The Hasten the Day Trilogy

by Billy Roper

  They were three houses up the street, now. The pattern seemed to be to knock on a door, first. If somebody answered, they were handed a printed sheet of paper. If nobody answered, the paper was folded and stuck in their screen door or around the doorknob. The group of soldiers, who he could tell now weren’t Americans, at least, they were all Hispanic, had started out evenly on both sides of the street. Now, though , the other side of the street had fallen behind. Old man Cooper, at 419, had slowed them down. Andy watched as he stood cursing at the soldiers, tearing up the piece of paper in the face of the one with sunglasses on, and waving for them to get off his lawn. The soldiers had M4s just like he used sometimes playing Black Ops, but Mr. Cooper didn’t look scared. He threw the pieces of paper down. Andy couldn’t understand that, why would he throw litter on his own lawn? Mrs. Guittierrez, next door to him, hadn’t acted like that, she had just taken the paper, read it, and shook the soldier’s hand. Heck, she had even looked happy about it. People sure were funny.

  The group of soldiers on his side of the street stepped over the low shrubbery into the McDonald yard. Andy stood up straight and tried to smile. Then he remembered that he might not have a good connection, but the camera on his phone still worked. He raised it and started clicking as they came closer. Two of the soldiers suddenly ran forward and slapped the phone out of his hand, then pushed him. Andy almost fell down, then the rifle butt hit him right in the nose. Blood went everywhere. That was embarrassing. A soldier threw one of the papers at him, and then continued on. Andy wiped his face off, but the blood still trickled. He thought that his nose was broken.

  That night after he got home, Andy’s father had read the p aper, first silently, then out loud, in disbelief. He had looked like he was going to cry. He never even asked Andy how his nose was. His mom had given him an ice pack, though, after getting flustered that he’d dripped blood on the white carpet. It felt better, but still throbbed. She hadn’t understood what the paper was all about. Andy thought that he did. The Arizona and New Mexico secession votes and the Anglos fleeing Santa Fe and Albuquerque filling up all the hotels in town had been the topic of discussion the last few days of school, before their summer break had begun a month early. None of the teachers would talk about it except crazy Mr. Holt, who said that a second civil war was coming. He hadn’t been there the last day of class. They’d probably fired him for getting the Hispanic students all worked up.

  Now, nearly five years later, Corporal McDonald sat with his boots dangling in the reservoir, barely an hours’ drive from his old house. He had eaten his MRE, and then walked off by himself a bit to think, and remember. A collage of memories filtered in past the sound of a hundred men setting up camp. His father on the phone, talking quietly with one of his professor friends to see if he had gotten the same note, and if it was legitimate. When he’d finished making more phone calls, his face was sad. It was true, he’d said. All non-Hispanic Caucasians, African Americans, and Asians were being instructed to leave the area within fortyeight hours, ‘for their own safety’. The paper didn’t state where they were supposed to go, just out of ‘the area’, presumably so the generic flier could be used as far north as the Mexican Army could reach. They would be contacted when the current crisis had passed, and it was safe to return.

  Mr. McDonald felt that his presence was needed, as a Sociologist with published papers on Latino-Anglo relations, so he decided to stay and attempt to broker a peaceful transition of power. His wife was too tearful at leaving behind her furniture and accents that she wasn’t able to drive. Although Andy was just fifteen, and didn’t yet have his driver’s license, he did have his learner’s permit. So, if they got pulled over, as long as his mom was with him, they wouldn’t get a ticket, he thought. They should be okay. His dad would follow them up to Colorado Springs in a week, when things had calmed down.

  Andy had just packed what he needed for a couple of days, sure that they would be back soon: his Iphone he’d found in the grass, a couple pair of jeans, his Chucks, and some t-shirts. His mom packed four suitcases of dresses and shoes. Her stuff filled the trunk and the backseat of the Toyota. They hugged his dad goodbye, then he and Andy shook hands awkwardly. Everything was going to be alright, this would all blow over soon, they’d see. He would call them every morning and evening. Let him know where they stopped for the night once they got to Colorado Springs.

