The Final Day

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 there 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.

It was not until after Fredericks’s defeat that John had learned that within Asheville, Fredericks had actually attempted to impose a mandatory confiscation of all silver and gold coins that had once been government minted. Unknown to those areas outside of Fredericks’s brief period of control, he claimed a decree from Bluemont had ordered such, with a so-called fair trade of a hundred dollars in printed money for each silver dollar and a thousand dollars of paper money for each one-ounce gold coin. Only those caught with silver or gold on them complied under duress, meaning, “We caught you; give us the coins—here’s your paper, now go and keep your mouth shut, or you are under arrest for illegal trading.”

Those thus caught referred to the paper as being “not worth a damn Frederick” or to a more direct scatological reference as its only real use. Yet another troubling bit of information that had come to light after that vainglorious man’s bloody defeat.

The paper currency was even how those serving with the ANR had been paid. Those who had survived and surrendered after the battle to take out Fredericks were expecting execution and thus were stunned by the offer to stay and join the community.

All of them were young, generally in good health thanks to the rations they had lived on for months, and were then divided up and assigned to different units within “the State of Carolina’s Militia.”

There was some resentment for the first few days on the part of his own people—for, after all, over thirty from the town had been killed fighting against these young men and women. There had been one tragedy when a young man from the college murdered one of the ANR troops, blaming his victim personally for the death of his fiancée in the fight to take the courthouse in Asheville. It proved to be an extremely tense day, the nearly hundred ANR prisoners fearing that they had been lulled by John’s promises and that Fredericks’s warnings that to be taken alive by “those mountain rednecks” would mean torture, rape, and death. Some had gathered together, ready to fight or flee, when more than a few locals supported the young man’s vengeance killing as justice, plain and simple.

It proved to be just about the most difficult day John had ever faced. The community had yet to stand down from a state of military emergency; therefore, John was deemed to be in command under military law. Reverend Black had insisted upon sitting on the tribunal since the accused came from the college where he now served as chaplain, rather than a civil trial since the crime had occurred while the community’s troops were still “in military service.” Reverend Black, when he pronounced his vote with tears streaming down his face, startled everyone, declaring it had to be done, quoting Old Testament verses, that killing in combat was a tragedy that had haunted mankind from the beginning, but this death was cold-blooded murder, using the translation of “murder” rather than “Thou shall not kill.”

John realized he had to carry out the sentence himself as he had done with others; it could not be delegated, though he spent hours praying over it, hoping to find a personal way out. At the end, the young man took it stoically, forgiving John for what had to be done and appealing to the dead man’s friends for forgiveness as well. Memory of it, along with so many other memories, still woke him up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night.

As to the regular army prisoners, especially the helicopter crews that had slaughtered many in Forrest Burnett’s community, there had been outright calls to execute them. But John had had enough of executions, even though many—especially Forrest’s community, which had endured the atrocity of being strafed by the pilot—cried for blood. In the end, John ordered them banished, pushed to the far side of the barrier on Interstate 40 at the top of the mountain and told to start walking. Chances they would survive a week were nil, and it was decided by all that the punishment was just.

The aftereffect? The ANR survivors witnessed something they had never expected, even expressing regret for the entire tragedy and its end result, and thereafter, no mention was made—at least publicly—of having been on one side or the other in the battle for Asheville. The ANR commanding officer, who had grown up near where John originally came from, now served as a platoon lieutenant in the militia, and what she and others had said about life outside of their valley added more fuel to his worries.

All the ANR personnel had told him, along with reports by the BBC, served to fuel his suspicions and concerns about what exactly was taking place at Bluemont, and he was eager to get on the road to Forrest’s community on the far side of Mount Mitchell.

The fire within the stove was now crackling hot, radiating warmth. He remembered an old favorite author who wrote on Americana, Eric Sloane, his works filled with wonderful detailed sketches of life long ago, stating that a wood fire heated you twice—from the labor it took to cut, split, stack, and haul the wood and again when it finally burned as it now did before him.

All well and good, John thought with a smile, if one was young and twenty and had grown up with life being such. There had been offers, which he always saw as little more than attempts at bribes, to provide him with wood and so many other things, but it was a point of honor that he worked and traded for it like everyone else. Before she passed, Jen, almost as if it were an afterthought, had revealed that there was a stash of several hundred dollars of face-value silver filling half a dozen mason jars tucked away in a corner of the basement. When the government had gone over to clad coins back in the ’60s, her husband, George, had denounced it as a damned conspiracy and had taken to emptying out the silver dimes, quarters, and occasional half dollars into a jar on his nightstand at the end of every day and then stashing them in the basement when filled.

