Millions would die in the first week alone, perhaps even you who are reading this if you require certain medications, let alone the most basic needs of our lives such as food and clean water. The place Bill writes about is real; he has set this story in his hometown and the college that he works at. I remember when he was writing the book and we'd talk. More than once he was deeply disturbed by what he had researched, discovered, and was now trying to express as a story for all to read.
What hit him the most, he told mo, is hat he kept picturing his teenage daughter in this nightmare reality, and I think as you read the book you will see that point of identification. It struck me deeply as well, for I have two grandchildren.
As he wishes to protect his daughter from this fate, so do I wish to protect my grandchildren, to be able to pass on to them an America that is safe from such threats.
The threat is real, and we as Americans must face that threat, prepare, and know what to do to prevent it. For if we do not, "one second after," the America we know, cherish and love, will be gone forever.
Nancy, the owner of the shop, Ivy Corner, smiled. Give her a big hug and kiss for me. Hard to believe she's twelve today. He was already enduring that with Elizabeth, his sixteen-year-old, and perhaps for that, and so many other reasons as well, he just wished that he could preserve, could drag out, just for a few more days, weeks, or months the precious time all fathers remember fondly, when they still had their "little girl. Next up the street was Benson's Used and Rare Books.
John hesitated, wanted to go in just for a few minutes, then pulled out his cell phone to check the time. Two thirty. Her bus would be rolling in at three, no time today to go in, have a cup of coffee, and talk about books and history. Walt Benson saw him, held up a cup, gesturing for John to join him. He shook his head, pointed to his wrist even though he never wore a watch, and continued to walk up to the corner to where his Talon SUV was parked in front of Taylor's Hardware and General Store.
John paused and looked back down the street for a moment. I'm living in a damn Norman Rockwell painting, he thought yet again, for the thousandth time.
Winding up here. Eight years back he was at the Army War College, Carlisle, PA, teaching military history and lecturing on asymmetrical warfare, and waiting to jump the hoop and finally get his first star. And then two things happened. His promotion came through, with assignment to Brussels as a liaison to NATO, a rather nice posting to most likely end out his career.
John would take the promotion, but could it be to the Pentagon? It'd place them nearby to Johns Hopkins, and not too far from Mary's family. It didn't work. Cutbacks were hitting as it was, oh, there was great sympathy from upstairs, but he had to take Brussels if he wanted the star and maybe a year later they'd find a slot for him stateside.
After talking to Mary's doctor. John resigned. He would take her back home to Black Mountain, North Carolina, which was what she wanted and the cancer treatment center at Chapel Hill would be nearby.
Bob's connections were good, remarkably good, when John first mentioned Black Mountain. A single phone call was made; the old-boy network, though disdained as politically incorrect, did exist and it did help at times when needed.
The president of Montreat College, North Carolina, in Mary's hometown, did indeed "suddenly" need an assistant director of development. John hated development and admissions work but survived it until finally a tenure-track professorship in history opened four years back and he was slotted in. The fact that the president of the college, Dan Hunt, owed his life to Bob Scales, who had dragged him out of a minefield back in , was a definite mark in John's favor that could not be ignored between friends.
Dan had lost his leg, Bob got another of his Bronze Stars for saving him, and the two had been buddies ever since, each looking out, as well, for those whom the other cared for. So Mary got to go home, after twenty years of following John from Benning, to Germany, to Okinawa, sweating out Desert Storm, from there to the Pentagon, then a year, a wonderful year, at West Point and then three more wonderful years teaching at Carlisle. At heart he was a history teacher, and maybe whichever bastard in the personnel office at the Pentagon had nixed John's request to stay stateside had done him a favor.
So they came home to Black Mountain, North Carolina. He did not hesitate one second in granting her wish, resigning his commission and promotion and moving to this corner of the Carolina mountains. He looked back down Main Street, frozen for a moment in time and memories. Mary would be gone four years next week, her last time out a slow, exhausting walk down this street, which as a girl she had run along.
