The Hasten the Day Trilogy

by Billy Roper

  “Absolutely! That’s exactly what I mean! And so, since we’re more important than dogs, it’s silly for people to be more concerned about the pedigree of their pet, than they are about the pedigree of their grandchildren, isn’t it?...Jimmy? Hey, where ya goin’?”

  No, Kelly liked her life simple and unentangled. She couldn’t imagine living as anybody’s wife. Least of all, as a sister wife. Now that she had access to all of the outside world’s information and remaining media, she didn’t even need to be an outlaw, any more. There was no reason to have a shortwave at home. She got more than enough data feeds at work.

  Deseret had achieved the Church of Latter Day Saints’ grandest dreams from 1850, and then some, but they weren’t the only game in town. In addition to the New Americans who had captured her, and the Texicans, the Chinese still held the Bay Area. They’d rebounded and had expanded back into the Central Valley all the way to the Sierra Nevadas at the heels of the Mexican withdrawal. ‘Yep’, Kelly thought, ‘They let us do their heavy lifting for them, then moved in to fill the vacuum when La Republica wasn’t quite so Norte, any more’. To give them credit, the 5,000 Chinese naval and Marine personnel who had been stranded in California had been a tough nut to crack. Stuck in place when their mother country dissolved in civil war and invasions and nuclear attack from both Russia and India, they’d survived. It had taken the strict regimenting of a hundreds of thousands of Chinese-American civilians to do it, but they had pulled together. ‘Just like Asians do’, Kelly mused. ‘Just like Mormons are supposed to, in the hive, too.” It was what she hated so much about her theocracy. That, and being ‘Sistered’ to death every breath. And coffee. She missed coffee. And rock and roll. And….

  So, the Chinese were now Deseret’s neighbors , unable to expand north because the formerly United States’ 7th and 3rd fleets, based in Anchorage, had established bases and zones of control all down the West Coast, from Vancouver to Seattle to Portland, and further. They provided arms and training to the anti-Chinese guerrillas in northern California. This morning, Kelly was tasked with distributing the latest briefing on the emerging chain of command in the Pacific Northwest, as Washington and Oregon formed territorial governments within the expanding Republic of New America. She sipped her water and wished that it was coffee, or at least tea. It was such a pretty fall day outside, just cool enough to need a sweater. For lunch, maybe she’d skip the Saints Cafeteria at the old McDonald’s that most government employees ate at. She might go to the gym next door for a quick workout, instead. It would help her clear her head.

  Kelly was just getting off the stationary bike when Jimmy walked into the gym. Instead of approaching her, he waved and stood awkwardly by the door. She knew that he was there to see her, and it wasn’t a social visit. Maybe he was embarrassed to be standing inside the women’s entrance of the gender-segregated workout room. Whatever. Like always, Kelly enjoyed making his face turn red, so she took longer than usual to towel off the bike. He waited silently while she took a two minute shower and changed back into her conservative LDS approved work clothes. She left her damp auburn hair up in a ponytail, to scandalize the more rigid staffers. Her old Thor’s hammer, which she’d been allowed to keep throughout her incarceration, remained under her blouse. When she came back out of the dressing room, he hadn’t moved. A couple of women came in, stared at him, and left. Okay, she had pushed the fun far enough. Kelly walked up to him and smiled.

  “Hey, Jimmy. Walk with me back to work?” she asked, winking. He looked relieved to be leaving. The two women who had stopped in the parking lot looked relieved to see him go, too. Kelly couldn’t help but think how funny it would be if a Deseret government secret agent spymaster got the cops called on him for being a pervert. He recovered his composure quickly, though, she had to give him that. He straightened his tie and opened the door for her. Always the gentleman, she thought, amused.

  Jimmy was obviously stressed. He wasted no time in getting right to the point. “Kelly, we need you to look into traffic between the Orange Free State and a group of South African expatriates in Ogden. They’re Saints, but they’re Boer first, if you know what I mean. We need to confirm who they’re talking to, and when, and about what. We’ll put together the why, and we already know the how.” Jimmy stopped in the parking lot and looked at his watch. “The file should be on your desk by the time you get back. Don’t assign this to your subordinates, we want you to handle this one personally.” He made himself smile.

