Read One Year After: A Novel for Free Online

to bald—new tires for such a car were of course impossible to find—so for safety, they kept it at a stately thirty-five miles per hour.
    The road had always been a favorite of his. A long, sloping climb a couple of miles west of the entry ramp at Exit 64 revealed a magnificent view of the Mount Mitchell range to his right, the highest mountains east of the Rockies at over 6,600 feet. At this time of year, the lower slopes were a lush green, but the peaks even in mid-May could still be dusted with snow, which was indeed the case this morning. The lower range of mountains to the left of the highway, rising up only four thousand feet, was awash with the spring coloration of pale brilliant green.
    The interstate was beginning to show the effects of two years without maintenance other than work crews pushing the hundreds of abandoned cars aside. The first year, the grass had not been cut, and now in the second year, spring saplings were beginning to sprout along the shoulders.
    Houses out along the fringe of town had long been abandoned, with folks moving into vacated homes in town for security. Many of the abandoned homes had broken windows, vines creeping up along the outside walls, overgrown walkways, and abandoned cars with flattened tires beginning to rust in driveways. In one sense, it could be a depressing sight, but in another way, John saw it as nature reclaiming the lushness of this land, working to erase some of the monuments of man.
    The flat, rich farmland flanked the road; nearly all of it was under cultivation. Precious gas was rationed out for the tractors, and that had been a deeply troubling concern for John and the town council. Gasoline might hold out for another two years or so, if rationed wisely and treated to maintain its volatility, but then what? He still harbored fantasies of trying to build steam-powered tractors, machines he had always been fascinated with as a historian.
    Several such tractors had actually been located in the barns of remote farms, rusted solid and forgotten. It was hoped that parts from the machines might be cobbled together by the time of autumn harvest into one tractor that could actually run on wood rather than gasoline. Again, his wish was that the community had more old-fashioned machinists and tool and die makers who could build such things from scratch.
    They drove past several well-guarded pastures along the highway, where the few precious horses that had not been killed for food in the first year were kept. He caught sight of a newborn colt frolicking about, and he smiled at the sight. It was not just the beauty of new life; it might be their main source of energy for farming in a few more years if the technological infrastructure of their world—at least to an early- to mid-twentieth-century level—was not restored.
    The scent of an apple orchard wafted through the car, and he breathed deeply. The last of the petals of spring were still falling and swirling about on the late-morning breeze.
    It had been a beautiful land when he had arrived there over a decade earlier, and it still was. In spite of human folly, the land was breathtakingly beautiful, whether cloaked in the glory of spring or covered with the mantle of winter snows. He had to keep reminding himself to look past the crisis, the terror and fear, that today was a good day to be alive up in the mountains of western North Carolina.
    Ahead was the barrier his community had set up just beyond the Exit 59 turnoff. The sight of it refocused him on the reason for a noonday drive along an empty interstate highway.
    He had called the new federal administrator in Asheville, Dale Fredericks, as he had promised Ernie and the gathering in front of the post office, and when told that the administrator was busy but could see him later in the week, John had offered a few choice words to the unidentified assistant and said he would arrive at noon and hung up. The game of bureaucrats, a game he knew well from his time serving