One Year After: A Novel Read online

  John had called an emergency meeting of the town council that same evening, unable to contain his excitement, and within the hour, the proposal by Paul had been passed with a full allocation of whatever resources were necessary—if and when they could be found—and even a boost in precious rations from the town reserve for those doing the heavy, dirty work for the project.

  The proposal: to retrofit the dam at Lake Susan down below the college and turn it into a hydroelectric generating system. The few old-timers still alive in Montreat—John’s mother-in-law, Jen, being one of them—could recall how there actually had been a hydroelectric power plant a couple of miles above Lake Susan that first provided electricity to Montreat until the big power companies had moved in and taken things over in the 1930s, abandoning the smaller mills and letting them fall into ruins. Jen, as a small girl, used to hike up to the abandoned site and prowl around the wreckage.

  The day after the decision was made, Paul led an expedition up there to scavenge through the bits of wreckage in hopes of finding abandoned equipment. Some useable pipe, a few rusted gears, and some disintegrating switchboards were dug out, but not much else—other than a rattlesnake, which was quickly dispatched. No matter how hungry he was, John could not stomach the thought as several students quickly skinned the still-twitching snake and made a meal of it.

  The list of necessary supplies put forth by Paul seemed insurmountable at first glance. So many of the items listed in the journals from the 1880s were readily at hand in that long-ago world. But to find them now? In the world of the 1880s, Tesla and Westinghouse could cook up their ideas about this revolutionary thing called AC current and then turn to an army of men with technical skills—wire makers, steel molders, and lathe operators on down to the sandhogs digging tunnels. The details of how they ventured to harness the power of Niagara Falls for the great megaproject of that time were outlined in the journals in the breathless detail that the Victorians loved to read about. They made it seem easy in comparison to turning tiny Lake Susan into a new source of energy.

  It presented the classic paradox of attempting to recover a lost technology when the entire infrastructure had been shattered. Tesla, Westinghouse, and Edison created one of the most significant technological advances in history, the ability to create energy at one location and move it to another to perform myriad tasks as yet undreamed of in the 1880s. They created a system that would lead to radio, television, medical technologies that nearly doubled the average life span from that of the year 1900, and limitless energy at the flick of a switch—everything that the world of the twenty-first century assumed was part of ordinary life until the Day.

  As they conceptualized those first ideas regarding the still barely understood thing called electricity, they could turn over their drawings to master tool and die makers, precision lathe operators, smelters running blast furnaces, wire makers, and even blueprint drawers. There was a nineteenth-century infrastructure already in place to make the great wonders of the nineteenth century, not just the generating of electricity but the means to get it out there and keep it running 24-7-365.

  As a historian, when he was first looking at the plans that Paul and Becka drew up for the town’s approval, John felt overwhelming despair. Nearly everything they envisioned for their project had to be made from scratch, reshaped from the salvaged refuse of a collapsed national infrastructure, and it would all have to be manufactured locally. As he examined Tesla’s patent application for the essential converters—the precision-made tools that converted the electrical current blasting out of a generator turned by waterpower into 60-hertz alternating current—it seemed nearly impossible to replicate. So to for the transformers, another of Tesla’s near genie-like creations, that could step voltage up for transmission and then step it back down again for final distribution into homes and factories.

  Paul shrugged off John’s concerns with a smile. “I helped with rigging up Internet to this campus and kept it running; this is no big deal in comparison.”

  The challenge presented to Paul and Becka by their discovery was ultimately to start the rebuilding of a modern community from scratch.

  The Day had taught all that electricity was the fundamental bedrock of their entire civilization, so ubiquitous that no one really fully grasped how crucial it was until it was gone. John’s former students, if successful, would begin the long journey back. If they said it was possible, he and the rest of the community could do nothing less than support them, and all had given the go-ahead even as it strained the community resources, taking dozens of workers out of food production—the bare essentials of survival—with the hope that the investment would indeed start the long journey back from the darkness. As John voted to approve their plan and requests for resources, he quoted the old Joni Mitchell song with the refrain “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.”

  So the plan had moved forward. Anderson Auditorium, a beautiful old structure that was actually a twelve-sided, three-story-high building—a popular architectural style for conference centers back in the 1920s—was cleared out and converted into a huge workshop. The interior of a day care center next to Flat Creek, which emptied out of Lake Susan, was gutted out to be converted into the town’s new power station. Out along the front of the dam, part of that structure was torn down, the lake was drained, and even during the coldest days of winter and early spring, piping was laid in and the dam face rebuilt.

  Lake Susan was a relic of a time when people actually built dams and created lakes for strictly scenic reasons. No one until Paul and Becka came along looked upon the sparkling water falling over the dam’s spillway as representing quite a few megawatts of energy.

  When Paul and Becka, now sporting official titles as electrical engineers, presented their wish list of necessary material, John had told them to move forward, but he did wonder if it was all turning into a pipe dream.

