It was war.

Bridgett barely made it out of the news office alive and it was only because Frida grabbed her after the first explosion and pulled her to the stairwell.

They frantically ran down fourteen flights of stairs without stopping or slowing or looking back. They heard seven more explosions as they ran and when they opened the door to the outside most of what they saw was fire. 

Frida guided Bridgett across the street and down an alleyway. They made it into the alley before another jet flew close over their heads. Bridgett watched as a small missile sailed  only feet above them and wound a path into the open front doors of the bottom floor of the building they just left. 

The twenty-three story building began to collapse underneath itself. Bridgett tried to stop, but Frida pulled her hard.

They ran as fast as they could for three more blocks until Bridgett couldn’t run anymore. She slowed to catch her breath. Frida turned around for the first time and realized that no one else was following them. 

She looked dumbfounded and confused.

“She was right behind us. Denise… Did you…?”

Bridgett shook her head. She didn’t see Denise at all.

Frida dropped to her knees. She took sharp breaths as tears started streaming down her cheeks. 

Bridgett dropped next to Frida and tried to hug her but older woman pushed her away and screamed. 

Bridgett sank down. She felt useless. And they sat like that for several minutes in the midst of explosions and destruction. Several people had began running past them now. Bridgett did not know what to do – she tried several times to get Frida to stand or to move to the side but she wouldn’t move.

Bridgett could see it in her eyes: Frida did not care if she died. 

They sat for fifty-three minutes until Frida lifted herself up and started walking back toward the house. All Bridgett could do was follow.

People started to join up after that. They started to pick sides because they knew that they were a part of it now. War. The government versus these invaders. 

Barbara was right and the destructionists were working with the anarchists. Bridgett learned that the groups calculated that Lakeview and the surrounding areas were going to create the most significant impact with the most acceptable collateral damage. Lakeview was a major tourism hub.

Frida joined up the next day on the side of the government. In her mind, destructionists had killed the only person that she had ever loved and she could not stand to keep going on in her everyday life. She would not move on. Frida left the following week to go to a government authorized training camp. Bridgett watched her get onto the convoy and hoped she would see the woman again. 

She was alone now. Again.

Bridgett did not feel as though she had a stake in the war, so she did not join up at first. She could have gone with Frida but had a hard time being around her. She felt guilty that she was alive, that Frida saved her instead of anyone else. Instead of who she wanted to save. 

Bridgett’s pay went up as she took on new responsibilities and others told her that it was unlikely that the same town would be struck twice. She was assigned new members, people who were new to Reclamation because the attack had displaced them or destroyed their work. She liked being in charge and took to it well. She passed on some of the wisdom that Delilah and Barbara and Denise had passed to her. Her team learned quickly.

It was thirty two days later when she got word that Hillston had been destroyed. It was a casual comment of one of the new members of the crew that she assigned to papers. The girl said that she had hitched a ride on one of the new government caravans that passed right by a town. The girl didn’t name it exactly, but described a town nestled in a valley with a large house on top of a hill. She talked about how they had to be quiet when they were passing and gave the place a wide berth because it was being occupied by these new insurgent forces. She said that most of the town was decimated.

Bridgett could not help picturing her brothers looking up at the sky and helplessly watching as death rained down on them. She could not stop dreaming about the burned face of her mother: how similar it must have looked to the man on the hill. 

Everything, she thought, looked the same after fire. 

Bridgett quit Reclamation and joined the government side three days later.

It was a remarkably easy thing to do. There had been tables set up by the government on virtually every block, capitalizing on the fear and loss in Lakeview. She signed her name and was asked to come back the following morning when the next procession of caravans would be departing. She packed her black bag and said goodbye to her new team, even though she knew they would not miss her and she would not miss them.

The morning was sharply cold, made warmer by the line of people joining up. Bridgett joined before the sun started to rise but there were already dozens standing there. No one was talking. As the sun peeked over the distant mountains, ourteen canvas trucks pulled up and they loaded each one until it was full before it started up, turned around, and headed the direction it had come from.

Bridgett was on the fifth truck. After her name was checked off on a manifest, she climbed into the back to see two benches, one on either side. One side held three younger looking men and an older woman already, the other side was empty. She stuffed her bag underneath the bench and chose the empty side, resting her head on the back of the truck cab to close her eyes.

It was a half-day drive to the camp that had seemingly been thrown together. Bridgett spent most of the trip bundled up and sleeping. It was warmer inside of the canvas truck, and it was full to the brim with people, but not balmy. When they arrived, they were shuffled into the largest of the tents and spent the remainder of the day watching a training video. She learned that the insurgents, the combined forces of the anarchists and destructionists, were calling themselves Emergent. The government had taken the name Army of Endurance. The war escalated.

For the rest of the day, Bridgett got settled into the camp. It was warmer here, she did not know the reason. But she found herself soon asleep, trying to mentally prepare for what was to come.

Bridgett met her first friend on her fourteenth day of training in the improvised Endurance camp. It was after a long day of physical training when everyone was in the mess hall eating dinner together. The dorms were kept gender specific but dinner was a time for intermingling. The commanders often spoke about how Endurance requires camaraderie. 

