The Hasten the Day Trilogy

by Billy Roper

  “I see a change is coming to our lives

  It's not the same as it used to be

  And it's not too late to realize our mistake

  We're just not right for each other…”

  But at least, she thought, at least instead of wondering what happened, people have finally gotten around to wondering what’s going to happen next. And while Elvis sang, Kelly typed her heart out, for them, in rhythm. Thank you, thank you very much.

  The file took shape with each letter. She was transcribing a debriefing report from the front: “The L.D.S. Air Force bombing of Parker Dam, formerly known as the chokepoint of the Colorado River, has continued despite Mexican Army rebuilding efforts for over a month now, as has the Gull forces occupation of the Hoover Dam 155 miles further north. This spike through the jugular of La Republic del Norte has caused the ongoing mass evacuations of Phoenix, San Diego, and Riverside due to a lack of drinking water. The Central Arizona Project and the Colorado River Aqueduct are dry now, and this action has made it possible…solidify defensive lines…recommend… Air Force bombing of the evacuated cities in order to prevent their reoccupation has…despite minimal concern over drift into Deseret territory.” People were getting blasé’ about mass destruction warfare.

  Kelly finished typing up the report. She printed it off, sealed it in a courier envelope, and sent it by messenger to an office upstairs she had never been allowed into, and was glad for that. After her lunch break, during which she pretended to read a dog-eared paperback copy of The Book of Mormon and ate some fresh yogurt and not-so-fresh ramen, she found a courier standing at attention at her desk. She had no idea how long he had been waiting there, but it must be an important message he had to deliver. This was an urgent classified communication that had to be hand delivered. He tried not to look down her shirt when she bent over to countersign the seal as having been delivered, but she caught him and made him blush with a raised eyebrow. Today’s fashion was insulation from the ankle to the wrist, but she hadn’t broken Brigham, yet. As he hurried away embarrassed, Kelly efficiently unsealed the paper and began to transcribe it for delivery back down the chain of command.

  “Prophet Rammell and the Council of Fifty have authorized the Deseret Air Force to begin regular F-16 patrols from Hill Air Force base along the border of the Republica occupied zone in California to monitor both Mexican and Chinese troop movements there. Operation White Horse, which will include the use of all of our Lewisite and Mustard at Toole, will take place the moment our Church is threatened.” Kelly whistled between her teeth. This was a big one, countersigned, straight from the top of the food chain. Last week the Prophet told a congregation at the Mormon Tabernacle that Deseret was watching the situation in southern California closely, as it also lay claim to the San Diego area as a potential outlet to the Pacific Ocean. So, he really meant it.

  Maybe the gamble was that the rest of the world would be distracted by the civil war going on in China between the north and south, or the Indian troop movements along their frontier looking to take advantage of it. It reminded Kelly of the old story of the school boy who was yanked up by the teacher for kicking another boy on the ground. “What’s wrong with you, why are you kicking that boy while he’s down?” the teacher asked. Her mental digression was interrupted by an obnoxiously loud cleared throat at her elbow. Another courier, with his hand out, ready for the copy of the message as soon as she entered it into the system for general e-mail delivery within the department. These people were serious.

  “What do you mean, ‘these people’? Her mind cackled at her. You’re one of them. The days were getting warmer and longer. Even near dark, the temperature was pleasant as she made her way home. Just yogurt and noodles had left her ready for dinner. It was amazing how much an important part food played in their lives these days. It used to be just fuel, or an excuse to socialize. Now finding it and preparing it and eating it was more urgent and ritualized. People hadn’t developed eating disorders after the hungry times, though, from what she had seen. In fact, the extra walking and physical exercise and not eating as much empty calories had made most people healthier. Those who hadn’t messed the bed because they couldn’t get their blood pressure medicine, at any rate.

  A group of uniformed school kids came snaking down the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. While they held hands and cleared a path for their exhausted looking teacher, they sang with innocent enthusiasm “I am gonna march with the cavalry, fly over the enemy, shoot the artillery, I am gonna march with the infantry, ‘cause I’m in the Lord’s army. Yes, sir!...” Kelly was reminded of what she had been thinking just after lunch. Oh, yeah…”What do you think I got him down, for?”

