The Hasten the Day Trilogy

by Billy Roper

  Kelly put on her housecoat and another pair of socks to ward off the chill, then slipped out and across the unheated hall to knock on the flaking metal door. Mrs. Murphy it on the second knock, as if her coughing had been a none-too-subtle plea for attention. Well, at least somebody is lonelier than me, Kelly thought. The older woman turned wordlessly from the doorway, waving Kelly in. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness and gloom, they rested for a moment on a picture on the bookshelf. It was of Emma. Emma smiling, her childhood friend happy before the drugs, before the partying, and before the Kenyan “International Student” who had been Emma’s boyfriend. The one who had ended up passing her around like a party favor to all of his third world brothers in the Black Student Union. Kelly preferred to think of Emma as the bright-eyed and happy girl she had grown up with, the girl who had won the sixth grade spelling bee, and played junior varsity volleyball. The cheerleader, not the girl the police had asked her to come and identify because her mom couldn’t be found that night. Mrs. Murphy blamed herself for what had happened to her daughter. She had often said so. Although it was obviously what she was looking for, Kelly had never bothered to disagree with her.

  “How are you today, Moms?” Kelly asked the shuffling shadow retreating down the hall to her recliner.

  “Oh, my arthritis gave me such fits last night, it was so cold, I hardly heard when you came in so close to curfew.” Mrs. Murphy whined. “That damn quack doctor won’t refill my pain pill prescriptions.” She droned on…“AND I went to bed hungry again because not all of us are lucky enough to have one of those fancy government employee ration cards for all the food we can stuff down our gullets.” As Mrs. Murphy ran through her ritualistic litany of ailments, aches, and pains, Kelly thought back to how Emma would often end up staying at her house when they were growing up. Many nights there had been no one home at Emma’s, to watch her. She had never complained about her mom’s drinking, or carousing, or bringing home different guys all the time. Emma had kept it all inside. Her dad had long ago given up and left, after one too many affairs became obvious. The courts had granted him no custodial rights, not even visitation. Mrs. Murphy had used the child support money for booze and pills.

  It was for Emma’s sake that Kelly had helped her mom get the apartment as it had come open. The girls had grown apart by then, not seeing much of each other, headed in different directions. Emma hung out with a different crowd every week, just to be accepted and loved. Her dating profile was equally desperate and flighty. Kelly seldom dated and preferred her own company. They hadn’t had any classes together, that last semester.

  Kelly came back to the present with a start. She snapped to with a shudder as she realized that Mrs. Murphy had asked her, in turn, how she was. Kelly said “fine”, then abruptly excused herself to go get ready for work. Her compassion had been exhausted more quickly than usual, today.

  The police made three arrests in the case, but had failed to take the three African students’ passports, so they made bail with the help of a Jewish lawyer hired by the University, the International Students Association, and the “Freedom for Fayed” campus fundraiser. They all hopped the next plane to Nairobi. Had that really been three years ago, already?

  As she left for work, Kelly placed a roast beef sandwich left over from last night’s supper, wrapped in a handkerchief, on the floor next to Mrs. Murphy’s apartment door. She knocked once, then walked quickly down the landing stairs in order to avoid another confrontation. It looked like somebody had been moved into empty and thoroughly looted apartment downstairs. Her breath clouded as soon as she reached the front door. She pushed it open and tested the slush with her boot. Not too slippery.

  Her morning walks to work were usually quiet. They gave her time to contemplate the differences between the reality of America, post-collapse, with the kind of Zombie Apocalypse or Global Pandemic or Nuclear Warfare scenarios she had read about before the fecal matter had hit the oscillating wind optimizer. This wasn’t the Walking Dead, more like The Walking Dread, she mused. Kelly vaguely remembered having read a nonfiction book about the Balkanization of America, what had it been called? “Civil War Two”, she thought, by somebody named Thomas Chisum…no, Chittum, that was it. Well, Mr. Chittum never saw Deseret coming back, did he? Who had?

