One Second After [99]
"Charleston is the nearest, two hundred and fifty miles away," Charlie sighed. "That won't help us a damn bit."
"I know," John said.
"What about the war?" Tom asked.
"Anything beyond the three cities?" Kate interjected.
"Nothing else. Oh yeah, the president is the former secretary of state. She's in charge."
No one spoke at that news.
"Apparently the president died aboard Air Force One; they got him up in the air and the plane wasn't hardened sufficiently to absorb the pulse. They didn't say what happened to the vice president or Speaker of the House."
"Nothing really that affects us directly," Charlie said, and no one replied. Strange, the death of a president and now we say it doesn't affect us, John thought.
"That was it. Then they played music."
"What?" Charlie cried. "Music?"
"Patriotic stuff. 'God Bless America,' it faded out with the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic'"
John looked around the room.
"At least we know they're out there."
"The legendary 'they,'" Kellor replied coldly. "Doesn't help us here and now with what I've got to talk about."
"Go on," Charlie said. "In fact, what you just told us, John, depresses the hell out of me. The thought that they're so close. Hell, a month and a half ago a C-130 loaded with medical supplies could have flown here in an hour from Charleston. Now it's like they're on the far side of the moon.
"Doc, why don't you go ahead."
"Only thirteen deaths yesterday," Doc said, and there was a murmur of approval, the lowest number since they had started to keep count. "Two were heart attacks; two, though, were our dialysis patients. I think that is the last of them. Everyone in our communities who was on dialysis is now dead."
No one spoke.
"We also lost one of our diabetics."
Again no one spoke, but John felt eyes turning towards him. Of course they knew. He stared straight ahead, saying nothing. "And we had a birth." "Who?" Kate asked.
"Mary Turnbill. A healthy six-pound baby girl. Named Grace America Turnbill."
"Damn, that's good," Tom said out loud.
"Eight births so far, and only one lost child and mother. Not much of a statistical base yet, but still it's better than average compared to a hundred and fifty years ago."
"Good work, Doc," Charlie said.
"Well, I better go from that to the downside of things. In one sense we are in what I would call the grace period right now, the calm between storms. Our initial die-off in the first days, those needing major medical intervention, the first round of food poisoning, those woefully out of shape, as you know, approximately twelve hundred deaths out of ten thousand, five hundred total here in Black Mountain and Swannanoa. We still don't have an exact figure on those who got in the first few days, but it had to be well over a thousand, so let's put our total number at twelve thousand, now back down to roughly ten thousand or so."
"That doesn't count the casualties from the fighting at the gap, and refugees dying outside the barrier," Tom interjected.
"No, I'm only counting those who died of natural causes at the moment. What I'm saying is that those who would die quickly have pretty well died off. Across the next fifteen days or so the numbers should be fairly low as long as we keep the community stable and nothing exotic sneaks in on us, but then, I hate to say, it's going to start sliding up again and within thirty days be far worse than anything we've seen so far."
Kellor hesitated, looking at John for a moment. Kellor knew his secret regarding the stash of insulin.
"Nearly all our type one diabetics will die this month. The pharmacies, in general, allocated one bottle of a thousand units per person. That supply is now running out for them. So we can expect all of them, approximately a hundred and twenty in our communities, to start dying."
No one spoke.
"Other deaths in the coming month: severe asthmatics running short on their rescue inhalators, severe heart arrhythmia patients running out of beta-blockers, so I expect we are in the middle