One Second After

CHAPTER TEN

The entire mountainside north and south of the interstate was burning. He gazed at the inferno, feeling nothing, even though his home was somewhere within that blaze.

Scattered shots still rang out. A holdout band of the Posse was barricaded inside a single-story house facing the interstate on a side road a couple of hundred yards back from the gap. It was a key position because it looked down on both the interstate and the flanking approach of the abandoned paved road and the railroad.

Two of his militia sprinted towards the building, approaching it from a blind spot, where a truck was parked. They crawled under the truck, came out the other side, and rolled up against the side of the building. One opened her backpack; the other took out a Zippo, flicked it to life, and touched the fuse.

Inside was a ten-pound charge of black powder, packed into three-inch PVC pipe, nails mixed in. The girl stood up and threw it through the smashed window, then collapsed backwards, shot in the chest.

He could hear screaming inside the building, someone standing up, trying to throw the backpack out, a fusillade of fire dropping him.

The explosion seemed to tear off the side of the house.

With harsh, guttural screams a dozen militia were up, charging, pushing through the wreckage and into the smoke-filled house.

Seconds later several Posse poured out the front door; none made it more than a dozen feet.

Two more houses to go at the top of the ridge. A couple of dozen holdouts within, surrounded now on all sides. A barrage of Molotov cocktails rained onto the buildings; from within one there were bursts of automatic weapons fire.

The assault teams waited. In just eight hours they were veterans, no dumb-ass heroics, no “follow me” charges. One of the buildings finally started to burn, and then the second, suppressive fire pouring in through every window to keep those within down.

It took ten minutes, a dozen more Molotovs tossed against the side of the wooden structure to feed the flames, which finally went into the eaves of the house. It was ablaze now. Screaming from inside. The front door burst open and the militia was waiting. Half a dozen were gunned down as they came out. The last two out were women, falling to their knees, hands up.

No one fired and they crawled away from the inferno, then fell on their faces, crying for mercy.

One house left, the one with the automatic fire. John, watching the fight, had a gut sense of who was in there.

He picked up a megaphone.

“I want prisoners from that house!” he shouted.

The house was ablaze.

“Come out and we won’t shoot!” John shouted.

Seconds later the door burst open and six men and a woman staggered out, throwing weapons aside.

“Down on your knees, hands over heads!”

They did as ordered and the student militia circled in around them.

The thunder of the battle was dying away now, a burst of shots from down near the second railroad tunnel, a volley from up on Rattlesnake Mountain, the louder sound now the forest fire sweeping both sides of the interstate, driven by a westerly breeze.

He looked around, some of the militia coming out from cover, standing up cautiously, looking around, most ducking when a sniper round zinged down from the ridge atop the pass. It was greeted seconds later with an explosive roar of fire and then silence. One of the militia then standing atop the ridge, rifle held high, waved the all clear.

John rose up from the side of the bridge over the interstate, walked around to the side, and slid down the slope and onto the pavement of the interstate, his action almost a signal that the war was over. Dozens more were standing, dazed, silent.

He looked up the road to the pass but a hundred yards away. It was a road paved with horrors. At nearly every step there were bodies twisted into the contortions that only the dead could hold, rivulets of blood pouring off the road into the storm gutters. It was a seething mass as well, hundreds of wounded.

He turned and looked back down the highway towards Exit 66 and raised his megaphone.

“Medics! Bring up the medics now!”

They had been waiting several hundred yards to the rear while the last of the Posse were wiped out from the ridge, which they had successfully seized in the opening round of the fight.

There must have been someone local with them, either willing or unwilling. Two hours before dawn fifty of them had emerged on the little-used Kazuma Trail, known only to hikers and mountain bikers, a path that led from the Piedmont below to the highest point on the crest overlooking the interstate and the flanking roads.

Seizing the half-dozen houses up there, wiping out the defenders in a matter of minutes, they had enfilading fire down onto the gap itself, with the defenders there pinned, unable to fire back.

Minutes later the main assaults came in, fifty vehicles up the flanking road, men and women on foot going through the railroad tunnel, and a column of nearly two hundred vehicles roaring up from Old Fort, led by a diesel truck with a snow plow mounted to the front.

The forward barrier fell, and then the next fallback position, where he was standing now, the bridge over the highway, since the houses above were perfect positions to fire down on it.

Though they were caught off guard by the surprise seizure of the houses and ridge above the gap, the rapid retreat had been part of his and Washington’s plan all along.

Washington was a superb marine, a superb trainer and leader, but John did realize now that all the crap about his being colonel .. . Washington had been right on that, too.

Washington’s plan was a classic defense on the high ground and John had vetoed it.

“Almost as bad as losing would be our winning too easily,” he had said. “We repulse them at the crest, they’ll take losses, retreat, and then do one of two things: either head off somewhere else or wait until the time is right and get us, and I think it would be the latter. Whoever is leading that band cannot afford even a single defeat; his own people will turn on him, kill him, and then come back yet again.”

John’s worst nightmare was that after a sharp defeat the Posse would pull back to Old Fort, simply spread out a bit, loot, probe, and keep them on guard twenty-four hours a day and wait them out. They’d make a mistake; there’d be a weak spot; the enemy would catch a guard asleep, attack the position at night in the middle of a storm. No, John wanted them over the ridge—let them take the gap—and then to lure them into a classic killing ground.

“The mountains to either side can give us a Cannae, or a classic Mongol envelopment,” he argued, and students who had taken his classes and were now officers sitting in on the planning just the day before instantly grasped it.

“Once in, I want them all in, and then I don’t want one of them to get out alive.”