  That night, after checking on Mrs. Murphy, Kelly made luxurious use of the restored full-time energy grid from the reopening of the coal mines in Wyoming. She microwaved some leftover chicken and had a dvd movie watching marathon, all by herself. “Mad Max”, “28 Days Later”, and “Dawn Of The Dead” kept her giggling until past two in the morning. She wondered if, like Dr. Pangloss had insisted, she really did live in the best of all possible worlds. It felt like old times, except for the Feral Canine Eradication Program popping off shots in the distance.

  We Drive Our Ships To New Lands

  Eurail had long been the most efficient and cheapest way to get around Europe, except for the stations that were unsafe due to crime. Spain had been notorious for rapes and robberies. That was before they had cleaned house while nobody was looking, Gerta assumed, as she awoke from a four hour nap in her berth. The breakaway of The Republic of Catalonia and the Basque Republic had made the Madrid government more paranoid towards their Muslim and African population. The TGV from Madrid to Paris took ten hours, but with even U.N. and diplomatic flights grounded, they had the only game in town. The train was packed with civilians trying to get home in the panic, but her job did have its perks, she considered, as she rolled over and sat up. She wondered where they were. Looking out the window did no good, not at nearly 200 miles per hour. Well, when they stopped in Paris, the next leg to Brussels should only take another hour and a half. She was suddenly feeling alone in the world, and missing her parents, as well as her brother and sister-in-law and nephew. What were they doing, right now, in Landshut? Probably sleeping, if they were smart, she thought. It was still early morning outside.

  After freshening up a bit in the public restroom at the end of the car, Gerta guided herself along the wall to the dining car for a croissant and strong black coffee, imported from Brazil before the cholera epidemic had fueled a blockade. Only two other members of her delegation were visible, a couple engaged in a romantic breakfast against staff policy. She casually waved at them and sat at the other end of the car by herself. Before long, a Eurail employee came down the aisle offering copies of ‘Le Figaro’, a popular French center-right newspaper. One glance at the headlines made her re-check the masthead to be sure that they hadn’t delivered a satire like ‘Le Canard enchaine’’, by mistake. No such luck.

  Ten minutes of near-frantic banging on a half dozen private cabin doors and shaking a few reclining seats of the lower-echelon staff had the grumpy and fuzzy-eyed German ambassador and his employees awake and checking their voice mail and texts and emails. Apparently they had all hit the hay hard following their stressful two week involuntary layover in Madrid while the E.U. internal borders had been locked down, right after the bombings of Omaha and Beijing. Frantic messages awaited them. After a half hour of listening to, reading, and responding to messages, the Ambassador rejoined them in the dining car and confirmed that ‘Le Figaro’ had essentially gotten things right, for once. The paper, placed on board with the baggage and food service during the brief stopover in Barcelona that they had all slept through, was today’s edition, printed only a few hours ago. It was the most popular French paper in The Republic of Catalonia, so that figured. Since they were already on the way to Brussels, and had crossed the French border, they had received a special dispensation
to continue on to the UNDP headquarters at Rue Montoyer, where they would be met by the German ambassador to Belgium, as well.

  The hurried staff meeting had little to go on except for what the official channels had confirmed from the paper, but the Ambassador was able to fill in the blanks well enough. The rapid abandonment of the northern and central regions of China by the military regime which had propped up and then replaced a new Central Committee in the first seventy-two hours after the destruction of Beijing had destabilized the entire Chinese command structure. By the end of the first week, Sanya had been declared the new capitol of the People’s Republic, but the true power lay at the Yulin Harbor naval base. General Jiang’s response was to declare the independence of the region under his control north of Beijing, and seek terms with the advancing Russians.

