RACE WARS
**OMNIBUS**
Seasons 1-5
(Episodes 1-30)
D.W. ULSTERMAN
Copyright © 2015
All rights reserved.
http://ulstermanbooks.com/
WARNING
These are stories of a highly controversial nature
READER REACTION TO THE ONGOING RACE WARS SERIES:
“Brilliant SHTF fiction that is very close to the reality we are now living in.”
“A great series that keeps you hanging on every page wondering what is going to happen next.”
“Read, learn, and prepare.”
“D.W. Ulsterman now ranks among the very best post-apocalyptic survival fiction authors.”
“A remarkable series that just keeps getting better and better!”
“Race Wars is a good author becoming a great one.”
“Very scary because it feels like it is happening today!”
“Great character development within an exciting plot. Race Wars delivers.”
A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR:
In the short time since the Race Wars series became available the interest and feedback generated has been considerable.
It is no doubt a controversial subject but one I feel has been handled with an obligation of fair warning to those who share with so many others the concerns over the dangerous abyss America now finds itself staring down into. Hopefully – and I mean this sincerely, we ALL step back from that precipice and do some serious reconsideration regarding the path this nation has been on in recent years and the country we hope to leave future generations.
RACE WARS is conjecture based upon fact. I take little pleasure in creating a frightening world that so closely mirrors the actual one, but it is done as much out of a sense of duty as it is one of creative enterprise.
I pray (often) that the world depicted in this ongoing series does not come to pass.
Hope for the best.
Prepare for the worst…
-D.W. Ulsterman
“America is not so much a racist nation as it is an ignorant one. Ignorance is the mother of manipulation and allows the ignorant to be made to do most anything to anyone at anytime.”
EPISODE ONE:
Chicago, Illinois
5:45 P.M.
Twenty-nine year old Lu Phan heard the news choppers overhead as he stood unmoving inside the family business – a neighborhood shoe store Lu’s father had started shortly after coming to America from the horrifying chaos that was the Fall of Saigon. Linh Phan had fought alongside American soldiers for seven years as an officer in the South Vietnamese Army. Even then it took several requests and all the money he had saved up to obtain passage on one of the outgoing U.S. military vessels returning from Vietnam to the United States in the spring of 1975.
Now forty years later a horde of people gathered outside seemingly determined to burn it all to the ground.
Unlike other businesses, Phan Family Shoes did not currently enjoy the benefit of insurance coverage. Lu’s mother Delia, a native of Puerto Rico, was attempting to survive her second bout with cancer and in order to pay the health insurance premiums so she could continue receiving the treatment that was keeping her alive, the family had to let their business insurance expire.
That meant that if the mob outside broke in and destroyed the business, Lu’s family would lose everything, including the ability to continue paying for his ailing mother’s health insurance.
That won’t happen.
Lu had repeated that thought often since making his way downstairs from the family’s second floor apartment that was directly above the shoe store. It was also the place Lu had called home his entire life.
The 12-gauge pump-action Mossberg 500 shotgun felt good in his hands. Lu had shot it just a few times, but he recalled the power of the gun’s kick and the sound of its fury and knew that if required, it could protect him and his family. He stood in the darkness of the store after having placed closed signs over the boarded up windows and waited for anyone who might attempt to break in. Three shells were already loaded in the Mossberg’s barrel and Lu had six more ready in the right pocket of his black and white windbreaker jacket.
A series of loud screams reverberated from just outside the store entrance followed by a thump against one of the front windows covered over in plywood. Lu forced himself to take long, slow breaths as he continued to wait. He couldn’t help but wonder if the fear he felt in the pit of his stomach was similar to what his father had experienced during the war.
Someone was attempting to push the door open. It was secured from the inside by two sizeable deadbolt locks. Then another crash came against one of the windows as several more voices were heard yelling from the sidewalk in front of the store.
Lu’s knuckles whitened as he increased his grip on the shotgun.
“Don’t come in here! Go away! I have a gun!”
For a moment it went quiet outside, and then something very big crashed against the window to Lu’s right with enough force he could hear the plywood crack. This was followed by another even more aggressive attempt to force the door open. Many more voices could be heard yelling and laughing, some of them threatening to take Lu’s gun and shove it up his own ass.
