The Hasten the Day Trilogy

by Billy Roper

  On the ride down to rear end duty rotation guarding the former grounds of the Army Ammunition Plant in Joliet for a week off the front line, McNabb wondered if finally a letter from his wife might have made it through the lines. He wondered if his children were warm in the bitter days of November, and like always, if they had enough to eat. More than the box of ‘liberated’ canned food he sent home to them every week as a privilege of command. He said a silent prayer for them in the darkness. The snow fell soundlessly outside his truck window, and he caught a nap as the roar of the engine created a white noise blur. The slumber was snapped off short when his body felt the truck slow and pull a tight turn into a sandbagged exit ramp off of I-55 guarded by two jackknifed flatbed trailers and a squad originally from the Illinois National Guard Band. They stopped for a minute, talking through the half rolled down window with the former musicians about how quiet it had been around here since the city was pacified, and how cold, and to gripe about the locals coming around begging. They laughed at the irony that even though no ammunition had been produced in the arsenal for years, a Wally world and rail hub made it about as important as Rock Island, which still hummed along as best it could making things that went bang.

  From I-55 they cut east to the industrial park and the Wal-Mart distribution center that the mobs had missed because it was away from any residential areas. It had only experienced minor looting by the employees themselves before they evacuated the city. The rows and rows of canned food alone made it worth defending. They would eat good tonight. Resupply was still sporadic, and would be so long as O’Hare was still in unsecured territory. That scarcity worked both ways, though. With every passing day the insurgency grew weaker. McNabb guessed that a combination of lack of food, lack of ammo, and lack of unified leadership was taking its toll. McNabb had seen to it that Meigs Field on the east side was cleared, though too short for C-130s, but nobody needed tanks dropped on this front, not anymore. He sure could have used them a month ago, though.

  As he grabbed his gear out of the back, the Major was met by his aide, and the young corporal grabbed the pack for him and handed him a clipboard without bothering to salute. The militia influence has really taken the starch out of us, McNabb thought to himself, but he let it pass. He read the front page of the report, then whistled tonelessly. “When did this come through, Kip?” he asked. “About an hour ago Cap..uh, Major,” he grinned, then frowned again. “We have him under quarantine”.

  Just before they had trucked out north on deployment, John had snuck a peak at his personnel file, out of curiosity. Who wouldn’t have, if they had the chance? It had been another late July staff meeting in the un-air conditioned Quonset hut. He had seen his name on a bulging folder sticking out of a stack, and thought, ‘why not?’. During a latrine break, he hung back to take a look. He almost regretted it. Apparently, he was “smart, gregarious, and hardworking”, but “appeared to find it difficult to relate to others whom he saw as unmotivated” and, as a leader, needed to “dumb down” his approach to fit the Guard’s rank and file. That, and his high ideals and perfectionism, kept McNabb from being a more effective leader. “God grant us the gift to see ourselves as others see us, right”?, he’d fumed. He’d almost walked out of the meeting, but decided to stay, in case anyone needed a multi-syllabic word explained for them. What he knew about himself, that he did know how to do, what he had done many times over the fall and winter, was interrogation. He was ruthless when he had to be and fake as Charlie Brown’s smile when that served its purpose, too. The carrot and the stick. Rub, slap, rub.

  The prisoner looked as bizarre as his story sounded. Squatting on the concrete, he gasped and wheezed, his stick-thin ribs working like bellows. Sweat drenched his coal black skin despite the thirty degree weather outside. Probably feverish, John thought to himself. He wore a pair of old Nike running shoes, cut off business slacks, a Bulls basketball jersey, and a rumpled tie. His guards had given him a bottle of water, then another, then another, shortly after he had shuffled up to the fence and mumbled the standard “Hands Up-Don’t Shoot!” greeting. Since then, all he had said, over and over, was “I surrender”.

  McNabb questioned the skinny ragdoll while it greedily slurped down a can of peaches. If he was telling the truth, the surviving blacks in Chicago had killed off all of the Hispanics, slaughtered every man, woman, and child in Chinatown, and then broken up into at least three or four mutually hostile groups. The only commonality they recognized anymore was that they had had enough. Within minutes, the Major had division HQ on the horn. Within hours, the Indiana and Illinois and Wisconsin National Guard forces, along with their auxiliaries, militia, volunteers, and camp followers, were advancing along the entire oval front on Chicago. Not a shot was fired against them as they drove through the trash and snow filled avenues, and they began the roundup.

  It took four days to reach and relieve the Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago, where nearly five thousand recruits and personnel had held out as their own small city through the worst of the mob attacks. Those people would be the backbone of recolonizing the city and getting O’Hare and the rail links going again, as well as the port, John knew.