It was indeed a Norman Rockwell town. That final walk down this street with her, everyone knew her, everyone knew what was happening, and everyone came out to say hi, to give her a hug, a kiss, all knowing it was farewell but not saying it. It was a gesture of love John would never forget. He pushed the thought aside. It was still too close and Jennifer's bus would be pulling up in twenty minutes. He got into his Talon, started it up, turned onto State Street, and headed east. He did love the view as State Street curved through town, past yet more shops, nearly all the buildings redbrick, dating back to the turn of the century.
The village had once been a thriving community, part of the tuberculosis sanitarium business. When the railroad had finally pierced the mountains of western North Carolina in the early s some of the first to flood in were tuberculosis victims. They came by the thousands, to the sanitariums that sprang up on every sunlit mountain slope.
By the early twenties there were a dozen such institutions surrounding Asheville, the big city situated a dozen miles to the west of Black Mountain. And then came the Depression.
Black Mountain remained frozen in time, and then came antibiotics right after the war and the sanitariums emptied out. And all those wonderful buildings, which in other towns would have given way to shopping plazas and strip malls, had remained intact, progress passing Black Mountain by.
Now there were conference centers for various churches and summer camps for kids where the sanitariums had been. His own college had been founded at such a site up in what everyone called the Cove. A small college, six hundred kids, most of them from small towns across the Carolinas and a few from Atlanta or Florida.
Some of the kids were freaked out by the relative isolation, but most of them grudgingly admitted they loved it, a beautiful campus, a safe place, an old logging trail across the edge of the campus leading straight on up to Mount Mitchell, good white water nearby for kayaking, and plenty of woods to disappear into for partying for some of them, to get around the fairly strict campus rules.
The town itself finally revived, starting in the s, but wonderfully, the charming turn-ofthecentury look was maintained, and in the summer and fall the streets would be crammed with tourists and day-trippers coming up from Charlotte or Winston-Salem to escape the boiling heat of the lowlands, joined by hundreds of summer "cottagers" who lived in the Cove, many of the cottages darn near mansions for some of the older wealth of the South.
That had been Mary's family, Old South and wealth. Me-ma Jennie, Mary's mother and Jennifer's namesake, still hung on doggedly to their home up in the Cove, refusing to consider moving, even though "Papa" Tyler was now in a nearby nursing home, in the final stages of cancer. John continued to drive east, the traffic on Interstate 40, coming up through the Swannanoa Gap, roaring by on his left. The old-timers in the town still expressed their hatred of that "darn road.
With the road had come development, traffic, and the floods of tourists on weekends that the chamber of commerce loved and everyone else tried to tolerate. Staying on the old highway that paralleled the interstate, John drove for less than a mile out of town, then turned right onto a dirt road that twisted u p the side of a hill overlooking the town. The old mountain joke used to be "you know you're getting directions to a mountain home when they say, 'Turn onto the dirt road.
The home he and Mary had purchased was in one of the first new developments in the area. In a county where there was no zoning, the lower part of the hill had several trailers, an old shack where Connie Yarborough, a wonderful down-the-hill neighbor, still did not have electricity or town water, and next to her was an eccentric Volkswagen repair shop. The house Mary and John actually named Rivendell, because of their mutual love of Tolkien offered a broad sweeping view of the valley below; the skyline of Asheville was in the distance, framed by the Great Smoky Mountains beyond, facing due west so Mary could have her sunsets.
When trying to describe the view he'd just tell friends, "Check out Last of the Mohicans; it was filmed a half hour from where we live. The bed was still positioned to face the glass wall, as Mary wanted it so she could watch the outside world as her life drifted away. He pulled up the drive. The two "idiots" Ginger and Zach, both golden retrievers, both beautiful-looking dogs—and both thicker than bricks when it came to brains—had been out sunning on the bedroom deck.
