Black Parade (Beginnings Series Book 24) Read online

  He didn’t think it was important when George was in charge. Now he did.

  The reason George wanted Beginnings was because deep within the communication room was a link up to a satellite that could scan the air, land and sea.

  We located the manual and sent it to Henry to work on. We needed him to get it up and running, praying that it wasn't too late.

  We figured out where they were coming from. The Fredrickson hit the far east. The surviving population knew the mini ice age and destruction was not conducive to survival, so they had migrated here.

  To say we didn’t have a good military strategy would be lying. We did. We did the best we could with the tools at our disposal.

  Surveillance from aircraft determined the military strategy Frank and Hal used.

  From Maryland to South Carolina, ninety ships lined up. Groups of five. Down in the gulf seven war ships and one submarine sat and waited.

  A hundred plus miles north of the Montana border were two thousand soldiers. A foreign military camp. We located it through our surveillance.

  We were able to round up close to sixty thousand of the Society soldiers. They were easy to convince once they heard the ‘George theoretical invasion’ was imminent.

  Frank moved two thousand of our men to the Canadian border, twenty-thousand of the troops south and scattered twenty thousand down the east coast. He then positioned the remaining troops near civilization and agricultural areas inland.

  Joe called him nuts.

  I remember that fateful day well.

  We were all in an office in Norfolk.

  “I don’t understand,” Frank said. “Danny and John Matoose have this system up and running. We can lock in the coordinates of those ninety ships. We have one hundred and three viable scuds. We lock on and take out those ninety ships, and concentrate hands on for the war ships down south. We hit them with what we can and deal with the ground invasion. If we gas the troops we can wipe them out.”

  You would have thought Frank was Attila the Hun. Or Hitler. The faces in the room were aghast. Myself included.

  “Did you see the report, Frank!” Joe blasted. “You’re treating this like it is an all out hostile invasion.”

  “Dad, they have movement north of us. Ships to the south and east. Uh, yeah, I’d say it’s an invasion.”

  I intervened. “Frank, these people lost their homes. I think the reason they have the war ships is in case we don’t let them in. Just in case they need to get tough. But I don’t think they came all the way over here to start a war.”

  “I do.” Frank replied. “Without a doubt. For the first time you’ll hear me say, George is right. We are not letting them in.”

  “The hell we aren’t,” Joe said. “Those ninety-ships. You heard the report, they have civilians on them. A lot of women and children.”

  Frank nodded arrogantly. “Dad. Take them out.”

  “What! You’re out of your goddamn mind. We need to concentrate on those war ships. First try to make contact, see what they want ….”

  “No!” Frank blasted. “I think it’s pretty clear what they want. Hal … tell him.”

  “Dad,” Hal stepped forward. “Frank has a point. I think we should go with his suggestion.”

  Joe nodded with sarcasm. “Wipe them out. All of them. A peaceful movement? Frank, move your troops, position them more south. Send out an air surveillance and a ship to try to make contact …”

  “Dad, no. The gulf movement is a feint. The civilians are the decoys. The ninety ships are the threat.”

  At that instant, Joe tossed photos on the table. They flew about. Pictures of the ships. Indigent people, looking straggly lined the decks. Children. Women. No soldiers.

  “This is not a war movement. Look at these faces, Frank.” Joe blasted. “Women. Children. Elderly. They aren’t invading us.”

  “They are decoys, my gut is telling me Dad.”

  Joe huffed and shook his head.

  Hal stepped forward looking at the pictures. “I hadn’t seen these. .. Frank maybe …”

  “No.” Frank said strongly. “Listen to me and listen to me good. Ninety plus ships. If these fucking people were so organized as to get together fuel and resources for ninety fucking ships, then they sure as hell had the resources to let us know they were coming. Radio. A single boat. Something. But they didn’t. They just showed up. Trust me on this one, Dad. Take out the ninety ships. We can do it in one push of a button.”

  But they didn’t listen to Frank.

  They should have.

  14.

  Attack

  Here’s how it was supposed to go. Robbie Slagel, Joe’s youngest son was to lead a four plane squad into the gulf of Mexico to do closer surveillance. Ground troops and equipment were positioned inland about twenty miles.

  Three days after it was determined, three days after Frank pleaded to take out the ships to the east, the battle plan began.

  Robbie led the squadron. It was a non aggressive mission.

  He was shot down.

  The first act of war was delivered upon us. They fired first.

  Within seconds, literally seconds, boats were launched from the ships.

  War erupted.

  But that wasn’t all. In a way, that was what Joe expected.

  He didn’t expect his youngest son to be shot down and lost at sea.

  Which he was.

  It was a devastating blow to the Slagels.

  It was the starting gun. When Robbie’s plane went down, the worst was yet to come.

  Over half of those ninety ships had been redesigned and reequipped with launch capabilities. They slammed us, simultaneously firing off at once, 76 SLBM low yield nuclear weapons to land randomly upon our soil.