  The Jayhawker Militia Corporal spat at the memory of poor old Mr. Cooper sitting in his front yard in a lawn chair with a shotgun across his lap as they had driven past. He wondered if the old man had gone down hard, or given up, when they came? Maybe he’d been killed in his sleep by his neighbor, as had happened to so many.

  When Andy had reached the I-25/87 onramp to head north, the line of traffic across all four lanes was at a standstill, and they all four were headed in the same direction. His mom had started to freak out. Andy tried to call his dad to ask what he should do. There was no service. Not far to the south, a single shot was heard, followed by several others, more rapidly. The teenager had made an instinctive decision, and done a U-turn off the shoulder, the Corolla bouncing down and back up. He drove until they reached the Highway 50 interchange, with his mom crying and trying to call his dad the whole time. When he turned left towards Kansas, she began yelling at him to turn the car around, that his dad would never know where to find them, they were going to get lost. Andy started crying, too, but he kept on driving. Pueblo had been in his rear-view mirror, ever since.

  They had never known if Mr. McDonald had been executed by the Republic del Norte regime, or by a random soldier. Maybe he had finally given up trying to be a peacemaker and had made it to Colorado Springs, and been killed there while looking for them, when the internecine battle between members of the Joint Chiefs had ended with Omaha nuking the control center at Cheyenne Mountain. Andy preferred not to consider that. It would be too much like thinking that his father’s death was his fault. His mom certainly thought so, he knew, even though she never said it. Truthfully, Mrs. McDonald never said much of anything, any more. She just sat in her FEMA trailer outside Dodge City with the other White Colorado and New Mexico refugees, missing the old days. That’s why joining the militia had been a nobrainer for Andy, as soon as he’d turned sixteen.

  Now, here he was, looking out towards where his home was, or used to be. Over the last few weeks, it had become obvious that the Mexican cartels were turning on each other. MS-13 was trying to clean out the other gangs, but the Zetas and Sorenos were fighting back. The loss of their ports in Texas had hurt them all, and they were taking it out on each other, his Sergeant had told them. That meant a great deal of confusion on the part of their command and control structure. To take advantage, New American Unified Command forces were pushing the Mexican Army south from Denver, right into the hot zone where Colorado Springs used to be. Andy sure was glad that he wasn’t in on that. If the advance didn’t stop soon enough, they’d all get a lethal doze in a few days, up there. The plan was for that to be what happened to the Mexicans, instead, which was why Cpl. McDonald and the Jayhawkers were driving west towards his old home town, first thing in the morning. They would bottle the Nortenos up, and keep them from being able to go anywhere except back south, where they belonged.

  Andy had heard scuttlebutt that the Mormons were supposed to be hitting the reconquistadores in Canon City from the west at the same time, and even that the Texicans had promised to resume pressure on Tucumcari down south out of Amarillo, but he’d believe that when he saw it. All three of the White countries working together at something would be hard to imagine.

  This was hard country to live in, especially without irrigation. He looked around at the sparse greenery. That’s what made little things, such as controlling the reservoir they’d camped at, so important for the campaign. Like the majority of the fifty-eight million Americans who had died since Cinco Day, most of the casualties around here had starved or died of thirst, or contracted a fatal stomach virus or dysentery from dr
inking contaminated food or water out of desperation. Only a quarter of the victims nationwide had died as a direct result of the ethnic cleansing and still-ongoing racial civil war. Another ten percent had perished from the direct and indirect effects of the eight or nine nuclear-tipped missiles that had blown out chunks of real estate in three waves of fighting within the first twelve months. Colorado Springs, Omaha, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Providence, the airburst over D.C., the Toronto tsunamimaker… Hundreds of thousands more, of course, would eventually develop cancers and long-range terminal after-effects from the fallout and their exposure to hot zones. But more people had died on the East Coast from the ‘Da Trots’ superflu epidemic of the first winter, than from the bombs. Of course, it was all interrelated, Andy mused. These days, you got a cut on your toe, and without antibiotics it could go septic and you could die from infection and blood poisoning. In much of the country, basic sanitation was medieval at best. Soap was a rare commodity, even. And clean water was as precious as ammunition, out here. They both were worth more than their weight in gold.

