The Heirs of Tomorrow

by Billy Roper

  Really, that part was easy. His paperwork had been by word of mouth and catch as catch can for the transfer. They’d told him where to bunk, and when he got there he introduced himself to the platoon and got their salute. He didn’t have to tell them not to call him “Sir” because he worked for a living, and he didn’t have to convince them that he knew what he was doing, because his face said it all. Throwing together new units for each operation didn’t do much for the esprit de corps, but after almost all the latinos had defected or mutinied and half the honkeys had gone home, the civilian powers that be preferred to keep the Texican military kind of off balance. Splitting them up and reforming them at arbitrary times and places like so many amoebas didn’t give an opportunity for seditious cliques to form. That was the theory, anyway.

  Joining up had seemed like the best way out of Santone Ringcity, to see the world and get college paid for. A good idea at the time, but now it meant he got three squares and cover. At least they hadn’t gotten stranded in some sandbox overseas, he thought, feeling the grit of good old American powder squishing in his socks. Some of those guys had been overwhelmed by locals without air support. Others had gone native. Of course, there wasn’t much call for computer programmers once the net went down and most circuit boards were fried by EMP. They’d all become infantry. Hell, he realized, they’d all become marines. Why not volunteer? Half the guys in the battalion had, once Governor Stout put out the word of what was happening here. Their old unit had been reformed and sent to slacken up the pressure on Dyess for the flyboys. And here they were, reenacting D day in the good ole former US of A.

  Strictly volunteers, ‘cause there were more pressing missions closer to home pushing back the Aztlan reconquistadores and relocating hispanics still hanging out north of the front. These days you could draw a line diagonally from Amarillo, bulging out to Lubbock, then back on course down to Abilene, Temple, and Baytown. Everything north of it was lily white. Everything south of it was tan. Sure, a few Caucasian stragglers got smuggled across the border every day. Sometimes the Anglos gave everything they had to coyotes to be slipped past the Mexican troop checkpoints. You didn’t want to ask them too many questions. Not if you still had people left behind the lines, living or dead.

  His two day trip to Beaumont, the fastest growing city in the Republic of Texas, had brought him to the cause of its growth, the booming Port Arthur. From there they’d skirted the Louisiana marsh islands before turning back north. It had been a long, salty, windy trip, on the lookout for pirates. All of them had been intimidated by the size of the fleet into keeping their distance, though. The Port of Lake Charles had been occupied by a R.O.T. expeditionary force which had fought its way east against the local blacks, displacing their own as they went. Now ships pulled in and out of the shiplanes back and forth and Fort Polk had been relieved. A couple hundred of the Airborne and infantry soldiers whose families had lived on base had stuck around to defend it, then thrown open the gates to Republic of Texas forces who had moved north from Lake Charles to link up. The survivors from the Florida panhandle were supposed to be relocated there, eventually, since there was a lot of defensible housing. To a man the remaining base personnel had taken their oaths to the lone star nation and its Governor. A refitted container ship loaded with doctors, nurses, and supplies from the combat hospital at Polk had eased out to join their convoy, to take on the more seriously ill refugees.

  There were hundreds of abandoned gas and oil platforms along the way, and a couple dozen that were still in operation after being nationalized by the Texicans. They’d peeled off some garrison platoons to occupy a few more links in the chain on the way over, to await operation crews. New Afrika had raided some of the shallow water platforms in small boats, so they had to be defended in force. The big fear in Dallas was that the Chinese would make a grab for them soon.

  They hadn’t come quickly enough or heavily enough to stop the way it was turning out, though, and suffered heavy losses retreating from Pascagoula. They hadn’t been able to break through the ring around the small city, and had abandoned the Whites trapped there except for the few who had been able to reach their fleet by boat. So far the Chinese naval forces supplying Mobile had left them alone directly. They were still afraid of the punch Texas could pack. Well, north Texas, anyway. Houston had fallen two months ago, for the third time, after heavy fighting that had wrecked Galveston Bay’s docking facilities as they were traded back and forth between the Texan and Mexican forces. They’d probably take it back, he figured, but whether they could hold it as well as they had Port Arthur was doubtful. Even after they used two nasty bombs pulled out of the Pantex plant in Amarillo, there were still too many La Raza there. After the evacuation of the state government from Austin to Dallas, the front had pretty well stabilized.

