by Billy Roper
For the most part, it was a ghost town. Fifteen Centuries were assigned to move out. They made it through the built up area and up into suburbia with only a couple injured. They were walking wounded, and didn’t slow them down. The third of a legion had hit the beach at midnight, and by daybreak they were skulking into the open ground of the Pasatiempo Golf Course. Another group of sour-faced Marines were already there, circled around a group of prisoners on the overgrown fairway. As Vinyard got closer, he was that the prisoners were all White, and all women. They were the first Whites he’d seen since he landed. The Sergeant was curious about their appearance, though.
“What’d you do, find a sorority house at the college?” he asked the first jarhead he came to as they walked up. The kid looked younger even than the girls he was guarding, and slightly embarrassed by the way they were dressed…or weren’t.
“No, Sergeant, they were being held prisoner by the Chinese. There were twice as many as the eight or nine we were able to rescue, but the damn guards just started shooting them as soon as we told them to surrender. It was awful, Sergeant.” The young soldier had probably killed more men than he had lived months, but he was near tears over the treatment of the women crouched at his feet.
The girls ranged in age from sixteen or seventeen to their early thirties. They had obviously been kept to entertain Chinese officers. Berry Vinyard was disgusted. He thought about the little sister he had left back home in South Carolina when he had joined up, and hoped that nothing like this had happened to her. The only reason why he hadn’t volunteered for duty in Australia, like others had, was so that some day he might be able to find out. He had pictured himself being the hero, and saving her…well, now was his chance, for somebody else’s sister. He motioned for his squad to stay back.
Kneeling down, he asked the girls what had happened. As the sun rose, it became more obvious how thin and weak they looked. They had been purposefully underfed and malnourished. Most of them were jittery, too. This was going to take a while, so he told his men to stop and take ten. They broke out their canteens and a couple chowed on MRE’s while they could. Others talked quietly with grunts from the other unit about what they had found at the University. The lack of Chinese prisoners told him all he needed to know about how it had ended.
It seemed that one of the dormitories had been turned into a brothel, and another a barracks for the guards. The fight outside the latter had been brief, but instead of surrendering the former, the guards had started killing their hostages. Berry learned this from one of the older women, since the younger ones seemed either to be in shock, or catatonic. One of them, barely sixteen by the look of her, just sat and repeated Chinese phrases that none of the soldiers could understand. Maybe she had forgotten how to speak English, the Sergeant thought.
Most of them were silent, but the one, who looked to be in her mid-thirties but was probably a decade younger than that, wouldn’t shut up. Her name was Karen, she said, and she and another one of the prisoners had been students at UCLA, of all things, when Cinco Day happened. If her tale could be believed, a group of about twenty White students had banded together and headed north when the Mexican Army arrived on campus and demanded that everyone assemble at the stadium. They had barely made it out of the city before the group had begun to split up. One car had run out gas, and another carload had headed off towards Palmdale. Two carloads, including these two, had headed up the 101. They were ahead of the Mexican Army, but it was like Mad Max on the road, as she described it, five years later. Berry guessed that she had told the story over and over again to the other prisoners, so that it had become kind of a performance.
She said that they had seen a jet try to take off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, then crash back down again and blow up, as they had driven past. They’d hid out in the back of a library in Santa Maria for a week, sneaking out at night to scavenge and loot for food. When one of the guys didn’t come back, taking them down to three guys and four girls, they had moved on. One of their cars ran out of gas at San Luis Obispo, so they all piled into the remaining truck and made it into Moro Bay. The roads were crowded with other refugees heading north, so they didn’t stand out in the wealthy beachside community. The electricity was out, but they camped in a ten million dollar beachhouse until the food ran out, then they’d ran out of gas for the last time in Paso Robles. The Sergeant tried to pretend to be interested, but he had a war to fight. He hoped she would end her story soon. It was nearly full light.
Over the next month they had hiked over the mountains, on foot. The Mexicans they met didn’t bother them because they had nothing worth taking and there were easier and better pickings elsewhere. That had changed when they had come down into the valley. They were too tired and too weak from hunger to even try to avoid the roadblock the Nortenos had set up. The three men went forward to ask for help, and were shot dead in the middle of the highway before they got within twenty feet of the barricade. Then the MS-13 members came and got the four girls, and carried them back to their hideout.
One of them they had cut up and let bleed to death just for fun, because she was the least pretty, they had said. The other three they kept, and passed around for several weeks. Karen’s voice didn’t falter when she spoke of it, she just looked right at him. Vinyard guessed she had told the story so often that it didn’t hurt her to tell it, now. Or, maybe the years had dulled her pain. After a couple of months they had gotten bored with them and tired of having to feed them. Karen and the two others were traded to the Chinese in Fresno for a couple of Mexican families from up north of the treaty line. Two of the girls were pregnant from their Mexican captivity, but they were beaten by the Chinese until they miscarried. One of them died from the beatings, the next year, when the same thing happened again. Karen considered herself lucky, since she seemed to be barren.
