The Hasten the Day Trilogy

by Billy Roper

  He had learned to sit and listen, until the blowhards ran out of steam, then deliver a punchline. The media in the galleries loved that, for the succinct one-liners it gave them as copy. True to form, the delegate from Nebraska was reluctant to commit herself, rearing reprisals from the S.A.C. forces holding her state’s capital. John would gladly go back to a field command, if they would let him, but he had begun to feel that what he was supposed to be doing here was important, more important than any single counterinsurgency campaign or siege. At any rate, the Governor of the Hoosier state had handpicked him, the Colonel had said, due to statewide media’s hero worship of McNabb after the battles of Gary and Chicago. He was stuck being a delegate ‘under the arch’, as his fellow conventioneers had taken to calling it.

  McNabb quietly rose and visited the restroom (inside!), then eased out past the Missouri State Police guards for a smoke. They recognized him, as most people did these days, and his uniform, waving him through without missing a beat. A dingy blanket of snow hid the wreckage of East St. Louis across the river, and except for the lack of much civilian traffic, things looked normal. He took a hard, long drag on the menthol, hotboxing it. Well, there was a heavy military presence on the street, and more bicycles and horses than anything else except for army trucks and Humvees. Okay, almost normal. The garbage was being picked up around the city, the entire county had been cleared, and people were moving in instead of moving out, for a change. That was progress.

  It was cold out side, and in him, too. The Major didn’t need the Barbie inside his left uniform jacket pocket to remind him of the gnawing hole behind it. He lived with it, every moment. Every blink he was haunted by the faces of his girls. He closed his eyes for a lingering blink in a momentary prayer. He feared forgetting what their voices sounded like, more than anything else. Leaning back against the chilly granite wall of the Old Courthouse, he inhaled hard on the menthol again, then flicked it away with a practiced flair.

  Like most urban areas, there had been hard fighting, here. Fire smudges, smoke stains, and boarded up windows still showed the scars of the battles waged by White Nationalists from a dozen different organizations who had taken back the downtown. St. Louis was now 98% White, and most of the other two percent were foreign media types and diplomats from other nations, looking to get in on the ground floor of this new enterprise they smelled cooking up. The city was back up to about 40% of its pre-collapse population, around 150,000, and growing every day as merchants, traders, and whole families seeking stability and security moved in to fill the vacant homes, apartments, and stores through City government permitted squatter’s rights. The Major, as a state delegate, had been assigned a free room at the Hyatt Regency, along with adjoining rooms on each side for his security retinue. Other state representatives occupied rooms there, as well as at the Drury Plaza. It was a short walk from his room to the Old Courthouse where he spent fifteen hours every day, and not much further to the open rummage sale and farmer’s market going on day and night at Busch Stadium, which served as the post-apocalyptic Wal-Mart.

  As he reluctantly went back in, McNabb was hit by a wall of welcoming heated air. A moment later, the buzz of animated conversation met him. He thought, optimistically, that the petty conniptions going on inside represented the birthing pangs of a new nation. He didn’t really care if he ended up being stuck here for the rest of the winter, but he did idly wonder how his men were doing, back home. Had they cleared out and cleaned up, Chicago, yet? The temporary markers on his family’s graves obsessed him, they had to be replaced with something more permanent. Oh, well, back to work.

  Western Pennsylvania, outside of the U.N. area of control, was represented, and stood with the delegate from Ohio, and McNabb, and Illinois as a solid block in the convention. Iowa, Missouri, and Michigan usually agreed with them, as well. But other states that weren’t divided, such as Kansas and Wisconsin, opposed allowing divided states like Pennsylvania, Arkansas, and Tennessee to have equal representation. Same as it ever was. The Major thought that cordoned off hellhole around Milwaukee took as big a chink out of Wisconsin, and Topeka and Kansas City out of Kansas, as Memphis’s mass grave took out of Tennessee. It was all silly. It was all necessary. It occupied his mind.

