“Down, John!”
He barely had time to turn back when a flurry of shots echoed, stitching Fredericks across his chest. He staggered backward and collapsed into his sacred office.
“What the hell?” John cried.
“Bastard was drawing a gun on you,” someone said even as the sound of gunfire echoed in the foyer.
John saw his old antagonist Ernie Franklin stepping out of the gathering that had come into the foyer to witness this final confrontation.
“What?”
“He drew a pimp gun and was about to blow your brains out, you damn fool. You’re a damn fool, Matherson, turning your back like that, so I covered your ass.”
John looked about in confusion. No one spoke. There were faint grins from several as Ernie walked across the foyer, stepped over the sandbag emplacement, and leaned over Fredericks’s body. Ernie’s hands were out of view for a few seconds as he appeared to pat down Fredericks and then stood back up holding a small pistol.
“Pimp gun. Bastard like this couldn’t even carry a real gun.” He then turned his weapon on Fredericks and put one more round into his head. Without further comment, he turned and walked out of the foyer, pausing to toss the “pimp gun” on the floor by John’s feet. “Historian, know your history. ‘Sic semper tyrannis.’”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
John had called for the meeting in the Fellowship Hall of Gaither Chapel at 10:00 p.m. for a reason. His trusted team was now augmented by Forrest and also by Ernie, who had simply just bulled his way onto the town council, like it or not. It was something John did not really object to given that he had essentially done the same thing immediately after the Day. Kevin Malady was with them, as was Lee, his arm in a sling from a bullet taken in the final assault. There were also representatives from Swannanoa, a couple of police officers invited from Asheville who, word was, represented a good grasp of public opinion in the survivors of that town, one of the two the cops John had befriended long before in the first days after the war had started. There was even a doctor from Mission Hospital—which, once the fight was over and it was no longer under Fredericks’s thumb—had thrown its support into caring for the injured and wounded.
Only a little over five thousand civilians were still alive in Asheville proper, and John had won most of them over with a most simple gesture. The ANR troops had over one hundred thousand rations stockpiled, and John decided they would be divided evenly between his community and Asheville. The following day, after the storming of the courthouse complex, a delegation had come to Black Mountain seeking John out with the request that, during the current crisis and until things were “straightened out,” he and the citizens of Black Mountain would consider a “consolidation.”
It was a decision he could not just make on his own. Ever since the Day, there had been a deep sense of division between Asheville and Black Mountain, fueled by the leadership there in the beginning, brought together somewhat when the army was in direct control, and then driven wide open again by Fredericks. As to the old pre-army leadership—which had stayed on but faded into the back while the army occupied the town, only to reemerge after the military left and then fallen in with Fredericks—the last of it was gone. Several had died in the battle for the courthouse, and the others—so typically—had excused themselves before the fighting even broke out and tried to flee to Greenville. There were rumors that a reiver group that at times had control of the two main roads leading out of the southern mountains down to the piedmont of South Carolina had captured the group. No one was discussing the treatment quickly meted out to them.
Both the town council and a vote by paper ballot of the community had been overwhelming to end the standoff, the more pragmatic and savvy politically noting that if they did not try to merge now and offer enough rations to stuff everyone for a couple of weeks in the immediate wake of the shocking battle fought downtown, some new bloc would try to rise up. The strain of it was that the spring planting and acres of fields now under the plow, along with the birthing of pigs and cattle and the hatching of chickens, promised that come fall, for the first time since the start of it all, there would actually be not only enough food properly stored away to see all through the winter but even a surplus. The edge of starvation up until this current crisis seemed finally to be pushed back, but the overnight doubling of mouths to feed would again mean living on the edge.
The alternative, though, could be infinitely worse, and the situation out in the rest of the world had helped seal the deal up, as well.
The argument to work toward a new union carried additional weight after the conversation that occurred with—of all people—a reporter with the BBC. The radio on the captured Black Hawk could be spun through a number of frequencies, and earlier in the day, Maury had been conversing with the chopper pilots down in Greenville, trying to talk them down from any follow-up action when, of all things, someone else had chimed in, identifying himself as a BBC reporter based in Canada who had been monitoring their conversation.
Maury had fetched John, and it had turned into a regular interview with John presenting his side of what had occurred. The signal was sketchy, wavering in and out, but John had at least been able to get a few questions answered.
“Bluemont declares itself to be the legitimate government of the United States,” the reporter had replied. “But as for my country seeing it thus, I can’t speak to that. England is still hanging on, just barely. We were not hit by the EMP directly; that was focused more on central and eastern Europe. The power vacuum afterward has triggered fighting between Russia on one side; Poland, Germany, we’re trying to stand clear. Neither side has stepped to nukes; my government pledged its arsenal to Germany if Russia should go nuclear, and it is tense, damn tense, and your government’s decision to pop that neutron bomb over Chicago has the Chinese ready to push the button.
“I don’t know who you really are, John Matherson,” the reporter concluded, “though there have been rumors of folks like you trying to reestablish order in spite of what is claimed to be the central government. But I can tell you this: either you take Bluemont out, or they will take you out—and in the process perhaps retrigger a nuclear war that will burn off the rest of this insane world.”
After that, they had lost the signal, and his words had rested heavily on John’s heart. If true, this was no longer about the survival of his town and the reivers from the other side of the mountain and the frightened survivors in Asheville. It was far broader, and he dreaded the sense of responsibility it now carried.
It was just about ten, and John nodded to his radioman to switch on his best radio, a small generator outside the room powering up to supply juice. The dial was already set, but it took a slight fiddling to bring the broadcast in clearly with the always soul-stirring ringing of Big Ben and then the always well-modulated voice of the announcer.
This is BBC News. It is 3:00 a.m., Greenwich War Time, and here is the news first from overseas.
Today, the federal administration of the United States in Bluemont announced a deepening crisis, declaring that twelve more administrative districts have descended into what it defined as “class-five status.” Here is a listing of those districts in alphabetical order:
Asheville in the Carolinas, Administrative District Eleven, where it was announced that the director of that district and his entire team of ANR troops were murdered by terrorists, many of the prisoners being summarily executed.