One Year After: A Novel Page 6

  As Richard motioned for John to take a seat in the chair, he looked around the office and felt that it indeed had a Civil War–era look to it. A woodstove in the corner was burning, in spite of the heat of the day, to sterilize instruments in a boiling pot. X-ray readers and a computer screen providing soothing images to divert a patient in the chair were replaced with some old-fashioned charts of the mouth and teeth—gruesome but illustrative when Richard had to point out where a problem was.

  John tried to settle back into the chair, Richard gossiping with him for a few minutes about the draft; his oldest daughter was one of those called up. And then the moment came.

  “Come on, John, open up; let’s take a look.” Then the dreaded “Ah, I think this is the one.” He tapped the sore tooth with the end of a probe, nearly sending John out of the chair.

  Richard sat back, nodding thoughtfully. “In the old days, I’d send you to a specialist for a root canal; I don’t even need an x-ray to tell you this one is bad. I can have it out in two minutes, John.”

  John looked at him wide eyed. “I’ll skip it for now, Rich,” he replied hoarsely. “Maybe in a couple of days after things settle down. I got a couple of meetings to attend to later today.”

  “Come on, John, I even got ether now. Have you under, tooth out, and you’re on your way an hour from now.”

  John shook his head. “I gotta be clear headed—too much going on at the moment.”

  “I think you’re begging off, John,” Richard replied with a knowing smile.

  “Yeah, well, maybe I am.”

  “Open your mouth again.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought I saw something else. Promise I won’t touch the sore tooth, but John, you and I know that kind of thing actually used to kill people two hundred years ago. It’s an upper molar—gets infected, gets into your sinuses, and then you got real agony that could eventually kill you. Come on; let’s get it taken care of.”

  John kept his mouth closed and shook his head, willing himself to think that it really didn’t hurt all that bad and could wait.

  “Well, at least let me take a quick look-see at something else. Promise I’ll leave that bad boy alone.”

  John reluctantly complied. Richard leaned in, tapping John’s lower-left canine, and John winced a bit.

  “Yeah, thought so,” Richard announced while still peering into John’s mouth. “Start of a cavity that could go nasty there.”

  All John could do was mutter a strangled “Damn it.”

  “I can take care of that nice and quick,” Richard continued, sitting back up and rubbing his hands on his apron. Gone were the days of latex gloves and masks, the few in the town’s supply reserved for major surgeries only. “Drill that sucker out in five minutes and pack a filling into it.”

  John looked at him wide eyed.

  “Compromise with ya, John. Let me fill that before it goes bad, and you get off free until tomorrow with the bad one. Otherwise, I go to Makala, and she lays some mandatory treatment order on you as the public health official.”

  John glared angrily at Richard for pulling that trump card and finally nodded a reluctant agreement.

  Richard smiled, and whistling, he went over to the boiling pot, tossed in the instrument he had been using to probe John, and pulled out several others with tongs. John tried to look the other way as Richard pushed the foot-powered drill up alongside the chair and clamped a drill bit in.

  It was yet another reason why, before the Day, John would shake his head when folks waxed too enthusiastically about the alleged beauty of living in the nineteenth century. They never thought about medicine and sanitation, let alone dentistry.

  Richard pulled out a rubberized bag from under a counter. It looked like an oversized balloon with a nozzle on the end.

  “I’ll open the tap on this,” Richard said with a grin. “You take a good deep breath in. Nitrous will chill you out for a few minutes.”

  Richard stuck the nozzle into John’s mouth and then opened the valve.

  “Go for it,” Richard said, and he did have a bit of a maniacal grin as John breathed in deeply.

  Within seconds, it hit, and John actually did feel mellowed out, even giddy, as Richard closed the valve, put the bag down, swung the old-fashioned drill around in front of John, and started to pedal furiously. There was a low humming as the oiled cables spun in their sprockets, the drill bit spinning. Richard moved quickly, prying John’s mouth open and pushing the drill bit down on to the cavity.

  John felt like his entire head was vibrating, the sound of the drill bit flashing him back to early childhood, a dreaded dentist who had yet to go high tech and used an old-fashioned cable-driven drill, but at least that one was electrically powered.

  For the first minute or so, it really didn’t bother him; in fact, he was tempted to crack a joke. There was pain within seconds, but for a blessed moment, he really didn’t care. It was strange how nitrous allowed one to feel pain but not care about it.

  And then it hit. The gulp of nitrous was wearing off, the treadle-powered drill was setting up an awful racket, he felt like his mouth was vibrating apart, and the pain was building.

  He started to gasp, waving his arm for Richard to stop.

  “Hang in there, John, just another minute—almost got it all.”

  Gone was the electrical-powered suction tube. John’s mouth was filling up with saliva and drilled-out bits of tooth, and it smelled like something was burning. He began to gag, waving frantically for Richard to back off.

  Richard pulled the drill out and held up an old-fashioned spittoon, John gagging, spitting, and cursing.

  “Think I got it all,” Richard stated.

  “Think you got it all?” John cried.

  “Well, you were putting on such a show there.”

