by Billy Roper
“Thank you, Misty, and stay safe. Well, as the potential for more bloodshed between anti-government extremists and the Salt Lake administration increases, radical fundamentalist militias have tightened their control over towns across northern Arizona, where their support runs deepest. And while the New American Speaker was unavailable for comment this morning, his Press Secretary, Carolyn McNabb, did have this to say,” Carolyn’s clipped and precise professional voice came on:
“All freedom loving people across this continent we share join in giving thanks to God that the Deseret official targeted by this hateful attack was not injured, and that the persons directly responsible for the cowardly act were detained and arrested, with the assistance of New American citizens who were present at the time…”
John chuckled quietly. Hope had called him right after it had happened, on her new cell phone, she’d said. She was quite proud of it, and of herself. Her voice was still shaky from the nerves. It was her first time to shoot anybody in years, she’d admitted, almost embarrassed. Her dad had chided her that she should learn her lesson about going shopping with Kelly Johansen, to which Hope had responded saying that was the best way to keep an eye on her. He had taught her well.
The Speaker hadn’t been available to comment on the story himself because he’d been busy over at Forest Park where the ceremonial ground-breaking was held for an expansion of the St. Louis Zoo. The new Charles Darwin Memorial Hominid Endangered Subspecies Park would house exhibits featuring small herds of Asians, Blacks, and Hispanics roaming free in natural habitat enclosures. By this time next year, he and Carolyn would be able to take Cindy and John Jr. to see what real live nonWhites looked like. They had only seen them on t.v. and in movies, their whole lives.
Flyovers from the new Air Force base in Memphis showed very little human activity in northern Mississippi and Southern Arkansas, which he had plans to reclaim as farmland, soon. The new John Deere factory in Moline was turning out tractors as fast as the assembly lines could go, in anticipation of the need. They would still have to do something about those crazies down in New Orleans, though. When the T.S.U. flu began to spread like wildfire, Rev. Clearly had ordered the Church of the New Dispensation to destroy all three of the bridges across Lake Pontchartrain and kill off five mile wide buffers from La Place to Kenner and from Raceland to Boutte. They would be hard to dig out. John had some plans in the works involving Bayou Cajuns and reverse gator hunts, though, that might work.
So, New Orleans might not be available as a port for a while, yet, but Norfolk would be, in a few months, and the Sixth Fleet in Pensacola would be moved up there, then, while the Seventh would take the long trip over to Emerald Coast duty and the Fifth remained on the West Coast. Coos Bay was fine for now, and the Third was at home in Anchorage, but they’d need to build a couple more carrier fleets down the road, one for the San Francisco Bay to keep the Mormons quiet out west, and one for Pearl, to protect Oahu and their allies down under. It all seemed daunting, until he realized how far they’d come since Cinco Day. And how far they were going. As his car pulled into the fenced perimeter of The Warehouse, The Speaker looked out the window at the blue sky, and wondered how long it would take to get there.
‘Wasting The Dawn’
Hasten The Day, Part III By Billy Roper
This, the third and final installment in the ‘Hasten The Day’ trilogy, is dedicated to my childhood imaginary friend, Pardoo. If anything is amiss in this book, don’t blame me. Pardoo did it. Pardoo says that any similarity between any person or institutions in this book, living or dead, is completely a figment of YOUR imagination.
Also in the ‘Hasten The Day’ series, by the same author:
‘Hasten The Day’
and
‘Waiting For The Sun: Hasten The Day, Part II’
“I tell you this, no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn…”
-Jim Morrison
Chapter One
“Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.”
-Thomas Jefferson
“O Beautiful for patriot dream That sees beyond the years Thine alabaster cities gleam, Undimmed by human tears!”
