“I’ll sleep with you for a meatball.” Julia Andrews said in Victor/Victoria. But that deal falls flat when there are no longer any meatballs to trade.
One Second After by William R Forstchen is a blow by blow account of how one idyllic little community in the hills of North Carolina becomes a Masada under seige from the rest of America after an EMP attack knocks out all modern electronics. This is a Conservative fairy tale, where everything would have been fine if everyone had voted Republican, kept a stockpile of weapons in the basement, and drove a classic car to Sonic on Friday nights.
The Wife has always liked Cosy Catastrophes, those wonderful end of the world stories where everyone seems to have died over night and a small band of heroes have to struggle to survive in a strange new world. The Stand, The Happening, I Am Legend, Mad Max, Survivors, Children of Man, The Road, and countless other short stories, books, and movies have explored this topic.
There is something about the very idea of an apocalypse that drives right to the core of being human. Most religions work on some kind of end of time event, whether it be the actual biblical apocalypse or the individual permanent death of Buddhism. We are in love with the idea that we are going to be the Last One On Earth.
None of these stories really care much about People at large, they have to focus on a small handful of survivors. After all, They Died In The Blast-The End, is a pretty dull story. One Second After takes a slightly different approach, telling the story of one community, though still focusing on just a handful of the members of that community.
There’s still not much story here. Just a death watch as more and more and more people die of this, that, and the other thing. But that’s pretty much the point. One Second After doesn’t want to be The Road Warrior or 28 Days Later, it wants to be Dr Strangelove or Fail-Safe. It has a message that it pounds home at every opurtunity -if only we had all been survivalist nut cases, we wouldn’t be dropping like files now. If only The Government had prepared for a EMP attack, none of this would have happened. If only. . .if only. . .if only.
The point is that we are not prepared for such an attack now. So it’s easy for me to think, as I drive from one fly speck town in Oklahoma to another-what would I do if I were stranded in one of these damned places? Or would it be a good thing? I was in a tiny town next to the Arkansas River yesterday, would I be able to catch fish there? There are a lot of deer around, but there are also a lot of hunters. So I am guessing that the local rednecks would see me out of town before they let me build a camp and go all Grizzly Adams. Not that I know anything about building a camp or cleaning deer. And what about The Wife back home in the big city? Could I even get back there? And what would I find if I did?
So One Second After takes the days after Katrina as an example and turns the entire country into the Super Dome. No clean water, no food, inadequate sewage and garbage control, people dying, people waiting for someone to rescue them, people killing each other over scraps. Our heroes talk about how lucky they are to be up in the mountains, where they have a defendable position. A couple of ex-military men take control of the moral and defense issues, which I found a bit funny. Military morals has always struck me like military intelligence, a bit of an oxymoron.
Almost from the first day the two military guys talk about defense and bottlenecks and in short order have turned the students of a local college into snipers and infantry. Of course, the one thing you need to survive a siege is food-which is another thing the tiny college town doesn’t have. They are soon wishing they were in the Corn Belt or the Beef Belt or at least had a hog farm somewhere near by. They are glad, though, that they are not in a Big City-there are people in a Big City and people are evil.
There is talk about Mother Earth News and picking mushrooms and following in the footsteps of Euell Gibbons. They plant all the seeds they can find, but there is not enough food for the 13,000, make that 10,000, make that 6,000 people starving to death. People eat their dogs and then start to eat their neighbors. In short order a mob of cannibals is at the gates and this means war.
There is a kind of countdown-Day 1, Day 8, Day 45, Day 60. The story is grim and only gets grimmer. How do you feed 10,000 people? How long if we eat all the cows, hogs, horses, dogs, squirrels, possums, raccoons, and rats? How long before we run out of mushrooms, nuts, and berries? What happens when winter comes?
Survivor lasts for 39 days, anyone left till the end is usually pretty damned thin. Elisabeth Hasselbeck from The View was willing to get naked for a cracker with peanut butter well before the end of her run on Survivor. And it’s standard news coverage to go to Wal-Mart when a Hurricane warning sounds and take footage of the empty shelves. But I still have to wonder, would cannibalism be the obvious choice after only two months without cars and electricity?
Our story doesn’t concern itself with people living in ranching or farming country. Doesn’t mention the people who work at the Supermarket Distribution centers surround by ton upon ton of food and supplies of every description. Doesn’t mention fishing boats-still floating even if they do have solid state ignitions-who could either feed themselves or flee to some other country seeking asylum. The assumption is that common decency will instantly vanish and everyone will become a ravaging mob overnight bent on eating each other’s children.
Hunger does strange things to people, most of us get a bit edgy if we miss lunch, so what happens when we all miss breakfast and lunch for two months? It’s hard for me to think about large numbers of people fighting for the same resources. Carp and Catfish and Bass-how long before they would all be pulled out of a local lake? How long would a hard salami stay good? How do you learn how to make salami yourself? Where would you get the ingredients? And so and so forth.
I listened to the audio book, which was pretty good except that the reader, Joe Barrett, sounded like he was reading a script for The Prairie Home Companion’s Catchup Advisory Board. So that I kept expecting him to say, after the latest horror, We Just Needed Some Catchup-because it has natural mellowing agents.
It’s a sad and horrifying tale and, like the nuclear scare stories, it seems a little over the top. It does make me want to buy a few fifty pound bags of flour and rice and a couple of dozen cases of Spam. And maybe some Twinkies, those things never go bad, do they?