  Kelly knew that history was full of historical events which nobody had seen coming. Most of them, people never would have believed were possible, beforehand. Imagine, she pondered, going back in time and telling a KGB officer in the Kremlin in 1985 that in a few short years, the U.S.S.R. would cease to exist, without a missile being fired? Or telling an East German yearning for freedom and McDonald’s that the Berlin Wall was going to be coming down in less than a decade? They wouldn’t have believed her. Hell, if somebody had told her a year ago that her country was going to come apart at the seams, she wouldn’t have believed it, either. She’d have laughed. But yeah, as a Monday morning quarterback, it looked like it had been inevitable, and people should have seen it coming from a long way off. Maybe ever since 1965 and the Hart-Celler immigration act that completely changed who was flooding into the U.S., and from where…or maybe all the way back another century, the fourteenth amendment, that had changed the definition of who could be an American citizen, to include nonWhites, for the first time. Kelly wasn’t really a scholar of history, and didn’t know.

  When the first serious moves for secessions began the summer before, and the increasingly nervous newscasters started using the word “Balkanization”, Kelly had Googled the term, and found many historic examples of multiracial empires breaking up into more homogeneous, racially based and smaller states. Sometimes she found that it had happened relatively peacefully, like when Kemal Ataturk had had the wisdom and courage to dismantle the Ottoman Empire after World War One, and created Turkey and its’ neighbors. Sometimes it got pretty nasty, as had happened in the Yugoslavian Civil War in the 1990’s. That was the most obvious example, and where the term “Balkanization” had gotten its’ name, she had learned. From what she knew of the here- and-now, the kind of ethnic cleansing going on in the former U.S. topped what had happened in Kosovo, but the internet was no longer around for her to double-check that guess. Kelly raised her head and walked on down the sidewalk.

  Not able to focus on the more academic subject of the inherent instability of multiracial societies, her mind skipped a track like a scratched CD, to Emma again. The newly opened Brotherhood Butcher Shop in the old “Starbucks” storefront had her humming a stupid Lady Gaga song that she and Emma used to sing together, at full volume, using their hairbrushes as microphones, as they’d danced in her bedroom. That was before Kelly had begun to read mythology and philosophy and Emma had started hanging out with the stoner and skater crowd. Mrs. Murphy had never cared when her daughter had started going out and staying out later and later. She had just put Emma on the pill. No, Mrs. Murphy hadn’t been upset when she had found that Mexican boy from the day laborer camp in Emma’s room, either, Kelly thought back with a shudder. The mother’s lifestyle had been liberal before, by mainstream standards. The only that Emma had known to rebel against that was to try and test just how liberal her mom could be. There had never been a limit. Now, she was dead for it.

  Kelly was surprised to look up and find herself nearly at the office, already. She would have killed for a cup of coffee, but that cost you fifty bucks, a week of hard labor in jail, and your job. That is, if you had one, in Salt Lake City, these days. If you didn’t, you didn’t eat, unless you worked for the state or the church, one way or another. Oh well. Squaring her shoulders, she pasted on a smile, and walked on in.

  Chapter Nine

  “We must reach out to our people. We must alert them. We must educate them. We must encourage them. We must inspire them. And here's a beautiful, wonderful thing: when you reach out to other people to encourage them and inspire them, you yourself will be encouraged and inspired. When you find out how many other people there are who share our concerns, our feelings,
our values, our sense of responsibility, you cannot help but be encouraged. Even the hatred that you encounter from some people -- especially from people in the controlled media -- will be encouraging. For you will understand that they would not hate us so much if they did not fear us. And the reason that they fear us is that deep inside them they know that what we say is true. So let's get out there -- all of us -- and start looking for encouragement!” –Dr. William L. Pierce

  Lenin Read A Book On Marx

  The Alaskan wilderness might have retreated, but not by much. Why they had been sent up here on this fool’s errand was a mystery to the Navy Operations Specialist. As he closed the stiffly creaking door of the tracked truck, Rick was surprised to see a hairy bear of a man up on a rough timber rafter. He appeared to be sinking nails into a ceiling joist. He called up to the man, who looked more like a lumberjack than a carpenter. The man answered, and he was given permission to come up. Yeah, it was that kind of day.

