Remains Brave {New War Series Book 1}

Chapter 1: Before I Burn

September 4th, One

I pick myself up off the ground. The cold hard ground. The only connection I have with my past life. The only connection I have with my parents.

I hate this world. My body should be buried here too. Purple lips and clouded eyes, lungs filled with smoke, frozen in time. The memories swirl into a terrible nightmare cycling over and over and over in this shitty head of mine...

A sniffle.

I look up from the clump of grass stuck in the dirt by its roots to see my brother's soot stained, tear streaked face. The little boy I grew up wrestling with now a giant man. The boyish face of a seventeen-year-old on the body of a hulk. He's a broken boy living the nightmare too. The nightmare where you bury your mother and father and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins... all within a few days of each other. The only difference being that he did not cause this... I did.

The hardest to bury was my Mother. She was our biggest fan, the one who supported every venture and every activity. The mother who never let us down. And yet I let her down. I killed her.

The ever-present ache in my chest returns as I relive the horrors of yesterday in my head. I wasn't sure how I would continue to be strong without her. She was my go-to for everything, and yet I killed her. Not a day will go by that I won't hold myself accountable for the grave I stand on. I'll probably go insane at some point from the guilt. I'm a monster, and yet my brother still stands by me. I don't deserve the support of him, or any of the Mutt army. I deserve to rot in this dirt.

Yet the more I think about it, the more I'm just angry at life. I hate the government, the Benes, the incinerators, all of them. I even hate the Mutt army to a certain point, but it's more of a deep and utter hatred for myself. I hate that my ideas somehow turned the world as I knew it upside down. The government... the Benes... they can all go to Hell. To the deep depths of Hell. They should burn like my family did. The savages murdered my dogs, and they have the gall to call us thugs. We fight for our freedom; we don't kill unless we have to. We don't set churches and nursing homes on fire. We don't kill innocent children to line the pockets of the few elitist out there who run this joint. I hate everything about life, yet I choose to go on. I think... I think I'm just a coward...

My brother and I... We both were going to make it out of the unfortunate situation our family had been stuck in. We were going to be successful and good people... We weren't supposed to be looking down at the mass grave of loved ones, but that's our reality in the New War. My brother should still be playing high school sports, but he would never play again. He's too close to me to make it out of this thing alive anyway. I would inevitably kill him too.

And then I look at Rye, the twelve-year-old cousin of mine, that I am now responsible for too. It doesn't make sense how we are the only ones left of us. Luck and strong immunity are the only things that got us to this point. Somehow our bodies were strong enough to survive the manufactured virus. I figure the immunity from strain A must have fought off the illness from strain B later. The vaccine they pushed on the masses killed off nearly every person who got it. If it weren't such a horrible thing, I probably would laugh at the stupidity of those pushing for a fast fix for something purposely set free to kill people. The governments capitalized on it, that's for sure. Actually, I think I will laugh. I laugh at morbid things now. It comes with having everything you care about ripped away from you in a matter of days. Maybe my mind will rot, and then my body will go soon after...

I shake my mind of those thoughts. I still have a purpose. I have lives to protect. I have people who don't even know me practically worshipping the ground I walk on. And like everything else, I have to go along with it because apparently, it's "the right thing to do."