The Final Day Read online

  “Not exactly,” Paul replied.

  “It’s like this, and it applies to us now,” John said, taking a deep breath, feeling a bit of calmness coming back with this diversion. Grief was a luxury in this world, especially for him, the one that far too many looked to for strength. Later, if still troubled, he’d let it back out when alone with Makala, though even after their more than two years together, he still felt uncomfortable when memories of his long-departed first wife troubled him. He had loved Mary deeply, but it was different from what he now felt for Makala, where there was a more mature intensity and a sense that she was truly his equal partner in all things.

  “I’m all ears for this history lesson,” Ernie interjected, and now he did smile. It was at least one area where Ernie really did defer to him, and there was no sarcasm in his voice.

  “Think about it,” John continued. “It is an unanswered question I find to be fascinating. Modern eyeglasses were being manufactured by glassmakers in Italy as early as the fourteenth century. They could even grind them for each individual’s needs. They used to be given as a symbol of achievement to scholars at universities of that time, since most of them had gone half-blind after years of studying manuscripts in dark rooms like this illuminated only by candlelight.

  “Across three hundred or so years, lens grinders were making glasses, and the question is, how come not one of them, even by accident, one day held up one lens in front of another and had the ‘oh my God’ moment that the two lenses, one in front of the other, were a telescope?”

  He fell silent and now smiled inwardly, the grief of a moment before pushed aside. It was almost like being back in the classroom again—and this time, even Paul and Becka were listening.

  “Then some guy in Holland, can’t remember his name, actually does that and does go ‘Oh my God!’ He put the lenses into opposite ends of a leather tube. Thus the first telescope.”

  The four were silent for a moment, and he wondered if they were caught up as he had always been with the fascination of this question of why three hundred years had passed when the tools were there literally on any lens maker’s bench.

  “So you’re saying that that stuff for telescopes lay around for three hundred years and nobody thought to do it?” Forrest asked.

  “For starters, yes.”

  “I remember this Italian girl in the dorm across the commons from my room when I was in college; we had a telescope aimed at her window 24-7,” Ernie interjected. “You’d think one of those Italian glassmakers would have figured that out.”

  John sighed. There was always someone in a class to blow away a teaching moment, and even Becka laughed, commenting that was exactly why every girl in Anderson Hall always kept her blinds down.

  “You’re losing the point,” John finally interjected, a bit exasperated.

  “Please continue,” Becka replied, though there was still a touch of a smile as she looked over at Paul.

  “So this guy in Holland makes the first telescope, and—typical then and now—the government gets wind of it and tries to clamp down a security lid on the whole thing.”

  “Why?” Paul asked.

  “Military secret,” Forrest said, and John nodded. “In Afghanistan, we were under strictest orders to smash our night-vision gear if we ever thought we were going to be overrun. They had stuff they had captured from the Russians years earlier, but nowhere near as good as ours. He who sees first or sees farthest wins.”

  “Exactly what happened,” John continued. “Holland was fighting a bitter, decades-long war with Spain—actually, the Hapsburg Empire—for their independence. A ten-power telescope at sea gave them a huge advantage, when from miles away you could tell if that ship on the horizon was friend or enemy, to run or to fight. But like with all weapon systems, the secret doesn’t remain secret for long, and soon the word was out.”

  “Same as today,” Ernie said softly. “I still want to get my hands on the damn idiots who allowed North Korea and Iran to get the bomb.”

  “So do we all.” John sighed, and again the thought … surely someone knew before they were hit. Surely someone knew it was coming.

  He let the thought drop for now, for it most certainly would take him back to his melancholia of but minutes ago.

  “Anyhow, to finish this little class,” he said, clearing his throat. “And this is the really interesting part. Galileo receives a circular letter, sort of like the trade journal of his day, from a friend describing this new invention. Being Italian, in Renaissance Italy, he goes to a lens maker and shows him the design, and he now has his own telescope to fool around with and then starts making his own. But here is the fascinating part. He actually plays around with it for some time until one night he points it at Jupiter.”

  “Checking out the girl bathing in the river down the street until then,” Forrest interjects.

  John just sighed and pressed on. “That night changed everything. He was the first to observe what we now call the Galileo moons and in doing so presented proof that the universe is not geocentric.”

  The four just looked at him, and he could sense his old students were now prepared for and would politely endure his launching off on some professorial run of thirty minutes or more about just how fascinating this moment was.

  But he stopped there, aware that they were standing in a cold, dank, mildew-laden basement, and if Makala found out that a young mother still recovering from giving birth to twins had been forced out of politeness to stay and listen, there’d be hell to pay. Besides, with all the rush of emotions this experience had triggered, he was suddenly very tired.

  “The point is that apparently every computer in use on the day we were hit got fried. We go without electricity for over two years until you two”—he nodded gratefully to Becka and Paul—“bring us back at least to the late nineteenth century world. But then in all the rush and excitement that created, none of us actually thought to look at the old electronic tools stashed away and forgotten in places like this. So thank you, Paul and Becka, for this discovery; you two are our Galileos.”

