Disclaimer: I do not own anything copyrighted.

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"In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore."

~In Another Country by Ernest Hemingway~

It was less than a year after the explosion that destroyed half of the United States. There were millions dead, half from the pathogen, half from the explosion meant to kill those infected by the pathogen. With the majority of the world dead for one reason or another, those who survived had to fight for food and survival.

We were in the Dominican Republic at the time of the blast, sent there to find a woman who had disappeared with no warning to her fiancée, coworkers, or family, aside from one eerily haunting sentence – "They're coming."

Isabella Esposito had disappeared off the face of the earth less than a week before the first person was infected by the pathogen, and it was her disappearance that let us survive. New England, especially Boston, was, for all intents and purposes, a Dead Zone.

The Dominican Republic was deep inside the Hot Zone, the name the government had come up with for the area affected still by disease and radiation from the bombs. We knew that unless they had gone on a random road trip to Central America to find who knows what, the people we left behind were dead or dying.

Beyond hope.

I was walking through the nearly empty streets, Olivia glued to my side, when the gunshots began. I reacted quickly, grabbing Olivia's wrist and dragging her into the nearest building. In the darkness, I could barely make out the blonde-haired woman's silhouette, but I could hear her ragged breathing and I knew what that meant – she had been hit in the firefight.

In the dark I couldn't see the extent of her injuries, so I waited several minutes for the firefight to stop, praying that she wouldn't die of exsanguination before I picked the blonde up and carried her out the back door into the boiling sun.

The bullet wound was in her left side, probably lodged in a rib by the looks of it. I would have tried to patch up the wound myself, but my hands were both shaking and covered in the fine brown sand that covered everything around me.

I looked up to see another woman – this one with brown-black hair – standing a the edge of the alley. She was wearing black jeans, a black trench coat, motorcycle gloves, a white t-shirt, steel-toed boots, and Men in Black-esque sunglasses. In one hand she held a police issue SIG Sauer, in the other, an AK-47 that looked like something straight out of the Soviet Union.

I froze, not because of the weapons, but because I recognized the renegade woman instantly as Isabella Esposito.

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A/N: I come up with very strange stuff in my Creative Writing class. The story was supposed to be based off a line from one of Hemingway's stories. And you see, I've been on this whole post-apocalyptic war streak, and I've been watching way too much Fringe, so here's the start of a very short story, at least on my terms.