The Warriors' Ends- Soldiers of the Apocalypse Read online

  The

  Warriors’

  Ends

  by

  Keith T Jenkins

  Cross & Hammer Publishing

  San Antonio, Texas 78228

  Cross & Hammer Publishing

  354 Consuelo Av

  San Antonio, Texas 78228

  © 2019 Keith T Jenkins. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

  https://www.facebook.com/CrossAndHammerPublishing

  Published by Cross & Hammer Publishing August, 2019

  Edited by Catelyn Critchfield-Wilson and Brittany Marshall

  Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  Table of Contents

  In Years to Come - Sabine

  Tomorrow’s Cities

  Six Months Before it All

  The Mess

  The Club

  Thinning the Herd

  Two Weeks In

  The President

  Jeremiah

  Three Weeks Back

  Management

  The White House

  Departure Day Due

  Islam Arise

  Revenge at Hand

  Two Witnesses

  River City Showdown

  Rendition

  Confluence

  Escape and Evasion

  The Message

  An Exclamation Point!

  In the Meantime

  In the Last Months

  Aleksandr’s Story

  144,000

  Poking the Bear

  Shall We Play a Game?

  The Rest of the Story

  The Final Message

  The All Conflict is On

  Phase Last Begins

  What Da Fatwah?

  Huns at the Gates

  Conclusion

  About the Author

  End Notes

  Dedication

  To the greatest Loves of my Life

  My God

  My Wife

  My Children

  In Years to Come - Sabine

  I’m going to find myself a girl who can show me what laughter means. And we’ll fill in the missing colours in each other’s paint-by-number dreams.[1]

  E-Day Minus 3 Months

  After more than five thousand years of human history, two hundred fifty odd years of the Free Market Experiment called America, and over six years retired from killing people, it all comes down to the gun . . . again. Mark had hoped for a life someday with a wife and kids, dog in the yard, and a cruise through the countryside, once in a while. Mike dreamed of . . . well, she just figured it would all work out different than it is. Some were just hoping they could finish their days in anonymity, not having to go to war anymore. But not all hopes and dreams are realistic. Many of these friends are warriors by training and talent, some gifted by God to be such. As I relay this story to you, I want you to understand; everything you are about to see and hear is true. It’s just that, from your perspective . . . most of it hasn’t happened yet.

  A hundred miles of tattered wilderness make every breath a dust-blessed joy. The kerchief over his face keeps him from choking on every mile. “What brings a people to name a town Sabine?” he asks himself, as he rides toward the well-ravaged hamlet. It looks nearly civilized, but looks are often deceiving.

  Over six years ago the place had another name, but that was before the world went to Hell, before the federal collapse, before the sky . . . well . . . just before. Pulling into the city limits, he passes the sign that says “Hobart” with the word Sabine painted over it.

  Between the middle of the fourth and the end of the fifth years, many of the cities and towns renamed themselves, somehow based on their urban identities. It started when New Yorkers renamed their city. Signs all around the city were spray painted with the same depressing, revealing, painful . . . truthful, “Black Death.” There were also signs upon entering the individual boroughs that said things like, “Plague-ville,” “Suicide,” and “Hell.” Those names never managed to stick though, and BD replaced NY in everything. After that, after the initial decimation, interdependence became a thing of the past; independence became the means of forced existence, and blatant survival became all that many could hope for.

  He wipes his face with a kerchief and rakes his fingers through his dust-hued hair, freeing the sallow powdered pollen, revealing the walnut brown colour so well camouflaged a moment ago. He solemnly remembers the past few years . . . how the culture shifted . . . how the populations moved, and how so very many had died.

  Most people tried to move to a town where they knew someone, usually a smaller town, because cities – almost everything over 100,000 people – suddenly became so dangerous that no one wanted to remain. Big city folk had to rely on distant relatives and friends of friends, and “welcome” was not always the word of the day. Many of them were run off as quickly as they arrived. The people who stayed in any major city soon found themselves fighting over every scrap of sustenance that could be grabbed. It is often said that there are thousands of rat holes where small groups of people have emptied out grocery stores into their basements or barns, stocking up on all the canned goods that could be had, collecting entire pharmacies. There were places where groups of people – families, churches, whatever – had moved into the storm sewers, taking millions of tons of canned goods and ammo hoping to wait it out; hoping for normal to return.

  It seems that some sort of militia, or a family with enough guns, took almost every Wal-Mart, and locked it down for personal or group use only. Over 5000 stores of various sizes were seized. SWAT teams or neo-military types had retaken those in the more urban areas. The more rural ones were under redneck guard ‘til all the useful contents could be carted off. These were the ones with the most firearms and ammo. Subsequently, these were the ones that, once taken, they were easiest to defend. In the more remote locations of Texas, the pickup trucks streamed into the “Exit” doors and out the “Enter” door, filled by neighbors in every isle. The smaller towns were the most civilized because those looting the store were all neighbors to one another, and as much as survival seemed to be on the line, neighbors don’t kill neighbors, and they don’t let them go without – not if they can help it.

