The Hasten the Day Trilogy

by Billy Roper

  Australia and New Zealand were isolated into playing nice, and Russia had been placated into docility on the northern fringe by reassurances from Beijing that they had no designs on their northern hegemony, but were focused eastwards. Over the last few months, Hu had hopped the Pacific, reassuring bureaucrats in Tokyo that the new Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere would not threaten their national sovereignty; wink, wink. Three weeks were spent in Taipei taking the pledges of loyalty from Taiwanese parliamentary members following the brief and relatively bloodless occupation, which had gone surprisingly smoothly. Once the Reunification Charter was ratified, he bounced to Seoul, spending a full month debriefing the interned American sailors and marines, all of them black or brown, he had taken notice of, who had been left behind and unable to withdraw to their last standing bastion in Honolulu, before it also fell in turn.

  The Americans left behind because apparently their fragmented command structure and fellow soldiers didn’t want them or didn’t trust them had been a public relations opportunity. However, the decision had been made by the Central Committee in their infinite wisdom to simply dispose of the detainees, instead of bringing to the attention of the world press the fact that China had so many unwanted prisoners of undeclared war to take care of. Hu thought that had been a mistake, as well, but his place was not to ask questions, only to follow orders. It was too bad that they hadn’t spun the story about poor oppressed minorities abandoned in foreign lands by their own government. Things had just developed too rapidly, and there hadn’t been enough time, in the end, to go to the trouble. The fish had to eat, too.

  India wanted China’s help in reining in Pakistan, badly, sinc e both were nuclear powers and sometimes hostile neighbors with lots of hungry people to burn. Pakistan, a Muslim state, was upset that they were too far from Israel to join in the multi-nation jihad against the embattled Jewish state, and ached to fight somebody. The only thing the Indians wanted more, in fact, was to replace the U.S. in the United Nations Security Council. For those two cherries, they were willing to follow the leader in recognizing the new Hispanic nation officially-even if most global insiders surmised that La Republica Del Norte would be annexed into Los Estados Unidos Mexicanos before too long. The overall geopolitical considerations mattered little to a man such as Hu. Like McNabb, he had a job to do. Consolidate Chinese control, Over the Chinese-Americans. Over the American West Coast. Then over these upstart Mexicans, whatever they called themselves.

  With No Time Left To Start Again

  Gerta Rausch –Schmidt marveled at how thickly dark the huge block of Central Park was from the air. Even the campfires and burning garbage piles surreally lighting the open major avenues looked bright in comparison to the ethereal ink below her, at the shadowed core of the gathering dusk inside the urban forest. The helicopter swung northwards. The German delegation to the United Nations’ second ranking interpreter flinched as the scene below shifted dizzyingly, and quietly cursed. She had never liked heights. Electric power in the five boroughs of New York City was confined to a handful of administrative sectors and government enclaves in Manhattan, and just a few tiny pinpricks of light elsewhere where private or corporate compounds had withstood the sieges of the masses, and held out through the worst of times. Down in those streets, it was worse than medieval, Gerta knew. Only heavily armed groups dared travel the concrete canyons of Manhattan, especially at night.

  The U.N. building and its surrounding block of offices on the East side was maintained as well as ever, at least for now, thanks to their own security augmented by blue-helmeted European Union special forces teams flown in from Brussels during the first days of the collapse. The NYPD had broken ranks during the Labor Day weekend riots, when One Police Plaza had been overrun by starving mobs sweeping through lower Manhattan. Only a few hundred of them remained on the job as unpaid volunteers still patrolling their own neighborhoods in teams and maintaining some neo-feudal level of order in fortified bunkers. Others hired on as mercenaries for the surviving compounds, or melted away into the general population, since anybody wearing a uniform was a target in most of the city. The blue flu had turned fatal. But with several of the European Union’s member state’s economies in freefall following the loss of their big brother, it had taken the personal appeal of the surviving Vice President of the United States to bring in the blue helmets en masse. That was about all Bellefont had done.

  Less than a week after the Senate office buildings and Capitol building were burned by throngs of urban youths from Anacostia, civil order was splintered in the halls of power. Rioters were joined by black Capitol police in fighting a pitched battle against the Uniformed Secret Service to take control over the J. Edgar Hoover building. Gerta’s personal feeling was that the biggest loss in the burning of Washington had been the Smithsonian. Her grandfather, a survivor of the Eastern Front, had taken her there when she had been just a little girl, and she remembered the science and technology exhibit halls in bitter grief. From reports filed after the fact, Black Block and ‘Anonymous’ anarchists upped their game and blew up the Washington Monument and the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, all on the same night. She had seen the video of their blasted ruins, and that saddened her, as well. It reminded her of seeing the red flag rising over the rubble of Berlin in old newsreels of 1945. Or her first two marriages. It was enough to sicken the heart.

  The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff made a heroic last stand at the Pentagon which would have made Custer himself proud, barricaded in his office with a handful of M.P.s and officers, but the black Army mutineers eventually burned him out, too. The Vice Chairman was aloft in the Looking Glass airborne command post as soon as things headed south, and he hovered overhead. In time, he would take command at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, and of the U.S. Strategic Command.