They stood up and barked madly, as if he were an invader. Though if he were a real invader they'd have cowered in terror and stained the carpet as they fled into Jennifer's room to hide. The two idiots charged through the bedroom, then out through the entry way screen door. Put a new one in, it'd last a few days and the idiots would charge right through it again.
John had given up on that fight years ago. As for actually closing the door. This was Black Mountain. Strange as it seemed, folks rarely locked Up, keys would be left in cars, kids did indeed play in the streets in the evening, there were parades for the Fourth of July, Christmas, and the ridiculous Pinecone Festival, complete to the crowning of a Miss Pine-cone. Papa Tyler had absolutely humiliated his daughter, Mary, in front of John early on in their courtship when he proudly pulled out a photo of her, Miss Pinecone In Black Mountain there was still an icecream truck that made the rounds on summer nights It was all one helluva difference from his boyhood just outside of Newark, New Jersey.
There was a car parked at the top of the driveway. Mary's mother, Me-ma Jennie. Me-ma Jennie was behind the wheel of her wonderful and highly eccentric Ford Edsel. There was even a photo framed in the house up in the Cove of Mary's great-granddad and Henry Ford at the opening of a dealership in Charlotte back before World War I. Though it wasn't polite to be overtly "business" in their strata and Jennie preferred the role of genteel southern lady, in her day, John knew, she was one shrewd business person, as was her husband.
John pulled up alongside the Edsel. Jennie put down the book she was reading and got out. But that had softened with time, especially towards the end, especially when he had brought the girls back home to Jen.
The two got out of their cars and she held up a cheek to be kissed, her height, at little more than five foot two, overshadowed by his six-foot-four bulk, and there was a light touch of her hand on his arm and an affectionate squeeze.
She'll be home any minute. He wondered if she practiced every night reciting before a mirror to keep that wonderful young woman— sounding southern lilt. It was an accent that still haunted him. The same as Mary's when they had first met at Duke, twenty-eight years ago. At times, if Jen was in the next room and called to the girls, it would still bring tears to his eyes.
Why didn't you go inside to wait? The way they jump, they'd ruin my nylons. Though dumb, goldens knew when someone didn't like them no matter how charming they might be. John reached in, pulled out the bag of Beanies, and, walking over to the stone wall that bordered the path to the house, began to line them up, one at a time, setting them side by side. She smiled sadly. Like hell. Tyler actually thought about driving you off with a shotgun. And that first night you stayed over. Jen had caught Mary and him in a less than "proper" situation on the family room sofa at two in the morning.
Though not fully improper, it was embarrassing nevertheless, and Jen had never let him live it down. He set the Beanies out, stepped back, eyeballed them, like a sergeant examining a row of new recruits.
The red, white, and blue "patriot" bear on the right should be in the middle of the ranks where a flag bearer might be. He could hear the growl of the school bus as it shifted gears, turning off of old Route 70, coming up the hill.
Going back to the Edsel, she leaned in the open window and brought out a flat, elegantly wrapped box, tied off with a neat bow. A proper young lady should have a gold necklace at twelve. Her mother did. And she was twenty then. Ginger and Zach had stopped jumping around John, both of them cocking their heads, taking in the sound of the approaching school bus, the squeal of the brakes as it stopped at the bottom of the driveway, its yellow barely visible now through the spring-blooming trees.
They were both off like lightning bolts, running full tilt down the driveway, barking up a storm, and seconds later he could hear the laughter of Jennifer; of Patricia, a year older and their neighbor; and of Seth, Pat's eleventh-grade brother.
The girls came running up the driveway, Seth threw a stick, the two dogs diverted by it for a moment but then turned together and charged up the hill behind the girls. Seth waved then crossed the street to his house. John felt a hand slip into his. Yes, he could see Mary in Jennifer, slender, actually skinny as a rail, shoulder-length blond hair tied back, still a lanky little girl.
