Chapter 1

I walked through the shop’s door, moving from the humid, West-Texas-in-June noontime heat into the coffee-scented, air-conditioned chill. I was celebrating, taking a victory lap, through the haunts of my last three years. I juggled my cane and my bags as I stepped up to the counter to give the barista my order.

“A twenty-ounce house drip, with room. And I’d like to pick up a couple of pounds of the Indonesian medium-roast.” She nodded, placed a couple of one-pound bags on the counter and turned to get my drink. I smiled to myself, a rare, good mood breaking through the gloom of the last few days. I had finished with school, even though I didn’t know what I was going to do next. A coffee sounded like the perfect end to the morning. I picked up my whole bean coffee and the hot cup and stepped over to the small counter to add half-and-half.

Amid the noise of the coffee shop’s gurgling espresso machine and whining blenders, I sat quietly in the rear corner, my back to the wall, my cane propped against the small table, and my eyes idly scanning the crowd filtering in from the bright June sunshine. People from the nearby technology business campus slouched in wearing casual Friday wear (which, these days, was getting pretty damned casual.) Hipsters read the latest headlines on their tablets. In the far corner sat four hulking military types in civvies, ogling the girls. They were probably associated with the technology businesses. Transfer of Confederacy tech for home-planet defense was getting to be big business in Lubbock.

Standing out from these thoroughly modern people was a group of young girls and boys from the nearby conservative Bible College, where I had been working on my master’s degree for the last three years. These kids stood out from the rest of the crowd by their clothes, their use of personal space, and the tone of their voices. They were happy and excited to be reaching the end of the semester, wondering what the summer would bring. I recognized most of them from the classes in Old Testament History that I had taught this year as a teaching assistant. There were Phyllis Santos, Ben Dunn, Diane Honeycutt, and a bunch whose names I didn’t remember. Sweet kids. (Sure, everyone over 14 these days was legally an adult, but to me everybody under 30 is a kid.)

The group of them, eight girls and a couple of boys, drifted back from the counter with their coffee drinks. They saw me and waved. I nodded back. Courtesy satisfied, they moved across the room to the area near the windows, pushed a couple of tables together, then sat down and started talking about the summer break ahead. I was an old geezer to them, I knew. I was part of School, and School was ending for the summer.

The young people looked adorable. The mainstream culture saw them as repressed and sexless, but I was charmed by the fresh-faced innocence of these kids. They were bursting with hormones just like everyone else their age, but they were trying to focus the energy and drive of their youth on long-term goals. Maybe they would make it and maybe they wouldn’t but, by God, they were going to try.

I smiled to myself again. I remembered that, back when I was a child, the Brotherhood was hard against coffee; and now their next generation of leaders gathered in a coffee shop. What would those old fossils think of the boxes of Montecristo perfecto cigars, wine, and the really nice Islay single-malt scotch I had in my bags? I had abstained for the last three years to be in compliance with the college’s code of conduct, but now I was back on my own. Still, I didn’t want to advertise what I was carrying, any one of which items would have gotten me dismissed, expelled, and generally kicked out.

While teaching freshman classes I had often thought, “If only I were 30 years younger.” One of the lessons that living a life on the edge had taught me was that I was alive. Even after all that I had lived through; I had a lot of living yet to do. The girls’ feminine voices, their slim, graceful legs, the promise of their hips, the occasional flash of their eyes; all these reminded me daily of that living.

I shifted my weight across to my good side and stretched out the bum leg. I found their fresh-faced innocence much sexier than the burlesque show that American culture had become in the last year.

“Got to keep a lid on those thoughts,” I told myself. A military life had not been conducive to celibacy (Kipling called it, “bachelors in barracks”) and for twenty years I had taken a lot of comfort in my wife Beth’s arms ... and legs ... and ass. But it had been four years since her death. The company of young people had made me feel younger. Why, I feel almost 40, I said to myself with grim humor. But there was some truth to it.

I looked down at myself. Pretty sad, I thought. Though I held down my food intake to the point where I was constantly hungry and worked out three times a week in the dojo, my hip injury had kept me from the kind of activity that would let me lose my slowly-expanding waistline. My doctor tut-tutted and prescribed a daily diuretic to help me control my blood pressure. I had the upper-body strength, but I’d never fit into my old BDUs again. And I hated fat preachers.

I blew across the surface of my cup and took a tentative sip. Another minute before it would be cool enough to drink. I sighed, a familiar brown mood sinking over me.

The young people’s voices seemed almost too bright, too happy, as though they were trying to deny the more pensive mood of the rest of the patrons, as though they were whistling past the graveyard of their own futures. I could feel the chill wind from that graveyard. It was a wind that I had felt before in far distant places: Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, and (whisper it!) South America. I had cheated death more than a few times in several regional conflicts. But I finally caught a bullet in my hip and was disabled out. Out as a civilian, I started a successful consulting business, raised two daughters, and buried my Beth.

After Beth died, I longed for a renewed purpose in life. I thought that I had found one in the Church.

My hero had become Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael, the 13th-century Welsh monk who had returned from the Crusades to live in an English monastery.

I could feel the corners of my mouth creep up fractionally at the irony. After running away from home to the Army to escape the hard hand of my father’s stifling fundamentalist religion, I had come back full circle. Earlier that morning at the Bible College of Lubbock Brotherhood University I had defended my thesis to achieve my master’s in divinity. My new purpose, my calling was to be the Church ... until the news broke of the Swarm. I remembered a year earlier watching the President’s Address to the nation and feeling the air start to leak out of my inflated, self-important plans. (How could anyone have plans in those days?)

