The Final Day (After, #3)(19)

“What exactly did he say?” John asked, pressing for something, anything.

“He came somewhat clear for a brief period just before slipping into a coma; I’ve seen that happen before. Said to tell you that you’ve got to get to General Scales up in Roanoke and stop them.” She hesitated, looking to the door as if to make sure no one else was listening. “He said, ‘EMP might be on the table.’”

“What? Were those his exact words?”

“‘EMP is on the table,’” Janet said.

“Whose table?” John interjected, leaning forward, eager for an answer.

“He never said who, what, or when. Was he remembering how the war started, talking about now or the future? I kept trying to gently prod him when he was conscious, but like I said, he was feverish and pretty well out of his head when he was brought in. I think if he had been out in the open even a few more hours he’d have died from exposure and would be lying under the snow rather than in the next room.”

John wearily shook his head and sipped his coffee. “Anything else? Please try to remember his precise words, ma’am.”

“Just that you, John, had to get to a General Scales.”

“Was he talking like General Scales was a memory from the past? I think I recognize Quentin. We might have served together while at the War College. Was he talking like that, rambling about our past or that I had to see him now?”

There was far more to this for John than just the urgency of a question about a garbled message from a dying man. If Quentin was speaking in the present tense, that meant that Bob Scales, one of his closest friends from before the war, was still alive—a prospect that could profoundy impact his responsibilities as a leader of his community. It meant a respected and beloved friend had somehow survived the Day. He had heard about the reports on the BBC that Virginia had been “pacified” by forces of the regular army. Was Bob the general in command?

Janet was silent for a moment, obviously carefully going over her memories. “Forgive me. I should have had a notepad with me and written it all down as he spoke. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t blame yourself, Janet,” he replied, though inwardly he wished she had indeed done just that, for memory of a conversation with a dying man that one was trying to nurse at the same time could indeed become garbled.

“There was something.” She sighed. “Again, I’m sorry; I should have written it down as he was whispering to me. He rambled about going to Roanoke. ‘Find Bob there’ or something like that.”

John looked over at Forrest and Lee, who were taking it all in but wisely were remaining silent.

“I got to add—maybe call it a perspective—sometimes he was talking as if it was before the war, kept saying he had to get his wife and kids out. When he talked of them, he would cry. It was terrible to see him like that; poor man was such a tortured soul.”

“Who isn’t?” Lee said softly, gazing out the window.

“He said something about looking up H. G. Wells’s epitaph, that the guy was right and will be right again.”

Why would he mention H. G. Wells’s epitaph? John wondered. He had read Wells as a kid, but all he could remember was The War of the Worlds and an old movie, Shape of Things to Come, Wells wrote the script for back in the 1930s predicting the coming of World War II.

“And you checked over everything he had on him?” John asked.

“Everything. Forrest and I stripped him down to check for injuries. He was in military fatigues but no winter overcoat, weapons—something about the marauders after taking him had stripped him down and joked they were going to sell him.” She paused. “You know, there are still some hideaway groups out there that won’t hesitate to take someone as food.”

John nodded. Fragments of groups like the Posse were still out there in remote valleys and on mountaintops. They had learned to stay clear of his communities, but like jackals, they did linger on out on the fringes of a slowly reemerging civilized world.

“What he still had on was soaking wet. We stripped him down and found no paperwork or anything like that. All we could do then was to bundle him into warm blankets, give him aspirin and a few shots of moonshine, and hope for the best. I told Forrest to fetch you; the poor man kept saying you were the one he had to speak to. Sorry, but that is all that I can tell you. Whatever answers he had rest now with his soul.”

John stood up and went back into the temporary morgue, respectfully pulling the blanket back to gaze at the battered corpse as if somehow an answer would emerge or, like Lazarus, he might rise up “to return and tell thee all.”

He sat by the body for several minutes, the others not entering the room, as he gazed at the mortal remains of a major he could barely remember.

The dead offered him no answers, just silent wondering. He covered the body and returned to the room where his friends waited in silence.

“Forrest, can we get home before dark?”

Forrest sighed and nodded.





CHAPTER FOUR

“So that’s it,” John said, leaning back in his chair after reciting the adventure of the previous day and the mystery it now presented.

The small office was crowded, representatives of the “Senate” for what they defined as the State of Carolina packed into the room. The body heat from so many people, along with the woodstove, made the room hot, the scent of the air all but overpowering with its warm, musky smell of unwashed men and women.