Don't Look Back

I dropped my eyes as the rebels burned the world. 

"Down with the Georgian States!" I hear the hoarse voice of my brother calling, dressed in rebel gray with the Emblem of the Free-- the rebels' mark-- emblazoned on his lapel. An answering call of a thousand more voices, like thunder, shook my vision.

"Don't, Jonas, don't!" I moaned softly, wrapping my arms around myself, rocking forwards and backwards, tring to obliterate every dark thought arising in my mind. The rebel movement will harden him, I remember the rebels' leader, Glen, warning my father as he stared outside, watching Jonas-- his only son-- march out to wage war. He will not be the same when he returns, if he does at all. My father swore, that day, that Jonas would survive. And he has... but Glen was right. He is cruel and stony, now, unmerciful. All of the evidence of his joy-filled youth is gone now-- his hair is shaved close to his head, not long enough for the casual flips of the forehead that drove the girls in our neighnorhood crazy. His muscles stand out like wires, coursing through his arms. 

Jonas is wearing a maniacal grin.

Our government, the Georgian States, was founded after the Murder Virus was spread, and destroyed the United States of America. Every fourth month, Father would pull out a thick, leather-bound book from the topmost shelf of his library, and read our country's history to us by candlelight. 

A long time ago, he'd begin softly, there was a nation; a nation so powerful it was drunk on glory, a nation so well-known that it basked in the light of envy and awe. This nation was the United States of America. 

Tensions between the US and other countries were taut, however; a nation so great cannot avoid the making of enemies, you see. When another country, its name either hidden or lost, invaded, they released a chemically treated virus of spores. This was not the Murder Virus, though... you could say that this horror was simply the warm-up act to the most ghastly show of all. 

When the spores were exposed to the correct combination of variables-- air pressure, heat, humidity-- the Great Fires began. These fires ate at everything, destroying everyone, and were impossible to obliterate. The first began in what was used to be called New York City, where the densely populated crowds succumbed almost immediately. The chemical fire released more spores into the air. Soon the very air itself was heavy with them. The fires spread-- when one ended, another began. The United States was soon but a shell of its former glory. 

The government survived. "We must retaliate," they said. The president, Leonard Haye, dispatched a group of scientists to conjure a horror beyond even the Fingers of Fire, which the fire spores were dubbed. They agreed, and then the bane of America's existence sprang into being.

The Murder Virus.

The United States resorted to biological warfare, unwise but effective, though who it hurt could not be limited to only one country. The Murder Virus was brought to the offending country. The fever begun. Neighbor turned on neighbor; family turned on family; friend turned on friend, and all was chaos. But there was one thing that the government scientists had overlooked. Viruses do not stop unitl they have obliterated everything; everything, and everyone. 

The Murder Virus spread, a mania and a deliria; soon the world was filled with blood and war and strife. The US was not spared-- the United States, the mother of the virus! It transformed people into vicious, delirious, blood-craving inhumans. Nobody was safe, save a select few belonging to the government.

It was at this time that rebels began to band together. They overthrew Leonard Hayes and executed him in his own court, and hanged his sympathizers. They were, quite possibly, the only sane people left on Earth. The leader of the rebels was a young man of twenty-eight, George Bates; hance the Georgian States. The movement was dedicated to obliterating the virus, and their movement succeeded. On the day of his death, Bates vowed to make his legacy everalasting.

His son, named after him, took up his ruling. But generations later, corruption seeped into the cracks of the fragile new government, and that is where history ends and the present begins.

Jonas will be wherever the "present" is. And that means war. That means the tearing-apart of my families, and it means the end of all that I love