The fundamentalist Jihadi’s were actively waging war, killing in the name of Allah, systematically attempting to subdue the world by force. The second wave was the imams around the world, preaching this “peaceful” solution for those who conform. If you don’t conform, the only peace is servitude. The third wave is those who sit in the mosque and listen every week, (moderates they are often called), listening sometimes every night, putting a little money into the mill to pay for the murder. Again, some things never change. Strangely, much of the remaining church-goers are silent, while many are saying, “Well, it is a religion, like any other.”
An arrogant, self-absorbed celebrity once said on some women’s talk show, “Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America where we have separation of church and state.” What she failed to perceive, in her comprehensive self-absorption, is that a radical Christian will tell you the Gospel again, and promise to pray for you. A radical Muslim will promise to burn your house down around your head and follow through with that promise. Then he will blow up your child’s school without a second thought. “Just as threatening?”
But this is the kind of crap the world has been selling for a couple of generations and it continues to just get worse. Churches are now free to preach spiritual pablum and to succumb to the forces at work promoting Islam as just another of the world’s religions, and since it is the fastest growing one, you may as well get on board.
The “COEXIST” crowd soon fell under their sway, because, after all, their motto was always, “Can’t we all just get along?” So, in order to get along, as is often the case, they had to go along. That’s how it worked in Germany in the previous 30’s and after, and how it went in the US with the promotion of unions to a prominent place. And just like the unions, it was all carrot in the front door, nightsticks and guns in the alleyway. Islam was preaching peace on TV and radio, selling like drugs on the internet, and if someone wasn’t buying, the protection rackets moved in, forcing allegiance.
They had most of the free-flowing fuel reserves because America had fallen into the hands of those who would not explore, drill, and pump, calling it the ravaging of the Earth. But now, with the States about to topple to Islamic oppression, the Islamic States will be pumping to fund the terror. And with the President’s right hand man being on the inside, how could they go wrong?
A previous President-Alleged had said on many occasions that Islam was woven into the “very fabric” of America from the beginning, but he lied. Now, however, it was becoming a part of the fabric of America. Remember, the current President doesn’t care much what you believe, he only cares that you believe, especially as long as his power and bank accounts continue to expand. Once his messaging on K-LORD can be brought into conformity with the demands of the Mullahs, purified of any incidental Christocentric thought, the opportunity to expand his markets around the globe, get it translated into Arabic, and spread his gospel of cash to the Third World, he knew he had hit the motherlode. All he had to do was promise to give 30% to the Mullahs, and that seemed a very reasonable request, since his base would expand by over forty percent, in just one year. And within a couple of years of the second disappearance, Ameristan was the subculture name for United States, at least by the new followers of the Way, the new believers in Messiah Y’shua. Their numbers had to remain under cover, and although these are not yet times for open beheadings on the White House lawn – not yet anyway – one could find himself in a bind at work if he bucks the Feds, the Islamists, or the Unions. It was the trifecta of quiet coercion that few could avoid. Sometimes, however, the coercion was less than quiet.
Islam spread like a plague across every previously civilized nation, mostly because there was no political force with enough will to stare them down, but partly because the Church had been removed and a new one, a fledgling church, like a tiny olive tree, was growing up in its place.
Remember the financial collapse that took place, the disappearance of a billion plus people, the absence of the wisest and most determined to resist, the governments being almost helpless, not able to fund their military arms, being offered “Protection,” in much the same way the mob had offered in major cities of America just a century before. At least the New York mobsters of the Twentieth had been, to some degree Catholic, so ceremonial public executions were not a thing.
For Islam, it was a combination of a great protection racket, a political power play the likes of which Muhammed and Marx had only dreamed, and the absence of any profound resistance, and the result is that the White House and Kremlin are in hand. The leadership of Parliament, though not on board, were under thumb, and the only consistent resistance pocket in the world was Israel.
The Knesset is still a Jewish reality and they are never going to become part of Islam, and the Iron Dome holds up as well as their iron will, having been fully supplied during a previous American administration. They had a good enough relationship with that president, that they were able to stockpile hundreds of billions of dollars in hardware, enabling them to resist anything thrown at them for a long time.
Still, there was an appeasement movement throughout the land, right into the Knesset on some levels, and it is seen as a stabilizing factor, allowing the tiny nation to continue trade with neighbors and around the world. There were still what some called “hard liners,” those who harkened back to a day when the US was a real ally, when Congress – even reluctantly – supported their President in his protection of Israel, and when there was a President who would defy the world in her defense.
That President had wisely decided that only one nation in the world would get automatic Foreign Aid, and that would be Israel. He had also convinced Congress – almost on a lark, but by some serious leverage – that the sum total of all Foreign Aid should be cut in half, that other nations had to prove their need and worth to the US to get aid, and that they could not be in conflict with Israel. The final detail is what really sealed the deal for the Middle East; when all the agreed Foreign Aid was distributed, whatever remained would be given to our greatest ally, the most important place on the planet, Israel. The aid package to that nation doubled, then doubled again, then quadrupled, so that they could fund their Iron Dome for the whole nation for the next three generations.