  The landed more toward the Midwest.

  The bombs were designed to cause turmoil and chaos. They did.

  The enemy ships did exactly what Frank wanted to do to them.

  Frank wanted to unload on them all at once. But three days later they unloaded on us.

  We couldn’t intercept.

  Random areas exploded in the worst ever surprise hit on U.S. soil.

  We could have avoided it. We could have stopped it.

  We were so concerned with what looked like an attack down south, we failed to realize the obvious invasion was indeed the feint.

  In the middle of massive upheaval, over one hundred and fifty thousand men, women and children, stormed our beach, invaded our home with the single intent to make it their own.

  The UWA soldiers were able to stave off the southern determined troops positioned in Canada.

  However, we were not prepared.

  It took seven days, impressively, to regroup and redirect.

  Over radios not taken out by EMP pulses, survivors were instructed to retreat west. After all, the invasion came from the east.

  Four states were not affected.

  Montana. Colorado. North Dakota and Wyoming.

  Beginnings was abandoned, and so was most of Montana. Only a few stayed behind and that was to link up communications and the satellite.

  We secured what people were left behind a front line wide and far.

  There wasn’t much left to do. Surrender or fight.

  We decided to fight. It was our land, our home.

  But we were outnumbered by a long shot.

  A unilateral decision was reached and unanimously voted upon.

  We back tracked our people into the NORAD compound, which held everyone, and waited.

  Dean Hayes went to work.

  Within weeks Henry had the Satellite link up and running and it pin pointed where the invading troops were located.

  As I said, Dean went to work.

  We launched our retaliation.

  We took everything we had. We pinpointed their locations and hit them.

  We hit them with nuclear weapons upon our own soil and with chemical weapons created by Dean.

  When the air was safe to breathe in the chemica
lly hit areas, we swept through cleaning up.

  When the dust settled in the radiated areas, we doused them with chemicals again.

  Double dose.

  We had to. It was the only way to defeat the great invasion upon our land. They had already hit us, we were only hitting areas again.

  That’s not to say, there still wasn’t a ground war. There was. For months. For months the enemy fought for what they came for. But they lost.

  While most of our land had been destroyed, the One Year Great War had taken its toll.

  We were victorious.

  But not without terrible loss.

  But we had the strength, will and determination to go on.

  And that’s what we had to do.

  15.

  Rebuilding

  Within six months of the war’s end, we started rebuilding. But we did it in pockets, keeping our civilizations isolated and at a distance from the radiated areas.

  We burned a lot of bodies and suffered a lot of casualties.

  However the percentage of our losses didn’t equal the losses sustained by our enemy.

  When it was all said and done, when the dust settled and the surrender was finalized, we had acquired over twenty thousand refugees. Some of them were women, but most were either too old, too young or too weak to fight.

  Our farming areas were in good shape and the war left us with lower temperatures, but we were rebounding.

  We had to leave Beginnings. The enemy managed to pollute our water supply which was derived from a nearby lake.

  Dean estimated it would take a decade before the water was drinkable.

  We’d do better settling elsewhere.

  We salvaged our crops, moved what we could, emptied Beginnings and moved on.

  Remember the killer babies I spoke of?

  They were genetically created to withstand the elements.

  Most were located outside of Beginnings.

  Frank had them under control despite the fact that their internal animal instincts made them predators.

  They could withstand the elements, but not without food. Any stream that fed from that lake was contaminated.

  Further south, contamination was still found but the water was able to be purified.

  The animals didn’t know the difference.

  Every animal in that region died.

  Without wildlife, the killer babies were unable to survive.

  Hence the end to them. Or so we thought.

  Bottom line was we were all on the survival path. We were building, growing and surviving.

  A country united once again with people and technology.

  16.

  Formative Years …

  A hundred years before they were referred to as the roaring twenties. Funny, we were giving the ‘twenties’ the same name, only this time in the twenty-first century.

  A lot occurred in the twenties.

  The start of the Great War.

  The end of that war.

  The rebuilding.

  Utopia, or rather Beginnings, laid to rest.

  Many others were laid to rest as well. The hardest being originals of Beginnings and members of the Slagel family.

  Robbie Slagel was the first casualty of the Great War. He died in 2020. He was something like thirty-seven.

  The Great War was swift but it took a year to finalize. A few more for the dust to settle.

  Jimmy Slagel passed away in 2027, from complications of radiation. He led crews going into the cities, cleaning up, sweeping for survivors. It took its’ toll.

  Johnny Slagel had a daughter. She was fourteen when she passed the same year as Jimmy. She got ill and left us.

  Probably because Dean Hayes wasn’t around anymore.

  He and Ellen, Frank’s wife, both died toward the end of the Great War.

  After the nuclear and biological weapons, during the ground confrontations, Ellen and Dean, both great doctors, traveled to many camps MASH units to do surgeries and help the injured. They, like many other doctors, were on the go constantly.

