The Hasten the Day Trilogy

by Billy Roper

  He was fascinated by the number of fires that seemed to be sending up smoke from all over the city. There was a barricade of traffic cones and two Army Humvees parked at the Ohio side of the bridge, but nobody was there to stop him, so he eased around them and kept going. The lack of other cars on the road was kind of unnerving. It was worse that nobody had plowed the streets in days, from the looks of things. Passing one of his favorite spots, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, he began to think about where he could find some good food. Something better than the prepackaged corporate G.M.O. crap they sold in all of the grocery stores in Covington. He refused to shop there. It was worth it to drive a little further, into the city, for healthy produce. Even if he did have to make a few stops to get what he liked.

  During an impromptu race riot on the way home from an ill-timed run to the Whole Foods store in south Cincinnati to buy up the last of their fresh kale, Tommy took a wrong turn. First the store wouldn’t take his credit card, and now this! When he saw a large group of black men marching in front of him in the street, blocking his way, he was confused. Tommy looked admiringly at the rear ends of some of the younger black men, boys really, closest to the front of his Prius. They couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years old, but they looked so big. Those were just the kind he liked. Tommy momentarily daydreamed about the many summer days he had spent at the park, offering cold soft drinks and bottles of water to boys just like the ones in front of him. A few of them had taken the bait, even…Then he saw that several of them were carrying signs saying “Stop Racism!” and “Kill Whitey!”, so Tommy rapidly honked his little Prius car horn behind them, in support.

  That got Tommy pulled out of his Prius and given a beatdown thrown his way by several blacks. They surrounded him, leaping in and hitting him, then jumping back, one after another, in a circle. He went down, pleading, and a brick hit him in the face, then another. Tommy collapsed, and was swarmed and curb stomped. The whole time he was curled up into a fetal position, wearing a “Change” t- shirt, and whimpering, trying to explain to his attackers that he’d voted for Obama, twice, and had marched with Jesse Jackson. Tommy then got explained to that he “be de white devil and must now pay", and got his jaw broken, along with some other body parts which he couldn’t feel any more, and some he didn’t need to use, anyway.

  In the distance, he faintly heard gunshots, once or twice. He was fading in and out of awareness. After a few semi-conscious hours, a White Nationalist skinhead crew helping take back their city block by block came across Tommy's broken and sodomized body. At first the Buckeye Wrecking Krew Skins though he was another corpse, but Tommy moved his arm a bit at the sound of the engine coming closer. He half rolled over, still clinging to life next to his looted and burnt car, with the bumper stickers still legible, by some miracle. They pulled their borrowed National Guard truck over beside the wreckage, human and machine, and two of them hopped out, armed to the teeth. Tommy was battered and bruised (still wearing his blood-stained Obama shirt). He blearily saw the White good Samaritans, and called out for water, food, and help. Their bomber jackets and straight-laced Docs meant nothing to him. He then started to explain deliriously through broken teeth who he was and that he could understand the black’s anger because of institutional racism. Four centuries of slavery and oppression were to blame. It was the poverty…Tommy asked the leader of the skinhead crew to help him up, so he could go find the black men who had felt intimidated by his White privilege. He wanted to give them hugs and say he was sorry and that he loved them…After hearing this, and seeing the Obama shirt and bumper stickers, one of the skinheads sneered "You’re way too far gone. I know only one way to help you". He inserted a .45 caliber Glock into Tommy’s mouth and blew red and gray matter all over the bumper stickers. A little gray matter, at least. A little goes a long way. With the right projectile behind it.

