by Billy Roper
Brazil had joined other Latin American countries in officially extending diplomatic recognition to La Republica del Norte, and warned Argentina not to continue with plans to ship beef to famine struck areas of the Carolinas. California had been divided into ‘zones of occupation’ along the San Joaquin river. Between who, they didn’t say. Kelly assumed the Mexicans and the Chinese. Things were so surreal. There wasn’t much other news about the situation inside the U.S.. Just a few snippets.
The Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force in Offutt had conspired to place the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under arrest. A summary trial was held for crimes against humanity. After the public firing squad finished their work, they probably hoped to be absolved of the incineration of Colorado Springs and the death of Denver. It might have worked, too, if they hadn’t made a power grab for the chain of command so ruthlessly, themselves.
Alaskan oil was for sale to the highest European bidder. Representatives from France, Italy, and Hungary had arrived in Anchorage, where the capitol had been moved to from Juneau, to place bids for crude from Prudhoe Bay. Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan promised wheat and beef next year in exchange for help refining their petroleum into heating oil this winter. A reporter from Calgary stated that Canadian army units under ‘independent command’ were coordinating resistance against Chinese aggression in British Columbia. Other units from Regina and Winnipeg had linked up in Minot to help put down a violent uprising by the First People’s Army, which had been conducting raids across the border…well, the former border. The Sioux were on the warpath.
It looked like the central part of the continent was pulling together, while the coasts and the southern corners were breaking away. In Atlanta, they talked to a tribal leader of the New African government at a wreath-laying ceremony honoring the 30,000 black victims of racial violence in Los Angeles this past summer. In a gesture of goodwill between their two new nations, 2,400 Mexican citizens who had been detained in Georgia would be released, as soon as someone could come get them. That probably meant never, Kelly thought.
All through the night she listened. In addition to the BBC, there were English language shortwave broadcasts from Calgary, Edmonton, New Brunswick, and St. Louis, she was surprised to hear. Just before dawn she logged a broadcast in English from Beijing, as well, on a frequency listed in a data file on the unencrypted CD-ROM. She probably could find more, she figured, even without having to decipher the Spanish language broadcasts that were plentiful all over the dial.
Kelly made some weak coffee with the same old grounds she had been re-brewing, then showered, dressed, and walked downstairs, careful to avoid looking at the yellow crime scene tape where it had fallen by Jimmy’s door during the night. She heard someone inside his apartment looting, but kept walking. First come, first served. There were no police cars outside that she could see on the gray morning. The cold outside shocked her lungs at the first deep breath. Acting casual, she stuck to her routine. The icy November wind kept her sharp, and she doubted she would be drowsy at work today, even on zero sleep. Her head was full of what she had learned about how the world had changed outside of Utah, err, Deseret. In all likelihood, she could continue to listen and learn, with some discretion, forever, so long as she didn’t actually broadcast and risk giving away her location, as Jimmy had done. No problem there, she had nobody she wanted to talk to, anyway. Even if it was nearly Christmas, as the official government signs everywhere declared. Her head down in the cold, Kelly made it into work before the twelve block hike could numb her toes very much.
Moss Grows Fat On A Rollin’ Stone
From the Bay bridge landing in the Presidio, to the Oakland bridge heading out into burned wasteland being cleared by a thousand uniformed laborers from San Quentin prison, Hu felt like the lord of a medieval realm. During peaceful nights when the gunfire was far away, he imagined that his kingdom, from the Columbia Plateau to Fresno, was truly his own. The peasants with shovels notwithstanding. How could he humanize his tyranny for those who were not Han? Already his troops were stretched thin. If the Russians moved to stop the People’s hegemony over Vladivostok, chances were the Central Committee wouldn’t be sending any more reinforcements to bridge the gap between Seattle and Sacramento. Well, he would just have to make do. Things were tough all over. He kicked the blonde girl in the leg to wake her. “You! Clean up this mess and leave. Take the other with you. You go now.”