  “You’re damn right. I swear you’re a sadist, Richard.”

  Richard grinned. “I’ll pack it with a filling, and we’re done.”

  There was no argument; John couldn’t very well walk out with a hole in his tooth on top of the other one that was throbbing away.

  Richard opened a drawer in the old-fashioned, white-enamel-topped table behind him, drew out a tissue-thin sheet of gold, clipped off a small piece, gingerly rolled it up, and then worked it with a miniature-sized jeweler’s hammer, turning it over and over. He finally picked it up with a pair of tweezers and dropped it into a petri dish filled with moonshine that served as an antiseptic wash.

  “Now rinse good. Make sure the stuff gets into that tooth, and it’s okay to swallow.”

  Richard handed him a mason jar of clear white lightning, and John did as ordered, nearly yelping with pain as the high-test moonshine swirled around his aching tooth as well as the one that Richard had drilled. He so wanted to swallow, but thoughts of the town meeting to come caused him to spit it out into the bucket, though Richard was not above a quick swig for himself before getting back to work, fishing the gold filling out of its antiseptic wash. After another agonizing minute, he had it firmly worked into the drilled-out hole.

  “There. All done,” Richard announced proudly. “Don’t chew on that for a few days. If it starts to get infected, get in here, and I definitely expect you back in here in another day so I can get that rotting tooth out of you before it really goes bad. We can’t fool around with those things the way we used to. Remember old man Parker died last month from a tooth infection.”

  John could only nod. Now both sides of his mouth hurt.

  “How much do I owe you?” he muttered, standing up.

  “Let’s see, one drilling, one filling with gold foil … make that a buck in silver; that covers the cost of the gold more than anything else. We’ll say a buck in silver or twenty rounds of ammo—prefer .22.”

  John fished into his pocket and pulled out a well-worn Barber quarter and two Mercury dimes. Over the previous year, silver money, hoarded by more than a few before the Day, had started to slip back into circulation as money that was accepted by
nearly all.

  “All I got on me. Can I pay you the rest tomorrow?”

  “Yup, but that tooth pull, that’ll be an extra fifty cents,” Richard said with a smile. “Only twenty-five cents if you want to skip the ether.”

  “Yeah, right.” John sighed. “I’ll be back tomorrow and pay you the rest then, along with the extra two bits for ether when you pull the tooth out. Okay?”

  Richard smiled and nodded. “You’d definitely better be back in, John. It’s no joking matter, and you know that better than most. Stupid to die because of a lousy tooth after all you’ve been through.”

  John all but fled the office and then turned to walk up Cherry Street, pausing to look in nostalgically at the used bookstore, a favorite haunt before the Day. The owner had died in the battle with the Posse. It had been turned into a borrowing library by his friend’s widow—bring a book in to trade for one taken out—and it thus continued to flourish, but he missed his old friend, the games of chess over coffee, a world where he did not face the situation waiting just around the corner. A sign hung on the door: “Closed for the town meeting. Chess tournament later tonight.”

  Nearly half a thousand had shown up in the town square for the hastily called gathering to find out the news about John’s visit to the new federal administrator. The pig roast lent a slightly festive air to the occasion; it wasn’t every day—or even week or month—when an open meal was offered to the town without requirement of ration cards, and more than a few showed for the roasted pork and then wandered off if their families were not directly affected by the draft.

  Phil, a favorite in the town where everyone still spoke nostalgically of his legendary barbecue restaurant, had presided over the roasting. He complained that he should have been given a week or so to properly prepare the wild boar, but John had left word with him to do his best and have it ready by six for the sake of all, which he faithfully did. The fire pit had been burning all day, Phil butchering off hunks of meat from the wild boar and just roasting them over the fire, muttering throughout the hot day that if given the time, he could have made the six-hundred-pound boar into a real feast. The meat was tough but at least edible, and any meat, especially in midspring, was welcome after the long, lean days of winter.

  There was nearly half a pound of meat for everyone present, and that had settled things a bit. Eventually, though, the meeting degenerated into angry questions, fueled primarily by Ernie Franklin and his extended family of kin and followers. John had no answers to give Ernie other than the fact that the draft had been pushed back to thirty days, that Fredericks had promised that assets were coming in to ensure public safety, and that the federal government was finally started to reach out to their region. It was a bit difficult to speak clearly; his mouth still throbbing from the ordeal with Richard, so it was a relief to announce he had another meeting to get to. He turned things over to Reverend Black and with a sigh of relief piled into the old Edsel with his family for the three-mile drive up to the college campus and Lake Susan to an event John had been looking forward to for a long time.

  * * *

  Paul and Becka Hawkins had arranged for the secret meeting up at Lake Susan long before the crisis over the draft had hit. Paul was one of the IT guys for Montreat College, and Becka was an assistant librarian. Both were students who had stayed on after graduation, found jobs at the college, and then eventually married. After the Day, the library, the place where they hung out together as students, had become their permanent home when they set up an apartment in the basement. Friends familiar with the old Twilight Zone series joked that the couple reminded them of a famous episode starring Burgess Meredith in which a bookworm finds paradise in a library after a nuclear war.

