Chapter 4
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The war had begun. As brutal as this initial air raid had been, we knew it would not be the last. We believed that the initial casualties, on both sides, numbered approximately, one hundred thousand. One hundred thousand killed in less than 24 hours. As bad as this was, it was still far short of the four billion dead that might be necessary to end the war. It felt weird to be thinking about going back to school, but school was still scheduled to resume September 4th. I never thought I'd miss school, but I wanted some return to normalcy. I soon learned that "Normal" is a relative term. There were new classes, like gardening. We were faced with the very real possibility that food supplies would run dangerously low, so they wanted us to learn how to grow our own food. We also had drills, like duck and cover. The air raids would typically come at night, but when the sirens went off we quickly went under our desks. I felt somewhat safer in the daylight, but every day there were news reports every day of the war. By this point the aliens had actually taken cities, in many small towns americans were living under alien occupation. Fewer and fewer people were coming to school. Some died in air raids, others enlisted to fight back. The sirens came at night, and when they did me and mom immediately rushed out of our apartment into the building basement with our neighbors. Once the sirens ended we all just went back upstairs. That wasn't so good for sleep, it's difficult to relax when you know those sirens could go off at any moment. I knew one girl who committed suicide with sleeping pills. In her suicide note she said she just needed some sleep.
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During this time I also did something I thought I never would, I learned how to shoot a gun. Guns were illegal, no real reason a civilian would need one. It had mainly been the gangs, the Anne Bonnys and the Mary Reads who carried them. But now, people in our very state were living under alien occupation. The police didn't really enforce that law anymore. One Friday night in December, I went out with some friends. We started off at the shooting range, and I was getting better. Then we went to the movies, and then to McDonalds. While we were eating, the sirens went off. We all quickly went under the table, one kid from our group quickly grabbed his fries and smugly ate them during the air raid. When it ended the rest of us went back to our meal, and picked off dust from the ceiling. On our way home we found an alien pilot. He looked barely older than us, he'd clearly been shot down, was wounded but alive. He couldn't move, but he could still speak in strained english, and he was surrendering. Under the terms of the agreements, we were supposed to take him prisoner, or at least find some policeman to arrest him. But less than one hour ago he had been bombing our cities. Had he killed friends of ours tonight? Had he killed them in previous air raids? Even if he wasn't he was clearly part of the same military that had done this, we saw him as our enemy. We were young, didn't understand the point neccessarily of prisoners. We all agreed what we should do, but who should shoot him? There were those who said they would have no problem shooting an enemy, others who said they could never kill anyone, not even the enemy. But the truth is, noone really knows until they're faced with the situation themselves. That's when you find out who you really are. While the other were discussing this, I shot him in the head. That was the first time I ever took a life, it would not be the last.