  Surviving blacks lined up to surrender, once word got out that they were being fed for laying down their weapons. By the time he had been able to get some sleep and write up the after-action, McNabb was able to formally report that major hostile insurgency in the city of Chicago was at an end. It was now a recovery mission. His role in securing Gary, then leading the triumphant entry into Chicago, was used by the Indiana National Guard’s press corps to boost morale and give the troops a badly needed hero. He would gladly have traded the fame for a ticket home to his family.

  A detention facility was established in Wrigley Field. There were 4,493 total hostile civilians housed there, almost all of the remaining black population of Chicago. The order in reply to his after-action report took six days to come back down from on high. Feed them, water them, and for God’s sake hose them off, then frog march them to Rockford, it said. They would be put on boxcars and shipped south by rail to Mississippi, where the New African regime was sending up (or so they claimed) an equal number of White survivors from the collapsed Biloxi Bubble. Either way, he would be rid of them. He shrugged his sore shoulders in the cold November rain, and smoked his menthol under the cover of a poncho.

  John did indeed spend Thanksgiving with his soldiers, instead of with his family. He was more than a little disappointed that he hadn’t received any mail from them in almost a month. All of his troops were a long way from their homes and families, too, though. The best they could do was empty out cans of spam, mash it into the rough shapes of turkeys, and bake it brown together. There were plenty of Americans all across the fruited plain who had a lot less than that to eat, this Thanksgiving, and a lot less to be thankful for, than he did. As usual, he led the company in a prayer of gratitude and hope, before they dug in together in an empty elementary school cafeteria. The decorations the kids had taped up on the painted cinderblock walls last spring made it a bittersweet dinner. Nobody felt like talking much about home. He and Kip sat together, and ate in silence.

  McNabb had thought that his war was over. It took two weeks to prepare the refugee prisoners and get them on their train. They finally got them loaded. A week’s leave was granted, at the end of which the Major and one of his companies were to rendezvous at Decatur, then board a train of their own, for St. Louis. Soft capitol-building duty, it looked to be. His other company was reassigned to collect and escort White refugees back into Chicago, then aid in the cleanup and reinstitution of city utilities. The city, its location, its name, were all too important to just abandon to its ghosts.

  One week seemed like too short a time to spend back with his family. At least, it felt that way until the third day of his leave, when the South Bend City Counsel Treasurer found them for him. They hadn’t had any more money among their personal effects to pay for the private plots, so the City Council ha
d paid for them, since they were the wife and daughters of a war hero, after all. That’s why there was any record of them, to find. The Treasurer sure was sorry, he kept saying. That super flu had just torn through the town like a wildfire. So many people, crowded into so little space, doubling up for heat. It was awful how fast it had taken so many. Hundred ended up just in mass graves at the edge of town, once the panic set in. Nobody knew where the flu had come from, or how it started. He had been down with it himself for a while. Did the Major want the personal effects of the deceased?

  Slipping his wife’s wedding ring onto his left little finger, so it could be next to his own, Major John W. McNabb started to shake. If he had told them to stay in Fort Wayne, Cindy would be wearing it. In his mind he could smell her hair, and feel the touch of her skin. His trembling kept rolling. He tried hard not to think about the girls who looked in their own way just like their mom in miniature. His teeth began to chatter as he pulled a small, dirty doll out of the brown paper bag. The bag crinkled loudly, way too loudly, grating on his nerves, like thunder. This bag was neatly rolled on top and labeled and stacked with so many others, it had taken several minutes of digging around in nearfrantic obsession to find it. Barbie looked up at him accusingly, with eyes the same color blue as his youngest daughters’. Just as lifeless now, too, he thought. Cindy and Kylie and MacKenna Rose, he rolled the names around in his head in a circle of pain. He took out the purse. The Harry Potter book. The dead Nintendo DS. Something in his face made the embarrassed bureaucrat take a step back. “I am so, so sorry, Major”. “If you’d like I can have somebody show you their final resting places”, he said nervously. “Nothing is final, and I’ll find them myself, thanks”, John whispered, as he walked away clutching the sack to his chest like a drowning man might hold onto a life preserver.

  The next three days he spent mainly just sitting in front of three narrow and short mounds of dirt, in a field of such mounds, marked with wooden planks. On each wooden plank was a typed biographical information sheet, stapled to the wood. The words and dates were already fading, and would soon be gone, their staples rusting through. He cried. He prayed. He swore at God, and begged Him to bring his girls back. He offered up his own life in exchange, a thousand times over. He sobbed and lay down in the dirt. The living envied the dead, just as everyone had always predicted. McNabb got up and stumbled off to find a bathroom but found an open bar, instead, at one point, and then he made his way back to his family. He carried a bottle for each of them. Well, the girls were too young to be drinking, of course, so he would, daddy would do that for them. One for Kylie and one for MacKenna and one for Cindy, too. He sat and thought about each of his girls for a while, and about each of the young soldiers he had loaded onto trucks with the flu and sent back here, back to safety. He looked at the rows of mounds and rows of planks and finally, at the larger mass graves beyond. He wondered how much blood was on his hands. He wondered how much he would have to learn to hate, in order to not hate himself. He thought it was too late. On the fourth day, he rose from the graves.