  The Indian Army had meanwhile mobilized in Ladakh and struck north into Pakistan to finish up the Kargil war of 1999, and taken Kel, Gultari, and Hushe, then headed for Skardu with minimal resistance. Islamabad threatened to unleash the atomic genie on India, if they did not withdraw immediately. She followed the troop movements with her eyes on the power point map. The emergency military government of Shanghai, in shame, threw in with General Jiang’s faction, and squadrons from the Dachang and Chongming air bases crippled the loyalist forces at the Hangzhou Jianqiao Airport with two days of sorties.

  By the next day, armor and mobilized infantry units crossed the Karakoram Pass from Indian territory for a do-over of the 1962 attempt there, and had taken Mazar, Xaidulla, and Kangxiwar, before the Chinese frontier garrison at Tianshuihai redeployed to Changmar, and called for help from Yulin. The Chinese military regime responded the only way it still could: with a hail mary, nothing left to lose launch from all of their nuclear submarines still obeying orders.

  There wasn’t much need for any interpreting on the Continent, but they did need more analysts. Gerta began crunching numbers and population figures in her head, as the names of cities were listed. The Chinese had bombed New Delhi, Jaipur, and Lucknow with multiple strikes, some of which had ended up undershooting into the Himalayas. The missile they had intended for Novosibersk had ended up in Mongolia, and Vladivostok’s in the Sea of Japan, but the Russians were responding, regardless.

  Most shocking, in an immediate sense, to the U.N. delegation, was the delayed Yulin push back from the U.S. strike on Beijing. They had been waiting for it for two weeks, like a downstairs neighbor waiting for the upstairs second shoe to fall. Some of the more macabre of the Germans had placed bets on whether the Chinese would incinerate Anchorage, or the fleet itself, or both. As it turned out, they must have used the old launch trajectories from a year or more ago. The submarine which took skewed vengeance for the seven million dead and dying in Beijing aimed for targets on the Eastern seaboard of North America.

  Of the sixteen SSBN missiles which came roaring up and eastwards, five splashed harmlessly into the Pacific Ocean on the way over. So much for Chinese technical prowess, the German interpreter thought with gallows humor. One exploded over Lake Ontario, creating a fresh-water tsunami that destroyed Toronto, Mississauga, and Hamilton. Another struck in the Green Mountains National Park, sparking a wildfire that raged for miles in Vermont. Two more overshot completely and fizzled out in the Atlantic. The remaining seven, however, found their intended targets, more or less. Fort Lee and Sheepshead Bay each took hits that would have killed them all, if they had been back in New York. A hit centered on Cambridge cancelled out Boston, as did Pawtucket for Providence. She thought of her countrymen in their tanks as a red dot appeared over the Philadelphia international airport, indicating a ground zero there, and of Mark Smith and his Marines, when they marked off Baltimore, further south.

  When they switched trains in Paris, the station was under heavy guard by armed young men with “Front Nationale” armbands on their right sleeves, and a stern look in their eyes. Most of the passengers were herded out of the Metro stop and away, but the Ambassador’s credentials got them onto the nearly empty train to Brussels. Gerta sat down and began researching and calculating on her tablet, again.

  A little over two hours later at UNDP headquarters, people had calmed down enough for her to be heard over the cell phone conversations and muttered curses in three languages. She had some numbers for them. As a preliminary estimate, the previous day’s casualties, collectively, stood at around four million in India, and over five million in North America. She began to run down the subtotals by area: New Delhi, 250,000; Lucknow, 2 million, roughly; Jaipur, just under two million, Toronto, 1.5 million, Mississauga and Hamilton, another half million, New York, a couple million; Boston, a half million, the same with Baltimore and Philadelphia, and less for Providence. There wasn’t much they could do about it, except count the numbers and report them to each other. One thing was for certain, they wouldn’t be going back to FDR Drive soon, if ever.

  The Russians didn’t blame General Jiang for the att empted attacks on the Motherland. They did make the entire island of Hainan radioactive, though, and depopulated eight million from China’s southernmost province, over the next forty-eight hours. The Chinese naval contingents which escaped the destruction of Yulin Bay fled east towards their recently acquired colonies. Some of them avoided the massive pincer movements of the Russian navy coordinated with the American Fifth and Sixth fleets from Australia, for a while.

