The Hasten the Day Trilogy

by Billy Roper

  Most of the strikes came at night, in typical instinctive guerrilla tradition, as probing attacks or raids for food and ammunition or White women. He had been luckier than a lot of unit commanders he knew of. They had been overrun twice in Joliet, and forced to use airstrikes against mobs doing the zombie shuffle out of Oak Lawn. The sound of artillery leveling the Horseshoe Casino had kept him awake last night. Some of the units that had started out with more diverse racial percentages were shells. Many had been disbanded and their survivors reattached to other units. Some companies were at platoon strength, absent militia reinforcements. A few units had been lost to internal fraggings, and had defected over to the other side, leaving their White comrades in arms behind as corpses.

  He still remembered the last divisional officer’s meeting before their mission purpose officially changed from refugee internment and peacekeeping to open combat operations against the definitively black insurgency. The Colonel, whose 31st ID had been reduced by two-thirds, made two shocking announcements to the exclusively White men (and a few women) crowded into the dusty Tinley Park restaurant on the front lines that day. First, they were to begin to peel their functional mobile units off of the line, one at a time in succession, to divert force into the grinding fight to push the Latino citizens of Peoria back into the city. In a shocking lack of appreciation for the blessings of multiculturalism, the black citizens had driven them out, furious after the Revs. Al Dullton and Jesse Johnson had been burned alive at a prayer breakfast attacked by local undocumented youths associated with the MS 13 gang. The Latinos were being driven out right into the White suburbs, and marauding there.

  It had reminded McNabb at the time of a history lecture he had given once, before he went into administration, where he discussed how the Hun hordes bearing down on Eastern Europe had displaced the Goths, one tribe had displaced another which sacked Rome, in a domino effect. Over the next two weeks, without showing gaps in their siege line, the I.N.G. was to push the MS-13 brats back into the Crips, block by block, house by house. Urban warfare, in confines too close for much armor or air support. Not that they had much of either. In a remarkable display of interstate cooperation, most of their armor from downstate had joined the campaign to clear East St. Louis and then raze Cairo. In exchange, their Illinois counterparts were doing the bloody groundwork in the shadow of the marble arch, and holding the western flank of the ring around Highland Park. God help them, that was dirty work.

  With his second revelation, however, the Colonel had earned the ultimate trust of his subordinates. The United States government, he began, had been paralyzed nationally by a major secession movement of Hispanics in the southwestern border states. Protests, demonstrations, and the seizure of government buildings had begun in Los Angeles on Cinco de Mayo, coordinated with occupations in San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, El Paso, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, and Corpus Christi, then spread outwards to smaller cities from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. Within a week local authority was relinquished, and clearly a full scale racial revolution for the Reconquista of Aztlan had begun. Or had already happened. The border was flooded with an unstoppably massive human wave of migration north into the free for all southwestern sector. McNabb had known all this, as much as he disliked hearing it rehashed again. After all, most of the people in this room had watched it all unfold on Fox News as the politicians wrung their hands and called for calm and for peaceful negotiations. At that sign of weakness, Hispanics in every major city across the country had joined in the rioting.

  The Colonel continued his review of recent events. During week two of La Reconquista, after the Stars and Stripes were lowered and the eagle and snake raised over courthouses across the southwest, the first hesitant convoys of Federal troops were ordered in by a vacillating President panicked that most in-state National Guard units had refused to deploy even when asked. The politicians were too afraid to lose Hispanic votes to act until it became obvious that the Hispanics weren’t interested in voting, ever again, at least not as U.S. citizens. At first they were delayed entering the areas in rebellion by the flood of White citizens fleeing north, in all four lanes and up the median. The congestion of the frightened refugees masked the armed Mexican Mafia, Norteno, and cartel forces intermingled with them, but CNN had carried live helicopter feed video coverage of running ambushes of surprised and isolated units as U.S. Marines bled and died on the shoulders of the road. The week spent by civil rights leaders and government soothsayers trying to placate the protesters had failed. Worse, it had emboldened the rebels into declaring secession in a joint press conference in San Antonio, at the Alamo.

