The Life After War Collection

by Angela White

  The second tape was shorter. Only four seconds, it was a brief flash of the same traitor, now putting the shiny barrel of a gun into his mouth, hands already stained with blood.

  There was a violent flash and the former president slumped to the floor. His message on the wall glared at the crimson-streaked camera lenses.

  I did it for my country, because my country would not do it for herself.

  These two clips only circulated for a few minutes before the stations airing them went to static, but it was enough. Most people understood the truth. There hadn’t been a terrorist attack: the government had caused it. America, and the world, had been betrayed!

  As to why–that didn’t become clear for a long time after the war, and even then, only a select few ever discovered the secrets of the Freemasons. There were more imminent atrocities to be survived first.

  3

  Marc Brady

  Virginia

  In northern Florida, a twenty-megaton ICBM caused the swampy shelf to begin cracking like window glass. The blinding flash was felt as far away as the Virginias, where fleeing citizens were stuck in crammed lanes of traffic on Interstate 81, with no way to avoid the danger. Nor could they escape the long convoy of draft trucks that were battering their way through the wrecks and vehicles in the grassy median, following orders with no exceptions.

  “All males will surrender to the draft! If you resist or run, you will be shot!”

  The faint bullhorn woke those who had been dozing in the uncomfortable seats of the cold Greyhound bus, and a ripple of warning went through the armed man sitting against the frosty window. People were standing, muttering among themselves, but the grunt only observed, waiting to determine how he should react.

  “Hey!”

  “He hit an old guy! They can’t do that!”

  “They shot a woman! Murder! Call 911!”

  Sergeant Marc Brady used his military voice to be heard over the din, shouting, “Everybody out! Make room!”

  The others who were stuffed into the crowded bus shifted toward the doors at the order, but they were panicked, shoving and yelling.

  Marc hefted himself up onto the vinyl seat and dove out the open window as more gunshots and screams exploded from the traffic behind the bus.

  People were pouring from their vehicles now, running for the nearby homes and businesses of Wytheville as the MRAPs full of soldiers followed, firing M16s at the citizens who refused to surrender. Backdropped by thick, black smoke and an angry, red sky, these soldiers remorselessly shot fleeing males and anyone else who got too close to their intended targets. Only a few of the soldiers bothered with the bullhorns or their aim. These were government men, specifically selected for draft recovery, and they didn’t listen to begging or excuses.

  Recognizing the bloodlust, Marc rolled through the slush, moving under the bus, and he stayed there as the chaos got closer, arms and ankles locked tight around the greyhound’s icy frame. The war had cancelled his leave, but he had to get home, and he was going–a decision these draft enforcers would shoot him for.

  Gun in hand, Marc stayed still as the trucks rolled by and the citizens he was sworn to protect were gunned down.

  A second later, the air shifted, thickened, and he instinctively shut his eyes and buried his head against his arm as the sky lit up and the sun fell on him.

  4

  Samantha Moore

  Wyoming

  The electro-magnetic pulse shot out brutally, and the devastating wave traveled the same path as the radiation and pressure blasts and then went further. Moving through the air and over the land, the EMP traveled like electricity–surging through train tracks, electric lines, and low band communication equipment. The surge short-circuited nearly everything it touched–sparking fires, stopping pacemakers, making engines stall…and causing planes to fall from the smoke-filled skies.

  “Please, can’t you tell us where we’re going?” Samantha asked, staring intently at their captor.

  Her mesmerizing blue eyes and calm demeanor encouraged the grim soldier to answer her when he hadn’t answered any of the others crammed into the chopper.

  “We’ve been diverted to NORAD. The Essex Compound is under evacuation.” He said it soothingly, but the deadly rifle in his hands didn’t lower as the loud chopper blades struggled to cut through the thick haze.

  The chopper suddenly lurched sideways, and Samantha stifled her scream, but not a low groan as the chopper was hit by an invisible wave of force and lurched again.

