Shall Not Perish Read online

  CONTENTS

  Copyright Notice

  Epigram

  Chapter One - Mere Anarchy

  Chapter Two - The Blood-Dimmed Tide

  Chapter Three - The Ceremony of Innocence

  Chapter Four - A Vast Image

  Chapter Five - Pitiless as the Sun

  Chapter Six - What Rough Beast

  Chapter Seven - Its Hour Come Round At Last

  About the Author

  Shall Not Perish

  Copyright 2013-2014, Adam Teiichi Yoshida

  "It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

  - Abraham Lincoln

  CHAPTER ONE

  Mere Anarchy

  The Executive Residence, The White House

  President Kevin Bryan folded his arms across his chest and wrapped his bathrobe tightly around himself as he dug through the desk drawers for the bottle that he knew was buried somewhere beneath the piles of discarded papers that he'd shoved into the compartment, filling it beyond capacity. Rifling through the papers, he felt a momentary surge of pleasure as his skin came into contact with something that felt like glass. Leaning over, he shoved one hand deep into the mess in order to create a temporary barrier while he used his left hand to scoop up the half-empty bottle.

  "Fuckers," he whispered to himself as he removed the cork from the small bottle of Grey Goose Vodka that had been smuggled into the White House for him by an obliging intern. The thought of it made him laugh for just a moment: not even a civil war could keep certain obsequious strivers from trying to climb the ladder of credentialed success. Pulling away the cork, he dropped to the ground, his back against the desk, and took a long sip.

  He wasn't quite certain exactly which set of fuckers to curse at more. The part of the country that had abandoned him and risen in violent revolt against his plan to speed up the rate of progress in America?

  "Fuckers!" he cursed, raising his voice slightly. He took a swift look around the room and then took another nip from the bottle.

  Perhaps, instead, he should curse the military. That part of it that had not turned against him - tried to actually kill him - was almost as bad as the rest. Always hesitating, always slow. They weren't loyal to him or to the cause of human equality: they were loyal to some piece of paper and its abstract values. In his more lucid moments the irony of that stabbed into him: the only reason he wasn't hanging from a gallows somewhere was that some people were so loyal to a document whose restrictions he despised that, for its sake, they were willing to serve even him. This fundamental conflict of conscience, he was certain, was why they had so far singularly failed in their mission of suppressing the Rebellion.

  "Fuckers!" he shouted, loud enough that someone was certain to have heard.

  Well, he thought, fuck them. In a sense, he hated the people around him more than any distant foe. He was the President of the United States, yet he was reduced to inducing naive college students to smuggle liquor into the White House for him. They were always shitting all over every single idea that he ever had .

  "I don't know if that would be the most prudent course, Mr. President..."

  "We have to consider the repercussions, Mr. President..."

  "Fuckers!" screamed the President. He went to take another sip from the bottle. It was almost empty now.

  Sure, he'd been distraught after Pueblo. How could he not have been? So many fine Americans - and so many Allied soldiers - lost. The best chance. It had been within his - their - grasp and then...

  "Fuckers!" screeched the President, so loudly that he could be heard in Lafayette Square, loudly enough that he could barely speak for a moment. The bottle was empty now. He held it by the neck and attempted to hurl it violently at the window. Somewhere along the line, however, he botched the throw and so, instead, the bottle merely bounced off the bulletproof glass and landed meekly on the floor.

  "Fuck," muttered the President as he rose weakly to his feet, stumbling as he attempted to move, and walked over to where the bottle lay. Smashing it now seemed, somehow, less of a gesture of defiance. Instead, he made his way over to a trash can and deposited it, taking a moment to try and hide it beneath the other debris that filled it.

  Falling backwards and landing on the floor, the President hesitantly stood back up and walked back over to the desk to begin going through the drawers again. This time his search was rapid and deliberately. He removed a scrap of paper that he had set there nearly one month before. After lingering on it for a moment, he re-folded it and put it in his pocket .

  Temporary Seat of the Government of the United States, Colorado Springs, Colorado

  When they had chosen a location for the temporary capital of the United States, reflected Acting President Terrance Rickover, they had singularly failed to consider the matter of climate. Colorado in February was cold. Even the people who had been born and lived their entire lives there thought that. For a transplanted Virginian like the Acting President it was simply Hell.

  "...fuel is increasingly a serious problem," explained Jarrod Huffington, the newly-appointed Secretary of the Interior.

  "I don't understand how that can be," said House Majority Leader Michael Nelson, gesturing towards the map that was projected against the wall, "we control almost all of the oil-producing regions."

  "Yes, we do," admitted Huffington, "but we don't control nearly the same percentage of the nation's oil-refining capacity, nor do we have anything like the capital to buy the sort of equipment that we'd need to get our refineries up to snuff."