It was the plan that Washington warned would triple their casualties but John argued in so doing they would annihilate the Posse rather than just drive it back, with the threat of a return.

The tragedy was that the first platoon of Company A, guarding the gap, was cut off in the opening move and not one of them made it out. That had nearly triggered a rout as the survivors of the second platoon gave way too quickly at the second defensive line, the bridge at Exit 66 and the nursing home overlooking it.

It had been near run then, the attackers swarming forward, sensing victory, pushing hard, squeezing in where Route 70 ran within feet of the interstate, the very place where John had first met Makala, her Beemer now upended and piled into the defensive barrier line across the main line of defense, where the interstate curved up on a bridge that crossed the railroad tracks. It was a bridge poorly designed for traffic, every ice storm someone always spun out on that bridge, but if whoever had designed it was thinking of a battle, it was superb. It was like a hill with no flanks to worry about, atop the bridge a clear field of fire for a mile back up the road, behind the bridge a sharp slope up to where the old town water tank was, another superb position, and the flank there protected by a wide cut through the forest for the passage of high-tension lines, thus creating an open killing field against any of the Posse trying to get to the tower.

And then the trap itself. Concealed up on each flanking ridge, back near the gap, Company B, armed with the best long-range weapons the town could provide, high-powered deer rifles with scope mounts. Every house to either side of the interstate, several hundred homes, including his own, and a trailer park were rigged to burn, buckets of gas placed within each. Students who were not trained as soldiers were now pressed into service, so that when the signal was given, the siren on the fire truck sounding off, combined with signal rockets, they were to go into action, moving fast on mountain bikes or mopeds, setting each house ablaze. He had bet on the usual breeze picking up through the gap, as the air farther down below in the Piedmont heated and began to rise, drawing down air from the pass in a cool continual breeze. Luck was on their side as well in that it had been a tinder-dry summer.

The hundreds of fires merged together into an inferno, acting as the blocking force on each flank, flames driving eastward, cutting off retreat except back onto the interstate or the railroad, which were now kill zones.

At the other end of the box, to the west, at the interstate bridge waited what was left of Company A along with them every citizen of the town who could carry a gun, concealed behind the reverse slope.

It had been a bloodbath.

Once his outer defenses fell, the second wave of the Posse swarmed in, hundreds of vehicles pressing over the crest and, as John hoped, undisciplined enough that, sensing victory, they were now just rushing forward to start the looting and slaughter.

The fight at the bridge had almost been like something from the Civil War, hundreds of men and women rising up from concealment, leveling rifles and blazing away, shredding everything in front of them. Posse vehicles crashed into the barrier line and the fighting had turned hand-to-hand. And then along the opposite slopes fires ignited and began to spread, and as the last of the vehicles crossed in, Malady’s team shut the back door, using the two automatic weapons provided by Tom, complete with six thousand rounds of ammunition, backed up by citizens who had produced “illegal weapons” and students armed with a couple hundred of the dangerous homemade grenades.

The force on the bridge had nearly given way, though. For several crucial minutes John had been down, knocked out by an explosion. But someone had rallied the ill-trained backup force, and they were charging forward regardless of loss.

All that was left then was the killing, the closing in of the box, and when cornered their opponents knew their fate and fought with a mad frenzy. This was not the type of fight where surrender was a way out, and they knew it. There would be no escape for them, no pulling back to wait and to then lunge back days or weeks later. They were all going to die this day, and tragically, for Black Mountain and Swannanoa, it was going to cost dearly to do that killing.

Washington had warned of that before the battle, suggesting a false escape path for the routed who could then be hunted down later in a second killing zone farther down the mountain, but there was no other way, John realized. If they left an escape valve, a sound idea with a well-trained force but risky with the assets he now had, the surviving Posse just might break through and indeed escape, and then it could be months of a bitter guerilla war against the vengeful survivors.

It had turned into seven horrid hours of taking ground back, a step at a time, a bloody step at a time.

The medics were coming forward at the double. Wounded from earlier in the attack who had managed to hide and not get murdered, those wounded in the relentless push back, lay by the hundreds along the road. From up on the south side the fire was rolling eastward and screams could be heard, those trapped up there and now burning to death. It made John think of the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864. One could read of that fight in the history books and feel remote somehow. Not now. Even if they were all Posse burning up there, it was horrific.

And behind him Tom’s men now came, deployed out in open order, and every few feet one would stop, lower his pistol, and fire.

The Posse wounded were to be summarily executed, and that was a task John wanted the police and older men of the town to do, not his own kids. They were hardened now, but he never wanted them that hard.

John slowly walked up the sloping road towards the crest and at last found him, a knot of students gathered round his body, heads lowered, some weeping.

Washington Parker was dead, killed in the opening minutes of the fight. The way he lay here seemed almost Christ-like, arms spread wide, heartbreakingly a young female student, dead as well, nestled under his arm as if in his final seconds he was trying to protect or comfort her, or maybe it had been the other way around.

Washington had insisted upon being in the front line, arguing with John that the kids needed him there especially to be led in the difficult task of feigning withdrawal, and along with the rest of the first platoon Washington had not come back.

John had held a hope that perhaps, just perhaps, Washington had managed to hole up someplace but knew it was unlikely.

John drew closer.

The man died as he would have wanted, John realized, leading “his men,” from the front, and John felt guilt, having fought the battle from the rear line, as a commander.

Washington’s “soldiers” were slowly filing by, battle-shocked kids actually, faces strained, sweat soaked, more than a few bandaged, coming down now out of the flanking hills and up the interstate, gathering in, and all now filing past their sergeant.