  The generator would have to be woven by hand with a dozen miles of copper wire. Most of the freestanding, old-fashioned copper wires in the community had literally melted off the poles when hit by the EMP or had been looted afterward for other such uses as the barely functional telephone system. The turbine of welded steel had to be perfectly balanced; if not, within minutes, it would burn out its bearings and either seize up or fly apart. New transformers had to be made, miles of wire needed to be restrung to run the power from the dam clear down to Black Mountain, and all the other intricacies of actually building a power grid from scratch had to be accomplished.

  Regarding the copper wire, Paul had uncovered yet another treasure trove that was under their noses: the old electrical substation at the base of the hill where John used to live. It had been heavily damaged by the EMP and further damaged in the battle with the Posse, which had been stopped in the area around the station. Paul began to tear the old transformers apart and pull out the copper wiring within them. Most of it was fused into a solid mass from the electrical overload of the EMP. The answer—and Paul, in his enthusiasm, made it sound simple—was just melt it down and draw new wire out of the molten mass.

  It had taken weeks of experimenting, of remastering a common technology of the nineteenth century. One student was severely burned, but they had finally figured it out, and the interior of Anderson Auditorium was now a thunderous, smoke-filled workshop of wood-fired kilns, a foundry, wire works, and lathes powered by a somewhat gasping old VW engine provided by the town’s auto mechanic, Jim Bartlett. Teams were sent out to pull generators and alternators from abandoned cars for their wiring and batteries for the acid and lead inside.

  The fact that a meeting and a demonstration had been planned for the evening after the meeting with Fredericks actually came as a welcome diversion after dealing with the crisis of the day, and it was a good excuse for John to keep the open community meeting from turning into an hours-long, dragged-out debate.

  A small crowd, the team of students and elderly workers who had once labored in the heavy industries of a long-ago indust
rialized America, was gathered outside the old children’s day care center, rechristened “Montreat Power Station #1,” and actually applauded with enthusiastic delight as John and his family pulled up in the old Edsel.

  In a way, it was simply a publicity show and test run; the real turbine and generator were still several weeks away from final placement. What Paul and Becka had set up for the evening’s demonstration was a one-sixth-scale test model housed off to one side of the main floor where the main generator was still under construction.

  The pipe from the dam face snaked downslope to the powerhouse, thus adding a dozen more feet of elevation drop from the dam face and thus more energy.

  It was obvious that Paul, Becka, and their workforce had been waiting excitedly for his arrival. Elizabeth, her worries of the moment forgotten, bounded out of the car with young and very sleepy Ben in her arms. Makala gently helped John’s aged mother-in-law, Jen, ever the elegant lady even at eighty, as she braced herself and slowly walked down to where the crowd waited, exchanging greetings with old friends and neighbors. Makala fell in behind her, John by her side, both ready to leap forward and grab the fragile woman if she should start to totter. The previous two years had aged her ten, and no one needed to be told that in this terrible new age after the Day, a fall resulting in a broken hip was a lingering and most painful death sentence.

  “So how are the wizards of electricity?” John asked cheerfully as he approached the waiting crowd in the gathering gloom.

  There were warm smiles and handshakes all around. John suggested that the two who first cooked up the idea offer a brief explanation of what they had accomplished. Paul was eager to go into a tech-laden lecture, but after a few minutes, Becka simply leaned up, kissed him on the cheek, and lovingly put a hand over his mouth.

  “He’ll go on all night like that,” she said with a laugh. “He even does it in his sleep. Doc, we got a good head of water coming through the pipe; all we need to do is open the valve that feeds into our model turbine. Would you do us the honors?”

  John shook his head and smiled. “You guys built it. You turn it on.”

  They hesitated, and he sensed they were nervous. They had actually resisted testing this out until now, so no one was sure all those old diagrams and their months of hard labor actually would amount to something. They were fearful a premature test run might blow apart all they had labored for so far. The two looked at each other and the several dozen who had worked with them throughout the winter and into the spring. The crowd laughed and urged them on. Together, they stepped into the powerhouse, and a joke was shouted that now was not the time to make out in the dark but to get to work.

  “I’m not sure how long she’ll run, so here goes!” Paul shouted through the open doorway, and together he and Becka first opened a valve that diverted water from the overflow pipe, shifting it to run against the turbine blades of their test model. All could hear a vibrating rumble as the turbine began to turn faster and faster, coming up to speed, as Paul watched an old-fashioned gauge monitoring the RPMs. He said something to Becka, the two barely visible inside the gloomy exterior of the control room. Together, they took hold of a switch that John thought looked like something straight out of a Frankenstein movie and forced it down to connect the generator and bring it to life.

  A gasp erupted from the small crowd. Light! Electric light!

  Electric lighting, not seen in their valley for over two years, shined forth from a community power station. Old hundred-watt bulbs inside the power station instantly flashing into brilliant darkness-shattering life. A string of bulbs along the roofline of the building began to glow as Paul and Becka threw a second switch, and even a salvaged string of Christmas bulbs draped along the eaves of the small power station, the same lights that had once decorated the campus tree every winter, sparkled in their multicolored hues.