  The Acting President's eyes lingered on the map of the divided nation that was projected against the wall. The Federal Government in Colorado, sometimes known as the "Congressional" government or quite-commonly the "Rebel" government, depending upon one's politics, controlled outright the South, the Mountain West, the majority of the Mid-West, and a variety of defensible rural communities throughout the rest of the nation. The Washington government, known as the "Loyalist" or sometimes the "Legacy" government controlled the Northeast, New England, the Pacific Coast, part of the Mid-West, and a handful of major cities, such as Detroit, in Rebel states where neither the State Government nor the new Federal Government had sufficient control. In theory the government of the United States out of Colorado controlled territory containing more than one hundred and seventy-million people and ought to have been, in terms of GDP, the world's fourth-richest nation (with the territory of controlled by the Legacy government constituting the second or third-richest, depending upon how one reckoned such things). In practice, however, the sum of the parts had actually proven to be less than the whole.

  "Even if we could buy some of this stuff abroad," noted the Secretary of the Treasury, "trying to import it would prove to be hellish. I wouldn't want to try and run billions in equipment across the Atlantic right now."

  Shivering slightly, the Acting President nodded. He wished that they could go back to Cheyenne Mountain, where they had made their first headquarters during the days after the Great Mutiny. It had been perfectly climate-controlled there. However, given the image problems that the Rebel Government already had thanks to the overwhelming identification with the Washington government by the media and entertainment industries, it had been deemed less-than-prudent for the new government to be based out of a mountain fortress.

  "Look," said Rickover, "we all know that we have huge economic and logistical problems right now
. I think that this can be - and probably best is - handled at the deputies level and below unless any of you have some brilliant solutions of your own to these problems. We're all so far removed from the day-to-day here that all we can do, in dwelling upon this, is to bring ourselves down mentally. What can we do? "

  "Mr. President," began Mark Preston, the Secretary of Defense, "I am reluctant to bring this up, because I know that it's been shot down before... But if we want to talk about what we can do, I think it has to come back to the Pacific plan..."

  Preston's interjection set off groans around the room. The President held up his hands.

  "Let him speak," he said before setting his eyes on Preston.

  "A minute, Mr. Secretary," he said.

  "We all know that the Army is in pretty rough shape after Pueblo," conceded Preston, "but so are they. In fact, they've withdrawn practically all the way back into Illinois, or at least the Illinois-Missouri border. And we know that they're having a heck of a time dealing with insurgent activity even in those areas that they hold over there. Every hour we get word of more snipers and IEDs in Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, etc - all along the front. They're not coming back this way anytime soon, if ever. The Europeans are still there, but they're hardly happy about the casualties that they sustained in the fighting here in Colorado and in Kansas."

  "What forces do they have in California? We hold most of the state outside of the coast. They've got some National Guard troops and some militia volunteers. We could punch our way to the Pacific Coast and link up with the Seventh Fleet. It's a contest in the Atlantic, but the Pacific is ours."

  "And then what?" shot out Secretary Huffington, who had been a straight-shooting United States Senator from Montana before the war. Preston looked quietly at the table.

  "Then we make the deals that we need to make," said Preston.

  "We already sold half of the damned Middle East to the Chinese," pointed out Nelson, "what do you think that they're going to want if they supply us now? All of Asia? The whole Motherfucking world?"

  "I didn't put us in this position," said Preston snippily, "my mission is to win this war and re-unite our country. So far as I'm concerned, if we can do that the whole rest of the Goddamned world can hang."

  "And what will your friends at Praetorian get out of this deal?" said Huffington.

  "Our friends at Praetorian International are patriots who have served our cause well," said Preston.

  "And made billions in the process," said Huffington.

  "Well, they are capitalists," replied Preston.

  "Alright gentlemen," the President held up his hands, "let's get back to the main point. We can survive this winter - barely - with what we have on hand. But we know we can't survive another. What are our long-range options here?"

  "Third Army is preparing to embark. Once they make their way back here, I am convinced that they will bring these matters to a swift conclusion," said the Secretary of State, Jon Simpson, speaking up for the first time.

  "If they can make it back unimpeded," said Preston, "and I don't think that we can count upon that."

  "Why should we throw away lives on a spring offensive towards California - one whose entire purpose will require us to sell out a large chunk of the world to the Chinese? Especially if it will be unnecessary so long as the Navy can deliver Third Army to somewhere in the Carolinas or thereabouts and they can then march on and hold Washington from there?" asked Simpson.

  "That's putting all of our hopes on something that isn't a sure thing," said Preston, "how does our domestic situation - dire as it is today - look twelve months from now if we can't pull this thing off in time?"

  "Well," said the Acting President, "obviously there's a range of opinion here with regard to this. I think that our best course of action will be to move to formal proposals. Interior needs to figure out how we manage what resources we have, Treasury needs to figure out how we pay for it, State needs to figure out who can help us, and Defense needs to figure out how we can fight and win."

  Wal-Mart Supercenter, Cedar Rapids, IA

  Nine months earlier, Jake Hunter's best friend Allan had come running into the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Cedar Rapids.

