No Happy Endings

Garter: 2031

Sirens. A whaling, horribke noise that made fear and dread creep into every mind and sink into every heart that heard them. Dread of who was coming and what they would do.The bombers were coming. The bombers from the South. They ouldnt be kind this time. Not that they were any time, but the North had taken their capitol. They would destroy the city.

Garter hid inside of the heroine house as the bombs rained down upon Washington. She had no where else to go. She could hear the screams, and the agony, and the chaos and death. One bomb hit the roof of the four story building she hid in. Garter was on the first floor and was just able to run out of the building before the higher floors crashed into the ground. A giant cluster of bricks almost hit Garter. It flew inches from the side of her head. She honestly wouldn't have cared if it hadn't.

Garter had to find another place to hide. She was in the part of D.C near Silver Springs. Maybe she could run there.

She saw bombs everywhere. This bombardment was worse than most others. The government had put blimps close to the ground to keep the bombs from fully destroying the city, but they had all been obliterated. She saw the shops and stores to her left all on fire. Snow was coming down slowly, but it was no where near enough to where it neesed to be to put out the fires. To her right she saw a family running out of their townhouse just before it was torn apart by a bomb.

She ran along the alley ways and side roads until she could see the giant spires of the 300 foot tall Cathedral of Jesus Christ. The Bell tower was sttles with Gothic architecture. There were beautiful glass stained windows from 2025. The church had been originally built in 1781, and had been rebuilt in 2024. She ran as fast as she could, and then some, to get to the cathedral. When she got there she swung open the door, ran in and shut the door behind her.

The cathedral was empty. It had been for years. Overturned pews, bibles torn apart, and a cross that had been broken into two pieces. The glass stained windows showed stories of the Bible. Garter had never been religious, but she still understood a little of it.

There was an open door on the left. It was dark, wherever it lead to. She passed through the doorway and down a stairs. It kept going, and going, and going. When the stairs ended, she was in a giant room. Probably for parties or celebrations. Round tables where situated around the room. They had white lace laid over them and flowers. On the opposite side of the room from the stairs, there was a casket. It was empty. Garter didn't know why there was an empty casket. She then realized there wasn't only one. There were twenty all around the room.

She heard music start. Then footsteps in unison as people walked. Garter felt super uneasy. Something bad was about to happen. She saw a closet and figured it was a good place to hide. She ran to the closet and opened it up and put herself inside. She shut the closet doors and remained silent. She could peer through the cracks in the doors to see 20 men, women, and children, each one standing individually by their own casket. One man left the group to stand in the center of the room.

"Our brothers and sisters!" He started. "We our gathered here today, because we all know now, that God, has left us. We must become god in the next life." Garter was internally screaming. She now realized what this was.

This was a sucide-murder funeral.

"Please, sing the Holy song with me as we depart from this mortal flesh, and become god!" He walked to the first coffin as the coffin people hummed fearfully. He was holding a gun.

The first person to be in front of him was a crying woman. Her hands were tied. She wasn't here by choice. She must have been kidnapped.

"You," he said, "tried to escape. But we here want to save you! From all the agony and from your own filthy sin inside!" "I am not filthy!" She shouted at him. "I am a lesbian! And your religion doesn't even say I'm wrong! You are wrong! You want to become god, and you can't! Your a fucking psychopath!" He put the gun to her head, smiled, and pulled the trigger. Her brains shot out the back of her head. Garter clapped her hand over her mouth to keep a scream from escaping out of her mouth. All the people at the coffins recoiled in shock and fear. One man seemed to be having a panic attack. Someone else was trying to choke herself.

The man kept going to every coffin and shot the person standing there in the face. He shot the men, the women, and the children.

He even shot a baby. He smiled every time he shot a person.

By the end of the shooting, Garter was in tears, lucky that the shooter didn't hear her muffled sobs. The shooter then turned to face the closet. He looked right through the crack at Garter, and then shot himself.

Garter waited two minutes and then walked out of the closet. It was so silent that the only thing she could hear other than the bombs up above was the trickle of blood leaking out of the bodies and over the tiled floor. She fell to her knees and cries. I could have saved them, she thought, and I didn't. She walked to the dead baby. It had a small hole going right through its chest. The face was the face of an innocent child. He was so small, he might have only been a few days old.

Garter took the baby and went up the stairs. She walked along the aisle and out of the church. She had been here once before and hadn't seen that man. He was a psychotic man, and probably kidnapped those people. That humming was forced out of them.

Garter held the baby. She swaddled it in a blanket that had been under it. She walked into the road as bombs and explosions were alla round her. The noises were so loud that her hearing became nothing but ringing. She held the baby close to her chest and walked in the direction of D.C. She walked until she reached the Potomac River. She took off her shoes. The grass felt good beneath her bare skin. She walked into the shallows of the river. The cold water caressed her. She walked until the water was up to her chest.

"Little baby." She said, "I don't even know your name, or your story, but I feel bad that someone killed you. I want to put you into this river, and then you'll be sent to the ocean maybe, I think. I'm sorry." She laid the baby's body in the water and let the current take her along. The baby submerged fully, and it's body was carried away from that place.

Garter swam slowly to the river bank and got out of the river. The planes were gone now, and the bombs had stopped.

The city wasn't at its worse. At least there was no complete destruction. Foggy Bottom had been rebuilt after the second bombing, but the Watergate Hotel Complex was completely destroyed now. The Potomac started to swirl with debris and pieces of wood. The Cherry Blossoms were all splinters. Except for one, it had some how not been splintered into a million pieces.

Suddenly the Bunker Alarms went off. That meant everyone had to go into the bunker City.

Every citizen had to get the things they wanted and go to the Square. The Square was at the National mall. All you had to do was stand on the Mall. The Mall would then sink down all the way to the Bunker City, and then after everyone got off, it would come back up to the top. Garter was on the fifth wave, and as she descended she made sure the last thing she would see in this city would be the Washington Monument. A symbol of peace and beauty and power. It became smaller snd smalle as the Square sank to the Bunker. Eventually, all of D.C, Arlington, and the surrounding parts of Maryland were in the city.

The city was almost beautiful. Glass lit buildings, man made waterfalls, and powerful lights made it seem as if they were in Delmarva City at night. Well, before Delmarva City had been invaded.

Before Garter could fully take in the city, a man grabbed her, and stabbed her neck with a needle. She fell asleep, and asleep she would be for the next 84 years. In a deep, ageless sleeps with dream after dream. And for Garter it was dream after dream of her dying girlfriend, and of her lovely city, and of Towson. Of Maryland. Of the Atlantic Ocean. And of the Mountains.

She loved the mountains. She always would.

As she slept she was oblivious to the surface world as it fell into ruin and decay, and as nuclear war consumed it and killed most of the population within a month. She didn't know how radioactivity mutated humans, and how monsters would be born from more monsters.

The world would drift into emptiness, and Garter wouldn't see the world for years.