One Second After [106]
She glared at him.
"Or what?"
"I'll have you arrested."
"Sieg heil, mein Fuhrer," and she raised her hand in the fascist salute. "Damn it, Kate," Charlie snapped, his voice almost breaking. "I don't want this any more than you, so don't ride me on it." She lowered her head.
"It has to stay in this room," John said sharply. "Are you getting an extra?" Kate asked. "Hell, no. We're still getting by."
"All right, Charlie. You don't take extra rations, none of us here do, and I'll go along with it."
"Tom has to be on the list for extra rations," Kellor said. "Like hell."
John looked at Tom. His rotund pre-war form had melted away quickly, belt drawn in now by several notches.
"All police, firefighters, the militia, those doing essential work," John said, "and grave diggers."
There was a long silence.
"And Doc, you, too," John said.
Doc nodded.
"I won't hide behind false heroics. I hate the thought, but I know my performance is degrading fast. I set a compound fracture yesterday, one of the Quincy boys, fell off a horse. I thought I was going to faint towards the end of it. If we don't have doctors and nurses in this town who can function, well, we're all dead anyhow then."
"How many will we lose?" Charlie asked.
"When?"
"You said the curve is going to start going up again. How many do we lose in two or three months?" Doc looked around the room.
"One-third to one-half if we follow the plan just outlined." "And if we don't?" Kate asked.
"We drag it out a little longer, Kate, by not much more than thirty days extra; then everyone will be dead by winter." No one spoke.
"Malthus is finally being proven right," Charlie said. "Our population here is three, four times higher than the carrying capacity. It was all about infrastructure. Out in Southern California right now I bet hundreds of thousands of tons of vegetables are rotting. The Midwest will be up to their eyeballs in unpicked corn in another six weeks. But there is no way to get that from there to here."
Silence, and John knew all were dwelling on food, the standard thoughts of someone going into starving and malnutrition. He could picture the hundreds of thousands of head of cattle out in Texas and Oklahoma. For that matter, just two hundred miles east of here, the hog farms. They were contemptible, usually rammed into poorer communities, five to ten thousand hogs raised at a clip in sheds where they could barely move from birth until slaughter, the stench and pollution killing property value for miles around ... and to have one of them here now would be greeted with people falling on their knees and thanking God.
But even then, John realized, it wouldn't work. The farms were dependent on hundreds of tons of feed being shipped in each week. If those farms had not already been looted, the waste going on was most likely beyond imagining. The animals starving to death, people who almost thought meat was grown inside a pink foam package now trying to chase a hog down, kill it, and dress it. No, they'd cut off what they could, others would join in like vultures, and half of it would then just rot in the sun. If the hogs escaped, they would be into the woods now, wild boar in short order and damn dangerous.
Charlie finally stirred.
"Anything else?"
Silence.
"Minor point, but it's starting to get dangerous. Dogs." John looked over at him.
"A lot of dogs are starting to run loose now. They're starving and they're going wild. We had an incident up on Fifth Street last night; two children got cornered by a pack of dogs. Fortunately, the father had a shotgun and dropped several of them; the rest took off."
After the grimness of the previous conversation John knew he shouldn't be reacting so hard, but he suddenly felt a tightness in his throat. The two fools Zach and Ginger were indeed getting hungry, begging ferociously at every meal, and yet still the family would share a few scraps. Most of the squirrels John had dropped over the last week had been tossed to the dogs raw.
"I think we have