One Second After [124]
"That's Dan," John said quietly. "And maybe he's right. These kids have to be in good shape. We can't have them staggering like weak kittens if this Posse shows up."
"Are they ready?" Charlie asked.
Washington shook his head.
"Not very reassuring, damn it," Charlie replied sharply.
"Look, Charlie. I love these kids. Have known them for years. Down deep they're mostly small-town kids with good hearts, and remember, as a Christian college here, we were drawing kids with particular values and views as well. Or at least their parents saw it that way even if the kids didn't.
"But if you want the harsh reality, I can pick out a couple of the young men for you. Kids who grew up in the projects in Charlotte or Greensboro or Atlanta. And they'll tell you a different story about reality. Kids at twelve cappin' each other and boasting about being gangbangers. Kids at sixteen already with time in jail, maybe fathers already, cold-eyed as dead snakes, and most of them dead at twenty-five."
"The old sick joke," John sighed. "You won't find a drug dealer with a four-oh-one (k) plan."
"Exactly," Washington snapped. "These kids here, up until two months ago were thinking grades, fooling around, getting married after college, the more mature ones exactly that, their four-oh-one (k) plans. What they face, if we face it, will not just be gangbangers from cities. What will have gravitated to this Posse will be every lowlife scum with a will to do anything to survive. Mix into that the psychos that Doc Kellor was talking about. What happened to guys in prisons when this hit? Where are they now? Remember, our proud country had more people in prison per populace than damn near anywhere else in the world.
"Let them starve? Execute all of them? Maybe in some of the maximum-security houses the warden might have just done that. The food runs out and he lines them all up and shoots them rather than let them escape. But the minimum places, I bet those people were over the little chain-link fences by the third day. Most of the kids with a stupid-ass drug charge went home, but you already had some bad hombres in those places and they would gravitate together and now the world is a paradise, wide open, whatever they want if they have the balls to take it." Washington shook his head.
"The food's run out here in the East," Washington continued. "If we were in the Midwest, the corn belt, cattle belt, I'd be more optimistic, but here? Density of population versus on-hand food, it's out, it's gone.
"And those barbarians, for they are barbarians, know only one thing now. Find food and gorge and take and inflict pain as they never dreamed possible before this happened. They're thinking that even as we sit around this table, talking about rations, the nobility of our college president, the debate whether to shoot and eat our dogs."
John winced at that. Of course Washington didn't know about this morning, nor did he notice John's reaction.
The phone rang.
The sound of it when it did happen was still rather startling. The three looked at one another and John stood up, went over to the president's desk, and picked up the receiver. It was an old rotary phone from the forties or fifties, receiver heavy, wire not even the coiled type yet, just jet-black and hanging down.
"Matherson here."
"John, is that you? It's Tom here."
"Go ahead, Tom."
"I'm here with Don Barber. I just picked him up and brought him to the town hall."
"What did he see?"
"Damn, John, he's pretty shaken."
"Can you bring him up?"
"Sure, John. We'll be there in five minutes."
"Over here."
The line continued to hum for several seconds until Judy, the switchboard operator at the town hall, pulled the connect and the line went dead. John hung up.
"I think we got problems. Barber will be here in a few minutes with his report."
They just made small talk as they waited, John standing, looking out the window, smoking what was now his seventh cigarette of the day. A group of students was coming down from behind the upper men's dorm. Half a dozen girls and a