  "Jake!" he had shouted, "the Rebels are marching on Washington!"

  The twenty-one year-old college drop-out and Manager of the Electronics Department had wished that he could throw down his blue vest right then and there. But he had bills to pay and a young daughter to support. The Rebels had his whole-hearted support, but they also didn't have any recruiting centres. If he had quit Wal-Mart on the first day of the Great Mutiny, where would the money to feed his daughter next week come from, especially if the rest of the Federal Government went to pieces?

  Instead he and Allan had watched in near-silence as the US Military turned on itself and bloody battles were fought for control of units all the way down the squad level all over the world. Then Allan had taken his aged 2011 Toyota Yaris and driven South to join the Rebel army and Jake had been truly alone, for Allan was the only man he knew who he considered his intellectual equal, at least within the narrow milieu in which he existed.

  Allan had gone to Fort Benning and learned to fire a rifle while Jake was promoted to Assistant Manager of the entire store. For the first few months of the war, ordinary commerce has seemed to continue almost unimpeded. The Dollar had collapsed slowly, than all at once. Federal Law, in both Rebel and Loyalist territories, required the stores to accept them anyways even as anything imported had to be paid for in some ungodly mix of Euros, Yuan, Yen, Pounds, and Western Republic and Australian Dollars. Wal-Mart, like the majority of the nation's great corporations, had attempted to maintain an official neutrality as the second war between the states expanded and spread. It was in the interest of neither government to shut down inter-state commerce altogether. However, shortly enough both sides began to restrict the flow of goods between the territories controlled by each.

  In Bentonville, Arkansas the computer techs and MBAs who had once used vast technical power to attempt to fine-tune Wal-Mart's just-in-time inventory system had been forced to address new challenges. Now they were forced to conduct market research to figure out what the best products were to substitute for another when the collapse of the buying power of the dollar made continued imports of certain products impractical and they had to figure out how to shift inventory around as shortages and hoarding began to take hold. In both Loyalist and Rebel territory, Wal-Mart had responded to the problem of hoarding by introducing new customer loyalty programs that permitted each customer to purchase certain quantities of various goods in ordinary dollars at sub-market prices. It was, the CEO had declared, a matter of demonstrating that Wal-Mart intended to support Americans through the long haul.

  Jake and his Store Manager, like a lot of other employees of Wal-Mart, Costco, Target, and the handful of other major firms with the capital and strength to keep their doors open even as the broader economy fell to pieces suddenly found themselves in a position of vital national importance. With the dollar's value in rapid decline and inter-state transportation having become a greater challenge, only major corporations had the infrastructure and resources to purchase and transport goods across long distances. A lot more Americans were planning to farm (or more accurately, to attempt to farm) the following spring, but that was still an awfully long way into the future. During that first winter of the war the ability of most Americans to eat had come to increasingly depend on the ability of the major corporations to move goods around the country to areas of need and to bring in whatever they could from abroad.

  "Thank God that the Westerners still take our dollars," said Jake as he watched the latest load of frozen Alberta beef be unloaded into the back of the Wal-Mart. He rubbed his hands together for warmth and warily viewed the area around the loading docks. These days the security guards who protected the place were armed with M-16s and they took part of their pay in goods rather than cash.

  "Are you kidding?" said one of the
crew on the dock, "those fuckers are going to get Goddamned rich off of this when we win."

  The mood of the customers hadn't grown any better in recent months either. For one depressing month after another they'd closed down departments one at a time. What point was it having a full electronics section open when all you had left in stock were a bench of accessories for old MP3 player models?

  "Jake," came a call over the radio, "I need you at six."

  "Fuck," the Assistant Manager muttered under his breath as he walked away from the loading dock and began his long journey towards the front of the store. He was still two hundred feet away when he saw what the problem was. A fat woman, her stomach pouring over the sides of her ill-fitting jeans, was frantically waving her arms in the air and shouting.

  "What you do you mean, you won't take my money!" she screamed, gesturing wildly in the direction of the other customers in the store.

  "Do you hear this?!? Wal-Mart won't take my money!"

  The other customers averted their eyes and shuffled along. Such scenes had been depressing enough in America before the war and now they were more common still.

  "Ma'am," said Jake, "I'm the Manager here. What seems to be the problem?"

  "This bitch," said the fat woman, gesturing in the direction of the Cashier, "won't take my fucking money!"

  "Sorry," said Jake, extending his hand, "I'm Jake. What's your name?"

  "Shawna."

  "Ok, Shawna," said Jake, "you're going to need to explain this to me a little bit more clearly. Wal-Mart definitely accepts cash and I'm sure that Beth would be happy to accept your payment upon that basis."

  "No," said the woman, scrunching up her face, "I'm not paying cash. It's my EBT. She won't take my EBT card. "

  "Ah," said Jake, sucking in his breath, "well, that's another story. Wal-Mart isn't presently able to accept that form of payment within the State of Iowa."