Post by timothylane on Dec 5, 2019 21:04:37 GMT -8
William R. Forstchen's One Second After received some sort of coverage back in the ST days. It's the story of a small area in western North Carolina -- basically, Forstchen's own home (with a character based a good bit on him), around small Montreat College -- after the United States is devastated by an EMP attack, knocking the country back into the pre-electrical era. It covers a full year, during which hunger, diseases (and the lack of medicines to treat them), combat casualties against looters (especially a large gang called the Posse), and other causes lead to about 90% dead in the Black Mountain-Montreat area.
This came out around 15 years ago and is available at any number of places, including Amazon and various sources of e-books (such as Kindle). Forstchen ends with the Army linking up with them, and he no doubt intended to end it there. But at some point, perhaps observing the way things were developing in America, particularly under the Black God, he decided to carry the story further. So he continued the series until it reaches a new resolution in One Year After and The Final Day. These books (about 900 pages between them) are available in the same places (I got them from Amazon using a gift card my sister gave me last year as a Christmas present).
In One Year After, the Black Mountain group led by series protagonist John Matherson finds itself having to deal with the new administration set up in Asheville by the restored government in Bluemont, Virginia, where surviving elements of the old government had escaped to a FEMA site intended to maintain them after a nuclear war. In a way, that's what happened, if not quite what was anticipated.
The new administrator, named Fredericks, starts out irksome and steadily becomes worse. At the same time, he is after just following orders, always a convenient excuse. The book deals with the political and eventually military dispute with him, and its immediate aftermath. Of course, this involves a SPOILER ALERT since I have to mention that they succeed ultimately in defeating him -- at a considerable cost on both sides. But in doing so the Black Mountain group had started accumulating allies, including a group of reivers who were basically just holding their own land and occasionally a little looting of their own. (Their fate was the spark for the final dispute with the Asheville government.)
Of course, this puts him on the wrong side of the Bluemont government, and that dispute is at the heart of The Final Day. Matherson is informed of an officer who comes from his old Army mentor and friend, Bob Scales, who in fact was talking with him when the EMP bombs hit (it was the birthday of Matherson's younger daughter, Jennifer, a diabetic who would be one of his most painful losses in the first book). The officer had been robbed and beaten by looters, and died before he Matherson could talk with him (it was the middle of winter and bad weather made it difficult to get around). But from what he hears about what the man (Quentin Reynolds, whose name he vaguely recognizes) said in his final days, it would seem that Scales survived -- and that there might be a great danger.
Matherson manages, with great difficulty, to get into communication with Scales. This isn't entirely good, because while Scales remains a friend, he also is still a high officer and his orders are very unfavorable for Matherson and the embryonic state of Carolina that they're forming. Resolving this will lead them to learn what is actually going on, and in fact actually happened.
There are a few points that come up later, and are as much explanation as I'll provide. One is the old quote from Milton's Paradise Lost: Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. And similarly, Scales recalls at one point, when he wondered why no one would prepare for a possible EMP strike, one brother officer reminded him that the elites will always find a way to prosper. Only a small amount of the country needs to survive largely unscathed for them to do so -- and who cares what happens to everyone else? This especially becomes obvious when they learn that an evacuation to one of these bunker systems started several hours before the strike.
And I'll have to leave it there.