Times of Tribulation: Christian End Times Thriller (The End Times Saga, #7)

by Cliff Ball

  Times of Tribulation: Christian End Times Thriller

  The End Times Saga, Volume 7

  Cliff Ball

  Published by Cliff Ball Books, 2014.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  TIMES OF TRIBULATION: CHRISTIAN END TIMES THRILLER

  First edition. October 9, 2014.

  Copyright © 2014 Cliff Ball.

  ISBN: 978-1498902694

  Written by Cliff Ball.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Where to find Cliff online

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  The United States had finally collapsed, a vote for Texas independence was rumored to be happening in a short time, and for Pete Robertson it seemed like it should’ve happened decades ago. He and his family were Preppers and had moved near Big Bend from Dallas-Fort Worth thirty-five years earlier while the threat of Y2K was hanging over everyone’s heads. The powers-that-be had thrown everyone into a panic when they claimed a massive computer programming error would shut down all computers when the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2000, which would, they said, end civilization as everyone knew it. Pete had been thinking about going off the grid anyway, so he was able to convince his wife they should move away from DFW so they could live the way they wanted, away from prying eyes.

  Even though he used Y2K as an excuse to leave the big city in case of civilization’s collapse, Pete’s other reasons included the fact that his fellow Americans seemed to be getting dumber and dumber each year, more than likely because the American education system was being dumbed down. He reasoned that when the U.S. finally did collapse, the dumber than dirt city people would panic and burn the cities down since a large majority of them would’ve never thought to go outside the city limits in the first place to find food to eat. Pete figured most of them wouldn’t know a chicken, cow, or pig if they saw one, nor would they have known how to kill one of the animals correctly so they could eat. Pete thought that some people were just too dumb to live.

  His other reason included the fact that the U.S. government, and to some extent, the state, county, and city governments were getting too tyrannical to tolerate, at least from his point of view. When the 9/11 terrorist attacks happened, he and his wife were more than happy with their decision to leave the big city behind, because the federal and state governments looked like they were beginning to ramp up their efforts to watch everyone. The final nail in the coffin seemed to be when the Patriot Act was passed, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) were created. After that, the federal government began monitoring all travel across the U.S., attempted to monitor all internet usage, and recorded almost all cell phone calls. Along with other forces at work, some of which the Robertson’s knew nothing about, it had only taken a little over thirty years after 9/11 for the U.S. to collapse, even though some of those outside forces had tried to bring the United States down much earlier, but they’d found it wasn’t easy.

  Even though he was only thirty years old at the time, Pete was able to afford to uproot his family and go off the grid because he’d invested heavily in traditional companies, like Coca-Cola, along with new dot-coms and companies that were internet related, shortly before many of the dot-coms failed. When he finally decided to leave the city and go to the relative safety of rural Texas, Pete withdrew the money he’d gained from investing, which came close to making him a millionaire multiple times over. A few months after he’d withdrawn his money, the dot-com bubble burst and many companies he’d invested in failed, which had made many who had invested instantly poor, but not Pete.

  The powers-that-be and their sycophants usually derided the do it yourself types, which included the Preppers, by saying they were uneducated, racist, right wing, white Christians, even though most of them were educated, not in the least racist, a few were Christian, and their only desire was that they wanted to be left alone. They had no desire to stuff their beliefs down people’s throats. The Robertson’s were a black family who happened to be conservative, but they had no religious affiliation. Pete had graduated from the University of Texas and worked as an investment banker before deciding to go off the grid. His wife had also gone to UT and worked as a nurse before they left for the Big Bend. Pete’s job made him see how volatile the Stock Market was, and he thought that if one were to pay attention, they could see that someone somewhere was manipulating the stocks to go higher and higher before the Stock Market finally crashed. This was why he pulled all of his stocks and he realized how lucky he was when some of the ones he’d invested in failed.

  Since they moved to the Big Bend region, all Pete had originally wanted to do was have his family grow their own food, and have all the supplies they could ever need in case of civilization’s actual collapse, so they wouldn’t starve to death. While working to make sure his family was fed and safe, he began hearing about the Doomsday Prepper movement, which began to grow ever larger as the government began to be more oppressive. Many of these Preppers had storage houses full of food and were as heavily armed as some small countries, because some of them were preparing to defend themselves when and if the government eventually sent their forces after them or for an eventual world war. Pete was wary about being almost as well armed as the Texas State Guard, but he knew he would have to make sure he was prepared for a possible invasion of his land by the feds. He really didn’t want to be another Waco or become one of the numerous examples of the Bureau of Land Management forcefully taking land away from the citizens.

