Alright, time to tell you about the War. Not the politics about how it started. I'm talking about what happened to me, personally.
I was having a bad day at school, which is another way of saying I was having a day at school. I'd pulled two detentions that day: one for sleeping in class, and one for profanity when the teacher rudely woke me up.
I was supposed to meet with June outside of Mrs. Hart's class. June, she got top marks. Always a lot smarter than me. Her parents would ground her from seeing Mark or myself if her grades slipped at all. In retrospect, I don't blame them. We weren't exactly good influences, and her two best friends being boys probably seemed awfully suspicious to them.
Me, too.
Hey, nothing untoward was going on, I can promise you that. June would've kicked our asses if we'd ever tried anything, too.
So, it was March 10th, a Wednesday. I was in Earth Science. I was having a normal day, ignoring the lesson, and then Mrs. Hart stopped talking. This was atypical for her because she never shut up. There was a little tremor in the building. Now, I will preface that we weren't strangers to earthquakes. The New Madrid fault would rattle Chicago every so often and nobody thought much of it. We first thought it was another of those.
The problem was that we then heard it. You don't hear earthquakes, at least not like this. The ground shook harder than it ever had under a normal earthquake. Then, it stopped. But right after that, the same siren that would run to warn us of a severe storm blared three times. Twice was for weather. Three times meant there was an impending attack. I didn't know that at the time--hardly anyone did. It wasn't like anyone was expecting an attack, and we didn't do duck-and-cover drills like they used to have kids do during the Cold War.
The principal came on the classroom's screen and told everybody to remain calm while they got more information about what was going on.
His face was barely off the screen when a pressure wave hit the building and shattered every window on the west side of the room. The loud boom that accompanied it almost went unnoticed because of the glass flying everywhere.
Nobody seemed to be seriously hurt by that, fortunately. The whole thing subsided and we just kind of looked at each other. Even Mrs. Hart was stunned into silence. Then we started to hear more distant explosions, gunfire, shouting. Mrs. Hart tried to tell us to get under our desks but not a single one of us was having it. We all got up and left haphazardly.
Turned out everyone else had the same idea. The halls were flooded with scared teenagers. Obviously, my first priority was June. I pushed through the crowd toward the class I knew she was in, and I guess she was doing the same thing because we met halfway. We hugged for a minute but we couldn't exactly dawdle or we'd get trampled.
The building rocked again and I asked June where Mark was. She didn't know, but said he'd been out of school all week. She didn't know the reason for that, either. I hadn't really thought to ask--we didn't share more than two classes and it's not like I hung out with him at lunch. I hoped he and his family were just out of the area altogether.
The building kept shaking sporadically and as we went by some of the classrooms we realized they had collapsed. I later learned this was from shelling being done by artillery emplacements snuck through Canada. I don't think the school itself had been targeted, they were just hitting everything. Now, we all knew that the Eastern Confederation was the most likely culprit behind the attack, but we couldn't figure out how they'd gotten so close. There wasn't time to worry about it, either. But clearly they had us dead to rights. It was probably lucky we were stupid teenagers because if not for that, we might have gone straight to total despair at having been caught with our collective pants down like this.
June and I broke away form the crowd and got out of the building into open space. This part of East Chicago was nearly a ruin already. We ran down several streets, avoiding tanks and soldiers--ours or theirs, we weren't sure--and got to a clear area where we could get a glimpse of downtown. Suffice it to say, there wasn't a downtown anymore. Chicago has a recognizable skyline. Or at least, it did. That was gone. The skyscrapers had either been felled completely or had their top halves blasted right off.
We weren't thinking, just running. We got lost and wound up in a part of town we'd never normally go to. Then we stumbled in front of a column of tanks with some infantry alongside. The lead tank just stopped and this guy popped out and said we shouldn't be there. Well, no shit.
I thought he was going to let us leave, but he insisted on escorting us out of the hot zone. He wouldn't explain anything. It was eerily quiet for a while apart from the sounds of the tanks and boots marching in unison.
It's funny how quickly you notice the sound of a bullet bouncing off a tank's armor. Everybody took cover, June and me included. One of the tanks rotated its cannon toward the source of the gunfire, and that's when I saw different tanks and realized those had the flag of the Republic of Illinois on them, meaning we were with the enemy.
Uh oh.
Yeah, not exactly where we wanted to be, though it's hard to say what would've been safer in that moment. The enemy did seem to be winning, after all.
After that little scuffle died down, they resumed taking us and a few other civilians they'd collected to the stadium where they were holding civilian prisoners. I don't know if they planned to bargain with us or what. It's possible they didn't even have a plan beyond the attack.
So, we're just outside the stadium, rolling up with the tanks and soldiers, and a bunch of Alliance troops pop out and ambush us. I mean, they came out of nowhere, just popping out of the alleys and side streets.
Gunfire broke out, shit got really hairy, June fell on me and then we were on the ground. I felt her bleeding on me but I didn't completely process it at the time.
She looked at me, said some things that didn't make any sense, and then went to sleep. Well, I mean, she died. I thought she was sleeping. Then I passed out.
That's horrible. She was just hit by a random bullet?
Basically. We were unarmored, unarmed, in a war zone that was still heavily defended by local forces, even if those forces had initially been caught off-guard. I'll give them credit for mobilizing so quickly, but you might imagine I wasn't too happy they killed June.
And I mean, that was that. Next thing I knew, I was being pulled out of a pile of bodies by Alliance troops and we were evacuated to O'Hare Spaceport. There were a handful of autonomous pods that could be launched toward Mars--one of those contingency setups they'd started putting at every major spaceport a few years before--and they shoved all the people that would fit into them, and fired us off into space. At that point in time, they didn't know if anyone on Earth would survive. They thought it best to send us away, just in case. There was quite a collection of people in my pod, honestly. There was this couple in their thirties that was just fucking petrified the entire time. There was an old guy who didn't say much. And then there was a toddler that, from what I was told, got orphaned pretty early on. You'd think the couple would have taken the kid, but they just shook their heads rapidly at the suggestion. The old guy had no interest at all. So, it fell to me. The kid wasn't talking yet, so we just sat together in the pod.
Everything was so quiet once we got into space. I called it a "pod" but it was about the size of a studio apartment on the inside, complete with food for the whole six-week trip. The entire pod was like the size of a big charter bus, so only maybe a third was habitable. Tight quarters for a bunch of strangers to spend so much time together in.
The old man got us to do singing games, like 99 Bottles of Beer. The little kid just clapped along. The couple halfheartedly participated. I was pretty chipper for a 16-year-old who'd just seen some horrible shit, but I think was in shock and denial. Going through all that and just being shot into space, it was easy to think everything before the pod was a bad dream. Of course, reality catches up with you sooner or later, and in our case the War caught up with us. There weren't a lot of engagements in space during the War but evidently we drifted right through one of them and took fire. We went off-course and slammed into the side of an Alliance ship. By some miracle, the toddler and I survived. Nobody else did, and from what I was told, several people within the Alliance ship were killed when our impact caused a decompression event.
Now, I say I "survived," but that's only in the most technical sense. About 38% of my body was destroyed by fire and impact. Everything that went into rebuilding me, that's another story. But in more ways than one, that war ended my life. It shouldn't be any wonder why I have such a personal grudge against it.