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  AND THE LAST TRUMP SHALL SOUND

  A Future History of America

  And the Last Trump Shall Sound (the complete anthology) copyright © 2020 by Arc Manor LLC. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise without written permission excerpts in a review, a critical analysis, or an academic work.

  This is a work of fiction containing elements of parody, satire, and extrapolation. While certain historical and contemporary public figures appear in these pages, their behaviors, thoughts, motives, and physical characteristics should not be construed as realistic representations. In offering this work to the reading public, neither the authors nor the publisher intend to make factual assertions about any actual persons, living or dead.

  “The Breaking of Nations” copyright © 2020 by Harry Turtledove.

  “The Purloined Republic” copyright © 2020 by James Morrow.

  “Because it is Bitter” copyright © 2020 by Cat Rambo.

  Cover art by Scott Grimando, grimstudios.com

  ISBN: 978-1-64710-006-3

  First Edition. First Printing. September 2020

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  An imprint of Arc Manor LLC

  www.CaezikSF.com

  This is a political satire, and meant to be a parody based on how events might look in the future. Although certain political figures are used as characters in these novellas, there is no attempt to prove or even imply that the situations depicted in these stories represent actual events related to any of these individuals.

  As a parody/satire with occasional over-the-top elements, some readers may find certain portions of these stories caustic. But the reader is reminded that this is a satire and neither the authors nor the publisher purport that anything contained in this anthology is either true or likely to happen, or is a true representation of the characters.

  Contents

  THE BREAKING OF NATIONS / Harry Turtledove

  THE PURLOINED REPUBLIC / James Morrow

  BECAUSE IT IS BITTER / Cat Rambo

  THE BREAKING OF NATIONS

  Harry Turtledove

  NICOLE Yoshida clicked the remote’s channel-up button, first once, then twice. The same story led on Fox News, Fox-CNN, and Fox-MSNBC. At President Pence’s order, the governor and lieutenant governor of Connecticut had been remanded to protective custody on a charge of treason for refusing to cooperate with federal court-mandated immigration sweeps.

  Connecticut State Cabinet officials had unanimously resigned in protest; the media said they had, anyhow. On a temporary basis—so every network’s newscasters assured their audience—the chief of the Connecticut State Police had been appointed acting governor of the state.

  The governor of California made a disgusted noise and turned off the TV. She remembered when the news channels each had a different spin on things. She remembered when some of them dared disagree with the federal government, even on important things like the first coronavirus pandemic.

  It hadn’t been that long ago, either. They’d stayed that way well into President Trump’s second term. The good old days, she thought sourly. Then consolidation hit television and radio and what was left of the newspapers. That social media had already gone the same way made finishing the job easier.

  “ ‘Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee,’ ” she quoted.

  Her CHP bodyguard—one of her CHP bodyguards—let out a snort. “Yeah, the whole country is Donne to a turn,” Captain Myron Flegenheim said with malice aforethought.

  She winced to let him know she’d noticed what he’d done. “How long till the Last Trump blows for me?” she replied, just as maliciously.

  His pained expression told her he’d hoped a governor would be above such things, and she’d just disappointed him … again. “The United States is washed up,” he said. Then he added, “Anybody got a cigarette?”

  “Go outside,” Governor Yoshida told him.

  “I always do,” Flegenheim said.

  And he did. Even almost a third of the way through the twenty-first century, even with vaping driving cigarette manufacturers batshit, some stubborn people with a nicotine jones still got their fix from good, old-fashioned tobacco. Captain Flegenheim was one of them. He was polite about it, but he was.

  Being polite helped only so much. People who smoked smelled bad all the time. The odor clung to their clothes, their skin, their hair, their breath. You couldn’t tell them so, either. They refused to believe you. They’d got so used to their stink; they were noseblind to it.

  Nicole Yoshida wished she were. She’d thought now and then about asking Chief Musavi to take Flegenheim off her guard rotation and to replace him with a nonsmoker. She hadn’t done it yet. The captain had a lively, sardonic wit, which was about as uncommon in cops as it was in politicians.

  As if to prove as much, he asked, “When the Feds come for you, will they give this office to my boss?”

  “They’ll be sorry if they do,” she answered.

  That Ali Musavi—not just a Muslim but a Shiite Muslim—headed the California Highway Patrol, might have been one reason the Feds hadn’t tried to seize her yet. That he was further left politically than she was couldn’t hurt, either.

  “They’re never sorry for anything. That’s part of what makes them what they are,” Flegenheim said.

  “I know,” she said. “Boy, do I know!”

  “How long can things go on like this?”

  “What an interesting question! If there are no other questions, class is dismissed,” the governor said. She’d taught poli sci at UC Berkeley. She’d got into academic politics there—an excellent training ground, she often thought, because the stakes were so low. But she’d wanted to play the real game, too, so she’d left the university for politics politics.

  And here she was, in the governor’s mansion in Sacramento. And the game was getting realer than she’d ever dreamt it could twenty years earlier.

  Captain Flegenheim made a discontented noise. “Joke as much as you want. They aren’t joking in Washington.”

