The Final Day (After, #3)
William R. Forstchen
PROLOGUE
DAY 920 SINCE “THE DAY”
This is the BBC News. It is 3:00 Greenwich War Time, broadcasting to our friends in the Western Hemisphere on this the 920th day since the start of the war.
Later in this program, we will provide an in-depth report about the tragic aftermath of the full-scale nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, followed by a report about the situation in the Middle East where the conflict continues to rage between Israel and its neighboring states—except for Jordan, which today reaffirmed its alliance with Israel against the Caliphate and its allies.
But first the news from the United States:
Today the self-declared federal government based in Bluemont announced that the former states of Virginia and Maryland have been brought up to what the government defines as “Level One” status, meaning that all forces allegedly in conflict with the “Reconstituted Federal Authority in Bluemont,” as it now describes itself, have been pacified.
The Bluemont government announced earlier in the year that it has abandoned its plans to establish the Army of National Recovery, more commonly referred to as the ANR. Today’s announcement of the completion of establishing stabilized status in those two mid-Atlantic states has been attributed to actions waged by the traditional armed forces of the United States. The Bluemont government declared that the victory was achieved by units withdrawn from confrontation with China’s occupation of states in the West and other units that were in service overseas on the day the war started.
After our reporting of other news of the day, a panel of experts will discuss the apparently changing status of the situation in North America.
But first, this message for our friends in the western provinces of Chinese-occupied Canada: “The chair is against the door.” I repeat, “The chair is against the door.”
CHAPTER ONE
DAY 920 SINCE “THE DAY”
“Do you remember the opening line of that book by Charles Dickens, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’?”
John Matherson whispered the famous line with hands wrapped around a warm mug filled with, of all things, coffee—real coffee. He looked over at his friend Forrest Burnett, who had arrived bearing the precious gift. Where it had been looted from John had learned never to ask.
Forrest’s crooked face, twisted up by his old Afghan wound, left eye socket covered with a patch that certainly gave him a pirate look, smiled in reply.
“Wasn’t that from the movie where the guy gets his head cut off by the French mob at the end?” Forrest replied.
John chuckled. “Yeah, something like that.”
“That guy was crazy, stepping in to take his friend’s place at the guillotine, and to top it off, the guy who gets rescued escapes with the girl. Never did like that movie. Why mention it?”
John sighed, standing up and walking over to the window of his office to look out.
The first snow of late autumn had arrived early this year, blanketing the Montreat College campus with half a foot or more. Old-timers prognosticating over woolly caterpillars and nut-gathering squirrels had predicted this was going to be a tough one, and this early November snow appeared to be the first proof.
Before the Day, a first snow, for John, was a time of relaxation and happy memories. Classes were usually canceled, forewarned by the Weather Channel on the Internet. He would have stocked in extra firewood, and it would be a long day of reading by the fire, Jennifer and Elizabeth outside playing, coming in soaking wet for some hot chocolate, and later in the day board games like Clue or Monopoly. If the power went out, so what? It added to the cozy feel, at least for the first few days, camping out by the fireplace and watching the woods fill up with snow.
Before the Day …
Jennifer is dead. His eldest daughter, Elizabeth, all of nineteen years old, was a mother with a two-year-old son and had finally taken a further step away and moved out of the house in Montreat. She had married Seth Robinson—the son of his old neighbor and close friend Lee—and was living with her new husband, and they were already expecting a child.
How that as well had changed after the Day. Only a few years back, the line had become that twenty-five was the new eighteen. Most kids were expected to go to college, get a degree, start their first job on the career ladder, date for a while, at last find the right partner, settle down, and around twenty-eight to thirty finally start a family. It was again like the world at the time of the Civil War—to marry at sixteen, seventeen. An unmarried girl at twenty-one was seen as already becoming an old maid.
No longer, and the historian in John read it as something that was primal, that after a tribe, a city, an entire country had lost so many lives in a war, the paradigm shifted to marrying young and starting families young—the so-called baby boom of the late ’40s and ’50s a recent example.
At the other end of this age spectrum, Jen—dear old Jen, mother-in-law of his first marriage to Mary—was gone. Perhaps in a different time, her life might have gone on for another five, even ten to fifteen years. But gone now as well were all the hospitals and medications that extended life, and thus something primal occurred with the elderly. Once they had seen too much tragedy, the will to live for so many was simply extinguished.
She had quietly slipped away in August. He had seen it far too often after the Day—the elderly one day calmly saying that they had experienced enough of life with all its vicissitudes and it was time to leave. He found her one evening sitting “alone” out on the sunporch, happily talking with her husband, young Jennifer, and her daughter—his wife, Mary, who had died long before the Day. She was talking to ghostly presences. He stood silent, eavesdropping as she talked and laughed softly to replies that were silent, at least to his ears.
Makala had slipped up to his side, listened as well for a moment with tears streaming down her face. Makala then guided him to the far end of the house, telling him to leave her be, that, as a nurse, she had often seen such, a clear sign that the beloved who had already crossed over were gathering to help in the final journey.
Jen insisted upon going to sleep that evening not in her own bed but out on the sunporch that looked out over young Jennifer’s grave. They found her there in the morning, as if just gently asleep.