed to the pharmacies and stocked up, but even then, on average a person got at best a thirty-day supply. />
  “They’re running out now. Withdrawal for some won’t be too bad; for others symptoms will be quite severe, including hallucinations. Compound that with the stress we are under already. As an old-time doc I’ll be the first to tell you quite a few on these meds were just mildly neurotic, living in a very pampered society where it was almost obligatory to have some sort of disorder. But seriously, roughly five percent of the population do have severe disorders, and one to two percent dangerous disorders that include severe paranoia and potential for highly aggressive behavior.”

  “In other words, expect a lot of insanity,” Tom said.

  “You’ll be the one dealing with it,” Kellor replied, “and I think your people better be briefed on it. Not too long ago in our past families suffered with it, keeping their crazy uncle Louie restrained or locked away, or shipped them to state hospitals which were indeed snake pits. Where do you think the word ‘bedlam’ came from? It was the hospital for the insane in eighteenth-century England and, if you saw the old prints, a true hellhole.

  “We haven’t dealt with this ever since all the modern meds started coming out in the sixties and seventies. That and the changing of laws that pretty well stopped involuntary commitment except in extreme cases emptied the hospitals.

  “If it was back fifty years ago, at least a hundred of our fellow citizens would be already under some form of restraint, either at home or in a state institution. Now they are with us and the medications that kept them somewhat stable are gone. Hundreds more are in varying degrees of instability as well. What I’m trying to get across is that we’ll have upwards of a thousand people in our community who are in varying degrees of psychological unbalance, not related at all to the crisis but instead to their forced withdraw from medications. And at least fifty to a hundred will be extremely dangerous, to themselves or to others. Severe paranoids, schizophrenics, delusional personalities, several living here with criminal pasts but who were declared insane, treated, then released back into the community. I think, Charlie, you are going to have to authorize me to be able to declare people to be mentally unstable and to then incarcerate them by force. We’ll need then to find people to tend to them, and also decide how we deal with food distribution to them.”

  Charlie sighed, rubbing his beard, and then nodded.

  “I authorize you to have the authority to declare a person to be mentally deranged and to have them incarcerated, if need be against their will or that of their family. Tom, you will be responsible for arrest. I’ll post that notice later today.”

  Kellor nodded.

  “I think in at least thirty or forty cases we should move preemptively, meaning now, even if they still have some meds left. As a doctor, I know which of my patients were truly over the edge long before this happened. Patients who had repeated hospitalizations and incidents. Tom, you would know some of them, too, from incidents that led to their going to a psychiatric unit or jail. I think we should grab those people now before it gets bad.”

  “One thing,” John said quietly.

  “Go on.”

  “Keep in the back of our minds how that power was also used to lock up those that neighbors just didn’t like, political dissenters, and, in a darker time, the belief that insanity was satanic and the resulting witch hunts. We got a couple small churches in this community that are already preaching that this disaster is God’s punishment to a sinful nation, and/or that it is now the end-time. I never thought about what Doc here was saying in regards to mass psychosis, but we might see some of these deranged people being seen either as prophets if they have a good gift for gab even though they’re crazy or, on the other side, demonically possessed.”

  “Damn, this is starting to sound medieval,” Kate sighed.

  “We are medieval, Kate,” John shot back. “If we got people going off the deep end, and definitely if there is prior record of severe mental disorder, yes indeed, we’ll have to lock them up, for everyone’s protection. All we need is a bunch of people following some mad prophet around or a mob stoning a witch and it could come to that, but it’s a fine line and we can’t go overboard on it. We all know the news leaking in from Knoxville about that crazy cult; we don’t want even the beginnings of it here.”

  John looked over at Kellor, who nodded in agreement.

  “And one other item related to this,” Kellor said. “Alcohol. The rush on the ABC store pretty well cleaned it out on Day One and the looting afterwards finished it.”

  John found himself thinking about single-malt scotch, the few ounces left in his bottle behind the desk.

  “So the drunks, the hard-core alcoholics, are out by now, and that can get tough. My concern: some will try anything for a drink, trying to distill it.”

  “Every ear of corn goes to food,” Charlie snapped. “We catch anyone trying to steal corn to turn into booze and there will be hell to pay.”

  “Not that, Charlie. I mean trying to distill out of any potential source, right down to people thinking they can get something out of hydraulic fluid. I’ve already got one idiot blinded because of wood alcohol. That’s going to go up as well.”

