Volunteers: A Novel of The Second Civil War

By James Rozhon

Civil unrest is carrying the country toward a second civil war and both Mark Jenkins and Delisa Hutchinson are being pushed aroung in its turmoil. Mark is white and Delisa is black. Both of them have fixed emotions about what is ongoing in the country and both have families and friends that support them. Will the Union survive the chaos and will

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gotham Books
• Release date: Dec 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9798887751757

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Other Novels by James Rozhon

The Doug Vance Novels

The 25th Child

Killing the Black Eagle

The Woman Behind His Eyes

The Coldest Passion

A Long Way From Home

The John Overland Novels

Remembering Carly

Bordering On Hatred

The Man in the Maze

Brother

The Four Degrees Of Speaker Hawke

America In The Shadows

Suffer The Children

The Doctor Six Novels

The Socrates Option

Chasing Death

The Savannah Cross Novels

Raincross

Words Will Never Hurt Me

The Goode Girl

Blood, Brother

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© 2022 James Rozhon. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by Gotham Books (December 30, 2022)

ISBN: 979-8-88775-174-0 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-88775-175-7 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

For Trish,

Still and Forever

Also, I want to give credit for this and all my writing efforts to the Riverside Writers Group. They keep my head up and my brain in the game. Thanks, folks.

Part One:

Picking Up the Rock

Chapter 1

Delisa Hutchinson had never been more scared than she was right then.

Oh, she’d been hearing the rumors of disunion just like everyone else had, but never took them very seriously. Her most pressing concern was being black in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It was bad enough that she worked in the Goodwill store across the freeway from her home, a roach-infested apartment that she hated spending time in, but one place didn’t subsist her and the other was an affront to her dignity.

But this?

She’d gotten a ticket from the State Patrol in Georgia after her brother told her, Go home, Delisa. The shit’s going to hit the fan soon and you’d be better off back home.

He showed her vids of volunteers he had on his phone, vids that showed armed men marching in formation, their rifles and weapons in the open for everyone to see. The most common question they were asked was, What are you going to do with those guns? Their most often quoted reply was, We’re going to make this country a safer place to live in. More than that, none of them would say. The only reply further questions got were smiles, randomly wicked ones.

For Delisa, those smiles were put into action when those same groups began shooting and killing every person that wasn’t white. She’d taken DeShawn’s advice and headed back to Chattanooga that Monday morning before Thanksgiving. Scared didn’t begin to describe her state of mind, hence the ticket. She tried to convince DeShawn to come back to Chattanooga with her, but he declined saying, Thanks for asking, but I have to make sure that LaWanda and her son are okay.

That was the first time she’d heard that name. She asked, LaWanda? Who’s she?

Her brother smiled sheepishly despite the scattered gunfire they heard in the distance and said, Someone special. Maybe we’ll meet you in Chattanooga later. Then he put his hands on her biceps and said like the big brother he was, Now, you get your ass out of here because we both know they is comin’ for us.

There hadn’t been a time in her entire life when that wasn’t true to one extent or another. But this? It was fear on another scale because none of those people with the guns would ask her anything about herself before they killed her. No amount of rationalizing herself to them would help either. She was black and that’s all they needed to know.

She was twenty-three that November morning. It was the Monday before Thanksgiving and she’d been in the Atlanta suburb of Marietta with her brother for that reason. The Goodwill store had given her the week off. Her boss, an old codger named Hank Goodman, smiled at her and said, Hmm. If that brother of yours convinces you to cut your hair, don’t come back. It was a reference to her Angela Davis afro. She loved it and wore it proudly. Hank loved it, too, and told her, It reminds me of times I’d rather forget.

When he said that to her, she came as close to cutting it as she ever had. When he saw her reaction, one that included a step backward and an expression on her face that indicated fear, he smacked himself on his cheek with his right hand and said, Oh, lord, no. He put his hands together and said, Yes, there were times when I would have hated you for your ‘do, but you’re such a great person with the people that come in here looking for help that I’d even accept it if you wore a Mohawk. Please, Delisa. Don’t fear me because there is no need. You’re an asset to the store. Please? Then he smiled and said, And it doesn’t hurt that you’re prettier than my granddaughter either.