  In one of the very last ground battles, just outside the Texas Oklahoma border, the small isolated medical camp they visited was hit by a large pocket of enemy gorillas.

  In a sneak attack they mortared the camp, then went in and took out the rest. It was in the middle of the night when there was minimal security. Why would there be a lot of security? After all, in every instance of the battles, never had a field hospital been hit.

  We cared for enemy ill and injured too.

  It was always speculated that someone knew the great mind of Dean Hayes was there.

  It took three days for us to learn of this. Three days of radio silence from them, and we went down.

  Dean was the only survivor .. barely. He lived for a few days and that was it.

  Frank was never the same after his best friend and wife died.

  Never the same.

  The toll of the deaths of his brother and then his wife hit him hard. At least he still had his children.

  The Slagels, the mighty family spared of the plague, went down in the Great War and after.

  But even with the heartache and the loss, and Great War gave Frank another leadership position.

  He was named President of the United States in 2028. That was after the death of his brother and granddaughter and retirement of his father.

  But it wasn’t long after that Joe too left us. It was the greatest loss of all.

  But it wasn't before Jack.

  Jack Slagel is very important.

  While his daughter was ill, Johnny met an immigrant nurse named Natasha. They married and on Oct 28th, 2029, Natasha bore a son. However, like Johnny’s grandmother, Natasha died giving birth.

  I still remember when Jack was born.

  Johnny was proud of his son, yet drowning in grief over the loss of his wife.

  He asked me to be his godfather, an honor I proudly accepted.

  “Look at him, Danny. He is so strong,” Johnny said.

  “He is.”

  “He looks like a Slagel. This is the next generation.”

  “Of course Johnny,” I chuckled. I mean wasn’t that obvious?

  “No, Danny, in a world that has fallen. In a world that needs to be lifted up… he was born to be a hero.”

  I remember the look on Johnny’s face when he held his newborn son, lifted him, looked at him and told him. “You were born for greatness, Jack. You were born with a great purpose. I know it. I feel it. One day, so will you.”

  Jack Joseph Slagel was anointed with an honor he was too young to understand. A legacy was bestowed upon an infant.

  Johnny sensed something that day.

  Jack was the last baby born of that decade. The last baby born before everything

  Moving to Extinction

  17.

  Living Beyond

  When the very first plague hit, surviving women were outnumbered by surviving men. Often times hundreds to one. But after the Great War and the arrival of the enemy, many immigrants and refugees were women.

  Women weren’t as rare.

  Especially the young ones.

  To someone like me, it wasn’t an option.

  Frank Slagel passed the reproduction law. Now, I know that sounds pretty lame, and those who knew Frank in his ‘early’ years, when he wasn’t always the brightest bulb, they may have thought it was a joke. But it wasn’t. It was needed.

  As boring as they may be, let me give you the stats.

  In the ten years after the plague and before the Great War, four hundred and twenty-six babies were born. The biggest percentage was around the seven-year mark.

  In the four years following the plague… six. Six babies were born, nearly a hundred thousand people and only six babies. Fifteen percent of the population were women in their prime birthing years.

  Two years following we had an increase, but it never hit fifty.

  In the beginning of 2028, when Frank became president, he issued the offici
al Reproduction Proclamation Law.

  In a sense, but in a more humane way, Frank was following the George law. If we wanted to continue as a species, we had to reproduce.

  Therefore, any woman living in the United States between the ages of 19 and 40, unless medically excused had exactly two years to conceive, or they would be artificially inseminated by a donor of their choice or a volunteer.

  They would be placed in pregnancy detention centers to ensure conception.

  Sounds harsh, I know but we were dwindling.

  He came to me with it first and we laid out the plan. Actually, he came to me before becoming president. We made sure we had the cows, and the processing centers for food and milk for these women. Special farms and greenhouses were set up for the ‘expectant’.

  Also, special medical care.

  These women and their offspring would get the best of the best.

  We found out after the law went into effect that it wasn’t that these women didn’t want to have children, they couldn’t find suitable partners.

  Wow. The return of conventional relationships.

  It was amazing. I never thought I'd see the day where one on one relationships would return. When women were outnumbered, women married more than one man.

  At least most did.

  I remember Joe, right before he passed away, talking to Frank about the law.

  “You are acting like George two,” he said to Frank. “Next thing you know you’ll put these women in vats and farm the kids.”

  “If need be,” Frank said.

  “You’re an ass.”

  “And man is a dying breed.”

  Goddamn if it didn’t work.

  End of 2028. Five hundred births.

  By the fall of 2029… 8,000 babies were born.

  Jack was the last baby born that year.

  In January 2030, over four hundred women were registered as ‘due’.

  Four hundred and seventeen gave birth.

  Four hundred and twelve died right after.

  Like Natasha.

  The other five went comatose eventually passing with in the year.