The War After Armageddon

Before Garcia reached the bottom of the stairs, he heard the machine gun open fire again.

EPILOGUE

How could I know these things? I didn’t know all of them, of course. Some had to be imagined. But I saw much myself. I am John Willing, former aide-de-camp to Lieutenant General Gary “Flintlock” Harris and the man who betrayed him. I was the one who reported all of his actions, plans, and weaknesses to General of the Order Montfort’s agents. I believed that I was a hero, doing the Lord’s work. I did my duty as an officer secretly enlisted in the Military Order of the Brothers in Christ.

I have long wondered if General Harris suspected me toward the end.

I was rewarded. For a time. I ended my career as a black-cross col o nel. Despite my good services, I had suffered too much contact with General Harris and his acolytes to be trusted with a higher rank. When I took off my uniform, I applied for a teaching position, for the young have always been dear to me. I then learned that I was not to be trusted with the education of our Christian youth. I had been contaminated by association. So I took a secondary degree in accounting, a discipline that offered no chance of my being put down as a heretic. I kept good books. As the years went by, I consoled myself that there would be a great accounting one day.

Of course, I was far luckier than the others who had contact with General Harris. Even before III Corps redeployed to the United States, all of its officers who held the rank of col o nel or higher were taken into custody. “For their own protection,” the newspapers reported. We were assured that the good Christian people of America wanted to lynch them for their treason. One lieutenant col o nel, Patrick Cavanaugh, was also arrested. He was charged with the premeditated murder of a Christian Heritage Advance Rescue Team in Nazareth.

The old U.S. Disciplinary Barracks on Ft. Leavenworth were reopened to receive the III Corps officers. Before any of the detainees could be absolved or reeducated, an accidental fire swept the prison. The system of electronic locks short-circuited. None of the quarantined officers could be saved.

Later, their names were erased from the chronicle of the Holy War, along with any mention of III Corps, the U.S. Army, or the Marines.

General Harris’s wife, Sarah, proved to be an unreasonable woman, a menace to herself. She refused to stop making public allegations that her husband had been the victim of a plot. She had to be institutionalized. For her own good. It is said that General Mont-fort, an old acquaintance, visited her in the asylum out of Christian charity. To their enduring regret, the doctors charged with her reha-biliation made no progress, and she died, still in restraints, a few years ago. So rumor has it.

Rumor also holds that her surviving daughter became an alcoholic and an immoral woman. But no one can testify to the truth of it, nor is she known to be alive and among us.

General of the Order Montfort fared better. The hero of the first stage of the Holy War, he was chosen by President Gui to serve as his vice president and Generalissimo of the Order. Thus began a long and fruitful age, we are assured, with President Montfort succeeding President Gui when the latter’s final term ended — although our Great Prophet continued to assist President Montfort with guidance until the prophet’s soul soared upward. In a state of grace, our Christian Congress acceded to the public’s demand that the Constitution be amended to allow President Montfort to serve an unlimited number of terms in office, with future elections to be held in church, on Sunday, by a show of hands. It was only last April, during his fifteenth year as president in Christ, that the Lord called the Dear Prophet home. We are told that he passed over in perfect peace while reading Scripture. And yet, he did not reach the four score years and ten predicted for him.

Of course, the Army was disbanded, as was the Marine Corps, their missions assumed by the Military Order of the Brothers in Christ. The Air Force went next — believing to the end it would be spared — then the Navy received its new dispensation. By the end of the Holy War, we were a unified people in every respect. We praised God for it.

General Harris was right about one thing: It was difficult to kill a billion people. But it wasn’t impossible. After their cities had been destroyed, all of their images and records obliterated and the names of those cities removed from every map and book, we still had to launch the seven Great Hunts — one for each of the Seven Seals foretold — to finish the job. Even now, we hear tales of Deobandi and Naqshbandi fanatics praising Allah in the nuclear deserts.

There was, of course, the dispute with the Chinese Messiah over the radioactive fallout from our nuclear offerings. But our Chinese brothers and sisters were exhausted by their civil war. And Christians were not yet ready to fight Christians. The Chinese eventually aided us in the last several Great Hunts.

At home, we enjoyed an age of sacred glory, albeit with a spike in cancer rates. But we must not question God’s purposes.

Yet, as the years went by, I did begin to question. The soul is not steady, nor is it still. And I do not believe I have been alone in my swelling discontent. Indeed, I know I am not alone. There was the Rebellion of the Fallen Angels in the California Reserve five years ago, for one thing. A number of us who had learned to speak in whispers grew excited by the hope of regained freedoms. Then we learned that the rebels sought to bring our New Jerusalem into the fold of the Chinese Messiah, whose Christianity is sterner still than ours.

I do not overlook the good. We live in comfort and safety, and he who does not transgress need have no fear. But there are so many possible transgressions.

What brought about my private change of heart? It did not come suddenly. I am a cautious man. I believe my slow turnabout began with the Cleansing of the Books, when a Helpful Visit condemned my entire library. There was even a question, briefly, of a trial, until they realized I truly had been ignorant of the additions to the latest Christian Index. It had become difficult to acquire information, even when the information included the latest rules we were to obey.

Anyway, they burned my books. Moll Flanders and The Great Gatsby, Hamlet and Anna Karenina, even poor Clarissa in her innocence — they all went to the fire as startled martyrs. I miss them still.

Of course, I speak for my waning generation. The Blessed Teachers discourage personal reading by the young. The young do not seem to mind.

But there you have the heart of how it all went wrong, I think. I do not mean that we suddenly found our courage when they burned our books — the intellectual’s valor is a fairy tale. I mean something quite the opposite: We who cherished books believed that books could defend themselves. To the final cinder, we believed that the pen was mightier than the sword, for so we had been told. We were such fools.

Others among us trusted to the quality of our laws and failed to see that those laws had little power against men who valued only the law of God. Still others believed that their wealth would insulate them, but their wealth was confiscated for Christ. Some trusted their beauty, their talent, or family ties. All, all were mistaken. Only purity of faith mattered, and no one could be certain his faith would be judged pure.

And General Harris? What a hopeless fool the man was! For all his skill as a soldier, for all he had endured in bitter wars, he still believed in human goodness. He was as blind as Christ entering Jerusalem.

But Harris was no traitor. No matter what the permitted books may say.

I was the traitor. And now I have turned traitor again. To set down this book as penance.

I am Judas.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is a novel, not a strategic forecast. That said, the plot does engage several of my enduring concerns, most notably the iniquity of fanat i cism in the name of any faith; the danger of nuclear proliferation among parties not dependably subject to deterrence; and our military’s reliance on electronics that may prove all too fragile in a