She slowed a bit, reaching out to put a hand on a tree as if to brace herself, Patricia turned and waited for her. John felt a momentary concern, wanted to go down to her, but knew better, Jen actually held him back. And you drove the Edsel today. Can we go for a ride? Pat looked over at the Beanies lined up, smiled, and looked up at John. He lifted her up, hugged her with fierce intensity so that she laughed, then groaned, "You'll break my back!
And Ollie Ostrich! Ginger, thinking the paper was now a gift to her, half-swallowed it and ran off as Zach chased her. When Jennifer opened the box her eyes widened. Maybe your friend can help you put it on. My God, it must of cost a fortune, heavy, almost pencil thick. Jen looked at him out of the corner of her eye as if to meet any challenge. It was one of the new digital readout models.
No more finger pricking, just a quick jab to the arm. She absently fingered the necklace with her free hand while waiting for the readout.
One forty-two. She nodded. Jennifer had lived with it for ten years now. He knew that was a major part of his protectiveness of her. When she was in her terrible twos and threes, it tore his heart out every time he had to prick her finger, the sight of his or Mary's approach with the test kit set off howls of protest.
The doctors had all said that, as quickly as possible, Jennifer had to learn to monitor herself, that John and Mary needed to step back even when she was only seven and eight to let her know her own signs, test, and medicate. Mary had handled it far better than John had, perhaps because of her own illness towards the end.
Jen with her strength had the same attitude. Here I am, a soldier of twenty years. Saw some action, but the only casualties were the Iraqis, never my own men. I was trained to handle things, but when it came to my daughter's diabetes, a damn aggressive type 1, I was always on edge.
Tough, damn good at what I did, well respected by my men, and yet complete jelly when it comes to my girls. Once your sister gets home and your friends show up we can have our party. She started to pull the cigarettes out, to stomp on them or tear them up, but a look from him warned her off. Out with Ben," the screen read. John held the phone so she could read the message. Jen smiled. A professor, well, they always struck me as a bit strange.
Either rakes chasing the girls or boring, dusty types. Down here in the South, 'Colonel' sounds best. More masculine. I am a professor, so let's just settle for 'John.
You'll lose both of them soon enough to some pimply-faced boys, so do hang on to her as long as you can. What did it cost, a thousand, fifteen hundred? He knew he had misspoken. If he had said such a thing around Mary, she'd have lit into him about a woman being independent and the hell with a husband handling the bills. As for Tyler, though, he no longer even knew what a bill was, and that hurt, no matter how self-reliant Jen tried to appear to be.
Let me go up to the nursing home to spend some lime with Tyler and I'll be back for the party. My God, look at that grille; it's ugly as sin. There were half a dozen cars in her huge garage, several newer ones but also an actual Model A, up on blocks, and, beauty of beauties, a powder blue Mustang convertible.
A lot of bad memories, though, were tied to that Mustang. When John and Mary were dating, they had conned her parents into letting them borrow the car for a cruise up the Blue Ridge Parkway to Mount Mitchell and John, driving it, had rear-ended an elderly couple's Winnebago.
No one was hurt, but the car was totaled and Tyler had poured thousands into getting it restored. And Jen still lived by that ruling. I bet a heck of a lot more than that SUV thing you've got.
The wall was warm from the afternoon sun. The Beanies were still there, and oh, that did hurt a bit; at least she could have carried Patriot Bear or the ostrich in. Inside he could hear Jennifer and Pat chatting away about the necklace until the stereo kicked on. Some strange female wailing sounds.
Britney Spears? No, she was old stuff now, thank God. What it was he couldn't tell, other than the fact that he didn't like it. Pink Floyd, some of the old stuff his parents listened to like Sinatra or Glenn Miller, or, better yet, the Chieftains were more his speed.
He picked up one of the Beanies, Patriot Bear. Leaning against the wall, he soaked in the view, the tranquility of the moment, broken only by the distant rumble of traffic on and the noise inside the house. Ginger and Zach came back from their romp in the field behind the house and flopped down at his feet, panting hard.
