One Year After: A Novel Read online

  John grasped his hand and squeezed it. “You won this one for us, gunny, knocking out that Apache,” John said, voice even, the man’s eyes drifting out of focus. “Semper fi.”

  “Didn’t get time to fire the second one. Did it get away?”

  John held his hand tightly. “You got both with that one shot, Sergeant.”

  “Incoming!”

  John crouched down, the gunny’s stretcher-bearers dropping him down and covering him with their own bodies.

  The shell detonated fifty yards to the north. They were definitely bracketed, most likely a firing position staring down their throats atop Beaucatcher Mountain.

  “Get it up, Maury! Get it up!” John shouted.

  The speed of the rotors picked up, Maury working the collective to get the feel of it, sound changing to the distinctive helicopter thwump, thwump, thwump. For a brief instant, it flashed John back to Desert Storm, the fleet of helicopters passing overhead in the opening moments of the attack into Iraq.

  John ducked back down, and the next mortar round blew just twenty yards away, over near where the wounded were waiting to be loaded onto trucks. More screams echoed even above the roar of the Black Hawk as it lifted half a dozen feet, dropped back down, and began to lift yet again. Then its tail swung violently, nearly crashing into John so that he dived for the pavement. As the chopper swung back the other way and started rising straight up, another mortar round exploding in the wreckage of the burning Apache.

  “Come on! Get out! Get out!” John cried, and he could see that most of his personnel were ignoring the incoming, looking up at the captured Black Hawk as if willing it to get up and away. It banked slightly, nearly drifting into the roof of the mall, rotating drunkenly, nose edging over, and then it just sped off into the darkness toward Black Mountain, disappearing into the night.

  Another mortar round clipped the procession of prisoners, dropping several along with one of his guards. Grace shouted for them to run down the street to where the flatbed truck waited, John crying for the ambulances to back up, as well.

  A thought seized him, and he shouted for one of his troops standing nearby to run down to the prisoners and bring back their captain, and then he ordered everyone to take cover inside the mall.

  There was no need for urging. John shoved Kevin Malady through a shattered doorway, his ham radio operator behind him. Lee Robinson brought up the rear, cursing out John for being in the middle of it all.

  Within was a dark and haunting sight. He remembered the weekly trip here with Elizabeth and Jennifer years earlier and the ritual of having to drag Jennifer past where the Disney Store had been, negotiating with her as to whether she wanted a Beanie Baby that week or one of the Disney stuffed animals—they cost more and were equal to two Beanies—Economics 101 for a four-year-old. Though painful in a way to recall, he did smile for an instant as he gazed down the darkened corridor, as if half expecting to see his little girl alive again.

  Beside her would be Elizabeth, reaching the age where she would slow at the sight of the gaudy jewelry offered at a corridor kiosk, and then they would head to the food court for a snack before going across the street for a movie, where minutes earlier he had ducked low along the roadside to avoid getting shot.

  All of it was abandoned ruins, completely looted out in the first week after the Day, though there was hardly a store in the vast complex that contained a single item necessary for survival. Much of it had then been burned by looters gone wild and left to sink into moldy ruin. Once one of the iconic images of affluent American society, a shopping mall, it was now a ghost building filled with ghost memories. He turned away from the memories to examine the building they were in.

  The huge Sears building had been turned into a barrack and storage area for the chopper crews and their security team. There was even an electrical generator still running, some fluorescent lights casting an eerie glow on the ruins of fire-gutted wreckage—shattered display cases, a mannequin with a broken face sporting what would have been the summer fashion of two years earlier, debris of a squatter’s camp, most likely driven out by the arrival of Fredericks’s troops. A disquieting stench of moldy, decaying clothing and waste hung over it all. The wreckage had been pushed back to make way for nearly a hundred bunks, a chow line, and storage area in what had once been the first-floor section devoted to tools and automotive supplies, which of course had been one of the first areas looted.

  Several mortar shells crumped onto the ceiling high overhead, but nothing collapsed down from the upper floor.

  “Malady, post security. Once the annoyance stops outside, get people into their supply trucks and move them into hiding; get others to check out what we have here.”

  John took a moment to get on the radio and announce in the clear. “We have one chopper—a Black Hawk—coming back. It is definitely ours.”

  If Fredericks was monitoring that, it would certainly set him off, and he could imagine the cheers erupting back in Black Mountain.

  “Prepare the hospital for at least fifty more wounded coming in.”

  He clicked off and looked around as his troops, many armed with flashlights, began to search about, and as they rifled the personnel bunkers, there were cries of excitement as MREs, snacks, comfortable sleeping bags, and personal items were snatched up.

  “All right, people, listen up!” John shouted, his voice echoing in the cavernous room. “Personal looting stops now. Second squad to secure a perimeter around this building. They won’t take their defeat lying down and might try coming back before dawn. Set up firing positions as you were trained to do, keep back from the doors, and stay low. I want the chow area secured by first squad and what rations we can find, one only to then be distributed to each of you. Third squad to that storage area over there; I bet we’ll find one helluva stash of weapons and ammunition. Fourth squad to the vehicles outside once the shelling stops, and get them moved. Keep your ears open and ready to run if the shelling resumes. If any of the fuel bladders have not been hit, find a way to move the damn things. They’ll weigh several tons each and that is gold for us.”

