One Second After [126]
No one spoke for a moment, Don just staring off, puffing on his cigarette right down to the filter.
"You're kidding," Charlie whispered. Don looked over at him fiercely.
"Would I joke about that?" he snapped. "There were a couple of hundred vehicles parked on the grounds of the hospital in a big circle, like they were circling the wagons. Old cars, Jeeps, trucks, even a couple of tractor trailers. Inside that circle the ground was blackened from a huge fire that was still smoldering. It was early when I flew over there; you could see them just sprawled out, sleeping it off. The hospital was burning, dead scattered all around it, most of the downtown burning as well, dead carpeting the streets. But it was what was inside that circle of old cars, trucks, motorcycles."
He finished the cigarette, stubbed it out in an empty coffee cup, and looked, appealing, at John. John handed him another and pulled one out for himself; it was down to nine now.
"They had something like a gallows set up. Bodies were hanging from it...." Don shook and started to cry.
"They were cut open, some without legs and arms. Ten or more like that. Like hogs hung up to be butchered. My God ..."
He fought for composure.
"You could see other people who were prisoners. As I flew over they were looking up at me, started to jump up and down, waving like poor bastards stranded in a nightmare. I sideslipped to get down lower for a closer look. One of those scum, I could see him looking up at me, and as I flew over he cut a woman's throat, cut it so I could see it.
"That's when I almost got shot down. They have an automatic and it opened up. Stitched my starboard wing. I dived down low, skimmed over not a dozen feet high, weaved and dodged."
He smiled.
"Like the old days. Damn, I was good then, could put my spotter between two trees not thirty feet apart with telephone wires waiting on the other side."
And then he seemed to unfocus again.
"I don't want to believe what I saw."
John sighed, sat back, lost in thought. Cannibalism. Leningrad, Stalingrad, with those cases it was civilians driven mad by hunger. Reports as well in China and, frightfully, documentation of Japanese soldiers doing it either out of desperation when cut off by the island hopping campaign, or ritualistically against American POWs.
"Not here," Charlie sighed, "not here. This is America, for heaven's sake."
"Yes, here," John said softly. "Why should we be any different?"
"Damn it all, we're Americans; it just doesn't happen here."
"Donner Pass, the Essex... Jeffrey Dahmer? Our sick fascination with films about that Lecter character. Sixty days with little or no food just because the electric suddenly shut off. Hell, yes," John said coldly.
"Most likely some damn cult down there. Like Doc said, psychotics running loose."
The cult over in Knoxville with its leader proclaiming he was John the Baptist reincarnated was still running. There were reports of others, some nutcase proclaiming he was the messiah, others speaking in tongues and looking for answers in Revelation, others just beyond madness believing that aliens had invaded. He thought of that one small coven up above Haw Creek, a couple of dozen families and a church, which according to rumors not too long ago was into passing snakes around. They had sealed themselves off completely, said that it was the end-time and God's wrath was at hand. No one dared to even get within a hundred yards of their barrier now, and John wondered what madness they were practicing up there.
"They have nothing to lose now," John continued. "A nation under martial law, they've looted, raped, murdered. They know that if civilization ever gets the upper hand again, any semblance of order, all of them will be put against the wall and shot. So nothing to lose.
"Mix into that the terror of it all. We figured out it was an EMP, but others ... especially others who were already off-kilter? What's the answer? God got angry, Gaia the Earth spirit got pissed, Satan took over?"
He found he was almost on the edge of hysteria himself.