The Islamic nations thought they no longer had to fear the US or Russia getting involved in their activities. Even though the more moderate of Muslim nations were now far less moderate, and fully on the jihadi side – even though they had a seemingly unlimited stream of revenue – every time they sent a sortie toward Israel, it fell to the ground or detonated in the air, often without any Israeli interference. It just failed. But that couldn’t hold out forever either.
Though their provision seemed eternal, their stores of arms began depleting. They had the Iron Dome, and it had extended across the whole nation, but the onslaughts were torrential, the expenditure of weapons, small and large, were continual, and in the end, Israel would eventually be unable defend herself. The ravening on the Holy City went on until it could go on no more. But that was years later.
Another headache was that the middle of what had been the US has become something of a no-man’s-land because federal law has disappeared, state leadership has been destroyed by the federal leadership that had been in place, and about the only thing holding the people together enough to not destroy one another is whatever personal code is being applied to the stronger parties at any given time. This is not, however a constant. Too many times, it is the marauders and the tyrants who take power in their tiny fiefdoms. Tiny monarchies spring up all over the non-coastal states, and when changes come, it is these areas that miss the recovery boat. Or is it their resistance to what they think of as Statism or Islamism that make the difference. In any event, the fiefdoms remain, the guns keep their little thunder domes in play, protected from the evils, and the cures of the outside.
It seems inevitable that Islam will reach their goal of Global Hegemony, but some
of that is about to change. The months are ticking down. The day will come when the months have passed, and the entire world has
Revenge at Hand
David called one of his men and said, “Go, strike him down!” So he struck him down, and he died.[15]
E-Day Minus 3 Months
The jerkwads are dead and buried with Gus, but that is not the end of the matter. Another youth from Sabine had followed his friends to the campground, responding to a CB call. He arrived late; late enough to see the funeral. He had parked at the road, having seen the headlights, and walked in through some old familiar trails. He got close enough to see the bus people tossing bodies into a hole, correctly assumed the worst, and took the news back to Sabine.
It turns out that the boy who died first, the one who had previously had Rita by the hair, was the son of the engineer who had made Sabine into a refinery town. The old man had borrowed a ton of construction skills from neighbors, and materials from neighboring towns, even hijacking some loads as they passed by that first year. He set up a pretty nice little kingdom for himself. His wife had gone missing in the first great disappearance, and he thought he had to develop a stone-hard shell to survive that. It got worse when his only son became something of a child thug, third in the local chain of command in the band of drug traffickers. Well, at least he was at home every night, even if it was late, and many of those rules don’t seem to apply any more either.
The kid was thirteen when the world went to hell, and the dad was busy trying to figure out what to do. As fate would have it, dad was a petroleum plant engineer, and he knew how to design and build a refinery. This time though, it would have to be done with very limited resources, money being done away, and trade being both scarce and irregular. He had worked his skills to the bone, cutting corners and shortening the materials list to something he could envision being able to fill in a short period of time. He already had half a dozen iron chickens pumping into a pipe that lead to nowhere, but that wasn’t doing anyone in Hobart any good. So, he planned and planned, and began acquiring what he needed to begin the process.
It was his idea to bulldoze the parts of town where residents were few, creating a safety buffer from the world. It was original, even though others later thought the same thing in their own small towns. The few residents that did live there were enticed to move into the heart of town, to apartments or condos of some sort. He built the storage tanks for the crude from raw stock that had been on a military convoy cross-country. He used the welding skills of a friend, and the sons of that friend in the next town, in trade for a fair share in the refinery, but they disappeared shortly after the last pipes were connected to the tanks. The ragtag plant was built to deposit the crude, straight from the chickens to the tanks, which fed the crude directly through the refinery by gravity, which flowed product into the storage tanks downhill from there, which filled the tanks of the three stations in town from which most of the common trade took place. There are also delivery pipes above a drive-through filling station for big rigs to take product to the rest of the living world.
That part is almost civilized in its operations. Usually, two trucks would arrive – one with product on board for delivery and trade, and one fuel tanker, which would fill up whatever it could for whatever they had to trade. Sometimes it was beans, and sometimes it was crates of milk, chickens, or something else a soul may need; but most things came their way eventually, even trouble.
The engineer is told about the hostage situation at the bus, how his son had lost all the weapons of his gang of thugs, how he had been taken from the town under threat of detonation, and now, how he had ended up dead. He hadn’t heard the part about the bus standoff, as of yet, because he was too busy at the time with some woman who wanted favors, and was willing to trade. She was exceedingly tasty, so when a knock came at his door, he shouted, “Go away.” Since it was not already a total disaster, the person knocking let it ride. Things change. The first knocker would soon be dead and a new day of dread would befall the town. Today, trouble has resulted in the death of his only son, and rage is his singular fuel.
