by Pope

Created on: August 15, 2008

The air is deathly still as the sun begins to appear over the horizon, causing deep shades of red to glisten off the river. The rays dance over the rubble of what was once the eighth largest metropolitan area in the United States, illuminating the endless ruin, revealing bullet holes in nearly every structure in sight, along with craters, burned out tanks, jeeps and other machines of war, and a mammoth crater nestled in the middle of it all. The crater is nearly 400 meters across, and its depth is over a quarter of that length. There is nothing but ash in the bowels of the hole, anything that is unlucky enough to have fallen in has been killed by the record breaking concentrated radiation residing all throughout it. But if you were to go into that crater, at the very bottom you would find a mangled piece of metal, the green identifying it as a street sign hardly visible anymore. But the white letters are still there, just barely legible. After a minute of looking, you'd find that the sign reads "Pennsylvania Ave."

As the morning dawns and visibility increases, a single shot rings out, echoing throughout each building. Frantic yelling, and a flurry of random gunfire answer the shot. Besides this small interruption, an unnatural silence still inhabits the air of the entire area. There is no wind, no birds calling, no movement to be heard or seen, at first glance. But on what used to be an intersection there is a former Marriott building, the top floors all sheered off, leaving only three floors intact, the top of which is open to the sky, with few walls and nothing that would resemble a hotel left. In the corner of this "roof" sits a single man, holding an old sniper rifle that looks like it belongs in a WWII museum.

The Sniper is barely a man at all, only 19 years old. He once attended the University of Baltimore, once had a steady relationship, once drove a green Honda, and was a citizen of what was once the United States of America. That all changed when the first intercontinental ballistic cruise missile with a nuclear payload hit Capitol Hill. The President, Vice President, and nearly every House Member and Senator were in the blast radius when it hit. America was thrown into an almost instant chaos. With no one claiming responsibility for the strike, and no one left with the authority to declare war, America went from World Superpower to an almost anarchic society within days of the first strike. Many governors and other politicians tried to claim presidency

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