Chapter 11
John’s eyes snapped open, a face hovering over him.
“Honey, you okay?”
He recognized Diane’s voice a second before her features came into focus in the early morning light. Cool air tickled his nose, but the rest of his body was sopping wet.
Diane felt his forehead. “You don’t have a fever. Was it another bad dream?”
It would take him another few minutes to phase back into the real world, making the prospect of answering his wife challenging.
“Iraq?”
He nodded. “Nasiriyah.”
That was all he needed to say. She became solemn.
“That wasn’t your fault, you know.”
One of the many reasons he loved Diane was her never-ending battle to ease his guilty conscience. From bus drivers to airline pilots and military commanders, it was a weight that anyone responsible for the lives of others felt. It was usually in situations where that conscience was lacking or even dulled by some distant objective that human beings became numbers and commodities.
Emma joined them for breakfast, quietly nibbling at the oatmeal before her. At least she was eating. No doubt when she was done she would escape to her room and the sketchpad and fantasy world waiting for her there.
Across from her sat Gregory, who seemed pensive. The chatterbox, that was what Diane had nicknamed him years ago, since he was always talking about his plans for the day, each goal exaggerated into a life-or-death struggle. He could make digging a foxhole sound like a Hollywood movie. If things had turned out differently, he might have made a fine actor or newscaster.
John understood his son’s desire to head off to the front and do his part. Back when he was Gregory’s age, John would have felt the same, but rushing off to get yourself killed wasn’t brave, it was foolish. And besides, if Gregory really wanted to fight Russian or Chinese troops, the chances were good they would be arriving at Oneida’s doorstep in the not-too-distant future. John knew this not only because the U.S. forces were at a serious tactical disadvantage without the integrated technology they’d been trained to fight with, but because they seemed to be refusing to accept that fact themselves. Flexibility and adaptability were essential qualities for any leader—a bit of wisdom that wasn’t his own. It went back about two and a half millennia to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.
Once Gregory was busy with the hard work ahead, John was sure he would forget his disappointment.
Not long after breakfast, the town was abuzz with activity. With a population just over two thousand strong, it had many helping hands, but that also meant more mouths to feed. Mounted patrols on six horses watched the outer perimeter for any signs of trouble. It didn’t seem to matter that foreign armies were on U.S. soil. Reports about gangs of thieves and raiders trickled in every day. Those groups weren’t large, maybe ten to fifteen hungry and desperate men who’d decided to survive off the hard work of honest people. A reality that in the present situation was unavoidable. To date, they tended to rummage through outlying cabins, robbing and killing anyone who was too dumb or stubborn to accept John’s invitation to come to Oneida.
In the first two days following the Chairman’s death, John had sent envoys to as many of the surrounding hills and mountain retreats as his men could find. The message was a simple one. The country was at war and they needed everyone they could get. Unlike the Chairman, John hadn’t used intimidation or threats. If news of an invasion by foreign powers wasn’t enough to kickstart your sense of patriotism, then nothing would. In the end, many of the families who preferred to go it alone had quickly changed their minds after suffering attacks from raiders on a near-nightly basis. Every day a handful of families continued to stagger in, battered, often hungry and many having lost loved ones to disease or assaults.
Diane rushed past him with a group of women in tow.
“You seem in a hurry,” he commented.
“We’re grabbing a pickup and heading to the pot farm to salvage what we can,” she said. “Might also scout around some of the produce and dairy farms to see what we can find.”
“Pigs would make a nice addition if you can find any,” John told her. “They’ll eat just about anything. Even urban families in the 1800s owned a pig, which they let graze in the yard and fed with leftovers.”
“That’s fascinating, Mr. Mayor,” a twenty-six-year-old brunette named Samantha Todd exclaimed. She looked at John, her eyes twinkling in the morning sun.
“Call me John, please.”
“Okay, John,” Diane said, giving him dagger eyes as she took Samantha’s arm and led her and the other women away. “We’ve got work to do.”
“Ask Moss to provide you an armed escort,” John called after them.
Diane tapped her hip and that was when John spotted the holster and the Colt 1911 inside of it. The first thought in his head was one he could never say to his wife out loud: that .45 might be too much for her.
Not far away, another group under the direction of Shelley Gibson was setting up a water collection system around town. They would start with fifty-five-gallon barrels connected to the rain gutters of the surrounding houses. Of course, this was only an emergency backup since Oneida was surrounded by reservoirs. All that needed to be done was purification and storage and Shelley knew what she was doing.
In a grid-down situation, food and clean drinking water were the biggest challenges. This was precisely why grocery stores were the first to be emptied out in a crisis. Lucky for John, hardware stores weren’t as high on the list. If the disaster had been a hurricane or a tornado, then things would have been different. The Ace Home Center stood with most of its shelves bare. That meant a trip to the closest Home Depot was a must and soon.
Did John expect the store to be in pristine condition three months after an EMP? Of course not, but with most folks running around trying to keep themselves fed, there was a chance some useful items might still be there. Parts they could use on the windmills they planned to build. PVC pipes for Dan Niles’ waste management projects. Additional fifty-five-gallon drums, nails, hammers and perhaps a few table saws if those windmills ever managed to get the power back on. The list was endless and it was going to be a big job. But the real problem was the distance. The closest Home Depot was in Oak Ridge fifty miles away. They would need a number of vehicles as well as the security personnel to keep them safe.
John was in the middle of making a series of mental notes when a whistle shrieked in the distance. The sound made him think of that whistle Tim Appleby had blown moments before he’d been killed. But this was one was bigger and louder. When it sounded again, John knew exactly what it was and for a reason he couldn’t quite explain, his heart leaped with joy. The army’s supply train had arrived.
Chapter 12
A cloud of steam vapor billowed in the air as the train slowed to a halt at Oneida’s modest station. Its arrival was met with cheers from the crowd that had assembled to watch it roll in. The locomotive looked like something out of the Wild West, although steam-powered trains hadn’t been completely replaced by diesel locomotives until the end of the 1950s. That meant this was likely pulled from a museum or private collection, and surely there were many more like it around the country being put back into active service. They might not be fast, but they were EMP-proof.
Soldiers in woodland camo fatigues hung from the open doorways and windows waving at the jubilant crowd just as they had during both world wars.
Moss came up beside John, a radiant smile on his face. He ran a hand through his mohawk and cupped the back of his head. “A beautiful sight, isn’t it?”