One Second After [156]
The First Battalion did still have strength, but he had kept them strictly to other tasks, to be the army, guarding the passes throughout the winter and guarding the food supplies. Their survival rate had been just about the highest. Black Mountain had lost close to eighty percent of its population in exactly one year, the college just over sixty percent, including the casualties from the war. Part of it was the resilience of kids in their late teens to early twenties, part of it the strict discipline, created by Washington Parker, continued now by Kevin Malady, and the slow, heroic sacrifice of President Hunt and his wife, who died from starvation, a month after the battle, so that "our kids" could have another meal.
That memory had stayed with them, bonded them, inspired them.
And as for the bonding, the campus chaplain had to perform eight weddings and a couple of the girls were coming close to due ... and like Elizabeth, two of them would be mothers who lost the fathers in the war.
Cutting around the fallen trees, John pulled back onto Black Mountain Road, continuing in towards town. A number of houses had burned during the winter and were gutted-out shells, others just abandoned, all within dead. The few with life still inside had yards already planted with this spring's "Victory Gardens"; there wasn't a lawn to be seen.
The town was quiet, more a ghost town now, but still had some survivors and many of them were heading down to the center of town, some of them nearly running. They all looked like survivors of a death camp, skeletal, children lanky, with swollen stomachs, nearly every man bearded, nearly all in clothes several sizes too big.
John drove faster now, heading down the center of the road, the sides filled with debris, broken branches from the storms, cars abandoned since the first day.
And as he came around the bend to the center of town he saw them and at the sight of them Elizabeth, Jen, and Makala all let out a shriek, screaming so loudly that Ben burst into tears.
John pulled into the town hall complex, not even bothering to find his parking slot. Hundreds were gathering, some even running.
He got out of the car and looked at them....
A Bradley armored personnel carrier was at the front of the column, fluttering from a pole strapped to its side ... the flag of the United States of America.
Behind the Bradley was a column that stretched back down the road for several hundred yards. Humvees, a couple of dozen trucks, five 18-wheelers, another Bradley, most all of them painted desert camo, all of them flying American flags.
"Here he is!" someone shouted, pointing towards John.
The cry was picked up, the people of his town parting as he slowly approached, eyes clouded with tears as he gazed up at the flag.
An officer was standing in front of the lead vehicle, surrounded by nearly a dozen of his own troops who should be back at the gap, the First Battalion of the Black Mountain Rangers, talking with soldiers decked out as soldiers as John remembered them, Kevlar helmets, a mix of uniforms, though, some desert camo, some standard camo green, a few in urban camo. And yet it was his kids, his soldiers, who looked to be the tougher of the two groups, lean, hawk faced, eyes dark and hollow, weapons slung casually, the regular infantry obviously a bit in awe of them, especially the girls, who seemed as tough as the guys they were with.
Nation Makers, he thought. He could see it now. His former students, like the soldiers in the Howard Pyle painting, ragged, half-starved, and yet filled with grim determination unlike anything seen in America in over two hundred years.
The lead officer next to the Bradley, John could