  “Okay, what do you think is happening?” Kelly asked. The Orange Free State had maintained their independence when the rest of the Republic of South Africa had gone the way of Zimbabwe. Whites from all over the southern tip of Africa had fled inland to hold a strip from Pretoria to Bloemfontein. They had survived the slaughter of almost every other White person south of the Sahara. After the collapse, when the world wasn’t watching, they expanded back out from Lesotho to the Vaal River. Their racial policies, as a state, were just a bit to the right of Albert Speer.

  “Well, we don’t think they’re really Calvinists pretending to be Saints,” Jimmy quipped, back in his game. He liked to tease Kelly about the depth and sincerity of her belief. “But, the Orangers were willing to reach out to the Indians for mutual diplomatic recognition before the Hindus got nuked. We think they wouldn’t have any qualms about working with the New Americans. In fact…” he hesitated. “In fact, we think that they’re coordinating heavy weapons left behind by the Chinese when they retreated south being shipped out from the old Coast Guard station in Astoria, Oregon. It looks like they’re smuggling mortars, heavy machine guns, RPGs and TOWs, or the Chinese versions, and tons and tons of ammo through Durban. Ultimately, what we need to know, since Oregon is an official Republic of New America Territory, now, is how deeply St. Louis is involved.” He stopped to retie his shoe.

  “Alright. After I figure out what they’re saying and to who, I’ll reach out to the ‘friends’ I made during my little ‘vacation’ back East.” Kelly assured Jimmy, sarcastically. He stood up, brushed his slacks, and punched her on the shoulder like a socially retarded teenaged boy, then quickly walked back into the office ahead of her. Kelly sighed deeply. ‘Workworkworkworkworkworkwork’, she muttered to herself as she followed him in. ‘Hi ho, hi ho.’.

  Till Gabriel blows his horn…

  The ambush along both sides of Highway 45 caught the Ma rtyr’s Brigade convoy as it moved through Sam Houston National Forest. It was clear that the Right Rev. Ike Huckleberry’s bearded Bible-thumpers wouldn’t get any closer to the capitol tonight. The Republic of Texas was pushing back, after three years of watching the Church of the New Dispensation forces swallow up Houston and occupy it with apocalyptic converts. Texas Rangers walked along the half-melted asphalt as small fires still burned long each side of the road. The Apache gunships called in from Fort Hood after the zealots had bunched up in the open had finished things off real quick. There was nothing left but crispy critters, here. Rev. Ike would probably have to hold a prayer vigil on his satellite broadcast tomorrow, to recover the lost souls. Or at least to replace their numbers with fresh recruits from throughout the Bible belt.

  Five years ago, before hyperinflation and a stock market crash and record unemployment had collapsed the U.S. economy, few evangelical Christians would have joined a Holy War. The Church of the New Dispensation was just a fevered dream in the drugaddled mind of a former governor. Uncontrolled immigration hadn’t yet led to protests and counter-protests and riots, and then to ethnic cleansing. The thin veneer of multiracial democracy hadn’t sloughed off, leading to secession and rebellion and racial civil war. There still was a United States of America, five years ago. Now, instead of being a talk show host and author and dieter, Rev. Ike led the Gulf Coast from Galveston to Port Fourchon. He was known as the uncensored voice of virulent Judeo-Christianity. His control of the harbors and ports in that stretch of Texas and Louisiana made him an asset to his cartel backers. Huckleberry’s mixed-race, inclusive bran
d of Fundamentalism gave him inroads into the New African territory of Louisiana, as well as the Mexican converts in Houston. His empire was growing.