  Some of the most bitter debates mattered the least. How should they reword the second amendment to make it clearer to future generations of wimps that it was an unlimited individual right under discussion? What amendments after the first ten should be kept, and which, like the fourteenth, should be scrapped? They were really getting ahead of themselves, John knew.

  In a few more days, McNabb had developed a plan to keep himself distracted from his loss. He would ignore his guilt by staying busy pushing for a consolidation of military commands of all the represented states and territories. Tirelessly, he began to lobby for a ‘unified command’. They could wait until later to settle the question of whether legitimate armed forces authority lay with Omaha, or Texas, or Anchorage, or with the U.S. forces co-opted by the U.N. With the strongest remaining authority in each state being the National Guards and Expanded private militias and in some cases County Sheriff departments, it was a hard sell. But there was little civilian authority left to oppose the centralization of power, and no representatives from Alaska, Texas, S.A.C., or the U.N. to lobby against the idea. Before a national civil government was re-established, before economic trade pacts were codified, it made sense to provide for the common defense.

  One of the aspects of the Major’s plan which helped it sell itself to the convention was the opportunity for local and state authority to integrate the many private militias into their chains of command. Most of these paramilitary groups had been around before the collapse, led by preppers and gun enthusiasts and military veterans. Some of them had been survivalists, or sovereign citizen advocates, while others were strict Constitutionalists. Some were libertarians, or White Nationalists, and others were patriot groups similar to the older Tea Party organizations. Many had an apocalyptic worldview, and had been flooded with an exponential growth of new recruits as the collapse became apparent. Once it had happened, they had been forced to turn people away, or be selective. Many of them were well armed, combat experienced, and swollen to company strength or greater.

  McNabb played an ace when he paraded in some of the better groomed commanding officers from the Missouri Militia 3rd Battalion 2nd Brigade, the Yorkville, Illinois militia, the Lenawee Militia from Michigan, the Illinois Sons of Liberty 1st Battalion Alpha Company, the Michigan Militia Corps Wolverines, and the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia one day; and the Missouri Militia 1st Battalion 3rd Brigade, the Ohio Defense Force Home Guard 3rd and 1st Battalions, and even the Idaho Lightfoot Militia, from the area north of Mormon control. Over the two days of testimony, they each took an oath to defend and obey the civilian authority of the convention, and to submit themselves to an integrated unified command structure. That dampened most of the fears that some held about the militias, especially once it became clear that those militia groups who didn’t play ball could be corralled by those who would.

  In many areas of the U.S., a power vacuum had occurred shortly after the collapse. Some places held on longer than others, some still held on to law and order, and others panicked and fell headlong into anarchy. In many regions, that power vacuum had been filled by bad guys, by demagogues and warlords and power hungry outlaws, either in uniform, or in business suits. Some of those areas had been regained by the militias and racialist groups who had re-established civilian authority. A couple of them had been better prepared to fill that vacuum, than others. A five County area along the Arkansas/Missouri border had become the undisputed territory of The Knights Committee, for example. Another Klan group had filled the power vacuum in Columbia, and were doing okay.

  The St. Louis Post-Dispatch had become the largest still functioning newspaper in the Heartland, maybe in all of the formerly United States. With the liberal media truncated, there was a vacuum to fill. Most of the me
dia networks had expired with their offices and equipment, and studios and resources lost, and in many cases their leading personnel making Aliyah to Israel or in hiding, if they had not fallen victim to the rioting and ethnic cleansing in the cities. Most of the media bosses were dead, or out of the country on permanent vacation. Some had watched the mobs crawl over the walls of their gated communities and swarm over their manicured lawns. Many of them, like Eisner and Bronfman and Siegel and Levin, eventually disappeared in the overlapping mushroom clouds engulfing Tel Aviv. The correspondents and reporters left unemployed cast about for a medium to write or broadcast for during the breakup summer. As word spread of the consolidation of power at the convention in St. Louis, the Post Dispatch staff became the elite of the national media, and developed a sideline local television station. It provided local news and city government programs, as well as entertainment, in between weather reports and rebroadcasts of BBC international news, in a fifty mile radius to everyone with power, a t.v. set, and a digital antenna. It also simulcast on a 100,000 watt AM radio station which covered most of the Midwest.

