Prologue
World War 3 began and ended within the week of May 2021. The national debt had been rising steadily, and jumped up nearly half a billion the day before we went bankrupt. Our president, elected the previous October, immediately tried to console the country, telling us we had nothing to worry about. When congress announced the news, the United states became a mess. The president committed suicide in the white house, continuing the long honored tradition of presidential deaths every 20 years. Power and Electricity was lost everywhere, and the TVs went down within hours. Everyone sat around their radios listening to static, just hoping that life as they knew it wasn't over. The next day, even the static was lost.
Europe seized the opportunity to gather up every force it could muster, and declared war, not that Americans knew about it. Included in our opposition was Russia, Northern Africa, and North Korea. Several independent attacks were launched by small countries. Since we had no military forces to defend ourselves, the war was directed against the citizens, and everyone began to suit up for the most influential battle Earth had ever seen.
The first wave of the assault came in the form of 5 nukes, directed towards New York, Chicago, San Diego, Houston, and Washington D.C. An enormous fleet of boats moved along both coasts, decimating all within sight, and air raids became regular for coastal cities. Then the ground troops were sent in, and there was no way to defend ourselves from the steadily advancing military.
The people gathered into small militia groups everywhere, but without organization, most were taken quite quickly. Perhaps the factor that determined who won the war was in Dallas, Texas. There a young man stood in his eighth floor apartment, simply because he could think of naught else to do. His refrigerator was full of rotten food, his water cut off, and his air conditioning gone. All the novelties he had before weren't there anymore, and without them he was lost.
Part 1: Going with the wind
Chapter 1
Bo Boise stood at his window, gazing at the scene unfolding below, as troops of all nationalities sped across what used to be Dallas. He lived in the northern edge of Dallas, close to the sign in the road which used to say City Limits, and now read Suck my cock in red capital letters that stood out against the bright green background of the original sign. The owner of the graffiti had perished last night in a mixture of crimson blood and steel bullets when he had the unfortunate luck to pass by a group of thieves stealing from a pharmacy. Upon sight of him (mostly because they were high), they decided it would be best to blow him away with their automatic weapons, so as to leave no trace of their robbery. Only when they came down from their high and realized what they'd done, did they feel some remorse.
Bo had watched the first sign of the invasion the previous day, when he could see flames and smoke on the horizon, presumably from where the oncoming force was looting and destroying buildings as they went. He alternated from his chair (repositioned closer to the window), to standing, to his small kitchen, where he ate all the dry food he had left and drank hot water bottles to keep nourished. His diet these days consisted of Pop-Tarts (In Bo's opinion no good unless toasted), crackers, and cereal. Quite a horrible diet for someone who could put away a twenty two ounce steak in twenty minutes, and this made quite a situation for Bo's high metabolism body. Within the first day it was all gone, leaving his stomach empty and growling.
As the battle drew progressively closer to his work and the random air strikes seemed much more likely to hit his complex, Bo began to worry. He began to suffer from a major case of insomnia, as he went from a regular 8 hour sleeping night to no sleep on the second day. This isn't a big surprise, as the noise was constant and unavoidable. His skin turned increasingly paler, and he found it much harder to concentrate. He was watching as a plane smashed into and apartment within 200 feet, and only twenty minutes later did he realize his window had shattered, leaving him with cuts and bruises throughout his body.
For a few seconds after he realized what had happened, he had seriously thought about throwing himself through the open space, and plunging to the ground. Would have done it, had he not finally passed out do to lack of sleep. He fell to the edge of the room, and the sound of tinkling glass was heard. His secretary, Lisa, who had been checking in on him every two to three hours found him like that, and began to panic. Her sobs woke him up, and she looked surprised as she told him she thought he was dead, and then offered to clean him up. She had been after his attention for some time, and took the opportunity to try and catch it here.
Once in the bathroom, she made good on her offer to clean him up, removing as much glass as she could, then dousing the wounds with alcohol (at which Bo gritted his teeth and held in a surprised shout; he hadn't expected his whole body to scream with fire, as the injuries weren't that bad). Lisa had also planned to try to sleep with her boss, but much to her dismay, once his body had been cleaned and dressed, he ushered her out of the room. She huffed off, not quite in a rage, thinking he had asked her to leave him alone for a while, and oh yes, he would be alone. In fact, until she died six hours later, he would not see her again.
He had returned to his previous spot, sitting this time, for he now had a fear of passing out and falling out the window (never mind the fact that he had been about to jump in the first place). The buildings around him were growing slimmer, and he found himself worrying more about what had happened to his home than to his parents. Oh yes, his parents were most likely long dead, as they had been living in New York, oblivious to the nuclear until it hit. He wondered if they felt any pain, and became disgusted with himself when he realized he didn't give a **** if they did or not. The whole end of the world thing had thrown his moral compass way off north, and he didn't need to worry about people who might be gone already.
