One Year After: A Novel Read online

  John did not react but knew he’d have to deal with it later.

  Shots erupted from the corner office suite that John knew was the nerve center and where Fredericks, he hoped, was most likely dug in. Sandbags had been piled around the entryway, the gunner guarding the approach collapsed and dead.

  “Fredericks, it’s over with. Your people have surrendered!” John shouted. “You got thirty seconds to come out, or we blow the rest of this apart and leave you to burn to death, because this building is coming down in flames once we pull back.”

  A broken door ever so slowly cracked open, and to John’s utter disbelief, the man was looking out at him, wearing his ubiquitous jacket and tie as if ready to head off for a noonday power lunch meeting.

  “Matherson, you could have written your own ticket, and I was ready to write it for you.”

  “Just come out slowly, you bastard. Hands up.”

  “For what? A trial by you and then a hanging?”

  John would not admit here that was precisely his intent after the crimes that Fredericks had committed, the hundreds who were dead because of him.

  “John, I was only following orders, and I suspect you do hate those five words, ‘I was only following orders.’”

  “You’re damn right, I do!” John shouted in reply.

  “Were you only following orders in Iraq? Were your minions only following orders when you executed the leaders and followers of the Posse?”

  He did not reply.

  “Greenville’s air-assault team will be here any minute, and if you kill me, John, the word will come down from Bluemont to neutron or fuel-air your precious hick village.”

  It was precisely what John feared, and Fredericks had hit a nerve.

  “Ah, I sense hesitation,” Fredericks taunted back. “So what’s it going to be, John? We talk this out like two reasonable men, or your community ceases to exist. You’d better call it now; the clock is ticking down.”

  Damn, he is good, John thought. As good as so many he had witnessed long ago, stalking the halls of power, amoral sociopaths drawn to power who, behind the smiles and handshakes and backslapping, held men and women of moral convictions and a soul-stirring love of a concept of the Republic in contempt. He knew far too many like Fredericks who, while mouthing platitudes, actually held everyone in secret disdain, because they as “leaders” knew what was best “for the people.”

  John took several steps forward. “It’s over, Fredericks. And no, I will not trade you back. You will stand trial in front of the people you ordered murdered where a jury of twelve of your peers shall decide your fate.”

  “You mean you don’t have the guts to just order me hung now, as you did that Posse leader?”

  “I hold you in contempt lower than that sick bastard I hung,” John replied. “He was driven by hunger and a twisted belief in his Satan that he worshipped. You, you son of a bitch, were driven by something far deeper and darker. You are beneath contempt.”

  John stepped closer, pistol in his hand half-raised. “Hands up, Fredericks, and step out slowly.”

  Fredericks lowered his head, and his voice began to choke up. “Okay, John, I quit, but know if you kill me, you’ve lost your best bet to negotiate your way out of things with Bluemont. I’m worth a helluva lot more to you alive than dead.”

  John sighed and nodded. The bastard was right. “Someone arrest him and get him out of here. And clear the wounded before his damned place collapses on all of us.”

  He turned his back and began to walk away, disgusted with the entire end of this affair. His rage of minutes before had cooled. Fredericks would live, and chances were, trial or not, he’d be a bargaining chip with Bluemont in the end to spare further retaliation, and then another Fredericks would eventually arrive, for vermin like him certainly did breed like lice and had been a plague since the first day that someone had figured out that while some labored, others would “administer.”

  “Down, John!”

  He barely had time to turn back when a flurry of shots echoed, stitching Fredericks across his chest. He staggered backward and collapsed into his sacred office.

  “What the hell?” John cried.

  “Bastard was drawing a gun on you,” someone said even as the sound of gunfire echoed in the foyer.

  John saw his old antagonist Ernie Franklin stepping out of the gathering that had come into the foyer to witness this final confrontation.

  “What?”

  “He drew a pimp gun and was about to blow your brains out, you damn fool. You’re a damn fool, Matherson, turning your back like that, so I covered your ass.”

  John looked about in confusion. No one spoke. There were faint grins from several as Ernie walked across the foyer, stepped over the sandbag emplacement, and leaned over Fredericks’s body. Ernie’s hands were out of view for a few seconds as he appeared to pat down Fredericks and then stood back up holding a small pistol.

  “Pimp gun. Bastard like this couldn’t even carry a real gun.” He then turned his weapon on Fredericks and put one more round into his head. Without further comment, he turned and walked out of the foyer, pausing to toss the “pimp gun” on the floor by John’s feet. “Historian, know your history. ‘Sic semper tyrannis.’”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  DAY 750

  John had called for the meeting in the Fellowship Hall of Gaither Chapel at 10:00 p.m. for a reason. His trusted team was now augmented by Forrest and also by Ernie, who had simply just bulled his way onto the town council, like it or not. It was something John did not really object to given that he had essentially done the same thing immediately after the Day. Kevin Malady was with them, as was Lee, his arm in a sling from a bullet taken in the final assault. There were also representatives from Swannanoa, a couple of police officers invited from Asheville who, word was, represented a good grasp of public opinion in the survivors of that town, one of the two the cops John had befriended long before in the first days after the war had started. There was even a doctor from Mission Hospital—which, once the fight was over and it was no longer under Fredericks’s thumb—had thrown its support into caring for the injured and wounded.

