CALIPHATE(110)

"Freeze, swine!" Hans said once the two were in his sights. When they had, he amended, "Get on your bellies, filth! Where's the grotesquely fat one?"

Meara stopped when he heard the voice. He stopped so suddenly, in fact, that the play toy bumped into his overly ample rump in the dark.

My God, Meara thought. They've come to get me.

His universe had always been centered on himself. He couldn't imagine any attack on the castle that did not have him as its prime target. They'll put me in prison. I'll be beaten . . . people will be mean to me. I've got to get out of here. And to hell with the others.

In his panic, Meara dropped the leash. The play toy wasn't important and would only slow him down. As fast as his lard encased legs would carry him, he began to waddle back the way he had come. Perhaps there would be time to get at his funds, or at least at his Swiss bankbook, before he made his escape.

It was a great surprise to Meara when an open palm slammed into his face, knocking him on his overstuffed rear to the cold floor. There, stunned, he lay quivering like the product of a Jell-O mold. Meara began to weep.

"I don't think so, you piece of rat-filth," said Hamilton.





Interlude


Nuremberg, Federal Republic of Germany,

17 October, 2021


In 2006 there had been just over three million Muslims in Germany. By 2016 this had grown to five, even as the number of Germans in the country had dropped and the average age of those who remained had increased. By 2019, with the massive influx of refugees from the radioactive ruins of the Islamic world, there were ten million Muslims in Germany or roughly thirteen percent of the population. Their average age was younger. Worse, the percentage of those that could be considered radical had grown enormously, partly as a result of the American atrocities against them, but equally because of their second class status in Germany.

Then again, there were those who claimed that Muslims would be radicalized by any social order that didn't place them on top and everyone else beneath them, as the Holy Koran called for.

Gabi didn't, couldn't, believe that. Fascist, racist nonsense, she thought. People are just people and will act well unless the iniquities and inequalities of society are too much to bear.

Muslim society in Germany was also highly urbanized. In the largest cities, some of them, they even made up a majority of the population. Even where they didn't, they often had the numbers where young and belligerent males were concerned. Street fights had become common. Nor were Germans generally coming out on top, except in the case of those who sided with the Muslim street brawlers, such as Anti-Fascist Action, a German derivative of a Swedish movement with origins in the British Isles. As in Sweden and parts of France twenty years prior, there were places in Germany now where the police simply would not go.

In an effort to placate the Muslims and stem the violence, Germany had established Sharia courts under Islamic scholars for Muslim communities. Moreover, acting under orders from the Supreme Court, itself under the European Court of Justice (itself having taken in and taken over the personnel and duties of the European Court of Human Rights), local German courts had taken to using Sharia in cases involving only Muslims within Germany.

If this did anything to stem the outrage of Muslim residents, though, it was tolerably hard to see.

In Nuremberg, however, things were not so bad. Of the city's population of about half a million, fewer than twenty-five thousand were Islamic. There were neighborhoods Gabi and Amal dared not go, of course, as there were in virtually every European city. But they were few, small, and generally avoidable.

Too, Gabi avoided thinking about the implications of there being places within her own country that she and her child dared not go.

The Christkindlmarkt hadn't opened in several years. The last time it had, even Nuremberg's comparatively few Muslims had been able to shut it down . . . violently. This had, as in many parts of Europe, led to an expansion of Muslim representation in the Polizei. The practical effect of that, however, had merely been to give the imams and mullahs their own, state-funded, enforcement arms. If it produced greater peace within and around the Muslim community it was only because, having no place else to turn, moderate Muslims knuckled under to the rule of the mullahs.

Before Europe betrayed itself, it first made sure to betray those outsiders who truly wanted to become European.

The practice of French Muslims, to the extent that that wasn't a contradiction in terms, of engaging in gang rape of both European girls and Muslim girls who failed to dress the part—tournante, or taking one's turn, in French—had spread, too. But with the courts and police only interested in keeping the peace—as well as they were able, at least, within the German community—girls had little recourse. Germany's thirteen percent Muslims accounted for about eighty-eight percent of all rapes in Germany. This was perhaps not such a bad record. In Sweden, twenty years prior, they'd been credited with as much as eighty-five percent of all rapes, and that from a much smaller percentage of the population. Some argued that this showed that Germany was doing a better job of assimilation. It may even have been true.