  Since the Robertson’s weren’t Christians, they didn’t need to worry about the government attacking them. If Pete had been asked if he was a Christian, he would’ve said he was - even though he had never been to church, had never read a Bible, had never watched a sermon on television, and had never asked Jesus to save him from his sins. He and his wife thought they were because they assumed the United States was a Christian nation, so they reasoned that it made them Christians too. They had no idea Michael Evans and the United States government considered Christians to be the enemy.

  The last time Pete and his family went to the city for more supplies was in 2015. He’d wanted to buy more weapons and ammo, so they traveled to San Antonio to buy some more. As they were driving, Pete was dismayed with the inept driving skills of those around him. Hardly anyone used their turn signals, or seemed to pay attention to traffic signs, to the traffic lights, or even to what lane they were in as one crazy driver after another drove across three lanes of traffic to get off the highway, almost causing many a wreck as the drivers were trying to exit. The lack of judgment from people who drove vehicles that weighed thousands of pounds was a scary thought since so many didn’t seem to have the proper mental tools to drive properly.

  “I’m so glad we left the city, Pete. All those people turning out in front of us without stopping at stop signs really
made me nervous. I really didn’t want us to get into a wreck,” Janet, his wife, told him when they finally made it home two days later.

  “Me too. I don’t know what’s happened in the last fifteen years, but it seems like everyone in the city has taken leave of their senses and have forgotten how to drive. It would drive me nuts if I had to drive to work every day with those kinds of people surrounding me. You know what I think I’ll do now?”

  “What’s that, Dear?”

  “As much as I don’t like using the internet nowadays, since the government is watching everything we’re doing, I think I’m going to start ordering everything we need, like our weapons, through online stores. It’ll save us time and gas, and we won’t have to put up with those lunatic drivers.”

  “If you think that’s what you need to do, then I won’t object.” replied Janet.

  Even though Pete was wary of using the World Wide Web, he knew a large majority of the Preppers through message boards on the internet, before the United States government joined with the United Nations in limiting internet access to such activities. To circumvent the limited communications, Pete and the others began communicating via shortwave ham radio because the government paid attention to digital communications and not something so old-fashioned. Not once were the Preppers worried about the NSA hacking their communications.

  Many hardcore Preppers in Texas heard about the Robertson family in Big Bend and began migrating there, hoping to join forces with him. To prevent having a community that was so large that he couldn’t control who came, Pete conducted background checks so he’d only have the most law abiding citizens surrounding him, instead of the troublemakers that liked to poke a finger in the eyes of the authorities. The state of Texas ignored his community as long as they followed the law, while the federal government had bigger fish to fry.

  The United States’ collapse accelerated when the President of the United States in the mid-2020’s began allowing illegal aliens to cross the border with no consequences. Even though the Big Bend region also went into Mexico, Pete made sure the small area he controlled remained free of the smugglers, known as coyotes, and Mexican drug cartels that brought the illegals across the U.S. border. Everyone, including the U.S. Border Patrol and Texas Department of Public Safety, knew to stay out of the Robertson’s and the Preppers way, since the group maintained a small portion of the border and were able to do what the federal and state government couldn’t do without some major whining from half of the political body in Washington and Austin. Still, Robertson and his group could only do so much, since the small trickle of illegal’s coming across the U.S. border began coming in torrents in 2026.

  Somehow, all of Central America had gotten the idea that the U.S. was going to let everyone come to the country and automatically become citizens since the federal government looked like it was going to give amnesty to everyone, so all sorts of people began streaming across Mexico to reach the United States. While the portion of the border that the Robertson Preppers controlled was never breached, other places had thousands of people streaming across every week, and in some areas, nearly every day. The DHS and FEMA began housing the people on military bases in Texas and in some hastily built shelters. Many illegals were infected with antibiotic resistant viruses and diseases, some of which had been wiped out in the U.S. for many years, but the powers-that-be and the media insisted that nothing bad would happen. Since so many children were supposedly by themselves, mayors across the country began offering to house them in their cities, which the federal government agreed to.

  The longtime mayor of Dallas, Wayne Davis, Dallas County Judge Clint Price, and mega church preacher Kevin Josten told the federal government they would take in the illegal immigrants, who they took to calling “refugees,” mostly because that’s what the U.N. insisted on calling the illegal’s. The two politicians dismissed the claim that the children had drug resistant diseases, saying that it was the other side in American politics that were fear mongering. Then they pulled out the “What Would Jesus Do” card, even though neither man believed in Jesus, because it effectively shut down the criticisms.