  He was pleased to see that his words had hit; both of them were smiling at each other, Paul’s arm slipping around Becka’s waist as he kissed her on the forehead.

  A thought struck him.

  “We lost our house in the fight with the Posse, but my mother-in-law, Jen, God rest her, was a regular pack rat. Beside the old cars, she hung on to everything. I remember when we moved in, there must have been half a dozen old cell phones in a desk drawer.”

  “No good without the towers,” Ernie interjected authoritatively.

  “I know, but just curious. We all used to joke how we could remember phone numbers from when we were kids, but once the cell phone craziness hit, and then the smartphones, one simply just said a name or tapped a screen and the number was there. We lamented all the photos lost, all the text messages that touched our hearts and were saved being lost. Just curious now—I’ll dig them out and bring them into the office tomorrow and see if they light up again.”

  “No good in that,” Ernie replied, “other than nostalgia. The question really is what to do with this computer and any others we might get running again.”

  “Go on,” John offered, for it was indeed the question that had hit him the moment the screen had flickered to life and he was staring at that damned grinning Pac-Man.

  “Databases,” Ernie replied. “Lone computers, like this Apple IIe, are nothing but toys.”

  John was silent, not leaping to the defense of an old friend of a machine that had enabled him to write a master’s thesis in near record time.

  “It was linking them together. The Internet back in the mid-’90s that truly launched the revolution. A machine alone, okay, it’s entertaining, and kids can play that dang Pac-Man and Mario on it until the motherboard finally fries off, and the way this one is smelling, I don’t give it very long unless I take it apart and clean it. I’m thinking about databases—uplinks, for example. Those guys up in Bluemont
, don’t tell me they don’t have systems up and running. I’ll assume the low-earth orbit sats got killed off when the war blew, but the ones up at geosynch? I’d give my left—”

  He paused looking at Becka.

  “Excuse me. I’d give my left arm to be able to tap into that data flow and they don’t know I’ve hacked in.”

  After mentioning losing an arm, seconds later, he realized the faux pas he had committed in front of Forrest, who had indeed lost an arm. He looked over at the veteran anxiously, and Forrest forced a smile.

  “At least it wasn’t the arm I use for important things.”

  Ernie offered a weak grin of thanks.

  John, however, was looking at Ernie wide-eyed.

  “Could you actually do that? Eavesdrop into Bluemont’s comm system?”

  “I already knew the story about Galileo, Professor Matherson. And yeah, maybe I could.”

  John looked over at Forrest, remembering the reason his friend, a former enemy, had ventured over the obstacle of the Mount Mitchell range in what was becoming a driving blizzard with word that someone who had once served with his closest friend in the prewar army had trekked two hundred miles to eventually reach them.

  “I’m giving you whatever gas you need, Ernie, to move whatever you want here, to this basement. If you can get any of these machines up and running, do so ASAP. I’ll put the word out in a town announcement for folks to start rummaging through attics and basements to see what can be found.”

  “I’d advise against that,” Forrest interjected.

  “Why?”

  “We learned that our old bastard friend Fredericks had one or more people of his planted here. Let’s assume the same. For now, I’d suggest keeping this nugget quiet, and let’s talk to that Quentin fellow first.”

  John took it in, hesitating.

  “Galileo, don’t you think he regretted blowing his mouth off about his discovery?” Forrest interjected. “He should have stayed quiet a few years, done his research, gotten it out to a trusted few others; instead, he invites the church officials in, and bango, he’s on trial for heresy and under house arrest for the rest of his life.”

  John looked at his friend with surprise.

  “Hey, a lot of long nights when deployed, plenty of time to read history, same as you, even if I didn’t get a fancy degree.”

  John smiled and nodded in reply.

  “Until this storm lets up, we’ll focus on what Paul and Ernie are playing with,” John said, though at this moment his thoughts were far more focused on who Quentin Reynolds was, if indeed Bob Scales was alive in Roanoke, and what portent that was for the future.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It was two days before the storm finally abated, the morning of the second day dawning bright, clear, and still. John was up first, shivering as he pushed kindling into the woodstove, the sole source of heat for the house, watching it flare to life as the kindling ignited from the hot coals from the night before, and then carefully feeding in split lengths of seasoned hickory and oak.

  Memory of another time hit him every time he did this. His abandoned and burned-out home up by Ridgecrest had a fireplace. Of course everyone wanted one when they moved to the mountains, and it was a source of comfort for Mary in her final days, wrapped in an old family quilt and nestled in an overstuffed chair pulled up close, John making sure the fire was blazing cheerily. The fireplace was purely psychological for Mary, though young Elizabeth, fed some propaganda in her middle school classes, would sniff, saying it was inefficient, polluted the atmosphere, and contributed to global warming.

  She was right on at least one point—the amount of heat generated when compared to the warm air sucked up the chimney all but equaled out—but there was something about crackling wood in the fireplace, the radiant heat striking a primal chord that just made one feel comfortable and content on a cold, snowy day.