As each passed they slowed, and John watched them, hearing their whispered farewells.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Be with God now, sir.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

With frightful intensity it reminded John of the famous column written by Ernie Pyle back in World War II, about the death of a beloved officer and how his men reacted.

One of the girls knelt down, touched Washington’s face, and then walked on. Some were silent, some offered a prayer or thank-you; others swore out of pain and bitterness.

John fell in with them and walked up. All he could do was come to attention, salute, and then move on. The sentimental side of him was dead at this moment, still in shock. He’d cry for Washington later on, alone.

More shots from behind, the sound of the horn of a Volkswagen Bus honking as it sped off, weaving around the wreckage, hauling wounded back to the main hospital in town.

More vehicles backing up, the old farm trucks, the diesel truck now rigged to a flatbed so that several dozen could be loaded aboard at once.

“John?”

He saw Makala coming forward and without thought he grabbed hold of her tightly. She began to shudder with tears.

“Thank God. There was a rumor you were dead.” He shook his head.

Yes, his face was burned. The Posse actually had made up some primitive bazookas, fired from pipes welded to several trucks, and a round had detonated on the bridge, knocking him unconscious for a couple of minutes.

She broke from his embrace and stepped back, holding up her hand.

“Track my finger with your eyes,” she said, moving it back and forth, staring at him closely.

“John, you might have a concussion. And you got some second-degree burns.”

“The hell with that now. Take care of the others.”

She nodded, stepped back, and went over to one of the wounded, a girl, a volleyball player from the school. She was crying, curled up, clutching her stomach. John watched as Makala knelt down, brushed the girl’s forehead, spoke a few soothing words, and then with an indelible ink pen wrote “3” on the girl’s forehead. Makala leaned over, kissed the girl gently, and then got up and went to a boy lying by the girl’s side. The boy’s leg was crushed below the knee, and he or someone else had slapped a tourniquet on him. He was unconscious. Makala put a finger to his throat to check his pulse, wrote “1” on his forehead, and stood up.

“A one! Here now!” she shouted.

A stretcher team sprinted up, one of the boys looking down at the girl shot in the stomach and slowing. And John could see the agony in his face. The two had dated a year ago, in fact had been something of “the couple,” until she broke it off. At a small college, everyone knew about the lives of the others, sometimes not so good, sometimes rather nice.

“Over here! This one here! Move it!” Makala shouted.

The boy, tears streaming down his face, was pushed forward by the girl at the back of the stretcher. They loaded on the boy with the mangled leg, turned, and started to sprint back down the road. Makala was already up to the next wounded, pen in hand. She was now, as the ancients might have said, the chooser of the slain: 1 for priority treatment, 2 for delay till all Is were taken care of, 3… 3 simply meant they were going to die and effort was not to be expended on them for now.

None of the student soldiers going into the fight knew about this triage, though the students assigned as medics did, as did all who were now helping to clear the battlefield, but it did not take long for the receivers of this to figure it out.

A girl was lying in the ditch against the median barrier, multiple gunshot wounds having stitched her body. Makala barely paused to look at her, wrote a “3” on her forehead, and moved on. The girl looked at John, crying.

“What did she write? What did she write?”

John knelt down by her side. It was a wonder she was still alive, the gunshot wound to her upper thigh having shattered her femur. How the femoral artery was not torn was beyond him. She was also shot through the chest and stomach, blood frothing her lips. He didn’t recognize her. Most likely a freshman who had yet to take his class.

“She wrote ‘2,’ sweetheart,” he lied. “Others worse hurt than you. Help will be along shortly.”

She tried to smile, to nod, but was already beginning the gentle slide into the night. John leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

“Go to sleep now, honey. You’ll be ok.”

She reached out and snatched his hand, her grip remarkably strong. “Daddy?” she whispered. “Daddy, help me.”

“Daddy’s here.”

She began to shake uncontrollably.

“Now I lay me down to sleep,” he whispered.

I pray the Lord my soul to keep…, she mouthed the words. The shuddering stopped…. She was dead.

John brushed the hair from her sweat-soaked forehead, kissed her again, then gently released her grip and turned away.

Distant shots echoed from the hills and more closely, from behind, as Tom’s men continued to kill the Posse wounded.

Ahead, smashed into the side of the gap, was the smoldering wreckage of Don Barber’s recon plane. During the worst moments of the fight John had seen Barber fly over, coming in low, tossing satchel charges, taking out one of their tractor-trailer trucks, and then suddenly wing over and go in.

John had specifically ordered Don not to tangle in the fight, to stay high, to keep doing recon, and in the opening hours he had done just that, flying up, observing, swooping back down over the town hall and dropping a note attached to a streamer with the latest update regarding the enemy moves, then going back out. The info had been crucial, keeping John posted on which direction the Posse was pouring in from and, most important, knowing when their full force had been committed before the closing of the trap.

But as he had feared all along, Don could not stay out of the fight and had decided, at last, to play the role of ground support fighter.

Don Barber was tangled into the wreckage… dead. He was wearing his old uniform from the Korean War. John slowed, saluted him, then pushed on.

A line of prisoners was being led along the westbound side of the road, hands tied behind backs, all roped together, roughly thirty of them, including the last survivors flushed out of the burning house.

A guard leading them looked over at John and he motioned for them to move towards the truck stop at the top of the pass, the place he was heading.