He had seen the carnage left behind when the Mexican soldiers had turned on the Anglos down in Twenty-Nine Palms. Not to mention what he had ordered done across the ugly bay, himself. In places along the edges of the streets and sidewalks, gray stains remained from the acid rain runoff. For weeks an intermittent acid wash had pattered ash from the Los Angeles basin fire. Up the coast it had poisoned trees, bushes, and every blade of grass before finally blowing out to see. The weird temperature inversion effect that the locals blamed for “Valley Fever” had trapped a plume of smog over the Central Valley that still hung low in front of the hills. It was not natural to be away from family and friends and society. His sense of alienation, of being disconnected, and lost from the hive, grew like the brown and lifeless vegetation never could. It might be that the landscape stretching as far as his eyes could see, caused by a lack of water pressure or organized firefighting efforts, made his mood worse. It was a small world, after all, and getting smaller by the minute, shrinking in on him then throwing his mind outwards into agoraphobia. Hu’s experiences with Taiwan, Japan, Hawaii, and the Philippines had not prepared him for this. For how…messy San Francisco was to govern. So disorganized. So dirty. Messy with sixteen different nationalities. Unkempt with a dozen languages or more. Chaotic with diversity. A proud Han, he could only feel disdain for these soft and squeamish Americans who had let their land be taken from the. It was ironic, he thought, here he was in America, with an army, but not even fighting Americans, well, not here, anyway. They were all just jackals fighting over the carcass of a dead lion. A dead cat. A kitten, mewling and dying pitifully.
Hu had other worries, besides pollution. Closest to home, how to sort out the Koreans and Japanese and Indians and Pakistanis and other non-Americans. What to do with them? Maybe march them south into what was now really a part of Mexico? Ooops, sorry, they looked brown to me! Or west, into the sea. The gulls were getting raucous and shrill with hunger.
At times like these, he envied his counterparts further behind the front lines. Yes, they had more oversight, people standing right there over their shoulder, judging them, every moment. But at least they weren’t out here so far all alone, as he was. Their biggest problems were trying to hide from foreign media what had happened after the U.S. bases in South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and at Pearl Harbor had surrendered. It had been inevitable due to lack of resupply, once their paler brothers in arms disarmed and left them there, marooned. Once all the personnel who could fly or ship out had escaped, headed east with the Chinese fleet in hot pursuit. Wary of U.S. submarine escorts, the pursuit hadn’t been too hot, granted, once a couple of overzealous cruisers were torpedoed and a flight of Shenyang J15s hadn’t come back to their nest. But in the end, the whole American Pacific fleet, what was left of it, ended up fleeing 2,500 miles north from their defeat at Pearl, to form a defensive arc from the Aleutians to the Queen Charlotte Islands.
He wished now that they could have pursued them and finished the job. Hu didn’t know how this all would end. He didn’t know who was going to win this sorry piece of real estate. He did know that what he had to do was to keep fighting, and fighting, and fighting, and then fight some more. The appointed governor knew that it wouldn’t be over until no Chinese grandmother had to go to sleep at night wondering if she was going to get bombed by an American plane. It wouldn’t be finished until not a single little Chinese child had to worry about being incinerated by a crazy American’s missiles. The fight wouldn’t be done until no sacred porcelain Chinese lady had to worry about a dirty roun
d eye staring at her and wanting to make her his submissive China doll. Some day, that would be the case, because all of these round eyes would be closed, they would be forever DEAD. In the overall picture, in the big scheme of things, that is how it had to be, Hu felt sure. He wasn’t a national separatist. Hu was a non-Chinese extinctionist. He didn’t really like the Mexicans, of course. He did not like them living in Chinese nations, just as they did not want him living in theirs. He wouldn’t want them marrying his daughters, just as they would not want him marrying theirs. But, anybody willing to carry out human wave attacks to kill Whites, was alright by him.
