She gazed at him and shook her head. “Didn’t you hear, sir? Plague, ebola—you name it—was rampant on the other side of the river. Rumor was there was still a hundred thousand or so living in the wreckage. It was medieval, the way the city was still burning. Hard to believe anything could still be found to burn. Those trying to get out we were ordered to shoot on sight.”
“And did you?”
She sighed. “At first, I couldn’t. Tried warning shots. They’d be in rafts, small boats, even some trying to swim across. But after a while, it was them or us.” She lowered her head.
“Yeah, I helped shoot them. We were told if any of us even touched one of them, we would be shot, as well.” She looked up at him. “What would you have done, sir?”
He had no reply for her question. “Go on, tell me the rest.”
“After that my unit was pulled with orders to report to Bluemont for special training.”
He sat up a bit at the mention of Bluemont. At last, someone who had actually been there other than Fredericks.
“What did you see? Did you meet the new president? Is the government really up and functioning?” The eagerness in his voice was obvious.
She sighed and shook her head. “I didn’t see anyone other than our trainers. Our unit was there for a month of advanced infantry training in urban combat. Sorry, sir, but that’s all I saw.”
He sat there silent, frustrated.
“We thought it weird. I mean, I had some interest in history, even thought of majoring in it in college. Old films of presidents and generals talking with troops. Morale boosting and all of that. We just went into an encampment in a town nearby that any surviving civilians had been cleared out of and practiced taking buildings. Rumors were that we were going to be sent to the Midwest. No one wants to go to Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and that had us worried.”
“Why?”
“Haven’t you heard the news?”
“We tune into BBC, that’s about it.”
She shook her head. “Other ANR units were coming in, same as us. Forming up into battalion-level strength. We bunked in with a unit recruited out of Ohio. They said most of that part of the country is level five. Gangs forming into their own armies, some of them nut job religious cults, others just, well, just barbarians.”
He thought of their own fight with the Posse but said nothing, just letting her go on as she talked about the rumors, the execution of a trooper who tried to desert, the fact that there appeared to be an abundance of food and supplies—at least in the Bluemont area—that lulled them all into compliance, and then finally the wave of fear when their company was pulled out of the assignment to Chicago with orders to accompany a new administrator to North Carolina.
“Why fear?”
She hesitated.
“Go on. There’s nothing to be afraid of now, Deirdre. Once all this gets straightened out, I’m giving prisoners with the ANR the option of staying on with us or trying to make their way back to their homes.”
“Really, sir?”
He actually reached out and took her hand. She was only a couple of years older than the students who formed his own “army,” and though battle hardened, he still at many times saw them as his kids.
“We were told that you people didn’t take prisoners. And like I said earlier, me being black, we were told…” Her voice trailed off.
“Those sons of bitches,” he whispered.
She just looked at him.
If her words were the truth, it was a stunning revelation of just who was in charge in Bluemont and reinforcement that his decision not to comply, to fight back, was the right one.
“Remember, I’m from Jersey too,” he finally replied.
“Which exit?” she asked with a touch of a smile, offering the old standard joke.
“Near Exit 150 off the GSP.”
“Around Newark?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t sound it now, sir.”
“Live here for a while; it changes things.”
He smiled and then turned serious, feeling that they had broken down barriers a bit. “I first came south over thirty years ago to go to Duke. Yeah, all the old stereotypes had me going too. Friends up north used to joke that I’d wind up like that guy in the movie Deliverance.”
“They actually showed us that movie one night. Said things had reverted back to that way down here.”
“Those bastards.” John sighed. It was the standard routine of dividing one off against the other with fear. No wonder the prisoners were petrified. Some of the reivers were definitely tough looking, but to play on that sick stereotype? “So you got shipped down here and thought we were all toothless rednecks and moonshiners?”
“Yeah, something like that. The entire unit is recruits from Jersey. I did start to wonder about that, why were they shipping us here and taking recruits from down here and shipping them up north.”
“Standard routine, Deirdre. Never set one’s own people against their neighbors and kin. Tell them the other side is different and hates you. They were going to take a hundred or so from my community and offered me the job of major general.”
“You a major general?” she asked, obviously surprised.
“Something like that.”
“And you turned it down?”
“Again, something like that. It’s kind of what this entire fight is all about.”
She was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry, sir. We didn’t know. We were kept separate from the day we got here. Told any of the civilians we encountered could be terrorists and all of you were in open rebellion against the new government.”
“If you guys had been allowed just a few days’ leave to mingle about a bit, you’d have seen different. We’re still Americans here.”
“What about Chicago, Cleveland, places like that?”
“I know just about as much as you do, Deirdre. Yeah, we faced gangs, and chances are they’re still out there. But most of us who survived the Day? I think we want nothing more than to come together again as a country and rebuild. Instead, it seems like some are turning us against each other.”
“Bluemont?”
“If Fredericks is representative of what they are, I’ll have to say yes.”
She took that in and sighed. Absently, she popped the lid on the can of dried scrambled eggs and bacon, scooping up a handful to munch on and offering the can to John, who refused.
The sight of it was tempting; he could not even recall the last time he had actually tasted real bacon. He recalled reports of how, prior to the Day, the government had brought up literally billions of dollars of such rations on top of the huge stockpile of MREs the military always kept on hand. Except for the day a battalion of regular army troops had come through Black Mountain more than a year earlier, he and his neighbors and friends had never seen such emergency rations. It filled him with a deep bitterness.
“We both need to get a little rest. But first, a few questions. You don’t have to answer them if you don’t want to.”
“Name, rank, and number–type things?” she asked.
“Yeah, you could call it that.”
She did not reply.
“How many troops came with Fredericks?”
She hesitated.
“Deirdre, you’re going to have to make a choice. If you don’t answer, I’ll leave it go at that. No torture or any of the other crap they filled you with about how we fight down here. Regardless of what you decide, there is going to be one helluva fight for Asheville in a couple of hours. Maybe what you tell me can help save lives, both of my people and those with your unit.”
She took another handful of the dried eggs and bacon, started to chew, and then began to shake, stifling back a sob. “Seventy-five here as security for the helicopter pad, a hundred or so downtown, billeted in the county jail,” the other half garrisoned in the county jail downtown,” she began softly. “Nearly all of us came in within the last week by transport to the airport south of town. We thought it strange the way we were moved in at night and forbidden any contact with the locals. Also a tech and support unit from what was supposedly the old army for the four choppers. And finally, a personal security squad for Fredericks. Those bastards, we don’t know where they came from, but none of us liked them, and they were kept separate.”