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Unlike the first rebellion that spawned the country, where battles were fought in columns and upon open fields, American blood was spilled now on concrete, playgrounds and abandoned districts that once catered to massive industries. The sky seemed always dark, the sun almost daily hidden behind thick swaths of smoke and debris. For the average American citizen, a mortar explosion, a fighter jet crashing and screams of pain from soldiers on the ground were nothing new. This was their life now. Or so thought a young woman who, while looking out the dusty window of her second floor safe haven, overlooking a high school sports stadium that had been turned into a defensive position once controlled by the American Resistance.

It had been bombarded by artillery for weeks and finally over run by the Government in Exile, something the young woman watched day by day as the scene below her slowly changed to reflect what seemed as though a superior fighting force overcoming the Resistance. But what she saw that day brewed a taste of rebellion in her soul. She tasted it upon her lips and with one sweep of her tongue knew the bittersweet sensation of a free life, a new American Century. The girl thought she heard her mother calling for her, so she snapped her attention behind her, but to her surprise there was no one there. She turned her attention back out of the window and down to the sports stadium, where she again centered her curiosity on an older woman, perhaps in her 50's, on her knees hovering a soldier. He was injured badly by shrapnel when attempting to hold a small advancing force from breaching the northern gates. Nearly 3/4's of his unit did not survive the battle. The young girl knew that much simply by looking to the northern gates, where blood splatter made art of the walls and bodies, some dismembered and others unidentifiable, piled atop the other. The young woman looked back to the two soldiers and saw their lips moving, she squinted her eyes in an attempt to read their lips. Unable, she pressed her own lips together, perhaps in anger at herself, and continued to watch the pair below her.

"Help me Lynn, help me." It was the only thing that the soldier could mutter. Lynn, a combat medic, applied pressure to the soldier's throat where shrapnel had cut a deep gash. The pressure would hopefully stop the bleeding in time for Lynn to evacuate the injured man to a safer place where she had more materials at her disposal. Low on morphine and bandages, all Lynn could

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