The truck stop was actually a turnoff lane at the very top of the crest, a mandatory pull over for all commercial vehicles, especially 18-wheelers. Trucks that pulled in were not allowed to proceed until the drivers had examined the map of the long descent that marked out “runaway truck lanes” for vehicles that might lose their brakes on the way down. A traffic light was hung across the lane, timed to let trucks through at safe intervals or to stop them completely if there should be an accident farther down the mountain. Of course all that was now in the distant past. To the good fortune of the town, at the start of the crisis one of the trucks stalled there had been loaded with snack crackers, but those were long gone as well.

It had been the command post for the barrier line established what seemed to be an eternity ago and was now where so many were heading, as if by instinct.

John continued on the road, several students falling in around him, all with weapons poised, acting as a guard. There had been a student assigned to him early, but that young man had been killed back by the Exit 65 ramp, taken down by the blast that had knocked John unconscious.

The prisoners were herded over into the truck lane, where a couple dozen more prisoners waited.

As the second group approached, those already there looked over anxiously. Some stood up staring at the short slender man in the lead, white, gray hair cut close, tattooed arms, ugly face twisted up from what looked to be an old knife wound, one of the final group flushed out of the burning house.

Malady, still alive, arm in a blood-soaked sling, came up to John.

John smiled and extended his hand, which Kevin clutched with his left.

“Good job, Kevin, damn good.”

“I lost a lot of kids, though,” he replied sadly. “It got real ugly once these bastards knew they were cornered. Kids were reluctant at first to shoot somebody who was down and looked dead, or badly wounded, but they learned real quick….”

His voice trailed off.

He looked at the young soldiers standing around, gazing cold-eyed at the prisoners.

“You interrogate any of them?”

“Oh yeah, they’re spilling their guts, pointing at each other. Everyone claiming they were forced into it. That piece of shit over there is their leader.”

Kevin looked over at the ugly man.

“Amazingly, that bastard is the leader. Apparently a big drug player in Greensboro, contact guy for major shipments of coke and heroin coming up from Florida. He might look soft, but they’re all scared of him, even the worst of the lot. They say he claimed to have the inside line with Satan himself, that God had abandoned America and Satan now ruled and he was the appointed one sent from hell to pave the way for Satan’s reign over America.”

“The stories about cannibalism?” John asked. Kevin nodded and spat. “They’re all true.”

John walked over to the leader, who gazed at him and then actually smiled.

“So let me guess, you’re the general here?” John did not reply.

“Masterful plan. I bet you’re the professor, aren’t you. I heard about you yesterday from a prisoner we took. A sweet girl she was, captured her yesterday.”

John froze. The girl they had most likely lost in the skirmishing on the dirt road.

“I see a touch of military history in this fight. The la Drang Valley

perhaps, lure in, get close up, and envelop? Saw it in that movie and on the History Channel.”

“And you walked right into it,” John said sarcastically.

“Yes, I did; indeed I did. I guess he decided it thus.”

“He?”

“Satan of course.”

The man turned and looked at the other prisoners.

“Did I not tell you that if you failed to offer your souls to him fully and in all things he would abandon you? Now you are indeed doomed to the fiery pit of hell. For God has cursed this world and because you failed me, Satan shall turn away from thee as well. Your reign by his side will be replaced by eternal punishment for your lack of faith.

“These dogs will show you no mercy. Rather than feasting tonight on their flesh, as Satan wished for you, instead you will be carrion for the dogs and crows… or perhaps…”

He looked over shiftily at John. “…they will feast on your flesh.”

John, his Glock half-raised, was tempted to blow the man’s brains out right there.

The other prisoners looked at him wide-eyed. Some started to cry; others knelt down, heads lowered, resigned to their fate.

It was so damn strange, John thought, how sometimes the most unlikely, an ugly little man like this one, could hold such power. He had a tremendous command presence, his voice sweet, rich, carrying power. So strange how some had that, could spout utter insanity and others would follow blindly.

“Cannibals,” John said coldly.

The man looked up at him, face twisted into a smile that almost seemed warm and friendly.

“My friend. You know enough about what has happened to know that this nation is doomed except for those chosen few with the strength to live. The flesh of the weak is the holy sacrament to us, the living, to survive and to have strength, to allow us our triumph of the will.”

He looked away from John and back to his surviving followers.

“For I have walked up and down and to and fro across the land and have considered this country that once was. Remove thy hand from it, protect it not, and the land that once worshipped thee will curse thee. And thus it was true and the land is now indeed cursed and we are the ones sent forth to cleanse it.”

He then looked back at John.

“That girl we captured yesterday. She was indeed sweet, the best I think I’ve had. Well fed before she became our sacrament.

“You know the natives of New Guinea used to call their foes ‘long pork.’ Well-fed flesh actually tastes like that… pork.”

John raised his Glock, muzzle touching the man’s forehead.

“Go on, you bastard,” he whispered. “Be like me; drink my blood once I am dead as I would have drunk yours. I know you are hungry. You do it, and all who follow you will join in, for they are hungry, too.”

John hesitated, then backhanded the man with the muzzle of his pistol, knocking him down.

John turned and looked at the hundreds who were now gathered round.

“You heard it from his own lips.”

No one spoke, all filled with shock, revulsion.

John looked around.

“Rope.”

One of his students came forward, a coil of rope in hand… the knot already made. John motioned to the aluminum crossbeam that supported the traffic light.

The rope went over the beam. Several already had the man up. He had expected to be shot and at the sight of the dangling noose he began to struggle, kicking, screaming, as they dragged him over and tightened the rope around his neck.

John walked up to him, almost spoke to him, but the hell with that. There would be no last words.