The long and lanky young man lying prone in the grass paused his firing to curse and complain bitterly, “One more that close and I’m going home!”. John Jr. adjusted his aim to make his next shot a bit more than six inches above the complainer’s ear, this time. Maybe the plastic wadding wouldn’t ruffle his longish hair as much. BOOM! Both kids in front of him flinched again. He tried to stifle a malicious laugh. This was fun. For him, at least. The grizzled and scarred veterans teaching the gray uniformed young men how to fire shotguns in volleys raised their eyebrows at each other, and hoped for the best. They knew they had to keep their eye on the youngster in back, especially. Most of the boys in the class were younger sons of first generation New American nobility. He, on the other hand, was the only son and heir apparent of the Speaker, so he was used to the world getting out of his way in a hurry.
Barely standing, the target for the teenaged boys’ practice today w as the broadside of a barn, literally. The fire-scorched edifice on the outskirts of the capitol city was chosen for demolition because it had been one of the last places of refuge for the Hispanic migrant workers in the area, before they had been ethnically cleansed. “That was a real ‘Harold’!” one of the younger boys cried in frustration, as his shotgun stovepiped the ejecting shell. The others chuckled at the slang reference to anything that fouled up and blocked progress. A black-shirted instructor with one eye and a long scar on his cheek shouted “Cold Range!” and took the shotgun from him to clear the obstruction, before the group resumed firing.
The Political History class that afternoon was a warm refuge from the cold and damp winter’s morning shooting lesson. An elderly man with a hunched back and a gravelly voice, Mr. Ness had refused an honorary doctorate and Capitol University lecturing tenure in order to teach at the Unified Command Military Academy. Only John Jr. was from St. Louis, the other boys in the class were all out-of-towners from the ruling families of Emerald Coast, Dakota, Alberta, or other New American states. Ranging in age from ten to fifteen, the six class years of students took all of their lessons together, but tested separately. The younger students, just fostered up from their parents, learned from the upper classmen, as much as they did from the instructors…except when it came to Mr. Ness’s class. Even Pastor Reed’s ‘Fundamentals of Christian Identity Doctrine’ class was less strict, at least until he began the chapter with the lesson plan on ‘dual seedline’, which still confused John Jr. a bit.
Following the class standing and giving straightarmed ‘Bellamy’ salutes while reciting the revised Pledge of Allegiance to the Starless Stripes, Mr. Hess began with a review of the last discussion.
“Matthew Hale Erickson! How long has the Unified Command been the fist of our body politic?” Ness asked, pacing the front of the room. He often paced with his head down and his hands behind his back, spewing forth trivia and facts about the last century as if he was oblivious to them all…until one of them stopped paying attention. The straw- blonde twelve year old had been caught watching the muted plasma screen in the corner of the ceiling broadcasting images of supply shuttles taking off to carry habitat construction material to the lunar colony. He blushed a deep red before answering. “Twenty years, Sir.”
“Correct. But we do not eliminate distractions here. Why is that, Mr. Alexander?” the teacher spun to confront a larger teen who had been making faces at Matt.
“Because our job is not to be free of distractions, but to be above them, Sir…,” the pale scion from Northern California began. “And what is discipline, Mr. Alexander?” Mr. Ness probed.
“Discipline means remembering what it is we really want, Sir.” G
eorge Rockwell Alexander recited from memory.
“And what do you really want, Mr. Alexander, to spend the rest of your ever- dwindling life making faces at Mr. Erickson?” his teacher demanded, looming over him.
“Uh, No Sir, Mr. Ness, Sir, that is, I don’t, uhm…” George stammered, his green eyes wide in panic.
“What about you, Senior Classman?” Ness asked the fifteen year old John Jr. smirking at George’s distress. “What do you really want?”
“I just want to be the last person to see the last nonWhite, Sir.” The Speaker’s son replied. He sat tall in his chair, expecting the praise he was accustomed to receiving from all quarters.
“And, by the three Kennedys, how many nonWhites have you ever seen, in fact, oh so brave warrior?”, the bent-backed old man asked. John Jr. felt his face grow hot, but an answer, and a truthful one, was required.
“A dozen or more, Sir. At the Darwin Hominid Endangered Subspecies exhibit in the Zoo crosstown. None in the wild, yet.”
Mr. Ness’s face softened somewhat at the realization that this new generation lived in a completely different world than the Old Detroit native had grown up in.
