The Final Day (After, #3)(11)
John was silent, not leaping to the defense of an old friend of a machine that had enabled him to write a master’s thesis in near record time.
“It was linking them together. The Internet back in the mid-’90s that truly launched the revolution. A machine alone, okay, it’s entertaining, and kids can play that dang Pac-Man and Mario on it until the motherboard finally fries off, and the way this one is smelling, I don’t give it very long unless I take it apart and clean it. I’m thinking about databases—uplinks, for example. Those guys up in Bluemont, don’t tell me they don’t have systems up and running. I’ll assume the low-earth orbit sats got killed off when the war blew, but the ones up at geosynch? I’d give my left—”
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.