  He wondered if his old Geometry teacher would like the pie chart he had drawn in his head with all of the acute little angles of slices for those dead because their pacemakers had given up or their blood pressure medicine or insulin ran out or their dialysis wasn’t happening, any more. Probably not, the Cpl. bet he was dead, or among the hundred million homeless refugees still displaced after five years of chaos. He tried to imagine Mr. Felan working for his soup in a displaced person’s camp like the one he’d spent a year in, and laughed. A covey of quails startled up out of a low thicket, scared by the noise. Andy had just gotten the promotion to Corporal a couple of months ago, after he happened to be the guy to help capture a ragged group of Indians up from Oklahoma. They’d been trying to hijack a tractor-trailer rig of wheat headed for Wichita to be somebody’s sandwich bread, when his patrol had happened by. It was all luck, but he’d take it.

  After he’d sat there thinking long enough to be sure that his squad would have his tent up and their own done, too, Andy wandered back over the low rise and reported to the Sergeant that everything was clear on the other side, just like he’d been on an important self-appointed mission. The Sergeant paused in struggling with his sleeping bag to stand up and pop his back. “Good work, Corporal, seeing to the defensive perimeter before your own comfort. That’s the kind of attitude we need more of in this army! Did you hear that, men?” he looked at the privates around them. They grumbled their assent, sweaty from the work.

  Andy rewarded his squad for doing a good job with his tent by letting them all go for a swim in the reservoir before it got dark. Running water, consistently, was another thing he really missed, though he heard they had it back full-time in Wichita, now. And of course, in Topeka. He used his swim time as a chance to scrub some trail dust out of his crevices. Marching behind the officer’s horses was dirtier than crawling under them would have been. That’s why he planned on being ‘Lt. McDonald’, some day. Maybe even ‘Captain McDonald’. That had a nice sound to it.

  Now I, hear you’ve got somebody new, And that I never meant that much to you To hear that tears me up inside…

  The ten foot tall lead statue, cast of the bullets from abandoned U.N. peacekeeper’s ordinance of odd European calibers, swung on its hoist as the crane moved it into position. The new Kentucky state capital building, the former Lexington History Center, used to be the Fayette County Courthouse, but it would make a fine Executive office building. At least, that’s how Governor Richard Cotton felt. The legislature, if there was ever need for them to meet again, and he wasn’t sure why there would be, could meet at the University in an auditorium here. Or, they could stay in Frankfort. It’s not like they needed a regular place of their own, or anything.

  He was glad that the expanded security around the nation’s gold reserve at Fort Knox had created the Kentucky Capital District, and moved the seat of government east. With the New American Dollar being backed up by that gold, their economy depended on it being secure. Everybody remembered what had happened the last time the dollar had crashed. They had all crashed, with it. Lexington suited him better, anyway. And, the move would allow him to delay holding general elections for, oh, at least another year. Maybe two. So what if Lt. Col. Martin had the final say on any matters that impacted security within a hundred mile radius of Fort Knox? The governor was allowed to run domestic affairs as he saw fit. Even the Mayor of Louisville couldn’t claim that, that yuppie had the City Council to contend with.

  The statue had been cast and molded and polished all the way up in Pittsburgh, and made from the donated weapons of a German unit that had defected over from the U.N. and become good honest Americans. Gov. Cotton had traded four traincar loads of locally produced coal to the foundry for it. Looking up at the forever smiling face of Dr. William L. Pierce on the statue, he figured it was an even swap. Down in Nashville, they thought they were fancy, switching gears from being a music city to the home of the Richard Butler Memorial Seminary, and becoming some kind of new Vatican. Sending out Christian Identity missionaries up and down and even over the Appalachians, like that. As far as the governor was concerned, he didn’t know much what was left east of those mountains, and he didn’t want to know. He was happy in Bluegrass Country where there were still horses to race and music to listen to. And as far as taking back the East, well, that’s what West Virginia was for.

