The Hasten the Day Trilogy

by Billy Roper

  Taneisha interrupted his thoughts by throwing a chicken bone at him. She’d already sucked it clean of meat and sauce, so it didn’t leave any more stains on his already smeared gold satin shirt.

  “Ray Ray, what you lookin’ so glum for? You still fretting over that oil tanker?” she asked, in between and during bites of pineapple.

  “Nah, just the three boats and the eleven soldiers it took. Ain’t nobody gonna want to go after the big prizes any more, before long.” He replied. Taneisha shook another chicken leg at him, flinging sauce on the lesser nobles of the tribe around her.

  “What you need to do is to get them Texas and Florida crackers to fight one another. Harold that shees up! You tell that Revrund Clearly that’s what he need to do!” the plus- sized Queen advised.

  “I shore will, big mama, I shore will.” Ray Ray assured her, grabbing the lightskinned girl by the arm as she passed by and giving her the look. If only everything was that easy.

  The next morning, after a breakfast of sliced fruit eaten outside as usual to clear up the headache from his hangover, King Ray Ray looked across his debris-strewn beach and got angry, as he often did these days, without warning. He started kicking some of the servants lying around asleep on their filthy blankets, startling them awake.

  “Get yore lazy sorry selves up and start cleaning this place. Get that trash picked up and burnt in a pile. What if Rev. Clearly came to visit? What would he think? You want them White folk to be lookin’ down on us? Move, you fools!”

  Rev. Joe Bob Clearly had never come to Freeport, and it was unlikely that he ever would. In fact, the fat old honkey preacher only left his compound in New Orleans to come over to Nassau and spend a few days at the time partying with Ray Ray. Or, more accurately, partying with the locally made rum and the locally raised girls Ray Ray provided. The pasty preacher liked them dark and he liked them young.

  That’s where Ray Ray was headed this morning, once he had woken everybody up and gotten them started picking up trash and piling it in a fallen in cabana hut. Others he ordered to haul the cooking pans and serving dishes from the night before down to the ocean to rinse out. That should keep them busy. Taneisha woke up and leveraged herself onto one elbow to watch Ray Ray blearily as he strapped on his prized 9mm Beretta and arranged his two extra magazines in their pouches. He hadn’t made it back to their royal chamber at the beachfront club the night before. Usually that didn’t bother her. This morning, though, she was worried. She couldn’t put her finger on why, exactly.

  Two of his personal guards, dressed in the royal gold satin he had ordered made from swanky drapes, wrestled their generator out of its’ shed out back and onto Ray Ray’s 34 foot yacht at the end of the marina dock. It had quit chugging away two nights ago, and he hadn’t been able to get the jenny started back, since. Not having his X-Box to play or to be able to watch WWE DVDs had made him irritable. He hoped that Clearly could take it back and get his people in New Orleans to repair it. Taneisha frowned as Ray Ray took the light-skinned servant girl onboard the boat with him without saying goodbye to her.

  Even with the engines running close to their top speed, it still took Ray Ray over four hours to get to Paradise Island. Standing up that long on the vibrating deck with the roar and wind tired him out, but he didn’t trust anyone else to do it. He was the Captain! Besides, he let the guards share the light-skinned girl below while they passed the time. The yacht was really too small for a King, and was beginning to make shuddering noises whenever it first started up. He would need to trade up to a bigger one, soon. Maybe he could Clearly to handle that for him, too.

  The population of Nassau was nearly twelve thousand, over half of them the New African refugees Ray Ray had brought over, and most of the remainder consisting of immune survivors who had made it through the viral rampage and the die-off from starvation and violence that had followed the Balk. There had been another round of deaths when the immune carriers arrived among those who had remained isolated from the virus during its first wave, but no cases had been seen in over a decade.

  Survivors from all over the Caribbean had flocked to the city, once Ray Ray had set it up as a trading center, and especially once the free clinic and hospital had been set up by the Church of the New Dispensation. Generators provided periodic electricity to public buildings and to the pump stations for the water system that the church’s engineers kept running, too, making it a real paradise, comparatively.