Bridgett would often spend these times sitting alone. She had not made many acquaintances yet and she found the food difficult enough to eat without the pressures of social interaction. The required part of the camaraderie was difficult for her. The training was hard and she did not want to give away that her legs had taken to shaking when they were at rest so she sat with her chair pushed all the way up to the cafeteria style table. She always sat near the middle of the room.

 Bridgett took to observing others as she ate and she had come to notice that a young man

had been moving slowly closer to her each day had been moving closer to her each day. 

He could tell that Bridgett was not interested in socializing and so positioned himself several humans away from her and slowly frog-jumped them in her direction so as to be discreet. It took five days for him to be sitting across from her and another two for him to say hello.

He sat right across from her.

“My legs shake, too.”

“What?” Bridgett looked up from her food at the man. He had brown skin and dark eyes and a kind smile.

“They make you do so much running and climbing. I’ve been in training for five weeks total already and my legs still get shaky. It gets better though.”

“Oh…” Bridgett felt nervous in a way that she could not remember feeling but relieved that the leg shaking might be normal. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Jameson had run out of things to say and so they sat in silence for awhile. The food at the camps was mostly freeze dried and reconstituted. It was high in protein and fiber and could be made in large vats with fire packs. They ate.

“I can even hold my legs still when I sit now.” Jameson said.

“Oh. Good.” Bridgett did not know how to respond. She looked at her food, moved it around on her plate.

“Yeah. I think they want to prepare us for all the mountains out here.”

“Maybe.”

“No mountains where I come from.”

“Where do you come from?”

“The east coast. New Jersey. Do you know it?”

“No. But I hear the coast is beautiful. I hear there are lots of things over there that aren’t over here.”

“Different things. But that’s for people with money. We didn’t…I didn’t have much money. So it’s mostly the same. Except, you know, more of it. And closer together. And bigger. And not so many trees. And…well maybe it is a little different. So…you’re from around here, then?”

“Yes.”

“That’s cool.” He nodded his yead.

Bridgett liked the way that his black hair made soft curls that fell onto his forehead.

“What’s your name?”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry. It’s Jameson.” And he wiped his hands on his pants and held it out to Bridgett. She took it.

“Bridgett.”

They smiled at each other and pulled away and continued to eat.

“This food is kind of hard to eat. But I think I’m getting used to it,” Bridgett said.

“Oh. It would be different for you, wouldn’t it. You all must have loads of fresh food out here. We don’t have that where I come from. It’s all like this.”

She looked up at him with pity.

“I’m so sorry.”

Jameson choked at true sadness in Bridgett’s face and food came out of his mouth. He looked up at Bridgett, embarrassed. She laughed.

They spoke a lot over the next three days.

Jameson had joined up on the east coast after the Emergent had made a show of burning flags and government officials in the city in New Jersey where he had grown up. The city was in chaos. His mother was secretary in a small government office and so she quit immediately and their family was just leaving town when their vehicle was overtaken by rioting groups attacking the exodus. His mother and father were killed in the chaos and he blamed the Emergent. He escaped into the woods and found his way to the closest city and joined. The Endurance Army were moving thousands of soldiers out west as a show of force and Jameson was among the first to volunteer. It took them three weeks to arrive by caravan.

Bridgett liked hearing someone else’s story. She didn’t know a lot about the world and it made her feel like there was more to it than she thought. 

It was one hundred and fifty three days after her seventeenth birthday, in the cafeteria of the Endurance war camp, that Bridgett fell in love for the first and only time of her life. It was in the exact same moment that Jameson fell in love with her. It was his first and final time as well.

Jameson had friends. He had met a few people before he was moved west and many of them had traveled with him. Bridgett was introduced to Paulette and Kane and Vera and the five of them became close during training.

Paulette and Kane were a couple that joined up together from the Badlands in the middle of the country after the same jets that destroyed Hillston and Lakeview dropped bombs on their town in a trial run. They were madly in love with both each other and the idea of combat for the sake of ideology. 

Both died two months after meeting Bridgett during the first deployment to the coast. 

Kane rushed prematurely into an unsecured building near the water and Paulette followed in an attempt to stop him. 

Bridgett and Jameson lay silently in bed after hearing about their deaths. They listened to the cacophony of explosions far in the distance and held hands.

“There was a man that died when I was a kid,” Bridgett mustered.

“A man?”

Bridgett turned over so that she was facing Jameson.

“He was a blacksmith in our town and threw these big parties. And one morning, really early, the party got attacked and he got killed. And…”

“Wait. Attacked by who?” Jameson furrowed his brow.

“I think it was the town elders but it doesn’t matter. My little brothers and I went up once everything was clear and we saw him, hanging there, burnt.”

“Jesus,” Jameson breathed.
“Yeah. He was a really nice guy. I remember meeting him in town. People can be so…” Bridgett trailed off. She had never found a word.

“Why would people attack him?”

“My classmates said it was because he was different.”

“Did he do something illegal?”

“The town just said that he ‘lived too fully’. I think he was gay.”

“That’s really messed up.” 

Jameson pulled Bridgett close.

“I can’t forget his face.”

And Jameson kissed her forehead and they both spent the rest of the night thinking about uncertainty of living.