The Forgiven The Fallen The Forsaken

by S. M. Armstrong

  The Governor said, “The General and I have been talking. I would like you to accept a Senatorial appointment to represent the State of Arizona.”

  “Governor, I really don’t have the time to play politician. Thank you, but no.”

  “That’s what he said you would say. Arizona needs a senator and it will give you the legitimacy you need to eliminate certain obstacles. And I would worry about anyone who would want the job. I need you to agree to accept the position now.”

  “You understand that rebuilding efforts come first, no matter what.”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way. Someone give me a Bible to swear him in before he changes his mind.”

  The swearing in was done in the lobby outside of the conference room with a couple of hundred people in attendance. Jim was relieved to have Susan there. This entire thing was insane and a distraction, but it was good to see her.

  After the brief ceremony, Jim was stunned by the loud cheering. He took the microphone and thanked the gathering, “I’m a little surprised at becoming a senator, but I will do everything in my power for the people of Arizona and of the United States. Okay, folks. Let’s get back to work.”

  No one was moving. He looked over to see Rob and the governor grinning like Cheshire cats. Something wasn’t right.

  Al walked over to Jim and said quietly, “Sir, Washington was hit with a nuclear weapon at the start of this mess. We have not been able to find any congressmen or senators who survived. You are now the President Pro Tempore of the United States Senate.”

  “What?!”

  “Exactly, sir.”

  Rob walked over as well. “We have another ceremony to complete, Senator Ambrose. You may recognize Justice Hart from the Supreme Court. He was out of Washington that day.”

  The Justice walked up shook Jim’s hand, and said, “General Whitman’s kept me up on your progress here. I think you’re the right man. Do what you have to do to get the country running again and the constitution back in force.”

  The ceremony was short. Jim spoke a few words then insisted that everyone get to work on their assigned tasks. He looked over to see George grinning from ear to ear. That's when it dawned on Jim that he had really just become the president. When George walked over to shake his hand, Jim said, "I bet you didn't see that one coming.

  George was beaming. He said, "I think we can change some things, sir."

  "I believe we can, George."

  Justice Hart asked for a few minutes of his time. They went back to the conference room.

  “President Ambrose, you have the power to appoint temporary justices to the Supreme Court to serve until the Senate can confirm permanent members. General Whitman’s staff and I have prepared a list that I would like you to consider.”

  Jim reviewed the dossiers for the next two hours. He was bothered that six of the justices were from the military, but told Al to prepare the paperwork for him to sign. The new justices would be sworn in the next day.

  JUNE 13th

  Samantha talked Jim into naming her his official Presidential Photographer and was running around taking pictures of everyone all the time. "Same thing, different title," Susan had said to Jim about it.

  Al had Samantha release a number of pictures from the past few months and soon Jim's story and face were all over what was passing as the internet.

  PHOENIX AREA

  JUNE 14th,

  Luke and Jamie had taken one of first raised sleeper semis to be repaired in Phoenix and were part of the convoys running loads of water and produce into Phoenix from outlying areas and taking working electronics, generators, and fuel back out to where needed. Helen had given them a crash course in driving big rigs and told Luke to say he was sixteen if anyone asked. Matt, Ricky, Deepak, and Zach were also driving in the convoys, but more than half the trucks were driven by Hopi and Navajo drivers.

  By now it was clear to everyone that Luke and Jamie were a couple, and no one had any qualms about it. Today they were running a load of and supplies and two busloads of the forsaken out to farms in Maricopa. It wasn’t far and should provide some crops within a few weeks if they were lucky. The key was irrigation, and Deepak would be staying to guide work on the pumps to get irrigation working again.

  Tomorrow they would be driving in to Las Vegas. Jim had ordered troops from Nellis Air Force Base to secure Hoover Dam. With a little luck, Las Vegas would have power restored in a few days.

  “I still can’t believe your uncle is the president," said Jamie. "That’s a trip.”

  “I don’t think he’s too crazy about the idea.”

  “Still, I think it is pretty cool.”

  “And now we’re truck drivers.”

  “Yeah, and it’s the single most important job in the country. And, by the way, could I see your license? And why aren’t you in school?”

  Luke said, “OKAY, I’m not complaining!”

  They were soon at their destination. It was fortunate to have a few of the farmers still living on their properties to teach and direct the efforts of the volunteers. They dropped off and helped unload their cargo and were soon heading back into Phoenix with an empty rig.

  FLAGSTAFF, ARIZONA

  JUNE 15th

  Julie had volunteered to stay at the village and keep food production running. Helen was back this evening but would have to fly out in the morning. They enjoyed a bottle of wine as they sat under the brilliant night sky.

  Julie asked her, “How’s Uncle Jim holding up?”

  “Like an old pro. Nothing seems to rattle the guy. I’ve never seen anything like it. Susan’s not too crazy about the First Lady title, though.”

  Julie laughed, “No, I bet she’s not.”

  “I think Jim figures he’s in a patsy role, and he’s not about to be a patsy without a real fight. I’m betting he makes it.”

  Julie agreed, “I don’t see my uncle taking anything sitting down.”