That single comment caused a quite involuntary smile to spread across her face. You think I’m pretty?

He put his old hands on his face, shook his head and said, Oh, god. She thinks I’m hitting on her. He dropped his hands from his face and said, Yes. But I think my granddaughter is pretty, too. She has nice hair in a way that is quite different from yours. Then he grinned and held up his wedding ring finger and said, Her name is Ramona, she’s from Southern California and she makes me quite immune from anything you can do to catch my attention.

It led to a hug where she said, Thank you, Mr. Goodman. Thank you for not scaring me to death.

It could have gone anywhere from there. His smile grew to genuine proportions as he said, Delisa? Just don’t bend over when you put shoes on the bottom shelf over there. That’s temptation that not even Jesus could withstand. Then he hugged her again and said, That was crude. I apologize. Now get your pretty butt to work.

She was skinny. That’s how she saw herself. Her boobs were too small, her legs looked like toothpicks and birds fell from the sky in fright when she smiled. She smirked at the thought that her butt was anything but thin pickings as she said, Your employee with the skinny butt thanks you for your nice warning, but knows it isn’t warranted based on said butt. It was worth a laugh, but every time she went to that rack to put up a new display of shoes, she knelt and felt nervous that her skinny ass was mentioned like that by her boss.

Now? All she wanted was her job, her roach infested apartment and her boss to act like he wasn’t a dirty old man.

Heck, at this point she didn’t care if Hank Goodman was the dirtiest old man in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Even after the Georgia State Patrolman gave her that ticket, the speedometer on her old Honda Accord hit one-oh-five as she neared the state line. She kept looking in the rearview mirror with the stark fear that someone – no, them – were behind her and gaining. She pushed the pedal harder even though it was on the floorboard and then began screaming, Faster, faster, faster, you piece of crap car!

She knew the state line was just ahead and was actually looking forward to being home. While she was in too much panic and was scared to death, which only meant she wasn’t thinking clearly, she was glad that she would be out of the State of Georgia in the next few minutes.

It never dawned on her to wonder why there was no traffic coming out of Tennessee and that there wasn’t much entering it besides her either. Even if she’d pressed herself to begin wondering why either of those things were true, it began to rain and that took her mind away from anything else. It started as a sprinkle, but it didn’t take long before it began coming down hard. She was scared and so confused that the only thing that registered was, Slow down, you idiot. She did, but she kept her eyes on her rearview mirror because she was convinced those people were behind her and gaining. She put her right hand to her neck because she felt that she was going to be lynched and hung from any of the trees on either side of the freeway. Tears began to roll down her face and she said to anyone who could hear, Why me? What did I do wrong?

The issue was that she knew what she’d done wrong. She’d made the tragic mistake of being born black in a country where Daniel Hart, the Republican nominee, had been beaten by a woman named Marian Norman. Ever since the election, now three weeks in the past, Hart had been pressing the good folks as he called them to, band together and take back what is rightfully theirs. Police forces all over the country had been put on alert – and not all of them came down on the side of President Marian Norman. No, the country had been coming apart ever since election day and had been getting worse as the days rolled onward.

The I-75 from Atlanta split into the I-24 going both east and west as it split. The first inkling she got that something was horribly wrong was the overpass that crossed over the I-24 and became the southbound I-75 was down and in a million pieces. Her brain began churning through what was going to happen to her once she hit the pile of debris below the overpass. What she didn’t count on was when her mind went into something resembling automatic pilot as she stomped on the brakes, skidded a bit and then drove left into the median that connected to the oncoming lanes that no longer had a connection to the I-24. The low rail that lined the inside lanes ended about fifty yards from the bridge. That meant she had a small window of opportunity to hit the lanes over there and maybe stop her car before she plunged through the road that no longer connected one side of the bridge with the other.