  “A dry community,” Kate chuckled softly. “We were for a long time after the Depression. Guess we are again.”

  “Now down to the harder issue,” Kellor continued. “Food.”

  There were sighs around the table.

  “With the cutting of rations yet again, we are, at best, doling out little more than twelve hundred calories a day per person. Our reserve stockpiles are down to not much more than ten days. I am going to have to suggest a further cut, by a third or so, to extend that out to fifteen days.”

  “What I was thinking as well,” Charlie replied.

  “What about the food on the hoof, cattle, pigs, horses?”

  “We’ve gone through a third of that stock, and we must stretch that reserve out as long as possible.”

  “For how long?” Kate asked.

  “The radio, though,” Tom said. “If things are coming back online down on the coast, hell, help might be up here in another month or two. All they need is one diesel-electric locomotive and it can haul ten thousand tons of food and supplies.”

  “Easier said than done,” John announced. “When we got hit, every train on every track in the country stalled. It’s not like a highway, where you just move around it. Once they get some locomotives working, every stalled train on every line will have to be pushed somewhere to clear the line. All switches will have to be set manually.

  “I’ve been hoping the folks up at Smoky Mountain Railroad might actually get something running with their steam locomotive, their track actually connects down into Asheville, but there hasn’t been a word about it.

  “Whatever help is coming in now, it will be from the coast. We are now like America of two hundred years ago. Get a day’s walk in from the coast or a major river and you are in wilderness. So don’t plan anything here with the hope that just maybe the legendary ‘they’ will show up.”

  “Maybe isn’t definite,” Charlie replied. “I agree with John on this one. Think of it, Tom; let’s say the navy did steam into Charleston. There’s a million people there without food. Anything beyond spitting distance of the sea I’m not optimistic for right now. Doc, tell us what you are thinking.”

  “The rations are running short,” Kellor said. “Compounded by the fact that more and more of our locals are applying for ration cards as well, now that their own food stocks have run out. So even as we run out, there are more mouths to feed.”

  John had yet to apply for ration cards for his family. He had always been proficient with a rifle, and using the .22 he had nailed several possums, a number of squirrels for the dogs, and remarkably, just the day before, a torn turkey that had been such a feast that he had invited the Robinson family up to join them, Lee Robinson actually producing a quart bottle of beer and canned corn for the occasion. Makala had been there as well with a chocolate bar she had kept stashed away. Even the dogs had been given some s
craps.

  The possums, well, they reminded John of the old television series where Granny was always talking about possum pie. Jen was horrified when he had brought the first one in, she tried roasting it in the stove out on the deck, a disaster, but they were learning, even though the darn things were greasy as hell.

  “You realize that if we cut back to around nine hundred calories a day we are at nearly the same level as the siege of Leningrad. Resistance is already down; the average person has lost at least fifteen pounds or more. For many that’s actually damn good, but now we start getting into the body eating itself, and not just the reserve fat most Americans carry around.

  “Strength will be impacted significantly and I want to talk more about that in a few minutes. For the general population on rations the impact is going to start kicking in within the next couple of weeks. Immunological systems in everybody are weakening, meaning if that flu down in Old Fort gets up here, it will be like the 1918 epidemic that killed nearly two million in America. I’d estimate ten percent of us dying in a matter of days if flu breaks out. I think, Charlie, that we will have to shut down our free passage through the gap or change the procedure. Lord knows how many flu carriers are walking along our interstate every day heading west.”

  Charlie sighed and looked over at John and Tom.

  “We do that,” Tom said, “there’ll be more riots. Getting those people moving further west has prevented any more problems since the big riot of two weeks back.”

  “I agree with Tom,” John said. “Block the barrier, we’ll have a buildup of a couple of thousand again within days, even more desperate than the first wave, and it will be a bloody fight. Let them through, but drill our people on extra caution.”

  “They’re wearing the hazmat suits already,” Charlie said.

  “Yeah, and most likely taking them off with their bare hands, not washing down properly.”

  He sighed.

  “It’ll most likely jump no matter what we do. People are not just staying on the roads; they’re crawling up through the woods.”

  “I’m getting reports of that,” Tom said. “Strangers breaking into houses, then running back up into the woods when someone shows up. Most likely outsiders.”