“By the power vested in me by the citizens of Black Mountain and Swannanoa I declare this man to be a condemned criminal, a murderer, an eater of human flesh. He is not even worthy of a bullet.”

John stepped back.

“Hang him.”

They hoisted him up and it took several long minutes of spasmodic kicking before he finally died. His followers watched, terrified. Several fell to their knees and started to cry that they had repented and wished to be saved, one calling for a priest to hear his confession.

John looked at them and then turned away. He saw Tom standing there, grim faced.

“Hang as many as you can; shoot the rest of the bastards. I want a sign painted onto the side of the truck over there: ‘Cannibals.’”

Tom nodded and within minutes half a dozen more were hoisted up.

The others now saw their fate, there were screams, pleas, and John stood there silent, watching.

“John?”

Makala was by his side.

“For God’s sake. A couple of them aren’t much more than kids. Most likely got sucked into this. Stop it.” He didn’t speak.

“John, this is a lynching now. This is out of control. It’s what you tried to stop this town from becoming. Look at us.”

He looked down at her and then back around at his young soldiers, the townspeople who had fought, and saw the savage light on more than one face.

Ten of the prisoners were led away from the side of the truck stop, most pleading, screaming… and were shot. Their bodies were tossed over the railing, dropping down the sheer cliff to shatter on the rocks below.

A minute later, another ten were shot, their deaths greeted with angry shouts of approval.

And it was as if at that moment a film was winding through John’s memory. Old grainy film, Russians hanging from makeshift gallows in that cold winter of 1941; the etchings of Goya, Spanish prisoners pleading, holding up their hands as French soldiers of Napoleon gunned them down; naked prisoners being led to a pit by the SS, kneeling down, shot, bodies tumbling forward. It was the face of war, of all wars, and now it was here and it was us against ourselves, John thought, as we fought for the last scrap of bread and now even for the bodies of the dead.

There were eight left, Tom’s men picking them up, dragging them to the edge of the ravine.

John stepped forward, Glock out, and Tom, seeing him approach, stepped back, assuming that John was reasserting his old position as the town’s executioner.

He looked at the eight. Several stood defiant, the same as the punk with the snake tattoo long ago. John looked into their eyes wondering, wondering why. Was this inside all of us? He turned and looked back, the hundreds gathered falling silent, and on more than one he now saw that same cold gaze. And he slowly turned back.

Makala was indeed right. Three of the prisoners, one a girl, were not much more than kids, fourteen, fifteen at most, though all three had that distant look of coldness and ice. He wondered if they were like that long before all this had ever started, gangbangers, as Washington had said, kids who would kill even then and think it a joke.

Next to them was a woman in her early twenties, shaking, so terrified that a trickle of urine was running down her leg, pooling at her feet. The next was an old man, eyes vacant, crazed, and beside him was a Hispanic kid, lips moving, the Spanish all but unintelligible but now obviously praying a Hail Mary.

“Kevin.”

Malady came down to John’s side. “Get out your knife.”

Kevin looked at John, hesitated, but then obeyed.

The eyes of one of the three defiant men widened. “Shoot me and be done with it,” he said coldly. “But not the knife, man.”

“Cut their bonds.”

“What?”

“I said cut their bonds.”

Kevin stepped behind each and cut their hands free. None of them moved.

John looked back at his students, his neighbors, his friends. “It’s over,” he said.

There was a murmur of complaint from the crowd. “What’s to prevent those bastards from coming back tonight and trying to cut our throats?” John shook his head. “I was wrong.”

“For killing them?” someone shouted.

“They killed our wounded without mercy!” a girl cried, one of his students, a girl who had been a Bible major long ago.

“And we have killed theirs. Washington and I ordered it because there is not even a fraction of the supplies needed to take care of our own.”

“Cannibals!”

John nodded.

“Yes. Some undoubtedly yes. I won’t bother to ask these, because they will lie to save their lives.” He wearily shook his head.

“I’m stopping it because I started to love it. I hate them. I hated that bastard hanging there more than I’ve ever hated anyone in my life….

“But I will not become him…. I will not let us become them. Because God save us, we are on the edge of that now, here at this moment.”

He did not wait for a reply but turned back to face the prisoners.

“I’m not going to go through some bullshit ritual of you swearing to me that you will leave, never return, and repent.”

The Hispanic boy started to nod his head, went to his knees, and made the sign of the cross repeatedly.

“Remember what you saw here. Don’t ever come back. All of you, if you survive, will carry the mark of Cain upon you forever for what you’ve done. If you come across other bands like yours tell them what happened here, and tell them they will face the same defeat.

“I ask but one thing. We’ve given you back your lives. Do not take any more lives, for then you surely will be damned forever.”

He started to turn away. Go!

Six did not hesitate; they simply turned and ran. The boy on his knees looked up at John wide-eyed and moved as if to kiss his feet. He backed away from the boy and motioned for him to get up and leave.

“Gracias, senor.” He turned and ran off.

The young woman who in her terror had urinated just stood there, unable to move.

“Go,” John said softly.

“Where?”

“Just go.”

“I’m sorry. God forgive me, I’m sorry. I don’t know if I can live now with what I’ve done. I’m sorry.”

Sobbing, she turned and slowly walked away. John turned and faced the crowd.

“Cut those bodies down,” he said, then paused. “Except for their leader. I want a sign under him. ‘Hung as punishment for leading the gang known as the Posse, murderers, rapists, and cannibals. May God have mercy on his soul and all who followed him.’”

John holstered his Glock and walked back to the rest, his soldiers, his neighbors, his friends parting as he passed, many with heads now lowered.