  Abilene was still under siege, and relied on resupply by air. Barnes had seen action in the defense of Fort Hood after the Georgetown salient collapsed. The Mexican Army regulars had pushed forward human wave attacks by “locals” of their own people, who died by the thousands under their heavy guns. You still weren’t supposed to eat fish out of Stillhouse Hollow lake because of poison from where they’d dumped the bodies in it during cleanup. You weren’t supposed to, but people got hungry, and did. Huge catfish there, these days. He was also a veteran of the Battle of Temple, where they’d drawn a hard line that stuck fast. Barnes got a purple heart there, he traded his good looks for it when a Molotov cocktail had splashed off the side of the wall next to his face and ran down inside his body armor.

  This wasn’t the Naval and Coast Guards’ first rodeo herding refugees from beaches, either. Their outlaw flotilla had evacuated Corpus Christi when the victorious Reconquistadores had given the gringos they had pushed out safe passage. Eight hundred of them, and more from Rockport. Many of them hadn’t made it out, and they’d learned a lot from that operation, both how to and how not to. There weren’t any groups that big left down there, any more. Not according to the official position of the Governor as expressed through their Colonel.

  They had come ashore as heroes all right, and then pushed out on every major road retaking block after block all the way north to the suburbs. Every night the enemy would sneak back in and reoccupy every building they didn’t burn down to the foundations. The Texicans didn’t have the manpower to establish a solid perimeter. The New Afrikans didn’t seem to have much except bodies to throw at them. They had plenty of those, though. After a few human wave attacks, the focus had shifted from taking territory to moving pale faces southwards as fast as they could move. Some local rednecks, remnants of law enforcement, and the militia and racialist groups knew the place better, and helped to plug the gaps. Some of them had gotten cut off from their own areas of operations and were refugees, themselves. They fought with a ruthless intensity.

  Food became an issue early one, and after all the stores were empty and all the houses and restaurants looted, it had become the paramount issue. There weren’t any fatties left, or any virgins, in the Redneck Riviera. The intermittent supply shipments had helped, some. People just got skinny instead of starving to death, for the most part.

  The waterfront at Gulfport held, and one man in five was assigned for rear guard duty to cover the evacuation of as many civilians as possible. Everything that floated was being cabled and chained and roped together to hug the coast west, with the bigger guns of their escorts keeping them safe from shore attacks. It was going to be like Dunkirk, if the Germans had resorted to cannibalism. There were shrimp boats, yachts, sailboats, fishing charter ships, two oil tankers, the hospital container ship, and a cruise ship, along with the Texas Coast Guard’s two clippers. Most surprising were the ancient Battleship Texas and U.S.S. Lexington museum pieces, whose skeleton crews had gotten them underway and out to see before they were claimed by Aztlan.

  Their infantry didn’t mix well with the Coast Guard and Navy types who’d gotten them there, and they had no common frame of reference with the Air Force types at
all. Those guys hadn’t seen the infighting that had broken up whole divisions and skeletonized battalions. Lucky, privileged bastards. Each of them had stories to tell. Private Jenkins was from an M.P. unit that had shot down one of their own, a black soldier, who tried to arrest his fellow White guards for “crimes against humanity” when New Orleans went up. Truth to tell, he should have been discharged sooner. Any idiot could have seen that coming.

  PFC. Carlisle had a brother who had enlisted just in time to be locked down in barracks during Basic after the border fell. The base was overrun after some Jose or another opened the gates. No survivors lighter than manila, there.

  PFC. Thompson, like Barnes, had lost family. His mom and dad had run an RV Park for winter Texans near Brownsville. Business had slumped in the past few years due to the cartels and caravans, but they hadn’t wanted to dump their investment at such a loss and go back north with nothing. At best they’d been displaced and were among the homeless refugees relocated north, but he hadn’t heard from them in four months, now.