The find had truly made them rich, and the historian inside of John had of course been fascinated by this first step back to a “real” money-based economy when he started offering a quarter here, a few dollars there for the essentials of survival. Silver and gold had disappeared from the economic flow long ago, and now finds like his were reintroducing them. Throughout the various communities that now made up the State of Carolina, there was hardly a basement or attic that had not been ransacked by surviving family members—and more than a few looters going at abandoned properties in search of such stashes. One such prowler, a drifter who had slipped in past the security posts guarding the approaches to Black Mountain, had been caught just a few months ago. Murder and rape were of course capital offenses, as was the case with one of his militia killing a former member of the ANR. Stealing food had been added to the list as one for which one could possibly face capital punishment. Some said it was little better than the obsessed policeman in Les Misérables hunting down a man who stole a loaf of bread. But after the starving times of that first winter, people did die for lack of a loaf of bread or the pig they had been raising on scraps to provide meat for the winter suddenly disappearing.

There was no jail in the town, except for an overnight lockup for the occasional drunk and disorderly. In such a time, to punish someone by locking them up in a warm jail, feeding them, and then having to feed and compensate someone to watch over the offender was absurd. An infraction of stealing other than while mobilized for military service resulted in a civil court. If the theft was not crucial to the survival of a family or the entire community, the standard punishment had finally become a sentence to labor in the communal farmlands. Thus it was for that looter in search of a stash of gold or silver, who labored for a month and then disappeared the night his sentence was completed.

A supreme irony was for all those who had secured their precious metals in bank vault safe-deposit boxes. With the failure of electricity, the vaults were automatically locked, sealed as tightly as some long-lost ancient tomb, owners of what some claimed were hundreds of ounces of gold only able to stand outside the empty buildings and stare forlornly. John and the town council had even agreed to divert power into the old Fifth Third Bank on Montreat Road, a surviving employee then attempting to unscramble the locking systems, to no avail.

Those standing outside watching the attempt, growing frustrated, started to suggest just blowing the entire thing up, which was of course vetoed. So the bank still stood, as did the other banks in town, the treasures within as remote as if lost in the hull of the Titanic.

Inwardly, John breathed a sigh of relief, for if successful there would have been a rush to crack into or blow up every bank in western North Carolina, and the flood of coinage pouring out triggering that age-old nightmare of inflation.

As for those who had purchased gold and went along with it being stored at “a safe and secure location in Switzerland,” they were truly out of luck.

John sat by the open door of the woodstove for a few minutes, dwelling on all the events and changes taking place, willing to bet that Ernie had awoken the Hawkins family at dawn, tool bag in hand, ready to continue probing the computers found in the library basement. He watched the flames dancing, enjoying the radiant heat blossoming out, the fire, as it always does, weaving a hypnotic spell, the iron sides of the old stove cracking and pinging as they expanded from the heat.

“How about some eggs and grits for breakfast?”

He felt Makala’s warm touch on his shoulder and looked up at her with a smile.

“Sure. But sit down with me for a few minutes first.”

She laughed, pulling her flannel robe in tight, revealing just how pregnant she truly was.

“If I sit on the floor, it will take a forklift to get me back on my feet.”

“Come on, I’ll help you.”

With a groan, she sat down by his side and snuggled in close, extending her hands toward the glowing fire.

“Sleep okay?” he asked while brushing a wisp of her golden hair back from her forehead and then kissing her.

“Little badger must have woke me up half a dozen times. That baby wants out.”

He laughed and put a hand on her bulging tummy. He waited and a moment later was rewarded with a kick. Laughing, he kept his hand there and kissed her again.

“Wish you’d wait a few more days before trying to get over the mountain,” she announced. “It’s still most likely snowing on the north slope, and the wind up there can kill. You ever read Jack London’s To Build a Fire?”

John smiled and nodded at the memory of a scoutmaster when he was a boy, getting the troop out of Newark and up to what at the time John felt was the true wilderness at High Point, New Jersey, for a three-day winter survival trek. Shivering around the campfire at night, the scoutmaster had read that tale to his group of frozen city kids, most of them convinced their leader had gone crazy to drag them out on this trek. John remembered reveling in the adventure of it, all the time imagining that it was like being with George Washington’s troops at Valley Forge or the midnight march through a blizzard to take Trenton.

Romantic then, but Makala did have a point. Temps could be twenty degrees colder up at the crest line at Craggy Gap, and though calm down here, it could be a thirty- to fifty-mile-per-hour blow up there.