  “He intends to make Las Vegas the capitol.”

  “What?!”

  Helen laughed and said, “You need electricity and lots of rooms. It’s a good choice.”

  “I know, but Vegas?”

  “Yes, the idea takes some getting used to.

  “There haven’t been any more cases of the flu, but we’re still using the forgiven as our front line. You should see them. You’d think they were missionaries. It’s amazing to watch. Jim has them delivering food, phones, radios, satellite dishes, and televisions.”

  “There’s TV now, too?”

  “The Air Force has been launching satellites from Vandenberg, and there are even a couple of private companies launching the commercial satellites that were on their schedule before the virus hit. Things are really moving along.

  “I brought a dish for us to set up. You like Elvis movies and concerts?”

  “Oh, no! They let Manny in on the programming!”

  “It was his price for taking the Chief of Communications job.”

  Julie said, in her best impersonation of a Filipino Elvis, “Thank you, Thank you very much.”

  They laughed, and after a moment, Helen said, “I’m sorry I can’t stick around up here, but I’m flying all the time. I don’t know when things will settle down.”

  Julie answered, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll cut back to a skeleton crew up here once the real farms are producing better, plus I’ll be running refrigerated loads down to Phoenix every so often. I do miss you, though.”

  Helen looked at her and said, “You know, who would have thought that our time here at the village would disappear so fast?”

  “Yeah, but you can’t be indispensible sitting up here.”

  Helen looked her in the eyes and said, "You're always indispensible."

  They sat silently enjoying the night sky, wondering what the next few weeks would bring.

  PHOENIX, ARIZONA

  JUNE 16th

  Jim watched from one of the hangars as the 747 flew in low and landed on one of the Nellis Air Force Base
runways. I wonder how the hell they kept that working. Must have kept it in a hardened bunker, he thought. Or maybe Europe didn’t get hit with any nukes or EMP. Now that’s an interesting thought.

  The pilots taxied the plane to the hangar and a stair truck was dispatched to the main doors. General Whitman was the first off the plane, followed by his staff, then a number of civilian adults and children.

  They were still unloading when Whitman walked up to Jim and saluted. Jim awkwardly saluted back and said, “Welcome home, General.”

  Whitman shook his hand and said, “Please, sir, call me Paul when it’s just us. This is my wife, Emiko.”

  The plump Japanese American woman grabbed Jim in a tight embrace and said, “Thank you for taking such good care of our daughter.”

  Jim had to laugh. “Really, I think it might have been more of the other way around, Emiko. You have an amazing daughter. Welcome back to the States.” She just hugged him tighter before letting go and allowing herself to be led away to temporary quarters.

  After she left, Jim and Whitman walked into an office that had been prepared for the occasion. They sat in a couple of office chairs around a metal table, and Jim said, “Okay, don’t think for a second that I’m buying your bullshit. That was some of the most masterful manipulation I’ve ever seen, so I’m not about to pretend that you don’t have a contingency plan. Either you need a patsy, in which case I’m going to turn your world on its head, or you needed me in place for a decision that you knew I would decide your way. So talk.”

  “Okay, Mr. President, I’ll skip to the point.”

  “First off, cut the Mr. President shit when we’re alone. You know damn well that you’re the one who put me here.”

  “Okay, Jim. You know that there is a group of politicians, corporate leaders, and billionaires that got early word of the crisis and dug in with a plan to come out later and be royalty rather than merely wealthy. They did everything they could to prevent effective measures that would have made us less vulnerable to the disease. Bluntly stated, they would rather rule absolutely over a population of a few million serfs than live as equals among a population of a couple hundred million survivors.

  "Unfortunately, they’ve recruited throughout the ranks of the military, too. For now, they are staying out of sight because they don’t know the vaccine is available yet, and that’s the only thing they are waiting for before they come out and clean our clocks.

  “Once they come out of hiding, the fight will be on their terms. You can count on a war over control of the military, and it only gets worse from there.”

  Jim rubbed his chin. “So it’s civil war if we don’t eliminate them and an unprovoked first strike if we do? Why didn’t you just take them out?”

  “There were difficulties with me giving that order from Europe. I don’t believe that it would have been carried out.”

  “You’re saying that the military is significantly infiltrated.”

  “That's right, sir.”

  “So what is your plan?”

  “We’ve identified the twelve major and thirty-three minor sites where they have dug in. I have loyal people positioned to eliminate all of them.”

  “No nukes, right?”

  “We don’t need them, sir.”

  “I don’t like this.”

  “Neither do I, Mr. President.”

  “I’d like to see some evidence before I give orders to execute them.”

  Whitman opened his briefcase and started handing over documents and satellite photos. After the third document, Jim asked, “They assassinated the Vice President?!”

  “I can assure you that you are number one on their hit list now, Mr. President,” Whitman said softly, “and I am number two. This is why I stayed in Europe for so long.”

  After two more hours of reading, Jim said, “I’m satisfied. Limit collateral damage if you can. Do it right. And I want it kept extremely secret. No leaks afterward. It can be one of those things that historians can argue about after we’re all dead.”

