…and they threw her out a fucking window.
Out a window, and she fell forty stories down, and I opened up on them with my rifle. I was firing at a monster, this mass of arms and legs and screaming heads; it backed out and left some of its parts behind with my bullet-holes in them, and I looked with binoculars and saw they were just ordinary people. I had shot two old women, a fifteen-year-old boy, and a guy who looked a lot like my brother Barry except he had a mustache.
It was a shock. I’d, y’know, shot individual people. And everything was changed. The mob came back and some of them had guns now, so I went to the roof and hid in the little house for the elevator motor, and they didn’t find me. And they left the place pretty much the way you see it. Then two weeks later the lines broke and the Russians moved in. Occupied the town. And it was just another army. A lot of people thought the Russians would be better than the NATO armies. But there was no food and more people starved… You must have been here—No? How long have you been here? Oh, you were in a Camp then… And then the Allies tried to retake Amsterdam with the tactical nukes and we couldn’t believe it. Small warheads, short-term radiation. No big problem, right? Only kill a fourth of the town’s population—you make an omelet you gotta break some eggs. At least a fourth of the town died. In a week. And then the earthworks were sabotaged, and some of the Dutch actually immolated themselves in the squares. The work of centuries to take Holland from the sea reduced to nothing in days, and they couldn’t handle it. Some days I understand why they did it and some days I don’t. People saw the old men set fire to themselves and most people took no notice. The gangs liked it, though, because it broke the monotony; they made a big production, big joke, of toasting ration bread on sticks over the coals of the guys who…
I tried to get out of the city again and stole a boat, but NATO spotters caught me. Convinced I was on a mission for the Russians. They had Jenkins prisoner, too. That’s where we met. But he had the brig’s lock program dazzled, so he and I escaped, and there was no place to go but here, back here… We’ve done okay. We got a way into the spotter camps, steal supplies now and then. We had to shoot some scavengers one day, but mostly we stay out of trouble, out of anything that looks like it might remotely be considered subversive, and they don’t come looking for us. The Armies… we don’t even talk them down. Either side. Because none of them give a fuck. NATO, the Russians, Americans, Brits, Czechs. Everybody calls them The Armies. Nobody cares which army. If you’re army, you’re The Man in the Helmet…
Smoke didn’t say anything for a long time. Not even to himself. He was too tired. He knew there was a lot more, but it was more he didn’t have to ask about.
A little later Hard-Eyes mentioned family in the States. Mostly he tried not to think about them, because the scramble screen blocked transmissions—all the civvy frequencies anyway and lots of others—so there was no way to get news. Social networking was blocked. Fones blocked. Why torture yourself wondering… wondering what it was like in the States now.
From an end-of-term report by thirteen-year-old Gary Krueger, of Cincinnati, Ohio, entitled “The Cause of the War.” Gary’s report grade was B+.
Different people have different ideas about why the Third World War started. I asked my C-driver Seeker to look in the Internet to see if there was a list of reasons. It found thirty-three reasons which don’t agree with each other, and they come from seventeen different groups of people.
The most commonly given reason is the one given by registered members of the Republican Party. They say that Greater Russia has been building up its strength in secret for years. They were making it look like less than it was, with underground training places. Then they saw that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was not maintaining its strength in Europe and was letting the United States carry the burden, so they saw they had a chance to take advantage of this weakness. Also they say that there were crop failures and industrial problems and all that corruption and mobster activity and other problems in Russia and the Warsaw Pact countries were rebelling and wanted to be independent. So Koziski of Greater Russia, after the coup in 2031, he thought that a war would distract people from these problems and bring the old Warsaw Pact countries back together because they would unite against an enemy. Also the Russians were running out of power supplies and wanted to capture coal and oil and atomic energy plants and microwave receiving stations that get orbital power. They also wanted to embarrass the Americans like they did after the “Bay of Pigs fight,” [sic] which was something that happened to the USA in the twentieth century that made the USA let the Soviet Union get concessions, even though this Greater Russian government is a different government than the USSR government.
The Democratic Party people mostly say that the US government pushed the Russian government into starting a war by installing the Milstar 7 and Milstar 8 military satellite systems in orbit. The Russians’ satellites weren’t as good and they were paranoid that we could use our system to shoot down their missiles and so we could invade them or attack them and they wouldn’t be able to defend themselves. So they wanted to take new territory over in Europe to capture Europe ground-based missiles and to create a “buffer zone” to stop invasion, and also, the Democrats agree on this part, they wanted to unite their people against an enemy and make them forget their problems.
The third group of people say that it is because of an “international conspiracy of Jews and Muslims to destroy the United States” that made the Russians do it. I think this a dumb idea because Jews and Muslims don’t work together and how could the Jewish people control the Russians when the Russians are persecuting them all the time?
I think the war was caused by all the reasons said by the first two groups.
A note to Gary Krueger from the teacher: This is a good report, but I think you use too much Internet material, too much online searching. Too many students do that! That’s letting the computer do your work for you. If you do it that way, you won’t remember what you learn. Also, be careful when you make sentences not to run them together with so many and’s. You are making run-on sentences.
The following is a poem written by a student in Gary Krueger’s World Affairs class, Barbara Wycowski, twelve years old: