FicWad

Prologue
It all started when I was in the car with my mom. The year was 2012. World War Three, as some called it, was ensuing just outside our town. I had never expected it to come closer. Or get so big. Wars are supposed to end eventually, after all. Once one side is finally weakened to the point of being outnumbered, they come out with their hands held high. This war had been going on for about two years, but its results were devastating. People were being forced into the military because every troop that went in was wiped out. America was nothing but a country on edge now. Everywhere in the world was in the same state. There were no allies. Countries refused to band together. It was every man for himself. The only thing frowned upon in this war was shooting someone from your country. Racial tensions were getting stronger, and people who had jobs that went overseas were being booted out of airports or, if they weren’t in their home country, being sent home. There was no way to get out of the country or make friends with anyone foreign. Every country was turning on the ones around it. Each country had its own army. Some had already been wiped out—the small ones no one would miss. I’m talking entire countries, a whole culture, a place many people called home, gone. Turned into nothing but ghost towns. Or should I say ghost countries. My mom and I were going to what some were calling “safe zones.” Really, they were just little buildings in the middle of nowhere. Battles were in full-swing all across the country at major cities—St. Louis, Dallas, Chicago, Las Vegas. New York and Los Angeles were the worst. The enemies picked these places to attack to cause the most devastation. But good ole America wasn’t going down without a fight.
We were somewhere over the desert when I saw the huge mushroom cloud rising over what used to be our town. That was my first warning that we were officially in trouble. My mom threw her foot on the brake, staring out my window with her mouth open almost as wide as mine was.
I blinked a few times. “Go. Drive. We need to move!” I yelled, turning toward her.
“Um…right. Drive.” She turned back to the windshield and floored it as fast as she could. We were zooming down the road when I heard the sirens. Cop cars came down the road, passing us, going full-speed. The town across the road from ours exploded in a similar display. The car’s speedometer jumped upward. I slowly realized that we weren’t gonna make it to the safe zone. Then, of course, the car ran out of gas. Couldn’t have picked a worse time. My mom pulled onto the shoulder. We got out and continued forward on foot. There were still cop cars zooming down the road. One of them slowed next to us.
“You need a ride?” the driver asked.
The guy didn’t look familiar. He almost seemed…Chinese? I shook my head and pulled my mom along with me, past the car. A loud bang sounded across the flat surrounding area. I stopped dead and glanced behind me. My mother was on the ground. There was a clear hole straight through her head. She had been shot. I screamed in rage. “How dare you!” I cried, turning to him. “She didn’t do anything!” Tears spilled down my face as he laughed.
“This is war, kid. Good luck. I won’t kill you; you’re too young.” He drove off, leaving me alone in a cloud of dust and smoke. I stared at my mother’s body. My mom’s phone rang in her pocket.
“Hello?” I answered in a shaky voice.
“Oh God. This is bad. This is really bad.”
“Where are you, Fallon?” Relief surged through me at her voice.
“I’m on my way up towards your town. Dallas is on fire. Where are you?”
“On the side of the road. They-they killed my mom.” I choked.
“I’m coming.”
I hung up the phone and sat down next to my mom. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know where to go. Was I supposed to take my mom’s body with me? Or leave it to rot on the side of the road? Would I have a choice? After a few hours contemplating this, Fallon reached my very spot. “GET IN THE CAR!” She roared, pulling me to my feet. “America has been infiltrated. We’re becoming another ghost country. Everything’s exploding. We gotta keep moving and we gotta get to where there’s nothing to explode. COME ON!”
“But my mom!” I moaned, breaking into a fresh batch of tears.
“We gotta go. I know. But she wouldn’t want you to die with her! We need to move right now.”
And she forced me into the car. We drove off. We got to a new city in the middle of being built—Battery City, out in California. The war destroyed everything around it, except the city itself, then died out. The world had lost over three quarters of its population. Time passed. It was just me, Fallon, and Fallon’s mom, Julie, all living comfortably in a small apartment in downtown Battery City. But things were changing. A new company rose to power—Better Living Industries, BLI for short. They took over the world and began to control everything. They developed a drug that took away emotions—love, hate, sadness, basically everything except happiness and relaxation. How you can have happiness without those other emotions, I don’t know. And they started sending around flies made from machines with cameras in them, and outlawed colors. That’s right, they outlawed colors. As in, no one could wear colors. And people who didn’t obey laws got killed. Of course, they didn’t broadcast that tidbit of information, in fact they tried their hardest to keep it hushed up, but everyone knew it was happening. Our country of freedom was quickly becoming a dictatorship. Eventually we got tired of it. Okay, not eventually. Fallon was sick of wearing black and white every day. And I was sick of my every move being watched by a fly on the wall. Literally. When they made it a law that everyone had to take their “miracle drug”, I exploded. No way were they going to force me to get rid of my emotions. So we took off. Fallon, Julie and I wore what we wanted to wear, got in the car and tried to leave Battery City and go to the world beyond—the Zones.
We didn’t get far before they killed Julie. We barely made it out alive. And then it was just Fallon and I. Two teenagers, fighting to stay ourselves in a world trying to force us to get rid of any feelings at all.
The journey we went on after leaving Battery City was the most fun I had in my entire life, despite how hard and sad it was.