10 A.C. God Wills It!

Welcome, Gentle Reader to life in the ‘Old South’. Ten years have come and gone since the man-made ‘Death Clouds’ swept the globe clean of most of the human race. For the small number of humans that survived ‘The Change’, (or ‘God’s Cleansing’ as some are now calling it), it has been a decade of great turmoil, strife and sadly, almost constant warfare.
During the first few years A.C. people killed for food, weapons and a semi-safe place to lay their head. Later they killed out of fear, greed, ignorance or self-preservation. Finally, when most people were no longer always hungry or always cold or always frightened, they killed, (as they always have and always will do) in the name of religion.
In 10 A.C., the crack of the whip, the clink of the chains and the cries of the enslaved drift over the dusty roads like a dark cloud staining the countryside. And not just this road, but all the highways and byways that criss-crossed the once great and glorious ‘Old South’.
They used to say that ‘All roads lead to Rome’. Now , ten years after ‘God’s Holy Cleansing’, it seemed, all roads led to Black Oaks, the ‘presidential plantation’ occupied by His Holiness, the somewhat less than ‘honourable Reverend Langhorne Calhoun.
A one-time preacher, part-time potentate and most recently, potential pedophile, the ‘Good Reverend’, now seems much more interested in selling slaves than saving souls.
To be fair, however, in the beginning the man ‘seemed’ to be ‘Heaven sent’ --- or at least the right man for a rather dirty job --- killing the crazies that claimed to follow some ‘fanatic’ that went by the laughable name of the ‘Dark Stranger’.
After three long years of terrible hardship and war, the Reverend and his ‘Army of God’s Warriors’ finally defeated this ‘Dark Stranger’, exterminated most of his Crazies’ and brought, if not ‘peace’, at least a time of respite to a people still recovering from a world-wide plague.
For a brief, shining moment there was a time when having a child in a bed and a crop in the field was more important than a gun in a hand or killing a stranger.
To achieve this ‘divine utopia’ however, the Good Reverend and his followers (the so called ‘Purists’ or ‘Pures’) were more than willing to beat the living shit out of anyone who even ‘looked’ like they might oppose the Reverend’s ‘divine will’. This new, holy society rose up on the bent backs and sweating brows of the ‘lesser folk’, condescendingly called the ‘Normals’ or ‘Norms’
‘All roads lead to Rome’, they say. They also say that ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ In the year 10 A.C., the Good Reverend proved that quaint old saying to be absolutely true.
God wills it! --- Alaha akbar! --- His Will be done!