  The six young White men then left, feeling good about the divine karma of the outcome, and commenting on how pieces of garbage like Tommy had enabled the situation they found themselves in. The Krew, as they called themselves, had been hardworking, hard partying hooligans and streetfighters before the collapse. They had continued to go to work every day for a month, once the bottom had fallen out. After the doors of the factory where they worked was chained and locked, they had begun looting Cincinnati, often in direct competition with black gangs, to feed themselves and their families. Before long they had taken over the job of guarding their neighborhood, and all of the White families in it. No police had shown themselves for days, and the power and then the water had failed. Things had gotten primitive, but they had made it. Pickings were getting slim for food and water, and they were debating trying to head south into Kentucky, when an Ohio National Guard helicopter appeared overhead, looking for survivors. The next day, they met up with some tired infantry and became local guides for them, as they swept the area. They had found some Whites left alive where they had hidden when the riots swept through their neighborhoods. Many more, they had found dead. Every White female whose body they found, from toddlers to grandmothers, had been brutally raped, before or after. The noise of the last riot on this street had attracted their attention, and they had begun working their way towards it, shooting down a few straggling protesters as they advanced block by block.

  The luck of finding Tommy made them all briefly philosophical, in fact, musing on how a lot of the current troubles could have been avoided if "Tommys" all around the country had gotten the help they needed decades ago. They debated whether sticking to euthanasia laws and not allowing the weak to breed would have helped. The discussion continued as they climbed back aboard their truck and eased down the street to continue their search for White survivors and refugees.

  A segregated U.S. Army armored column pushing north from Fort Knox smashed the Prius, and what was left of Tommy, into the ditch a week later. There was a lot of road kill laying around, during those days. Turkey vultures and other carrion eaters, of the four and two legged varieties, thrived.

  It Landed Foul Upon The Grass

  Private Luke Hanna woke to the ring of rounds on metal walls, followed by the crump of a small explosion. Confused shouts and questions from other bunks let him know he was not alone in wondering what was happening. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that some of the bunks were empty already. Camp LeJeune was under attack! No, wait, it was probably just another stupid drill, like they had been going through every few days since the State of Emergency had been declared. Out in the hall, somebody yelled “Marine! Stand down!” and was interrupted by another flurry of shots. He was the third man through the door to see what was going on. The first two were shot down before they cleared the entranceway. The nineteen year old from Florida tried to slow down and stop himself, but his bare feet slipped in blood on the buffed concrete floor, and he fell painfully onto his back, staring up at the ceiling. Madness raged all around him. Who was attacking? He wished he had his gun, or a pair of pants, he thought in embarrassment, as he lay there in his underwear in the hallway. Rolling sideways against the far wall, Hanna raised his head quickly to have a look around. Aside from the two men next to him, the hallway was now empty. One of them was not moving at all, and the other wouldn’t shut up screaming. Somewhere off ahead, boots pounded, then the base alarms started sounding.

  “Oh, just in time, great job”, he sarcastically whispered to himself. Testing his side by moving to see if anything was broken, he found that he seemed to be okay. Hanna gingerly got up and limped back across the space to the open door of the interior barracks. There were nine other dudes huddled against the back wall. They had pulled two racks of bunks across the room as a barricade. Playing defense? That just wouldn’t do. Even though he was just a private like the rest of them, they listened when he started getting dressed, and told them to do the same. Time was on his bad side. The wounded guy in the hallway had gone quiet, except for some soft sobs as two of the privates ventured out from behind their rack to try and render firs
t aid. It didn’t help. No, this was not a drill.

  Nobody had liked it much when their squads had been broken up and locked down in barracks. It was crazy not knowing what was going on. Maybe some kind of weird new Marine psychological test. If this was another team-building exercise, it had failed, badly, if they asked Luke. A few of the jarheads had been saying that it had something to do with the riots. Every man wearing green tried to ignore other colors, but they were there. They always were there. Some of the blacks and Latinos didn’t try as hard to pretend that those differences didn’t matter as the White Marines did. Had the riots come here? To Lejeune? To Jacksonville?

  It was surprising how hard it was to find anything to use as a weapon on an active U.S. Marine base.

  “Talk about the second amendment, even soldiers couldn’t be trusted with guns, huh?” he asked the lanky man beside him. Gowatney, his name read. While they crept in double ranks down the hall towards the offices where the firing continued, his companion cocked his head in the direction of the gunshots and gave Hanna a look that clearly meant “I guess they were right.” Outside, the school bells were ringing and klaxons were howling. As they rounded a corner, the group found the bodies of two uniformed and combat rigged black men, a Lance Corporal and a PFC, surrounded by a scattering of brass empties. It looked like they had been trying to get into the door in front of them, with no luck. Hanna had an idea.