  The other Seattle civilians aboard the struggling chopper echoed her noise of near panic.

  Taken together, they’d been “relocated” from their jobs at the Environmental Protection Agency by big soldiers with clipboards, government passes, and guns. After witnessing a coworker shot when he tried to run, none of them had rocked the boat despite obviously being abducted by their own government.

  The need to fight warred with her survival instincts and Sam brushed only a quick glance over the other well-dressed, “lucky” few on board with her. In their faces, she recognized the same dismay and slowly dawning terror, and yet, she could have been alone–she didn’t feel a connection with them. She was different.

  Samantha fingered the badge around her neck, almost wishing she didn’t have it. If her alarm hadn’t worked, the former president–Robbie Milton of the infamous suicide video–would have died in Nebraska, and none of this would be happening. Sam had been horrified to recognize the “terrorist.” Did her saving his life four years ago make some of this her fault?

  Sam assumed they were flying low to avoid Star Wars, and she stifled another sound of misery as the cities rolled by. She was unable to believe that was her country down there tearing itself apart. Shootings, fires, assaults, murders, and bodies everywhere–in cars, on streets, even on playgrounds! Moreover, no one was coming to collect them!

  Samantha swallowed her panic. This wasn’t happening. Just a horrible nightmare–

  She gaped in terror, forgetting to breathe, as an unending line of destruction rushed over the land, eating everything in its path. Power lines lit up, sparking violently; gas lines ruptured and exploded; and homes and cars disappeared under the rapidly advancing brown and gray avalanche of death that was now drawing even with the military transport chopper. They were out of range, weren’t they?

  “Get higher!”

  Even as Sam finished the shout, the blades stopped spinning, her ears registered the sudden, deafening silence, and then they plummeted to the earth in a sickening blur of swirls and screams.

  The government bird slammed into the rocky, Wyoming ground at a hard angle and flew back up, flipping and twisting into new shapes. It blew through a thick tree and rolled, scattering awful debris and thick smoke along the crash site.

  Samantha groaned, not opening her eyes. Her hurting body checked in as bruised and ready to hide but otherwise uninjured.

  The lack of noise (not a whimper or scream) told her that the rest of her traveling companions had not been so lucky, and Sam moaned again, dazed.

  Forgetting for a second about all that had happened; she hoped someone had already called an ambulance.

  “There! Told ya it’s a woman!”

  The voice released her tears. Help was here! In a few minutes, she would be bundled on a stretcher and on her way to the emerg–

  “I’ll hold her down ‘n you can go first this time, but let’s pull her away from all that glass.”

  Hands clamped like iron bands around her slender ankles, and Samantha began to scream.

  5

  Adrian Mitchel

  California

  Less than half a minute had passed when another wave of destruction rushed out–one of pressure and wind at levels that not even buildings, let alone people, could withstand. Those who had time to get below ground did so, but they were not as safe as they thought they would be, especially in California, where the “Big One” finally came.

  It went mostly unnoticed. Peopl
e were already busy dying.

  “Is it true? Are you his son?”

  Adrian opened his mouth to confirm the lethal secret he’d just been confronted with by his fellow Greenpeace members, but he snapped it shut as the neighborhood sirens wailed again. The radio blared out a reporter’s shocked words.

  “…has been unlike anything my generation has ever experienced. We are watching in horror as each of these bombs hits and…it’s so ugly! Huge fireballs instantly create gaping, fifty-mile wide craters around the point of impact and blast all those buildings, cars, and people into the sky. As it rises, it forms a gigantic, toxic black mushroom cloud that immediately begins to spread with the wind.

  “Instantly following these explosions are rushes of thermal heat and light that shoot out in every direction, peeling skin away from bones and blinding every living thing facing that direction. The temperatures are in the hundreds of degrees, and those in the path have no chance of escaping as our way of life comes crashing down…”

  The station faded into a national anthem as a city siren reached a peak. Earsplitting, it overwhelmed, for a brief second, the horrible noises going on outside the small, San Bernardino ranch home and across the riot-ravaged country.