The scent of lilacs was heavy on the air; if anyone wanted to truly see spring, they should live in these mountains. Down in the valley below, the cherry trees were in full bloom, just several hundred feet higher here at his home they were just beginning to blossom, but the lilacs were already blooming. To his right, ten miles away, the top of Mount Mitchell was actually crowned with a touch of snow, winter was still up there.
It reminded John that tonight, the second Tuesday of the month, was Civil War Roundtable night in the basement of the Methodist church. It'd be another fun round of the usual raucous debate, the other members all needling him as their one and only Yankee, whom they could pick on. And then the phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket, expecting it to be Elizabeth.
There was going to be hell to pay if it was. How she could stand up her kid sister on her birthday to sneak off with that pimple-faced, horny, fast-handed Johnson kid. But the area code was He opened the phone and clicked it on. Where's my goddaughter?
Bob Scales, now three stars, John's former boss at Carlisle and a damn good friend, had stood as Jennifer's godfather, and though Irish Catholic rather than Italian, he took the job seriously.
He and his wife, Barbara, usually came down three or four times a year. When Mary died they had taken a couple of weeks off and stayed to help. They never had children and thus they considered Jennifer and Elizabeth to be their surrogates. I even got tickets to Disney World for once school lets out that I'll give her at dinner, but I wonder now if it will be the same.
Hell, yeah, it will be different, but you'll still see the little girl come out down there, even with Elizabeth. How's Elizabeth doing, by the way? She nodded her head; then chattering away, she walked around the house. John looked out the window across the valley to the mountains beyond.
It was a beautiful, pristine spring day. And his mood began to lighten. Several of Jennifer's friends would be over soon for a small party. He'd cook up some burgers on the grill out on the side deck; the kids would then retreat to Jennifer's room.
He had just opened the pool in the backyard over the weekend, and though the water was a chilly sixty-eight, a couple of the kids might jump in. He'd flush them out around dark, go to his Roundtable meeting, and maybe later this evening he'd dig back into that article he was committed to for the Civil War Journal about Lee versus Grant as a strategic commander.
He could stay up late; his first lecture wasn't until eleven in the morning tomorrow. John took it, gave her a quick peck on the top of her head and a playful swat as she ran back off. Seconds later the damn stereo in her room doubled in sound. He could hear some voices in the background. It was hard to tell, though; Jennifer's stereo was blaring. Will you be down next month? Got a problem here. I gotta—" The phone went dead. At that same instant, the ceiling fan began to slowly wind down, the stereo in Jennifer's room shut down, and looking over to his side alcove office he saw the computer screen saver disappear, the green light of the on button on the nineteen-inch monitor disappearing.
There was a chirping beep, the signal that the home security and fire alarm system was off-line; then that went silent as well. John snapped the phone shut. Damn, power failure. Actually, if he could permanently arrange for that damn player to die, he would be tempted to do it.
Pat just gave me a CD and I wanted to play it. Let me call the power company. Most likely a blown transformer. Last time that happened some drunk had rammed into a telephone pole down at the bottom of the hill and wiped everything out. The drunk of course had walked away from it. Cell phone. John opened it back up, started to punch numbers. Cell phone was dead.
He put it down on the kitchen table. The battery in his phone must have gone out just as Bob clicked off. Hell, without electricity John couldn't charge it back up to call the power company.
He looked over at Jennifer, who stared at him expectantly, as if he would now resolve things. They'll be on it, and besides, it's a beautiful day; you don't need to be listening to that garbage anyhow. Why can't you like Mozart or Debussy the way Pat here does?
They'll have the power back by dinnertime. Flipping the four burgers on the grill, two for himself, one each for Jennifer and Pat, he looked over his shoulder and watched as the girls played tag with the dogs in the upper field behind his house.
