This War

Chapter One: 1.5 Years After WWIII Began

    The pummeling of fists against a brittle door frame caused the old, broken down house to rattle and jolt quite loudly in the night.
    “Please! Let me in! I mean no harm!”
Dead silence followed the man’s pleads.
    “I know you’re in there! I’m a doctor! Please!”
After a moment, the front door opened and the man faced a younger woman with tangled, light brown hair and gray, almond shaped eyes. She looked at him with a sense of strong distrust along with desperation. A quick few seconds passed before she grabbed his wrist and pulled the man inside with her. He stared at the torn walls and smashed picture windows as they passed and began to feel that choosing this hideout may have been a careless decision.
The woman sped with him through many more badly damaged rooms before stopping by a man who laid across a ripped, corduroy sofa that was clearly once a vivid shade of yellow, but had been turned brown by dirt, dust, and probably gunpowder. The man laying was dark of skin and had a military style buzz-cut that dripped with sweat. The doctor found it easy to see that the sweat was caused by pain, mostly because of the blood soaked rag he held against his left thigh. The woman let go of his arm and pointed to the man on the sofa, simply demanding, “Fix him.”
The new man got on his knees and lifted the rag away from a fresh, four inch wide, bloody hole. Above it was a belt tightened to become a tourniquet.
    “What happened to him?” He asked.
    “He was shot.”
    “Oh god,” he looked around the room frantically, “By who? Are they still here?”
The woman, now agitated, glared at him, “Just fix him!”
    He turned back to the bleeding man and cut his pant leg off below the belt. He flipped the rag over, applying more pressure to the hole. There didn’t seem to be an exit wound.
    “Oh no,” he said, beginning to panic.
    “What?”
    “I think the bullet’s still in there.”
    “So? Get it out! There are tweezers around here somewhere. Use your fingers if you have to.”
The man looked up at her with guilt, “To be honest, I’m only a student.”
The woman growled, “I don’t care. Use your hands!”
    “You sound like you know what you’re doing,” he said condescendingly, “Why don’t you do it?”
“Then you would both probably die.”
    “Wait, why would I?”
She glared again.
    “Oh.”
The man let his hand hover uncomfortably over the bullet hole, shut his eyes tight, then drove three of his fingers into the open wound. As the man on the sofa yelled with a deep tone, the student’s eyes squeezed closed even more. The bullet was a few inches down, but once it was in between his fingers, he did his best to pull it out without slipping up.
    He dropped the bullet on the carpeted floor and put the rag back on the bleeding man’s thigh.
    “I need thread or wire, a needle of some sort, and alcohol or something to clean it,” He said through shaky breaths.
The woman turned and ran into a different room.
    While they were alone, the student lifted the bleeding man’s head a bit to face him.
    “Can you talk?”
He got a few sputters and gasps in reply. The man on the sofa breathed like that for a few more seconds before speaking between pained gasps, “Yes.”
    “What’s your full name?”
    “Anthony James Scotsman.”
    “How old are you?”
    “Twenty three.”
The student hesitated, but finally asked, “by whom and when were you shot?”
    “By annies, about an hour ago.”
The student jumped to his feet in panic, fearing that the anarchists Anthony spoke of were still near.
    “Calm down,” Anthony demanded, “They’re not here anymore.”
The man gulped, nodded, then sat back on his knees to examine the hole more closely.
    “Damn. . . What kind of gun was it?”
    “Didn’t see it well. A shotgun maybe?”
    “Looks like it. The shrapnel is still in your skin.”
Anthony grimaced, “Does that need to come out too?”
    “No, there’s way too much of it. People can live with it in them without trouble.”
The woman ran back into the room with a needle and a spindle of green cloth thread.
    “I couldn't find anything to clean it.”
    “This’ll have to do, then.”
He doubled the string over and wound it up in the needle’s hole, preparing himself mentally.
“Could I have something to bite on?” Anthony asked before he began.
The woman placed a thin, leather bound journal from her jacket in between his teeth.