He had approached Billy Tyndall yesterday with the thought of using their Aeronca L-3 to fly him over the mountain range, a short twenty-minute hop by air, so he could meet this Quentin Reynolds, and Billy had replied with two words: “You’re crazy.” He then went on to a lecture about the killer weather conditions to be found around Mount Mitchell, pointing to an old FAA map of the region pinned to the wall of the makeshift hangar, where a specific warning was printed about the dangers of severe turbulence in the area.

“You ask any pilot who’s not crazy and thus still alive about flying around up there, especially in an old underpowered tail dragger, and they’ll tell you that you are indeed crazy. We damn near got killed last time you and I flew there; it wasn’t the bullets and Apache helicopters that scared me half as much as getting slammed by a downdraft and sending us right into the side of a mountain. So no way.”

So waiting for a crystal-clear and very calm day was out.

“It can’t wait,” John finally replied to Makala. “Forrest said the guy was in bad shape. If he slips into pneumonia, he could be on the edge of dying unless we can get some of our antibiotics into him, and that alone is reason enough to at least try to get to him. There’s something about the name of this guy that rings a bell somewhere in my head beyond the fact that he claimed to have served with my friend Bob Scales. I gotta go.”

“All right, help me get up, eggs and grits, something to stick to your ribs.”

John never could figure out the Southern obsession with grits, but when one has gone through a starving time, the memory lingers.

“Did I hear grits?”

The two looked back to see Forrest coming out of the guest room, pulling up his suspenders over his shoulder, deftly doing so with his one hand.

John stood up, helped Makala get to her feet, pushed a few more split pieces of hickory into the stove to ensure a good, long, hot fire, and closed the door. A moment later, Makala had the iron skillet resting atop the woodstove. She’d also set an old-fashioned percolating coffeepot filled with water—which was again coming out of a faucet tap thanks to the electrical pump that soaked up a significant part of the town’s electricity but again provided safe, clean running water to most homes and another item of the past—ready to put in some chicory roots and an herbal concoction.

“Oh, damn it, wait a minute.” Forrest sighed at the sight of the coffee percolator and disappeared back into the guest room.

They both knew he had some, the scent of it as seductive as any perfume, and both of them had silently hoped he still had some left. Etiquette was never to ask people if they had a secret stash of some precious item like chocolate, honey, coffee, or cigarettes. One waited to be offered, and while visiting with John and Makala, coffee—wherever it had come from—was part of breakfast again. After the meal, Forrest would step outside, at Makala’s orders, to enjoy his one cigarette, Makala keeping a watchful eye on John so that he didn’t break his vow to Jennifer.

Forrest returned, and in his open hand he held out four small plastic K-Cups—hazelnut, no less—fully caffeinated.

Makala all but snatched them from his hand. Along with rare .22 bullets and silver coins, the once ubiquitous K-Cups had become a cherished trade item, the coffee within still fresh even three years later.

Makala carefully cut each one open, not letting a single grain fall to the floor, and emptied them into the percolator before putting it on the stove.

“Now tell me you got some of those creamer cups and packets of sugar, and life will be complete,” John interjected, breaking a golden rule of good manners. Forrest smiled, reached into his pant pocket, and produced three of the creamer cups as well.

“Sorry, but sugar is out.”

“Apologies for asking,” John replied, but Forrest smiled. “Who’d have thought those darn things would one day be worth so much?”

Within minutes, the grits were simmering atop the stove, and heaven of heavens, the scent of coffee brewing filled the room. The sound of the coffee percolating was a flashback to childhood, cold winter mornings, still dark outside, coming down to the kitchen, his father nearly finished with breakfast, letting John have a few sips of the warm brew before bundling up to take the train over to the gas plant in Harrison. It was a breakfast sound that disappeared with the advent of the Mr. Coffee machines, a sound he still missed, and all the other nuances of that time and place: his father’s insistence on heavy cream and to hell with the cholesterol count, fresh bacon at least three times a week, or even the dreaded winter breakfast for kids—hot oatmeal—with a slab of butter and perhaps a sprinkling of cinnamon.

There was something about the quiet of breakfast time that triggered such nostalgia for John, particularly on a cold day—the sky a sparkling blue, the freshly fallen snow reflecting the morning light, the trees, especially the pines, still blanketed from the storm just passed.

John helped to set the table, appealing to Makala to get off her feet while he placed a single egg on each plate, doled out the grits, and then carefully poured cups of coffee for each, as a proper host shorting himself slightly while making sure the provider of such largesse had an extra gulp in his cup.

Sitting, they joined hands, John reaching over to touch Forrest’s empty left sleeve, said grace, and then wordlessly dug in, savoring each bite.