It was a beautiful sight, late afternoon sun, the eight apple trees in full blossom, the girls laughing as they dodged back and forth. Ginger, the younger and crazier of the two goldens, knocked Jennifer over with a flying leap as she tried to hold a Frisbee out of her reach, and there were more squeals as the two dogs and two girls piled on each other.
Months ago he had stopped wearing a wristwatch; the cell phone was now his timepiece. He looked through the kitchen window to the grandfather clock; it was just about six. The other kids should have been here by now; the agreement was they could come over for a brief party, but as it was a school night, the party would be over by No one had shown yet. For that matter, he thought Jen would have been back long ago.
He lit a cigarette, puffing quickly—it was amazing how annoying a twelve-year-old could be when it came to a "quit smoking, Dad" campaign— and tossed the half-smoked Camel over the patio railing. Burgers done, he set them on the patio table, went in, opened the fridge, pulled out the cake, and set it on the table, sticking twelve candles in. Back out again to the deck. Pat and Jennifer came out of the field.
It was a quiet spring evening, silent except for a few birds chirping, the distant bark of a dog. There's no traffic noise from the interstate. It was concealed by the trees. When he had first purchased the house, that had been one disappointment he had not thought of while inspecting it but was aware of the first night in, the rumble of traffic from the interstate a half mile away. The only time it fell silent was in the winter during a snowstorm or an accident. It was common enough, the long winding climb up from Old Fort; every month or two a truck would lose its brakes and roll or old folks in a forty-foot-long land yacht would lose it on the twisting turns as the highway zigzagged out of the mountains and down to the Piedmont.
One such accident, a hazmat spill with a truck rolling over, had shut down traffic in both directions for over a day. That's what we thought, but it's weird down there. No traffic jam, just cars stopped all over the place. You can see it from atop the hill. A bunch of cars, a lot on the side of the road, some in the middle, but no jam up, just everyone stopped. The girls nodded and dug in. He ate his first burger in silence, saying nothing, just listening. It was almost eerie.
You figure you'd hear something, a police siren if there was indeed an accident, cars down on old Highway 70 should still be passing by. Usually if the interstate was closed, emergency vehicles would use 70 to access the highway and it would be jammed with people trying to bypass the interstate.
At the very least this was the time of night the darn Jefferson kids, up at the top of the hill, would start tearing around into the forest with their damn four-wheelers. And then he looked up. He felt a bit of a chill. This time of day any high-flying jets would be pulling contrails, and directly overhead was an approach corridor to Atlanta for most flights coming out of the northeast.
At any given time there'd be two or three planes visible. Now the sky was sparkling blue, not a trace of a contrail. The chill. How quiet it was that afternoon, everyone home, watching their televisions, and the sky overhead empty of planes. He stood up, walked to the edge of the railing, shaded his eyes against the late afternoon sun.
Up towards Craggy Dome there was a fire burning, smoke rising vertical, half a dozen acres from the look of it. Another fire raged much farther out on the distant ridge of the Smokies. In the village of Black Mountain, nothing seemed to be moving. Usually, before the trees filled in completely, he could see the red and green of the traffic light at the intersection of State and Main.
It was off, not even blinking. He looked back at the grandfather clock. It was usually this time of day that the "million-dollar train" came through, so named because it hauled over a million dollars' worth of coal, mined out of Kentucky for the power plants down near Charlotte.
When the girls were younger, an afterdinner ritual was to drive down to the tracks and wave to the engineer as the five heavy dieselelectric locomotives, thundering with power, pulled their load and crawled towards the Swannanoa Gap tunnel. The silence was interrupted by a throaty growl as Grandma Jen came up l he driveway in her monster, the Edsel.
She pulled in beside his Talon, got out, and walked up. And you should see the interstate, cars just sitting all over the place, not moving.
That's supposed to automatically kick in. I mean completely out. That's required," John said. Someone said there must be a broken relay and they'd get an electrician in. But still, it's a worry. They had to shift patients on oxygen to bottled air, since the pumps in each room shut off. Tyler's feeding tube pump shut off as well.