  Only a little over five thousand civilians were still alive in Asheville proper, and John had won most of them over with a most simple gesture. The ANR troops had over one hundred thousand rations stockpiled, and John decided they would be divided evenly between his community and Asheville. The following day, after the storming of the courthouse complex, a delegation had come to Black Mountain seeking John out with the request that, during the current crisis and until things were “straightened out,” he and the citizens of Black Mountain would consider a “consolidation.”

  It was a decision he could not just make on his own. Ever since the Day, there had been a deep sense of division between Asheville and Black Mountain, fueled by the leadership there in the beginning, brought together somewhat when the army was in direct control, and then driven wide open again by Fredericks. As to the old pre-army leadership—which had stayed on but faded into the back while the army occupied the town, only to reemerge after the military left and then fallen in with Fredericks—the last of it was gone. Several had died in the battle for the courthouse, and the others—so typically—had excused themselves before the fighting even broke out and tried to flee to Greenville. There were rumors that a reiver group that at times had control of the two main roads leading out of the southern mountains down to the piedmont of South Carolina had captured the group. No one was discussing the treatment quickly meted out to them.

  Both the town council and a vote by paper ballot of the community had been overwhelming to end the standoff, the more pragmatic and savvy politically noting that if they did not try to merge now and offer enough rations to stuff everyone for a couple of weeks in the immediate wake of the shocking battle fought downtown, some new bloc would try to rise up. The strain of it was that the spring planting and acres of fields now under the plow, along with the birthing of pigs and
cattle and the hatching of chickens, promised that come fall, for the first time since the start of it all, there would actually be not only enough food properly stored away to see all through the winter but even a surplus. The edge of starvation up until this current crisis seemed finally to be pushed back, but the overnight doubling of mouths to feed would again mean living on the edge.

  The alternative, though, could be infinitely worse, and the situation out in the rest of the world had helped seal the deal up, as well.

  The argument to work toward a new union carried additional weight after the conversation that occurred with—of all people—a reporter with the BBC. The radio on the captured Black Hawk could be spun through a number of frequencies, and earlier in the day, Maury had been conversing with the chopper pilots down in Greenville, trying to talk them down from any follow-up action when, of all things, someone else had chimed in, identifying himself as a BBC reporter based in Canada who had been monitoring their conversation.

  Maury had fetched John, and it had turned into a regular interview with John presenting his side of what had occurred. The signal was sketchy, wavering in and out, but John had at least been able to get a few questions answered.

  “Bluemont declares itself to be the legitimate government of the United States,” the reporter had replied. “But as for my country seeing it thus, I can’t speak to that. England is still hanging on, just barely. We were not hit by the EMP directly; that was focused more on central and eastern Europe. The power vacuum afterward has triggered fighting between Russia on one side; Poland, Germany, we’re trying to stand clear. Neither side has stepped to nukes; my government pledged its arsenal to Germany if Russia should go nuclear, and it is tense, damn tense, and your government’s decision to pop that neutron bomb over Chicago has the Chinese ready to push the button.

  “I don’t know who you really are, John Matherson,” the reporter concluded, “though there have been rumors of folks like you trying to reestablish order in spite of what is claimed to be the central government. But I can tell you this: either you take Bluemont out, or they will take you out—and in the process perhaps retrigger a nuclear war that will burn off the rest of this insane world.”

  After that, they had lost the signal, and his words had rested heavily on John’s heart. If true, this was no longer about the survival of his town and the reivers from the other side of the mountain and the frightened survivors in Asheville. It was far broader, and he dreaded the sense of responsibility it now carried.

  It was just about ten, and John nodded to his radioman to switch on his best radio, a small generator outside the room powering up to supply juice. The dial was already set, but it took a slight fiddling to bring the broadcast in clearly with the always soul-stirring ringing of Big Ben and then the always well-modulated voice of the announcer.

  This is BBC News. It is 3:00 a.m., Greenwich War Time, and here is the news first from overseas.

  Today, the federal administration of the United States in Bluemont announced a deepening crisis, declaring that twelve more administrative districts have descended into what it defined as “class-five status.” Here is a listing of those districts in alphabetical order:

  Asheville in the Carolinas, Administrative District Eleven, where it was announced that the director of that district and his entire team of ANR troops were murdered by terrorists, many of the prisoners being summarily executed.

  Bismarck in the Dakotas …

  The broadcast was drowned out by the cries of protest erupting in the room. John stood silent, gazing out the window. Ernie had brought him the report of the broadcast two hours earlier; apparently, the radio set in his enclave just below Ridgecrest had picked up the first of the early evening broadcasts.