  Mother, Tell your children not to walk my way Tell your children not to hear my words What they mean, What they say…

  Scott and Perry stood together at the dock, looking out across the huge port facilities of Houston. The rotor kept turning as they took it all in. Crude from Republic of Texas oil fields out west was being refined in Republic of Texas refineries, and the fuel loaded into tankers preparing to carry it first to their nearest allies, the Emerald Coast enclave in the Florida panhandle. Even if they were a New American Territory now, they could help keep the heat on the Church of the New Dispensation from one end while the Texicans held them at the Red River, on this one. The dribble of gas and aviation grade that the New Americans had been able to fly into Pensacola had barely kept them in the air. Just like with a drug dealer, Perry thought, the first taste of jet fuel is free.

  Of course, the next step was to buy, bluff, or blast their way past the Cuban stranglehold over the Caribbean, and open a new market for the black stuff in southern Europe. The President figured they could undercut the British by 10% and still make a pretty profit, even counting their transport costs across the Atlantic. Hampton advocated taking the fight to the Cubans, right away. His top General was chomping at the bit to take on the world. First things first, though.

  The R.O.T. Air Force had been retasked from harassing Rev. Ike in Lake Charles to providing air cover for Ranger units at Conchas Lake near I-40 in New Mexico. The Nortenos were in a grudging retreat, there, fighting on three fronts and hating life. The infighting between the cartels had stopped the Mexican navy’s weak attempts to recapture his gulf ports, too, so they were feeling pretty good about things. They climbed back on board the helicopter to return to the capital.

  This morning’s situation room briefing had been positive, overall, too. Deseret was apparently attacking Mexican Army positions north of San Diego, and the New American army they’d landed up by San Francisco was pouring it onto the Chinese there. His Ambassador in Salt Lake, that spoiled rich kid Walker punk, had told him that he was on top of things with the cultists’ secret plans there. Claimed to have an inside source in the government, or something. His intel had been good, so far, at least.

  The New Americans had recognized the Republic of Quebec’s claim to New England all the way down to the New York/Pennsylvania and the New York/New Jersey lines. Thank God for the goofy French, mediating that and colonizing the empty quarter. That’s seven more states they’ll never get back, thought Bellefont, with satisfaction. He didn’t care that most of that area was depopulated from the Superflu and s
potted with radioactive hot zones, south of Maine. All he cared about was that a rival was weakened. Maybe Quebec needed some oil at a discount? It would be closer than the Republic of Catalonia, and the enemy of his enemy could be his friend.

  Now in darkness world stops turning Ashes where the bodies burning No more war pigs have the power Hand of God has struck the hour…

  The rough terrain reminded him of the Stans, except with more trees. And, it was never this cool over there, the first day of May. All the way over, he had been thinking about fighting house to house through built up rolling hills where queers used to roam free. Instead, here was, laying on his belly ears deep in pine needles as long as his knife blade, wishing he could twist around to pee on his machine gun’s barrel to cool it off before it turned red again. But, even though he needed the relief, the rising steam would give away his position. He knew better than to expose himself like that. Sergeant Vinyard had just been a private when his unit had missed the last bird out before they got stranded in the north sandbox. He had been short, too, just a couple weeks from the end of his rotation, when it all shut down. Now he was in charge of the eleven men spread out to his right at the top of this ravine. They trusted him, he saw it in their old beyond their years eyes when he gave them an order. They were the best in the Cohort.

  On their way up from downtown Santa Cruz, it had looked like this was going to be a cakewalk. Gen. Harrison and the main body was up there with a whole legion somewhere north of them, exactly where was above his pay grade, but they had to meet up with him, most ricky-tick. They met their first resistance at the beach, just a few guards they took out quietly with their knives. They all made it out of the waterfront before the first gunfire was exchanged. Some guards hanging out at the Boardwalk. That got things hopping. At first, the Chinese they met seemed caught off guard. They would fire off a magazine, then run, not even covering each other’s retreat. Very amateur hour. It reminded him of Tblisi. Like shooting fish in a barrel. It was so easy, Major Woodrow had only peeled off five Centuries to clear the city, two in either direction and one to hold the beach in case things got hairy. There seemed to be a concentration of enemy at the U.C. Santa Cruz, and one of them was headed there to see what was up. Live Oak and Capitola downstream would get some special attention, too. It looked like just a few hundred people lived in the whole city, all Chinese by the look of them. Most of them spoke English with no accent when they surrendered. He figured they must be American born Chinese, and that irked the Sergeant to no end.