The first thing that went wrong was that while her side of the freeway didn’t have guard rails for those last fifty yards or so, the other side did. She hit them and lost control of her car at that point. She couldn’t know that the front of her car took so much damage that it was effectively a missile at that point. All she knew was at that point the car hit the same rails on the other side of the road. Completely disoriented, the car hit something solid, but all it did was slow the rolling motion of the car. It hit something else and stopped at an angle. Confused and knocked a bit senseless, she would have fallen onto the passenger seat had she not been wearing her seat belt because that side of her car was resting against something that refused to allow it to settle on a level.

Her purse had been on the passenger seat, but was not there when everything came to a stop. Her coat was laying against the unbroken window on that side. Wherever she had landed was wet because the side of her face was getting that way. When something approaching coherency caught up with her, she saw that her window had shattered and that’s where the water was entering the car. The first thing she realized was that unfastening her seatbelt was going to be difficult. If she did it wrong, she could slide along the seats and maybe break the window on the passenger side with her head.

Come on, idiot. Get out of this deathtrap and find out where you are. Her head hurt. She put her left hand to a spot on the left side of her head and it came away with blood on it. It wasn’t a lot, but it was there. Since the rearview mirror was gone, she flipped down her visor and looked at herself in the mirror. Blood was matted in her hair on the left side of her head. If she had to guess, the window breaking on her side of the car was responsible for it. It hurt and that became her reason for wanting to get out of her car.

It was difficult to maneuver around. When she unbuckled her seatbelt, gravity pulled her toward the other side of the car. She didn’t fight it because she needed both her coat and her purse. She managed to get her legs out from the floorboard and used them to balance herself against the frame of the window on the right side of the interior. She grabbed both her coat and her purse, pulled her keys from the ignition and was ready to try to get out of the car. The jagged pieces of glass still around the open window intimidated her, but she squeezed and wiggled herself out of her car and then surveyed the damage. She cried when she saw how mangled it was as it leaned against the tree.

However, as she stood there trying to shake the various aches and pains she was experiencing, she realized where she was. She looked back toward the road, the I-75, and then turned around and said to herself, "Parkridge Hospital is just over there amid all those medical offices."

Over there was relative because there was still a fairly thick canopy of brightly colored trees she was going to have to thread before she got there. Wrapping her coat around her and sliding her purse to her shoulder, she headed directly away from the road as the sound of gunshots began to fill the air. They stopped her and she began to worry anew. That sense of dread that she was wearing the wrong color of skin, that she was alone in a world that wanted to turn itself white again returned to her. When she stopped and tried to swallow her fear, she felt that the shooting was to her north, from Chattanooga itself. It brought another wave of fear to mind, but she decided to try for the hospital because she felt she’d be safe there.

The gunfire grew more intense.

Her fear began to spike and she stopped and realized there was nowhere to go.

Except to the hospital.

Brilliant oranges and every offshoot from that one were everywhere. While it was beautiful, she knew it would all be gone in another month. Bare trees would serve easier as places to lynch niggers.

And she was.

As black as any nigger you ever saw.

She trudged onward as the sounds of warfare intensified around her.

She almost changed her mind about going to the hospital because the sounds of gunfire seemed more intense in that direction. She didn’t change her mind because as those sounds of hatred burned more terrifying around her, she still saw the hospital as a friendlier place, as a refuge of sorts.

It was her only hope.

As she staggered through the trees, newer and more frightening sounds were added to the growing mix of terror and fear. She thought, "Even bigger guns? Is that even possible?"

It put her into high gear and she began to run toward where she felt the hospital was.

And she ran into him, her worst fear.

A white man.

With a gun.

It was over.

She was dead.

She screamed.

And fell to her knees, her hands pressed together.

And nothing else mattered.

She didn’t want to die and she was going to.