They said he'd be OK. So I go out to the parking lot and all the five o'clock shift of nurses and staff were out there, all of them turning keys, and nothing starting.
Had to be here for my little girl, and that monster, as you call it, worked as it always has. Grandma Jen leaned over and kissed her on the top of the head. John grimaced and realized he should have made sure Jennifer had taken it off before running around with the dogs.
If she had lost it or it got broken in the roughhousing with the dogs, there'd have been hell to pay. She shook her head. The other gifts were now opened, a card from Bob and Barbara Scales with a gift certificate for a hundred bucks for Amazon, the Beanies he had carried over from the wall and lined up on the table. Jennifer tucked Patriot Bear under her arm and opened the huge envelope, half as big as herself, that John had made u p the night before, a collage of photos of Disney World with a fake "Ticket for Jennifer, Daddy, and, oh yeah, Elizabeth" printed in the middle.
It was indeed a hit and now it was his turn to say, "Hey, don't squeeze so hard; you'll break my neck. Jennifer and the dogs walked her home. The silence. But we still had electricity then; we could see the news. All those cars stalled. There was a thought, but it was too disturbing to contemplate right now.
He wanted to believe that it was just a weird combination of coincidences, a power failure that might be regional, and would ground most flights due to air traffic control. Maybe it was some sort of severe solar storm, potent enough to trigger a massive short circuit; a similar event had happened up in Canada several years ago.
A thought hit him. The sound, even after but a couple of hours of silence, was reassuring. He turned on the radio. It really was one of the old ones. With dials to turn, no buttons to push, the slightly yellowed face even had the two small triangles on them marking the frequency of the old Civil Defense broadcast frequencies. Static, nothing but static from one end of the dial to the other.
It was getting towards twilight, usually the time the FCC had most AM stations power down, but the big ones, the ones with enough bucks to pay for the license, should be powering up now to fifty thousand watts, and reaching halfway across the country if the atmospherics were right.
He could remember as a kid making the long drive from Jersey down to Duke in his old battered Bug, killing the time by slowly turning the dial, picking up WGN in Chicago—that strange country and western station out of Wheeling, so alien sounding with its laments about pickup trucks and women—and throughout the night, if the atmospherics were just right, WOR out of New York, catching his favorite, Jean Shepherd, in the middle of the night.
Now it was just silence. The way she said "Colonel. Might be one helluva solar storm, that's all. If it had blown up, would we still be seeing it? That's what triggers the northern lights. Sometimes the storm is so intense it sets off an electrical discharge in the atmosphere that short-circuits electronic equipment.
It might explain why yours keeps running and others stopped. At the bottom of the driveway he caught sight of Jennifer, shouted for her to pile in, and she ran over, delighted, climbing over her father and sitting between the two of them. That's the way it used to be forty years ago, he realized. Mom and Dad out for a drive, the kid between them, no bucket seats yet, except in sports cars, Junior not locked up in the back and, of course, belted in.
John just hoped Tom Barker, the town's chief of police, didn't spot them. Although John was now a well-confirmed local, Barker might just lay a ticket on them if in a foul mood. Historians have often speculated about what might have transpired from legendary "matchups" of great generals and admirals. In this story of the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the notorious gambler Yamamoto is pitted against the equally legendary American admiral Bill Halsey in a battle of wits, nerve, and skill.
Days of Infamy recounts this alternative history from a multitude of viewpointsfrom President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and the two great admirals, on down to American pilots flying antiquated aircraft, bravely facing the vastly superior Imperial Japanese Navy aircraft. Gingrich and Forstchen have written a sequel that's as much a homage to the survivors of the real Pearl Harbor attack as it is an imaginative and thrilling take on America's entry into World War II.
I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. They become soldiers with youthful enthusiasm.
But the world of duty, culture, and progress they had been taught breaks in pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principle of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against one another.