“You were right, John,” someone whispered.

His soldiers. He looked at them as he passed. Some were now beginning to break down. Postbattle shock, perhaps what had just happened here as well.

Some started to cry, turning to lean on one another for support. Others stood silent. More than a few were kneeling, praying, others wandering back now, stopping to roll over a body, then collapsing, crying, hugging a fallen friend.

John felt weak, sick to his stomach.

“John, let me take you back into town.”

It was Makala, who had come up alongside of him, slipping her hand into his.

He stopped and embraced her.

“Thank you for stopping me,” he whispered. “I was out of control.”

“It’s ok, sweetheart. It’s ok.”

She leaned up and kissed him, the gesture startling, for so many were walking by him now, seeing this and respectfully not looking directly at them.

He suddenly did feel weak, as if he was about to faint, and had to kneel down.

“Stretcher!”

He looked up and shook his head.

“John, you have a concussion. You’re suffering from shock; you need to lay down.”

“I must walk out of here. Just help me.”

He leaned against her, walking across the battlefield.

A battlefield, he thought. Memories of photos of the dead at Gettysburg, bodies lying in the surf at Tarawa, the dead and wounded marines aboard a tank at Hue. Always photos, but never in a photograph was there the stench.

The battlefield stank not just of cordite but also the coppery smell of blood, feces, urine, vomit, the smell of open raw meat, but this raw meat was human, or once human. Mixed in, the smell of vehicles burning, gasoline, rubber, oil, and, horrifying, burning bodies, roasting, bloating, bursting open as they fried.

The forest fire to either side of the highway had been a tool of battle but an hour ago. Now it was a forest fire raging, the heat so intense it could be felt from hundreds of yards away, moving with the westerly breeze, already over the crest of the mountain, moving down into the valley towards Old Fort, bodies, the enemy but also his own, roasting in those flames.

Now that it was over, hundreds were moving about, looking for loved ones, sons for fathers, mothers for sons, young lovers and friends looking for lost lovers and lost friends.

Film, yet again film. The scene from the Russian film Alexander Nevshy, after the battle on the ice, the mournful music, the haunting twilight effect of the lighting, wives and mothers weeping, looking for their fallen loved ones.

Again, though, this was no film; this was real. A boy, one of the tougher kids from the ball team, collapsing, lifted up the shattered body of a girl, cradling her, screaming, friends standing silent around him and then suddenly pinning him down as he dropped her, pulled out a pistol, and tried to shoot himself.

John staggered on.

A line of vehicles on the highway ahead. Wounded being loaded onto the flatbed trailer. Makala motioning for help. Hands reaching out, pulling him up, Makala climbing up by his side.

The sound of the diesel rumbling, exhaust smoke, they started to move, picking up speed as they cleared the ramp for Exit 65, the driver holding down the horn as the trailer came up State Street and then stopped in front of the furniture store in the center of town. All the furniture had been moved out, tossed into the street, except for the beds and sofas in the main display room.

But the facility was already overflowing.

“All ones here!” someone was shouting. “Twos over here!”

Four of the ones, all of them on stretchers, were lifted off and rushed inside.

John looked at Makala.

“I need to go in there.”

“John, it’s a concussion, not too bad, I hope. I think it’s best I just get you home and into bed. You should be all right in a week or so. Jen can take care of the burns.”

“No. I have to go in there. Those are my kids . .. my soldiers.”

She didn’t argue with him. A couple of townspeople helped him down. The last of the wounded off the truck, the driver revved it up, swung around the turn to Montreat Road, then turned through the parking lot of the town hall complex to race back to the battlefield.

John stood outside the door, hesitated, took a deep breath.

He let go of her embrace, stepped aside from her, and walked in.

He almost backed out but then froze in place.

It was the hardest thing he had ever done in his life up to this moment. Worse than holding Mary as she died, worse than anything.

“Jesus, give me strength,” he whispered to himself, and then he walked in.

Dozens were on the floor, all with ones marked on their foreheads. Some were crying, others silent, trying to be stoic. Fortunately for some, they were unconscious. Every wound imaginable confronted him.

He walked slowly through the room. If any made eye contact he stopped, forcing a smile. Some he recognized, and he was ashamed of his lifelong inability to remember names. All he could do was bend over, extend a reassuring hand, and kept repeating over and over: “I’m proud of you.… Don’t worry; they’ll have you patched up in no time…. Thank you, I’m proud of you….”

He left that room and in the next one he truly did recoil and Makala came up to his side. He looked at her, wondering how in God’s name she had ever handled what he was looking at.

The two towns had nine doctors and three veterinarians Day one. One had since died. There were eleven tables in the room and on each was a casualty and around each was a team at work, the veterinarians as well in this emergency.

The anesthesia saved from the vets’ offices and the dentists’ offices was now in use. He saw Kellor at work and the sight was terrifying. Kellor was taking a girl’s leg off just above the knee. The knee was nothing but mangled flesh and crushed bone. Her head was rocking back and forth, and she was weeping softly.

Horrified, John looked at Makala.

“We’re using local for amputations,” she whispered. “We have to save the general for the more serious cases.”

“More serious?”

But he did not need to be told. Head wounds, shattered jaws, chest wounds, stomach wounds, though, were being triaged off because there were not enough antibiotics to treat them after the operation, if they even survived that.

He went up to the girl on the table. She looked up at him, wide-eyed, panicked, eyes like a rabbit that had just been shot, waiting for the final blow, and his heart filled. He knew her.

He grabbed her hand.

“Laura, isn’t it?”