She felt a hand on her shoulder.

Then, nothing.

• • •

Mark Jenkins worked in the gift shop at Parkridge East Hospital. He just celebrated his twenty-third birthday and then the world fell apart. It wasn’t hard to predict either. Everyone he knew…

No.

That was wrong. It wasn’t everyone he knew because he knew people of all racial types. No, it was people who decided that the best answers were the easiest ones that were causing trouble. Like blacks. They walked around saying the stupidest stuff. Black Lives Matter. No, they didn’t. White lives mattered because those were the people who worked hard and pushed the country ahead. Progress was possible in the country at large only because white people pushed it ahead. Everyone else dragged it down and stopped it in some places. It wasn’t hard to see where those places were either.

California.

New York.

Colorado and their obscene pot laws.

Washington and for the same reason.

They even dragged down places that had always been forthright and stable, places like Virginia and even North Carolina. General Robert E. Lee had organized the best army in the world back when the CSA was a living and breathing beast. Now? They had elected a Democrat to Congress and the NBA had moved their All Star game from Charlotte. The world needed fewer niggers and Mexicans.

Those thoughts and feelings had spurred him to go to the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga for nearly three years chasing a dream of being on a nationwide TV station telling people the truth and nothing but. It wasn’t his fault that he had to drop out of school because his grades were bad. No, his grades had always been good, but those fucking nigger professors and their white lackeys in the administrative part of the campus conspired to push him out of school and into a world where no one listened to him.

Well, his father always had.

His father, Matthew Jenkins, was a thirty-year veteran of the Chattanooga PD. He could retire at any time with a full pension, but the prospect of retiring to a life of anonymity kept him employed. That was fine by both of them, too. Mark liked having a cop for a father because of the number of times his liberal cop friends had trumped up something against him only to have his Dad settle things peacefully were too numerous to comprehend.

It was his father who got him his job at the hospital.

He hated it.

The number of stupid people who came into it staggered his imagination. It didn’t hurt that the stupidest people were niggers either. They’d come in blubbering and crying about this or that relative who was sick and what could I buy them to cheer them up. The way Mark saw it, they should all die because fewer blacks were better than more. In fact, he sold some of the most hideous gifts to them for that explicit reason alone. He wanted the sick nigger to see the gift and receive some sort of systemic reaction to kill him or her. He didn’t know if anything he’d sold out of that store had done its intended job, but he was going to keep trying.

That day started no different than any other. He was in at eight o’clock and started clock-watching ten minutes later. That’s when he heard the first sirens. Since he worked in the gift shop, he paid little attention or heed to whatever was going on outside. The way he saw things, he was a lot smarter than most of the people who wound up there.

When the gunfire started, he listened close because he knew what guns were and what they sounded like. He loved guns so much that he wished he could bring his gun that he had stashed in his car into the hospital with him. If any of those niggers got out of control, he’d show ‘em.

The issue, however, was that the gunfire got more intense as the morning continued. It didn’t hurt that business dropped off to nothing either. He went to the entrance into the shop that looked out on the lobby because it gave him a clear view of the carnage that was coming. He smiled to himself as he heard the unmistakable sound of an RPG being fired as a series of thumps. Yeah, boys. You get ‘em. Kill those fucking niggers.

Everyone he knew supported the revolution that was coming and so did he. Daniel Hart was a gift sent from Heaven. That was his summation of the movement that surrounded the man after that bitch Marian Norman cheated Hart out of being President. We’re going to set up a new CSA and he’s going to lead us to glory, he thought to himself as he saw explosions beyond the trees in the parking lot. There were far more explosions he couldn’t see and those made him proud to be a supporter of Hart.