  Now it was different. The wood was not delivered as it once was—by one of his neighbor’s friends at a hundred bucks a truckload, at least somewhat seasoned and stacked by the back deck. During the first winter after the Day, it had been a mad scramble for heat, any kind of heat, and more than a few had died, not from freezing—though that did happen—but more often from pitching heart attacks while trying to hand cut and then split firewood, complete to chopping down decorative dogwoods and cherry trees in the front yard. Long forgotten was the time when nearly every home and farmstead had its own woodlot of a couple of dozen acres, up on the side of a mountain slope too steep to be cleared for plowing or even grazing.

  Preparing for the next winter started even before the last snows of spring had melted off and was why a farmer cherished having several sons, whose daily chore was to spend a few hours every day cutting down trees, bucking them down to stove length, splitting the stove-size wood by hand, and stacking for curing, not just for warmth come next winter but for daily cooking, heating water atop the kitchen stove for the occasional bath … all of it accomplished by hard labor.

  Gone as well was the essential knowledge of anyone 150 years back. Seasoned hickory and oak put into the fire would last through the night; maple was easy splitting; pine was good for a quick start-up fire but didn’t last for heat; locust became fence rails; the now-extinct chestnut could be burned but also made excellent furniture; in a pinch with the wood pile running low, unseasoned ash could be harvested and used; and, if out on a cold, rainy day, one could carry some rolled-up strips of birch bark, which would burn like a torch to get an emergency fire going. Information essential for living, which nearly all had to relearn to survive.

  The Melton brothers, after months of backbreaking work, rebuilt a long-ago dam face while the rest of their family labored for weeks to shovel out the silted-up marsh behind the remnants of the dam. Dams long ago built to block off once bubbling mountain creeks often fell into eventual disuse as decades of summer storms and the floods of springtime thaws trapped hundreds of tons of silt, the narrow valley pond behind the dam turning into a marsh and then eventually abandoned … and besides, who needed a water-powered mill dam with all its labor and headaches when first steam, and then a twenty-horsepower electric motor, could do the same amount of labor?

  In this new world gradually being rebuilt, the Meltons were the first in the valley to actually get a water-powered sawmill up and operating just below Ridgecrest, along the aptly named Mill Creek, because down its tumbling length, there had once been a dozen small mills for wood cutting, grinding corn for—among other things—making mash for a still hidden nearby. They built it on a site where a great-grandfather had once run a similar mill, which, when the “revenuers” were not poking around, supplied mash to stills up and down the valley.

  Ernie and family tried to argue they now owned the land and had the surveyor plats to prove their modern legal argument. It had nearly turned ugly until John helped negotiate a deal that whatever logs Ernie dragged down to the Meltons with his old reliable Polaris off-road vehicle the Meltons would cut up for free. And if a few mason jars were mixed in with the returned firewood as well, no further questions would be asked.

  The historian in John loved the sound of that mill, knowing he was hearing the echo of a long-ago age of waterpower … the creaking of the slowly turning waterwheel, the rasping of the saw driven by the wheel, the redolent scent of fresh-cut wood and cool mountain water cascading over the waterwheel. And although corn for actual food was still a “national” priority, in this the third year of harvest since the start of the war, he was learning to turn a blind eye toward the thin columns of wood smoke rising up from nearby valleys and the occasional whiff on humid fall mornings of corn mash fermenting. He would ease his sense of duty with the thought that “as it was in the beginning, so it is again…”

  Farther downstream, Paul Hawkins’s team was waiting for the community of Old Fort to finish rebuilding what had been their original dam for a water-powered turbine so that he could set a generator in place and get the small community of survivors down the
re back online. The villagers of Old Fort, all but wiped out by the Posse attack, planned to run a wire along old Route 70 toward Marion and sell the power for trade items and food.

  In this the third year since the Day, an economic trading system was again back in place, and it did include white lightning brewed in remote mountain valleys, but now included much else as well. Those with foresight to stockpile some precious metals found they indeed had real worth again; in fact, by the standards of this terrible new world, they could be counted as wealthy, the silver and gold not just something to be locked away in a safe for “just in case”—“just in case” had indeed arrived at last.

  Increasingly scarce was .22 ammunition so that it was hardly on the trading market anymore, worth far more per round than the rabbit or squirrel it could put on the table. The weapons to be valued for hunting were the old flintlock rifles, once the realm of history buffs, reenactors, and muzzle-loading hunters. Lead salvaged from dead car batteries and saltpeter from manure pits provided two of the ingredients. Sulfur came from the old resort spa of Sulfur Springs down in Rutherford County, which long ago had provided the crucial element for gunpowder manufacturing from the colonial period and the Civil War. The Peterson family, old man Peterson once a good friend of John from Civil War roundtable days, had set up the family business, which tragically killed his daughter and grandson, who had made a fatal mistake several months back out in the mixing shed, blowing up themselves and the entire building.

  There was even talk of scrounging up enough bronze or brass to make several small cannons for defense, a strange thought given the town had endured air attacks from Apache helicopters and now had a precious Black Hawk in their possession, a world of retro weaponry mixed with surviving remnants of a prior age.

  Beyond the trade in gunpowder from Rutherfordton, and networking out to other communities struggling to come out of a dark age, a viable economic system was indeed emerging.