Two hours later the first real sign of the army was seen though the eyes of a man who had condemned himself to death not long ago. The rational portion of Bo's mind was slowly dwindling into nothingness, but what little of it there was told him nothing could save him from a grisly fate that awaited him. The images of soldiers bursting into the homes down below told him that much. He was having a hard time getting rid of the worst one he had seen, where a group of men who looked Korean (although even with his 20/20 eyesight Bo could have been mistaken; the distance was insurmountable to the naked eye) had lined up about twenty people in a row, and went along the line with a handgun shooting each person in the head. The screams had carried, and what haunted him the most was the sound of a small baby crying. Then he had watched as the baby was shot over and over until the clip ended, and the mother followed quickly.
Now, as Bo stood watching the brutal force break the doors to the ground floor of his office, where he had worked for six years following his three years of college, he felt an anger unlike any come over him. He walked slowly to his bookcase, and pulled a pile of magazines (titled simply Stocks) out of the shelf, allowing them to drift to the floor. A house plan which he had been working on for around four months slid out of its hiding place, and breezed out into the wide unknown. This was not Bo's concern, that life was over now. He pulled the shotgun from behind its "case," and checked to make sure it was loaded. Grabbing the box full of spare ammo, he hurriedly opened it, and stuffed as much as he could down the pocket on his shirt, and putting more in his pockets. This had taken about two minutes, and he could here shots being fired endlessly down below, and then heard a scream on his level. He quickened his pace, and quickly left through the door.
********
Lisa stood angrily pacing back and forth from her downed computer to the doorway towards the elevator. She had heard the cries of agony down below, and was now trying to decide what to do. She had spent most of the morning staring down at her sister, a child of only twelve, and wishing she could see her again. As she weighed her options, she got her wish. The door to her bosses office opened, and he stepped through. Perhaps it was the surprise of the weapon he was holding that cause her to back up.
As she did, the room became a blaze of sound, and suddenly she felt nothing. Lisa looked down, taking in the sight of her bloody suit. 'Damn, this was expensive. And he never even noticed.' Her ripped muscles suddenly screamed with an agony so fierce it caused her to black out. She would never wake again.
********
The door swung open revealing a small office that was loaded with personal artifacts. Photographs stood on the desk, showing her small family, and Bo saw that she held another in her hand. The sight of that would have made him sob had the door not rebounded off the wall and hit him in the side.
As he dropped to his knees from the pain, the door blew inward and he saw chips flying outward from the impact. Lisa stood shocked there, and as she fell to the ground, dropping the shattered picture on the floor, a strange feeling of deja-vu hit Bo. What a beautiful dress, he thought. A man stepped through the frame into the room ad began swiftly searching the lady.
What saved Bo's life was the door. It stood between him and the man, blocking him from view. Bo quickly raised the shotgun and pulled the trigger. The recoil sent him backward into his office, and Bo only caught a glimpse of the man he had just killed. His left arm was gone, severed (not neatly) at the elbow. A small hole in his side was also present. What was fatal however was the small fragment that had went in his ear, leaving a tiny hole no bigger than the size of a toothpick.
Bo stood, quite a different man than just five minutes ago, and gathered his thoughts. How can I get out of here? Bo felt stupid as soon as he asked the question. I wont get out of here. That's certain. My only way out is death now. But I'll take as many of the bastards down as I can on the way. With that thought, he stood up and waited for the army that was sure to come.
*******
Adler was a small man, not much bigger than a child of maybe twelve, and he hated America. His very instinct and bringing-up had taught him that much. His prejudice against American's could be compared to our prejudice against illegal Mexicans, on a much larger scale. That's why he was fighting, and he had killed damn near 60 of them already. So when he approached the crowd of 19, and pumped two clips of his small ruger into everyone, including the small babe whose crying was irritating, if not maddening, all he felt was pure calculations. '76 now,' he thought, and it was a short thought because there was more killing to do.
They approached the Callahan building, and breaking in was no harder than it had been previously. No one was alive in the lobby, so Adler hurried to the stairs, where he felt a supernatural attraction. Ignoring the rest of his squad, who stopped at every floor to see the damage, he continued upward to the nineteenth floor, and although there were no apparent survivors, he quickly followed this force that was leading him... to where? He didn't know the answer to that, but it would soon become quite evident, when he stopped outside room 1918, and cautiously peeked inside.
A man and a woman were tangled in the floor, both wounded, and looking crazily complete, like something you might see at a fair, where the tent said, 'Man and Woman together at birth! Come see the brother and sister joined at the waist!' Adler started slowly into the room, cringing as the glass beneath his feet erupted into a loud sound. Even trough that noise, an audible echo of surprise was still heard in the next room, and Adler grinned.
Still holding his ruger, he threw himself fully into the room, landing on the rolling chair ('lazy ass **** can't even get up and walk' was the thought that hurled through his head), and sliding behind the small desk, and amid the squeaking wheels of the chair a blast was heard, and where he had been had he casually entered the room a hole appeared in the wall.
He fell from the chair, and peeking out from beneath the desk, he drew a bead on the man, who was now reloading the gun, and it was perhaps his resistance that pissed Adler off to no end. Steadying his shaking arm, he pulled the trigger not once, but twice, and Adler could only laugh as he saw both enter his skull right above the eye.
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