  The military, especially the National Guard, was already popular in St. Louis. Most towns and cities still safe for Whites were kept calm by patrols of armed citizen militias, expanded police and Sheriff’s departments, or by White skinheads, Klansmen, or other longtime racial activists. The prominent presence of official National Guardsmen was welcome. On the Post-Dispatch radio and t.v. programs, and through the print pages of the paper, McNabb’s celebrity grew. Reporters breathlessly covering every jot of the convention seized upon the fame of the “Guardsman of Gary”. They blew up his celebrity as he rose to prominence through his advocacy of a unified command.

  At a New Year’s Eve dinner party, the highest ranking U.S. Air Force officer in the Midwest made a surprise announcement. As a major blow to Omaha’s claim to authority, Lt. General Nathaniel Harrison, in charge at Wright-Patterson in Ohio, declared that he was transferring an entire U.S. Air Force wing under his independent authority to Lambert Field in St. Louis. The combined force, gathered from the remnants and survivors of various air bases around the nation which had been evacuated or mutinied, was significant. Two thousand military personnel, including a fighter squadron of twentyone F-16s, twelve C-130s, seven C-5 Galaxies, three KC-135 refueling craft, and a squadron of thirteen F-15 Strike Eagles were putting some meat on the theoretical bones of the unified command. McNabb got the call the next day, and smiled for the first time in a very long time. What a way to start the new year off right!

  One of the huge worries on John’s mind had been the U.S.’s vast nuclear assets. What if those were lost, or turned once again on their own people? Warren Air Force Base outside Cheyenne and Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana had both refused to get involved in the chain of command fight between Omaha and Colorado Springs. When Omaha used the nuclear option against its adversary, though, both base commanders had resigned their commissions in protest. They apparently had been in back and forth discussions of the situation, and reached a mutual agreement to take that step, simultaneously. One had even dramatically committed suicide over it, the poor old soldier. General Harrison communicated his intent to join the Unified Command to the Colonel and Major, respectively, who had assumed commands of the two crucial strategic missile bases at Warren and Malmstrom. They both willingly subsumed their commands to Harrison. That secured the three-hundred and twenty LGM-30 Minutemen, and their five hundred nuclear warheads. The hundreds of silos scattered across Northern Colorado, Southeast Wyoming, Western Nebraska, and central Montana were securely under the control of forces loyal to New America.

  The B-52H StratoFortress bombers at Barksdale Air Base near Shreveport had been able to evacuate, taking with them all of the on-base AGM-129 ACM cruise missiles, each loaded with a W80-1 variable yield nuclear warhead, to Minot Air Force Base in loyal North Dakota. Minot’s base commander subsumed those assets to Gen. Harrison’s overview, as well. The Barksdale Base crews hadn’t had much choice, once Louisiana’s state legislature had joined Mississippi’s in voting to secede from the United States and joined in the formation of ‘New Africa’. Most of the White base personnel got out alive and headed north.

  The Major General in command of the Indiana National Guard, a major fan of John’s, responded, along with the commanders of the Guard in Illinois and Ohio, by nationalizing his command (with the Governor’s reluctant approval) under the auspices of the U.S. Army. Technically, this rendered Lt. General Harrison the highest ranking U.S. military officer recognized by the convention, which may have been just what he had calculated. Harrison was unanimously declared the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, absent any civilian executive. One of his first acts was to give an immediate promotion to Lt. Col. to John W. McNabb. This came as a direct result of his status as a hero and celebrity. He only cared because that strengthened his position as a lobbyist for finalizing the Unified Command.

