The Final Day (After, #3)(48)

“Mind if I ask a few questions, sir?”

“Maybe.”

“Why keep meeting me a secret? Do your friends in Bluemont know you did this?”

“Did what?”

“Came down here like this, based on a somewhat cryptic transmission back and forth? Why didn’t you tell them?”

“John, to be honest, at the moment, I’m really not sure.”

“Come on, sir,” John replied sharply. “Do you trust Bluemont?”

“What?”

“Just that. You claim you have never met anyone up there face-to-face. Do you trust them?”

“I trust the Constitution of the United States, which I am sworn to uphold. We have to have something to hang on to. There’s nothing else out there now, John. Bluemont is at least something.”

“I took the same oath, sir, to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” He emphasized the last word, domestic.

Bob stared at him and finally nodded. “I’m not in the loop on a lot of what is going on. Just rumors—you know how it is—and my focus is the mission to bring this entire region back under control. Your community, what you folks are calling the State of Carolina, is part of that mission.”

“But you’ve been hearing rumors.”

Bob nodded in reply.

“Quentin rambling about an EMP—is that a rumor or fact, and from whom?”

“John, my entire life I’ve served. I served under some brilliant men in the White House, and yes, some that I thought at best were na?ve when it came to the harsh realities of the world and what warfare truly is. And yeah, I served under more than a few I thought were an outright danger to the survival of my country, at least my country as I saw it. But always, in the end, I saluted.

“I recall Lincoln once declaring that across four years, no president could do ultimate fatal harm to the Republic, and at the end of those four years, the people could vote him out and replace him with someone they thought more capable. Even when I passionately disagreed with a president, I took solace in that and forced myself to salute even when I felt the person I was saluting was unworthy of that. At such moments, I saluted the office and not the person.”

“EMP, General Scales,” John pressed in, unable to contain the question any further. “Fact or rumor? If fact, by whom and when?”

“I can’t give you a straight answer.”

“Because you aren’t sure yourself, or if you are sure, you can’t say?”

“Damn it, John, don’t press me on this!” Bob shouted back, an action so rare in the past when they served together that it startled John.

He stared straight into his old commander’s eyes. “I believe you at least suspect something is up. That perhaps I’m even tied into it, directly or indirectly.”

Bob returned his gaze without blinking.

“I suspect you are disobeying them right now,” John whispered as if someone might overhear their conversation. “You said you had orders to detain or kill me. But here you are when it would have been just as easy to lure me into this meeting, confirm I was here, and then take this whole place out.”

Bob stood back up. “I’m freezing. Let’s at least go outside and stamp around a little bit and stretch.”

John followed him out of the hangar. The glare reflecting off the snow was so intense that John wanted to put on his old scratched sunglasses but decided against it. Sunglasses were often the cheap trick of concealing a man’s eyes—or worse, the way some cops used to wear them to intimidate.

The air was sharp, crisp puffs of wind kicking up crystals of snow that glimmered and danced in the morning sunlight. If not for the presence of the Black Hawk, the landscape would have been one of peace. It was an unnatural sound now after more than two years of near-total silence with the death of nearly all man-made machines. There were times he missed those sounds, the hum of traffic on the interstate, the near-constant whispering of jets passing high overhead, all the multitude of sounds of an advanced technological world.

Now it was usually silence except for the whispering of wind in the trees, the delightful sound of summer thunderstorms coming down off the mountains, and what had always been his favorite, the winter sound of wind cracking the ice out of trees, the hissing and tinkling of snow swirling down, and the scent of wood fires carried on the breeze. As they walked along the row of hangars, he could catch a glimpse back to the airport’s cinderblock clubhouse. Smoke was wafting up from the chimney, a bit of a crowd gathered outside, weapons shouldered, his people pumping Bob’s for information, and Bob’s troops undoubtedly doing the same.

His orders had been that if such a situation developed to be friendly but reveal nothing about their numbers under arms, praise the food situation as well supplied—though the reality was that it would be tough going by spring—and convey confidence that all was well. The precious supply of moonshine that Forrest had brought along was to be applied liberally to any of Bob’s people who were willing to try a swig, but except for Danny and Forrest, who seemed to have a prodigious capacity for holding their liquor, the others were to refrain.

He assumed nearly the same orders had been given by Bob to his personnel.

“Things seem okay over there,” John announced, nodding back toward the clubhouse.