by Billy Roper
North of the empty Château Pèlerin, a door to a medical laboratory in the University of Haifa creaked open, nudged by the ocean breeze. On the debris-strewn lab table, a bank of glass vials rattled, sprinkling their dried specimens onto a sheaf of stained printouts. Over in the corner, a bespectacled skull rested on the tiles between a yarmaluke and a white labcoat. As the door creaked back on its hinges, it seemed to smile with a hidden secret. Otherwise, all was quiet in Israel.
But wherever I have gone, oh you’re sure to find yourself there, You can run all your life, but not go anywhere…
A civil war battlefield was a crazy place to fight a war, General Ray-Ray Destrehan told his fanners as they struggled to keep him cool in the Mississippi heat. It had never been this hot in Hotlanta. Why’d Emperor Bling-Bling have to send him back down here, of all the niggahs he coulda sent? Well, the Emperor couldn’t say he hadn’t done what he’d asked. Ray-Ray would probably have compared his forced march across Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi to Sherman’s march to the sea, if he had ever heard about it. The eight thousand New African Speshul Foahsus soldiers had torn through a twenty mile wide path of rape and pillage, smearing feces and smegma as they went, through all three states, to end up on the bluffs of Vicksburg. Bluffs where his victorious warriors were throwing the cracker preachers in the big river, now that the battle was over.
He had laughed at the group of honkeys with a couple of token Uncle Toms who had met them at the beginning of the fields with all the old cannons in them, in front of the statues of old dead White folks, and tried to talk some smack about brotherhood and diversity and love. Something or other. He told them that they were in New Africa, not in Heaven, but he was gonna put them there. The one preacher out front was sure an ugly mo-fo. His big old head all swollen on one side and his skin yellow instead of White over half of his face. Looked like somebody had done taken half his head clean off. He tried to do a bunch more talking about how they all should just get along and work together and Jesus loved Ray-Ray, too. General Butt-Naked behind him started to laugh at that, and General Rambo was nudging General Shark Tooth in the ribs. He couldn’t have no honkey frontin him in front of his men. That’s how a nigguh got kilt and de-posed. The Emperor had just tolt him to come and kill these Church people, not talk trash with them.
Rev. Ike could see that things weren’t going well. The grinding pain behind his eye and the heat from his ear inwards flamed again, blindingly. Caught between the Republic of Texas at the Red River and the Emerald Coast at Mobile Bay, the Church of the New Dispensation had really had no choice but to evangelize northwards. Their missionaries had blazed a trail through New Orleans already, so they followed it through Baton Rouge and Alexandria and Natchez as they went, converting with the cross and the sword. Huckleberry picked up new believers by the hundreds along the way, and many of them became Faithful, making his mixed race mobile congregation predominantly black. The former governor didn’t care, he knew that Jesus loved them all. That’s what he was trying to tell this poor ignorant wretch, General Ray-Ray. That was why Rev. Ike had crossed the Mississippi to meet the approaching New African Army here, of all places, on this ancient battlefield. Here, brother had fought with brother, over whether all men were equal and should be equally free.
Their holy host numbered over ten thousand, now, and it had been hard to feed them all as they gleaned the last manna from Louisiana. God had led them here, to spread his word and advance his kingdom of love and multiracial brotherhood, and the Church of the New Dispensation would not be stopped by any army of man. Rev. Ike saw the grins and shifting stances on the other side, and sensed the nervousness of his flock behind him. ‘Oh ye of little faith’, he thought. “Brothers!” he called out through the pain. “Brothers, I beseech ye, God is not mocked! Join us in Christian love and peace! Help us to spread the word of the Lord, the truth of equality and diversity and light! Come and shake my hand in brotherhood, as equals, before God….” Ike moved forward, beaming a smile despite his throbbing head, and thrust out his hand. General Ray-Ray drew his machete, and with one swipe, cut it off.
