“It’s been bad.” “How so?” “A fight at the gap two nights ago.” “How bad?” “More than two hundred dead on both sides, several hundred injured.” “Jesus, what happened?” “Well, we were letting folks through a hundred at a time, as per your suggestion, good professor. It was going slow, though, and now the refugees from Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Greensboro, even some from as far as Durham were piling up on that road. God, John, it’s positively medieval down on that road. Squatters’ camps, people fighting for a scrap of food. Disease breaking out, mostly salmonella, pneumonia, a nasty variant of
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