  Private Reed was from Texarkana and mainly listened to the others, keeping silent about how lucky he had been to be out of most of the trouble. Hearing stories like theirs was why he wanted to help out, he finally said, to make a difference.

  Cpl. Wilcox had been in armor, an MRAP driver, but wanted himself a war bride. His thought was that some pretty little refugee thing would be really grateful to him and…the rest of them snickered. Wilcox was a clown, but he knew how to take the edge off things. Like a conscience, or a memory.

  F-16s from Carswell Field in Ft. Worth buzzed over Long Beach to drop napalm on the Hard Rock Casino, where the New Afrikans had set up a forward observation center, before turning south and making a ninety degree turn for home over Cat Island. They couldn’t land and refuel at Keesler any more under orders due to small arms fire, word had came down, which meant they wouldn’t get any more VIPs out by air, like they had up until last week. Barnes could see floating traffic backed up probably all the way to Fort Massachusetts on Ship Island. All of them in the front row were watching the show. He turned back to the nightmare right in front of him. It was so close he felt the heat on his face and the ground trembling.

  Militia and League of the South volunteers were fighting a rear-guard action to hold the 15 bridge and 110 halfway across, pushing the refugees in front of them who had made it through. There were a lot who still hadn’t. The sick, the old, the scared, those who couldn’t imagine leaving their homes, or who were just too stubborn, had stayed behind. The smoke rising from the north told everyone how well that had worked out for them.

  Wilcox had been up there with the civilian auxiliaries the day before, on a resupply run before the final retreat had begun. He said that most of the guys were out of shape and over the hill, but they weren’t broken, not by a long shot. They had that look in their eyes of men who knew they would never see home again, and didn’t care. It was the look Barnes imagines must have been common at the Alamo, under whose walls he used to play the guitar for tourist dollars. “Got a request, Mister? Five dollars a song, anything you want, name that tune, Sir!”

  Rumor had it that the Chinese really traded hard for White prisoners of a type, that type being young girls. Most of the New Afrikan soldiers couldn’t resist those type of spoils themselves, so few White girls made it to the Chinese in very good condition, but the ones who did were worth their weight in AKs. Some of them were even grateful to be sold into servitude as comfort women for the Chinese. Anything was better than what had already happened to them as the black forces surrounded and rioted their way through one isolated White suburb after another. Any White men or women too old or too young were just shot or butchered, sometimes after being raped, sometimes before, depending on the mood of the soldiers.

  The expeditionary force was all about ‘hurry up and wait’. Take a block or ten during the day, then fall back from it that night when the nig-nogs crept in close. Then lather, rinse, repeat. Finally attrition told and they couldn’t replace casualties like the enemy could. So they would take a block and sit on it for a day, then give it up after declaring that there weren’t any more refugees in the area requiring assistance. Week three they didn’t even send out patrols to look for any. If they couldn’t reach them themselves, or at least signal for help, then technically they ceased to exist. Eventually, that technicality became literal.

  Reed played the harmonica, and that made Barnes wish he still had his guitar, they could have entertained the whole company while they waited for each staggered retreat to be ordered. Instead they had to hear Wilcox tell the same jokes over and over and pretend they were funny, or even worse, listen to Carlisle talk about the two kids he had left with his ex-wife back in Denton. Pulling back was almost a relief.

  There had been a last minute exodus towards northern Georgia and northern Alabama in each of those states, but once the Mississippi River bridges had been blown by Ozarkians, the way west had been blocked. When the looting ran dry in Jackson and Montgomery, hordes from each side of the coastal bubble had converged on them. Then the “official” New Afrikan army had marched in from Atlanta, before getting resupplied through Mobile Bay. The Floridians had said a silent prayer of thanks that the Mississippians had been targeted first. They knew they were next, though.