“Oh God, I can feel it,” she gasped. “Hang on,” John said.

The sound was terrifying. Kellor was now cutting the bone with a saw. John spared a quick glance down. It was a hacksaw, most likely taken from the hardware store. My God, they didn’t even have the right surgical tools.

“Oh God!”

John squeezed her hand tight, leaning over, looking at her. “Look at me, Laura; look at me!” She gazed up at him.

“Laura, remember your song ‘Try to Remember’….”

“‘The kind of September…’ Jesus, please help me!”

The sound of sawing stopped; someone assisting Kellor lifted the severed leg off the table. Kellor stepped back from the table.

“Nurse, tie off the rest….” He pulled aside his surgical mask and looked over at John, then down at Laura.

“Laura honey, the worst is over,” Kellor said. “We’ll give you another shot of painkiller shortly.”

Sobbing, she nodded, John barely able to let go of her hand.

Kellor looked at John as they turned away.

“We’re out of painkiller except for some oxycodone,” he whispered. “God save her and all these kids.”

Kellor tore off the latex gloves and let them drop to the floor.

“Nurse, I’m taking five minutes; prep the next one.”

John felt guilty leaving Laura, but Kellor motioned for him to follow him out of the operating room.

“John.”

It was Makala.

“I’m needed here now. I’m finished with triage up at the gap.”

He nodded to her, but she was already turned away, motioning for an assistant to pour some rubbing alcohol on her hands.

John, following Kellor, walked past the other operating bays. The floor was slick with blood, and as John looked down he was stunned to see that it was covered with sawdust, an assistant throwing more down on the floor even as the doctors continued to operate.

As they passed the last table one of the doctors, a woman, stepped back.

“God damn it!”

She tore off her gloves stepped back, and leaned against the wall, sobbing, and then looked over at John, glaring at him as if he had intruded into a world that he should never have ventured into.

Two assistants lifted the body off the table, the boy’s chest still laid wide open from her frantic attempt to save him.

Kellor took John by the arm and led him out of the room.

“A friend of her daughter’s,” he whispered. “They were neighbors.”

The next room was set up as a postop, barely any floor space left. There was a precious small supply of plasma that had been saved from the clinic over in Swannanoa. Half a dozen bottles were hooked up, not necessarily to those who needed it the most but instead to those for whom a single bottle could ensure survival.

Some volunteers from the town who had not been in the fight were now sacrificing their own lives. They had volunteered to donate blood. In their weakened state not more than half a pint would be drawn, but even that was too much for so many of them. But they volunteered anyhow.

Those who knew their type were being matched up with the wounded. The letters had been marked on the chests and backs of those who had known their blood type before the fight with a grease pencil. The blood transfer was direct. To John it looked absolutely primitive, using old-fashioned rubber hoses, squeeze balls, and needles, the donors lying on cots higher than the patients receiving the precious fluid.

Kellor led John through a side door and out into the open air. After the last twenty minutes, it was impossible for John to believe that there was still a world out here of sunlight, a warm summer breeze… but then he saw the long line of bodies in the parking lot behind the store… the dead.

He fumbled in his pocket. There were but two cigarettes left. With trembling hands he pulled out one and lit it.

Kellor looked at him, started to hold up a finger. “Makala already diagnosed me. Concussion.”

“And some burns. You better get some ointment on that face and sterile bandage. Have Jen boil a sheet and cover it. You can’t risk another infection. You’re still weak from the last one.”

“Sure, Doc.”

“John, we’re going to have a terrible problem in a few days.”

“What? What after this?”

“Disease. I was up at the battle site after you pushed them back from the bridge. Saw some of the Posse. Talked to a few of them before…” His voice trailed away. “Before Tom’s men shot them.”

“John, their camp was loaded with disease. Flu, hepatitis, I think some exotics as well, typhoid perhaps. You look at their bodies you could see they weren’t much better off than the people they were terrorizing. I think we’re going to have some kind of epidemic here in a matter of days and it will be far worse than the last one. All that blood splattered about, many of them obviously drug users, we might be looking at hep B and C, maybe even HIV.”

“Tell Charlie,” John sighed. “I can’t bear any more.”

“Charlie?”

John looked at him.

“John, didn’t you know? Charlie’s dead. He was killed in the fight at the overpass.”

“Oh Jesus. I told him to stay back here. He was too weak. His job wasn’t in the front lines.”

“You knew Charlie,” Kellor said with a sigh. “He wouldn’t stay back, not at a time like that.”

“Damn.”

“John, you’re in charge of this town now.”

“What?”

“Charlie appointed you. He told me just before he died. Kate was in here, witnessed it, and agreed. You’re in charge now under martial law.” John sagged against the wall.

“I just want to go home right now.” Kellor nodded and put a reassuring arm around him. “Things will run by themselves for the rest of the day. I’ll take care of it. And John…” He hesitated. “I think you should go home.”

“Why?”

John took the last puff of his cigarette and tossed it to the ground. Kellor reached into John’s breast pocket, fished out the last, the last of all his cigarettes, and offered it to him and helped him light it. “My God, what else?”

Kellor reached into his pocket and pulled out a ring, a high school ring. “What is this?” John asked. “Ben’s ring.”

He couldn’t speak. He just held it, looking down at it, flecks of dried blood coating it.

“He died an hour ago. He was triaged off as a three, but I saw him by the bridge and brought him back anyhow, John.”

Kellor nodded to one of the bodies, one of the few with a sheet covering it.

“He was a good kid, John. A damn good kid. Stayed on the bridge even as it was getting overrun. A lot of people saw it, saw how he rallied people about to panic, shouting for them to charge, and then he went down. I thought you knew. You passed within feet of him when the counterattack started.”

