If Fredericks had a means of tracking him, he had done his best to throw him off.
Once through the door, he was met by chaos. The basement had been converted into a temporary hospital. The Assembly Inn had once been a rather upscale hotel for conferences, and shortly before the Day, it had gone through an extensive remodeling. It had a long history, including housing enemy diplomats in the opening months of the Second World War. There had been little use for it since the Day. Of course, there were no more tourists and conferences, and with such a radical population decline in the year afterward, those who needed housing simply moved into abandoned homes while students remaining on the campus on the far side of Lake Susan had found that old familiar haunts were of the most comfort and stayed there. Those who married moved in together and lived not just with their spouse but beloved friends and even some of the staff who remained, as well. The college had become something of an old-style commune of sorts, led by the moral guidance of President King and Reverend Black while the beautiful Assembly Inn on the far side of the Lake Susan had slipped into disrepair. It had been designated a year earlier as the fallback position of a hospital and refugee center if ever Black Mountain were overrun or destroyed, but little had been done other than board up some windows damaged in an ice storm the previous winter.
But within the last twenty-four hours, it again had a use as Makala organized the transfer of the thirty-eight surviving wounded refugees and several dozen family members of the wounded who had trekked over the mountains in search of help. The town’s precious reserve of gas had been nearly depleted as a result, but no one questioned that. She had even managed to get all their emergency medical supplies out of the hospital and fire station.
Several dozen wounded from the morning’s first attack had been brought in, and again Makala had assumed her role as the “angel of choosing,” marking each incoming case on the forehead with red lipstick, sending some into immediate surgery, the center rigged up in a former classroom illuminated by the morning light streaming in through east-facing windows. Those marked as ones were sent to wait in the rear of the foyer, and the tragic threes were sent into another back office with the minimal comfort of mattresses and slightly moldy sheets dragged down from long-vacant rooms on the upper floor. No Red Cross flag had been set up out front or atop the building. That would only draw Fredericks’s attention.
As John walked down the packed corridor, Makala looked up from her work with a young woman in her late teens, obviously very pregnant but with no sign of injury.
“Sweetheart, you’ve gone into labor,” Makala announced, smiling at her, clutching the frightened woman’s hand. “You’re most likely hours out, and once things settle down, we’ll get you a comfy bed, and I know a granny who was a midwife who will help you. Okay?”
The girl tried to smile, her face soaked with sweat. An elderly couple, perhaps her grandparents, braced her on either side while a young nurse, dressed in camo but wearing a medic’s armband, said she’d lead them to a safe place.
Makala looked up at John, smiled, and then dashed the few feet between them to embrace him tightly. “I’ve been worried sick about you all night.” She sighed. “Thank God you’re safe.”
“How are things here?” John asked.
“Not bad, but not good.” She drew closer. “Actually, when compared to the before times, it’s practically medieval,” she whispered. There was pain in her voice. “The ones I mark as threes? Nearly all could have been saved before this, and John, everyone in this town knows what a three means. They look up at me wide eyed, saying, ‘I’m not a three, am I?’ I lie to nearly all of them. Damn all this.”
She held him tightly, and then he tensed, looking toward the open window. The helicopters were coming back to Montreat.
“Everyone!” John shouted, breaking the hushed whispering—which, even now, everyone felt was the way one should talk in a hospital—his loud, booming voice even startling Makala. “It might get a bit rough in the next few minutes. I need all of you to work with me as a team. Any wounded in the rooms facing Lake Susan, we have to get them out now and into the back rooms away from any windows. Those of you with vehicles, get them the hell out of here. You only got a minute or so to do it. Now move!”
John looked passed Makala and saw the elderly couple helping the young pregnant woman, who was bent double from a contraction and crying out. John ran up, shouldered her family aside, and picked her up. Ignoring the sharp pain in his chest and dashing for the back room, he set her down none too gently.
Makala had taken charge, as well, shouting for people to move as she ran into the surgery center that needed as much lighting as possible and thus had been set up in an east-facing room. John looked out the window and saw one of the Apaches swinging up over Lookout Gap, lining up for a strafing run across the valley, the second one turning behind it.
Surely the son of a bitch had not ordered this!
“Move them now!” Makala shouted. “Move them now!”
Three surgeons were working on wounded set side by side, one of them Doc Wagner, a young assistant by his side handing him instruments as Wagner bent over to pull something out of a boy’s chest, which he had split wide open.
“Doc, go now!” John screamed.
“Not now, I can’t!” Wagner shouted back, still intent on the forceps buried in the boy’s chest.
John looked from him to Makala, who had shoved aside two nurses struggling to stop the bleeding from an old man’s shattered arm and was trying to maneuver his makeshift gurney out of the room. John looked back out the window. The Apaches were skimming down the slope of Lookout Gap, guns blazing, shots ripping across the campus and now slashing the waters of Lake Susan, coming straight toward them.
He tackled Makala, knocking her to the floor and rolling with her up against the outer wall, the window a foot over their heads shattering into a thousand shards. A split second later, Wagner was dead, nearly torn in half from a bursting twenty-millimeter shell that also killed his assistant and the boy they were both trying to save. For a second, the room was a cacophony of exploding twenty-millimeter shells, shattering glass, blood splatters, screams, and hysteria. John’s memory flashed to the videos posted on the Internet showing the work of gunships killing terrorists in the years after 9/11, the comments on the web pages nearly orgasmic with delight, laughter, and jokes. Yeah, they had been enemies who deserved to die, but had all those commentators ever seen people up close as twenty-millimeter shells exploded in their bodies?
Makala was screaming not with fear but horror at the sight, and John buried her head against his chest, holding her tightly, forcing her up against the wall and shielding her with his body. Where were Elizabeth and Ben in all this madness? Elizabeth’s post was on campus. He had caught a glimpse of her as he’d left the communications center, but he had not had time to speak to her. Ben, thank God, was in a shelter in the basement of the girls’ dorm.
He spared a quick glance up over the edge of the windowsill and then instantly ducked back down. The second helicopter was nearly on the tail of the first, which had roared overhead in a sharp banking turn to avoid slamming into the mountains that bordered the northwest slope of the valley. Another volley of fire ripped into the room, but there was nothing left to kill or destroy; all three surgical stations were a shambles. The chopper roared overhead, and John stood up, pulling Malaka to her feet.
“Run!” he screamed. “Get into the back rooms. If they had put a rocket in here, we’d all be dead. Now run, and keep down until they’re gone!”