  Vexed To Nightmare By A Rocking Cradle

  “He is the most dashing and eligible widower in the city”, the Post -Dispatch assignment editor had told Caroline McKenzie, the young city beat reporter. “After all, with your t.v. exposure down to co-anchoring a half hour news program on the EBS broadcasts locally, you need all of the exposure you can get.” Carolyn rolled her eyes dramatically.

  “Hey, don’t forget getting to pick the lottery winners every week”, she joked. “is this a puff piece, or a real interview that you want?”

  “You can be hardball if you want”, the tired editor sighed, rubbing his temples, “but remember that the freedom of the press is a fragile thing here and now, so don’t push it. Also, keep in mind that this guy may be the closest thing to a genuine war hero, celebrity, and future founding father all rolled up into one, tigress!” Caroline purred, then growled, making a catlike swiping motion with her red polished nails. They both chuckled tiredly. She would get the interview. There was no doubt about it.

  She had never been so scared as when the mixed group of ‘Bloods’ gang members and uniformed black city police officers had stormed into the CNN studios. They had been ordered, at gunpoint, to not broadcast any news story which hadn’t been pre-approved by the Mayor’s office. Two days later, Atlanta had been locked down by the black Chief of Police, and a curfew declared for all White citizens. As in other areas of the country, the brutally effective terror method of raping White women became the standard operating procedures of the new regime. Carolyn and four other CNN bureau reporters bribed one of the station’s helicopter pilots to fly them out of the city. All of the White staff wanted to leave, but some of them couldn’t be trusted because they had been too chummy with the minority staff employees and anchors, and others had their families there, and wouldn’t leave town without being able to take them, too. So, only the handful who gathered on the CNN headquarters roof at the edge of the helipad had been told exactly when and how they planned to make their escape. Fortunately, the big Bell 407 could hold them all, along with their luggage, and had a range of almost 300 miles, fully loaded. They all wanted to go north, across the state line, and out of the black controlled areas. Unlike so many of the other staff, Carolyn was from Chattanooga, where her family still lived. She would be the first one dropped off.

  Two months later, the Chattanooga Times newspaper she had been writing for since returning home gave her the present of putting her in touch with the Post-Dispatch editorial staff. Although they hated to see her go, they were proud to have her accepted as a city reporter in St. Louis. Once again Carolyn gave her dad a hug and kissed her mom goodbye, then climbed aboard the big truck headed to Arnold Air Force base, where she would catch a ride to Whiteman, and then a ride from there in another military convoy to St. Louis, all based on being an “embedded CNN war correspondent” using her old credentials. The ruse worked, and got her there, and she did write up the stories of her trip for the PostDispatch, but she hoped the guys she had lied to along the way didn’t mind, too much.

  C
hapter Eight

  "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [blacks] are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them." --Thomas Jefferson

  A Shape With Lion Body And The Head Of A Man

  The new Lt. Col, adjusted his shiny new silver leaves that had replaced the gold ones. He was amused at how fast he’d been promoted, twice in a row. After they had cleaned out two more riotous neighborhoods around the new capital, as everybody already thought of St. Louis, most of his old company had been sent back to continue rounding up “suspected terrorists” in Indiana. The rough crew was now under the command of the new Captain who had been given his old bars, the poor kid. He hadn’t really understood at first why Kip, now a Corporal, and a squad of five of his men had been ordered to stick beside him in St. Louis. He didn’t feel like his new assignment as an appointed delegate needed a staff, or a bodyguard unit. But after they settled into their three rooms, he didn’t having them around. The city could be lonely. They had known him when he was just a school principal, so they helped keep him humble. Now, he had an entourage, he considered with good humor. That was especially true on days like today, when reporters kept sending messengers requesting an interview. Even though he kept sending back the same negative response by return courier, it cost him a .22 long rifle round for every message. By the time Kip had turned red in the face from the constant knocks on the door by messengers, he had stopped responding. Take a hint. Take a nap. Take a valium. Jeesh. Give it a rest.