The other boys were too intimidated by the young McNabb to giggle at him, but it was obvious they wanted to. “Well, maybe you will, before they’re all gone, Senior Classman. Maybe you will.”
Their assignment for the day was to draw an accurate map of North America, including major cities and political boundaries. John Jr.’s greatest artistic competition in the class came from W.P. Wickey, another fifteen year old. He quickly sketched the eastern seaboard, then drew in the border between Nouvelle-France and New America along the Potomac. W.P. was being different on purpose, starting on the other side, shading in the Mormon territory from Deseret to the Pacific. Matthew struggled, as always, with where to place the boundaries where the four major nations met, and was showing frustration by kicking the leg of his desk. George had just started laboriously marking the Republic of Texas controlled areas of New Mexico and Oklahoma when the two older boys both raised their hands at the same time to show that they had finished. Most of the other students had barely begun to label in the capitol cities.
Due to the tie, W.P. and John Jr. shared leadership of the P.T. that evening after auto repair and welding class. They both beamed with pride as they led the younger boys through a grueling ten mile run with full backpacks. Six of the thirty-four cadets in New America’s most prestigious officer training school fell out in exhaustion before they made it back to barracks, and had to be carried by their classmates. Only one of them rang the bell to drop out. They were a tough bunch of boys. They had to be, this was a tough world they were going to inherit, full of ghosts. It was no place for the meek.
“We three kings, of orient are. Bearing gifts, we traveled so far…”
Less than twenty miles away, John Jr.’s dad was peering at a pile of printouts forecasting the costs of the new atmospheric domes being built in place on the moon. For the last ten years, human technology had matched and then surpassed scientific advancements leading up to ‘The Balk’, the paradigm-shifting breakup of the former United States. The fact that he rubbed his eyes now out of habit instead of tiredness was another example of that. His laser corrective surgery had given him better than twentytwenty vision last year, despite the Speaker now being in his sixties. He could read the Bible in church, when it came his turn to stand, without even squinting.
Granted, Deseret had lagged behind, focusing on recreating a more pastoral and agriculture based society, but that was by their own choice. There were just as many silver lines launching up from Houston to the Republic of Texas’s orbital station as headed to the moon from Chicago, these days. The two European superpowers’ programs were even larger, if less refined. McNabb thought his and Gen. Ball’s was the best approach, at any rate.
His intercom buzzed. McNabb’s secretaries kept getting younger and younger, he thought. This one sounded like she should be in Sunday School learning which nations descended from which Israelite tribes, still. The German Chancellor, formerly the ambassador to New America, was on line two. He’d let the military attaché planning General Ferguson’s retirement party stew a bit longer on line one, while he took Gerta’s call. Affairs of state must take precedence over affairs of state, after all.
Just as he tapped a code for a secure satlink, the most powerful man in North America heard a low warbling siren go off in the outer office. Putting the phone back down, he met the black-uniformed secret service guards at the door as they came in. The look on their faces told him that it was serious.
“Mr. Speaker, the airjet carrying the first lady has apparently been hijacked between Oahu and Sidney, over the Pacific. We don’t know who’s responsible yet, but unauthorized inbound flights have been intercepted just west…” the veteran S.S. officer was interrupted by someone in his earpiece. Holding a finger up to pause, he listened intently for a few moments. John Sr. knew better than to try to talk over the data feed. The younger guard, Grueder, was also listening to his own earpiece, and began unholstering his sidearm. ‘Well, that doesn’t look like good news,’ their boss thought.
Whatever it was going on, he hoped that his wife was safe. Carolyn was half his world. After their daughter Cindy had died in a tragic automobile accident that had killed his driver and injured both of them nine years earlier, his wife had been unable to have any more children, and sunk into periodic depressions. Their worlds had centered on John Jr., and maybe they had been guilty of spoiling the boy a bit too much. But he was all they had, except for each other and their grown adoptive daughter, Hope. Carolyn had bloomed again in the last few years, after Hope had given them grandchildren. Founding a nation from the chaos of civil war and rising to its unquestioned top meant nothing to John Sr., without his family.
