The Final Day (After, #3)(13)

Those thus caught referred to the paper as being “not worth a damn Frederick” or to a more direct scatological reference as its only real use. Yet another troubling bit of information that had come to light after that vainglorious man’s bloody defeat.

The paper currency was even how those serving with the ANR had been paid. Those who had survived and surrendered after the battle to take out Fredericks were expecting execution and thus were stunned by the offer to stay and join the community.

All of them were young, generally in good health thanks to the rations they had lived on for months, and were then divided up and assigned to different units within “the State of Carolina’s Militia.”

There was some resentment for the first few days on the part of his own people—for, after all, over thirty from the town had been killed fighting against these young men and women. There had been one tragedy when a young man from the college murdered one of the ANR troops, blaming his victim personally for the death of his fiancée in the fight to take the courthouse in Asheville. It proved to be an extremely tense day, the nearly hundred ANR prisoners fearing that they had been lulled by John’s promises and that Fredericks’s warnings that to be taken alive by “those mountain rednecks” would mean torture, rape, and death. Some had gathered together, ready to fight or flee, when more than a few locals supported the young man’s vengeance killing as justice, plain and simple.

It proved to be just about the most difficult day John had ever faced. The community had yet to stand down from a state of military emergency; therefore, John was deemed to be in command under military law. Reverend Black had insisted upon sitting on the tribunal since the accused came from the college where he now served as chaplain, rather than a civil trial since the crime had occurred while the community’s troops were still “in military service.” Reverend Black, when he pronounced his vote with tears streaming down his face, startled everyone, declaring it had to be done, quoting Old Testament verses, that killing in combat was a tragedy that had haunted mankind from the beginning, but this death was cold-blooded murder, using the translation of “murder” rather than “Thou shall not kill.”

John realized he had to carry out the sentence himself as he had done with others; it could not be delegated, though he spent hours praying over it, hoping to find a personal way out. At the end, the young man took it stoically, forgiving John for what had to be done and appealing to the dead man’s friends for forgiveness as well. Memory of it, along with so many other memories, still woke him up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night.

As to the regular army prisoners, especially the helicopter crews that had slaughtered many in Forrest Burnett’s community, there had been outright calls to execute them. But John had had enough of executions, even though many—especially Forrest’s community, which had endured the atrocity of being strafed by the pilot—cried for blood. In the end, John ordered them banished, pushed to the far side of the barrier on Interstate 40 at the top of the mountain and told to start walking. Chances they would survive a week were nil, and it was decided by all that the punishment was just.

The aftereffect? The ANR survivors witnessed something they had never expected, even expressing regret for the entire tragedy and its end result, and thereafter, no mention was made—at least publicly—of having been on one side or the other in the battle for Asheville. The ANR commanding officer, who had grown up near where John originally came from, now served as a platoon lieutenant in the militia, and what she and others had said about life outside of their valley added more fuel to his worries.

All the ANR personnel had told him, along with reports by the BBC, served to fuel his suspicions and concerns about what exactly was taking place at Bluemont, and he was eager to get on the road to Forrest’s community on the far side of Mount Mitchell.

The fire within the stove was now crackling hot, radiating warmth. He remembered an old favorite author who wrote on Americana, Eric Sloane, his works filled with wonderful detailed sketches of life long ago, stating that a wood fire heated you twice—from the labor it took to cut, split, stack, and haul the wood and again when it finally burned as it now did before him.

All well and good, John thought with a smile, if one was young and twenty and had grown up with life being such. There had been offers, which he always saw as little more than attempts at bribes, to provide him with wood and so many other things, but it was a point of honor that he worked and traded for it like everyone else. Before she passed, Jen, almost as if it were an afterthought, had revealed that there was a stash of several hundred dollars of face-value silver filling half a dozen mason jars tucked away in a corner of the basement. When the government had gone over to clad coins back in the ’60s, her husband, George, had denounced it as a damned conspiracy and had taken to emptying out the silver dimes, quarters, and occasional half dollars into a jar on his nightstand at the end of every day and then stashing them in the basement when filled.

The find had truly made them rich, and the historian inside of John had of course been fascinated by this first step back to a “real” money-based economy when he started offering a quarter here, a few dollars there for the essentials of survival. Silver and gold had disappeared from the economic flow long ago, and now finds like his were reintroducing them. Throughout the various communities that now made up the State of Carolina, there was hardly a basement or attic that had not been ransacked by surviving family members—and more than a few looters going at abandoned properties in search of such stashes. One such prowler, a drifter who had slipped in past the security posts guarding the approaches to Black Mountain, had been caught just a few months ago. Murder and rape were of course capital offenses, as was the case with one of his militia killing a former member of the ANR. Stealing food had been added to the list as one for which one could possibly face capital punishment. Some said it was little better than the obsessed policeman in Les Misérables hunting down a man who stole a loaf of bread. But after the starving times of that first winter, people did die for lack of a loaf of bread or the pig they had been raising on scraps to provide meat for the winter suddenly disappearing.