  It all came to fruition before anybody realized what was happening. The state legislatures of Arizona and New Mexico met the same day in emergency session. The heavily Hispanic state police, after a brief internal purge and shootout on the capitol steps, locked down Albuquerque. In a shorter standoff in Phoenix, the non-Latino representatives were placed under ‘protective custody’ due to the irate crowds surrounding the House chambers. The Hispanic Governor of New Mexico went on statewide t.v. that evening to praise the return of his state to its ‘rightful owners and historic native people’. The Anglo governor of Arizona tried again to call out the state National Guard, which refused to budge. That began a bloody internal uprising with several White pilots from Luke Air Force base loosing their ordinance on Camp Navajo, which had declared for the insurgents after half the base burned. The 355th Fighter Wing from Davis-Monthan joined in, then had nowhere to come home to when thousands of Latinos stormed the base and began killing the remaining personnel on duty. Those White military units who were able to disengaged and withdrew, or demobilized and joined the evacuation of the Anglo civilian population. On bases like Cannon and Holloman, Air Force units unwound into soldier vs. soldier, crew vs. crew fighting, and both were evacuated, along with Kirtland, from which aircraft strafed the streets of the capitol for 48 hours while the nuclear weapons on and around the base were safely loaded and evacuated to Omaha. At least as far as they knew, the Reconquistadores had not captured any nuclear assets. Yet.

  This was all new to McNabb and the other officers present, who had never heard the details of force degradation in the southwest. It was shocking to hear. He looked around and saw that a couple of the female officers were silently crying, and most of the faces looked stricken and gray. The Colonel digressed into a story about how Camp Pendleton and Miramar had been opened up by Latino servicemen to a horde of Mexican nationals cutting their way through San Diego, then continued. All across the southwest, the weight of numbers told. Military units were locked down on their bases by Presidential decree. The order was widened when shooting began at Ft. Polk, Ft. Sill, Ft. Leonard Wood, and Ft. Bragg. Twenty-Nine Palms fell to the insurgency, compromised from within, after bloody hand to hand combat. On MSNBC, Glenn Speck was assassinated in the middle of an interview when a car bomb interrupted him mid-sentence. Few people even noticed.

  After brief resistance in spots, those National Guard and regular U.S. Army or Marine units who were majority White and survived the region-wide purges withdrew north as well to await further orders. Many of them deserted and headed home to escort their families to safety. Others, aided by the private Border Patrol civilian militia volunteers, herded the growing tide of Anglo refugees along in front of them, helping as they could. This action saved countless lives, as it discouraged Latino forces from wiping out several enclaves of Whites attempting to abandon the area. Captain McNabb had since heard many stories of heroism and martyrdom, of latter-day Little Big Horns, from Laredo to Ventura. Who could separate the rumors from the facts, they myths from legends, when the ongoing casualty count estimates were rounded to the nearest ten thousand?

  What he remembered most from the daylong briefing was the garish map of the new front lines, curving sinuously from California’s Central Valley, across Nevada and Arizona’s northern tier, through New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle, to Houston. Regul
ar Mexican Army forces had been invited in by the new state legislatures in the border states, and they hadn’t had to be asked twice. They were there, of course, to protect the lives and property of Mexican citizens, they announced. The border had not so much disappeared, as turned from black to gray and moved north by leaps and bounds, with a wide uncertain area on the north side of the amorphous line.

  An urgent session of the U.S. House of Representatives arguing whether to declare war on Mexico, seek a diplomatic solution, or impeach the President for waffling so long, was leaning towards granting amnesty to the insurgents in exchange for oaths of citizenship. They were interrupted when the Congressional Black Caucus joined to sponsor two bills, one for the diplomatic recognition of what the Latino members of Congress were calling “The Republic Of The North”, and a second which sought to rip the country from halves into thirds. Representative Lakeisha Roosevelt, the Democratic Congresswoman from Atlanta, authored a bill stating in part that “Whereas, the African American peoples of the United States have suffered under centuries of systematic oppression and institutionalized racism on this continent, having been enslaved, kidnapped to these shores, raped, murdered, and forced to build civilization thereon…the African American peoples of the United States request recognition of the fact that should the Hispanic and Latino peoples of the formerly United States be deemed deserving of their own nation, then certainly the African American peoples are equally deserving of such…”