For the last three years, they’d been moved around from one place to the next, always serving only the officers, except for when they did what they had to do to get enough food to survive from the guards. They had seen a lot of other girls come and go. Some had tried to escape, but most of them had been either shot or caught and brought back to be made examples of through torture. A few had committed suicide, by cutting their wrists or hanging themselves. Most, though, just died from being beaten too roughly, or from drug overdoses, since their captors kept them strung out all of the time.
Sgt. Vinyard knew the survivors would have a hard time of it as they went through withdrawals, but he was glad that he and his men had stopped to hear Karen’s story. It had shown them exactly what kind of enemy they were dealing with. They would never offer to allow them to surrender, again.
The rest of the line had moved up without them, but they caught up in Scotts Valley, where a pocket of resistance was holding out at a big, strangely shaped complex of buildings anchored by a swimming pool. That gave him a chance to report in to Major Woodrow about the White prisoners they had liberated at the University. The Major told him that as soon as they were able to link up with Gen. Ferguson, they, along with any other White survivors, would be transferred to a secure area. Woodrow had made radio contact with the legion up north, which was bogged down in Mountain View, just north of San Jose, where they were headed. The next objective was to reach Los Gatos before dark.
Tree-lined canyons were a lot nicer to trudge through than the desert and rock they had gotten used to for the last half decade, but you also couldn’t see as far, Berry considered. They reminded him a lot of the pine woods of South Carolina where he’d grown up. It was in woods like these that older boys had begun calling him “Berry”, because of his last name, instead of “Barry”, his given name, since they both sounded pretty much the same, where he was from. So, he’d just stayed ‘Berry’ when he grew up and joined the Marines to prove how tough he was. His family name was what mattered the most.
So, here they lay, with the Santa Cruz highway to their right and downhill, crossing the tip of a lake or reservoir, and them hunkered down at
the top of this ravine, with the other tip of the lake, or a runoff pond, behind them. Things had begun to go bad when they’d started downhill and seen the figures scurrying around the big round water tank. There looked to be a few hundred of them, at least, with more coming up the road and fanning out on both sides of the highway. The Centuries got off the road in case anybody down there had a long range capability, but as they got closer, it became obvious that they were almost all Chinese civilians. At least, they weren’t in any kind of uniform, and very few of them were armed with anything except for shovels and hoes. They had lots and lots of hoes. A few dozen actual uniforms waved at the farmers furiously, directing them where to stand and how to get there.
Major Woodrow radioed them forwards. Their Lieutenant emphasized the order, with expletives, as did twenty other junior officers, for their Cohorts at the front. Even though they were already tired, they humped it double-time down the canyon so that they could get the lake on their right flank and protect that front. Their experienced swing maneuver where the woods widened out at an overpass was what allowed Sgt. Vinyard’s squad the pleasure of ending up in the vanguard of the legionnaires.
As luck would have it, the Chinese had started slipping and sliding down the muddy parts of this very bank less than a half hour ago, just as Berry saw them coming and ordered his men down. It was kind of tragic, if you didn’t think about the fact that they were in the wrong country, the way they scrambled to the edge of the pond, then waded right in, holding their hoes up like they thought they were about to chop a snake they’d found in the rows. Alongside his unit, over a hundred other heavy machine guns had been braced in the dirt and leveled across the shallow, muddy water. Within seconds, Major Woodrow gave a single word, and that water turned red with blood.
For several long minutes, hundreds of eerily silent Chinese dressed in thrift store castoffs stumbled into the water like a zombie horde, row after row of them going down. Some of them tried to scramble up the steep shoulder of the highway’s bank on one side, or across the mud flats around the pond on the other, but none of them could outflank the reach of the heavy machine guns. The Sergeant and his crew, along with several other units, had jogged across the mud flats instead of through the water, too, when the order came to advance, a couple of minutes later. Half of the forward units stayed down to provide covering fire, while the other half leapfrogged them and crossed the flats to the other bank. When they poked their heads up under the shade of the pine trees, they saw hundreds of pairs of legs running at them from the cluster of houses directly ahead. Without having to be ordered to, they’d opened fire, again. When their belts ran dry, they fought the instinct to stand up and go at it hand to hand with the hoe choppers. The machine guns behind them on the far bank continued to pour death at waist level across the pond, in solid sheets.
As far as they could tell, none of the Chinese laborers retreated, and none surrendered. A wall of bodies four or five deep and equally high towered over the legionnaires, when the machine guns finally fell silent. A few stragglers still tried to crawl over the pile of their own dead to get at them, and had to be put down with sidearms. Only by remembering Karen’s story could Berry keep from feeling sorry for them. Over eight hundred Chinese died in their human wave attack at the Battle of Lyndon Canyon, only fifty or so in uniform. There were eleven New American casualties, two fatal, from hoe chops. Sgt. Vinyard and his men moved up the road a ways, just to get away from the stench, and camped on top of the dam, that night. The next morning they came down from the mountains, and into Hell.
