“What else do they have down there?”
“Part of Charleston has power again, feeding off the carrier anchored at Patriots Point. John, you step foot on that carrier and you swear nothing ever went wrong. Computers still run onboard the ship, hot showers, real food, and not just emergency rations…” His voice trailed off as if sensing the frustration John was feeling.
“How about hospitals? And what about insulin?” John asked. “They ever run out of that?”
Dale hesitated for a moment, not sure of the meaning, and then he nodded, his features solemn. “Sorry, John, I did read about that in your profile report. And no, things were just as hellish down there during the first months after the attack, even more so with the summer heat than up your way until the navy arrived in force.”
“My profile report?”
“Sure. It’s been two years since the war started, but some things are slowly coming back online. They had some backup database systems in Bluemont; remember, it was always one of the fallback positions in the event of a major attack hitting the lower forty-eight and taking out Washington, D.C. When I put your name in, they said your dossier from your service in the Pentagon was still intact, and they mentioned that you had a daughter with diabetes. Damn all, John, if only you had been evacuated up to Bluemont when this hit rather than being down here, it might have turned out different.”
“Don’t go anywhere near there, Dale,” John replied. Whenever the death of Jennifer came anywhere near a conversation, he always felt something about to break inside. “We weren’t, she wasn’t, we had no insulin, and she died—and that was it.” He glared at Dale icily.
Dale lowered his head. “Sorry I mentioned it.”
John sat silent for several minutes. It was his weakest spot, and Dale had just touched it. Of course, he had thought of all the alternatives—one of the worse of them that, on the day things had hit, before everyone else began to catch on, he should have just stormed into the pharmacy and cleaned out their supply rather than accept the six bottles the pharmacist had offered him the day after. But then again, would he really have done that? He knew that regardless of his anguish, that was a moral boundary. Condemning others to death to save his own was not something he could ultimately live with.
“Perhaps we should talk about this commission your people want to give me and how it will affect the draft in my town,” John said, shifting the subject back to the main point of this visit.
Dale, who apparently regretted his misstep with his reference to Jennifer, looked back up, his pensive gaze gone. “Sorry if I hit a bad nerve, John. Just my clumsiness at times.”
“No harm done,” John replied. There was a moment of awkward silence, which John finally broke. “I think I asked where you were on the day the war started.”
“I was out in the field that day on an inspection tour for a government agency, fortunately near Bluemont.”
“What agency?”
“The White House,” Dale said without elaborating.
“Oh?” Again there was an awkward moment, as if both were stumbling to keep the conversation going, Dale obviously not yet feeling ready to push John further regarding the offer of a return to government service.
“So is it true that Air Force One was not sufficiently hardened and went down?” John finally asked, breaking the silence.
“Something like that.”
“Too bad.”
Dale stared at him intently for a moment, John returning the gaze unflinchingly. His tone had not conveyed horror at such news; it was a response of complete detachment. Where once the entire nation dwelled on the latest actions of the celebrity of the moment—and the president was definitely in that classification—now there was a distancing by all. Each had endured horrors unimagined before the electricity went down, and there was little room for empathy for what occurred outside of their sight and hearing.
When half, three-quarters, or more of your community dies, a death rate unprecedented in all of Western history since the great plague of the fourteenth century, survivors focused on their survival and that of their families, blocking out what was no longer part of their world.
“And the president now,” John finally offered. “You feel she’s qualified?”
“Constitutional line of succession. Secretary of Health and Human Services was the highest-ranking survivor, but you already know that. The vice president was the secretary of Homeland Security.”
“This is a presidential election year. What’s going to happen?”
“That’s a tough one, John. We first need a census. Do we stick with the Constitution as written and reestablish the Electoral College or just go with a national vote?”
“Electoral College,” John replied instantly. “The Constitution must stand untouched. That is a rock-solid bottom line for this country and for me personally. I will not serve a government that abrogates the Constitution. Yes, we had to move to martial law, but I pray those times are passing, regardless of the crisis that continues in many regions. If we tear out the bedrock of the Constitution, we will find ourselves on shifting sands that will eventually swallow all of us up into the darkness.”
“Easy to say, John, but think of the complexities—and then think of why you are being asked to come back to serve. May I just rattle off a few points?”
“Go ahead.”
“A year after the attack, we ran an analysis up in Bluemont and cataloged some classifications for the various states.”
“Classifications?”
“Rating each state from a level one—meaning fully stabilized based on a number of different criteria—down to a level five, which means currently occupied either by a hostile nation or a nation claiming it is neutral and alleging it is here to help—to complete anarchy into lawlessness, of which Florida is still the worst case.”
“And the results?”
“Not one state has reached what we define as a level one, with functioning local and state governments in conformity with federal law, as well.”
“Conformity to federal law?” He was a bit cautious now.
“Come on, John. You do recall the Thirteenth Amendment, right? Do you know there are places where slavery is back, one of them in what used to be Charlotte?”
John sighed, not really surprised, and then he sadly nodded.
“Twelve states are level five. We got a few zones at level one, but not an entire state yet as it existed prior to the attack. I’m proud to say a hundred-mile radius around Bluemont is level one, touching into four states—West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. The rail corridor of the B&O for a couple of hundred miles is actually up and running. They pulled out half a dozen old steam locomotives from museums and got them running since we’re smack in the middle of the coal region.”
What about all the anticoal rhetoric of several years back? John thought, but he decided not to throw that into the conversation.
“Anyhow, back to your original point about elections this year. I think you can see it’s impossible if we are going to do so within the proscriptions of the Constitution. We need a census—and out of that, a redrawing of congressional districts, most likely a significant reduction in total members of the House given the blow to our population. It has not always been 435, as you know. Some are saying we only need a hundred or so, the same as the Senate.”
“I got no thoughts on that right now,” John replied.
“And what about senators from level-five states? The vast majority of senators and members of the House were in D.C. on the Day with Congress in session. Not many made it to Bluemont.”
“Have either houses even met since the war started?”