The naval warfare for control of the Pacific had stalemated once it became clear that the humanitarian efforts of the peaceloving People’s Republic would extend to California, despite its’ losses along the way. Like two wounded animals, the American and Chinese fleets kept their distance, and eyed each other vengefully. And so his thoughts grew morbid with dread. His malaise, these days, bordered on depression. There was no way that he could sacrifice the manpower to put out the fires of resistance smoldering in the mountains and forests of the wet north. There was no way he could continue to feed his millions of hungry, greedy, whiny peasants. Every day the strain hurt his head more.
The homosexual freaks wanted to hold a parade, of all things, to celebrate ‘global unity’, and had sent a ridiculously flamboyant spokes-thing to plead for permission to do that monstrosity. It even had offered a most unusual bribe, even for Hu, a veteran of the graftfueled spoils system of Party politics. He’d had it killed, cleanly.
Admiral Liu, chief of the People’s Humanit arian Foreign Aid Task Force fleet, technically had the unenviable duty of delegating responsibility for organizing the impossible logistics. They could ship in enough food and water to keep the rations flowing, but Hu was under pressure to persuade these Americans of the Party’s benevolent intent. Thus, he was to stop, for example, minor crimes such as the painting of racist slogans over Chinese-American friendship posters from escalating into sabotaging of the struggling water treatment facilities. That was harder to do when people were hungry.
As Hu walked slowly downstairs to dinner, he felt the weight of the world, or a good chunk of it, on his carefully tailored, but slept in, suit’s shoulders. He wasn’t hungry, unlike most people in California tonight, but dinner was a state function, a ritual. Rituals must be observed.
The Darkness Drops Again
Alexander City got its drinking water from Lake Martin, so the town wasn’t thirsty, yet. There were no lights, though, and hadn’t been since September. Generators powered the water plant, and a few battery recharging sites, along with the police station and clinic. The police chief had closed all of the service stations in town and confiscated the fuel before the tanks were emptied, so they still had gas. Joe Don was glad the power was out as he and the boys drove south on Highway 9 for a long-delayed trip to Montgomery. He kept his headlights off and drove by the light of the round moon, keeping it under thirty just in case there might be something in the road. There was no other traffic, like usual. Almost nobody had gas, except the rich and the stingy, and even they only had it for emergencies.
When the bluegum porch-monkeys had taken over the state legislature and declared martial law, most of the Klansmen like Joe Don in the area had gone to ground. Some had grabbed their bug-out bags and split, but many of them who jumped too quick got caught up in the massive traffic jam of Whites trying to get out of Birmingham as it went up behind them. Being stuck between two big black urban areas was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they couldn’t really go anywhere. Only a few people with private planes had made it out once the zoo gates broke open. On the other hand, the zombie hordes hadn’t come out this far looking for brains. They mostly stayed put and tormented the poor White idiots stuck in there with them. Folks took care of their own, and had potlucks when they could. Some families doubled up, abandoning the harder to maintain homes. They bartered and donated when they needed to, and generally had gotten by, except for the very old or sickly. A couple of the local churches had suddenly gone back to their roots and started teaching against interracial marriage and homosexuality, after one of the bigger congregations in town that had welcomed mixed race couples had suffered a late night fire, perhaps linked to a cross lighting. Those churches began to help the local community with free stores, food baskets, and collections for the needy.
The real change came when groups of activists from the Southern Impoverished Legal Committee, the S.I.L.C., began visiting schools throughout the state. Acting on ‘anonymous tips’ about child ‘psychological abuse’ or neglect, they would show up at the classroom door with a black police officer, or a ‘deputized’ group of black youths. Typically, they had a list of the children of people in the community who held ‘politically incorrect’ views. Many of those lists came from the rosters of the local Republican Party, or Tea Party group, or known NRA supporters. The S.I.L.C. representative would demand that the teacher release a specific child to them for ‘counseling’. The child would be taken to a private room, where behind locked doors they would be asked whether their parents ever used racial slurs at home, or owned guns, or prayed. Most school administration and teachers were intimidated into going along with the interrogations.
