A warning to you all:

This story is not meant to be happy, or fulfilling. I fully intend for this story and any sequels it inspires to be majorly depressing, especially by the end. It won't be fully funny or upbeat. It is truly a man born before the war that lived in Virginia witnessing the aftermath of the destruction of his entire livelihood. Do with that what you will.

Prelude: A World Reborn in Fire

War...

War never changes...

Before registered, recorded history, long preceding the collective economization of combat, humanity first found a way to destroy itself in the art of the hand and stone. In the back-when times, mankind fought over survival, for land and food, and for rites of passage. The men that charged into combat slaughtered their enemies for the spoils of war- life-giving clothing and water.

In the ages of iron and steel, kings and lords sent their subjects to fight argumentative battles over petty squabbles between families. They killed hundreds of thousands over the course of only a few short decades, and the killing continued. Despite the fact that survival was all but guaranteed, men still killed one another for trivial gains.

By the times of the sixteenth century, the beginning of the age of musket and bayonet, men had become so efficient in wiping themselves off of the face of the earth that wartime became a way of life. Men, women, and children spoke of the war as if they were regarding the Sunday news by the fire. For mankind, war was a collection of civilized and political means by which an end was reached. To humanity, the end justified those means.

When the twentieth century revolutionized combat technology forever, men could destroy one another in groups of hundreds or thousands in the blink of an eye, all without seeing the faces of those they killed. Combat then was for reasons of humane law and moral code. The long-romanticized view of battle was eschewed for a practical and applicative approach. Still, man tried its best to seek its own destruction.

In the twenty-first century, when the protective bubble weaved by millennia of armed conflict burst and spread the hellfire of nuclear annihilation over the barren ashes of those who once called earth home, man finally succeeded in bringing the world to its knees. Their nuclear war was over oil, nuclear material, and food resources.

There were few who survived the atomic obliteration of their homes without reaching the safety of large underground security chambers, the vaults. Those that witnessed the destruction of their daily lives and homes became shells of themselves, their flesh and minds rotting into oblivion due to the radioactive air.

All except one.

For on the day that nuclear fire was released from the very fingertips of every government and military on earth, one man was completely spared the hell of the wastes. He fought for his country, witnessed the atrocities of the greatest war of mankind, and gave his effort to the betterment of society...

but his service to mankind is not over; he will soon bear the weight of humanity on his shoulders. For though the reasons for the war have changed...

War...

War never changes...

Awash in flame.

The world, his entire existence was awash in the red flames of nuclear fire, rather becoming of a nation that spurned the other nations of the world enough to provoke a preemptive strike that resulted in a retaliatory set of launches, and the chain continued.

Abel stared from the entrance of his small cliff-side bunker as the mushroom clouds in the far-off distance rose into the sky, spewing ash and smoke into the air for miles in every direction. The red flames of hell spread over the landscape before his eyes, torching buildings, trees, grass, men, women, and children alike. An irradiated, overbearingly hot wind blew with a harsh whisper through the burning Virginia Commonwealth.

He felt tears escaping his eyes as he watched his hometown in the great bowl of Virginia's valleys fling dust, the remains of the houses and people that rested there, into the mix of smog blanketing the earth. He was lucky (or unlucky) enough to be moving a few supplies to his fallout shelter at the time of the nearby detonations, but his family, his home, was within the blast radius of the first few bombs. All he saw was a mighty flash, and then suddenly everything was gone.

Abel dropped to his knees in the open doorway of the bunker, the muscles around his eyes twitching in horror, anguish, and fury. His wife of four years and his daughter of three had been in the town before the dropping of fire from the skies. They were close enough to the blast that they would have been nearly instantly vaporized, and so while he was devastated by their loss, a small part of him was thankful that they hadn't been on the outskirts of the explosion like himself and some of the more unfortunate people in the cars on the highway a few miles to the east. He could see the small specks of metal and broken glass from the mountainside, one of the tallest in the state.

He closed his eyes and looked at the ground for a moment, his eyelids flashing red and black as the annihilation in front of him bellowed smoke and fire in alternating patterns. Had this been what his service in the Anchorage Campaign had bought him? A surviving chance while his family and his life were destroyed? Was he meant to be thankful to whatever deity looked down upon him from the heavens that he wasn't among the dead? He didn't feel thankful. All he felt was that he wanted to be down there with his family, becoming ashes in the wind.

His vision shifted between the throbbing blur of red and black before him and a hazy mixture of colors that raged forth from his head as his mind swam in his despair. A new wave of tears rushed forth and spilled over his cheeks and stubbly chin to fall to the ground below. There, the heat that overtook his world made the drops evaporate in just a few seconds. He felt his skin protest as radiation continued to sweep over him, and he slammed his fists into the ground in front of him, furious at his country, at his country's enemies, and at himself, all for the same reason.

The world was over, his family dead, and he blamed himself just as much as he did the other two parties. He had been a Colonel once, during the initial Anchorage campaign. He could have stayed in the army and reached a General rank. He could have stopped this.

But he had a family to stay with. They were gone now.

A bright, white light filled his eyes once more, and he looked up from his prostrated position on the ground in time to watch another nuclear missile detonate over his hometown. He put up an arm to cover his eyes as he watched the buildings there evaporate into nothingness, and his eyes widened as he watched the shockwave born from the explosion spread out past the burning trees of the mountain.

He screamed in terror as that same nuclear shockwave slammed into his bowing form and launched him backwards through the doorway of the fallout shelter. His skin cracked and he felt bile escape from his mouth as he flew backwards, before his head slammed against a wall and everything blurred. His last vision was the door of the fallout shelter sliding itself shut, sensing that there was no one in the doorway anymore.

Then, all he saw was white, and he let it embrace him.