  Mooring the small yacht at the end of the dock, they left the servant girl asleep or unconscious in her berth and strode past the swimming trunk uniformed black pirates who stood up and bowed as Ray Ray strode past. One of them slapped the girl holding a tray of warm beer cans to the sand when she didn’t bow low enough. Ray Ray wondered where they had been looted from, and how old they were.

  The steady thumping of generators could be heard above the squeals and crying mingling from Rev. Clearly’s suite, as Ray Ray and his guards approached the hotel. Some of the White tourists had taken refuge in the top floors of the two castle-like buildings with the connecting floor high above, when the Balk had been in full swing. The locals had burned them out, causing the connecting wing to collapse and fall. The first few floors were spared from the fire, though, and had been reclaimed as luxury accommodations for the wealthiest merchants and slave traders, as well as V.I.P.’s. Rev. Clearly kept the whole third floor of the right hand building reserved for himself and his special ‘guests’.

  Sickeningly sweet smoke drifted down the stairwell, giving Ray Ray a contact high before he even reached the top of the steps. He smoked his share of ganja, it was the biggest tribute offered from their bases in Jamaica. But even he couldn’t keep up with this cat.

  Two elementary aged brown-skin girls were discarded in the hallway, one of them looking like she wasn’t going to be moving again, under her own power, at least. The other still cried softly and twitched her legs every time she breathed. One of the Church of the New Dispensation’s brown-robed Faithful, who acted as Rev. Clearly’s security, was dragging her towards the broken out window at the end of the landing, to join the growing pile below. Ray Ray and his guards looked at each other. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t done worse, themselves, but some people never seemed to take a nap. After his grisly task was finished and the hallway cleared, the Faithful Deacon clasped his hands in a prayerful gesture and half-bowed to Ray Ray. The King of the Caribbean tried not to show hesitation as he stepped over a puddle of vomit and blood and knocked on the door. It swung open on its’ creaky hinges, corroded by the years of exposure to salt air. The stench of several different human bodily fluids and solids mixed with burnt hair and worse hit them like a fetid wall as they walked in, overlaying the marijuana smoke.

  “Merry Christmas, brothers!” the drunken and stoned preacher slurred. He was wearing his white papal robe, or at least the top half of it, and laying on top of another girl who was bleeding from her nose and mouth. She didn’t move when he got up to greet them.

  “Is it really Christmas, Reverend?” Ray Ray asked coolly, ignoring the mess. His guards stayed just inside the doorway, without being told.

  “Yes it is, Brother Ray Ray, yes it is. But during this extended time of tribulation drawn out by mankind’s hatred for his neighbors, nobody makes calendars any more, do they? No, I guess not.” Another brown-robed Faithful stood in the shadows behind Clearly, holding a girl with her arms behind her back. Her head was hung low in resignation. “Yes, it’s baby Jesus’s birthday, almost. Let’s sing him ‘Happy Birthday’. Blow out your candle, and make a wish, baby Jesus” Clearly shrieked.

  “Maybe we should string up some Christmas lights on the palm trees, like the old commercials had, huh, Ray Ray? Well, maybe not. So, what do you want from Santa this year, little boy?” the florid-faced Reverend continued, oblivious to being pantless. Ray Ray had to steel himself to not show anger at the word ‘boy’ from this cracker priest.

  “Well, my generator is loaded in my boat, it needs fix
in’, and the boat motor is knockin’, too, Reverend. Them getting’ fixed would be nice. Also, if it wouldn’t be too much to ask, could we start doin’ the trade convoys into N’Orlins at night, so to avoid the evil raciss and theys search planes? My men, theys…uh…theys faith is being tested, Reverend.”

  “Hmm, well, we’ll see about that, Ray Ray. We’ll see. But if they come in over night, they’ll have to stay on board their ships the next day, before they leave again. I can’t have a bunch of wild, uh, unregistered guests romping around the city, you understand.” Joe Bob Clearly sighed deeply. “But, I guess so, nighttime is the right time.”

  “That will make it a lot easier for me to convince them to keep the convoys going, Reverend. And the generator?” Ray Ray ventured.