  “Hey, Marine, the bad guys outside are down. You’re clear!” he shouted. After a moment, the bullet-riddled door of the supply closet opened, and a scared looking White M.P. came out, pistol first. Well, at least he was armed. That was an improvement. The M.P. took one of the dead guys’ M-4s, and handed the other one to him. He offered his pistol to Gowatney, who made a prissy face and asked for the M4 instead. “Fine, whatever, let’s just go!” the M.P. relented.

  Taking point with the dead black Lance Corporal’s carbine, Hanna led the small group forward. Now that three of them were armed, they could take names and kick…more firing erupted from just in front of them, suddenly. The other guys crouched down while Luke, the lanky dude with the other carbine, and the M.P. covered the hall ahead. Voices could be heard, cursing, then more individual shots. Off in the distance, heavy motors started up, and idled higher. The overhead sprinkler systems chose that moment to kick on, as the fire retardant protocol was initialized by automatic sensors. “Great, just what we need”, he groused, wet and cold and frightened. Everybody started griping and complaining. Time to find an exit.

  Outside , they headed “downtown” without discussing it, picking up three or four small groups of stragglers along the way. They all told the same tale: black and Latino marines had attacked them, in a surprise move, in the middle of the night. Many of them had been armed. Some had burst in the door and just started shooting. A couple had tossed hand grenades and ran. This must have been planned pretty well, Hanna thought, and for a while. After humping and bumping street by street, they located another group of surviving M.P.s holed up in the Dunkin Donuts next to the Commissary. They were exchanging fire, Call of Duty style, with a group of black enlisted across Birch Street, hunkered down in front of the Wendy’s. Other firefights were going on in every direction. An assault helicopter, probably called in from MCAS New River, hovered over the Field House, pumping heavy machine gun tracer rounds into the Chapel. It sounded like a Cobra/Viper. Smoke began to build. The sky looked like the Naval hospital was on fire, in the distant dark. They would need help there. They found more massacres going on as they went along. It looked like the blacks and the Latinos had turned on each other at some point. By the time they were halfway to the hospital, almost everyone was out of ammunition. Fortunately, the fighting seemed to have moved on when they staggered into the emergency room parking lot, exhausted.

  By dawn, a Staff Sergeant was the highest rank they had found alive. Just one platoon leader. It looked like all of the officers had been targeted for assassination as primary goal one. Some surviving brass might be hiding somewhere, but they couldn’t be found. “Leading from the rear”, Gowatney said, as they watched helicopters rising and leaving from the west. A mixed throng of military and civilians, in various states and stages of undress, milled in front of the burning hospital trying to figure out how to get out. Women and children cried while they walked in nervous circles, as the men looked on helplessly. Some tried to bluster and take command, but nobody listened. One family said they had tried to get out the main gate, only to find the way blocked by a traffic jam, and black enlisted men calmly walking down the road between the cars, shooting everyone White, one carload at the time. When the shooting began several men tried to rush them and fight back, and the witnesses had used the chance to escape on foot.

  “The golf course! They’re evacing us from the golf course!” somebody with a single stripe yelled up ahead. Like a herd of stampeding cattle, they had broken ranks and jogged up Brewster Blvd. to the sound of rotors. Ospreys were coming in like giant dragonflies to light and take in a swarm of dazed and wounded White marines who would rush each aircraft as soon as it touched down. Luke tried to get them to let the women and children on board first, but the herd was spooked. Three, Four, Five loads were picked up. Hanna watched the crowded fairway under the crowded skies as Cobras flanked the incoming V22s. Finally, it was their turn. As they rushed the next in line Osprey’s open doors unashamedly, the pop-pop-pop of small arms fire cracked from the bay of the craft pulling up. People ducked as two of the Ospreys collided in mid-air, one rising and one coming in. Gowatney fell back in front of Luke like something had kicked him in the face. Something big and mean and buzzing, as the rounds came sawing in. Hanna had time to see a big rotor turn sideways and move across his line of vision from left to right before somebody punched him in the gut, taking his legs out from under him. “Fore!” he thought absurdly, and almost giggled. He sat down hard in the sandtrap. Something warm and then cold washed over him like a fever breaking, and then he didn’t feel cold and he didn’t feel tired. He didn’t feel cold and tired at all.