  “Yes, I know,” Yoshida said. They’d been over this ground several—dozen—times before. “Why do you think the CHP is as militarized as I can make it? If I need more muscle, I can call up the California National Guard.”

  “You can till President Pence federalizes it,” Flegenheim replied. “That’ll take—what?—thirty seconds, tops, from when you order it to active duty.”

  “It will if California officers obey the president’s order.”

  He looked at her. She hadn’t been so blunt before. Well, things hadn’t been so bad before. “Funny, but you don’t look like Jefferson Davis,” he said, then softened it a bit by adding, “You’d look silly with a little fringe of beard under your chin.”

  “Heh,” she said. It wasn’t much of a laugh, but in the year of our Lord 2031, with Mike Pence; star-spangled fascism; and the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost calling the shots from D.C., you took what you could get and were glad to get anything at all. In a different tone of voice, she went on, “Would you step into the outer office for a while, please? I need to make a conference call, and I don’t want any witnesses.”

  “Okay, but do you really think that will do any good if the Feds aim to hear what you’re saying?”

  Nicole Yoshida only shrugged. Some Silicon Valley people, whose expertise she trusted, said nobody in Washington could crack her encryption. Maybe they were wrong, maybe n
ot. Either way, the FBI probably already had a good notion of what she meant to talk about. As a song older than she was said, you didn’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blew.

  Occasional horizontal streaks of color marred the images of Governor Ng of Washington state and Governor Lysbakken of Oregon. No doubt her face was similarly streaked on their phones. It was an encryption artifact. They just had to live with it.

  “Do you really think it’s time?” Axel Lysbakken asked.

  Of the three of them, he’d shown the most doubts over the past few years. Nicole Yoshida felt some sympathy—what they were eyeing hadn’t been seriously contemplated for more than 160 years, not by sane people it hadn’t—but only some.

  “If not now, when?” Dakotah Ng said.

  She sounded firmer in her purpose than Governor Yoshida did. She’d come to politics from real-estate law, not academia. In a racket like that, you had to sound sure of yourself whether you were or not—perhaps especially if you weren’t.

  But with or without bravado, the governor of California had facts on her side. “We started this ball rolling down here, remember,” she said. “People were circulating a secession initiative for the 2018 ballot here—Calexit, they called it. It didn’t get on, but the spirit was willing even that early.”

  “Secession.” Governor Lysbakken spoke the word as if it tasted nasty in his mouth. It probably did, because he went on, “I don’t want to be tarred with the Confederate brush.”

  “Ha! You won’t be! I can just about promise you that,” Dakotah Ng said with a snort. “Pence won’t dare. Half his base—more than half—thinks the nineteenth-century secession was a good idea.”

  “I wasn’t worrying about his base,” Lysbakken said gloomily. “I was worrying about mine.”

  “You can make a good constitutional case that secession has been legal all along. I used to teach that stuff, so I did the research,” Governor Yoshida said. “It never got litigated in the courts, though. It got litigated on the battlefield instead. That the South lost, and that it tried to secede on account of slavery, left secession with a permanent bad reputation after that. Until now, I mean.”

  “A permanent bad reputation unless you wear one of those dumbass made-in-China MAGA caps, anyway,” Governor Ng said.

  “Yeah, unless,” Nicole Yoshida agreed. “But we haven’t been talking about leaving the United States because we want to take freedom away from people. We’re talking about it because that’s what Washington’s been doing ever since Trump got elected the first time.”

  “Washington and Moscow, you mean,” Axel Lysbakken said. On the phone screen, Governor Ng nodded. Nicole nodded, too. It was funny how a fellow who’d learned his trade in the Marxist-Leninist KGB turned out to be so good at spreading fascism across the world. It was funny if you didn’t have to live with it, anyhow.

  “All three of our states have passed resolutions authorizing us to pull out of the Union if things get bad enough,” Dakotah Ng said. “We’ve had them in our back pockets for a while now. How much worse do things need to get, exactly? What happened in Connecticut can happen here, too. And you bet it will, as soon as Pence and his stooges decide they can get away with it. It will if we don’t move first, I should say.”

  “If they do everything they can, we’re toast,” the governor of Oregon said. “We’re a bunch of atheist heathens and queers out here. Everybody knows that. Everybody in Buffalo Poop, Kansas, and Chitlin Gulf, Arkansas, anyway.”

  “Pence may not care. The people who prop him up and feed him money will,” Governor Yoshida said. “But are we agreed? We’ll put the ordinance of secession through our legislatures and come out the other side as Pacifica?”

  Neither of the other state leaders told her no. Since California had three times as many people as Oregon and Washington put together, she knew she was likely to become the first president of Pacifica … its George Washington, or, as Captain Flegenheim had said, its Jefferson Davis.

  On the TV screen, President Pence looked like a man bedeviled by bees. “This so-called Pacifica is illegal and ridiculous,” he growled. “As someone before the Civil War said, it’s too small for a country and too large for an insane asylum.”