  Perched on top of the ladder, Rick introduced himself and did his best sales pitch. The Navy needed all of the electronics and computer experts they could muster from the civilian side, to help transfer their logistical framework computation systems and data centers to dry land. That had heard that he was one of the best. Could he help his country?

  “Yes, I am, but no, right now as you can see I’m trying to build a cabin by myself, with my fourteen year old boy helping, for me and him and my wife. If you noticed, it’s snowing, and my roof isn’t done. Or my walls.” The burly man said, with more than a little frustration in his voice. He pushed his glasses back up his nose and patted snow out of his beard. “I’m not going nowhere until I finish that.”

  Rick thought quickly. “Well, Mr. Rohm, my tracktruck made it up this hill okay. If you’ll go down with me today and take a look at the servers we’re setting up in the hockey field house, and see if you can help us with the hardware and the coding interface, I know a whole lot of bored sailors with nothing much to do who I can have up here tomorrow to finish your cabin for you.”

  A rare flash of teeth glinted in the brushy face. “Alright, you’ve got a deal. But they stay until I say they’re finished, agreed?” Rick closed the deal: “Agreed, Mr. Rohm”. They climbed down the ladder, then shook hands on it. The local cop who had known where to find the prepper computer specialist looked very cramped as the four of them, Rohm and his son Alec and the policeman and Rick, squeezed into the cab for the braking grind and slide back down the rock-strewn canyon trail. But the lieutenant was pleased to have another civilian expert on the team, especially when he heard about the bartered labor in payment for services rendered. The next morning, twenty-three able seamen volunteered to get out their barracks. Rick trundled them, two at a time with their tools borrowed form an abandoned construction site, up the hill to do their part. It took them six days, but they got the job done, to the owner’s satisfaction.

  Rohm was pleased that his cabin was finished, following one setback after another. Over a barbecued goat dinner that next weekend, he told Rick that he might be crazy to wait until January in Alaska to build a homestead, but the timing hadn’t fully been his choosing. The computer expert sat by the fire in his new fireplace and waxed rhetorical about how he wished that he could go back and warn people of what was coming, and of what the high costs of open immigration would be for their country. Rick didn’t say so in order to not offend his gracious host (the goat was much better than he had feared), but he knew that being able to tell them, well, it wouldn’t do any good. Kind of like that story in the Bible about the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man, in Hell, looks up to see Lazarus in Heaven, and asks first for a drop of water, then if maybe somebody could warn his relatives to repent…and Lazarus had said that it wouldn’t do any good, basically. He remembered that from Sunday School. People just don’t care, for the most part, until a problem is right there on their doorstep, Rick knew. Why, worse than that, it had to barge right in the door and make itself at home, like Mr. Rohm and his son and wife were doing in their new cabin, before they even noticed there was a problem. Most of them were too chicken to admit the truth, anyway, back then. Besides, there had always been people warning them. Most people had just called them evil racist Nazis and ignored them. Nobody was ignoring them now. Heck, pretty much every body still alive WAS one, now.

  Tommy’s opinion of human nature was p retty low, and he had told Rick that he thought most people were sheep, not really able to make the most important basic decisions about their lives, much less any decisions that affected anybody else’s. Rick could tell that Tommy wasn’t a Democrat. Neither of them, to be honest, had much faith in what passed for “democracy”, at all. Mob rule, it was, driven by demagoguery or celebrity or fame, and all too easily manipulated by the media and people in power. The vast majority of folks just needed to be led, and told what to do, for their own good, and for the greater good of the larger group, the way he figured it. It seemed like now, they were just as willing to do what the people making the hard decisions about detainments and detentions and curfews and racial hygiene laws and ethnic cleansing told them to do, as they had been eager to do what the anti-racist politically correct had told them to do, when they had been in charge. That said something. The Enclosures south of Anchorage, where the native Inuit and Eskimos from within a hundred mile radius of the city had been relocated to, were proof of that. But no, people had been warned. The Klan and skinheads and internet White Separatist sites had been saying it for years, with few listeners. The people had heard. They had just been too scared or lazy to pay attention. Now, they sure were. They were seeking out the groups that had been preparing for this kind of thing, waiting for a Zombie Apocalypse or Tribulation or Armageddon or Racial Holy War or Civil War Two all along, and asking “Okay, What Now?”. “You were right. Oops. Sorry. So, what do we do now”…and they were getting organized and told what to do, now.

