The Peacekeepers

Part One; Chapter Eight

War at Home.

New York City has fallen. The war that my uncle predicted would happen finally has. Our soldiers and cops are fighting as we wait for the United Nations to get off their asses and help us. We wait for help that never comes as our entire east coast is getting overrun by the U.E.A. and their massive army.

I'm thirteen years old when it happens. I've trained every day over the years except this week. It's the week after Christmas and Dad and Tybult are in New York fighting right now along with most of the grown men in my neighborhood. Trying desperatly to take back New York from the United Eastern Alliance.

I'm sitting here with my mother watching the most horrible event in U.S. history unfold before our eyes on a television screen. School was canceled and most of the teachers either enlisted or were conscripted into the military along with all the doctors they could get their hands on. All the cops were either dead, at war or trying to quell the riots in the city.

There was a hole in the living room wall shaped like a human head and a broken window from where a human being was thrown through it. He broke into the house and tried stealing our supplies and getting what he wanted from my mom. She was pinned to the couch when I ran out of my room and broke some of the guy's ribs with my knee to his body. I picked him up, drove his head through the wall, ripped it out and threw him through a closed window.

We don't have our guns anymore because they were all taken for the war effort. I'm actually glad Dad was gone when it happened. He would have died and taken many with him over his guns.

I've been keeping Alice in her room for safety. I've trained her a bit but not enough for her to fight anyone who's a real threat. She's just not ready yet.

Our food stores are running low and the water and electricity have been unreliable at best. Mom's getting sick. Really sick. She looks worse and worse each and every day. She ran a fever of 105 degrees one day. The winter air is coming in so I told Alice to start bundling up. 

It's snowing now. I used to love snow but now it just seems like more of a nuisance than anything. I've been able to melt and purify it for us to drink and I've been making mom drink most of it. She barely has the strength to do even that. She's cold. I hold her blood stained handkerchief up to her mouth for when she coughs up her bloody mucus. Breathing is painful for her now. A struggle. I hold her close to me as she violently coughs and breaths her last. I remain with her even in her final moments of life.

About a week after the snow started falling the grid went down. No food, no water, no gas, no information, nothing. The last news report was that the conflict finally went nuclear. Tennessee, Florida, New York, Most of the United Kingdom and Europe, Israel, and all U.E.A. countries had been completely engulfed in nuclear fire.

The doctors were gone. The teachers were gone. The police? Gone. Fire department? A distant memory. All of them were dead. No adults to keep order. Just scared kids wanting to live. I had to turn away people I once called "friend" and kick more than a few of their asses because they were trying to raid my garden or steal our supplies. Within a few short months it turned into a literal Hell on Earth.

As I bury my mother and comfort my sister, kids die, gangs and remnants of gangs fight for control of neighborhoods. As I plant my garden and dig a well, kids younger than Alice die slow deaths from violence, hunger, dehydration and exposure. I see children collapse from sickness in front of my house and all I can do is burn their corpses and pray I don't catch any diseases from their carcasses.

This was the time of The Chaos...