Freedom's Last Stand
General George S. Patton
Looking from any window of any building in, you could see a foreign soldier walking down the street, usually with another. Patrols were common. Even since the removal of the US military from the East Coast, Chinese casualty rates remained high; civilians were rallying. They would not accept the tyranny brought upon by their oppressors. The streets were destroyed, bridges fallen, entire skyscrapers toppled or burnt to rubble. This was the better future which the Asian powers sought to bring to the globe?
There was a bar in Battery Park, nameless from the bombs that dismembered it. The windows were smashed, tables tipped over, and it seemed no one was there. The back door was locked. Behind the door, it was supposed to be an ordinary restaurant or bar room with booths and tables, but supplementing that, there were four shipping crates, filled with weapons: rifles, handguns, ammunition, grenades, and one rocket launcher lie on a table. What was odd was that an acoustic guitar and its case were leaned against the wall in the corner. There was a door in the rear of the building, the led out to a dark alley, which was also locked from the inside. It was like a hidden munitions depot. The walls were falling apart, like in any of the urban buildings around New York City, and paper products such as napkins littered the floor. Anywhere you turned, you found abandonment in the city; people's lives were changed so drastically that even the most loving of couples couldn't comfort each other enough, or more importantly, their children.
It was almost silent, but click after click, one more bullet was loaded into the magazine of a machine gun clip. A young man sat at one of the booths, a machine gun looking like an M249 SAW on the table in front of him, stabbing through the silence with his intent eyes. His shirt had his own blood spilled on him from when he was shot about two weeks ago, but now he was ready to rejoin the action. His own odor stunk the room, but just about everyone did as it was almost impossible to shower every two days or get deodorant. He itched his head, then grabbed another clip to load additional ammunition into.
Outside, a bus pulled up, laden with Chinese prisoners to be sent to re-education camps. Two Chinese soldiers pushed a middle-aged couple along, armed with rifles. The mother was crying as her son, only a toddler, tagged closely behind, and her husband was silent but there was no doubt he was grieving. The bus doors opened, but it seemed the bus driver had no room for the additional prisoners, only the soldiers who needed transport would come aboard, but that didn't mean the civilians were saved.
"Go, go, to the wall now!" one of the soldiers commanded, yelling at the couple. The other soldier held on to the child's collar. Many of the soldiers began to learn English as it was needed to effectively ordered the newly conquered Chinese citizens, or former Americans. The couple got to the wall, frightened, as one of the soldiers began to take aim.
"Try-" the mother began to say to her son, choked up from the fear and grief, "try not to think about it honey, everything will be fine, we'll always-" and their life was ended with two thundering flashes of light. The toddler began to cry hysterically as he was dragged aboard the bus by the Chinese soldier, and his parents dropped to the ground right in front of the nameless bar. Once both soldiers and the toddler were on the bus, its doors closed, and it began to drive off.
Hearing the gunshots and the woman's shaky last words, and the result of the child crying, Ryan knew exactly what happened as he gripped his ammo clip harder than ever, feeling as if the rage would empower him to crush it in his single hand. But the moment of anger passed, and came the realization of tragedy. What would happen to that little kid? Only time would tell. And when the sadness passed, as much as it could at least, he began to think of why he had struggled to bring all of the arms here to this room in the past two weeks, and why he was loading his clips, and why he was waiting for his friends who were also part of the resistance to answer his call to assembly.
There was no exact ranking system for the civilian resistance, there were only people who would organize against the Chinese. Whoever had an idea for an objective would then organize his accomplices, and they would set out for the mission when told. It was only whoever had the idea that was leading.
"Soon," Ryan said to himself, "soon they'll be here." He paused for a moment, thinking, and he continued to have a conversation with himself.
"Is it crazy to talk to yourself like this? Or is it just a way to make me feel like someone's actually here, that I'm talking to someone and that someone is listening? Is it even more insane to have a conversation with yourself about having a conversation with yourself?" He pondered these questions endlessly.
"It doesn't matter... I'm going to kill them all."