  Adrian’s patriotic heart bled for people he didn’t know. The powerful secret he had held for so long suddenly seemed tiny in comparison. But it wasn’t. It was the sum of all secrets. Likely, it was the reason their world was ending.

  The radio on the basement steps wailed again, mirroring previous sounds of arriving warheads. Adrian stepped under the protective planks next to the Christmas tree as a dozen angry men surrounded him, shock and outrage on their faces.

  “You caused this!”

  Adrian had a brief moment to think he was glad that most of those who had come for the meeting had already fled at the reports of a bomb hitting the capitol, but even this dozen was too many to fight unarmed if things got ugly. Good thing he wasn’t unarmed. How had they found out?

  “Answer the question!”

  “Tell the truth!”

  The furious men came at him, and the plastic tree and presents went flying when he tried to use them for a shield.

  “We’ll beat it out of ya!”

  “Did you know the war was coming?!”

  “Did you help them hide it?”

  Their faces and voices were full of hate, demanding answers. Again, Adrian started to answer the demands, but he was cut off, this time by a vicious rumbling that came hard and fast. Dust from the stairs fell over them as it pounded through the rock and stone.

  Adrian had been in enough hot landing zones to recognize the danger, and he threw himself to the tiled floor, putting a hand on the gat in his pocket as some of the men followed his lead. Others lunged his way, thinking he was trying to escape.

  “Get him!”

  “Incoming! Get down!”

  The walls above them exploded an instant later; blown away like brittle leaves in the fall, and then the small, neat house above crumbled, burying them all alive.

  6

  Angela White

  Ohio

  These were the first and most direct effects of the war on American soil. It was the beginning of a hard new world, where all authority disappeared. In less than one day, calm, arrogant safety vanished and took with it the rest of society’s perceived protections that had always been taken for granted. Like calling 911.

  “He didn’t say Fort Defiance. He didn’t.”

  Angela dropped the stained hospital scrubs she’d just changed out of and gripped the chair in stunned agony. Oblivious to the gunshots and screams outside, and to the pains tearing through her slightly rounded belly, she stared in terror at the CNN report on the plasma TV. The reporter was talking of an impact over twelve hundred miles from her Cincinnati home.

  “…latest word is five million dead and another two million injured or exposed, and the cloud is moving west, northwest toward the Alabama state line at thirty-seven miles per hour. Camp David is gone, Houston, all the coastal oil refineries…”

  “Charlie?”

  The woman slid to her knees on the plush carpet of the two-bedroom apartment, the agony in her chest worse than the bands of pressure clamping around her stomach, pushing down.

  Footsteps thudded in the halls outside her door, followed by more shouts. Both went unnoticed.

  “It can’t be!” The cell phone slid out of her hand, liquid suddenly oozing down her thighs and swollen legs as Christmas lights flashed mockingly in place of emergency blinkers.

  “I would know!” she cried suddenly, doubling over. “I would know!”

  The door in her mind rattled and she grunted in pain, trying to draw on a gift (curse! her mind screamed.) she had locked away over a decade ago, but she was weak and those magic halls remained shut.

  Her forehead thumped on the carpet as pain, raw and sharp, tore through her abdomen. Darkness flooded her mind.

  Now unheard, an emotionless voice echoed calmly: “Please hold and the next available operator will assist you. 911 estimated wait time...two hours, fourteen minutes… The system is currently experiencing heavy call volume. If this is not an emergency, please hang up and try your call again later. Service outages can be expected in some areas. Please continue to hold and the…”

  On the TV behind her, the horrified reporter continued to describe what was happening, but few people were listening. The end had come.