Lu attempted to call 9-11 for the third time in the last twenty minutes and was once again greeted by a busy signal. When he had left the apartment upstairs, telling his nearly seventy-year old father to make sure to lock the door behind him and watch over Delia, the news was showing several large riot areas throughout the city. There were even reports of a white bank executive being shot dead in the street as he tried to escape an angry mob of black youth who had dragged him from his office shortly after the lunch hour. Another report indicated a black man who tried to stop a gathering of twenty or so rioters from setting a police car on fire outside his home was himself set on fire, his corpse smoldering on the sidewalk long after his screams went silent.
The police had withdrawn entirely from the most violent riot areas and took up positions primarily in and around a one block perimeter surrounding City Hall where the mayor and other city officials were hiding behind a wall of blue they hoped would prove enough to keep them safe.
That left families like Lu’s completely on their own.
“We gonna huff and puff and blow your damn house in!”
Lu flinched as another crash slammed into the side of the store followed by a second and then a third.
“I said I have a gun! Go away!”
Lu’s threat resulted in more derisive laughter from outside followed by the sound of cracking wood as several hands began trying to pull the plywood off the windows.
Lu brought the Mossberg up and aimed its barrel at the partially exposed window and prepared to pull the trigger.
“No!”
The voice was that of Lu’s father, Linh whose left hand pushed the gun back down so it pointed toward the floor. The old man was several inches shorter than his son, but even at seventy had the straight-shouldered posture of a soldier who knew well a life in the military and the resulting horrors of combat.
“It’s too soon. Be certain before firing. Be sure you actually have to take a life before doing so.”
Lu glanced down and was shocked to see his father’s Vietnam War-era Colt Commander sidearm hanging from the old man’s narrow right hip. Linh Phan had not worn the weapon since coming to the United States decades earlier.
“Father, you should be upstairs with M
other.”
The former South Vietnamese Army officer shook his head.
“Your mother was the one who demanded I come down here and help keep you safe. We will do this together.”
Both men turned at the sound of wood being pulled back from one of the windows. By the multitude of voices heard yelling, Lu figured there were at least forty or fifty rioter attempting to enter the store. It seemed incomprehensible to him that an entire city could be overtaken by such chaos in less than twenty-four hours.
Lu recalled how he watched the local news reports from the previous night of the young black man by the name of Darnel Watts who was shot dead in the street by an off-duty Chicago Police officer just three blocks from his family’s store. The young man had been armed with an older revolver investigators soon discovered wasn’t loaded. There had been reports of an attempted robbery and when police attempted to question him, Darnel took off running and two uniformed police officers gave chase.
That’s when he encountered Brandon Briggs, a twenty-four year old first year member of the Chicago police force who was off-duty at the time when he spotted Darnel running down the sidewalk with two uniformed officers giving pursuit. The news reports indicated Officer Briggs yelled twice for Darnel Watts to halt and then when the officer saw what he correctly believed to be a drawn weapon, he opened fire, hitting the young man twice in the chest. It took nearly an hour for an ambulance to arrive and remove the young man’s blood-soaked body from the middle of the Chicago Southside street where he fell and then took his last painful gasps of life. By then a crowd had gathered and began taunting the authorities, some screaming that Darnel had been unarmed. Others yelled out the police had tried to question him without cause. Still more spread the lie that the young man had been killed in cold blood without provocation.
Some who willingly spread those rumors knew better. Darnel was a low-level street thug, a dropout who had already been in and out of both the local juvenile and adult prison system following a series of drug and assault-related charges. The gun he had on him at the time of his death was stolen.
The truth of Darnel’s troubled past didn’t matter, though. The local media and soon the national media portrayed him as a young man of hope and promise whose life was potentially ended much too soon by a white police officer. Darnel’s death became the leading news story that night and remained the focus of media attention throughout the next day even as protests formed based entirely upon the false and increasingly dangerous race-tinged narrative being actively pushed by this same media.
Hundreds took to the same Chicago streets that had seen black on black murders for decades and shown little inclination to care, and then hundreds grew to thousands, all of them screaming accusations of city-wide racism. Darnel Watts’ death was but a single match that lit the great fire of misplaced discontent – discontent that had turned violent and now attempted to make its way into the Phan family store.
One of the store windows was now exposed as the plywood that had covered it was finally torn away. The crowd outside roared its excited approval as a large rock burst through the glass, the cacophony of their oddly screeching cheers resembling something far more animalistic than human.
Once the rest of the glass had been broken away from the window frame the dark face of a teenaged boy emerged from outside to peer into the gloom of the store’s interior.
“Please…don’t come in here.”
