One Second After [95]
"Well, that's not going to happen to my kids," Dan said coldly, "and in our doing so our community will survive as well."
"A hundred and fifty for Company A. Another hundred for Company B once we get the weapons in. You take a close look and a couple of those kids are carrying reenactor Springfields from the Civil War by the way. The others are doing community service work or working on other projects. Kids that helped stop the salmonella outbreak, volunteering up at the isolation ward. Already have a crew of kids starting to cut firewood for the winter. Professor Daniels with the outdoor ed department figures we can retrofit a couple of the old oil boilers to burn wood in this building and the library and have steam heat. We'll need over three hundred cords of wood, though. Professor Lassiter is talking about rigging up a water turbine in the dam at Lake Susan. He thinks we could have it up and running by autumn and have electricity." John could not help but smile.
Most of the towns in the area, back a hundred or more years ago, first got their electricity that way. Entrepreneurs would come in, sell the community a generator, show them how to hook it up to a mill dam, string some wire, and the miracle, what was then the miracle, of electricity arrived.
"Professor Sonnenberg tells me that in our school library are back issues of Scientific American all the way back to the 1850s. Also Popular Mechan-. ics. In those golden pages are plans from eighty years ago, a hundred years ago, to build radios, telegraphs, steam engines, batteries, internal combustion engines, formulas for nearly every advance in chemistry.
"In our library we got darn near every issue of Mother Earth News, and the Foxfire books." Dan chuckled at that. "Most of the other profs had viewed such publications with disdain, but on the faculty was a beloved old professor from before your time, now dead, who was definitely, as the kids said, 'a granola eater.' That prof left us a gold mine. How to find food, how to preserve it, how to store it up. We got several groups out now, those books in hand, harvesting enough to keep us alive. Hard to believe, John, but rattlesnake shish kebab isn't all that bad.
"It's all at our fingertips if only we look down at our fingertips to see it there.
"But the kids out there must keep this place secure and, if need be, buy time."
"Buy time for what? We have the passes secured." "You know about the fight there, don't you?" Dan asked. "Yes."
"Well, that was a disorganized mob. Word is starting to filter in that groups are starting to come together. Most are just scared people banding together for survival and mutual protection, exactly what we are doing here. But some, John, there's rumors about cults. A family that was allowed to pass through here yesterday, actually heading east, coming out of Tennessee, said that over by Knoxville there's a guy claiming this is the start of a holy war."
"And let me guess, it's his vision of holiness you subscribe to or you die."
Dan nodded his head.
"Says that Jesus appeared to him just before the power went off and gave him his mission, that he is the new John the Baptist preparing the way for the final return. And good God, supposedly there are hundreds now following him and killing those who disagree."
"Several weeks, that's all it's taken," John sighed.
Dan rested a hand on his shoulder.
"Just remember Ecclesiastes, John: 'A time for war, a time for peace.
"So now it's back to this.