One Second After

by William R. Forstchen

"Peace through superior firepower,"

"We finally figured out that when you set off a nuke in space, that's when the EMP effect really kicks in, as the energy burst hits the upper atmosphere. It becomes like a pebble triggering an avalanche, the electrical disturbances magnifying. It's in the report. It's called the 'Compton Effect.'

Seems like this EMP moves a lot faster than ordinary power surges like from lightning. Not faster in terms of speed, just that the impact hits and peaks faster, three or four times that of a lightning bolt hitting your electric line. So fast that the relay inside the surge protector doesn't have time to trigger off and, boom, the whole system is fried. That's why it's so darn dangerous. It fries out all electronics before any of the built-in protections can react."

"The enemy will never attack you where you are strongest… He will attack where you are weakest. If you do not know your weakest point, be certain, your enemy will,"

"Why not?" Kellor said dryly. "You forget how fragile we really are, the most pampered generation in the history of humanity. Heart attacks, quite a few just damn stupid accidents, at least eight murders, and several suicides. To put it coldly, my friends, all the ones who should have died years ago, would have died years ago without beta-blockers, stents, angioplasties, pacemakers, exotic medications, well, now they're dying all at once."

Nothing worse than a corporal type, with limited intelligence, a gun, and his "orders."

They don't know how to survive without a society that supports them even as they curse it or rebel against it."

"Once they run out of food, then the reality will set in, but by that point, anyone with a gun will tell them to kiss off if they come begging. And those poor kids, if they have food, the ones with guns will take it. They're used to free clinics, homeless shelters when they need 'em, former hippie types smiling and giving them a few bucks. That's all finished. They'll die like flies, poor kids. No idea whatsoever how vicious the world can really be when it's scared and hungry.

I'd tell her the only reason Gandhi survived after his first protest was that he was dealing with the Brits. If Stalin had been running India, he'd have been dead in a second, his name forgotten."

Scale of social order, he thought. The larger the group, the more likely it was that it would fragment under stress, with a few in power looking out for themselves first.

a bicycle can be a packhorse; loaded down, properly balanced, it could push along a couple of hundred pounds.

He settled into what was now his chair at the middle of the table. Interesting how quickly habits form regarding a meeting: sit in a chair once and the following day that's where you sit again, symbolism of who sits at the foot and head of the table the same.

"I doubt that will work with the Franklins," Tom said, shaking his head. "At least not with them and all my men still being alive after we get the meat. Up in these hills we have more than a few of the old survivalist types, the kind that were real disappointed that the world didn't go to hell after Y2K. They're just waiting for us to come up and try." "Let it go for now," John said. "If we start turning into Stalinist commissars hunting out every stalk of grain and ounce of meat for the collective, the fragile balance we have right now will break down and it will be every man for himself.

"Salmonella, that's lurking in any community. I'm talking about the exotics now. In a large urban population you'll have carriers of hepatitis in every variant. What scares the hell out of me is a recent immigrant from overseas or someone stranded at the airport in Charlotte, which is a major hub. He might look well and feel well, but inside he might be carrying typhoid, cholera, you name it. "We get one of those in a crowd, given the sanitation for those people walking here? Just simple hand contact or fecal to water supply or food distribution supply contact and that bacteria will jump. If we give someone a plate of food, and they haven't washed their hands, or we don't clean that plate with boiling water, within a week thousands will be sick and dying. "You ever seen cholera?" Kellor asked. No one spoke. "I did thirty years back. A mission trip to Africa. It makes salmonella look tame. People in those regions, most of them were exposed to it at some point in their lives and survived. We're wide open to it. We are six, seven generations removed from it and we have no natural immunity. America is like an exotic hothouse plant. It can only live now in the artificial environment of vaccinations, sterilization, and antibiotics we started creating a hundred or more years ago. "We're about to get reintroduced to life as it is now in Africa or most of the third world. Not counting the global flu outbreak of 1918, the last really big epidemic, one that killed off a fair percenta...

"Frankly, I'd kill for someone who could build a steam engine." There was a round of chuckles at that. "No, people, I'm dead serious. A steam engine would be worth its weight in gold. Do any of you know how to make one, let alone repair an old one rotting behind a barn and then keep it running?" Everyone was silent. The thought started him rolling. "Get a steam engine and you have power where you want it. To pump, dig, cut, hell, you could even mount it on the rail tracks and move things.