Oh, how the crazy crackers in their black robes had started screaming then! Some had fallen on their knees and started praying to their God for deliverance or to the New African warriors for mercy. They, along with Ike, were immediately hacked to pieces. A few others swung rifles up from under their black robes and started blasting away as they backed up among the monuments. Ray-Ray wished that he had been sent down to Florida, where the Cuban Army had melted away from their sickness that only brown people seemed to get. New Africa was going to take the whole thing back. As he swung his machete down into the crying face of an old White woman, the New African General imagined lying on a beach down there, with lots of cold beer and blunts and slave girls…he had no idea where the cold beer would come from, it was good to have dreams. “I have a dream!” Ray-Ray shouted, as he caught up with a bleeding White man trying to crawl behind a big bronze horse. His soldiers looked at him strangely as he brought his machete down, again and again.
After the first few hundred of them panicked and ran and were butchered, clumps of the Faithful rallied to stand and fight. All through the bright afternoon, the two sides tangled. Down the slopes of the military park, and into the town, over two thousand New African warriors fell before the New Dispensation rifles, but they took twice that many of the congregation down with them. By the end of the day, the thousand Faithful who were able to, retreated back across the I-20 bridge. The Church of the New Dispensation would live to fight another day, barely. Rev. Ike Huckleberry, martyred, would be declared a Saint.
For today, though, General Ray-Ray had the surrendering congregation herded into the Convention Center by the river. The White ones he just had thrown into the Mississippi and gave orders to only waste bullets on them if they tried to swim back. Most all of them drowned, of course. His men’s arms were tired from the hours of machete work, and they were angry that a quarter of their army had been killed by the Faithful before they had surrendered. He was more curious about the black Church members, though. Most of them had surrendered without a fight, but Ray-Ray still wanted to know why they had joined up with the crazy White people, in the first place.
Taneisha kneeled on the dirty convention center floor with her wrists and ankles tied together behind her back. The smell of cookfires came through the open doors as the victorious army butchered the dead for a barbecue feast tonight. She hoped that she wouldn’t be on the menu. In one way, she regretted joining the Church of the New Dispensation, and leaving her babies with her Auntie to come north with them as a missionary. She didn’t regret doing God’s work, though. When the scattering of Latinos among them had grown sick and died, but the blacks and Whites had been spared the wrath of God, that had been a sign from Heaven. The Reverend had said so, and she believed him. In the confusion of the fight, she had heard that Rev. Ike had been called home to be with Jesus. Taneisha hoped it wasn’t true, but if it was, she was ready to join him in Glory with the Lord. She just didn’t want no brothuh eating her on the way. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a group of elaborately dressed New Africans moving among the black captives, asking them questions, then moving on. When it came to be her turn, Ray Ray recognized her. He called her name, and ordered her to be freed. Taneisha stretched her arms experimentally before wrapping them around his neck. “Where you been, RayRay?” she demanded. “Your chile been hungry!”.
Chapter Eleven
This trendy, new crowd, which likes to do everything with committees, really believes that all it takes to make anything legal and OK is a majority. I guess they call that democracy. When the majority is what it has become in the United States today, a better name is mobocracy. But really, it's much worse than mob rule. It is rule by a self-appointed elite of utterly evil and destructive people who have in their hands the tools for controlling and guiding the mob. They're pretty cocky now -- so cocky, in fact, that they're making statements of the sort I'
ve quoted today. They're cocky because they believe that no one can take away from them their tools for controlling the mob, and that as time passes and America becomes darker and more degenerate, their grip on the mob will only become firmer. Our job is to prove them wrong. It's a big job, and we'd better get started. –Dr. William L. Pierce
You’re one in a million, yeah that’s what you are, You’re one in a million, baby, you’re a shooting star…
The heavy environmental suit was difficult to move in, and even harder to practice injections with, but Dr. Sur Moerdani had done this many times. Behind the plexiglass face mask, his eyes watched the monitor as the subject’s pulse and heart rate quickened. The artificial coagulant seemed to be keeping him from bleeding out satisfactorily, but the blood vessels and capillaries were still weakened enough to have cast a faint blue tint to his skin. At this stage in the viral progression, the restraints were more to keep the prisoner from falling off of the 45 degree angled bed, rather than to keep him from resisting. Salbutamol and terbutaline as a beta-2 agonist made the best cocktail of albuterol to keep the lungs flush with oxygen, but the steroids had a debilitating effect on the circulatory system. He had lost most of his recent test subjects to seizures and heart attacks. He sighed as number one-thirty-two flatlined into a monotone. Oh well, Jakarta’s millions would not miss another such as this.