John couldn’t speak.

Kellor sighed.

“John, he’ll leave behind a child you shall be proud of. Proud that Ben was the father. Someday I’ll come up and tell Elizabeth about him. Hell, I helped to bring him into the world seventeen years ago.”

He shook his head.

“We might of lost the fight without kids like him, a lot of kids like him. “John, he asked me to tell you that he was sorry if he had disappointed you. And asked that you love the child he and Elizabeth will have.” Kellor began to cry.

“Damn all of this,” he sighed, then looked back at John. “Now go home to Elizabeth.” John could not speak.

He walked over to the body and was about to remove the sheet, but Kellor stopped him.

“Don’t, John; remember him as he was.” John looked down at the body.

“You are my son,” he whispered. “And I will take care of your baby; I promise it. Son, I am proud of you.”

Woodenly John turned and walked away.

Going around the building, he came out onto State Street. Another truck was pulling up from the front, half a dozen wounded in the back, three of them with twos marked on their foreheads, the others with ones.

He walked around them, barely noticing.

“Colonel, damn it, we won!”

He didn’t even bother to look back at who was speaking.

His old Edsel was parked in front of the town hall. A crowd was gathered round. Someone had written on the bulletin board but one word: “VICTORY!!!!”

Some began to ask questions as he approached, others asking for orders, others asking what they should do now.

He did not reply; he simply got into the car. The keys were in the ignition, the engine turned over, and he backed out.

The radio was on. Voice of America.

“This morning, a containership from Australia docked in Charleston. Our allies have sent us over a million rations, a thousand two-way radios, six steam-powered railroad locomotives—”

He switched it off.

The barrier was still up at the gate into the Cove, two students guarding it. He rolled to a stop. “What’s the news?” He looked at the girl holding a pistol. “Sir, are you ok?”

“We won,” was all he could say.

The girl grinned and saluted, motioning for the other student to move the Volkswagen that blocked the gate back.

John drove through and turned onto Hickory Lane, rolling to a stop at number 12, Jen and Tyler’s house.

As John pulled into the driveway, all four of them were out the door, Jen, Jennifer, Ginger wagging her tail… and Elizabeth.

He sat in the car, unable to move as they came running down to him.

He looked at Elizabeth, all of sixteen and a half. No outward sign yet of the life inside her, still not much more than a child herself.

Jennifer reached the car first and then stepped back.

“Daddy, you look terrible!”

“I’m all right, honey. Just a little singed.”

Elizabeth was beside her now, Ginger up between them leaning in, wanting to lick him.

God, but two months ago this was the way it was. Come home after a lecture and office hours, if a Tuesday or Thursday when he had a 2:30 to 4:00 class the girls home ahead of him. Always the dogs would come piling out, Jennifer with them, his teenage daughter at least still following a bit of ritual and joining them with a hug and kiss.

He was unable to move, to get out of the car.

Jen was now up looking in.

“What happened?”

“We’re ok,” he finally said. “We won; they’re gone.” Jennifer shouted and grabbed hold of Ginger, dancing around. “We won; we won; we won!”

He stared ahead… the victor returning from the wars, he thought. The triumph, the parade, the ovation. The stuff, yet again, of film, but now, this the real reality of it?

“John?”

Jen was leaning in through the window. “You’re hurt.”

“Nothing much. Concussion, some burns, I’ll be fine.”

“Daddy, where’s Ben?” Elizabeth asked. John looked past Jen to his daughter. “Let me out,” he said softly.

Jen opened the door and as they exchanged glances he could see that Jen knew. She could read it in him.

He stepped out of the car and slipped his hand into his pocket.

He remembered that the ring was caked with dried blood. Frantically he rubbed it with his hand.

“Daddy? I asked you about Ben. Did you see him?”

“Yes, honey.”

John walked towards the door, Jen rushing ahead to open it.

“Then he’s ok?” Elizabeth asked. “I knew he’d be ok.” John could hear the wishful strain in her voice.

He walked into the house. Jen had opened all the windows, airing out the stale, musty smell that had greeted them. Sunlight flooded in through the bay windows that faced the creek that tumbled down through their backyard.

It had been Tyler’s favorite place in the house, the bay windows open unless it was freezing cold, the sound of water tumbling over rocks, the deep, comfortable sofa facing it.

John sat down.

“Elizabeth, come here.”

“Daddy?”

She was beginning to cry even as she sat down beside him.

He reached into his pocket and drew out the ring.

“Ben wanted you to have this,” John said, fighting to control his voice, to not let the anguish out.

She took the ring, cradling it in her hands. He had done a poor job of cleaning it. Flecks of dried blood rested in the palm of her hand.

“Someday,” he said softly, “someday you will give that to your child and tell them about their father, what a wonderful man their father was.”

She buried herself in John’s arms, sobbing, hysterical, crying until there were no more tears to give.

The shadows lengthened. He could recall Jen bringing him some soup, saying it was sent down by the chaplain from the college and she had been over to see Ben’s parents, who had moved into an abandoned house. John remembered Jennifer’s voice, in what was now her bedroom, talking to Jen, crying, then saying a prayer, the two of them reciting the Hail Mary together. The sound of Ginger paddling back and forth, then finally climbing up to sleep alongside Jennifer, sighing as she drifted off to sleep.

As darkness settled, Elizabeth came back out, nestled against his shoulder, and cried herself to sleep.

He held Elizabeth throughout the night, and would hold her until the coming of dawn.