"We also need an old chemist who could make ether or chloroform. Doc, we're going to need a lot of that in the months to come and I'm willing to bet we're short already.

"Amazing, isn't it?" she said, shaking her head. "Three weeks ago we were all Americans. Hell, if somebody said an offensive word, made a racial or sexist slur, my God, everyone would be up in arms and it'd be front-page news. Turn off the electricity and bang, we're at each other's throats in a matter of days. Outsiders, locals, is the whole country now like this, ten thousand little fiefdoms ready to kill each other, and everyone on the road part of some barbarian horde on the march?"

He looked up at the orchard. If only the trees were peach trees; in another several weeks they could start to gather the peaches.

Food, bulk food, just a fifty-pound bag of rice or flour, shoes, batteries, an additional test kit for Jennifer, damn it, even birth control for Elizabeth, dog food, a water filter so they didn't have to boil what they now pulled out of the swamp green pool… I should have had those on hand.

Would our friends overseas, those we had helped so many times, without a thought of any return, now be coming to us? Were ships, loaded with food, racing towards us… or was there silence or, worse, laughter and contempt?

Others, the survivalist types, including the legendary Franklins, were teaching the kids how to concoct homemade claymores, land mines, satchel charges, and homemade rocket launchers fashioned out of PVC pipe.

"Look, you get people scared, then you knock out every prop that we've taken for granted. After these last sixty days I bet there's a dozen prophets running around this country saying, 'Follow me,' and even if but one-tenth of one percent of the survivors do so, that will still be hundreds of thousands of barbarians on the march and the rest of us running, scared shitless of them. "Damn our enemies who did this to us, they knew us well," John sighed. "They knew human nature too well, and just how fragile civilization is, and how tough it is to defend it. Something we forgot."

"Squirrel seven bullets, rabbit twenty bullets, willing to barter," read a hand-lettered sign. As food grew scarcer, the price was going up. But bullets were scarce now as well. John's earlier prediction that cigarettes might very well become currency had been wrong. Nearly every last one had been smoked long ago. He still felt the pangs of withdrawal. It was bullets that were now the currency of choice, especially .22 and shotgun shells.

It was the dying-off time and by yesterday's count just over forty percent of the two communities, which had been alive little more than four months back, were still alive. As a war, it was the most horrific since the Middle Ages. The legendary twenty-five million dead in the Soviet Union during World War II had been but one-seventh of its population. And yet now, briefly, they were swimming in food. The carefully guarded cornfields had yielded a bumper crop. Every apple orchard was stripped of its fruit, even the wormy ones. Pumpkins had fleshed out to fifteen, twenty pounds or more, and would not just be used this year for carved decorations. The college scavengers were bringing in bushel baskets of nuts, pinecones, sunflowers, and in some places finding remains of orchards up in the woods where a homestead had been a hundred years ago, and these long-forgotten trees were also stripped clean.

The few elderly in the community still alive were pressed into service to teach the now all but forgotten art of canning. The problem was, there were hardly any proper canning jars and gaskets, which sealed them, to be found.

"Incredible as it sounds, pirates made it all but impossible for any kind of serious fishing. It was like something out of the seventeenth century. The coast is riddled now with pirates; the Navy is hunting them down. A couple of small towns, especially along the keys, set up good defenses. They had only one road to block, and their own navies to guard the fishing boats, so they got through relatively OK, but the hurricane last fall knocked them over pretty hard."

"Add in the heat without AC. Few houses down there today were designed for living without AC. Add in that twenty percent of the population was elderly. So many died in the first days that they say that in some of the retirement towns the dead carpeted the streets, again like something out of the plagues of old. Disease just exploded in that climate; that's what killed most of them before starvation even set in… food poisoning, heat exhaustion, bad water or no water, then malaria, West Nile. They say typhoid and dysentery ran rampant in the Miami area; there were even reports of bubonic plague…" He paused.

"Voice of America never said anything about that." The general shook his head. "Did you think we'd actually tell you the truth?" he sighed. John bristled. "So what the hell is the truth?" "We had our asses handed to us, that's the truth. Just several bombs, and we had our asses handed to us. With luck there might be thirty million people still alive in what was the United States." "What do you mean, was?"