  His most fervent followers were those who had nowhere else to go. Liberal White refugees pushed out of southern Texas when the Mexicans took over, or from the Southeastern states when the blacks had taken over, were his best customers. They had lost everything, couldn’t go back, and had nothing to lose. Rev. Ike offered them a purpose in this life, and the next…as well as three hots and a cot and roof over their heads, when they joined his congregation. Most of all, since those who were inclined to come to his area were guilt syndrome stricken White liberals, he allowed them the chance to maintain their illusions. Even after being kicked out of their own homes, even after watching their neighbors being raped or killed, many were more afraid of being called a ‘racist’, than they were of dying. They wanted out of the nonWhite ruled areas of the former United States, but they weren’t willing to admit why. Kind of like the people who used to pretend that the reason they dare not take a certain interstate exit was because of ‘poverty’ or ‘institutional racism’. Several prominent Hollywood celebrities who had gotten out of Los Angeles before the Mexicans took over had guest shows before and after his broadcast on Rev. Ike’s satellite t.v. channel. One of them, an aging actress who’d had double mastectomy surgeries after making a fortune in Indiana Jones type movies, was very popular with the feminists who joined his cause. Her cluster of diverseraced adopted children were on every day, pretending to like each other. The show had a good run before one of her Asian boys stabbed her to death in her sleep, then killed the rest of his family, including his adoptive dad. The replacement show starring a White rapper from Canada wasn’t nearly as popular with the Church of the New Dispensation’s older viewers, but the young girls liked it.

  From the Midwestern States and the upper South, even, recruits came to Rev. Ike. The Heartland of America, the ‘flyover states’, the ‘red states’, had pulled together as the growing ‘Republic of New America’, with its capitol in St. Louis. New America was, after half a decade of brutal and bloody pogroms and ethnic cleansings, over 98% White. From the Appalachians to the Rockies, and even to the Cascades, those with mixed race offspring or family members were no longer welcome. They, too, found their way to the Church of the New Dispensation. It was a strange brew the former governor cooked, like the most flamboyant and multicultural ‘P.T.L.’ or ‘Daystar’ mish-mash from pre-collapse t.v.. Ex-hippies, Judeophiles, the parents and grandparents of mullatos and homosexuals or adopted third worlders, and members of the dozens of congregations which had declared themselves ‘sanctuary churches’ for illegal immigrants, all flocked to his one world church. They came as modern Crusaders. Only, Ike set them on a Holy War to build up his own theocracy. Only the most trusted of his closest followers knew that the Church’s real purpose was bringing in drugs from Mexico and Central and South America for the cartels. Most of them were blindly sincere in their belief in a brown Jesus who loved everybody the same. They knew not what they did.

  Because they had nonWhite spouses or offspring or family members, or were nonWhites, themselves, most of Rev. Huckleberry’s followers didn’t have a choice about what side to be on. They were heretics from the Christian Identity denomination churches that had become widespread throughout New America, and were growing in the Republic of Texas, as well. C.I. taught that people of European ancestry were the descendants of the Biblical Israelites, and that only Whites were God’s chosen people. In fact, the dominant Protestant denomination in the White areas of North America held that only Whites were descended from Adam and Eve, and that nonWhites were ‘Pre-Adamic’.

  When the state of Israel was attacked, nuked, and nearly overran by the Islamic State and its allies, many American Jews made Aliyah, and left to volunteer to fight for their nation. The collapse of the U.S. economy, and then of the political system, stripped most of them of their wealth and power. Without the mainstream media presence they had steered through their ownership or control of most outlets before the collapse, Jewish Americans lost much of their former influence, as well. Most of them had just enough assets left to leave en masse. Many ended up dying in the ashes of Tel Aviv, or being bulldozed into the Mediterranean. Those who did not leave, died at higher rates than most other population groups due to starvation and violence after the collapse, or in the pandemic which swept Boston, or the bombings of New York.

  The Jewish population in southern California and the other Southwestern states occupied by La Republica del Norte fared better than those in the Northeast and Midwest. In the sunbelt they were, in large part, able to buy pardons from the Mexican conquerors. By doing so, they were able to escape the fates of their White neighbors. Tens of thousands of Jews were able to migrate to Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey, and join the Jewish communities there. The wealthiest continued to Buenos Aires, where over 200,000 already lived. Only after the Argentine-Brazilian War were they expelled. Rev. Ike had helped several tens of thousands make Aliyah a year into the collapse, himself. He’d encouraged Evangelicals to round up Jews from their local communities and bring them to his young theocracy for shipment to Israel. Of the six and half million Jews in the U.S. and Canada on Cinco Day, when the Latino revolution began, less than three hundred thousand remained. Almost all of those lived under assumed names, hid their ethnic identities, and attempted to assimilate into White communities. Some were more successful than others, for a time.

