CHAPTER 1
The Birthday Party(s)
Hello again. Haven't seen you for awhile. Not surprising since I've been in hibernation for almost two of your Earth's years. I see that it's 5:15 a.m., Thursday, July 4th, 2019. Your leader's big 5-0 birthday! You've got an exciting three-day holiday weekend ahead. Since you're up so early anyway, let's go see what's happening in the Blue House by way of party preparations ...
The slightly short-sighted, deep-blue eyes of the President of the Federated States of America open slowly and blink twice. At first her eyes sleepily focus on an elaborately embroidered triangular silk pillow with forty-two bright-white stars against a dark-blue background. With some effort, just in view over the tip of the pillow top, she can blurrily make out the right profile of a beautiful woman lying very quietly, her body covered up to her neck with their shared deep-blue silk bedsheet.
The room is chilly, almost cold, in the always overly air-conditioned master bedroom of the Blue House living quarters. Recollections of last night's tenderly erotic jousting are mingled lovingly and maturely with the simple joy of seeing her lying there so artfully, so calmly, so comfortably.
Almost reflexively the president's hand reaches across the pillow to stroke the woman's honey-beige, porcelain smooth forehead. Her fingertips register the to-be-expected slightly chilly temperature of the woman's face and the flickering twitch of her right eyelid. Slowly the president's hand glides under the sheet and registers the warming softness of a small, firm breast, the nipple reflexively erecting. As the hand moves down to the firm belly, the woman's eyes open and she says, "Happy birthday, Meryl." I've got your present right here", while sliding her sheet-covered left hand over to gently grasp and guide Meryl's right hand down onto her short, sparse, tangled pubic hairs.
"Should I unwrap it now, Krissy?"
"Of course! You've got to be up at six for some reason, and it's probably full speed ahead the rest of the FSA day."
Half an hour later President Meryl Machiavelli Montessori is taking a quick shower with her very personal physician, Dr. Kristin Koo.
"So now that you're fifty and have opened your present, what's next on your agenda?"
"Tom'll be in my office in ten minutes and then we're going down to the Bunker for a hopefully brief DoDD briefing, followed by a gathering of the Blue Battalion at 10:00. I hope Rachael and Peter made it back from Chicago last night. I need their first-hand report on Operation Rind and you're probably more than ready to hand back Chickee and the twins."
"Kaleb and Kefira are only thirteen months old, nowhere near the terrible twos. And besides, it's nice having more than one patient, even if my pediatrics isn't as good as my geriatrics."
"Thanks, Krissy. You're the cruelest birthday present I ever opened."
After drying each other off, Meryl and Krissy go to their respective armoires located on opposite sides of the tall, elegant sixteenth-century Villefranche pendulum clock occupying the only wall in the bedroom not covered with books and bookshelves. Meryl opts for an austere, almost authoritarian,blacksuit/blousecombowhileKrissydonsherusualplayfully professional skirt and sweater ensemble. The only jewelry they put on is matching filigreed gold bands which slip easily onto their respective ring fingers. Neither of them bothers with makeup, neither of them needing any adornment to make them more strikingly gorgeous. Their one concession to vanity is high-heeled shoes to elevate them above their identical five-foot three-inches.
A knock on the side door in Meryl's bedroom that leads to her private office signals that Meryl's genuine genius of a national security advisor, Tom Yager, has arrived for their pre-DoDD briefing preparations. Taking inventory of her purse, Meryl shouts in the general direction of the door.
"Be there in a minute, Tom. What's top of the agenda on my birthday?"
"The Sino-Russian Front is spilling over into Uzbekistan and the Tyrant of Tashkent is burning up my phone demanding we do something. We've got a problem along the California section of our border with the United Kingdom of Western America. It's that damn ambiguous Piedra Blanca land grant near San Luis Obispo. The descendents of Mariano Pacheco and Jose de Jesus Pico are at it again. You'd think after a hundred and forty-three years they could work things out. Happy Birthday!"
"Thanks, Tom. I've already opened my present from Krissy. You should have kept yours under wraps."
"I've saved the best for last. It's a Blue Battalion special, so I won't broadcast it to you. I've postponed the Joint Chiefs' meeting. Tell you why when you get in here."
Giving Krissy a parting hug, President Montessori heads for her office while her doctor takes the main-door exit down the wide hallway lined with silk Japanese boxwood topiaries, passing the semi-somnolent Secret Service agent-of-the-month sitting on his surveillance post, an early 19th-century Regency mahogany elbow-chair, located discreetly a few yards from the bedroom and just before the open door to Meryl's reception room. Krissy can never walk by that antique chair without a flicker of recollection of the time almost two years ago she'd raced by it on her way to deal with what turned out to be a real nightmare in Meryl's bedroom.