  It really came as no surprise, though he had hoped that his conversation earlier in the day with the BBC reporter had somehow been relayed back to England. It undoubtedly had been, but at this stage, they would most certainly not claim it as fact.

  All of the radio gear Fredericks and his troops had been using in the courthouse had been lost in the fire minutes after the fighting was finished; the fire of the upper floors had so weakened the roof that the entire building started to cave in. It had cut John off from any means of reaching Bluemont to try to negotiate or at least report in as to what had really happened with the tin-pot dictator whose body had been left behind to be consumed in the flames.

  John motioned for order, and the crowd settled down in the room. He had taught many a class in this same room when a larger area was needed for special events that drew larger crowds. The acoustics were terrible, and without a mike and speakers, it could be tough to be heard at times.

  The radio was still on.

  And Syracuse, New York, Administrative District Three, where there are reports of a rebellion and the murders by terrorists of over eighty troops of the ANR.

  The administration repeated its announcement again today that the draft for the million-troop mobilization for the ANR is moving forward smoothly in most areas, cooperation with the draft being a factor in defining a district as not in rebellion, but it cautioned that those not in compliance will face the full authority of the law and appealed for those districts not yet reporting in to do so immediately. There has been no response of just how many administrative districts are in compliance so far.

  In a surprise move, the administration also announced that it is rescinding for the moment the authorization to theater commanders of the ANR to use neutron bomb weapons within the continental United States, except when receiving a direct order and release by the administration.

  The repeated queries by our embassy in Bluemont to respond to the rumor that the acting president was either forced to resign yesterday or has been removed from office have not been answered.

  Again there was an eruption of comments. That news had exploded around the world early in the day. It was one of the reasons everyone listened to the shortwave edition of the BBC; few now trusted the Voice of America for anything other than a highly censored version of the news. The implications were profound. Had the administration that sent people like Fredericks out into the field collapsed? Was there a coup d’état taking place in Bluemont? If true, were they sliding into civil war, or could one hope that more reasonable heads were prevailing and the announcement of the pullback on the use of neutron bombs was a signal of serious change?

  John kept his ear to the radio speaker, but there was no more news on that front, though there was an announcement of a discussion to ensue with various “experts” as to what might be transpiring in America.

  The crowd settled down so that the radio could be heard again.

  And for our friends in Hong Kong, “The sun is rising in the west.” I repeat, “The sun is rising in the west.” And now to our discussion about events transpiring in America today …

  John nodded for the radio to be turned off.

  “I wanted everyone here,” John announced, “representing the town council of Black Mountain, Montreat, and Swannanoa—along with our friends from Asheville and representatives from the group some called the Mount Mitchell Reivers—to gather together in one place, garner what news we can from the outside, and decide if we will henceforth move forward in mutual accord. This could go on for some time, perhaps most of the night. I guess I’m stuck with moderating, and I will ask that those representing different perspectives try to limit themselves to five minutes. Let’s work toward points of mutual agreement rather than tear each other apart. We have a rare chance here to settle issues that have divided us for far too long. Let’s bury them here and now.”

  He looked around the room. “There is one issue I have to present to you first before we move on to other business, and I am afraid I’ll have to hold the floor for this one.”

  All knew what he was about to raise and fell silent.

  “It is impossible at the moment to raise Bluemont. The communications gear to do so was destroyed in the fight at the courthouse. It was undoub
tedly on a secured scrambler, so we are in the dark there. I have tried to reach out to Greenville by radio, so far without success other than conversations between Maury and the chopper pilots. At least from that, those pilots know our situation, and Maury feels they just might disobey orders if directed to attack us. They have made no aggressive moves toward us yet. I pray it stays that way. If we cannot raise them within the next few days, I’m asking our friends who lived north of Mount Mitchell to head down toward Highlands, talk with the folks there, and see if they’ll honor letting a convoy with a team to visit Greenville to pass safely. Also, that will open up a conversation with folks in the southern mountains to consider joining in with us.”

  There were nods of approval to that.

  “What do you think Greenville will do?” someone in the back of the room asked.

  “I can’t say for sure. We do know that when the fight was on in Asheville, they did send several attack choppers up, but they stopped while over Hendersonville and the Asheville airport, one of the pilots repeatedly asking for a decision as to whether to go in or not. They turned back about when their signal to the courthouse was lost. We do have the radio in the captured Black Hawk. Maury Hurt has raised one of their pilots several times, told him what happened here and why, and made it clear we had no desire to see any more Apaches up here and will react accordingly. I listened in and felt that the pilot Maury was talking to was of the same accord and less than happy with the prospect of turning his weapons, as he said, ‘on our own people.’ So I want to believe there are second thoughts down there, perhaps even at least an ‘administrator’ we can deal with in a friendly fashion.”