  Other stores that got swarmed early and quickly were Bass Pro, Cabela’s, Dick’s, Academy . . . hell, anywhere that sold what most would consider hunting, survival, and camping supplies were immediately inundated – especially those with guns. Target didn’t truck with much of that manly shit, so they figured to be left alone. But even Target has things that are useful; camping supplies like bedding, cookware, shelters, lanterns and even archery equipment, as well as fishing supplies, and clothes of all shapes and sizes. And any store with a grocery aisle inside found itself looted almost instantly. Local pharmacies found the fronts of their stores pulled off and the shelves empty in a few hours. High fashion stores and places that sold purses and fancy footwear were abandoned quickly and barely touched; although there were some that became home to the addle minded. Porn shops were burnt to the ground and malls were flowing with armed traffic, because people would need knives, pocket tools, baby clothes, non-disposable diapers, formula, children’s wear, diving gear, gigs, underwear, optics of every kind, soaps and cleaners, and even generic glasse
s . . . you know, cheaters. This was just in month three after the . . .

  Tire stores emptied out in a moment, and in that moment just after the population was instantaneously hammered by the severity of the situation, in that awful moment; people died for radial woven steel and bonded rubber. People began dying for all kinds of things, hundreds of millions of people, and most of them had no idea why. In this little piece of scrap leather town, it could be about to happen again.

  Inside the city limits is still not inside the city. Like most of the smaller burgs, this one has walled the city within and the world without. The population is down to about one tenth of what it had been, augmented by the travelers, and the city is reduced in acreage by about thirty percent, having had the outlying neighborhoods bulldozed toward the city to become a fifty-foot-tall ring of rubbish, creating a thirty-five-hundred-yard circle of ground to become farmland.

  They’re not very good at it – farming that is – though the crops are sufficient to supply the city; they are farming enough area to provide groceries for ten to fifteen times that many, and then some. Like the fools in Russia over a century before, some local idiots, thinking that the shortages would be temporary, had raided the successful gardens in the city. They stole from those gardens behind the houses of middle-aged and elder women mostly, taking all the food they could. They often killed the people who owned the homes, who knew how to grow things, leaving their own murderous selves with enough of something for now, but with no means to get more in the future. The city people attacked the farm people, and when it was all over, the farm people had been so badly outnumbered that the city folk won out. And just like in Russia, winning meant losing, because the city folk knew little of nothing about farming. Still, this ain’t Russia; is it? This is . . . er, I mean, this used to be America.

  The only intelligent thing that the latest version of anarchists did was to remember what kind of foods they had stolen from the gardeners they killed and what those farmers had grown. That helped them to not plant absolutely useless things that would die as soon as they grew up. There was still a library in town, though it had become almost unused before the . . . before then . . . but now, it has things to say. They plant the right things but none of them knows how to fertilize or irrigate anything. Few if any know when to plant things and when to harvest and none of them know how to get rain, or who to ask. In a place that used to get forty-five inches of rain a year, for the past six years has dwindled down to a seventeen-inch average. The average corn ear is just under four inches long instead of ten or twelve, and a little over an inch thick; but the up side is that you can eat the cob too, if you steam it long enough. The harvests of wheat in the surrounds have been down to about forty percent, yielding scruffy looking stalks, in skinny sheaves, and half of the kernels are almost desiccated.

  The sun is high in late mid-day, but Mark doesn’t figure to make the next town by dark, so he pulls his bike up next to a group of church kids looking for a new home. Their ages look to be between sixteen and twenty-five years, fifteen people in all, riding in a sixteen-year-old Danzig Power Stag double-decker bus with the cargo bin in back, and some parts of the seating, full of their stuff.

  The bus is originally one of the later Danzig models, with the Wankel powerplant cranking three high capacity generators, providing energy to two hundred sixty “GatorZTail,” NeoOrganic/Lithium/Ni-Cad batteries, which power the electric drive motors on each axel. Today it has its windows open because, being out of fuel, and running on battery power alone, they are not running the air conditioners. When the gas is gone, this bus can still go a couple hundred miles, if the roads aren’t too steep or the load too heavy.

  She is beautiful to behold, double decker, Danzig, 88 passenger, with an extended nose, 15 degree, blade-like slope to the front & divided windscreen, slicing the air, for greater fuel efficiency, and a vertical slope making the bus profile look like the edge of a katana sword. It had been purchased by a previous President Alleged of the US, as one of a half dozen. He fell out of power and his toys were put to pasture by the next Prez. A couple presidents later, someone sold the fleet. Their original purpose was as a fleet of mobile executive offices, staged in strategic locations, in and around “battleground” states, so the President Alleged could tour around, campaigning for his agenda items. The original cost of the motorcoaches was 7.9 million dollars each. Each was equipped with a luxury bedroom upstairs in the rear, with a three-piece ensuite, and a meeting room toward the front. There was a complete galley kitchen downstairs, with a custom made Sub Z fridge, a washroom, a small dining area for eight and cruising seats for six.