Sandy Vogelhäuschen, Meryl's more alert watchdog/personal assistant, looks up from behind her antique oak desk, sees Krissy passing by, and motions for her to come in.
"Good morning, Mrs. President, got a minute?"
"I wish you'd stop that. It's very confusing."
"Sorry, Krissy. I still get a kick out of you and Meryl getting hitched. Now we've got two `Mrs. Presidents'."
"I understand but don't forgive. What can I do for you, Sandy...or should I say `Miss Birdhouse' instead?"
"Nothing major. I just wanted to let you know that Peter and Rachael may be a little late. Seems their plane was diverted to New York. Lo and Frank are already in the conference room and Bill's somewhere around, of course. Anyway, Abe's with the twins, but maybe has to leave soon on some errand for Meryl."
"No problem. I haven't been asked to the Battalion gathering this time, so I'll tell Abe he can take off. Any idea what the flap's about?"
"No, Krissy. But if you're not invited to sit in then it doesn't have anything to do with MOMMY and that's a relief."
"Thanks. See ya later." Her unspoken thought is `Sandy's so sweet. Who'd guess she's got a .45 automatic hung on her belt and knows how to use it?'
Krissy continues briskly down the hall. On her right she sees through a large window in the Treaty Room three still not-quite-familiar flags undulating in a gentle breeze, plus someone has attached a large hand-painted "HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MERYL" banner to one of the guy wires.
Flying in the middle and tallest pole is the strikingly triangular flag of the Federated States of America, forty-two white stars scattered randomly over a field of dark blue. Although born in battle as had been the United States, Meryl had insisted that there be no red in the new nation's flag, no symbolic blood. To the left from Krissy's perspective is the flag of the United Kingdom of Western America, the new country carved out of the former USA by the Latino Armies which had assisted in defeating the rebel forces of the self-styled, now defunct Federated States of the Two Washingtons. To the right hangs the flag of the República Nueva de México in recognition of Mexico's role in defeating the FSTW during the 2016-17 Second American Civil War.
In two days all three flags will be flying at half-mast to mark the third anniversary of the San Diego Holocaust and the beginning of the Rebellion.
As she is about to open the door to her office, Krissy hopes that Peter and Rachael will arrive soon and also that they're not going to be sent off again immediately by Meryl on another "Orange peeling" mission.
* * *
An excited and sad, almost-eight-years-old, tall-for-her-age girl's long, thick, black hair is blowing and flapping in the eighty-mile-per-hour wind, emulating the pennant-shaped flag flying over the Stanton County Pioneer Museum on the southern end of town. Dorothy Chamashgete JohnsonKrestos is hanging on tightly to the top strut of the Johnson City, Kansas open-frame water tower. From her thirty-three-foot altitude she can easily make out the forty-two white stars scattered randomly over a field of dark blue because the flag is only ten blocks distant and longer than she is tall. The rusty 2,000 gallon water-tank above her head partially obstructs her almost 360º view of the monotonous grey street-grid blending into the monochrome amber waves of grain that spread out for miles under spacious skies.
Dorothy vaguely remembers seeing a striped, red, white, and blue, star-spangled banner flying over the post-office three years ago, but that was in La Junta, Colorado where she'd been born. The prior flag she remembers better is the tattered, shell-and-bullet-torn one that had flown over the former La Junta Regional Military Headquarters of the Federated States of the Two Washingtons. That one had been lowered for the last time and forever in late September 2017.
Dorothy would be a remarkably pretty girl but for a five-inch jagged beige scar marring her otherwise smooth, beige-brown forehead. She had not acquired this flaw because she'd negligently fallen off a slide or dived carelessly onto the hidden rocks that lurk just under the water at John Martin Reservoir where her parents would take her swimming. Rather, she'd traveled the 135 miles from La Junta to Johnson City in October 2017 and been ambushed by a remnant of the rebel FSTW Army of the West. The piece of grenade shrapnel that had severed her mother's trachea continued unabated and did not quite avoid striking Dorothy's skull.
The aftermath of any civil war usually includes incidents of revenge and reprisal between militants of the opposing camps. In 1947, sixty years before Dorothy's mother was killed, the two-way exodus corridors between India and Pakistan were soaked in blood and offal as caravans of displaced Hindus moving east parallel to displaced Muslims heading west slaughtered each other by the many hundreds of thousands. The partition of British India had been both just and inevitable, but that did not mean it was loved or accepted.