Sur and his foreign correspondent colleagues had discussed whether their work was righteous according to the Prophet. He personally felt that it fell under the same blessed authority as that allowed for space travel: “O assembly of Jinns and men, if you can penetrate the regions of the heavens and the earth, then penetrate them! You will not penetrate them except with authority.” To Dr. Moerdani, this meant that if Allah willed it to be known, the secret to this virus would be revealed to him.
The Indonesian Health Authority took a somewhat more conservative view of medical science, which is why they had isolated his research facility on this little island called Sangiang, in the Sunda Strait between dead Sumatra and living Java. Borneo, Sulawesi, and Timor had likewise gone silent, but no one was allowed to go look and see what they would find there. Royal Australian and New American ships had probed all around them, but left them alone, so far. They had plenty of places to plunder where nobody would fight back.
The doctor did not ask where his victims came from. He assumed that they were refugees caught trying to cross the Java Sea. The naval quarantine was as tight as the Javanese could make it. They were immunes, having survived the Turkish Flu, but they still carried the deadly virus. Just one of them getting through, just one, and the last Islamic state carrying the word of Allah and the Prophet would fall, like the rest. His task was to trigger the latent virus in remission within them into active status so it would attack the hosts. Then he tried to stop the viral load progression he had triggered. If he could understand how to trigger the viral load, he might come to understand how to stop it. That was his hope.
He was halfway there, now, and could trigger an remissive into an active case, by artificially tricking their autoimmune systems into thinking that the threat had passed. So far, he couldn’t stop what he started, though. If he failed to learn how to stop the viral load progression, his only other option, an idea borrowed from Dr. Sayanora in the Osaka Labs, was to load the host with a counteracting virus that would be introduced while the autoimmune system was shut off. That would have to be a genetically engineered retrovirus that would do the opposite of what the Turkish Flu did, and in matching measure and reverse sequence, so as not to kill the host by overcorrecting and going symptomatically overboard. It would be like fighting fire with fire, or to be more exact, like starting a flood of water as a backfire against an oncoming wall of flames. That would take a lot more time, and many more test subjects, to perfect.
His Imam taught that this was a test to see who among the faithful was the most worthy, and all had been measured and found wanting, save the Javanese. How they planned on feeding the 140 million faithful crammed into such a small space, if they were afraid to go out and re-colonize new land for farming, Sur had no idea. All of the coffee plantations and mangrove and tropical rain forests were being converted to wet rice farming as quickly as the people could clear and plant, but they looked hungrily towards the vast openness of their neighbor to the south.
For weeks, he had been combining different drugs in different doses on captured infected, searching for a cure. Moerdani had been working with other specialists around the world, at first. A week into his research, the Indian scientist leading the research team in Kolkata had reported a containment breach in their isolation chamber. The Iranian complex he had been talking with at Mashhad was taken over by the Russians as they moved south, and they were still continuing the research there and in Kiev and Krasnodar, but they had come no closer to a cure than he had. The Osaka Labs had not responded to his last question two weeks ago, and Shenyang had gone off of the air after announcing that they had found a cure, which Sur seriously doubted. Sur radioed the guards to suit up and bring him another test subject from the pens. With the heavy elbowlength gloves, he wiped the chalkboard clear and clumsily scrawled 1-3-3.