  With Israel pretty much gone as a viable state, and the Jews no longer a force to be reckoned with in North America, the politics of the Church of the New Dispensation had evolved away from sycophancy of the Jewish people. Instead, Rev. Ike now focused on a universalist, multicultural vision for the masses. It was how he bridged the three races, and the three worlds. That was how he had taken over from the Gulf Cartel and absorbed the Zetas to bring in more cocaine and marijuana and methamphetamine than all of the other cartels, combined. The amazing thing that the Candyman was able to do was defuse the Tribulationist wing of Fundamentalists who wanted to head off to the Holy Land themselves. At first, many of his Judeo-Christian recruiting pool feared they had missed Armageddon, and been ‘left behind’. Rev. Ike reassured them that despite scriptural mistranslations, they were in the time of Jacob’s tribulation right now. By his reckoning, they only had a couple of years to go before God’s kingdom would return to Earth for a thousand year reign of glory. Their job, he told them, was to expand the territory Rev. Ike was acting as ‘steward’ for, until the Lord’s return. They were building the foundation for God’s physical kingdom on Earth, he preached. He sold drugs to help his flock escape their new reality, drugs of both the physical and the spiritual kind.

  Perry Bellefont, the aging former Senator and Vice President, had laid down his chance to inherit the decapitated mess left when the President had died in D.C.. He was quite content to be the President, instead, of the Republic of Texas. Especially now that the official capitol had been moved from Fort Hood back to Austin. Even though it had been cleaned up and rebuilding continued, population regrowth was slow for the city, since it was so close to the Mexican army positions north of San Antonio. Perry’s much younger trophy wife and kids still lived on base at Hood, in fact. He stayed at the Governor’s residence in Austin, where he could direct the day to day affairs of the Republic. The commute was close enough to go back and forth every weekend, though. The important thing was that his family was safer in the middle of a military base than they were in public, where one of Rev. Huckleberry’s ‘The Faithful’ suicide bombers and assassins could get to them.

  Perry’s dream, and indeed the dream of all Texican patriots, was to reconquer the Alamo, and reclaim it as an image of Texican independence. It would be a hard fight. Especially with the frothing New Dispensationalist thumpers converting with sword and fire. He had really wanted to get Houston back. The Republic of Texas was big enough to survive as a landlocked country, but it didn’t
have to be. It didn’t need to be. It shouldn’t be. All that sweet crude, begging to be traded internationally, just waiting to go out…Perry hated Ike Huckleberry. The President hated the Church of the New Dispensation penitents who clogged 290 from Brenham East. He hated the flagellants who stood at the Texarkana checkpoint between his territory and New America’s, periodically and rhythmically beating themselves with baseball bats and whipping themselves with belts. They reminded him of that scene from ‘Monty Python’. The R.N.A. Marines could go ahead and shoot them, as far as he was concerned. Lord knew they wanted to, bad enough, you could see it in their eyes when he visited the border. But, the BBC or NTV or Post Dispatch TV cameras were always there, hoping for something juicy to broadcast. The Republic of Texas wouldn’t let them in. That would be suicide. The Republic of New America didn’t want them. That made them a humanitarian disaster, waiting to happen, right there on the border.

  General Hampton interrupted Perry’s consideration of his northern immigration problem by knocking on the open door, before stepping in. Scott, of all people, had earned the right of informality in the Republic, if anyone had. He held a sheaf of papers in his hands, Bellefont noticed. Oh, goodie.

  “Mr. President, if you have a moment, I’d like to go over the latest intelligence reports from the New Braunfels front, and then, the Joint Chiefs have a revised list of prioritized lendlease military hardware they’d like to ask the British Ambassador to forward up his chain of command.” the highest ranking military officer in the Republic of Texas explained.

  “Ain’t it funny, Scott, how even with their North Sea platforms, the British can’t pump enough to export to the continent?” Perry’s greying sideburns scrunched up the sides of his face as he grimaced. “If the B.N.P. would just send a few destroyers to break the blockade and give us back our ports, we could give them enough oil for them to choke on.” he added, thoughtfully. “What’s the point in holding onto the majority seats election after election if they don’t USE that power for more than just rounding up the last few Muslims and giving them the boot?” The President was no fan of parliamentary procedure. The largest city in the Republic of Texas, Dallas-Fort Worth, dominated the Texican Congress. They were a bit too liberal for Bellefont’s taste. All that talk about free elections, for example.