The aftermath of the Second American Civil War followed this usual course but with a twist. The partition of the USA that created the Federated States of America and the United Kingdom of Western America righted a two-hundred year old perceived injustice by giving to the Western Latinos the territories wrested from the Mexicans in the 19th-century. The war itself had made the partition inevitable because without the support given to the USA by the Latino armies the rebels would have won and any chance for a truly free America lost. The defeated but not yet fully subdued rag-tag FSTW army accepted neither the justice nor the inevitability. Unable to vent their rage directly against the newly-established FSA government, they instead ravaged the caravans of citizens moving through the last rebel strongholds in the Midwest.
Unlike the partition of British India, the Latinos resident in the FSA and the Anglo/African Americans in the UKWA were not compelled by religious or racial prejudice to move from their former homes. Those who caravanned in either direction were simply expressing their preferences, not their compulsions. But the slaughter was the same. The FSA Armed Forces eventually isolated the remaining FSTW rebels into a small region comprising portions of Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and eastern Kansas. But that was not until November 2017, too late for Dorothy and her mother.
Since she was three, Dorothy has evidenced an almost adult maturity, speakingfromthefirstincompletesentencesanddisplayingsincereempathy for those around her. She even avoided the "terrible twos". As a result, her mother and father were the envy of every parent of young children in the greater La Junta area, even though her parents were a strange couple in many ways.
Dorothy's father is Ethiopian by birth, immigrating as an orphaned, Jesuit-educated child to America from a small village on the northern coast of Lake Tana in the Amhara highlands. He'd insisted on keeping his original name, Yemrehana Krestos, even after he'd been adopted by a Jewish family in Colorado. He was and is proud that his name dates back to the first Christian Ethiopian emperor of the 12th century Zagwe Dynasty. The historical irony unknown to Yemrehana is that Ethiopia is the only country in sub-Saharan Africa where the Christian faith arrived before the Jewish one. Now in the year 2019 Yemrehana is the only ethnic-Ethiopian psychologist employed in the Department of Domestic Psychology created by President Montessori in early 2017 as a means to deal with the terrible stress on the mental and social fabric of a country engaged in brutal civil conflict.
Dorothy's mother, Dorothy A. R. Johnson, had been a native of Johnson City. Her middle initials and last name came from the town's founder, a colonel in the Union Army of the First American Civil War. In 2009 she had moved to La Junta with her partner, Krestos, whom she had met at Colorado State University in Fort Collins where they both were engaged in post-graduate cognitive research on the physiological causes and cures of stress-related mental illness.
Their joint parental decision to preserve little Dorothy's dual ethnic heritage in her given-names is consistent with their shared views on diversity. That her middle name, "Chamashgete", means "ruby slipper" in Ethiopian is consistent only with her father's sense of serendipity.
Somehow the Johnson-Krestos family survived the many battles in and around La Junta during the last days of the war. The FSTW's capital city, Denver, had been attacked respectively from west and east by Latino/FSA armies. Many civilians were executed by the rebels as perceived traitors to the cause. Dorothy's parents were known for their anti-rebel views, but were spared because their professional skills were in short supply. Both Dorothy senior and Yemrehana were impressed with President Montessori, so when the time came to choose between UKWA and FSA citizenship the choice had been easy. The date chosen to join a caravan east had been tragic.
After two years, Dorothy is now plagued more often by the scar on her forehead than by the scars on her heart. Her daily pain is getting her teachers to spell and pronounce her full name correctly. Dorothy's frequentbut-not-daily torment arises when any of her contemporaries discovers what her middle name means, followed by rude comments about wicked witches and Munchkins. However, she actually does share one similarity with the fictional Dorothy. Although not born in Kansas, she certainly arrived there in a cyclone of violence and death.
Today, July 3, 2019, the day before her birthday, Dorothy is on top of the water tower for the first time because she wants to view all of Johnson City for the last time. She is flying with her father this afternoon to Newark, NJ and from there tomorrow morning taking the train from Newark's Penn Station on to Washington, DC. Her father has been personally appointed by President Montessori to be the new Director of the Department of Domestic Psychology. Unfortunately, there are no direct flights from Stanton County Municipal Airport to the nation's capital. Indeed, direct flights to Washington from anywhere are restricted under relaxed, but still onerous, wartime regulations not yet revoked due to continued, shadowy rebel activity.
Even though they will be "on the road", Dorothy is looking forward to celebrating a double birthday tomorrow, hers and the President's. Meryl and Dorothy were both born on the now no-longer-observed anniversary of the former United States. But there will still be fiery celebrations on the 4th so long as Meryl Montessori is president of the FSA. Dorothy loves fireworks.
Climbing down carefully and reluctantly from her pre-nostalgic visual farewell to her funny little town, Dorothy hops and skips the half-block to her home on Weaver Avenue, just across from the high school she will now never attend. Every few hops she looks back at the water-tower tank with its six-foot tall rendition of a Trojan soldier in honor of the football team she will never again see defeat the rival Wildcats. But she's also excited about the move.
