The Final Day (After, #3)(121)

“We want you to stay with us for several days,” John said as he grasped the man’s hand. “There is so much to share with you about Grace, to tell you all that she meant to us, all that she did.”

John’s voice filled up. He had once thought of himself as being so stoic, able to contain his emotions, only letting them release when alone. Perhaps it was Jennifer that broke that in him. He had lost Jennifer; this man had lost Grace.

Grace’s father smiled but offered no reply either way. “I think I’ll go and sit with my girl for a while,” he whispered and then continued on. John watched the man walk down across the front lawn of the campus for the long trek to the military cemetery at the edge of town. John had taken him there the day before and was touched to see that someone was still thoughtfully putting flowers on her grave, suspecting it was Kevin, who had taken her loss in such a way that it was obvious that he had been deeply in love with her.

“You’ll be late, Professor,” Makala announced, and John looked over at her, smiled, kissed her lightly, bent over to kiss Jennie, who stretched up to him with chubby arms for a “smoochie” and laughed as he mussed her hair, blond like her mother’s.

He left his family and started on the short walk to his classroom. Then, as he so often used to, he stepped into a tiny octagon-shaped building just ten feet across, three of its eight sides open to face on to the bubbling creek that flowed down through the middle of the campus. It was the campus “Prayer Porch,” a favorite place where he used to often come to sit, to listen to the creek tumbling by, at times to pray, at times to just soak up a moment of peace and solitude before the start of a class.

The walls were covered in graffiti, without exception all of them touching, a brief quote of scripture, a “Thank you, God,” a heart with initials in it, but so many now “RIP, my love,” “I miss you, sweetheart,” and “I’ll see you in heaven.”

Several hundred names were written on the walls in long, orderly rows, the names of all those from the college who had died in the war.

Too many, far too many.

He sat in silence, looking at them. As years would pass, as it did with all wars, the pain would lessen, the aura and legends would grow as was so with nearly all wars, and memory of the names would drift into history.

The issues of this war were still in doubt. The day of the reopening of the school had been chosen because of all that was symbolized by this day in May, three years to the day since the start of the war.

Some things that John had said to the man who this day would be sworn in as a duly elected president must have stuck, and though John did not remember it, the new president did. That there was a final day and what John had learned was to be the theme of his inaugural address to be delivered at the hallowed resting place of Gettysburg. That the war had reached its final day. Perhaps it was just rhetoric. Half the country was still occupied by foreign powers.

As for those who once ruled from Bluemont, some had indeed met their fate at the hands of angry mobs that eventually stormed the facility while their “Praetorian Guard” had shown the wisdom of standing aside, in the same way the original Praetorians would do at times with an unpopular emperor when a mob stormed the imperial compound.

Many, though, had managed to disappear, John musing that such was often the case with people like that, a few cropping up as far away as South America and Africa, though one such nation thinking it would be a friendly gesture publicly hanged several of them.

Within Site R, there had actually been a standoff for several weeks between the guards and dwellers in what was actually known as Section Alpha and the troops under Colonel Bentley. The guards of that section finally agreed to disarm and for those within to face the same fate as the rest of the dwellers of Site R.

As for those elsewhere in the facility, it was a profound moral question for the nation as to what should be done with them. The majority favored just driving them out into the snow where more than a few waited just beyond the fence that encircled the compound to loot them at best or deliver far worse punishment. Many, therefore, still resided there after Bob, citing the example of Lincoln, appealed that to take vengeance on them was not in the spirit of what the country should again aspire to and that it was accepted that the statement against “attainder of blood” meant that no person could be punished for the crime of another family member.

The consensus was growing to let each of them take two to four weeks’ worth of rations and find transport back to wherever they originally lived, though many now pleaded there was no place for them to go, that their spouses and parents were dead or had fled from Bluemont and disappeared.

Upon the revelation that Bluemont had indeed planned to loft an EMP over the southeastern United States, nearly every officer in the military had refused to accept further orders and within days declared that their oath was to the Constitution; as such, they would follow legal orders from a higher commander who had not been tainted by direct association with Bluemont and waited for such a person to be chosen. It was finally agreed that an admiral aboard one of the surviving carriers, who had ordered his SEAL team to seize the nuclear-tipped weapon at Wallops Island and was clearly untainted by any direct association with Bluemont, would serve as chief of all military operations until a new president was in place.

Bob’s appeal for the beginning of a convention to reestablish a federal government had gotten off to a rocky start, ironically nearly identical to an argument when the original Constitutional Convention was held. Why were certain delegates sent rather than others? Who had the power to choose the delegates or even issue such a call for a meeting? Some states, particularly high food-production states, had experienced far fewer casualties than small urbanized states, such as New Jersey, which was all but depopulated, as was Rhode Island. There was also the question of whether delegates of states west of the Mississippi would be admitted. Texas, which was fighting what was nearly a full-scale war against Chinese and Mexican incursions, flat out said it was quit with the Union and wanted to proclaim that its boundaries should be what they had been when it was an independent republic, which had once included most of the southwest clear to California and parts of Colorado and Utah.