The Final Day (After, #3)(23)

The low murmuring in the room of those he could sense were about to tell him to just calm down, relax, go home with his wife, and take a few days off after the stress of his trip over the mountain now fell silent.

“Are we going to be hit again?” John asked.

“By who?” Again it was Ernie. “Why bother? America is finished as we know it. Sure, we flattened Iran and North Korea. India and Pakistan are turning each other into radioactive wastelands, the same in the Middle East. We still have the nuke boomers at sea. Why would anyone want to hit us again?”

John looked at Forrest, and though he felt the demonstration would be absurd, perhaps it was the only way to get his message across.

“Forrest, you got any of those K-Cups of coffee on you?”

Forrest, who had been listening intently to John, recoiled slightly. “What the hell is this, a shakedown?”

“Just yes or no—you got any on you?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Give me one.”

“Why?”

“Okay, loan me one; I promise I’ll give it back.”

Forrest reached into the side pocket of his battered fatigue jacket and pulled one out and reluctantly tossed it over. John snatched it and looked at the lid.

“Hazelnut, my favorite,” he whispered, and he put it on the desk in front of him. “Okay, my friends, who’s gonna grab for it first?”

“Come on, John, what kind of game is this?” Reverend Black asked.

John could see the hungry gazes of those crammed into his office. His own indulgences with Forrest these last few days he had not discussed with anyone else in this room, Makala and Lee the only ones present who had enjoyed the largesse of Forrest’s secret hoard.

“To my point. You all want it; I know you do. But let me just add this one caveat in.”

“You and your professor’s Latin.” Ernie sniffed, his gaze locked on the small, white plastic cup.

“One chance in ten—no, make it one in a hundred that coffee in there is laced with cyanide poison. A one in a hundred chance it turns into you drinking the Kool-Aid—Jonestown kind of stuff. Some of you remember that insane day. Still want it?”

He could see the confused glances.

“Hell, you might risk it for yourself just for the taste of coffee again. But share it with your spouse, your kids? Who wants to try it?”

No one spoke.

He scooped up the white plastic cup and tossed it back to Forrest, who looked around a bit suspiciously, reminding John of Gollum the way he clutched at the One Ring, and quickly slipped it back into his pocket.

“Point made,” John announced.

“What point, damn it?” Ernie snapped.

“One chance in ten, maybe one chance in a hundred, that the message that Major Quentin Reynolds was carrying was a warning of things to come. Last time we got hit, no one here knew it was coming, and look at us now. Suppose someone somewhere is planning to do it again? Suppose my friend General Scales is still alive and wanted to get a warning to us?”

“Then why all the mystery?” Ernie retorted. “If your buddy is still alive out there and has this big secret he wants to warn you about, just fly in and tell us, or get on the radio and announce it. The whole thing is screwy, John, and you know it.”

“I agree in part, Ernie. Yeah, it is strange, a lone guy claiming to have served with the general showing up half-dead. But we definitely live in a screwy world. Maybe my friend has reasons for not doing what you said. I can think of a dozen of them.”

“Name one.”

“He knows something he can’t let anyone else know for whatever reason and wanted to get word to me. Send it out on a radio and the entire world can listen in. Fly here? That draws notice as well. I could go on, but there’s a couple, for starters.”

Ernie took that in. “Or the whole thing could be a trap to lure you out of this valley by claiming a friend is still alive with some sort of secret message. You take the bait, and Bluemont gets payback for Fredericks with you dangling from the end of a rope.”

John could see Makala go tense over that one, nodding in agreement. It was exactly what she had said within minutes after he returned from trying to see Quentin. It was a setup to entrap him.

“Think about it,” John pressed in, avoiding eye contact with his wife. “We are just starting to get back on our feet. We’ve got electricity back, a lab here on campus making antibiotics and anesthesia; they even think they’ll get one of Doc Weiderman’s old x-ray machines he had packed away down in the basement of his office on the day things hit back online soon. Think of what that would have meant after our fight with the Posse and with Fredericks. We’ve got water pumping again through the town water mains. We are starting to crawl back out of the darkness. But if we are hit by another EMP, again without warning, we might as well just bury the last two and a half years of struggle, dig a grave for the rest of us, and crawl into it.”

“Who would be crazy enough to do that again?” Maury asked.

John shrugged. “Who was crazy enough the first time? After the fact, we finally figured out it was North Korea and Iran handing off nukes to terrorists who launched them from container ships in the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific. There are still terrorist cells out there, maybe wanting to this time provoke a full-scale global nuclear war. Could be China wanting to push us down even further but stand there looking innocent and then suggesting we need more aid east of the Mississippi. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter who.”