If the children gave in to the browbeating and the directed, leading questioning about whether their parents liked the President or people of different races, the next step was taken. Their parents received letters of summons from Child Protective Services, followed by an unannounced visitation. Their homes were inspected to make sure that the children’s safe environment didn’t include any firearms or right wing extremist literature the children might have access to. The new black government rubber-stamped all of the S.I.L.C. actions, since they were no longer under the old U.S. Constitution with its protective Bill of Rights. Alabama, after all, wasn’t a part of the United States, any more.
When Joe Don’s third grade daughter got off the school bus crying one day, he found out about what the S.I.L.C. was doing. Alone in her bedroom, his wife was able to get out of the little girl that the big black counselor man and the black policeman had asked her all about if her family was in the Klan, did her daddy ever tell her not to have black friends, and had she ever heard anything racist being said at home. They also had asked her how often his friends came over, and what they talked about.
His wife’s ashen facial color and trembling shoulders told him that there was much more to it than that, though. As he sat impatiently wanting her to tell him everything that their daughter had been asked, and everything that had happened, she finally started crying. “One of them asked our baby if we would like it if she liked girls instead of boys, and when she said ‘no’…” she broke down sobbing in anger and shock.
“What!?! What did they say?” Joe Don asked with a rising sense of urgency. “Oh, it’s not just what they said, they told her that was good, because her mommy and daddy would like her to like boys, like them, and since they were boys, they could show her what boys liked..”
“They did what? They said that? If they touched her I’ll find them both and I swear to God I’ll…” Joe Don felt strangled, like the room was collapsing in on him. “She’s EIGHT!” he screamed.
“Well, she said the school shop teacher and the football coach kicked the door in and made them stop talking to her then, and she says there was a fight and the black councilor man and the black policeman left. But they said they were coming back, Joe Don. Even if we pull her out of school, they know where we live. What are we gonna do? How are we going to protect my baby girl?” she sobbed in despair.
Joe Don hugged her tight. “That’s my job, you don’t worry about nothin’.”. He then went and gave his daughter a big hug and told her that she hadn’t done anything wrong, that everything was going to be okay, and nobody was going to hurt her. Once she had fallen asleep, he picked up the truck keys and told his wife he was going to make a few house calls.
His
Knighthawk Roy shifted next to him, and, pointing his shotgun up towards the roof of the cab, pulled a can of skoal out of his shirt pocket. One of his last log. It was a special occasion. They were going hunting. Joe Don grinned. The only radio stations still playing he could pick up were blaring hip hop and rap, so he let an old Johnny Rebel CD slide into the stereo and keep him awake as they sliced through the night.
Normally on a hunting trip like this, the rest of his boys would ride in the back of his pickup and scream their rebel yells into the wind, but it was a bit nippley for all that tonight. The new Mayor of Montgomery was planning on giving a speech tomorrow morning announcing the citywide Kwanzaa celebration schedule for next month. Joe Don and his redneck revolutionaries intended to put a damper on the plans.
The only kind of jobs still available for Whites in Alabama, New Africa, were in menial positions no black man wanted, such as waiters and janitors. That explained the strange mixture of greasy coveralls and bow ties that crowded the other two pickups. This was a bonafide mission, not a cross lighting where robes and hoods would suit. The back of the trucks were each filled with six barrels of diesel fuel, and ten fifty pound bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Some assorted electronic devices rounded off the list of goodies covered with tarps, on their way for delivery. Mohammed Jarvis might be planning a Kwanzaa, but they were bringing him a Christmas. Joe Don was even wearing a red Santa Claus hat, just for the occasion. Behind the three pickup trucks painted to advertise a local catering service, two stolen school buses filled with their closest kin followed at a distance.
They had C.B.’s, but only for life and death situations would they use them and risk being caught. So, communication was confined to within the trucks, for the trip.