  “...Chicago barrier gave way and millions of gallons of debris-filled water barreled downstream, overwhelming towns and cities for forty miles before joining the Wabash River, swelling it even more. It has poured down every stream, sewer, creek, and river it touched, sweeping away thousands of people in each state.

  “This merciless torrent split briefly between the Wabash and Mississippi Rivers, widening the path of damage, and then merged again in Louisiana, where it finally punched a hole through the city of Baton Rouge and emptied into the already flooded Gulf.

  “In an ironic twist, the ancient New Madrid fault line under St. Louis also woke today, causing a 7.7 earthquake that has leveled untouched areas. Aftershocks are being felt as far away as Kansas City and Louisville. Places like Humboldt and Jonesboro have simply collapsed like dominoes, already weakened by the surge of debris-filled waves….”

  7

  Kenn Harrison

  Arizona

  Once again a target for the government they represented, the military was especially hard hit. Most of the service men and women who survived later denied they were ever a part of any armed force. As few as three of every ten came through the war alive, despite being so well trained. Most of the deaths came from attacks by individuals in their own groups, and from their neighbors, who had ended up with desperation on their side. Even those who were still following orders didn’t have an easy time of it. They became walking targets.

  “Damn!”

  Kenn ducked, pushing the muddy hardback as fast as it would go.

  Fort Defiance was under siege. Furious and terrified citizens were trying to get over and through the ten-foot-high electric fence that surrounded the seventeen mile-wide compound. It sounded like a giant bug zapper–poles, cars, furniture, and even people were being used to try to break the live wires–but so far, the strong magnetic force had held.

  It didn’t keep out the bullets, though, and the Marine pulled his cover on tighter as the popping grew steadier, almost rhythmic. Someone out there was firing an assault rifle.

  Kenn’s grip on the wheel tightened, knuckles white–he hated the feeling of near panic that lurked under the surface. He had to get there first! Choppers were swarming over the grounds of the base, trying to evacuate the Marines and “draftees,” but the violent winds gusting from the direction of Houston made landing difficult and might give him a chance.

  In the past, the weather was the worst challenge the pilots had to face here. Now, it was the least of their worries. Arriving birds were being blown out of the smoky skies before
they could descend to safety–crashing, exploding, and flinging twisted metal debris into the screaming mob of rioters. A few of the aircraft were only damaged and crashed later in a remote location, but many were lost on the scene. The telephone poles and grenade launchers were hard for the overloaded choppers to avoid. In short, it was mayhem.

  “Yes!” The cadet barracks came into full view through the thicket of trees. “He has to be here!”

  Men shouted, hungry rioters screamed, guns fired, and gust after violent gust of stomach-churning wind pushed against the truck, slowing it down. The sky above the base roiled with thick red clouds that flashed angrily, and black flakes fell like a blizzard, coating everything with a heavy layer of soot that looked like ash from a volcano.

  Kenn looked up suddenly, the shadow of the chopper passing overhead not what drew his attention, but the silence of its engines. He stared in shock as the big bird began to spiral toward him.

  Kenn mashed the pedal and ducked as the chopper spun past, but the truck’s engine had died too and the hardback didn’t respond. He met the eyes of the horrified pilot for a brief second before the chopper hit the main dorm and exploded.

  Orange flames and thick black smoke billowed upward, and Kenn’s heart froze as the cheers and screams of those outside the fences grew louder, hungrier. If the boy had been in there, he was dead now. No one could have survived that.

  8

  Falling apart at the seams

  By midnight, communication lines were down across the country. There was no internet, no phones, no cable–and unchecked rioting spread across the nation. With their lives suddenly blown away, the stunned survivors had no idea what to do. Few thought to help each other.

  Split between broken states that had only small areas capable of sustaining life, most people tried to get out of the cities. Searching for safety and unaware that it no longer existed; millions more were lost in the aftermath. At dawn, the American people were confident and arrogant about their future. By dusk, the dream was crushed, faith not only shaken, but also mortally wounded.