  Rohm continued to work for the Navy, as did a large number of civilians, and was paid in fish and free heating oil and jenny fuel, like everybody else. But there were only so many cabins to build. All throughout the late winter the sailors and Marines and airmen grew restless. Few deserted during the coldest weeks of the winter. For many, however, only the weather and the distance from home kept them around until Spring. As far as winters went, it was the lowest morale point for American armed forces since Valley Forge.

  A Quartet Practiced In The Park

  Dozens of U.S. Navy ships kept the ice broken patrolling from the Aleutians to northern British Columbia. All winter long, back and forth. Three or four times they rendezvoused with a Russian frigate or one of the three “Ohio” class submarines still in service in the Pacific. Two others had been sunk by Chinese action, one had been damaged and forced to scuttle. Four others were still quietly patrolling, refusing to break radio silence to acknowledge any authority in the broken chain of command except the Commander in Chief, who wasn’t saying much from wherever her corpse had been carried off to by the looters of D.C.. The rest, another half dozen boats, had redeployed to the Atlantic and accepted U.N. command. The lone exception was the U.S.S. Nebraska, which had surfaced coming up the Mississippi after going through the Gulf of Mexico. She and her arsenal, including fourteen ballistic nuclear missiles with fifty nuclear warheads, docked to unload its crew at the Port of Metropolitan St. Louis. The announcement of that docking shocked the world. The single negotiated redeployment made the new Unified Command of what the global media was beginning to call more and more “New America”, (after the term used by Lt. Col. John W. McNabb in a speech before delegates of a convention of Midwestern states in St. Louis) a power with mobile nuclear deterrent. Somehow, the hundreds of nuclear missiles in their silos at Malmstrom and Minot and Warren Air Bases, even though solidly under New American command when it all shook out, didn’t make as big an impression on the remaining world powers as the Nebraska did.

  With the Seventh and Third fleets close to mutiny over the lack of direct sustained action
against the Chinese, a decision was made at the Vice-Admiralty level. The sanctimonious idiots in Omaha had attempted to order the U.S. Navy Pacific Command to continue to stand down. The U.S. Strategic Command didn’t want to be upstaged by the swabbies. This conflict led to a spokesman for Offutt Air Base, the Strategic Command headquarters, pointing to Colorado Springs as an example of what could happen to Anchorage, if the Seventh and Third continued to maintain an independent command. Making such a threat through an e-mailed interview with the BBC was an error, because the civilian population of Anchorage reacted with fury. The U.S. Navy was forced to either act, or abandon their land base in Alaska. Vice Admiral Woods was in a corner, and he knew he would have to fight his way out.

  The Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army suddenly stopped counter-signing any communiques from Offutt, demonstrating more instability of the command structure there. It was unclear who was in charge, or what their intentions were. Perth was notified, as were St. Louis, London, New York, and Brussels, as a courtesy. When Offutt next gave out a press release in which the board of Air Force brass there calling themselves the Joint Chiefs of Staff made their next threat, it was too much. “If the rogue elements of the U.S. naval command in the northern Pacific region act unilaterally, outside of legitimate Joint Chiefs of Staff command, those vessels and their crews will be considered in mutiny against the line of succession approved military command of U.S. armed forces, as defined under the preservation of powers directives.” It stated in garbled military bureaucratic legalese. It was a threat, obviously, to Woods, signed by the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force. It was a huge gamble. And it was their last mistake.