Caleb Martin
Period 4
April 18, 2013
Chapter 7
"War, war never changes." These words could not have held truer despite the fact that humanity had nearly been decimated by an apocalypse. War today looked like war in the Old World. In tattered rags and bearing decrepit pre-war weapons, our Texas soldiers marched to the slaughter that awaited them in Longview and dammit I had never considered suicide harder than I did that day. It all started going downhill when our convoy of pre-war armored cars was hit by a Confederate roadside bomb hastily built using a pressure cooker, some nails, and a bit of fireworks along I-20. My battalion made camp there for the night to bury the dead. I couldn't help but cry at the sight of the fourteen charred and disfigured bodies of good Texas Union troops getting tossed into a giant pit.
The dinner rations were terrible and I now know why. As new Secretary of Defense I had access to certain information about the inner workings of our "fine" nation. I looked through my mission file for miscellaneous info and found some things that were pretty interesting. Apparently the rations, which were mostly bread, are all composed of sixty-percent sawdust as to give the food 'bulk'. It was based on World War Two research abandoned in a filing cabinet at an old office building. I pitied the soldiers as they ate and almost thought about telling them about the wood they were eating but I figured that doing so might anger them and I needed them as loyal as possible before the battle. We all slept well that night.
When we got up the next morning we all piled in to the few remaining armored cars and set off along Interstate 20. We would soon be approaching the small city of Canton, Texas which was the last known town to still be held by the Union east of Dallas. The plan was to spend a few days in Canton to resupply before we tried to retake nearby Tyler, Texas. Plans were made to go wrong through. As we were approaching a bridge near the city we were stopped by a new checkpoint along I-20. I told them our intentions but they said the Interstate east of here was on lockdown. I became suspicious and asked to see their supervisor and me reply was a gun to the head. They were Confederate guards posing as Union officers. I told the lead convoy driver to gun the throttle and he barreled through the checkpoint. Everything for the next five minutes was a blur and all I can remember is fire and falling. When I regained consciousness I looked up and saw that the bridge was nothing but a smoldering, twisted heap of metal and concrete. I frantically looked around saw that all the convoy vehicles were on the bottom of what seemed to a canyon. The bridge had been blown up and half of my battalion was either dead or missing. The unfortunate survivors would be forced to walk nearly forty miles with only the supplies scavenged from the convoy.
This began the march. It began to remind me of the Bataan Death March which I had read about in text books as a child in pre-war schooling. It became more miserable as we marched further on. The terrain became less and less of the favorable desert expanse and more and more of a humid and swampy bog. The heat was unbearable and most of us weren't prepared for such a hike. We went a little over ten miles per day and in two days we found ourselves in Canton. The town was a complete wreck. It appeared that the Confederates had ransacked the place and were in the process of turning it into a fortress. Charred buildings and dead bodies laid scattered across the town. With their fortress unfinished perhaps the Confederates fled upon hearing word of our arrival because all but one dead Confederate weren't there. We made camp in Canton for two days to get some much needed rest.
My men and I left to liberate Tyler from the Confederates with four abandoned trucks but we remained alert as we were now in Confederate territory. All was good until we were about 20 miles outside of Tyler and our battalion's Geiger counter started ticking off the charts. We stopped and looked for a source when my binoculars spotted something disturbing. On the horizon a makeshift launch pad could be made out and it had what appeared to be a primitive rocket that was maybe 15 or 20 feet tall. It resembled a missile and it was a nuclear one. While nowhere near the destructive power and technical complexity of their pre-war counterparts that divided the New World from the Old World, their nuke appeared to be constructed from a bunch of garbage cans filled with irradiated waste.
It didn't matter where the Confederates were planning to launch their nuke, the Texas Union couldn't afford to lose any one of its communities. This only accelerated our need to retake Longview and push the horde of Confederates back across our borders. Even if we failed I would make sure to use this nuke to take more than a few Confederates with me to hell.