  Not only was this the first use of the term “formerly United States” by a government representative, it set off riots and protests and demonstrations by blacks in every major urban metropolis nationwide, and especially throughout the southeastern states. The black population of the heart of the old Confederacy had been growing due to larger birth rates and remigration of northern blacks back to the deep south for decades, matched with the outward migration of Whites from those states, due to the rising black percentage. More base lockdowns of racially mixed units, and more fraggings and defections and desertions and mutinies by local, county, and state law enforcement units followed. The President addressed the nation and asked for calm, assuring everyone that the situation was under control and would soon return to normalcy. Then, the New York stock exchange was closed ‘indefinitely’ after the largest one day loss in trading since 1929. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange closed, the next afternoon, due to ongoing riots. Neither reopened.

  By week three, Captain McNabb’s teachers had stopped even bothering to call in sick. White parents pulled their children out of school after a week of racial fights and organized ‘knockout game’ attacks in the hallways and classrooms. The President declared martial law in fortytwo states, due to “organized attacks by White racists”. By the time anybody knew which military units were dependable, the armed forces were decimated. Worse than that. “Decimated” referred to the ancient Roman punishment for disloyal tribes, killing one in ten of their population. Most units were below half strength, even before the lights went out. Rule of law remained solid only in local, isolated pockets, primarily in rural areas. The Midwest, the Heartland, the Red States…they got off lucky. He gave credit for that blessing to the Lord, and to God-fearing White men who kept it so.

  McNabb learned as the briefing wrapped up that the United States of America no longer functioned as such. The Colonel used a word unfamiliar to most of the officers present: “Balkanization”. It meant the breakup of a large, multiracial country into smaller, more racially homogeneous states. It meant the dream of equality and multicultural diversity was over. As he sat there, stunned at the flood of information, the Captain couldn’t get the old Don McLean song out of his head…”Bye , bye, Miss American Pie…”.

  The next few days and weeks in Peoria broke the thin veneer of civilization for him completely, and for his remaining troops. By the time the fires had died in the Northwoods Mall and the Newman Golf Course had been bulldozed into a mass grave there, they had the stomach for bigger jobs…and several hundred civilian volunteers eager to join the fight as auxiliary militia.

  The young Whites, the teens, both boys and girls, were the most eager to fight back. They had finally gotten sick and tired of the years of abuse they had suffered at the hands of blacks in the classrooms and hallways and lunchrooms of public schools. Now, they were being trained in how to use rifles, and getting their confidence and self-respect back. Older community activists had taken the place of their parents as role models. Some of them, mainly the organizers and the leaders, had been racialists before the collapse. A few had been Klansmen, or younger Tea Party activists, or Stormfronters. A handful had been Creators or Odinists or skinheads. But most had simply been mainstream White citizens who had seen too many of their daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers raped by black mobs, to ever forgive and forget. Refugees make the best guerrilla soldiers. With nothing left to lose, they became modern day berserkers. The die was cast. She Just Smiled And Turned Away

  Kelly pushed her Thor’s hammer further under her conservative blouse as she rose from the pew to join the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in the closing song of the morning service. “I know that my redeemer lives” filled the church and flowed outside across W. North Temple to the Square, where overflow crowds of newly enlisted Deseret Defender militia troops stood in rows, waiting to receive the Spirit. Her boss, a young state police trooper who had lost a leg in an on the duty car accident at the end of a chase and was now a deskbound bureaucrat, used to be a pro-immigration activist, she knew. He had admitted as much to her on a shared lunch break. From several rows back he smiled and silently gave her a thumbs up for putting in a diplomatic appearance. She was learning to play the game as well as any of them. The Utah Air National Guard, newly nationalized as the Deseret Air Force and having taken over Hill Air Force base as well, were performing an impressive aerial display outside, for the encouragement of the new recruits. Patriotism, as defined by the LDS, was the flavor of the day, it seemed. So the Elders decreed. Kelly knew what they had inherited when they took over Hill: the atomic fist of God.