The student inhaled deeply, eyes closed, then opened them and stared intently at the ugly gash.
    “Here we go.”
He began at the gash’s edge and drove the needle into some of the skin, then he pulled the thread through the new hole and punctured the other side. The patterned continued as Anthony screamed and growled behind the journal’s spine. The woman kneeled down and grabbed his hand, wiping the sweat from his head with her jacket’s baggy, tan sleeve.
    When the student was finished, he tore the rag into stripps that were used to cover Anthony’s stitched wound.
Once everything seemed to calm down a bit and the sun went down, the woman sighed and smiled at the student.
    “Thank you. My name’s Amy. You?”
    “Mitch Greene.”
She nodded and looked out of the shattered window that was above the sofa.
    “It’s dark, and too dangerous to sleep on this side of the house. We should bring Anthony down to the basement.”
Mitch agreed and helped carry Anthony and several other couch cushions down the stairs. The house they were staying was quite large, three stories including the basement, but that didn’t count for much when the back of the home had been shelled several times over and was open for the rest of the world. The basement was about the safest place they had. It was a bit more warm than the rest of the floors as well.
    Amy and Mitch set out three rows of cushions for temporary beds and let Anthony sleep off the pain.
Amy locked the tall, scratched up door, lit a single candle and sat on her bed.
    “What were you doing before you found us?” She asked.
    “What? Oh, I was living in my apartment building with a few other people. We stocked up on vending machine food before soldiers came through and chucked grenades around like idiots and made the whole place collapse in on itself. We were on the bottom floor, so we were blocked in. We would’ve been able to survive on the food and drinks we had for maybe a whole week or two, but one of my friends from med school hid in the bathroom and ate most of our stuff. Four days later, I was the only one that didn’t starve to death or commit suicide. I grabbed an axe we had hidden in case of an attack and almost died trying to get out. I found a bike and ended up here. The bike broke though. And I lost the axe.”
Amy nodded, “I used to be a journalist, so I stuck to the streets and kept record of everything around me,” she held the journal from Anthony’s mouth proudly in her hand, “When I started to run out of food and when soldiers started living around my area, I moved on to rebel areas to trade and live a bit more safely. That’s where I met Anthony. He told me he planned on quitting the rebellion and -”
    “Wait,” Mitch’s eyes grew wide, “He was a rebel? I knew coming here was a mistake! The army’s gonna hunt him down and kill us too!”
She scoffed and peered over at the man’s unconscious form, “I doubt anyone is going to go after one measly rebel. Don’t tell him I called him that.”
    “I won’t if you don’t tell him how bad the wound is.”
Amy looked to him in panic, “How bad is it then?”
    “If it gets infected at all, we’ll have nothing to stop it. It’ll be either to cut it off or leave him. And as for the pain, he was probably in a bit of shock earlier, let’s just say that he’s lucky to be unconscious for it all right now.”
    “How do we prevent infection?”
    “All we can do without medical supplies or a team is keep it super clean.”
She sighed, things were getting too bad. Her head hurt from stress and now she may have to carry a one legged man around this ruin of what was the world’s strongest country.
    “We need to get out of Nevada.”
Mitch squinted, “To where?”
    “I don’t know. . . maybe east? I want to stay away from Washington and Oregon.”
    “Why not head around the capital and up north? We should go up to Canada and out of the US.”
Her expression turned solemn, “You didn’t hear about Canada? Right along the southern border, Russia bombed them too. I bet there are tons more annies around that area too. ”
    “Why? I thought Canadian-Russian relations were OK!”
“No idea. I haven't seen a working radio in a long time. That’s just what I heard from passing people.”
Mitch sunk to the cold, concrete floor and held his head in his hands, “My parents and little sister live around the border.”
Amy’s eyes widened, instantly regretting the fact that she had told him so harshly. She too went through tragedy, but it had been a year ago. She looked over at him. His reddened eyes were locked on the ground. Mitch almost seemed lost, like a child.
    “B-but that was about a half a year ago! I bet a lot of people were evacuated from that area. Where did your family live?”
