The Hasten the Day Trilogy

by Billy Roper

  The few days’ warning that the Republica del Norte authorities in Arizona had received of the Turkish Flu’s advance only served to throw them into a panic. The cartel administration was overthrown by a mob demanding vaccinations or immunization shots against the virus, treatments which noone could provide, not in Tucson, and not in Shenyang, where Premier Jiang fell ill from it and succumbed. The next stage of panic led to an intensive assault on Deseret forward positions throughout the state. Human wave attacks pushed LDS troops back to the edge of the Tonto National Forest, before the virus began to take its’ toll on the reconquistadores from behind. Kelly was deeply immersed in the conflict as Salt Lake ordered their militia to fall back for ten miles along the Arizona front, to give the Nortenos room to die in. They obliged. The Mormon advance was resumed when the virus ran its course. One cartel leader had holed up in Davis-Monthan Air Force base with a few dozen of his most loyal men before the disease arrived, and remained quarantined from it. He held out against the Gull unit sent to eradicate him for a week, until the LDS forces used helicopters to drop infected Latinos onto the base, leading to his surrender. Because they had resisted, the Church did not bother to relocate the Latino immunes in Arizona, they simply euthanized them.

  While Kelly had been busy doing her part to help the Saints expand Deseret southwards on all fronts, Josh had been busy keeping up with his own nation’s conquests in the Republic of Texas. As the Ambassador, he had a lot of irons in the fire, too. They hadn’t had much time together since the virus had hit the continent. She had missed their days and nights alone, but just keeping all of the different Church bureaucracies in line with the Council of Fifty’s approval of the Treaty of Denver had taken all of her strength and energy. Even with Prophet Rammell himself meeting with the New American Secretary of State, Mark Smith, and shaking his hand at the agreement that Colorado east of the Rockies would be New American and west of them would be Deseret was not enough to keep some of the more militant missionary expansionists from grumbling that the territorial concessions were too generous. Some people just were never satisfied.

  Then, at Jimmy’s suggestion, Kelly was included in the diplomatic negotiations with Austin over the division of their two nation’s spheres of influence, which eventually came to be understood as roughly the former Arizona/New Mexico state lines. It was fun for her to sit opposite Josh at the negotiating table and argue over water rights to Silver City and who had responsibility for disposing of the surviving Apaches during the day, and carrying on like a teenager with him to seal the deals, later at night.

  She had just rolled out of bed to go pee when a knock came at her apartment door, early one morning. It was a uniformed Gull Sergeant, looking officious. Kelly thought for a moment that maybe they had decided to crack down on them, if they didn’t need her any more. She’d probably be given a choice of marrying an elder and being a third or fourth sister wife, or being branded. Josh’s diplomatic car was parked out front, for all of the world to see. She guessed they had been getting sloppy lately. Kelly was hopping from one foot to the other in her bare feet and nightie, trying to decide whether to yell to Josh to wake up and hide, or run and hide herself, when she saw a smaller figure standing behind the broad-shouldered soldier on her steps. It was a woman, a woman who looked like her mother, a thinner and much older version of herself…suddenly Kelly threw the door open, recognizing her sister. Karen had come home.

  I been all around this great big world

  And I seen all kinds of girls

  Yeah, but I couldn't wait to get back in the states Back to the cutest girls in the world…

  The top eight floors of the TransAmerica Pyramid were still his. Ming’s men were fighting like devils to slow the American Foreign Legion dogs clawing their way up the stairs. He could have made it. He could have won. He just hadn’t had enough time. Harry Lee was somewhere above, camped out in an office suite sleeping what little remained of his life away. He had been so deep in depression that Ming had ordered two of the men to carry Lee up all 48 flights of stairs. Probably, that had been a foolish waste of time, on his part, he should have left him to die far below, along with the rest of his sell-out Chinese-Americans. Ming had always called Lee and his type of expatriates traitors, or twinkies: ‘yellow on the outside, but White on the inside’.

