James and Antonio never worked apart. It was the wish of the Pope in hiding that all priest work in twos, if possible. And, the job of this team, to go through The Wasteland and minister to Catholics and gather information of the remnant, demanded that each support the other in prayer, in brotherhood.
James Carter was older than Antonio. He had been an Anglican priest for 20 years and had converted and been ordained before the establishment of the Ordinariate in North America. His wife and three daughters had tragically died in the nuclear blast, as they had traveled to Colorado Springs to visit the grandparents for Christmas. All the Carter Clan had perished.
James had been prepared for horrible times, but the fact that his entire living family had been taken all at once in a huge gathering at Christmas had take an long time to sink in. His brother, Robert and Robert's wife and children, his uncles and aunts, his nieces and nephews all died immediately, as the center of the blast was Denver. James had the small wedge of peace that his family has not suffered long, if at all.
Antonio had also lost his entire family in Chicago, in the great tidal wave. Antonio had been in Rome at the time, finishing up a course in Canon Law, as he was only recently ordained, when the terrible flooding of the Midwest had occurred.
He knew, instinctively, that his mother, sisters, and nieces were all gone, along with the rest of the family in Roger's Park. Although Antonio had never received word of their deaths, all the Guzmans and Costellos had perished immediately in the great tidal wave, which had been caused by the largest earthquake ever witnessed on earth, located just north of Toronto, making all the waters of Lake Michigan move north and then flow back down in a great tidal wave over the middle west. The waters filled the great Mississippi Valley up to the tops of the cliffs and destroyed any cities below that line.
Like James, Antonio was grateful that his good family had perished immediately and quickly and did not witness the violent anarchy which overtook the states of northern Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and parts of Minnesota and Iowa. Sadly, the great Catholic Bruderhoff in Mundelein, with about 1,000 Catholics, had been destroyed in the great tidal wave as well. No knowledge of that group had trickled down into other parts of the state. It was assumed all had died. Antonio, being from the Archdiocese of Chicago, had to bear other sorrows, as many of those people in the Catholic Bruderhoff had been his personal friends. Antonio did not know for years that, indeed, many of that group had left to go south to the new community outside of Irondale, having been warned in prayer to do so...but not all had heeded the warning.
The two priests were bound in grief as well as duty.
All transcripts were written out in notebooks in pencil and sent via an underground of priests and deacons to the southern part of Appalachia, and then to the coast of Florida, where some wealthy Catholic families maintained two shipping businesses which allowed communication to England and then to Rome.
Besides ministering the sacraments and saying Mass on the road, travelling from place to place, Antonio and James were commanded by Anselm to get as much information as possible about the state of the Catholic Church in America.
Small, excellent surprises had encouraged these two men, as they quickly discovered that many people from the north had moved to southern Illinois, inland Missouri, and most of the southern states, creating instant communities of survivors.
Other good news was that there were many priests already serving these new itinerant communities and as the dioceses had to go underground, many were just working as "lone rangers" as they were fondly called.
Antonio was the most serious of the two. His youth was clouded by so much trauma and loss, that James had to help him with this transition to missionary priest and emissary to Rome. James was a typical intellectual, almost "effete" and still wore the traces of his long Anglican life in his manner.
But James loved Antonio like a son, and the two worked well together. Prayer sustained them, and even on the road, they found time to talk and share ideas.
One of the great treasures in James' back pack was a Summa of the Summa. James' background in Aquinas, (he had done his doctoral thesis on the virtues in the Summa) gave him the ability to teach Antonio, who, like the proverbial sponge, soaked up the wonderful insights of James. In turn, Antonio was teaching James both Spanish and Tagalog, as Antonio had spent a year in the Filipino community in Chicago as a deacon and was a whiz with languages.
The conversation and prayer of these two priests on the road grew into long discussions on virtues and the intricacies of language.
On this trip, James and Antonio were leaving The Wasteland and moving into Louisiana to meet up with some other priests for a small American conference. Rumor had it that at least three bishops would also be attending.
This secret meeting was to be held in Bienville.
As all priests across the world had taken on other skills, James had learned basic architecture, the old way, with pencil, paper and the old tools of the trade. He was actually quite talented. Antonio was a carpenter.
Recently, both has met a priest who had travelled up from Texas and had word on the Catholics in that state.
Again, the state had been spared the take-over of China in the western states and western Canada, as the great tidal wave had stopped the fighting and because the Texans had waged a huge war in the north, holding off until the Chinese army retreated back to Arizona and New Mexico. There still was a stand-off.
Texas had also declared itself a Republic again and taken over all federal rule. No one cared. Texas was thriving in some ways and more and more people who had survived the blast and the brief war straggled into Texas, making it the most crowded state, before it declared independence in 2023. The fast onset of the glacial era had forced the Chinese back, as their own country was rapidly being covered in ice and supplies to the army interrupted. Weapons were scarce, and none of the Chinese wanted to use nuclear weapons after witnessing the horrible destruction of western Canada and America by the rogue government of North Korea, which no longer existed, being blasted out of existence by the orders of the dying American president, in Hawaii at the time, in sheer revenge. China was no longer in a position to finish taking over America, although it held all The Wasteland west from the Pacific to the Red River Valley in the north, and to the borders of Texas to the south, excluding Arkansas and Missouri, which for some reason, lay like islands surrounded by the mighty waters of the Mississippi on one side and the waters of the Missouri and the Arkansas creating dry spaces, large areas of clear land. Basically, all the states west of the upper Missouri were in the hands of the rapidly shrinking Chinese army or destroyed by the great nuclear blast. Some areas of Arizona and New Mexico had not been destroyed by the blast, but now lay under Chinese rule. Those two states were the only states in the west where there was some semblance of normality, except for martial law and conquest. Water was a problem, however, as most of the water was polluted.
That communications were almost non-existent, as the gird was gone, and as the major communication companies, mostly located in Los Angeles, were gone, there was no real news. Most Americans simply were existing in survival mode. The east coast has been taken over by the global government immediately after the blast and those places had become, like the west, states under martial law-but under a different warlord. America, therefore, was divided into several areas and under two tyrannical governments, neither of which could hold things together. Much of the northeast had experiences anarchy. New York was a battleground of looters, criminals, and the military.
James and Antonio were making their way to Lousiana when they met the priest from Texas. Something interesting was happening there.
To be continued....