He is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank, a man who can bend language to his will. Whether he writes of men or of inanimate nature, his touch is sensitive, firm, and sure. Imagines a horrifying scenario where, in the course of one day, the terrorist group ISIS carries out massacres in schools and on highways across the United States.
With a surprisingly small but well-organized and ruthless force, the nightmarish devastation brings America to a state of near paralysis"--Page [4] of cover.
In search of answers and action, the award-winning poet and essayist Lisa Wells brings us Believers, introducing trailblazers and outliers from across the globe who have found radically new ways to live and reconnect to the Earth in the face of climate change We find ourselves at the end of the world. How, then, shall we live? Like most of us, Lisa Wells has spent years overwhelmed by increasingly urgent news of climate change on an apocalyptic scale.
She did not need to be convinced of the stakes, but she could not find practical answers. She embarked on a pilgrimage, seeking wisdom and paths to action from outliers and visionaries, pragmatists and iconoclasts. Believers tracks through the lives of these people who are dedicated to repairing the earth and seemingly undaunted by the task ahead. Wells meets an itinerant gardener and misanthrope leading a group of nomadic activists in rewilding the American desert.
She talks with survivors of catastrophic wildfires in California as they try to rebuild in ways that acknowledge the fires will come again. Through empathic, critical portraits, Wells shows that these trailblazers are not so far beyond the rest of us.
They have had the same realization, have accepted that we are living through a global catastrophe, but are trying to answer the next question: How do you make a life at the end of the world? Through this miraculous commingling of acceptance and activism, this focus on seeing clearly and moving forward, Wells is able to take the devastating news facing us all, every day, and inject a possibility of real hope.
Believers demands transformation. It will change how you think about your own actions, about how you can still make an impact, and about how we might yet reckon with our inheritance. A seemingly ordinary village participates in a yearly lottery to determine a sacrificial victim. The definitive work on Stalin's purges, the author's The Great Terror was universally acclaimed when it first appeared in It was "hailed as the only scrupulous, nonpartisan, and adequate book on the subject".
And in recent years it has received equally high praise in the Soviet Union, where it is now considered the authority on the period, and has been serialized in Neva, one of their leading periodicals. Of course, when the author wrote the original volume two decades ago, he relied heavily on unofficial sources.
Now, with the advent of glasnost, an avalanche of new material is available, and he has mined this enormous cache to write a substantially new edition of his classic work. It is remarkable how many of the most disturbing conclusions have born up under the light of fresh evidence. But the author has added enormously to the detail, including hitherto secret information on the three great "Moscow Trials," on the fate of the executed generals, on the methods of obtaining confessions, on the purge of writers and other members of the intelligentsia, on life in the labor camps, and many other key matters.
Both a leading Sovietologist and a highly respected poet, the author blends research with prose, providing not only an authoritative account of Stalin's purges, but also a compelling chronicle of one of this century's most tragic events. A timely revision of a book long out of print, this is the updated version of the author's original work.
This powerful Newbery-winning classic tells the story of the great coon dog Sounder and his family. An African American boy and his family rarely have enough to eat. Each night, the boy's father takes their dog, Sounder, out to look for food.
The man grows more desperate by the day. When food suddenly appears on the table one morning, it seems like a blessing. But the sheriff and his deputies are not far behind. The ever-loyal Sounder remains determined to help the family he loves as hard times bear down. This classic novel shows the courage, love, and faith that bind a family together despite the racism and inhumanity they face in the nineteenth-century deep South.
Readers who enjoy timeless dog stories such as Old Yeller and Where the Red Fern Grows will find much to love in Sounder, even as they read through tears at times. Skip to content. One Second After. Author : William R. One Second After Book Review:. Forstchen Publsiher : St. The John Matherson Series. One Year After. One Year After Book Review:. The Final Day. The Final Day Book Review:. One Step After Another. Pillar to the Sky. Pillar to the Sky Book Review:.
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Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to fiction, apocalyptic lovers. Your Rating:.
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