  He paused for applause. The assembled representatives and senators gave it to him, abundantly. Applause at every presidential pause had been standard operating procedure since Donald Trump got the authoritarian ball rolling. It reminded Nicole Yoshida of the acclamations the servile Roman Senate used to give really rotten emperors in the third century A.D. The way Vice President Lindsey Graham and Speaker Devin Nunes blistered their palms while sitting behind Pence on the rostrum particularly disgusted her.

  Except for Speaker Nunes, only a handful of representatives and no senators from Pacifica sat in the House chamber. The rest were getting ready to come home. The ones who wouldn’t be welcome here now were literally men without a country. As far as Governor Yoshida knew, no women elected in California, Oregon, or Washington supported staying in the USA.

  President Pence went on, “We will try to resolve our differences with the governments of the West Coast states by peaceful means if that is at all possible. If a peaceful basis for reconciliation is not possible, we will use whatever means we must to show them that our great federal democracy, now and forever, is one and inseparable.”

  More rapturous applause. Lincoln had said pretty much the same thing. Governor Yoshida had no doubt Lincoln had said it better, too. He couldn’t very well have said it worse. Mike Pence was the kind of man who could put coffee to sleep.

  Nicole’s iPhone vibrated. She checked the text. Studio is ready for your reply, her communications director had written.

  I’ll be there as soon as he finishes, she wrote back. How much will the country east of our border get to see?

  The reply from Anna Badal came in moments. Nothing on the networks, of course. We’re also streaming on several platforms. They won’t block all of them—they aren’t as good at it as the Chinese. Yet.

  She had to be content, or discontented, with that. She was glad the studio was inside the governor’s residence. That would make it harder for the FBI or ICE to grab her. Getting those people out of the new country would have to be a top priority. So would a million other things. As far as she could see, the biggest roadblock to secession was what a pain in the ass it was.

  President Pence called down the blessings of God on the United States—not, Governor Yoshida noted, on Pacifica or its people. Then the screen cut away to the Reverend Franklin Graham. As the capital’s favorite preacher was in the habit of doing, he declared that anyone who didn’t bow down to Mike Pence and the ghost of Donald Trump was heading straight for Satan’s George Foreman grill.

  The governor hit the power button harder than she’d meant to. Franklin Graham reminded her of an Americanized German Christian: one of the many Protestant ministers in Nazi times who’d put Hitler ahead of Jesus. Franklin Graham didn’t just render unto Caesar. Caesar was the Golden Calf he worshipped ahead of God. He creeped her out every time he opened his mouth and stuck his foot in it.

  As she walked to the studio, she understood that she was counting on Mike Pence to show a certain amount of restraint toward the new republic she was about to proclaim. In one sense, counting on restraint from anybody running things in Washington these days was an act of insanity. In another, though ….

  If Pence wanted to scramble a squadron of fighter-bombers with orders to flatten this residence, he could chop Pacifica’s head off right now. The new nation couldn’t stop him or his planes, not yet. One day real soon now, it would have to be able to do that. She understood as much. But it couldn’t yet. One thing at a time.

  She relied on Pence to understand that killing her and Governor Ng and Governor Lysbakken wasn’t the same as killing the idea of Pacifica. Donald Trump wouldn’t have got that. He’d thought telling him no was a ca
pital crime.

  But the second great COVID outbreak in 2024 had sent him to the hole in the ground, six feet by three feet by six, which was as much as anybody owned more or less permanently. Trump had broken the Constitution’s grip on the government by simply ignoring it as much as he pleased. As soon as he was gone, Pence smoothly started to consolidate his party’s and his faction’s grip on power.

  Not knowing or caring how government worked, Trump wouldn’t have been so good at that. A bureaucrat born, Pence understood which levers to pull, and when.

  To Nicole Yoshida, who’d grown up playing D&D, they illustrated the difference between chaotic evil and lawful evil. Odds were Pence would have called that satanist. In Pacifica, just about everybody got it.

  As soon as she walked into the studio, a makeup artist attacked her with powder and soft brushes. “You have to look your best for this,” he said.

  “Thanks, Jeremy,” she answered, and then, sputtering from the powder, “I think.” He laughed. She wasn’t so sure it was funny.

  Anna Badal bustled up: a small, slim, medium-brown woman in a dress somewhere between gold and copper. “The teleprompter isn’t loaded!” she exclaimed. “Are you going to wing this?” The prospect plainly horrified her.

  “No, no,” the governor reassured her. “I have some notes”—she tapped her handbag—“and this is stuff I actually know. I’m not just telling one more lie to get me through one more day, the way they do in D.C.”

  “All right.” By the way her communications director said it, it was anything but.

  Nicole sat down at a desk that was a good mock-up of the one where she usually worked. Behind it stood the flags of California, Oregon, and Washington. For the past century and a half, the Stars and Stripes would have been at the right of the line.

  Not tonight. Tonight, the world would see the new flag of the new nation of Pacifica. On a background of gray-green—the color of the North Pacific as it washed against these shores—were three gold stars wreathed in concord.