  The President was still watching poll numbers indicating that no sitting Commanderin-Chief who abandoned the Capitol could expect to be re-elected, so she dithered while Langley and the survivors at the Pentagon more prudently began evacuating key personnel to the hinterlands. Their efforts were mooted, however, when a relatively small electro-magnetic pulse producing nuclear blast high over Washington fried virtually every computer chip in the District…including some of the more important ones in Marine One, the President’s helicopter, that at the moment happened to be evacuating her from the White House. The residence had been surrounded by frightened, angry, and hungry mobs for days. Her flight crew managed a superb emergency landing at the Georgetown University Hospital helipad.

  Gerta had been embedded with the first wave of thirty E.U. special forces troops, from the German KSK Kommandos. Their mission was to evacuate diplomats from the member states’ embassies in D.C.. They were flown from Fort Hamilton, virtually a ghost town, into Fort McNair, because it hadn’t been breached yet, on three Sikorsky Uh- 60 Black Hawks. Flying in reminded her of the movie about Mogadishu, in more ways than one. At the besieged base, they were greeted by some joker’s huge painted sign stating “The End Is Coming Soon…But Not Soon Enough”. There, they had been provided four armored M113s, eight Army transport trucks for the stranded embassy staffs, (all retrofitted post EMP) and a platoon of resentful hold-outs from Company A of the 1st Battalion of the Third U.S. Infantry regiment. After first evacuating the staff from the deceptively calm, shady tree-lined residential avenue of the German embassy on Reservoir Road, they were unprepared for the downtown madness just a couple of streets away. Suddenly it looked like a B-rated Zombie movie through her window. Their armored personnel carriers and trucks had been forced to outrun mobs block by block to Wisconsin Avenue and hightail it back to 29 out. Along the way Gerta had seen the spraypainted graffiti on the side of the looted Presidential helicopter bluntly stating “Kilt the bitch”, with her own eyes. If the video posted on Youtube before it went down was real, she had not died easily. The President’s body was never recovered. They never made it to Embassy Row or Dupont Circle, either. At first she didn’t understand
why the U.S. Army escorts were so angry, since she was the one who had failed to save any ambassadors but her own…then one of the Kommandos told her. Their unit had been designated as the Commander-inChief’s Guard. Yeah, that would kind of bite the big one. Having the President raped to death on their watch had to be demoralizing. Wouldn’t look good on the old job reference, either.

  Nobody knew who had launched the single-warhead missile that carried the E.M.P. blast. Most suspected the Russians. Some accused the Chinese. A few claimed the Israelis has done it, in frustration at the loss of their bully boy and protector, as hundreds of thousands of American Jews made Aliyah, any way they could. But with the District of Columbia already being overrun by starving mobs, and in ruins, it hardly mattered. It was a small bomb, with limited human casualties directly, and at a high altitude. Just enough to put everything electronic in the District, Maryland, and northern Virginia that wasn’t shielded out of commission. Only stubbornness had forced the late President to involuntarily go down with her ship of state. That just sealed the deal for the national government. The city itself was already lost.

  For a small town Bavarian girl like Gerta, sharing quarters with the surviving members of the U.S. Cabinet was daunting. She was more used to cows, and liked them better. The ragged bunch in Turtle Bay were always jockeying for position. They and the former Vice President, who had never been sworn in as Commander in Chief formally, shared U.N. delegate housing. The few dozen Congresscritters and Senators who had made it out of D.C. clustered around the outer edges of the U.N. green zone on the East side along FDR in lesser accommodations. ‘A government in exile in their own country’, Gerta thought. All in all, it made for a crowded, stressful environment, even before they had to make plans for an additional battalion of peacekeeping troops headed their way from the U.K.. ‘That’s what you get for sending out a call for help’, she observed wryly. One thing Gerta couldn’t help but think of as the rotors spun down on their rooftop helipad, though, was that once they paid the Danegeld, how would they get rid of the Danes? This city, this island, this country was largely a lawless and starving jungle. Power abhors a vacuum. Who would fill it? How many more would die beforehand? And after?

  Chapter Two

  Psalm 109:8

  King James Bible

  “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.”

  The Halftime Air Was Sweet Perfume

  Northern Indiana was lake country, so fresh water wasn’t an issue for his troop, as long as they used their sterilization kits. As things fell apart and the center didn’t hold, civilization died fitfully in some areas, and revived in others. Most places with local sources for water and power fared well enough, if they could feed their people. But even in the upper Midwest, folks were going hungry. Captain McNabb had heard from the few prisoners of war they took alive that cannibalism had become the new ‘down-low’ of the eastside inner city. His troops ate, sometimes only due to airdrops from Grissom. He had orders not to share rations, if there were any extra, with civilians. This was a war of attrition. This was a siege. This was genocide. But they couldn’t afford to feed all of Gary. It was embarrassing how quickly people had sunk. Not just the blacks and browns, either. Proud men begged and women who had been wealthy offered themselves for a can of tuna. The hungry zombies loitered in urban ghost towns where tumble-weaves of matted hair extensions rolled down empty streets.

