In The Event Of A Real Emergency

By Stewart Arthur Ravelin III

The World Was In Flames...

A madman had launched a nuclear attack on America. Cities were burning. Millions were dead.

But the rich and powerful did nothing...

The American elites were too busy fighting one another to care. They were happy to let ordinary Americans die horribly while Senator Helga Oxblood and Vice President Flichier built their competing dictatorships.

Only one man could prevent the death of the nation.

And he might have to destroy the United States to save America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Belfort & Bastion
• Release date: Jan 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386111108

Book preview

Stars And Bars

Stars and Bars, he thought.

Conrad sat at his desk. He was wasting time, really, while he waited for his appointment to show up. He had the book on his desk and he flipped idly through it. Images of soldiers and generals in blue and gray slip past. He really shouldn't be doing this on company time, but, what the hell? He was the director. Ought to be a few perks to the job.  God knows—he smiled to himself—it wasn't the salary.

He brought books in to work to read during his lunch hour. This week, he had a new hardback history of the Civil War. It was lavishly illustrated with the paintings of a popular artist who specialized in the period. On the page before him, now, was a band of ragged, steadfast men in Butternut coats making a last stand beneath the unfurled banner of the Confederacy.

But not the Battle Flag. Not the flag that everyone thinks of...the red flag emblazoned with a blue cross of St. Andrew, and white stars in the blue cross. As any Civil War history buff will tell you, that was the flag of the CSA only much later. The first official flag of the Confederacy was quite a different design, the Stars and Bars...

His phone rang. He answered. Chief? He heard Vicky, the office manager, say.  Your two o'clock's on the way.

Are they here?

No. Just called from the highway. They'll be here in fifteen.

Well, he considered. I guess there's no hope of them being abducted by aliens between there and here.

He heard her laugh. Probably not likely.

Ah, well. Put 'em in the conference room and I'll be right there.

Right, Chief. He heard her phone go down.

He put the book away, reluctantly. It was one of the few notes of color in his office. His walls were a bit gray and no matter how many photos and personal knickknacks he put on them, the place still had the feel of a cave. Which made sense, really, because the Facility, or, more precisely, The Southern Rocky Mountain Emergency Network System Redundancy Node (SRMENSRN) #7, was in a cave. Or at least part of it was. There was an external building above.  Up there, the Facility seemed just one more little nondescript little office building in the middle sized south Colorado city of New Prairie. But, down here, hidden from view, was The Bunker ... the real heart of the Facility . . . where could be found the server farm, the network connections, and the (now silent) sound stages.

The place had been constructed in the bad old days of the Cold War. It was really quite funny, in a morbid sort of way.  He understood that the Facility had originally been designed to be a sorting sub-station for change of address cards in the event of a full-scale nuclear war. Some low-wattage collection of earnest bureaucrats of the 1960s had