“Could we leave the room?” Lee whispered. John looked back at his friend and could see that Lee, with a stomach even weaker than his, was getting queasy.
Janet nodded in agreement and drew the sheet back over the body, and Forrest motioned for them to head into another room. The three men stripped off their winter gear, Janet coming in a few minutes later bearing four cups of coffee, black.
“I’m sorry, but I gotta ask, and hope I’m not being impolite,” Lee said. “You guys always have coffee. How?”
Janet looked over at Forrest, who, in spite of the gravity of the moment, actually chuckled.
“I always said don’t ask, don’t tell, but this time? Okay, I’ll spill. We found an abandoned truck, gone off a ravine up near that rich folks’ resort you keep wanting me to move into. The dang truck was loaded with cases of these K-Cups, cases of them. Sorry, I kind of forgot to tell you about it.”
There was a tense moment of silence. There was an understanding among all that “finds” that could help the entire community should be shared. But it was not mandatory; the few who had tried to press the issue as an actual statute once the initial state of martial law was over with were denounced as thinking like commissars. Medical supplies, a truckload of preserved meat or canned fruit that children needed, and such were one thing, but tens of thousands of K-Cups?
“Finders keepers,” John finally replied, and Forrest visibly relaxed.
“Sorry, John. There were half a hundred cartons of high-class cigarettes in there as well.”
“Don’t even mention those,” John replied sharply, not even wishing to contemplate his struggle with that addiction that still haunted him, for like nearly all ex-smokers, years could pass and yet still the urge to try “just one” could hit. The only thing that kept him straight was his promise to Jennifer.
John looked over at Janet, who was sipping her coffee.
“Try to sort through it all, even the trivial, which might be really important.”
“Like I said, he was brought in here badly beaten up, half-frozen to death, frostbite to fingers and toes; if he had survived, he might have lost those anyhow. Three ribs staved in—wonder that his lung wasn’t punctured; that injury was certainly no help when it came to the pneumonia already setting in—cracked jaw as well, which made it even harder for him to talk and understand what he was saying. Fever was up over 102 when I got to him, no way to check blood oxygen level, but I could tell it was dropping. I was praying you’d get back with some antibiotics, but by last evening, I knew he was over the edge. He slipped into a coma and died at around midnight.”
“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.