His quick and silent prayer for Carolyn ended just as another group of S.S. guards entered the room, then closed and locked the doors behind them. “Okay, what’s going on?” the Speaker asked.
Fontel, the grizzled older guard, summed it up: “Sir, three aircraft have been shot down, of unknown origin, entering N.A. airspace from the Pacific side, over Northern California. They appeared to be Chinese jets, but they wouldn’t have the range, even if they still had the tech. I don’t know. Maybe from Java. But more urgent is the call we just got that the perimeter has been breached.”
He hadn’t heard anything at all. It’s not as if the Old Courthouse’s grounds were that expansive, even with the added security. “What do you mean? An assault?”
“No, Sir,” Fontel replied, holding his earpiece again. “Secretary of State Smith was found dead in his office a few minutes ago, Sir. He’s been murdered.”
“Mark? Dead? How? Shot, stabbed, poisoned?” John Sr.’s first thought, macabrely, had gone to how his old friend and co-ruler had gone out.
Grueder looked at him strangely, but Fontel had served in the Capitol’s honor guard long enough to not be wierded out by how his leader’s mind worked. He waved the other guards to cover the windows as he answered, “Shot, Sir. With a suppressed weapon. His secretary and one guard, as well.”
The North American leader spotted a problem instantly. “One guard, Major?” Fontel frowned, looked at Grueder, at the other guards, and then back at the Speaker.
“Yes, Sir, Mr. Speaker. The other guard is…currently missing, Sir. Away from his post. Several called in sick, today.”
Grueder spoke, then, saying “Sir, the rest of the cabinet has been advised, and their security teams on high alert status. The Secretary of Defense cannot be located, Sir.”
“Did you try his ranch? Oh, of course you did, never mind. Are we looking at something internal, then?” John didn’t want to say the word ‘Coup’. Not yet. Not until he was sure.
Fontel looked uncertain, and nervous. “I believe we should relocate to a more secure location, Sir.”
“More secure than the Capitol building?” the Speaker drew his customary Glock .45,
slipped back the slide to check that the chamber was loaded, and was just releasing, checking, and reseating the magazine when the stuttered coughs of suppressed fire came from outside the door, where the external guards were posted. He was about to say ‘I see your point’, when Fontel’s face tightened up and his eyes looked over John’s shoulder. Grueder launched himself at the New American Speaker, tackling him to the floor. “What the!?!”….the air went out of him. The Glock was up and sweeping towards Grueder’s side when the top of the guard’s head sprayed blood all over both of them, and he slumped like a marionette whose strings had been snipped.
Fontel got off two shots as he fell backwards over the low table between the overstuffed chairs, struck multiple times. Some of the guards at the windows were yelling in surprise and anger. Some of them were quiet, firing calmly, into his back, as he lay on the floor on his left side. ‘Try to roll over to face them, at least.’ It felt like he was getting kicked in the kidneys. Hard. Couldn’t breathe in. Couldn’t breathe out. He barely had time to register understanding that his own S.S. had been infiltrated and betrayed him, before the last loyal guard fell. John W. McNabb was so angry at being unable to move or fight back that he didn’t have time for any more noble last words than “You stupid pieces of…” before the last bullet answered the last question anyone ever learns the answer to.
The assassins slipped out in the chaos. Noone seized control of the government. Not right away. That wasn’t the point. The point had been to create a vacuum. Then to fill that vacuum. The attempt was obviously blunted though, by a lack of commitment on the part of some of the conspirators. Three bombs were found on the capitol grounds which, together, could have leveled it. They had never been armed. And half the missing guards appeared to have just called in sick to work, that morning. Loyal Secret Service and Unified Command troops patrolled the streets of St. Louis after scouring the Old Courthouse for any living witnesses or enemies. Without telling him why, a squad of military police awoke the Academy administration and escorted John Jr. back to the Warehouse, his family’s compound in the city. There, under the watchful eye of his father’s most trusted friends and personal guards, he would be safe.