Chapter 1

My name is Alexander Johns, and this is my story. I suppose I should first explain who I am. I am 16 years old, 5' 10'' and 145 pounds. Before it happened I was a Junior at Centennial High School in Phoenix, Arizona. I was the designated geek of the class of 2010, 4.0 GPA, glasses, and when I wasn't in front of a computer I could usually be found behind either the Savage .22 rifle, the M96 Swedish Mauser, Mini-14, and my favorite pistol our Springfield Armory 1911 that my father owned. My father was trained as a sniper in the Army and insisted on all of his children most importantly knowing gun safety and how to hit what they were aiming at with a firearm. As I said before, I'm a damn good shot with all of the above. With the exception of the .22 and the .45 a hostile pie plate at 300 yards was dead if I was using open sights ... If it goes bang, chances are I'm a hell of a good shot with it. I lived with my father and 2 younger brothers, ages 14 and 12.

It was November 4, 2008 and the Presidential Elections were just a few hours away. After glancing at the news on the T.V. in the living room I sighed and walked off into my room to play some video games. It wasn't that I didn't care about politics, it's that I already knew what the result was going to be. Barack Obama was going to win for primarily two reasons, reason number 1; he is black and a lot of people will vote for him simply because of that. Secondly, at the time the economy was not particularly strong and the majority of people were looking for a short term solution for themselves, regardless of the damage to the country as a whole. Personally, i think that neither of the two candidates were any good. "Reagan's Corpse '08!" Not surprisingly, when I woke up the next morning after binging on caffeine and video games Obama had won the election. I muttered to myself, "Welcome to the end of the United States, Super Power." Greeting my brothers and father I grabbed breakfast, got dressed, and hopped the bus to school. I slid through the day, finishing my work in class a half hour before the bell. Then I hopped the bus home, grabbed a Coke and gamed away until I took a short break to eat, then continued until midnight. Thus continued the next 3 months, with regular visits to the local shooting range to exercise the right to bear arms while it still existed.

The day I knew was coming finally came. The news said that China, North Korea, and various terrorist organizations were becoming more and more aggressive towards the USA. I went to tell my father what I had heard on the news but he was already one step ahead of me. I found him in the spare bed room and he was stacking cases of ammunition, food, and water. When he caught my movement he told me that I wouldn't be going to school today, and to strip, clean, and oil the two new Browning Buckmarks and Ruger Mini-14 for my brothers, he said that my next oldest brother, Nate, would be getting my Mini-14 and that I also needed to strip down, clean, and oil the two new semi-automatic AK-47s he had gotten. And I thought I was paranoid! Turns out however, we were quite lucky for my father's preparations. We had enough food and water for a month stored. A week later China and North Korea launched missiles armed with warheads of a chemical agent, a virus, genetically engineered to kill and jump from one unlucky victim to another like a plague. Immediately afterwards, Obama ordered that the remaining Nuclear Arsenal of the USA be unleashed on North Korea and China, rendering them the world's largest pieces of radioactive glass. However, the retaliation was too late, for the Chinese and Korean missiles had already began to air burst 1000 feet over New York City, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, and Phoenix, Arizona. At the time of the strike, my father was out gassing up the truck. Luckily for us, he made sure that all of the windows and doors sealed in our house. While we stay inside our home, the outside world began to turn into chaos. For fear of spreading the plague to his children my father laid on the porch, pistol in hand, until his death.