The worldwide announcement of the Confederacy had finished the ongoing collapse of American Evangelicalism as a political force. Growing up in the 1970s, I had watched Evangelicals be seduced away from their role as a Witness to the Truth to becoming advocates for conservative political causes. As an adult in the 2000s I saw the next generation being seduced for left-wing political causes. The pendulum was always swinging.

The heart of a faith is steadfastness, but politics is the art of compromise. As a young man I saw in my father the corrosive effects of power close up. Now everybody saw it. With the collapse of those pre-Swarm political causes, political “religious” leaders were suddenly left high and dry. Some (mostly hardscrabble fundamentalists, but even the odd Catholic or Episcopalian) tried to fire up crowds with calls of fire and brimstone. ‘The Swarm is a lie, the Confederacy is the whore of Babylon, and any who don’t agree with us are tools of Satan.’ Not many people bought in, and most people left those churches. The ranters were getting the headlines, much as the “God Hates Fags” ranters got headlines before the collapse. In fact, I guess in many ways they were pretty much the same group.

As many congregations among the Brotherhood fellowship shrank or disbanded, and some believers migrated to older, more historic churches, I, perversely, felt drawn back to my roots. My studies had shown me how the collapse had come, and my just-defended thesis tracked how the Church had abandoned the “Theology of Hope” for a “Theology of Power.” All those centuries of struggle between Christ and Caesar wound up in the American Republic with the people becoming Caesar, rendering all things unto themselves.

Well, they enjoyed it for a brief few decades, just long enough to see it collapse with the threat of species extinction.

I remembered a Rastafarian irregular (Is there such a thing as a regular Rastafarian?) with whom I spent a week of spectacularly miserable tropical rains sharing a leaky San Cristobal farmhouse. When he was confronted with my Anglo attitudes, he would shake his dreadlocked head and say, “‘Tis Babylon, mon.”

‘Where was political power now?’ I thought. ‘Tis Babylon, mon. Where was hope now? What was now my Calling? What could I, in truth, preach? A call to missions? To whom would I go, the Sa’arm?

Your late-50s is a little late to decide what you want to be when you grow up. It’s Babylon, mon.

I sipped at my coffee. It was slightly too hot--just how I like it. You gotta suffer to enjoy life’s best things.

With all that, I knew I was better off than the Kids. Now in my late-50s, I had a wild and woolly lifetime of memories to look back on. They could only look forward to ... what? A desperate, rearguard fight against a genocidal alien horde? An endless, star-spanning war? Chattel slavery?

Both my daughters had been picked up, joining the Confederacy Marines. My only contact with them was receiving short and infrequent text messages. I wasn’t happy about their leaving, but I felt better knowing that whatever was going to happen, they wouldn’t be passive sheep. But I had left the life of a soldier behind; all that remained was to decide what my life was to be.

My griping was interrupted by the lights flickering and the sky outside the windows going gray. All conversation stopped. Everybody knew what had just happened. Just. Bloody. Perfect. I thought I had left the military behind me.

“Ladies and GENTLEMEN, may I have your ATTENTION please, your attention PLEASE!” The coffee shop grew dead silent. The speaker was one of the military guys I had spotted before. “I am Sergeant Gitchell of the Confederacy Marines, and this is a PICKUP.” He looked at a small tablet. “Will Mister Wilson Arthur, Mister Richard Beltran, Mister Li Chen Do, Mister Richard Steward, Mister Ben Dunn, and Ms. Clarissa Donahue please step FRONT and CENTER and IDENTIFY yourselves, using your CAP cards, to the nearest marine?”

The voices that had fallen silent now rose in a confused babble. Some female voices started to rise in pitch, approaching shrieks. Most of the males in the room started eying the females around them speculatively. I looked over at the Bible school kids. One of the boys, Ben Dunn, stood up and started walking over to the marines. His girlfriend stayed at the table, her eyes tracking him with desperate hope and poorly hidden dread. Her dreams of a traditional life with a husband and home were evaporating before her eyes. She and the girl sitting next to her, Ruth Something-or-other, clutched each other’s hands.

Nobody had been in a pickup; but everyone knew what happened at pickups. The stories were common and got more lurid with the repeating. They formed a constant refrain in a lot of those fire-and-brimstone sermons I had been hearing out of a television preacher named Powers over in Denton.

One of the female baristas vaulted the counter, heedlessly knocking over a display of muffins and biscotti.

I rose, grabbed my cane and limped over to the marines. They were handing out some kind of device. A huge Amazonian female troop with closely corn-rowed hair looked up and greeted me. “Master Sergeant Steward, welcome. Good to see you.”

Her nametag read JACKSON. I tried to correct her, “It’s just Mister Steward these days, Jackson.”

“Master Sergeant, you have a long career ahead of you, and you are due all military courtesy.” Her lips spread in a big, white-toothed grin that lit up her face and changed her looks from severe to damned sexy. I couldn’t help but smile back. After years of bullshit in the business and academic worlds, the simple directness of a troop felt like a phone call from home.

“If you’ll take this CAP card reader,” she handed me a flat square of something, “you can start selecting your harem. You are rated 8.1 and so you can choose up to six concubines. This is a small pickup, so we jump,” she paused for a second, “in 21 minutes.” She turned away from me to speak to the barista.

I took the small device and, as a test, laid it atop my own CAP card. I squinted, then scowled and pulled out my reading glasses. The top had lit up, displaying a photo of me taken on the day I took the test (I needed a haircut), my overall numeric rating and several tabs. I swept my index finger across the display and scrolled through several of the tabs. I saw one labeled “Medical” and tapped it. I scrolled through my Army medical discharge, my intake physical, even my doctor’s notes on my childhood episode of the measles. I was surprised at how much information was carried on the card—or maybe the reader was linked to a Confederacy database.