Heaven can wait, and all I’ve got is time, until the end of time, But I won’t look back, I won’t look back…
Premier Ming tried to remain dignified scrunched over in the back seat of the crewcab pickup truck, but it was impossible. If he lost much more face, he wouldn’t have to commit suicide, his men would take care of that, for him. The sole consolation was that Harry Lee was right now grimacing in equal discomfort. The Chinese-American former businessman and politician was stuck in San Jose, organizing his thousands of farm laborers being brought in by the busload from the Valley into human wave shock troops. If anything justified using their limited gas supply up, this was it. His job was to hold back the round-eyed devils coming up from Santa Cruz, while Ming rallied the 5,000 Chinese regular troops to counterattack. The sudden attacks from the air against his ships had shocked Ming, he hadn’t expected the Americans to move against them from the Seventh fleet’s air wing so quickly…unless they hadn’t. Ming considered that the invasion might represent the arrival of the Fifth fleet with Ferguson’s legions. It certainly must be the Fifth, since the Sixth fleet had just arrived in Coos Bay. If so, he would soon see how welldeserved their reputations were. It really didn’t matter who had sunk his ships, the result was that they were at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay, along with a few hundred good men whom he couldn’t afford to lose, any more than the surviving naval contingent.
While Lee tried to slow down the southern advance of the invaders using the ChineseAmerican peasants, Lee gathered his forces from the northern end of the San Francisco Bay. When the first reports that thousands of New American troops were charging up Half Moon Bay into the mountains had reached his headquarters, Ming had disbelieved it. Not until they reached San Mateo was he forced to accept what was happening. He first radioed Chairman Jiang’s command in northern China, but the leader was in Seoul accepting the surrender of the last Korean forces there. The Captain whom he spoke with smugly wished him luck and promised to tell the Chairman as soon as he spoke with him. Just as Ming and Lee had discussed and anticipated, they were on their own. His next call was to Lee, telling him to put his pawns into play, immediately. The knights had landed.
The next surprise for the Premier had been when Ferguson turned right and drove south, rather than north towards the Presidio. Instead of Ming taking the brunt of the blow, it looked like Harry Lee would. That gave Ming a chance, if he moved quickly enough, to counterattack the legion from behind once they had passed. He radioed Lee again, telling him to send his largest force north to block the largest group of invaders, whom he now knew due to radio intercepts to be the legion and commanded by Ferguson. The next group he could gather should head towards Santa Cruz, where another force had landed during the night.
The regular Chinese troops caught in Redwood City and Palo Alto stood their ground, but Ferguson had rolled right over them. Ming could only hope that Lee’s farm laborers could slow them enough in San Jose to let him catch up before they took the Valley, then circled back around to block him in with his back to the sea. At least Ferguson’s decision to attack San Jose first in a pincer movement and take the Bay Area piecemeal had bought him some time. The way it was playing out, he was the one who had circled around. As Ming rode through Fremont toward Milpitas, he gathered his best and most loyal men behind him. All of them knew that with their fleet destroyed, there was no retreat possible, and no surrender. This would be a fight to the death.
Chapter Nine
“ I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, [applause]-that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” –Abraham Lincoln
Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run There's still time to change the road you're on
And it makes me wonder…
The regimental flag of the Bluefield ‘Deerhunter’ militia, with its distinctive Griffin emblem, flew a
bove garrisons throughout western Virginia, these days, Commander Burkesson considered. The old highway map taped to the dashboard of his Humvee showed red dots where his forces held territory wrested from New Africa: Lynchburg, Forest, Bedford, and Roanoke. His big fingers traced the lines. The West Virginia Guard garrison towns of Christiansburg, Cave Spring, Pulaski, Wytheville, and Moneta were indicated with blue dots, and the Rebel Brigade Knights claimed Martinsville, Danville, and Rocky Mount in green. But most importantly, the strategic border towns of Bland and Bluefield were red.
Ornstolt, called ‘The Big O’ by his men because of his size, considered the East River Mountain Tunnel at Bluefield to be the key to controlling the area. The underground fortress, controlled by the fierce blonde giant Earl Warren, was a long tunnel passage for I-77, right through the mountain. On the south side was Virginia, and on the north side was West Virginia. Both ends were barricaded, and nothing came in or out of New America without Earl Warren’s permission. The maintenance subtunnels, storage rooms, and offices and control rooms alongside the tunnel had been turned into a stronghold for Warren and his men. Even though the front lines may have moved on, East River Mountain remained the redoubt that the Deerhunters depended on. The old National Guard armory in Bluefield had been stripped bare by Warren to armor and fortify his underground castle, making it nearly impregnable. If an overwhelming force approached from either end, he was even prepared to blow that end. He had enough supplies stored to outlast his enemies, if he was ever placed under siege. Best of all, there was room for almost all of the Deerhunters and their families inside the nearly mile long twin tunnels, if they had to hole up there.