  Feeling guilty for laying around drunk in the mud, John brushed himself off as best he could. He knew that he never would have acted that way in front of his daughters, so he shouldn’t act that way, now. McNabb said a guilty prayer of apology for his rage at God. He asked for the wisdom to understand why he had lost his girls, or the strength to bear it. Inside him, a cold resolve grew. It didn’t feel better. It just felt…less.

  The next morning, his men exchanged knowing looks as he stood before them, chain smoking, his uniform perfect except for the Barbie peeking out of his holster at them. He wore three more, and those weren’t playing. Major John W. McNabb had a score to settle with somebody. He just wasn’t sure who, yet.

  Chapter Four

  Romans 1:26-27 King James Bible

  26 “For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:

  27 And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.”

  For Spacious Skies

  A Federal prison was no place to sit out the end of the world. Especially when the doors were locked shut and the guards had stopped coming to work. Jeff Price knew that it took about three weeks for a person to die of starvation. Thirst, however, was the quicker messer-upper. It had been four days since he had seen a guard. That last C.O., Bilansky, had been scared, and wouldn’t stop to answer his questions about what was going on outside. The overhead lights and air conditioning had gone out the day before. Only the faint emergency lights powered by the automatic battery reserve power system that had kicked in kept it from being pitch black. Bilansky used to be a stand-up guy, a C.O. who would talk to you, and turn a blind eye to a kite dropped to another tier, or even pretend not to see a baggie of smoke when they tossed your cell, instead of sending you to Ad-Seg or giving you a write-up that would cost time points. Not the last time. He had just shook his head and kept walking forward, the small circle of light cast by his Maglite in front of him dragging him away.

  Jeff had listened hard, since then. Beyond the diminishing hoots and calls and screams of the locked up cons, he had heard nothing from or about the guards in four days. No commissary or mess in a week. The remaining chips and candy bars in his cell he’d eaten yesterday, chewing the last pack of Ramen dry the day before. No cells had opened or closed at all in that time, either. From what he could tell, nobody in adjoining cells knew any more about what was going on than he did. He figured the world was going to pieces outside. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to see how ugly stuff was getting, the last few weeks.

  ‘Mistakes had been made’ in his life, as the saying we nt. He had ended up in the Federal Correctional Institute in Manchester, Kentucky after a parole violation for a single shot .22 bolt action rifle he had given to his twelve year old son for Christmas. The black officer had stabbed him in the stomach during the arrest. In between his state arrest and federal trial he had been released back into his small, majority black South Carolina hometown. The local media had painted him as a racist. Then, he was attacked three different times by blacks who wanted to test him. That led to him being arrested again on assault and battery charges. When it was all over, they gave him fifteen years, like they were giving away candy.

  The water left in the squatter was down to the bottom. He had tried to make it last, taking just a sip at the time. At least he was lucky that his cellie had been in the infirmary when they’d went on lockdown. Well, okay, maybe it wasn’t entirely luck. Jeff had put him there, after all. It had been a prison politics thing. His cellie had raped another inmate in the showers. Toning him up was necessary. It was the righteous thing to do. He had stayed in G.P. because his cellie had told the C.O. that he’d fallen in the shower. For that, his cellie had rights to run-backs, if he wanted it. He sat and wondered about his mom and his sons, hoping they were okay. From what had been on t.v. before the C.O.s had shut them off as being ‘a threat to the order and security of the facility’, most of the riots seemed to be in the cities, but they might have spread. He had no way of knowing. The last mail he had received from groups and people in the White Nationalist movement on the outside hinted that they weren’t taking a revolutionary position, but quite the opposite: they seemed to anticipate the illegal immigrants kicking off ‘the day of the rope’, instead of the other way around.

  Jeff’s eyes fluttered open at a subtle shift in the background noise. His watch told him it was seven, in the p.m., he guessed, going by his internal clock. He had no way of verifying that with any certainty. Suddenly, he could no longer see the face of his watch, as the gradually diminishing humming quietened to silence, and the emergency backup lights faded to complete darkness. At the moment the pod was immersed in night, faint clicks popped from the gates and cell doors thro
ughout the block. He knew immediately what had happened. When the emergency battery power had died, and nobody had been around to start the backup generators, the electronic locks had fail-safed open. He held his breath. As one of the thirteen percent of White inmates in the institution, he was a constant target. Being a stand-up Wood, and more, a broken down old White boy friendly with the clover leafs, Jeff had a number of Christian Identity and other brothers to back him up in the yard, so he’d never had to dive into the SHU. But here, in the dark, it was every man for himself. He decided to hunker down and wait out the drama.