Meal done, there was several minutes of silence, each one enjoying their cup of coffee while gazing out the window, until Forrest finally stirred.

“Time to get going.”

John nodded, helping Makala to clear the table and clean the dishes in a pot of hot water that had been set atop the woodstove. Even now, after three years, people were still falling ill because of the lack of hot running water. The Saturday-night bath was again a nineteenth-century ritual of heating water on the stove and standing in an old washtub, soap again a mixture of lard and wood ash and crushed mint leaves to at least create some kind of pleasant scent.

John pulled on a tattered snowmobile suit that hung loosely on his lanky frame, followed by ski mask and gloves, and hoisted his emergency travel pack stuffed with winter survival gear, including a small tent, dry clothes rolled up inside a plastic bag, some dried beef jerky, and matches with a twisted-up piece of birch bark packed in a waterproof container. He picked up his M1 Carbine, which had become his preferred weapon, checking to make sure it was cleared, holstered a Glock, and waited for Forrest to suit up in the guest room.

Makala looked at him anxiously. It was still all so ironic. They were only traveling twenty miles up over the Mount Mitchell range and down to where Forrest’s community had decided to remain even though there was plenty of vacant housing in Asheville and right here in Black Mountain and Montreat. John had argued repeatedly with Forrest before winter closed in to move, but Forrest always rebuffed him, that he and his friends preferred to stay on the land that had once been their home; none of them were cut out for what he still sarcastically called “city folk,” and he did have the logical point that by staying north of the mountains, his community kept an eye on the northern flank of their world.

The year before the Day, several of John’s students who owned jeeps had offered an adventure ride for his two daughters and himself, and it had turned into a day the girls adored, traversing fire roads and trails clear up to Mount Mitchell and back, soaking in the splendor of a sunlit autumn day. Now they were suiting up as if going into combat; there was still always a remote chance that perhaps some marauders following the old Blue Ridge Parkway were in the area and would gladly kill for Forrest’s old Polaris 4×6.

Forrest came out of his room wearing heavy winter camo, left sleeve cut off and sewn closed. A hunting rifle was slung from one shoulder, and a military-grade M4, taken in the fight with the ANR, was slung around his neck and across his chest.

“Ma’am, thank you for your hospitality,” Forrest said, nodding politely to Makala, old mountain etiquette coming to the fore, extending his hand, giving her half a dozen K-Cups—which she tried to refuse, John watching the exchange and of course inwardly hoping that the game would play out with Makala reluctantly taking this incredible gift, which could mean coffee in the morning for nearly an entire week.

“Take care of my husband,” she finally replied, kissing Forrest on the cheek, and he actually blushed slightly. He had long ago come to accept that his scarred, twisted face with one eye missing gave him a deadly looking demeanor, and rare would be the woman who kissed him, even in a friendly gesture of politeness.

“He can take care of himself, ma’am; otherwise, I wouldn’t salute the son of a…”

“Bitch? Yeah, can be that at times,” she said with a laugh and then turned and looked John straight in the eyes. “I know you’ve got to go, your damn sense of duty and all that. But, John Matherson, if you get yourself killed and leave me seven months’ pregnant, I’ll never forgive you.”

He looked around the room. More than enough firewood was stacked by the stove, the fire within radiating a comfortable glowing heat, augmented by the brilliant sunlight streaming through the sunroom window. If all went well, he’d back by midday tomorrow… if all went well, something that in this world no one ever took for granted.

They went down to the basement garage, the place where there had once been a lovely blue Mustang convertible, destroyed in the fight with the Posse. The old, battered Edsel still ran but was rarely used now since it was such a gas guzzler. When time again permitted, he planned to go into Asheville and prowl the abandoned automotive shops, finding a set of tires to match up with a 1958 Edsel, the tires on his nearly bald. The engine as well needed a major overhaul, and trying to find new rings and valves would be another challenge.

They opened the garage door, and it took a minute for Forrest’s open-air vehicle to start and keep running. John put his gear in the back well, double-checked the two jerricans, making sure they were filled with gas, waited for Forrest to ease the vehicle out of the garage, closed the door behind him, and climbed into the open-air seat. Just sitting there made him doubt the wisdom of this trip. It was freezing cold; the old-fashioned thermometer next to the garage door, mounted to a faded tin frame advertising the “new” 1958 Edsel, registered fifteen degrees. His wife was right; chances were it would be below zero up over the pass. He tightened up his jacket, made sure no flesh was exposed, looked over at Forrest, and nodded.

“Let’s go get Lee Robinson and hit the road.”