  Well, it wasn’t the worst mistake he had made, Ming though despairingly. There had been a few. Sacrificing the mass of their human wave peasants on the legionary Centuries coming north from Santa Cruz would have been better than pulling them back to Milpitas, where the farmers had all dropped like flies once the virus spread up the coast, anyway. That had been a waste. Of course, Ming had already selected the best of his regular army units, the original People’s Republic of China Humanitarian Expedition to North America Peacekeeping Forces, to fall back across the Dumbarton bridge with him while the other 4,000 held Ferguson in San Jose. The New American legion had been tricked into thinking that he was still there with the main body of his troops until the Turkish Flu had killed most of them. The Premier of a realm that had shrunk to this tower wished that he could have seen Ferguson’s face when he realized that Ming wasn’t among the dead and dying.

  It had been two weeks since he had been able to contact Jiang, and had no idea what was happening there, but the radio news reports broadcast in Chinese had ceased on the government frequency, too. Ming feared the worst. He had sacrificed another hundred men slowing Ferguson down at Millbare two nights ago, but the Americans had broken through that chokehold, too. The one thing he had going for him was that none of Ming’s remaining 800 troops were infected. Aside from some isolated Pacific islands here and there, he might be the leader of the largest remaining uninfected Asian population group in the world. The thought made Ming proud, but sad at the same time.

  Firing slacked off below. Reports from downstairs indicated that the legions were pulling back. Maybe they intended to starve him out, instead of wasting more men on a frontal assault upstairs, flight by flight. That was smart of them, Ming thought. A noise from the distance chilled his hope. As the high pitched roar of airborne jet engines screeched closer, Ming realized why the Americans had pulled back.

  The first pattern of F-18s separated onto individual trajectories and launched their missiles at Lt. Matt Ball’s order. The flight leader had waited until he could see that the nearest legionnaires were a block away from the base of the largest building in the city. As he called the shot, his own jet lurched from the launch, then was beyond the highest skyscrapers. Other plumes followed his in. He turned around over the Bay and made another pass.

  The thick black smoke rose from above as the building shook under his feet with each impact. Ming had lost count of the floors as he made his way to the roof. The stairwells acted as natural chimneys, carrying the burning plastics and fumes upwards in a hot blast that worked inwards from each corner of the building. His eyes and lungs burned, and the men in front of him didn’t move fast enough, while the men behind him were crushing what little breath he had left right out of him. So much for Chinese discipline and orderliness, he thought. A narrow rectangle of light could be seen above, filling and emptying with men as they squeezed through in clumps to the deceptive freedom of the open air.

  On his third pass, Matt saw that numerous impact points had crushed in the walls of the TransAmerica building at roughly the tenth and twelfth floors, below where forward legion units had reported the remaining enemy resistance to be concentrated. There was heavy structural damage on two sides, and gray and brown plumes obscured the top few floors. Out of the edge of that dark cloud, Lt. Ball glimpsed falling figures emerge. “Jumpers!” he said aloud to himself, like a curse.

  Long ago, when he was a boy, he had been allowed to go to a park and play. The sun had been warm and there were green trees and soft grass and a pretty lady with a kind smile. At first when he had ran, he had fallen. Then, he tried again. That made the pretty lady smile. He had ran and ran until the wind had made his e
yes tear up and it hurt to breathe. This time Ming knew better, and he would not stop running in the open air until he could make the pretty lady smile at him again, no matter how scared he was of falling.

  “Take a sad song, and make it better…”

  As an interview for a Cabinet level position, it wasn’t so f ormal as the post-collapse Senate hearings. In a laid-back style, the confident brunette told her life story since Cinco Day to the full session of Congress. At the Speaker’s request after his introduction of her, she began at the end.