  The Mormon shock troops, fueled by religious fervor, had driven the regular Mexican Army detachments back across Lake Powell and nearly into the Grand Canyon. The desert campaign was grueling. Back in September, military service had begun to be called ‘divine service to God’. U.S. government offices were universally closed or simply repurposed. A new nation arose, and shook itself, testing its teeth and claws.

  People like Kelly Johansen kept their heads down and blended in. But they watched. They watched as Samoan and Tongan and black and, yes, definitely Mexican citizens and even church members were systematically detained, excommunicated, and deported. B.Y.U. had led the Church to declare that nonWhites did have souls, after all, so that their football games could be televised through the NCAA. Now, with nobody looking, the effects of their South Pacific missionary work back-colonization was reversed. Any who tried to come back across the San Juan River once they were dropped off and pointed south just ended up at the bottom of a uranium mine shaft. There was no point in trucking them out to Monument Valley as they had been forced to do during the summer. Why bother? Kelly snorted to herself in derision at how divine revelation of God’s will had, on angelic wings, brought the call to ethnic cleansing and polygamy, both on the same celestial trip. But she never peeped. Very few did. Some had slipped away on their own. Others had help. She shivered at the thought. All dissent quickly evaporated, and disappeared. It was no way for a religiously based small nuclear power to behave. Just ask Israel.

  The next morning, she flagrantly sipped her coffee at her desk, and absentmindedly wondered how long it would be legal to enjoy. It was already strongly frowned upon, and all forms of tobacco were considered contraband. Kelly shrugged, knowing that it would be impossible to find soon, anyhow, outside of the black market. Importing it would be difficult, criminalized or not. She missed her Mountain Dews and Reeses more than live music or youtube. Could such things still be found back East, or up North?
The only thing playing down south was mariachi and narcocorridos. Blinking herself into focus, she set back to work. The newly formed Sea Gull Brigade, named after an 1848 event when seagulls from the Salt Lake had eaten up the crickets that had been eating up the Mormon pioneer’s crops, were leaving in two days to link up with the Deseret Defenders and Beehive militia units who would lead them along the Colorado river and deep into Arizona.

  Kelly had heard the officers talking after church the day before, and knew that the canneries had finally been retrofitted from bulk size to individual ration sized production. Most people didn’t think so, but she was smart enough to know that meant an extended campaign, beyond the normal soup kitchen line of supply. Sergeant Cooper, who was in the office more than necessary and likely thought that Kelly might let him sin just a bit, had confided in her this morning that they were headed that way. He had confirmed her thoughts by openly explaining to her how if he showed initiative with the primary advance seeking to drive the ‘invaders’ back to Flagstaff, or with the secondary arm of the pincer aimed at capturing the Hoover Dam and the Lake Mead watershed, he could be made. “Imagine me marching at the front of the boys driving the ungodly from Las Vegas, and all the gold and silver in those casino vaults, still…or I could be an officer inside a month, Sister Kelly. An officer’s pay can easily support a second wife. It might be time for you to settle down, soon….”. How gross. The skinny, short little Sergeant made her sick, the way he strutted around with his Napoleon complex. He made her want to slit her wrists, or better yet, his, but she listened. It made her feel more subversive, somehow, and less of a sellout and coward, less domesticated, if she knew what was going on. As much as anybody did.

  On purpose, she lived and ate alone. She preferred books to people-especially outlawed books that most of the people she worked with might start burning, sometime soon. That is, if the Mexican army didn’t chew them up and spit them out, first. That was always another, more cheerful possibility. Still, she only had two days to type in their names and biographical information, if only for their headstones and plaques in the Marty’s Field cemetery. If they were martyred for Deseret, they were automatically Sainted, regardless of how they got there. Somebody had to know who they had been.