  Rev. Clearly waved his fat and liverspotted hand dismissively. “Yes, yes, we’ll get you a new generator and fix your boat. There’s loads of extras at the hospital, just go get one. Get two, who cares?”

  “Thank you, Reverend, Sir. And thank you for the fuel delivery last week, too. If I get a bigger boat, do you want mine?”

  “What? Wheew, no, brother, it would take me weeks to air it out. No, I like my floatplane just fine, it’s faster and less likely to sink.” Joe Bob laughed at his own joke. But you know, it is customary to exchange gifts this time of year, so I have something to ask of you, too.”

  Ray Ray braced himself. The famous teacher of diversity of and multiracialism never ceased to surprise him with his demands veiled as requests. “Of course, Reverend, what do you need?”

  Clearly stood up straight and jerked his thumb at the last girl in line. “I need more vestal virgins, Ray Ray. These are almost used up.”

  Princess Margaret Hospital had been overwhelmed by the sick and dying during the viral contagion, when a cruise ship of infected refugees had docked in Nassau, but the New Dispensation doctors and nurses had cleared it out with the help of conscripted local ‘volunteers’. The Doctor’s hospital next door had been stripped down to the walls to restock some of the equipment, and the rest had been salvaged from Havana and Miami by Ray Ray’s pirates. It was the cleanest, most constantly lit, and best supplied building on the island. While his guards loaded four new generators into the pickup truck he’d borrowed from the hospital staff garage, the King relaxed for a few minutes in the lobby waiting room, enjoying some live t.v.. It was a rare treat for him, these days. The station they kept on, a New American satellite channel out of Talahassee, was the closest thing to local news there was.

  The weather system it showed bringing snow and freezing rain to the top of the screen wouldn’t come close to affecting them here, so he took the time to study the map displayed during the forecast in awe. In the middle, the New American state of Emerald Coast stretched from Mobile to Jacksonville, straddling both coasts. Above it, the recolonized area around Savannah and its’ coastal suburbs was a populated island in the charnal house of southern Georgia, which was still pretty empty up to the northern quarter of the state, just off screen, where the Whites had held on throughout the Balk. Ray Ray remembered what it had been like during the high times when Atlanta had been the capitol of New Africa, and he himself had commanded the best of its’ national army at Fort Benning. That was a long time gone, now.

  South of the Emerald Coast, a few remnants of the Cuban Army that had occupied the peninsula still ruled pockets, but colonizing White enclaves were pushing them out, the hard way. It was a polka-dotted blur of borders, on the screen. Dr. Chen, the oriental physician with a White wife, came over to talk to Ray Ray and ask him how his shoulder was feeling. Every few weeks he had to come in to have a cortisone shot in the joint, to fight the rheumatism. Then he asked him if he had given more thought to surrendering his life to Christ, so Ray Ray got up and walked out to check on the loading of the generators.

  On the way back to the dock they stopped off to pick up some groceries, including more of the chicken Taneisha liked, and fill up ten five gallon cans with gasoline for the generators. After the boats’ tanks were topped off, one of his guards discovered that the light-skinned girl had disappeared, so they started up and turned North for home. He would get the motor looked at another time. Ray Ray had had a long day.

  Chapter Four

  "When we get through with the Jews in America, they'll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing."

  -Father Charles Edward Coughlin

  “Don’t you worry, about a thing…’cause every little thing, is gonna be alright…”

  The Crescent flags of the Caliphate of Java flew not just from the home island, but from mosque domes and minarets in Kuala Lumpur, Makassar, and Singapore. Under Dr. Moerdani’s leadership, the abandoned military equipment of a half dozen Asian nations had been salvaged and repaired or cannibalized over the last decade and a half into a significant force, the largest in the region. The Javan Navy carried out salvage operations from Ho Chi Minh City to Manila, and patrolled from Taiwan to Hong Kong. His Air Force, with bases in Jakarta and Surabaya, claimed sovereign airspace from Vietnam to Australia. Colonists from Java had, under his direction, repopulated areas from Singapore and Malaysia, to the Philippines, to cement his claim to those land areas, too. The resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Muhammed’s followers had worked out well for their salvage efforts, as well as eased their overcrowding and the strains it placed on local food production.