  “Ben, look at the lights, the lights!” Elizabeth shouted as she hugged her squirming toddler, who was now awake and pointing at the multicolored Christmas lights, squealing with laughter.

  John pulled Makala in closer, hugging her. He looked over at his grandson’s shining face, and tears came to his eyes. The child, for the first time, was seeing what half a dozen generations before him had experienced from their first seconds of life and knew throughout their lives. And now those around him were laughing and cheering. And then, as an added thrill to it all, music! An old-fashioned boom box Becka had mounted on a windowsill came to life, blaring out an old song—“Blinded by the Light.” Within seconds, all were dancing to the music, laughing and cheering like wild children, some of the elderly in the crowd showing the college kids how to form up for a line dance.

  Then the music seemed to go slightly out of beat, slowing down and then speeding up, reminding John of when he was a kid and he and his friends would put 45 RPM records on and crank the player up to 78 RPM and think it wildly funny. The hundred-watt bulbs glowed with hot intensity. One winked off, and another actually burst, and before Paul could throw the switch off, the Christmas lights shorted out.

  The music and dancing stopped, and the scent of ozone filled the air. Becka raced back inside the power station to switch the water back to the outflow pipe. A grinding sound came from the turbine housing as its blades clattered to a stop. The crowd outside stood silent, not sure how to react.

  John quickly stepped forward, breaking the tension, clapping his hands. “Bravo, you guys! Magnificent!”

  The two engineers peeked out nervously from the power station building, ready with excuses and explanations about this being a test run, that the real turbine would be far more finely tuned and that they still had to get more precise with Tesla’s alternating generator system, but they were drowned out by the enthusiastic applause and hugs from their coworkers, the uproar growing even louder when Becka let slip that she could not be picked up and tossed around because she was expecting. The promise of any new life in their so tragically depleted community was greeted with laughter, cheers, and more than a few ribald jokes about what had been going on in the library basement other than research.

  John and Makala worked their way through the crowd, and the act took on something of a ritual as John warmly grasped Paul’s hand, congratulating him first on the good news with Becka and then for their miraculous achievement with the power plant.

  Makala warmly embraced Becka. “First thing in the morning, I want you to stop by so we can talk over your diet, and Paul, let this lady rest for a while. If need be, the power plant can wait; your baby is far more important to us.”

  Far too many pregnancies had been lost in the first year after the Day, and more than a few mothers actually died due to malnourishment. The entire community now gave top priority to expectant mothers. For John, there was a flash memory of the sacrifice he had decided on for Elizabeth, the death of their beloved golden retriever, Ginger, a decision he had made without hesitation and which still filled him with tears.

  John sensed it was time to leave the electricity wizards to their celebration; it had already been an exhausting day after a sleepless night. Returning home, he slipped off to be by himself while the rest of the family went to bed.

  A half hour later, he sensed a presence behind him and turned to see Makala standing in the moonlight. He didn’t say anything other than to slip over on the bench by Jennifer’s grave so that she could join him.

  Makala offered him a glass of blackberry wine, the last of half a dozen bottles that had been a Christmas gift from one of his old students. Makala took a sip from her glass and remained silent.

  “You know, there are times I still crave a damn good cigarette.” He sighed, finally opening up. “And this is one of them.”

  “One of the few benefits of what happened, it made you kick that loathsome habit,” Makala offered, leaning in against his shoulder.

  He struggled not to let her know that he had been crying, but he could not hide it. It still hit him at times when he came out at night to sit by his daughter’s grave
for a few minutes for silent thought and a prayer before going to bed.

  “I should be at least somewhat over it all.” He nodded to the grave. Nightmares still haunted him, her last words coming back to him, whispering that she wanted to be buried in the yard so she could remain close to him and for him to take good care of her beloved stuffed animal Rabs, whom he now held whenever he visited with her.

  He finally sat back, coughing, embarrassed, wiping his face with a soiled handkerchief, Makala kissing him on the cheek again.

  He nodded an embarrassed thanks even though she had witnessed moments like this scores of times, but he was glad to feel her close by his side. “And now they want to take Elizabeth away from me,” he gasped, struggling for control. “If she goes off, she’ll never come back.”

  Makala remained silent as she always did at such moments to give him room to finally let his feelings out, a luxury he could not indulge in when in front of others who expected his stoic leadership.

  “There are times I am so sick to death of the role I have to play,” he said. “The rock-solid leader, the one that everyone else comes to for strength. I can’t bear the thought of her going, but I have to stand by silent and let her go if that is the way this plays out. To do otherwise is pure hypocrisy. I have to tell her to go if others are forced to go.” He sighed, looking off. “When we went in on the attack against Iraq, I wanted to be on the front line, not stuck a couple of miles back in a well-armored command vehicle. When several of my men were killed, I had to take it in calmly, reassure the other troopers, tell them to push on, even though I wanted to scream with frustration and pain, since I knew those kids well. When we came back to the States, I went to see their families; one was married with two kids. The whole rest of the country was celebrating what they thought was an easy win, but it still cost hundreds of lives. What could I tell those who had lost a son or husband? They died in a good cause? They were heroes?