Cities in Dust

My childhood was very typical of my class and hometown. My parents divorced early and my mother essentially rose on her own. I attended public school, which I did not excel at. I was always more interested in art and music. I was eventually prescribed Ritalin, even though later in life it turned out that I had never been ADD.

I was 16 when it happened, though I now see that it had begun much sooner than that. I was living in foster care at the time, because my mother had lost her battle with drug addiction and passed on.

It started with the mandatory psych evaluations and meds. That in itself had never been out of the ordinary, but the new consequences for not complying with their new system became borderline cruel and unusual.

Then they began changing our medication. Higher doses, new names. The side effects became worse and worse, and he sedative effects were becoming more overpowering with each new prescription.

Then came the random sweeps. Foster care had always had strange rules about what you could and could not have, but suddenly they were searching more vigorously than ever for all of the new things they considered 'contraband'.

I was fortunate enough to have a computer, and immediately they took it from me and swept through my files. They returned it to me empty and blank, saying that all of the contraband files had been removed, and that I would be issued a warning for my illicit behavior. My music, my artwork, my photographs and my writing; everything I held dear, had been taken from me.

I immediately retaliated. I stopped taking my medication, and began to attempt to subvert what had begun to try to take a hold of my life.

I found others like me. Determined to 'fight the man', keep their freedom, their liberty, and their art. I found that it had spread from those under government control to normal citizens. Homes were being raided under suspicion of 'illicit activities'. People were being arrested for everyday things that were suddenly crimes, like planting a garden, listening to music with 'violent', 'subversive' or 'vulgar' language, or reading certain books. Travel had become restricted, and unless you had the clearance, you could not even leave your county. We couldn't get news of the outside world. We had been cut off, completely.

By the time I was 18 we were underground, and we began broadcasting our pirate radio signal. We were constantly on the move and on the run, making makeshift broadcasting towers on the rooftops of our crumbling city.

At first, we had a very limited broadcast area, but soon our hard work and effort paid off, and our signal reached Chicago.

It wasn't long until we learned of the fate our brothers and sisters of the west. Chicago had essentially become a police state. The government had been 'bought out' with bribes and promises by a group we had become very familiar with; Better Living.

Their 'security', a ruthless brigade of armed men, had taken the city over. People were being executed in the streets for seemingly anything, without trial, and left to rot. Children who were left homeless were sent to 'reintegration camps', where they were processed and turned into brainless, emotionless, cookie cutter people.

That was where The Great Purge began. It consumed every part of our lives. Our cities, our government, and our family and friends succumbed to this terrible beast. It swept across our country like an uncontrollable wildfire.

We knew that it wouldn't be long until they came to our city. We acted as quickly as we could. We had tried to remain a 'peaceful' resistance, but we now knew that the only way to ensure our survival against these barbarians was to take up arms, and fight fire with fire.

As we had all assumed, Detroit's government quickly succumbed to the bribes and buyouts from Better Living, and their soldiers dressed in white began terrorizing our citizens. Our resistance was forced further underground, and every day the fight to survive grew more and more difficult. Our date houses were routinely compromised and raided. In the first few weeks, we lost over two dozen of the most amazing and tenacious of our brethren. But, despite our heavy losses, we were a force to be reckoned with, and but up one hell of a fight; which did no go ignored by the higher ups in Better Living.

I remember the last few days of Detroit very vividly. The streets were filled with the dead; bodies piled as high as twenty feet in some places. The night skies were scorched by the burning city, and the air was choked with smoke and ash. Our forces had been pushed back to the river, with most of us taking refuge in and around the remains of Joe Louis Arena. For five nights, we held our ground, taking on wave after wave of Better Living's best forces. It was in these days that we began to call their elite operatives by the nickname 'Draculoids'. We felt it very befitting, for it described their heinous ability to suck the very life out of a community and its people as well as their robotic nature. These men must have found this absolutely fucking hilarious, because the next morning, they began donning old style Dracula masks.

Finally, on the sixth day of fighting, the remaining five of us conceded defeat and fled the city with nothing more than the clothes on our back and the weapons on our belts. We ran westward, gathering survivors as we made our way across the Michigan landscape. We managed to find a handful of our brothers and sisters in Ann Arbor and Kalamazoo, but survivors were few and far between until we crossed the Michigan/Indiana border.