  From 140 miles away, the ground burst at Offutt had mirrored a new sun rising on the wrong side of the Earth. Dr. Tina Edwards still remembered how the tinted windows of her small family clinic in Des Moines had lit up like the extended flash of an oldfashioned camera. With no Medicaid or Medicare of Obamacare working, her patients had started bringing in items to barter for medical care. It was surprising how few people got sick, sick enough to go to the doctor, when nobody else was paying for it. She had known that she was lucky to not be working in most cities, where the hospitals and clinics were overwhelmed not only with gunshot and stab wounds, but burns and shrapnel injuries, as they devolved into war zones. Still, she got enough business to get bartered fuel for her generator and eggs and meat for her supper.

  She had just been starting the local anesthesia for a left thumb amputation on a farmer who had been trying to work on his tractor with a hammer when the long flash came. She looked up, and with a sinking feeling, knew immediately what it was. Ever since D.C. and Colorado Springs, Tina had expected other shoes to fall. She began to count down from the flash to the sound, which should follow in about four, three, two…the low rumbling thunder confirmed it. Omaha was gone. Some of her patients wandered out of the front lobby to gawk at the flattening fireball, despite Trish’s telling them to stay inside. Her receptionist liked to be bossy, she even tried to act like she ran the clinic, sometimes, but this time, she was right. Limiting exposure was best, long-term. Once you reached a certain lifetime dose, over a hundred years or twenty, the odds of cancers spiked.

  As she calmed the patient in her chair down and quickly finished the procedure, Tina’s mind drug up medical school textbook sidebars. Let’s see…R.E.M. meant “Roentgen Equivalent Man”, and more than a couple hundred could be fatal short-term. Symptoms of radiation poisoning: sunburn, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, lethargy…sounded like a typical post-divorce weekend, for her. The smashed thumb came free with a twist and a snip. Discretely wrapped and into the biohazard marked baggie for medical waste. What were the treatment options before exposure? Avoid exposure. Okay, smartie-pants, failing that, she chided herself? Potassium Iodide, it blocked the thyroid from absorbing the harmful radiation. The stump bled weakly as she began placing stitches into the flesh she’d left an inch above the bone joint. Okay, after exposure? Hydration, antibiotics to fight systemic infections, and a nice long shower. Didn’t that count as hydration?

  With her patient stitched and bandaged and sent on his way with a strip of her dwindling supply of percosets, Tina announced that the clinic was going to close for the day. At this point, her two remaining patients didn’t care. Their psoriasis and diabetic edema were all but forgotten in the excitement of a nuclear bomb going off within sight. That didn’t happen every day, around these here parts, she thought brattily. She sent Trish home, too, telling her that she would call her to let her know if they would be open tomorrow. The overweight woman hesitated, until Dr. Edwards told her to take the two gallons of milk and five pounds of bacon they’d taken in payment today with her. That got her moving. Tina gathered up the nonperishable barter items, including the ten 00 Buck 12 gauge shells. They were for her Remington. She turned off the lights and locked the front door, even though the black population of Polk County had been relocated over the last couple of months to the State Fairgrounds if they wouldn’t agree to the Voluntary Relocation Ordinace. After the riots in Chicago and Detroit caused the Mayor to panic, he’d used the police department to force the City Council into an emergency session to pass the law requiring all members of “disloyal population groups” to register for temporary rehousing. Those that wanted to protest about that had been put into beds in the Fort Des Moines Correctional Facility after all of the non-violent convicts were summarily released. There wasn’t much call for locks, these days.

  She thought about E.M.P. as her car engine turned over, but the bomb hadn’t been high enough. The five miles to her home was just outside of her comfortable daily walking range, and just inside the radius of gas she could gather from patients. On the way, the thirty-three year old doctor turned on the local news radio station, but they knew no more about what had happened than she did. She turned it back off as she pulled into the driveway of the three bedroom ranch she used to share with her husband, but now live in alone.

  What had worried Tina most, since it looked to her like Offutt had taken a ground burst, was fallout. It all depended on the winds. She had no way of knowing that it had been an American submarine which had launched the strike destroying Omaha and killing over a hundred thousand in an instant. But she did know her meteorology. The prevailing winds had carried the deadly dirt and ash clouds south, rather than east, causing Kansas City to button down just as the black riots there were hitting their stride. The thick rain came down on the protesters in buckets, leading to the majority of them dying after two weeks of hard suffering. Des Moines, however, was spared.