  He turned back to his radioman and clicked back on again. “Reserves, move to objective two, then hold in place.”

  Within the half hour, he wanted them holding the southeast-facing pass of Interstate 240 cutting through Beaucatcher and the old tunnel of Tunnel Road.

  John came up to Kevin and put a hand on his shoulder. “Pick out half a dozen of your best, and find the surviving reivers with us; they should be good at this. Give them fifteen minutes to rest and get something to eat, and then I want them to get up atop Beaucatcher Mountain, hunt down that mortar team and any observers, and take them out.”

  Kevin nodded.

  “And, Kevin, what was the butcher bill?”

  Kevin sighed and shook his head. “Didn’t have much time to tally it yet.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cluster of dog tags that had been manufactured for every serving soldier in the town’s battalion, stamped with name, blood type, and next of kin. “I’ve collected eighteen of these so far.”

  He offered them to John, but John did not take the burden. There would be time later after the fight was truly finished.

  “Let’s see what we’ve captured,” John said softly, a reassuring hand on Kevin’s shoulder, “and what can be used immediately.” He looked at his wristwatch. It was ten past four local time. All of this in little more than an hour. Sunrise in another hour and a half, and then to the next step, which he prayed would end without another fight. “Where’s the captain we took prisoner?”

  Malady gestured to where one of his troops was escorting the girl. Someone had tied her hands behind her back.

  “Wake me at six, but I want to talk with her first.”

  John went over to the prisoner, and as he approached, he drew out his pocketknife and snapped it open. At his approach with knife drawn, the prisoner looked terrified, and that reaction filled him with pity. The kid thought he was going to
kill her.

  “Deirdre, turn around, please.”

  She just stood their gazing at him.

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, Deirdre, I’m just going to cut your handcuffs off. Now turn around.”

  She complied, still nervous, as he carefully sawed through the twist of rope that bound her wrists while telling the prisoner’s guard to get something to eat and relax.

  Once freed, Deirdre turned back to face him, rubbing her wrists. “Thank you, sir.”

  “I have your word you won’t try to bolt?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Fine, then. Now let’s go over to your food supply, find something to eat, sit down, and talk.”

  He let her lead the way to where a small crowd was rummaging through shipping boxes stamped with the old FEMA logo containing old commercially packaged cans. He pulled out one stamped Bacon and Eggs and a plastic-wrapped packet of utensils. He motioned for her to lead the way, and she walked over to a small temporary cubicle.

  “This was my bunk,” she announced as she sat down on the collapsible camp bed. He looked around. Pinned to the canvas wall that had offered her a modicum of privacy were half a dozen photos.

  “Your family?” he asked, his gaze lingering on what was obviously her college graduation day.

  She nodded.

  “Mind if I look?”

  “No, sir.”

  He unclipped the photo and held it close, examining it with his flashlight. Deirdre was in the middle, beaming with pride, holding her diploma, a tall young man by her side, elderly couples to either side of them, several children in their early teens on both sides and standing in front of her. He forced a smile, yet another frozen memory of the time that was lost, and he respectfully handed the photograph to her. “Who is in the picture?”

  She did not reply.

  “If you don’t want to talk, Deirdre, I understand. I have a photo of my daughter in my wallet. She died from diabetes. It’s still hard for me to talk about.”

  Deirdre looked at the photo, hands shaking slightly.

  “That’s my parents to my right. My fiancé, Jim.” She paused. “He was going on to med school at Rutgers. Those are his parents. The kids are his younger brothers and sisters.”

  He did not reply. Either she would end it with that or, in a moment, blurt out the rest.

  “My parents owned a nursery for roses. I was helping them to run the business side of it.” She sighed and then chuckled. “What with the way developments had swept through the area, land value was through the roof. I kept telling them to sell the place; they were sitting on millions, but they loved their rose business. When everything hit the fan, it was only a matter of days before we got looted. As if a dozen acres of a rose farm actually had anything of value to keep you alive. That’s when Daddy got killed.”

  She continued on, falling into a monotone, a recounting of the horrors that to John had become all so familiar, the story of survivors, repeated over and over in a flat, emotionless tone, the story of a nation going into collapse.

  She and her mother managed to scratch by until the first winter, thanks to a small garden. Fending off other groups of looters, killing a rapist, not being so successful with killing the second one until after he fell into a drunken sleep, waiting for her fiancé to show up but never hearing from him again, her mother dying of pneumonia the first winter … it was a somber, ten-minute recounting of horrors spoken of without emotion.

  “When I heard of the ANR, they had set up a recruiting station in Princeton. I joined. I actually believed their line that they were helping to rebuild America, and besides, it was a couple of real meals a day, and frankly, it was safety, as well. They were taking anyone who walked through the door voluntarily. An hour later, they said I’d make officer. I went into a training camp at the university campus, and it darn near felt like heaven at first. A warm building, real food … I actually put ten pounds back on within a month, and then they shipped us out.