  The prettiest White girls were kept as reparations, that was definitely more than rumor. His third day ashore Barnes, Jenkins, and Thompson had helped clear out a nest of slavers at the Arbor View apartments, and rescued several young White women who had been drugged and beaten into a catatonic state. Some of the slavers tried to surrender, but nobody had been in the mood to take prisoners that day. The White refugees who had escaped capture seemed to look down on those who hadn’t. They’d had to send them out by boat to the hospital ship, first. Jenkins and Thompson got the afternoon off for the boat ride there and back, but they didn’t seem to enjoy it.

  Barnes had taken six of his men out the next night for some retribution. He hadn’t needed to recruit them, they had come to him. Reed, Jenkins, Thompson, Wilcox his Corporal, Michaels, and Carlisle. They’d caught a couple of darkies out of uniform, unless you counted their skins, and put them up against a wall. It hadn’t been very satisfying, but it had built a bond between them. It became something of a habit. Sometimes they’d go hunting and not catch anything. Other times they’d find a whole black family hunkered down in some basement or crawlspace, expecting to be treated like Americans.

  When he was a kid, Barnes’ family had taken a trip to a petting zoo. The guide there had told them that if one of the chickens got hurt, the other hens would peck it to death. He figured this was kind of a similar situation, so he let it go.

  While the auxiliaries backed down the bridge ramps and moved aside for the Texan artillery to rake 110 one more time, the Guardsmen herded the civilians from both directions into the Old French cemetery. There were only a couple hundred uniformed men left on the beach, the rest had escorted one load of refugees after another aboard the waiting pleasure craft and speed boats and party barges to shuttle out to the larger ships waiting off shore. Forty of them had been volunteered to stay until the last of the refugees were out of harm’s way. None of his guys, at least. Then the unimaginable happened.

  The group of blacks who had stopped to cheerfully celebrate their impending victory by burning Jefferson Davis’s home suddenly heard the engines of the trucks, or smelled fresh blood, or saw the exhaust. Whatever keyed them in, the mob turned to face away from Beauvoir, marching up Beach Boulevard. The Coast Guard helicopter saw the surge and called off the incoming transport boats. They’d have to disembark from further East. The new evac zone was Point Cadet. His men had instinctively clustered around him, in sight of each other, to see what he would do. Like he had any answers.

  Thompson and Michaels passed a canteen back and forth that probably had better stuff than water in it, but he pretended not to notice. They’d earned that, and more. Before this was over, they’d pr
obably need it. Barnes almost wished that he hadn’t given up the stuff. He remembered once at a junior high party when he had drank a couple of beers and mouthed off to a group of MS-13 wannabes. Four of them. They’d broken his nose and shut both his eyes that night. The next week he’d made a point to catch them out alone, one by one. After that he never had any trouble in the neighborhood. He still had trouble with that left nostril when the air was humid like this, though.

  Most of the people were already emotionally and physically exhausted. As the small boats pulled away from the beach to try again, the equally tired Texican soldiers who were the rear guard formed a line between the beach and the lighthouse. There wasn’t much cover, especially after the last bombing runs had left the next two blocks burning rubble. They had to drive through them, anyway.

  The first two trucks went through empty, pushing aside burning debris, clearing the road of broken window glass and blocks of stone and brick at the sacrifice of their own tires and undercarriages, and pulling off of the sandy curb alongside 90 just past the devastated zone, both of them on their rims. They wouldn’t go any further. The drivers got out and ran back towards them through the black smoke, one of them getting shot at by a sniper the F-16s must have missed. Barnes’ Lieutenant, a skinny red-haired officer named Bailey, began ordering the refugees onto the remaining buses. It didn’t look like there had been enough seats before, but now there definitely wouldn’t be.

  The four squads of ten men in the rear guard watched in bemusement, alternating staring at the chaos of trying to force back able-bodied men and let women and children on first with glancing back over their shoulders towards the direction where the New Afrikans were. “Just another day at the beach!” one of them yelled over the noise. It was a pretty place to die. Just for a second Barnes took a look out over the white sand and green waves, calculating how long it would be before sunset, and how long before another White man took in the view.