His first twinge of nervousness began when a grenade blew off the canopy over the entrance to the lobby. Several more gun-launched grenades landed around the same entrance, but this time he saw people die from their effects. A woman was helping a staggering man into the lobby when one grenade landed next to them. They were blown off their feet and into the next world. The site bothered him because it was the first time he’d ever seen death. He’d seen all the movies, all the TV shows, all the ways the American media wanted him to see death, but this was the first time he saw it up front and real. The pieces of flesh that were left in the doorway bothered him more than he thought it ever would. He backed away and into the shop when another RPG round landed in the lobby only because the previous one had blown out the doors and there was nothing to stop it from rolling deeper into the hospital as it did before exploding.

That was when he became aware of the screams.

Once that grenade rolled into the lobby and detonated, people began doing anything to get away from the danger the shattered front door represented. He was already nervous and had his hand on the doorframe when a second grenade hit the wall next to the front entrance and blew away part of the wall.

It was time to get out and join up.

He threw down his name badge and headed away from the front entrance and began looking for a way out. He had no idea where he was when he saw a sign that featured a huge red arrow that was labeled EXIT. He threw open the door just as several more people poured through it. It emptied into the parking lot, but that was where he first saw them, the soldiers of the CSA. Wearing tan uniforms, he waved to them and was rewarded with shots being fired at him. He tried to shout a welcome to them, but three of them knelt, aimed and began firing at him from across the lot. How they missed, he would never know, but they did and left a long series of puncture wounds in the wall beside the doorway.

Maybe it was just time to get out.

The problem was that his car was parked in the same lot where those CSA heroes had set up their equipment. If he was going to survive this fracas in order to join them, he was going to have to survive it first. That meant…

…the trees that bordered the hospital to the east.

Since it was high autumn, he thought their bright colors might camouflage him just enough to hide away until things had quieted down. He figured he could find a nice safe place among those trees and hide until things fell silent. Then he could find their nearest recruitment station and join up.

His gun first…

Since he wasn’t very far into the trees, it wasn’t hard to reverse course and approach the lot. There were several businesses and at least one apartment complex between where he was and where he parked his car. He saw a few bodies, a few of them were niggers, too. That didn’t exactly make him happy as it did to reinforce how he felt about them. He kept low and alert as he neared where he parked. Crouching low against the corner of the building he smelled gun smoke and a few other telltale odors that signaled an abrupt change in American politics. As much as he wanted to stand up and cheer, he didn’t want to get shot by a comrade in arms. So, he kept low and hurried to the lot where his car was parked. Using his key fob, he had it unlocked before he got to it. Since his gun was under the driver’s seat, he opened that door and pulled it from its hiding place. He paused amid the sounds of gunfire and screams. If it was possible to stand and join, he would. What changed his mind was when another poor soul with the same idea stood from a similar hiding spot in a different place in the lot and was promptly shot. It didn’t matter that he’d screamed, I’m on your side, before he died. The guy was as dead as he was going to be if he did this wrong.

That put him on the run back to the trees where he could lay low until the coast cleared. Feeling like a scared rabbit as he ran across the lawns and pavement toward the trees, he just hoped he made it safely into their midst. He felt a lot better and a lot safer when the tree line fell behind him as he dove into their depth.

A huge explosion rocked him, a sound that came from a place ahead of him. The bridge that connects the freeways. It gladdened him in a way he couldn’t describe, so he crouched with his back against a tree and let the good tidings wash over him.

The gun, a military-issue Colt .45 pistol, felt good in his hand.

Between the assault on the hospital and what he suspected was the bridge over there being blown, he was in a good mood. Still, it paid to be cautious, so he was going to be that way until the assault on this area was over. Then he’d join up.

The sounds of war and cleansing continued for a while until another sound intruded upon him.

Rather than gunshots and explosions, it sounded like a crash of some type. As he sat and thought about that sound, he figured that someone from the freeway didn’t see the blown-up bridge until it was too late to stop, so it went out of control. He didn’t think his smile was of the malevolent type, but didn’t care if it was either. All that meant was that he was going to survey the wreckage and look for survivors. While he knew the sound could be from anything, he expected the wreckage of some type of car or truck. It didn’t matter either