  The undercarriage was hardened to protect against explosive devices on the road, the body panels were all spun titanium and Kevlar with a half inch, triple density ceramic overplatting. The windows were all 300 gauge BAMG, capable of absorbing dozens of 30mm rounds each, and common ammo would just bounce right off, without leaving a mark. Given a low amperage charge of 24 volts, along with a little time, the glass would actually heal itself; being a hybrid bond of living nanites, constructed of titanium, carbon, and silicon on the outer layers, over a PlastiGlas static shock resistant layer in the middle, backed up by another layer of carbon/silicon hybrid. The product was labeled Bad Ass Monkey Glass – partly as an homage to Gorilla Glass, from the good old days. Don’t forget that silicon is the stuff of true glass, and carbon is what diamonds are made of, and make no mistake; this glass was damn close to diamond-hard, when healed and whole. The coach has an onboard computer system that is amazing, but the current operators only know how to use the most basic elements.

  The whole fleet came up for auction in New Jersey and was bought by a Texas oil zillionaire, all six, for just under ten million. He appeared on every form of social media telling the world, “The most godless president in the history of America will be pleased to know that the coaches that were bought for his personal vanity and agendas are to be put to use for Christian ministries. We will be accepting applications on my personal website,” and he gave a web address. Hundreds of churches borrowed the coaches, and when the day came, those who had them would be eternally grateful.

  This group had been on a church retreat when it happened and the whole world changed. All but one of the counselors at the camp were suddenly gone, as were their group leaders – all but one – and all but a couple dozen of the youth. Reggie, twenty-nine, a counselor from the camp, was an all-around fix-it guy whose off-season job was as a school bus driver in a small, rural district. Cheryl, thirty-four, was one of the youth leaders from the church, who was a nurse by training, but had been working for schools for a while, and always a little lost-seeming in the crowd of Bible thumpers. Maybe, when the rest of the leadership disappeared, everyone knew why anyone had been left behind, though many would still not fully believe.

  When it happened, the bus, which has a capacity of sixty-five, had been on loan to take about forty of the youth and leaders to Camp Winnamocka, in Arkadelphia, where they had spent most of a week. When it happened, some of the youth panicked and ran into the woods. Others ran the opposite direction, finding the city, Wal-Mart, and the rest. Some despaired and, after a few weeks of bad news, in a fit of fear, found ways to kill themselves. The others, mostly figured out what they could of what happened – the big picture, not the details – and steeled themselves to ride it out, knowing that it was going to get worse before it got better.

  Cheryl and Reggie took some convincing before they were ready to buy into the whole “Left Behind” scenario, but once they understood what was happening, they became infinitely more useful to everyone around.

  For a couple of years, the group lived off the land, at the camp, and a little rummaging at Wal-Mart down the road. The crowds of looters were a nightmare for a few days, tapering off from the first thousands on week one. The camp had the luxury of sixty or so solar panels for power, as well as a generator for the kitchen and dining area, and the kids made black out curtains from sleeping bags that
they gathered in a trip to the store. There were a couple of shotguns in the owner’s cabin, and a Winchester 30.30 with a few hundred rounds. That first day, the seniors in the group made a hurried trip to the store, sensing that they were facing a disturbance of Biblical proportions. Some of the kids laughed and tried to make them feel foolish, but they went anyway, retrieving some rifles, some ammo, some camping gear, and one of the girls gathered a few dozen bolts of solid, cotton cloth. One of the older kids had worked at Wal-Mart and knew how to get into the storage containers on the outside, where they kept the backup stock, even some of the firearms and ammo. Once they knew how to read the codes and bypass the locks, it was all good. Having pushed the doors closed, they returned the next day for another run, but every box they had opened was now empty to the walls. Soon, there would be people living in those empty containers.

  Some of the kids had read the book of Revelation, and even though it painted a dire scene, most kids still thought that a terrible thing would be for the X-Box to fail, and their cell phone to not work. Those things happened too, but were not as severe as seeing the police stop working, the ambulance stop running, the stores go black, hospitals falling into silence, and cemeteries filling with dead, unboxed, and unburied. Soon, and far sooner than anyone thought, the flies and roaches became as much a nightmare as anything imagined.

  Since that day, these kids, and their grown-ups, have made their way in the world, for over six years, at and around the camp. Eventually, when the sky grew too dark to charge the systems, or the systems grew too old, they took to the road. That was several dozen wander-lost months ago.

  The phones worked for a while, and communication with home was possible for some, but many parents couldn’t be reached from the first. Still, in light of the events, martial law declared, and no one allowed to leave their locations, they mostly felt safer just staying put. Planes were grounded, trains were parked, and buses found no legal means to travel, so they ceased to run. Interstate travel and transport came to a standstill. Suddenly, law and order meant stopping everything that was moving.