Shadows, Nightmares and New York

My alarm clock rings for a third time, and i finally get out of my sleeping bag. But I'm not letting it have the last laugh. In my half-awake daze, i put on the nearest thing to me, which happens to be some trousers, grab my revolver, aim and shoot the fucking thing. I hate waking up.
“That's gonna need patching up.”
I spin around, gun raised to see a smirking girl in the corner.
“Jane, you frightened the fucking life out of me!” I say, lowering my gun.
“Lol.”
“Lol?” I ask. “What is that, teen-speak?”
“Sort of. Means Laugh-Out-Loud. You've never heard that before?”
“No.” I pause. Then I realize something. “Why are you in my tent?!” I demand.
She smirks. “No need for the tone.” She giggles, as if laughing at a private joke. “I was cleaning. Haven't you noticed?”
I look around, and now I'm awake I notice the place is a lot cleaner. “How long have you been here?” I ask.
“Hour, Maybe two.”
“Wait... then that means...” I suddenly remember I slept nude, and look at the open sack i sleep in.
“Oh yes,” She says comically “I saw the whole package.” She winks at me, then holds up a bag.
“I even kept the crisps and candy bars.” She hands me the bag.
“Thanks. For the room as well.”
“No problem.” She replies, and smiles as she turns to leave.
“Jane,”
“Yeah Strand?”
“Did you see anything you like?”
She giggles, and puts on her most flirty face. “Maybe” She smiles, and leaves, leaving me sky-high.

I'm finally dressed. I study my clear- cut military hair style and my other facial features. I've got deep brown eyes, a small nose, and small length facial hair around my chin and cheeks. I'm fussy about how I look. I walk out of my tent in black jeans and a yellow shirt with a radiation symbol on. Half the group are around a table eating breakfast, including Mandala, Joe and Pete. Dimitri is trying out some of the rifles they have stored in a tent, and Jane is on a laptop in one of the cars, a huge 4x4. I walk over to the table, and start to introduce myself to the people at the table I haven't met yet- no time the present I guess. Ten minuets later and I think I know their names by now. There's Chris and Tony, the two trigger-happy teens. They're alright with being called trigger-happy, there's nothing that they love more than killing urchins. There's Sadie, the no-nonsense type of lady who has absolutely no sense of humor. But, she somehow comes across as a really nice person, so it evens out. There are around 20 kids, and I know some of their names, aging from 4-14. The 14 year old Jack, but everyone calls him Coleman, sometimes helps out with the fights, but he's being eased into the world of killing huge monsters on a regular basis slowly. There are the twins, Kai and Liu from China. They're not hard to tell apart, especially since Kai's a boy and Liu's a girl. And there's Tex (3 guesses where he's from), a small, muscular man. Apparently he lived in a town near Dallas and he has a strong texas accent. Stronger than mine. And now I'm speaking to Lily, a 26 year old emo who apparently is the technician for the camp. To be honest, I think she's out of her fuckin mind! She's just ended telling me about “Her little project” called Mr. Happy Jr., a 12ft long Bomb with enough explosives to blow up half of Washington. I don't ever want to fall out with her.
“Did you know that if you poke a baby on the back of it's head, its arms and legs stretch outwards?” Lily enquires.
“No, I don't think I did. Thanks.” I reply. Over the last half an hour I must of learnt so much useless information I could be part of the Jackass crew. A tall, black haired boy bounds over to her and throws his arms around her. She hugs him in return, and introduces me to him.
“Jest, this is Strand. Strand, this is Ben, but we all call him Jest.” She says, looking from me to him and back to me again. I've heard about Jest. He's the practical joker of the group, throwing smoke-grenades into tents at 2am and spiking the breakfasts with laxatives. Although, they used to be worse, until he replaced Pete's revolver with a fake gun, and later when they got ambushed by Urchins, his gun fired a BANG! sign instead of the slug it was meant to. It goes without saying that the pranks weren't so bad after that.
“Hi Strand! Weird name.” Jest says, extending a hand.
“I could say the same thing” I say shaking his hand. Three seconds later and I wish I hadn't. My hand has around 15 volts going through it, just enough to make my hand sting like hell. I look at Jest through a scowl, and see that he's on the floor, crying with laughter. Lily's with him. I'm about to grab my plastic knife and shove it 3 inches up his arse before Jane calls me over. She's looking through a satellite feed at the Empire State Building, whose roof and top couple of floors have been blown off.
“This is a feed from New York ” Dimitri explains. “We don't know how many of them there are, humans or Urchins.”
There are lots of humans, crying, shaking, holding eachother in comfort. And there are a few familiar faces. There's the 2 Urchins I saw before, The Bear and The Crow, and there's something small beside them...
My heart stops. I feel like vomiting and rejoicing at the same time.
It's Abbey.