  The Blood-Dimmed Tide

  Laura, the heavy girl who had been sitting at the desk next to her, didn’t come in for the second day this week. For a diabetic, no longer having insulin must be tough. Most of the insulin was manufactured by huge pharmaceutical companies, a lot of it from pig’s pancreases in Germany, so there was very little coming in, and what did trickle through was very expensive. Kelly had known of four other diabetics she could name who had been trying to survive without it. Three of them didn’t last two months after the collapse. Heart attacks, strokes, blood poisonings…At least walking a lot more and eating less processed foods might help some of them out a little, she thought sympathetically. Diabetics had a slightly longer life expectancy than those on dialysis or ventilators, when the world stopped turning. Those on blood pressure medications probably weren’t far behind. Laura must have been really big before the grocery stores ran out of everything, to still be heavy at all, now. There were very few obese people left, these days.

  For all of last year, and years before, Kelly had envied her older sister, Karen. In addition to being skinny, Karen had been the smart one, the popular one, the favorite, and had grabbed a full scholarship to study “Gender Issues” at U.C.L.A.. During her last phone call, she had begged Karen to come home before the interstates were closed, but her sister just laughed Kelly’s fears off. She had finals coming up, she would see her during the summer break, and besides, only racists thought that the undocumented workers would bother anybody who supported comprehensive immigration reform. She thought that the latest amnesty offer on the negotiating table would satisfy the protesters. Karen was an active member of the College Democrats and had nothing to worry about, she had said. Besides, she had asked Kelly, “we’re all immigrants, aren’t we? They’re just like us”. Three days later there was spotty cell phone service, then none. When Kelly tried to call Karen’s dorm room number from a land line, it just rang and rang. Nobody answered
at the other end. Very little was heard out of Los Angeles after the declaration of Reconquista, then, until a Spanish language radio station from Arizona announced the opening of a Chinese embassy in L.A., a month later. She had heard, though, what happened to White women in occupied areas. It had all come apart so fast. Kelly blinked back tears of regret, and typed harder. Her stomach growled, urging her on, page after page, towards her dinner.

  The Marching Band Refused To Yield

  Hu Shan Lin thought that the embassy opening was a mistake, but he dared not say so openly. As an official government adjunct to the People’s Humanitarian Expeditionary Force, his duty was to liaison with the peacekeeping forces currently pacifying the hell out of the sick and starving population of Oakland. He, along with the troops, had been dispatched by the Central Committee of the Party to insure the safety and security of Chinese citizens all along the Pacific coast of the former United States, in general terms. It was their duty, since obviously the United States government could no longer guarantee the safety and security of Chinese citizens in North America.

  The entire San Francisco Bay grid of hills and streets was his responsibility, in particular. Granted, he technically could call on the entire hundred thousand troops steadily working their way inland for his mission. However much that would help. But Hu took advantage of the thousands of Chinese-Americans who were opportunistically lined up to profess their patriotism and, oh by the way, report on a round –eyed neighbor for hoarding food or stockpiling guns. Yes, there was a reward involved for information on terrorist activities, of course, thank you very much. No, I do not wish to take your daughter as my concubine. Fine, for the sake of your family honor, very well. Just one. The last thing he needed was to have to select the staff of an ambassadorial office in a newly declared breakaway country which only their government had officially recognized, so far. His real orders were to prepare the Republica Del Norte, and all of Mexico, to become a dependent consumer market for China. With the collapse of the American stock market and economy, and the failure of the dollar, the Chinese economy didn’t go into a depression, it had just ceased to exist, almost as quickly as did the U.S.’s. Only aggressive territorial and resource acquisition had saved them. Still, he knew that his country’s manufacturing base was eroding faster than the pounding surf could wash away sand. New markets were needed. His job was to provide them.