Free One Year After: A Novel by William R. Forstchen Page A

he should have been given a week or so to properly prepare the wild boar, but John had left word with him to do his best and have it ready by six for the sake of all, which he faithfully did. The fire pit had been burning all day, Phil butchering off hunks of meat from the wild boar and just roasting them over the fire, muttering throughout the hot day that if given the time, he could have made the six-hundred-pound boar into a real feast. The meat was tough but at least edible, and any meat, especially in midspring, was welcome after the long, lean days of winter.
    There was nearly half a pound of meat for everyone present, and that had settled things a bit. Eventually, though, the meeting degenerated into angry questions, fueled primarily by Ernie Franklin and his extended family of kin and followers. John had no answers to give Ernie other than the fact that the draft had been pushed back to thirty days, that Fredericks had promised that assets were coming in to ensure public safety, and that the federal government was finally started to reach out to their region. It was a bit difficult to speak clearly; his mouth still throbbing from the ordeal with Richard, so it was a relief to announce he had another meeting to get to. He turned things over to Reverend Black and with a sigh of relief piled into the old Edsel with his family for the three-mile drive up to the college campus and Lake Susan to an event John had been looking forward to for a long time.
    *   *   *
    Paul and Becka Hawkins had arranged for the secret meeting up at Lake Susan long before the crisis over the draft had hit. Paul was one of the IT guys for Montreat College, and Becka was an assistant librarian. Both were students who had stayed on after graduation, found jobs at the college, and then eventually married. After the Day, the library, the place where they hung out together as students, had become their permanent home when they set up an apartment in the basement. Friends familiar with the old Twilight Zone series joked that the couple reminded them of a famous episode starring Burgess Meredith in which a bookworm finds paradise in a library after a nuclear war.
    Their shared passion was poking around old books and magazines, looking for anything that might be helpful to the community, such as articles in Mother Earth News on how to identify which mushrooms were safe to eat. Six months before, they had finally hit the mother lode of treasures.
    The reason it had taken so long to find this particular treasure trove was twofold. Years earlier, the library had gone over to electronic cataloging. The old card-filing system, once so familiar in all libraries, had finally been carted to a back room and not updated since the turn of the century. Anything that had come in since had simply been entered into the campus database—now long lost, of course.
    One of the great weaknesses of the now lost digital age was its total dependence on electronic databases rather than old-fashioned backups with ink on paper. A poignant pastime for some was to gaze at a dust-covered iPhone, trying to remember something called phone numbers of friends and even that of children and parents. Older folks could still rattle off a number and address from a quarter century earlier, but from the day before all systems went down? Where were the addresses, even photographic images of life in the decade before the Day now? It was symbolic of just how much had been wiped out of their lives, most likely never to return. Thus in the library—as in so many millions of other locations, from federal government offices down to iPhones and iPads—nearly all data from the decade prior to the attack had been lost.
    The second factor behind the long delay of discovering the hidden treasure was that, every spring, locals emptying out attics and garages would haul thousands of moldering books and magazines into the library for the annual Fourth of July book sale and fund-raiser. Of course,