  “My first tour of duty was guarding the approach out of New York City. My unit was down in Hoboken with orders to shoot anyone trying to get across the river.”

  “What?”

  She gazed at him and shook her head. “Didn’t you hear, sir? Plague, ebola—you name it—was rampant on the other side of the river. Rumor was there was still a hundred thousand or so living in the wreckage. It was medieval, the way the city was still burning. Hard to believe anything could still be found to burn. Those trying to get out we were ordered to shoot on sight.”

  “And did you?”

  She sighed. “At first, I couldn’t. Tried warning shots. They’d be in rafts, small boats, even some trying to swim across. But after a while, it was them or us.” She lowered her head.

  “Yeah, I helped shoot them. We were told if any of us even touched one of them, we would be shot, as well.” She looked up at him. “What would you have done, sir?”

  He had no reply for her question. “Go on, tell me the rest.”

  “After that my unit was pulled with orders to report to Bluemont for special training.”

  He sat up a bit at the mention of Bluemont. At last, someone who had actually been there other than Fredericks.

  “What did you see? Did you meet the new president? Is the government really up and functioning?” The eagerness in his voice was obvious.

  She sighed and shook her head. “I didn’t see anyone other than our trainers. Our unit was there for a month of advanced infantry training in urban combat. Sorry, sir, but that’s all I saw.”

  He sat there silent, frustrated.

  “We thought it weird. I mean, I had some interest in history, even thought of majoring in it in college. Old films of presidents and generals talking with troops. Morale boosting and all of that. We just went into an encampment in a town nearby that any surviving civilians had been cleared out of and practiced taking buildings. Rumors were that we were going to be sent to the Midwest. No one wants to go to Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and that had us worried.”

  “Why?”

  “Haven’t you heard the news?”

  “We tune into BBC, that’s about it.”

  She shook her head. “Other ANR units were coming in, same as us. Forming up into battalion-level strength. We bunked in with a unit recruited out of Ohio. They said most of that part of the country is level five. Gangs forming into their own armies, some of them nut job religious cults, others just, well, just barbarians.”

  He thought of their own fight with the Posse but said nothing, just letting her go on as she talked about the rumors, the execution of a trooper who tried to desert, the fact that there appeared to be an abundance of food and supplies—at least in the Bluemont area—that lulled them all into compliance, and then finally the wave of fear when their company was pulled out of the assignment to Chicago with orders to accompany a new administrator to North Carolina.

  “Why fear?”

  She hesitated.

  “Go on. There’s nothing to be afraid of now, Deirdre. Once all this gets straightened out, I’m giving prisoners with the ANR the option of staying on with us or trying to make their way back to their homes.”

  “Really, sir?”

  He actually reached out and took her hand. She was only a couple of years older than the students who formed his own “army,” and though battle hardened, he still at many times saw them as his kids.

  “We were told that you people didn’t take prisoners. And like I said earlier, me being black, we were told…” Her voice trailed off.

  “Those sons of bitches,” he whispered.

  She just looked at him.

  If her words were the truth, it was a stunning revelation of just who was in charge in Bluemont and reinforcement that his decision not to comply, to fight back, was the right one.

  “Remember, I’m from Jersey too,” he finally replied.

  “Which exit?” she asked with a touch of a smile, offering the old standard joke.

  “Near Exit 150 off the GSP.”r />
  “Around Newark?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t sound it now, sir.”

  “Live here for a while; it changes things.”

  He smiled and then turned serious, feeling that they had broken down barriers a bit. “I first came south over thirty years ago to go to Duke. Yeah, all the old stereotypes had me going too. Friends up north used to joke that I’d wind up like that guy in the movie Deliverance.”

  “They actually showed us that movie one night. Said things had reverted back to that way down here.”

  “Those bastards.” John sighed. It was the standard routine of dividing one off against the other with fear. No wonder the prisoners were petrified. Some of the reivers were definitely tough looking, but to play on that sick stereotype? “So you got shipped down here and thought we were all toothless rednecks and moonshiners?”

  “Yeah, something like that. The entire unit is recruits from Jersey. I did start to wonder about that, why were they shipping us here and taking recruits from down here and shipping them up north.”

  “Standard routine, Deirdre. Never set one’s own people against their neighbors and kin. Tell them the other side is different and hates you. They were going to take a hundred or so from my community and offered me the job of major general.”

  “You a major general?” she asked, obviously surprised.

  “Something like that.”

  “And you turned it down?”

  “Again, something like that. It’s kind of what this entire fight is all about.”

  She was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry, sir. We didn’t know. We were kept separate from the day we got here. Told any of the civilians we encountered could be terrorists and all of you were in open rebellion against the new government.”

  “If you guys had been allowed just a few days’ leave to mingle about a bit, you’d have seen different. We’re still Americans here.”

  “What about Chicago, Cleveland, places like that?”

  “I know just about as much as you do, Deirdre. Yeah, we faced gangs, and chances are they’re still out there. But most of us who survived the Day? I think we want nothing more than to come together again as a country and rebuild. Instead, it seems like some are turning us against each other.”