  Dr. Edwards had headed to Mercy Hospital the next day instead of reopening her clinic, just in case they had any burn victims or worse from Omaha. They hadn’t. Iowa Lutheran hadn’t, either, but they were assembling a team of doctors and nurses willing to join an expedition with half of the Des Moines Air National Guard 132nd Fighter Wing escorting them. Tina had signed on. Her husband and she had never been able to have kids, and now he had left her for a floozy who could, so she didn’t have many people who would miss her, if she caught a dose. Fortunately for her, after the first few returning pilots became sick from flying over the blast site, they had suspended overflights, so she didn’t.

  After a break for lunch during which she sat with John and talked to him about the best ways to soothe his new baby boy’s colic, the nominee described how the Iowa Relief Field Hospital had been established in Council Bluffs, just outside the blast damage area, but within walking distance for the ambulatory wounded. She told them about the first few days of triage, as horrible burns and broken limbs and apparent dosages decided whether a victim was deemed too far gone to waste time and resources on, or if they were likely to survive without care, or fell into the sweet spot in the middle where medical help would make a difference. Playing Goldilocks with people’s lives, she called it.

  Often, the difference between the living and the dead simply depended on how quickly they could baptize them in the Missouri River to wash the fallout off, since there was no running water in the area from broken mains. The first victims they encountered were from the furthest away from the blast zone, so they had the fewest traumatic injuries. As word spread among the survivors of the Field Hospital, though, the wounds they were presented with became more severe. Those combining radiation poisoning with physical injuries were the most complicated. Small things stuck with her, like teaching a young boy how to make a crude radiation detector from a metal coffee can and two sheets of aluminum foil strung on strings inside that would move whenever gamma rays passed through them, so long as some crushed drywall was kept in the bottom. His parents were too sick to absorb the lesson, so she taught it to the eight year old.

  Several of the doctors who actively went out looking for victims came back ill, as did their Air Force guards. Some of them never came back, at all. Fights between patients over who would receive care first, or angry over their triage assessment, resulted in some fatalities. After the first week, Major Hardwick, in charge of the expedition, gave an order that no more trips would be made across the river until they had received more NBC decontamination k
its and suits. A few thousand civilians might have died because of that order, but it made sure that the twenty-one physicians in the I.R.F.H. survived. For six months, as it was resupplied and expanded as a material aid center and soup kitchen, then as a permanent encampment, the Field Hospital became the focus of migration for survivors from Omaha and its intact suburbs. Just before the second anniversary of Cinco Day, Omaha was designated a cleared zone, open for supervised salvage operations. Council Bluffs had nearly tripled in size, to 150,000.

  Over the next year on staff there, Dr. Edwards had specialized more and more in the study of the mid-term health effects of acute to moderate radiation poisoning. She also ticked off the myriad communicable diseases she had dealt with in a tent city of 100,000 immune-deficient refugees living with minimal sanitary facilities. Since then, she had been focusing her research less on the long-term cancers of the bone and organs and blood, and more on the effects of radiation on the mutation rates of viruses. This field of specialization was what had made her John’s nominee for Surgeon General.

  In taking questions from the Representatives, Tina was asked by the Congressman from the Emerald Coast, where the Turkish Flu had decimated the Cuban Army to their south, what the likelihood was of a further mutation allowing the virus to attack the White population. She responded that without a clearer understanding of the disease’s origin, she couldn’t guess at its stability, or the direction that it might mutate towards. “Think of the precursors to a genetically modified virus, such as this one, as being a multicellular organism, just like you or me. We have recessive traits within us which aren’t obvious by looking at us now, but if you knew our family trees, you might get a better idea of what those recessive traits are. It’s the same with the Turkish Flu. Without knowing what they made it out of, it’s hard to guess what direction it might take next, if any,” she explained.