He demands that someone storm the camp and kill everyone. He demands that the whole town turn out to take revenge on this “bus people,” the people with a suicide bomb on their leader. He calls on his iron-hard men, pounding on whatever his fists can find, and he demands that something must be done; and so it is. But the plan is restructured according to the insights and opinions of the mercenaries in his employ.
Mark has shown Rita some of the most amazing things in their bus. It turns out that he had worked on the protection teams for that previous President Alleged, and had, in fact, been well trained in the uses of the bus. Its colour had been changed, but it was still the same bus, with all the same security settings in place. Someone had fallen down on the job of reconfiguring everything, and right now, that is working to Mark’s advantage. Since they feel no need to flee, Mark takes a bit of time to show the current owners around.
Just to the right of the driver, there is a button marked, “KNEEL.” This is common equipment on buses, allowing them to get closer to the ground for deployment of passengers. If this one is pressed on the top edge as three short presses in a row, a panel on the dash to the right would flip over, revealing a keyboard, as the touchscreen rises out of the dash, and a small stool unfolds to stand up in front of it all.
The higher function systems boot up for the first time in many years, and they do so in about twenty-five seconds. After they learn about this, the higher functions will never be fully shut down again. One of the most important functions in the system is the “HELP” icon in the top right corner. If one touches that icon, a search window appears where one can type in any word or phrase to search for, and in very little time, one can learn whatever he or she wants to know. There is much to learn about what there is to learn, and Mark is eager to show them.
Everyone knew that it had been a presidential residence on wheels, and that it had some serious defensive capability, beginning with it being virtually bullet and bomb proof, but they do not expect the aggressive, offensive, or retaliatory capabilities. It could deploy smoke, oil, sewage, bullets, or rockets (front or back), and it has additional electric engine settings, on each of the six drive motors, that would allow it to seriously override the governor, which had been set at 75.
Mark created hand-scan security for each of the six tech savvy youth who were ready to take the responsibility as an armorer/gunner. One of the nicest toys is the Gunner’s Screen, which allows for the cameras on the bus to target things. Once an object is on the screen, the CTRL key on the keyboard could be depressed, with the Shift, and a tap of the screen would lock the targeting system onto that object, following it around, ‘til another target is chosen, or ‘til the space bar is hit or held down to fire at the target. Tap the space bar and get one round. Press it for more than a quarter second and get three rounds. Continue to hold it down and . . . well, hell happens. Press the CTRL/Shift/Space Bar at the same time, and something similar to an old Stinger missile would launch from the front or rear and hit the crosshairs within a few inches.
Also from the Gunner’s Screen, without touching the screen, one could be looking at the rear view of the bus, and press CTRL/Shift O for an oil dump behind the rear wheels of about thirty gallons on each side. CTRL/Shift S would super heat the oil in small quantities, mixed with sulfur, and produce a cloud of black and yellow smoke, impossible to see through, and it was deep and dense enough to cover three lanes of a road at seventy miles per hour. When a CTRL/Shift Z is pressed, it dumps up to thirty gallons of sewage contents from the onboard dunny, straight onto the street below, which would be devastating to any motorcyclists to the rear. This is considered a specialized, and even last resort weapon by all who have ever considered it.
The window healing processes are active at all times, so they never have to be activated or initiated, and that is why the windscreen was always in perfect shape. The healing process
was so good, that even the dead bugs or bird poop would disappear as the day wore on, just because the nanites were doing such a job at sealing the surface, always. They were also “eating” some of the deposits on the glass, so they would have more materials to work with, and the waste would be deposited into the black water.
He showed those few children, along with Reggie and Cheryl of course, these few toys, suggesting that they all take turns trying them out, but to leave the system in “Demo” mode while they poke around.
“After all,” he said, “we don’t want to go burning down the forest.” Then he took Rita to show her his bike.
The additional fuel cells are easy to see, and the tonneau can easily be removed, where he shows her his private stores of things. There are MRE’s (Meals Ready to Eat), and lots of ammo for a few favored guns, and some really big bullets in extra-large magazines, like she had never seen before. He takes her to the rear of the sidecar and shows her a spring release panel, which flips open as a door in the back of the body, about six inches wide by ten tall, and inside is the butt of a gun. Mark slides it out on a rolling drawer which supports his .50 Caliber Barrett Anti-Materiel Rifle. Already loaded in the magazine are ten rounds of tracer ammo, able to be seen by their trails at night. There are three mags of this ammo already loaded and ready, as well as two mags with explosive payloads mingled with incendiaries, and a few boxes of more “specialized” rounds.
The Warriors' Ends- Soldiers of the Apocalypse Page 15