  “I think that’s wise, sir.”

  “And by the way, next time I see you, you’d better have that fifth star on your uniform.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Whitman used his own pilots to launch the mission and, in the early hours of the next morning, twelve recently built small cities and shelters were completely destroyed within seconds of each other. Bombs, missiles, and bunker busters proved effective at wiping away the best laid plans of those who would be kings.

  By the time Jim woke the next morning, it was to world in which the worst of his enemies were buried under tons of earth or burned to ash before they had even realized the war they were savoring was already over.

  CHEYENNE, WYOMING

  JUNE 17th.

  Nicholas Larson was furious. The Organization had just lost three quarters of its assets overnight. They were down to two bases and a few caches and small communities here and there. Had he opted to stay on the Idaho base instead of at his own home, he would be dead now.

  Of the eight leaders, he and those idiots Simmons and Walker were the only ones who survived. The future now looked very bleak.

  The immediate problem was General Whitman. The man had gotten wind of the organization and, clearly, had done his homework. The Organization's ranking military officer, General Evans, had died in a helicopter crash just before the outbreak. Larson was sure that Whitman had something to do with that. He's not going to stop, thought Larson. Whitman had also figured out that they were waiting for the vaccine to be completed to set their launch day. He had obviously hijacked that process, while feeding everyone bogus information about the vaccine not yet existing.

  The more serious problem was that they no longer had the resources to create a completely new form of government. Now he would have to claw his way to the top of whatever would be left of the old. He now knew his foresight in saving Wyoming's governor and as many of the state's people as possible would actually pay off. I will get my House seat and my revenge. You're a dead man, Jim Ambrose.

  He called in some of his men and took a drive to meet Governor Martin.

  LAS VEGS, NEVADA

  JUNE 18th

  Jim met with Rob, Al, and General Whitman. "We need the internet back up and running. We can't manufacture computers here, yet, but I understand that Mexico was not affected by EMP and they have factories to manufacture the computers, televisions, satellite dishes, and radios that we quit making a couple of decades ago. I need to have those factories pumping out products."

  "We can do that," said Al, "but the days of Mexico supplementing our lifestyles with ultra cheap labor are over. If we treat them that way, we'll never have enough troops to make it work."

  "So we pay them more," said Rob.

  Jim looked at the map on the wall. He stood and walked over to it. The others stopped and waited for him to speak.

  "Here's what I'm thinking," said Jim, drawing a big circle on the map with his finger. "We go all in. We take Mexico, Cuba, and all of Central America and make it the New Territories. We take out all opposition and use Helen's forgiven, fallen, forsaken model to get the people up and running. We vaccinate those who join us and we execute those who are destructive to their own people.

  "Once things are subdued, we bring all of it in as new states, or at least as much of it as will go for it."

  Whitman said, "You sure don't think small. What's the advantage?"

  "I need their manufacturing capability and we need crops grown in a climate that doesn't require massive irrigation. For sustainability, we have to have them."

  "Here in the states, I need a free press up and running as soon as possible. It can start with local radio, internet newspapers, then satellite radio and TV, even though we'll have to set up the initial stations ourselves. NPR and PBS might have to be the initial model until we get commercial stations up and running. Maybe we can talk Samantha into starting an online newspaper."

  "Shouldn't we be using the milita
ry or our own people?" asked Al.

  "No, Al. The military is the one group that has been well protected from the flu. By the time all is said and done, they will be almost four percent of the remaining population," said Jim, pausing to let that fact sink in.

  "Realize that we're coming out of this as the only nation in the world with our military almost completely intact. Our only remaining enemies have been internal, and I can't fully trust my own armed forces yet. It wouldn't break my heart to have a lot of the military doing humanitarian and other work overseas until well after our government is stable.

  "The other component to this is that the American people have to be functional. It's crucial that they have to be the ones to do the work to rebuild. We use the military to keep control and to help with logistics, but the people themselves are going to put in the elbow grease and ingenuity or it's not going to be done.

  "So, what I'm thinking for the military is that we start in friendlier areas of the New Territories and go in with massive humanitarian missions and vaccination programs while we hunt and destroy the cartels. We'll set the people up to help free themselves of the corruption and crime that have been keeping them down for so long. At the end of the day, the combat mission turns into a humanitarian mission that eventually turns into annexation. We need all the people we can get and most of them want to be Americans anyway."

  "You're full of surprises," said Rob.

  Whitman said, "But he's right. It makes a lot of sense. Al, can you take point on this one?"

  "I'll have to shift some things around, but yes, I should be able to go to work on it."

  "I want to start as soon as we have the southern states and coasts under control," said Jim. I don't want to give the conspiracy folks any time that I don't have to. Let's get to work on the planning."

  LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

  JUNE 20th

  Julie and Helen flew four forgiven into Las Vegas in a twin engine Cessna T303 that had been abandoned at the Phoenix airport. It was a beautiful aircraft and had been very well maintained. Julie made up her mind that, unless the actual owners showed up for it, she was keeping it. In less than two hours, they made the trip from Sky Harbor to McCarran in Las Vegas.