He looked upwards, “Kenora, Ontario.”
    “That’s incredibly far from where the initial bombs were dropped. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were a little farther north.”
    Mitch rubbed at his dry skin and took a deep breath. Amy was right, and he needed to stay as calm as possible. He nodded and turned to Anthony, who seemed to be sweating in his sleep. The man’s eyes were clenched shut in pain, they could only hope that he would sleep through the night. No one around here had access to any kind of painkillers or antibiotics, so it was up to Anthony to push through it all himself.
“If he can make it, I can make it,” Mitch thought.
    “You can sleep. I’ll take first watch,” Amy said. She watched him roll over on his bed, away from the candle’s light.
It was possible that She would take all of the night watches, after thinking too much about the first bombs it would be hard to sleep at all.
    It was a day no one would be able to forget, worse than the twin towers, worse than the Pearl Harbor attack. A year and a half ago, Russia sent three massive missile strikes to DC, Oregon, and Santa Barbara. Ever since then, they’ve been sending air strikes without warning to tear down big cities. Destruction spans from the west coast to around Colorado but everything east of that is in no better state. Chaos runs rampant throughout the entire country. Savage and merciless anarchists known as annies began to appear in every city of every state. They shell whole neighborhoods and wander the streets day and night for the simple reason of ending innocence. Some will plain out shoot you in the face, but others choose to force your food and useful supplies away and let you starve.
    Amy saw a building fall. The structure itself wasn’t too impressive, just a nice, glass hotel building she used to stay at. She watched it’s bottom supports crack and shudder under the stress of strong, homemade bombs until it gave up and toppled over. She was close enough to taste the cloud of dust it sent into the air.
    She woke up to the basement’s darkness, the candle had gone out. Worried that she had accidentally slept through anger, Amy used up another match to relight it and looked to the two sleeping bodies beside her. They seemed fine aside from Anthony’s clenched eyelids and a bit of sweat on his forehead. She stood and decided to search through the rest of the basement. When she and Anthony had taken refuge in this decaying house, there was too much to panic about for a full search.
The stone walls surrounding her dripped with dirty street water and smelled like mildew. There were two doors, the metal entrance they came from and the battered, wooden one that stood before her. It opened without trouble and when the candle’s light spilled through the opening a family of rats scuttled into a gap in the wall. Amy examined a pile of cardboard boxes, each labeled with the same brand, Exoco. Hope passed in her mind, perhaps they contained food, or anything else that could be considered “valuable” to traders. She set the candle aside and pulled each box’s unsealed lid away to reveal only dust, empty aluminum food cans, broken glass, and a few pieces of shredded cloth. She grabbed the cloth and shoved it in her jacket pocket with a scowl. This house was proving to to as useless and desolate as the one before, and then the one before that.
Amy moved the light to the other corner of the room to illuminate a pile of broken light bulbs and a rotten cat carcass. She was stunned at first by the dead animal, but it all washed over as sadness. After half a year, dead people didn’t scare her anymore. After a full year they became nothing but a smelly annoyance, it takes another half a year to stop noticing them along the street sides or laying in their decrepit homes, but dead animals were not quite as common. Amy stepped away and crouched down. Her left hand covered her mouth as she cried and the other still held onto the candle. She watched a couple of flies crawl over the cat’s almost hairless, leathery skin and hide within it’s frame, curled up and tired.
The door she came from opened and Mitch stepped through, but Amy didn’t turn away.
He walked over and sat on the cold floor next to her.
    “Are you OK?”
She put the candle down and wiped her face with the jacket’s worn sleeve, shaking her head.
    “What is that?” He said, noticing the cat’s body.
    “A cat,” she sputtered, “It’s a cat.”
Mitch’s eyes widened and averted away from it in response.
    “It’s been. . . So long,” Amy began, “Did you see the dead body in the entryway when you came in?”
    “No.” He said softly.
    “Neither did I. I mean. . . I saw it, but I didn’t notice it.”
She didn’t have to say anymore for him to understand.