He paused looking at Becka.
“Excuse me. I’d give my left arm to be able to tap into that data flow and they don’t know I’ve hacked in.”
After mentioning losing an arm, seconds later, he realized the faux pas he had committed in front of Forrest, who had indeed lost an arm. He looked over at the veteran anxiously, and Forrest forced a smile.
“At least it wasn’t the arm I use for important things.”
Ernie offered a weak grin of thanks.
John, however, was looking at Ernie wide-eyed.
“Could you actually do that? Eavesdrop into Bluemont’s comm system?”
“I already knew the story about Galileo, Professor Matherson. And yeah, maybe I could.”
John looked over at Forrest, remembering the reason his friend, a former enemy, had ventured over the obstacle of the Mount Mitchell range in what was becoming a driving blizzard with word that someone who had once served with his closest friend in the prewar army had trekked two hundred miles to eventually reach them.
“I’m giving you whatever gas you need, Ernie, to move whatever you want here, to this basement. If you can get any of these machines up and running, do so ASAP. I’ll put the word out in a town announcement for folks to start rummaging through attics and basements to see what can be found.”
“I’d advise against that,” Forrest interjected.
“Why?”
“We learned that our old bastard friend Fredericks had one or more people of his planted here. Let’s assume the same. For now, I’d suggest keeping this nugget quiet, and let’s talk to that Quentin fellow first.”
John took it in, hesitating.
“Galileo, don’t you think he regretted blowing his mouth off about his discovery?” Forrest interjected. “He should have stayed quiet a few years, done his research, gotten it out to a trusted few others; instead, he invites the church officials in, and bango, he’s on trial for heresy and under house arrest for the rest of his life.”
John looked at his friend with surprise.
“Hey, a lot of long nights when deployed, plenty of time to read history, same as you, even if I didn’t get a fancy degree.”
John smiled and nodded in reply.
“Until this storm lets up, we’ll focus on what Paul and Ernie are playing with,” John said, though at this moment his thoughts were far more focused on who Quentin Reynolds was, if indeed Bob Scales was alive in Roanoke, and what portent that was for the future.
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…”