  Still, it had been quite a feat for them to repair, refurbish, fuel, and man the Chinese aircraft carrier they had recovered from the Paracel Islands. This had been their secret project for a year, before it had been relaunched as the ‘Scimitar of Allah’ and made its’ way East to launch three suicide fighters as a distraction against the New American West Coast. Granted, Moerdani had hoped that their sabotage efforts against the radar stations and the data centers for their air defenses, accomplished by paratroopers dropped in two man teams off the coast to motor in in zodiacs, would have gone better. They might have, if most of the paratroopers hadn’t drowned in the rough seas on their way in. As it was, not enough radar stations were disabled. The flights were detected, and had been picked off before they could deliver their bombloads to their targets. Now, there were three nuclear bombs resting on the bottom of the ocean floor off of California, and Sacramento and Coos Bay and Portland were still there, along with the New American 7th and 3rd fleets.

  It was not a total failure, though. Not by any means. The rest of the Scimitar’s carrier wing had shot down the New American Speaker’s wife’s plane over the open Pacific in spectacular fireworks. They had even managed to fake a transmission declaring that the plane had been hijacked, to muddy the waters. Then he had followed that up with an announcement, after a while, that Carolyn McNabb was alive and under detention there to ward off any retaliatory nuclear strikes by the New American infidels, if they felt vengeful.

  Sur Moerdani now faced the combined hostility of the world, with no allies left standing. In his mind, though, he had outmaneuvered the unbelievers, typical of his brilliance. His, after all, was the mind which had found the cure for the Turkish Flu which had killed eightyfive percent of the world’s population, directly or indirectly. He was the savior of his nation. He was the right hand of the Prophet on Earth. He could not be beaten.

  The Imperial Russian sabre-rattling didn't worry him. Sur knew that the Czar was just using this international crisis as an excuse to take Japan without the New Americans complaining. If he dared come further south than Okinawa, Vladimir would be dealt with. The combined fleets gathering off Darwin and Cairns were a more immediate problem.

  Unfortunately, he had used up all of his pawns in the New American Secret Service in one move that had nearly, but not quite, decapitated the infidel government. He was still tying up loose ends there, but all of his pieces had been removed from that chess board, sacrificed in a gambit to put his opponent in check. On the bright side, before he outlived his usefulness and became a liability, Stephen Susanna had put in place four dozen militar
y officers still awaiting activation. A few had been used in the ill-fated attempt to disable the coastal radar stations, and been casualties of the skirmishes there. He had made sure none of them had been left alive to confess, like the captured S.S. had. The New Americans might know that he had assets in the Unified Command, but they couldn’t know who they were, yet. Or where.

  That was crucial, because he knew that they would begin re-testing all of their junior officers who had enlisted within the last decade, or even go back two decades, as soon as they could begin. His time-frame for action was a brief window, then, before his assets there would all rot on the vine, like fruit left unplucked when ripe, as Allah commands.

  This time, though, he wouldn’t make an obvious move. He needed to draw the attention of the infidels away from Java, and back to their own adder’s nest. He would use his remaining New American agents in the Unified Command military structure to create another front, and give them more enemies to fight.

  “…every rose has it’s thorns, just like every night has its’ dawn, just like every cowboy, sings a sad, sad song…”

  Christmastime was always grim in these kind of honky-tonks, but things were looking up. Lt. Charles Morris couldn’t believe what he was seeing on the t.v. at the end of the bar. New American fighter planes were swooping in from Mobile to plaster the Church of the New Dispensation defenses on the outskirts of Kenner. The ground forces hadn’t yet moved from their positions on the edge of Lake Maurepas, but he figured they would, soon. Why the attack seemed to be so disorganized, the Republic of Texas fighter pilot didn’t know. He did know that it was about time they did something, however halfhearted. He also knew that he wasn’t going to be left out of it. He threw two Texas silver dollars onto the tinsel-strewn bar top, and bellied away from his second home.