  McNabb had initiated the tactic of liberating nonperishable food in empty and abandoned houses from Hammond that the scavengers had missed, and using it to set up aid stations to feed hungry suburbanites coming into the relocation center at Calumet City. It was his own version of Christian charity, wartime style. Other units had long and awkward tails of camp followers trailing in their shadow, as ancient armies had. Everybody just did what they could. What amazed him was that people still shuffled along, shallow and dumb and useless. ‘A mile wide and an inch deep’, his momma always called them. No depth, no passion, no interests. They didn’t believe in anything bigger than themselves, really. To him, there were way too many ugly, lumpy, misshapen pieces of genetic drift floating in the gene pool. They were people, to use the term generously, whom natural selection would have helpfully killed off before they were able to breed and pass on their warped genes, in the past. People who misplaced compassion and sympathy had made citizens and voters and ‘equals’. Now they died like flies. To the tired officer, true compassion meant making the people as a whole better, not coddling the worst of them and making the whole weaker. True compassion meant sparing the people as a whole from supporting and being dragged down by genetic drift. His Christian faith required him to seek the true compassion which placed the greater good of God’s people as a whole, first. He believed in God, and he believed in signs, and he’d be leaving soon, but while he was there, he meant to make a difference.

  Most of the nonWhite citizens along I-90 had high-tailed it inside the loop once the real shooting started and it became clear that anyone ‘rioting while black’ was going to get a rifle, instead of a news camera, stuck in their face for their trouble. They had been more interested in looting electronic stores and jewelers than food warehouses, until it was too late. The population of Gary was down to twenty percent of its pre-war level. That was great for the Indiana National Guard and their militia auxiliaries. Plenty of empty buildings to post snipers and machine gun teams in. Fewer people to feed and watch over…and watch their backs around.

  This crisp autumn morning, McNabb was pretending to clean his glasses and watching out of the corner of his eye while some of his non-commissioned officers trained a group of the civilian militia volunteers in how to arm and deploy anti-personnel mines-but not in that order. Some of the guerrilla leaders of the militias were more post-apocalyptic warlords than tactical geniuses. Most of them had female family members who had been raped or murdered by the black mobs in the first days of the collapse, however. They would not retreat. Their practical ambush line, set up along Buffington Harbor Road, was a part of the defense in depth of the Gary airport they depended on for the resupply of material too big to airdrop but small enough to come in on the short field. He felt like holding up a sign to them saying “Congratulations on 91 days without a workplace injury!”. Only seventy-odd greasy NG’s, 11-Bravo ground-pounding infantry, were left from his original command of one hundred and thirty Guardsmen and women. The attrition rate had spiked in surges. Ten percent never responded to the call-up because they saw the cities were already coming apart. With the writing on the wall in blood, they had opted to stay home and take care of their families.

  Th e Captain couldn’t blame them too much for that, but he really fumed when others began to trickle away, singly and by twos and threes, after the first week. By then things had obviously become racial, and some wanted no part of that. When the Major got fragged in his mobile command center by a black lieutenant, the command became McNabb’s- and he almost had lost it completely, as had happened in so many other units. Like most other Guards, the 38th Infantry “Cyclone Division” had been more diverse than the local population it drew recruits from, due to Department of Defense racial recruiting mandates and quotas. They were all antsy. So, when his direct superior was shot dead in the midst of a growing racial civil war by a black junior officer, McNabb didn’t wait for orders from division headquarters. They were nailed down clearing out domestic terrorists from northwestern Marion County, anyway. Instead, he took a few minutes alone in prayer, asking for guidance, then he held an impromptu and abbreviated court-martial adjudicated by himself, his two remaining lieutenants, and the Unitarian Church Chaplain, a Captain who offered the sole dissenting vote against a summary firing squad.

  The execution was carried out over her objection the next day, but before the new commander could decide what to do about the dozen other remaining black and Hispanic soldiers left in the Company, they disappeared in the night, in two different directions, after stealing four trucks and two Humvees loaded with about
half the company’s stores of M.R.E.’s and a dozen pallets of ammunition crates. They also left behind four of their former fellow soldiers, guards they had stabbed to death and left to bleed out in the motor pool parking lot. McNabb still blamed his reluctance to lock them up for that loss.

  He ran down the tally in his head as the militia’s self -appointed squad leaders were instructed in the handling of the kind of improvised explosive devices used by both sides to make interstate and inner-city travel more risky than ever. “Let’s see, one hundred and thirty to start out with on the roster, one hundred and fifteen showed up, eleven deserted, one fragged, one executed, thirteen more deserted, four murdered, and fifteen more honest-to-God actual combat casualties since then due to incursions by the enemy. Not counting over fifty civilian militia casualties, since they were always enthusiastic about taking the fight to the enemy and being first to fight.” McNabb spat on the cracked street in disgust. Yes, his fellow Americans, his former fellow Americans, were the enemy, now. How strange that he had almost gotten used to that. He shook his head and waved away a gaunt brunette in an expensive but dirty evening gown who stood up straighter and made eye contact hopefully when he walked into sight. Oh, how the mighty had fallen.