Linh Phan held his pistol in front of the young man’s face.
“Tell them all to go away and leave us alone.”
The face withdrew as suddenly as it had appeared.
“There’s some old man in there with a gun! Say he’s gonna kill us all!”
The gathered mob howled its disapproval and then pummeled the side of the store with more rocks. Then the chaos outside suddenly grew quiet as Lu watched his father turn to him with an expression he had never before seen on the old war veteran – fear.
“Lu, get down!”
The unmistakable sound of semi-automatic gunfire erupted around both father and son as they fell to the floor of the shoe store. This was followed by yet more aggressive cheering from outside.
Another face looked inside the store and then another. Lu scrambled to stand so he could face the open window with the shotgun raised. Linh Phan was slower to get up, but as he did so he made certain to intentionally put himself between his son and the window.
“Father, get out of the way!”
Linh looked back at his son and motioned with his left hand for Lu to lower the weapon. Lu had no choice but to do so, knowing that if he was to fire he would hit his father.
The same face that had first looked through the broken window into the store had returned. The young man’s eyes were shining with drug and alcohol-fueled excitement. When those eyes fell upon the elderly Vietnamese store owner they widened noticeably, surprised to see the old man still standing guard even after the gunfire.
“You got a death wish, old man? We gonna come in here and take what we wanna take!”
Linh Phan stood his ground, his gun once again pointed at the younger man’s head.
“I said don’t come in here. Please leave.”
The black man’s eyes narrowed as he considered Linh’s implied threat and then his mouth widened into a wolfish grin.
“You ain’t gonna do shit, old man.”
Linh Phan again pleaded with the would-be trespasser as the young man began to pull himself through the open window.
“Please don’t do that. Please go back outside.”
The black man pointed at the old man and snarled his response.
“I’m gonna kill you.”
A single gunshot reverberated inside the shoe store’s interior. The bullet entered the upper half of the teenager’s skull, sending blood-wet fragments of bone and brain matter spraying behind him.
Tears formed at the corners of Linh Phan’s eyes as he looked down at the motionless body of the young man he had just killed that lay partway inside the store window. Lu stood in shocked silence behind his father as he struggled to comprehend the finality of a life just ended.
And then the screams outside began again though this time all semblance of humanity and understanding had left them.
“They killed him! They killed him!”
Linh Phan shuffled backwards away from the window as several hands grasped the dead man’s legs and pulled the body back outside. The old man turned to his son with eyes that held the truth of what he knew would be the inevitable reaction of the mob outside.
“Lu, go upstairs and lock the door. Keep yourself and your mother safe for as long as you can.”
Lu Phan moved out from behind the counter as he shook his head.
“No, I’m staying here with you, Father. You had to kill that man! You had no choice!”
The war veteran knew there was little time for argument. His eyes flared with anger and fear as he pointed to the stairs in the back of the store that led to the apartment on the second floor.
“Lu, I am not asking. Go upstairs NOW! You must try and keep your mother safe.”
Linh watched Lu wipe tears from his eyes as he ran to the back of the store while holding the shotgun at his side. Before Lu began to climb the stairs he paused to look back at his father. Linh Phan offered his son a faint, sad smile, and then realizing it would likely be the last time Lu saw him alive, the former military officer straightened his posture as any remnants of fear left his face, replaced by the proud and calm assurance of a man fully prepared to die so that his family might yet live.
“I could not be more proud of you, my son. I love you.”
Lu climbed the stairs three at a time, ran into the apartment and locked the door behind him. Then he waited.
His father’s gun fired eight more times followed by a brief and terrible silence and then the sound of a single gunshot from a weapon Lu knew was not from his father’s weapon.
The triumphant, savage shouts of the mob re-e
merged as the sounds of looting echoed from the first floor below as he recalled his father’s final request.
You must try and keep your mother safe.
Lu Phan heard footsteps coming up the stairs to the apartment. He glanced behind him toward his parent’s bedroom where his cancer-weakened mother remained in bed.
Voices could be heard muttering at the top of the stairs. The door handle turned slowly and then rattled as someone suddenly grasped it violently from the other side.
And then the entire door frame shook from being hit by a shoulder attempting to break it down. Lu could hear more cheering from the street below as the sounds of breaking glass from another nearby building echoed across the warm Chicago summer night.
American Survivalist: RACE WARS OMNIBUS: Seasons 1-5 Of An American Survivalist Series... Page 1
