I am in a large room, dimly lit. I feel like I haven’t taken a shower in months, maybe not slept in the same amount of time. The building I’m in appears to be an old apartment building. I somehow know that I am on the top floor, maybe 15 floors up. The windows are almost all boarded up.
There are people all around me, busy like a beehive. There is a tension in the air. A closer look, and most of these people are armed. Not small arms either, some of these are larger machine gun type weapons. They are familiar, yet not. I realize that several of these people are asking me questions. Wait, not questions, they are asking for orders. Orders? I’m momentarily confused. I look around again, and I realize that this is some type of guerilla headquarters. At the moment that I begin to ask where I am, an alarm sounds. “Aircraft, coming from the southwest, big ones!” I hear from the far corner of the room near a monitor with lots of red dots. Lights begin to flash, and I hear a siren. Everyone grabs something and heads for the south exit. (I have no idea how I know this is the south exit.) I am herded towards the same direction……..
At this moment I wake up. It’s 2AM. I grumble, and lay back down to sleep.
It’s darker. I am going downstairs. There are people in the stairwell that do not belong with us. They are standing on landings, wandering into the halls. I think “Damn civilians, they are going to get killed.” I fire my rifle into the ceiling, and I tell the people to get out of the building, in a very unkind way. My group continues down the stairwell. At this point I know that I am underground. We reach the bottom of the stairwell. It is very dark. At this point I hear a noise. It’s droning sound, very loud, yet very distant. It steadily gets closer. The woman next to me, complete with fatigues, looks worried and begins to pray. I hear someone mutter under their breath “Dear god, they sent the dreadnought drones after us…..”, and then I hear the bombs begin to fall………
I wake up again, it’s now 3AM. I try to sleep again.
It’s near pitch black. I am in some type of tunnel. There is a great deal of smoke in the air, stale. There are a few lights on the ceiling in the distance, but they are sparking and not very bright. My group has greatly reduced in numbers, and most of us appear to be minorly injured in some way. One of the men next to me asks if I am ok. I nod my head, and ask where we are. “About 2 miles from the dust off point. We were lucky to get into our tunnel system from Goucho HQ. We just finished the tunnel connection last week. And good thing too, they destroyed the top 12 floors in that bombing run I’m told.” 12 floors? There must have been 400 people on those 12 floors……..why would anyone kill 400 innocent civilians? My thoughts are interrupted by the floor shaking. Dust falls from the ceiling in rhythmic intervals. From far behind us there is a loud WHOMP, followed by a whooshing sound, and a breeze wafts from that direction. “Run! They’ve broken into the tunnel system!” The next few minutes are a jumble of darkness, dust, a frantic scramble towards…….. what exactly?
I wake up. 4AM. Dear god, is this nightmare going to stop now? Please?
My group is decidedly haggard. There are now 5 of us. We are in some type of air transport. The woman next to me hands me a pair of dark tinted glasses. “Look to the north. We’ve just confirmed the big ones are 5 minutes out. They think they have you trapped in Dayton sir. Keep your glasses on.” I remember thinking “Of course, why would I take them off?” I look to the north, and just then a tremendous, horrible light fills everything……………
I wake up, sweating. It’s 5 AM. That last blast, that was nuclear! It takes me nearly 45 minutes to get back to sleep.
Still riding in the air transport. “We’ve just confirmed that 8 more launches have taken place. It appears this is the beginning of the next phase sir.” 8 more cities gone. Millions of people. Over what? A little freedom? We weren’t hurting anyone. We just wanted to be left alone after the collapse. A few others felt the same way and joined us. We had it pretty good for a few years, then the juntas got involved. Corporate war parties, the last remnants of the old way. They are the only ones with good resources left. They threw everything they had at us, simply because we didn’t want to follow their rules. But they weren’t expecting us to evade them for so long, and they got impatient. Nukes were their last option. Don’t they see what they’ve done? No more sunny days, no more warm winters. At least 40 nukes have gone off worldwide in the past 4 years, more than enough to counteract the so-called global warming they warned us about 30 years ago. Now we have 300 years at least of winter, winter, and more winter. It’s going to be tough to survive, even without having to fight these fanatics. I look to the group, and I look outside. The mushroom cloud in the background is glowing red. We have so far to go, and so little time to prepare…………………….
And then I wake up to go to work. Talk about a rough night!!!!