And I knew if I had my chance, that I could make those people dance And maybe they’d be happy for a while…
The team put together by Dr. Edwards as soon as her nomination as Surgeon General was confirmed began work on hypothetical origins for the Turkish Flu feverishly. One train of thought was that persons of European heritage whose ancestors had survived the Bubonic plague which swept through Europe in the 14th century had inherited a resistance to the disease now killing 70% of the world’s population. A contending view was that the Turkish Flu was genetically more similar to the virus that had swept through northern Europe in the 1650’s, which seemed not to have been the same as the Bubonic plague. This second theory was based on the fact that the mass graves of the dead in London and elsewhere from that pandemic were not buried with rats, the primary carriers of the Bubonic plague’s flea inducers. The 14th century grave’s victims had been. In addition, the 1650 plague also hit Scandinavia hard, where the climate precluded the flea infestation which was believed to have ridden on the backs of the rats to transfer the Bubonic plague from victim to victim. Northern Europeans, then, might have inherited a genetic resistance to a virus very similar to the airborne pestilence from that later pandemic.
If the Turkish Flu virus had occurred naturally, either of these theories might have been a reasonable explanation of why Whites were proving resistant to the disease. It quickly became obvious, however, that the way blacks and Whites were both unaffected by the virus was not accidental. With no Jewish population left in St. Louis, and few left in New America, the former Barnes-Jewish Hospital in the capital city was taken over by Dr. Edwards and her team, and research staff from around the nation brought in. The massive building, renamed Margaret Sanger Memorial Hospital, began to buzz with activity. Ethnic and racially specific diseases such as Tay-Sachs and Sickle Cell Anemia were the early focus of the research there.
Get up, come on get down with the sickness Get up, come on get down with the sickness Get up, come on get down with the sickness…
Sickle Cell Anemia was also the focus of intensive medical research being carried out elsewhere in the world, albeit with a somewhat different goal in mind. The Center for Medical Research in Johannesburg had entered into negotiations with the British Royal Navy to develop regional alliances between themselves and, now that the Argentines and British were ironically allied, the government in Buenos Aires. The diplomatic overture, coming from a health facility rather than a military government, was quickly reciprocated.
Ostensibly, the unusual request from the Center was for the Commander of the British Forces South Atlantic Islands to authorize the HMS Dauntless Type 54 Guided Missile Destroyer on duty in the Falklands to transport twenty immune Argentine survivor volunteers to the Orange Free State to participate in medical tests in pursuit of a cure for the
Turkish Flu. The volunteers, from the surviving Mestizo segment of Argentina’s population, were eager to escape what was, due to the virus, a 97% White nation. The Dauntless made port in Durban a month after the specific request was made, and thus began a period of growing alliance between the Orange Free State, the re-expanding British Empire, and Argentina. However, the Center for Medical Research’s attempts to isolate the Turkish Flu virus from the infected volunteer’s blood samples and attach the virulent immune-suppressant trait to the genetic marker for Sickle Cell took several more shiploads of volunteers to reach fruition.
In the meantime, several of the test subject ‘accidentally’ escaped from their supervised medical care, and found themselves transported to the northern border and released. There were still hundreds of thousands of East Indians and Chinese in SubSaharan Africa who had been shielded from the pandemic by a buffer of nonsusceptible black populations. Up until then.
In South America, the much more diverse Brazilian population was affected more by the Turkish Flu than Argentina, whose almost wholly European military forces took the opportunity to drive north and east into the region called Triângulo Mineiro, one of the richest agricultural regions of Brazil, between the Paranaíba and Grande rivers. After the Argentine nuclear attack on Brazil with New American collusion to end the latter’s invasion, much of southern Brazil’s German population had moved away from the coasts, and further inland.
The area around the former Universidade Federal de Uberlândia campus became a vast dead zone, ruled for the most part by packs of immune children and teens. Most of the Whites had fled the chaos of the city as the final straw when the Turkish Flu swept down the Atlantic Coast of Brazil and inland like the impending doom of nightfall. Professor Oscar Neiman had remained. The library, his library, could not be abandoned to the elements, or to the sadly ignorant savages of the streets. His family had been hunters, and so he had not found himself defenseless when the students who had not left their dormitories began to die in them or come looting. He had a rifle, with a scope, and he had twenty boxes of ammunition for it. Classes were cancelled, but he refused to let this spark of civilization go out.