  Within two weeks of the children being housed, which was in the poorer parts of the city, their caretakers came down with virulent forms of tuberculosis, scabies, and cholera, to name a couple among a dozen different diseases and viruses that the children were infected with when they were sent to Dallas. The diseases spread like wildfire amongst the population who hadn’t taken a vaccination for any of these, killing off whole neighborhoods in less than a month. Dallas’ population fell by half, while the surrounding cities tried to maintain a quarantine of Dallas. The quarantine was effective at first, but the viruses spread anyway across Texas, affecting mostly poor urban areas, causing the major cities to have half of their populations die off before anything could be done to stop the problem. When the problem finally began petering out, Texas population had been reduced by half – from twenty million to ten million.

  Davis, Price, and Josten were immune to the fallout from their decision, since the neighborhoods they lived in were far from the poorest parts of Dallas where the children had been housed and most of the low-information voters who voted for Davis and Price had died. So, nobody in Dallas criticized the three for bringing the diseases into the city, nor did they punish the two politicians when it came to election time. The state legislature and the Governor of Texas blamed them for the lack of common sense they displayed, but did nothing to the two politicians. Josten also escaped criticism for his role, since so many thought he could do no wrong, and because he was such a popular preacher all over the world. Instead, the leaders of Texas began grumbling about the federal government starting this mess and started floating the idea amongst the voters about seceding from the United States. If anyone had asked Pete, he would’ve supported secession, but only as long as Texas was more about freedom for the people rather than control of the people.

  The chance for Texas to secede came eight years later when President David Collins, who had declared a dictatorship after the previous election showed that he lost by a large margin, effectively became the last President of the United States when he died in office from a supposed stroke. Michael Evans took Collins’ place, even though he wasn’t in the order of succession or even a politician. Within a week of the death of the President, the Texas legislature and the governor offered up an amendment for the voters on whether Texas should leave the Union. The argument was that the federal government had failed, which would cause the whole country to collapse, so the state government didn’t want Texas to fail too. The state had plenty of energy and food producers, and its economy was as large as some countries, which would enable the state or businesses to buy whatever they needed without interference from Washington.

  The vote was set for March, just in time for Texas Independence Day, and it would be the first time in a long time that Pete and Janet looked forward to voting. Most of the time, they skipped voting, especially in national elections, because they refused to vote for the lesser of two evils, and usually the Conservative Party fielded a very weak candidate. The Robertson’s usually voted in local elections, since the candidates they voted for usually won.

  “What do you think, Pete, should we vote for Texas to leave the United States? I’m leaning towards a yes vote.” asked Janet.

  “I think we should. If we don’t, Texas’ economy will be dragged down with the American economy when it finally hits bottom, even though we don’t really participate in it. If Texas were to go on its own, I’d be more comfortable with that government, since we the people have to vote on everything. I’m wondering if Governor Pierson will run as the President or if she’ll transition from being Governor to being President, and then call for an election to vote for President of Texas. I guess we’ll have to see.”

  Even though a majority of the state’s population was already solidly for secession, Governor Pierson went on television and her press conference was also streamed live online
to make the case, “Ladies and Gentlemen, I come to you today because we need to make the decision to leave the failing union of states known as the United States of America.

  “Nearly two hundred years ago, the Republic of Texas ceased to exist because they joined the United States for a variety of reasons, but now, those reasons do not apply. With the federal government’s all but official collapse, it has started dragging everyone down along with it. Some states are seeing cities fall, even burning to the ground in some cases, their people are starving, and some even have a United Nations military presence in the larger cities. So far, with the exception of a plague that happened to our state a few years ago, none of that’s happened here, and I hope to God it never will.

  “We have the means to go our own way with hardly any serious effects to our economy or our way of life. The legislature and I are committed to your Constitutional rights that the American founding fathers envisioned and we will begin dismantling the federal government’s heavy hand as we go along. We can only make our new Republic strong with your help, so please vote on this important issue, even if you completely disagree with it. Thank you for listening and may God bless Texas.”

  Two months later, the vote for secession passed with eighty-five percent of the vote, with nearly every eligible voter having exercised their right to vote. There was not a peep from Washington as Michael Evans could’ve cared less, since his goal for the United States falling apart had succeeded.

  Pete was thrilled with the overwhelming of the voters to secede. He told everyone in his community, “Now, we’ll just have to see how this all shakes out and if it bodes well for all of us. I hope Pierson and her successors are really for liberty and not just more of the same tyrannical control freaks that we’ve had for the past thirty plus years. In the meantime, we’ll continue doing what we’ve always done.”