The Final Day (After, #3)(14)
There was no jail in the town, except for an overnight lockup for the occasional drunk and disorderly. In such a time, to punish someone by locking them up in a warm jail, feeding them, and then having to feed and compensate someone to watch over the offender was absurd. An infraction of stealing other than while mobilized for military service resulted in a civil court. If the theft was not crucial to the survival of a family or the entire community, the standard punishment had finally become a sentence to labor in the communal farmlands. Thus it was for that looter in search of a stash of gold or silver, who labored for a month and then disappeared the night his sentence was completed.
A supreme irony was for all those who had secured their precious metals in bank vault safe-deposit boxes. With the failure of electricity, the vaults were automatically locked, sealed as tightly as some long-lost ancient tomb, owners of what some claimed were hundreds of ounces of gold only able to stand outside the empty buildings and stare forlornly. John and the town council had even agreed to divert power into the old Fifth Third Bank on Montreat Road, a surviving employee then attempting to unscramble the locking systems, to no avail.
Those standing outside watching the attempt, growing frustrated, started to suggest just blowing the entire thing up, which was of course vetoed. So the bank still stood, as did the other banks in town, the treasures within as remote as if lost in the hull of the Titanic.
Inwardly, John breathed a sigh of relief, for if successful there would have been a rush to crack into or blow up every bank in western North Carolina, and the flood of coinage pouring out triggering that age-old nightmare of inflation.
As for those who had purchased gold and went along with it being stored at “a safe and secure location in Switzerland,” they were truly out of luck.
John sat by the open door of the woodstove for a few minutes, dwelling on all the events and changes taking place, willing to bet that Ernie had awoken the Hawkins family at dawn, tool bag in hand, ready to continue probing the computers found in the library basement. He watched the flames dancing, enjoying the radiant heat blossoming out, the fire, as it always does, weaving a hypnotic spell, the iron sides of the old stove cracking and pinging as they expanded from the heat.
“How about some eggs and grits for breakfast?”
He felt Makala’s warm touch on his shoulder and looked up at her with a smile.
“Sure. But sit down with me for a few minutes first.”
She laughed, pulling her flannel robe in tight, revealing just how pregnant she truly was.
“If I sit on the floor, it will take a forklift to get me back on my feet.”
“Come on, I’ll help you.”
With a groan, she sat down by his side and snuggled in close, extending her hands toward the glowing fire.
“Sleep okay?” he asked while brushing a wisp of her golden hair back from her forehead and then kissing her.
“Little badger must have woke me up half a dozen times. That baby wants out.”
He laughed and put a hand on her bulging tummy. He waited and a moment later was rewarded with a kick. Laughing, he kept his hand there and kissed her again.
“Wish you’d wait a few more days before trying to get over the mountain,” she announced. “It’s still most likely snowing on the north slope, and the wind up there can kill. You ever read Jack London’s To Build a Fire?”
John smiled and nodded at the memory of a scoutmaster when he was a boy, getting the troop out of Newark and up to what at the time John felt was the true wilderness at High Point, New Jersey, for a three-day winter survival trek. Shivering around the campfire at night, the scoutmaster had read that tale to his group of frozen city kids, most of them convinced their leader had gone crazy to drag them out on this trek. John remembered reveling in the adventure of it, all the time imagining that it was like being with George Washington’s troops at Valley Forge or the midnight march through a blizzard to take Trenton.
Romantic then, but Makala did have a point. Temps could be twenty degrees colder up at the crest line at Craggy Gap, and though calm down here, it could be a thirty-to fifty-mile-per-hour blow up there.
He had approached Billy Tyndall yesterday with the thought of using their Aeronca L-3 to fly him over the mountain range, a short twenty-minute hop by air, so he could meet this Quentin Reynolds, and Billy had replied with two words: “You’re crazy.” He then went on to a lecture about the killer weather conditions to be found around Mount Mitchell, pointing to an old FAA map of the region pinned to the wall of the makeshift hangar, where a specific warning was printed about the dangers of severe turbulence in the area.
“You ask any pilot who’s not crazy and thus still alive about flying around up there, especially in an old underpowered tail dragger, and they’ll tell you that you are indeed crazy. We damn near got killed last time you and I flew there; it wasn’t the bullets and Apache helicopters that scared me half as much as getting slammed by a downdraft and sending us right into the side of a mountain. So no way.”
So waiting for a crystal-clear and very calm day was out.
“It can’t wait,” John finally replied to Makala. “Forrest said the guy was in bad shape. If he slips into pneumonia, he could be on the edge of dying unless we can get some of our antibiotics into him, and that alone is reason enough to at least try to get to him. There’s something about the name of this guy that rings a bell somewhere in my head beyond the fact that he claimed to have served with my friend Bob Scales. I gotta go.”