A JAG-Sims3 Story
Author: Haruo Chikamori
Rating: M
Classification: Angst, Romance.
Spoilers: N/A
Summary: Continuity of Government (COG) – a stark term for starting over after a holocaust the likes of which is hoped will never ever happen. This is a what-could-happen if the button was ever pressed.
DISCLAIMER: The characters Harm Rabb, Jr., Sarah "Mac" Mackenzie, Meg Austin, AJ Chegwidden, et al. belong (in concept if not name) to CBS/Bellisarius. Animal and all OC characters are the property of Heather and Hugo Chikamori. No profit is being made from this story, nor is any infringement intended.
------------------------------------------------Chapter One - Matthew
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I woke up the next morning feeling as though I'd been kicked in the teeth. To look around and see no-one else in the house just made things even worse. It was a long time before I felt even up to getting out of my sleeping bag. When my parents had left the bunker they hadn't brought much else with them...and bartering with other people took the rest of the things that we had, so essentially we had our sleeping bags, a minimal amount of food and that was it. We survived the latter part of my teen-age years scavenging what we could get. The rest of the people in the bunker were not much better off. They were scavenging just like the rest of us.
In the morning I decided that I'd better pick the apples off the apple tree or risk having people coming into my yard and picking them off for me; leaving me with nothing. It was a matter of you grabbed what food you can to make sure that you were able to eat. In Nightmare City there was nothing. No supermarket, no farms...essentially you had to eke out a living by scrounging around.
Even though I had what would be considered a good sum of money out of what the government had given us in the neighbourhood of $1.7M per person...it meant nothing since money wouldn't be enough incentive for others to help get us out of this place. And the ones who coveted money were the ones that you didn't want to have the help of to begin with. So for better or worse, I was stuck in Nightmare City for the foreseeable future. The only thing between me and death was my Dad's M4 and I took it with me whereever I went. I wasn't going to trust my well-being to anyone if it meant being able to survive.
Next door was a small pond, and perhaps I could do a little fishing there if I wanted to catch some fish to fry up on a firepit. Of course that meant having to one hand my M4 with one hand while trying to balance the fishing pole with the other. It took a bit but I think I managed it. At least I could drop the pole if someone tried to get the drop on me.
There's still smoke from all the fires that went on...and it hasn't really cleared up. It probably isn't good for my long-term health but I'm not going to worry about that too much. If I get shanked by a gangster, it's not going to matter if I end up inhaling a lungful of smoke because the shank will end me sooner than the smoke will.
Who should appear at my solitary house but Matthew Mackenzie-Rabb. When we had known each other back in the bunker, we were little toddlers. He'd grown into a handsome, muscular guy with dreamy blue eyes. (Author's note: I'm sorry, I've got an XY chromosome...so I'm just not that attracted to my gender...but since I'm supposed to be writing from the viewpoint of a female...) Funny I'd notice that in the situation that we're both in; I found out that his father and mother both passed away recently too. My dad and Harmon Rabb Jr. (his dad) were friends and well, it just felt good to see a familiar face for once. At least he also had his dad's carbine and that meant that both of us were armed He also had a tactical vest, that meant that he was one up on me. His mom, Sarah Mackenzie-Rabb was a Marine Brigadier General by the time she got out of the service and we'd spent our early childhood together before the Rabbs had moved away out of this nightmare.
Matt had a hunch that I was still there and so he came back looking for me. And I'm so grateful for that because for a second there, I had thought that it was only me, my Dad's M4 (now mine) and my memories of my parents. So now we're in this mess together and hopefully we'll both get through this.
I was just about to crash on my feet and just dumped the sleeping bag on the ground and curled up inside it. Matt said that he'd take watch and kept a lookout for any thugs. I doubt that with an M4 in hand, none of the thugs around here would chance messing with him. That was the thing about being the daughter and son of combat veterans, our parents taught us our way around a rifle and woe betide anyone who tried to mess with us.
Matt told me later on, after I'd woken up, that he'd seen a deer come by looking for grazing area. Of course I wasn't too happy about that because I really wished that I could see a deer; considering that I'd lived for the greater part of my teenage life in this wasteland and had never seen one at all. Maybe the radiation had come down enough to the point where wildlife could actually tolerate the fall-out. Luckily there weren't too many ground-blasts and the majority of the explosions had been air-bursts so there wasn't much fall-out to contend with.
After seeing the deer come by, Matt had decided that he needed to do some fishing to increase his skill and increase the chance that he'd be able to catch some fish for us to eat. Because subsisting on apples wasn't going to allow us to get to where we needed to go and we needed a good supply of food to do that.
Some excited sounding whinnying in the distance meant that there were wild horses in the area. But it was night-time and I didn't want to stray too far off our property because the criminals and thugs were out and about looking for a major haul and even though we had weapons, the last thing we wanted to do was get into a firefight and waste ammo that we could use to hunt for food. We had limited ammo and we wouldn't be able to get more unless we ransacked an abandoned military base.
...and no matter how much we tried...
we couldn't get a signal out. Evidently the Russians had detonated one of their one megaton nukes up in the upper atmosphere and sent an EMP pulse over the CONUS that wiped out all cell-phone towers; anything electrical or computerized...that wasn't shut off and locked in a Faraday Cage. We were lucky that our devices still worked in some respects...but as far as doing anything with them other than as a rather expensive paper-weight, nothing doing...but at least they may come in handy when we get to a place that has some phone service restored.
At least the nice thing is...that we're no longer alone.
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