  Their shared passion was poking around old books and magazines, looking for anything that might be helpful to the community, such as articles in Mother Earth News on how to identify which mushrooms were safe to eat. Six months before, they had finally hit the mother lode of treasures.

  The reason it had taken so long to find this particular treasure trove was twofold. Years earlier, the library had gone over to electronic cataloging. The old card-filing system, once so familiar in all libraries, had finally been carted to a back room and not updated since the turn of the century. Anything that had come in since had simply been entered into the campus database—now long lost, of course.

  One of the great weaknesses of the now lost digital age was its total dependence on electronic databases rather than old-fashioned backups with ink on paper. A poignant pastime for some was to gaze at a dust-covered iPhone, trying to remember something called phone numbers of friends and even that of children and parents. Older folks could still rattle off a number and address from a quarter century earlier, but from the day before all systems went down? Where were the addresses, even photographic images of life in the decade before the Day now? It was symbolic of just how much had been wiped out of their lives, most likely never to return. Thus in the library—as in so many millions of other locations, from federal government offices down to iPhones and iPads—nearly all data from the decade prior to the attack had been lost.

  The second factor behind the long delay of discovering the hidden treasure was that, every spring, locals emptying out attics and garages would haul thousands of moldering books and magazines into the library for the annual Fourth of July book sale and fund-raiser. Of course, the sale had never happened after the war started, and the hundreds of boxes of donations were all but forgotten in the basement. It took the Paul and Becka prowling around the damp, moldy basement for yet more curios and things interesting to read to find the treasure: a complete set of the Journal of the AIEE—the American Institute of Electrical Engineers—dating all the way back to 1884.

  Nearly anyone else in the world would have consigned the moldy, sneeze-inducing magazines to the kindling pile, but fortunately, not those two. Months earlier, they had burst into John’s office—unlike most in the town, they still called him “Doc” out of memory of his days as their history professor—and tossed a dusty, brittle magazine on his desk without preamble or explanation.

  “Doc, this is a gold mine!” Paul cried. “They even got the first edition here from 1884! And check this out—articles actually written by Tesla, Nikola Tesla himself!”

  It had been a quiet, snowy day when they arrived, and he had indeed been in a mellow mood after a romantic night with Makala in front of the fireplace and no new crisis to deal with, so he was initially in an indulgent frame of mind. Hardly a day passed without someone presenting a harebrained idea to solve the town’s problems with everything from cold fusion machines to perpetual motion. When Mabel’s husband, George, first walked in with plans for how to run a car off charcoal fumes, he thought the man crazy, but a year later, half a dozen such vehicles were chugging around the community.

  As a professor, John had always turned to Paul when it came to the inevitable computer glitches in his classroom, and Becka could always track down some obscure journal via interlibrary loan for an article he was writing, so of course he would listen to them. Within minutes after they dumped the journal on his desk, he was as excited as they were. They brought in a box of the journals and spent a delightful afternoon poring over them. Beyond being the onetime head of this town, he was a historian, and the journals were a remarkable glimpse into a most remarkable time in global history where the world was coming out of the darkness and into the future brilliance of electrical power … and in so doing would set itself up for the greatest disaster in human history since the great plagues of the fourteenth century.

  The monthly journals dated all the way back to the first days of the electrical industry. The infamous “current wars”—the conflict between Edison on one side supporting the use of direct current and Tesla and Westinghouse on the other pushing for alternating current—had been fought out for years on the pages of the magazine. Historically, that was interesting enough, but far more important were the details of the genesis of the mode
rn electrical current grid from generating station to transformers to household appliances with detailed plans and patents set out for everything.

  It was a time of excitement and new inventions nearly every month. It was also a time of bitter infighting, turf wars, patent arguments, claim jumping on who invented what first, character assassinations, and outright thievery and sabotage.

  Becka’s librarian skills came to the fore as she laboriously indexed and cross indexed the material they had uncovered. That was an essential step since the magazines had been printed on cheap, wood-pulp-based paper, and many were as brittle as glass, about to disintegrate if handled more than a few times. The secrets of the past could literally disintegrate in a reader’s hands, and she therefore became their guardian, ensuring the magazines were not pawed over in a frivolous manner. What she was protecting covered the development of the entire industry, from just a few years after the first commercial incandescent lightbulbs and power plants went online up until the 1960s when the AIEE had merged with another organization to include advanced electronics—unknowingly beginning to lay the groundwork for disaster with an increasingly delicate infrastructure.

  The library had already proven its worth innumerable times over since the Day. There had been a rush to uncover half-forgotten issues of Mother Earth News and the Foxfire series of books for some retro learning about food gathering and preparation. The college had set up seminars for students and the general public to teach canning, mushroom gathering, hunting, trapping, and folk medicine. But this? It was like some lost tablets had been found by archaeologists that would explain a forgotten language, a language that could unlock one of the great secrets of the universe—how to restore electrical power. More than a few, especially the ham radio operators and a few other hobbyists, understood how it all had once worked, but to see the actual diagrams and patents once written and filed by Tesla and company was undreamed of.