Chapter Text
The cold wind blows trash around the streets, people are freezing to death, and no one can sleep through the sound of gunshots and screams. The sky is grey and the air is musky, filled with smoke and ash. Ruthless people intentionally fighting others in allies, and people stealing food to survive. Officers deceiving and abusing citizens of our country. I truly don’t understand these barbaric behaviors. During this calamity, I lie here with an old blanket on top of me, in an old, abandon penthouse in an apartment complex, right off of 15th street, scared to death of what the world has come to. Next to me, curled up into a ball with a blanket over her is my seven-year-old sister, Rosie, crying her eyes out while watching Netflix on her iPad plus ultra. I am still amazed that we have a stable WIFI connection in the midst of all of this. Everyone knew this was coming, for the chances of this were highly probable. We knew that we would be facing this tragedy sooner or later; we just didn’t know when. It has only been four months since World War Three started and our parents are both already dead. You never know true tragedy until you watch your whole entire world fall apart right in front of your eyes.
The war was officially declared a world war on November 21st, 2054. It all started over a fight for fossil fuels. The world ended up burning almost all of its fossil fuels which cannot be replaced. Having said that, there are alternative methods of using energy such as wind, water, or solar power but they are not as efficient; but instead of finding ways to make the alternative energy methods more efficient, most of the first-world countries have been fighting over the remaining fossil fuels. Our father was an eminent general in the American army who led troops to help fight in the battle for our nation’s very soul. Unfortunately, he and all of his men were killed in a fight in Denmark. Our older brother Phoenix was recruited to fight in the army when he was sixteen and was one of the top soldiers in his troop until he became a P.O.W. during a battle in Spain and was later said to have been killed. Our mother, well, she was the heart of it all. She was beautiful, sincere, intelligent, romantic, and most of all loving. She was the one to keep our hopes high once the war started and even after our father had died and Phoenix was recruited to the army. Rosie and I were so close to her until one morning when we woke up, and she was nowhere to be seen. We haven’t seen her since that treacherous day and we both presumed she was dead. In late January of 2054, there was a pandemic of a very contagious disease that had swept the nations just one score and ten years ago. A virus called COVID-19. COVID had killed millions of people from coast to coast and sea to sea almost including my sister.
Now it is just me and Rosie. We rely on each other for everything. There is not much left in our city. The remains are mainly just abandoned skyscrapers, theaters, shops, cafes, and restaurants that are extremely worn down to the point that not even the homeless man begging for food on the street would want to step foot into them. The fact that one of the largest and most populated cities in America can go from being a top tourist attraction to basically a ghost town in such little time is appalling! This is New York City! Once home to 8.5 million people! One of the largest megacities in the World! A place where every view of the city was picturesque. The Big Apple! Looking back and analyzing the drastic differences that happened in less than one year and I am still bewildered by all of the tragic changes the city has gone through. Everything was perfectly normal and on routine until February 5th, 2029 when German troops stormed into NYC because of how many “unnecessary” fossil fuels that the city was using. Everyone in the city who was not shot or terribly injured by the troops was evacuating as quickly as humanly possible and the only people left were the few people who truly had nowhere else that was better to go.
Even after all that has happened, there are still people that live here, but there are only about 2,000 of us. We still have a couple of small grocery stores, clothing shops, gas stations, and a police station with trained officers and a jail. We even still have two fully functioning hospitals though. We also have five schools, each grades K-12; one per borrow. Rosie attends the school in Queens near the old mansion we live in. I would be graduating from high school this year but so much has happened that I don’t think I could keep my attention on school work. I would just be baffled by the academic concepts. Also to be quite honest I feel like I am just graduating early at the age of 17. I have made it through my junior year of high school and every year before so I just consider myself a person who simply just skipped a grade.
Looking around at the shelves upon shelves of old books, one particular section catches my eye. There are about thirty-five books, all written around 1860. There is folklore, novelties, historical fiction, and books about the revolutionary war. I open one of the books titled Little Women. I scan over the first couple of pages then read the inner cover to understand the main premise of the book. The dialogue is complicated and hard to comprehend. Only now do I realize that Rosie is behind me and home from school. Usually, she sneaks up behind me and says “Boo!” but when I turn around, I see her trembling and speechless.
I look at her pale, fearful face and suddenly remember the last time she resembled such fear; it was when we could not find our mother.
“Rosie!” I say panicked with a slight tremble in my voice, “what happened?” She remains silent.
“Rosalyn Mae Dorian!” I scream with fear starting to take over me. She finally snaps out of it and falls to her knees covering her face.
“What’s wrong? Rosie, you’re scaring me!” I exclaim. She breaks out into tears.
“What is going on here!”
“I’m sorry,” Rosie cries,
“I’m so sorryyyyyy!” she says extending the “y” sound as she cries.
“What are you sorry about?” I ask confusedly.
I’m not able to wrap my head around what is going on and before I can ask any more questions, I hear Rosie scream. In the blink of an eye, I feel something abnormally hot and painful pierce through my back and I drop to the ground unconscious.