  Pakistan’s crude atomic attacks o n Ludhiana and Rajkat that weekend only took a half million lives altogether, but they proved their point and opened up the occupation of Jammu, Kashmir, and Rajastan.

  For her part, Gerta had started smoking again. She had quit nearly a year ago, not long before the world went crazy. She had resisted the urge during the first shocks to her system, when the Islamic State had snuck three small nuclear devices into Tel Aviv and Jaffa. While the world had recoiled in horror, Israel responded to the dirty bombs by nuking Beirut, Damascus, Cairo, Tripoli, and Amman, all at once. While they counted their dead and prepared to repel boarders, the Jews had threatened Baghdad and Tehran with the same treatment, and stated bluntly that Mecca and Medina would be next. “Operation Goliath”, they had called it, with clear intent. It was small reassurance that Jerusalem, too valuable to either side to risk losing, had been spared. By the time the Middle East, or what was left of it, had gone back to conventional warfare for the endgame, things had gotten too far along for the world to intervene, or even care as much about the collapse of the U.S., as it otherwise would have. Well, she had had enough of counting the dead and interpreting for the soon to be dying. She was finally going home for a much needed vacation, where the NPD had won a majority in Parliament and hopefully wouldn’t let in any mullahs with bombs while she caught up on some sleep. That threat was real, now that Turkey had joined the I.S. caliphate. The Golden Dawn Party had swept into a majority in the Greek parliament when non-Muslim Turks started flooding across the Bosporus. At least she could try to put some ghosts behind her, and see her family, again. She wondered where she would get tobacco from.

  We Are Your Overlords

  He was furious. How dare she, outside of the chain of command, with no title or office or authority? And what was in the sub Captain’s head, that he would obey her ‘suggestion’ as if it were an order, without consulting him or, okay, without consulting anybody in the Unified Command? What would General Harrison think? That he was trying to stage a coup? Why would Carolyn think that sending their only mobile nuclear asset downriver to offload two SEAL Away teams in the ruins of Memphis was a good idea?

  Her response, when McNabb had Kip and his team ‘escort’ her to his office to question her, was that she had wanted to have them liberate some things from Graceland and the Sun Records Studios, for his birthday. His birthday. She had put American lives, and a nuclear submarine loaded with enough missiles to kill millions more, at risk for a treasure hunting, no, a looting expedition. Purely for personal gain. The men involved might not have minded, but it was a flagrant misuse of power and i
nfluence.

  He should be planning the campaign against the Cherokees and Choctaws in northeastern Oklahoma, to clear the way for the reclamation of the rail centers in Kansas City. Instead, he was having to deal with this, this…personal stuff.

  Granted, the USS Nebraska had come back without any loss of crew, and undetected by the disorganized New Africa-allied population below the shattered pyramid, crushed in when a 747 had nose-dived into it. The plane had been shot down by an RPG while trying to take a planeload of Whites out of the city when I-40 had been shut down. They even had brought back lots of goodies from Memphis, ostensibly for him. But it could have gone horribly wrong, and cost them their mobile nuclear deterrent, and their nation’s future. Those fourteen missiles, and the silos at Malmstrom and Minot and Warren, were all that stood between them and invasion by the biggest kid left on the block, whoever that turned out to be. The Nebraska was the only part of that which was mobile. What if those missiles had been lost, or taken by New Africa? The worst thing was that he had given the Captain a severe verbal lashing for undertaking the mission, and the officer had taken the abuse as if it were a legitimate, official reprimand from a superior officer. Well, that’s what the Unified Command was for, he guessed.

  Carolyn was unrepentant. Instead of being hurt that he was angry, she responded to John’s fury with her own. She began by sitting in the chair in front of his desk like a guilty little girl called to the office of the principle he used to be. As he stomped and paced and waved his arms and fumed, however, she got mad and began talking back.