This was written sometime in the fall of 2004. I had at this point roughed out the stories of most of the characters that will appear in the comic, but felt that I needed to get a better feel for Nekos, a character you will soon get to know very well. This is the first piece of a LONG story, which I ended up changing completely. While it sort of fits, it just doesn’t fit Nekos the way I’d hoped.

It never did stop. The jarring blasts from the bombs outside made the old building shudder and quake around the soldiers inside. The endless shake and tatter of gunfire was like a rattlesnake’s warning, “come any closer and you’re done!”

The soldiers sat in a cluster around a small fire, awaiting orders to be thrown into the onslaught. The enemy was out there, more real than any of them had imagined when they’d signed on with the resistance.

Silence was their language, each of the boys knowing the others’ thoughts, because their thoughts were collective. Fear, hope, desperation. It was all shared among them. How many had lost a family to the enemy? How many had given up their dreams to be here? Who was going to die here today?

What have I done, what have I done? How did I get myself here?

Sprawled casually against some unidentifiable piece of burnt rubble, the eldest of the soliders sat staring into the small flame before them, pondering his own fate. He was no older than twenty-two, slim from the minimal amount of food available, his hair no more than fuzz on his head, only starting to grow back in after being shorn off as all recruits were. His skin was pale white, because no one dared go out in the light. There were scant few fighters as it was, the resistance couldn’t afford to lose anyone to stupidity as well.

Folding his hands together, staring at his brothers around him, Kyle Nekos bowed his head to pray.

Pray to what, he thought. God and any other deities out there have forsaken us long ago. We are nothing. We are lower than dust. We are the end.

Maybe it just felt better to believe in something. Some of the boys had only the hope that some higher entity was guiding them to give them the will to struggle on in a hopelessly futile war. But for Nekos, that hope was long gone. He had watched his family killed around him, his friends, his neighbors, his country, his freedom. All of it gone, all of it pieced away one bit at a time. With little else driving him on in life, the only reason he had to get up in the morning was to fight. Here, he had gained a new family. He wasn’t prepared to lose two families in one lifetime, so he felt it was his duty to do everything he could to protect them.

They sat there, huddled together, surrounded by a battle none of them had chosen, a world, time, and life, that would forever change the course of history. They had learned that the thing about war is you get more scars watching it than you do fighting. Your world cracks. People you laughed with yesterday are dead today, and you can only hope that you, too, will make it to tomorrow.

Nekos looked at the boys sitting around him. From himself, the oldest, on down the line to their youngest at only fourteen, he saw his family, his brothers. No matter what, they would stick together until the bitter end.

They are so young, they don’t deserve this, Nekos thought, shaking his head slightly. He closed his eyes. His heart ached. He didn’t know how much longer he could stand to watch his friends die around him.

He was shaken from his reverie by a particularly close bomb blast. The building rocked dangerously; bits of plaster and stone tumbled from above.

“It’s been hours,” one of the boys stated with a shaky voice. “They should have been back for us by now. They should have needed us by now.”

Through a gaping hole in one of the walls, Nekos looked out at a reddened sky and the shadowy figures of soldiers and tanks crawling across the horizon like ants and beetles. The worst fighting was out there, on the plains. Here in the city, the enemy filtered through seeking stragglers and those who’d managed to escape their initial attacks.

Nekos stood.

“Come on,” he said softly to the others. “We’re getting out of here. We’re no use to the cause if we all die here in a blast.”

“But where are we going?”

“The front lines. We’re here to fight, not sit around. We’re useless here. Something bad has happened out there, I can feel it.”

He stared into the wide eyes around him, the dirty, malnourished faces looking back at him.

“Let’s go fight.”

The youngest, Tim Holliman, had raised his voice in agreement. Slowly, the others solemnly nodded in agreement.

They followed Nekos out of the room and down the rotted stairs of the old hotel they had been hiding in. They took each step cautiously, not knowing who or what waited for them on each floor of the building. With bated breath and guns drawn, they arrived on the ground floor.

Stepping out into the lobby, the group of boys looked around. There was nothing more there than some broken furniture, dirt, and the remains of what had been a picture window looking out onto the street. An old map of the city hung haphazardly in a frame on the wall, somehow having survived the initial fighting and raiding. Even stranger was the fact that an old flag, covered in dirt and worn by sun and time, still hung proudly from a small pole sticking out from a wall. Even through the layers of grime, and colors faded from bright sunlight, the boys could see the remains of bright red stripes and a field of blue covered in white stars.

Somehow, the dingy old flag gave Nekos a small sense of hope. If that little flag, one tiny piece of fabric amid fires, explosions, and destruction, could survive, maybe there was a chance for these boys, as well.

He stood on tiptoes, reaching up for it. He tugged it from its pole and folded it up gently, tucking it into his pack.

“Let’s go,” he said, motioning for the others to follow with a shrug of his shoulders.

Onward, they went, into what, they weren’t sure. The ground shook from each and every blast they heard in the distance, and they couldn’t totally rule out the fact that they might be watched from somewhere. The enemy was everywhere.

Somewhere behind him, Nekos could hear one of the boys whistling a tune. For a moment he worried that attention might be drawn to the small group, but as he gazed at the smoldering remains all around them, he knew that there was nothing left here. It was almost certain that no one was around to find them. While it meant that something bad had likely happened to the rest of their team, he knew that he and the boys were safe for the moment.

As they made their way through the city, they became more and more relaxed. Feeling more at ease, they loosened up, beginning to talk and joke with one another.

“Come on, now, guys,” Nekos said, ribbing them verbally. “Gotta keep your eyes peeled, you never know where they’re gonna come from.”

They all laughed.

“Yeah, Nekos, they could be right over there. They could be behind that building. Or they could just be behind us,” Tim laughed.

CHA-CLINK.

That unmistakable sound of a grenade hitting the pavement.

The boys stopped.

Nekos whirled around.

And then came the blackness.