Rebuilding

         The year is 2051.  The world has changed, but not as much as science fiction writers would like to believe.  The world has been through a 20-year war, which had ended only a year earlier.  Science has made some advances — but, as is usually the case with humankind, they are mainly in only the field of weaponry.  There are some laser guns, but cars do not fly and computers cannot carry on a full conversation with their operators.  Earth is still the only known planet with human life and there are no spaceships able to travel across galaxies, cures still have not been found for major diseases such as cancer or AIDs, and no contact has been made with any extra-terrestrial civilizations (intelligent or otherwise).

         The United States is no longer considered the most powerful country in the world.  In fact, it is perhaps now the most pitied.  It is once again a colony of Britain, because the “great” Americans refused to learn from the past.

         In 2025, a seemingly wonderful man was elected president.  He was young, handsome, and very charismatic.  He reminded those old enough to remember of John F. Kennedy (without the rumors of affairs).  He had even been named after one of the great “founding fathers” — Benjamin Franklin.  But history would remember him as one of the greatest monsters — along with the likes of Adolf Hitler.

         Shortly after he was re-elected for a second term, a law was passed that made him president for life — more accurately, dictator.  And in the spring of 2030, he started World War III by invading and conquering Mexico, then launching an attack on Russia.  Unknown to the people, or perhaps unnoticed, military bases were set up in schools and places of religious worship.  Anyone who disagreed with what was happening was branded a traitor, hunted down, and killed on sight.

         Despite Franklin’s brutality, he truly was a brilliant man — an evil genius, you could say.  Despite all the atrocities he committed, he still managed to convince the majority of the populace he was a good and righteous man.  By using the places of innocence — the schools and religious buildings — along with leaking false information through spy networks, the people believed him when they were told that their enemies (truly, the rest of the world; the only other countries on the “Axis” side were small Third-World countries who had been given aid they had been unable to repay and were now in essence indentured servants) were savage barbarians who would bomb their children and their churches.  They never doubted him when he said the rest of the world was against them, because they were envious of what the Americans had — and those who didn’t believe him remained silent out of fear for their own lives, and the lives of their families.

         The war finally ended with the “great commander’s” death.  But, just as Hitler did, he escaped justice.  In an almost ironic twist of fate, he died peacefully in his sleep (a luxury never afforded to his victims) of heart failure.  Without his “leadership,” the people became unsure of themselves — who would think for them now?  Within a month, the surrender was final.  Government (or ex-government, as it were) officials released a public statement apologizing to all of the victims and their families.  But it was far too little, and far too late.  And, as with most countries on the losing side of a war, the once considered great USA sunk into a land of slums and poverty.

***

         New York City, on the roof of St. Catherine’s Cathedral.  A small feminine figure can be seen sitting on the shoulder of the archangel Gabriel’s statue.  Most who see the figure assume it is another statue.  However, if they were to look closer, they would see her hair — bronze, streaked with blue — fluttering in the breeze.

         The woman sits perfectly still, her eyes closed, listening to the sounds of the world.  Her male companion, who stands with his back against a low wall a few feet away, sighs slightly.  The woman smiles.  “Just a little longer,” she says softly, her voice husky with a trace of a British accent.

         She had been born here in New York, but both of her parents had been born and raised in the slums of London.  They had come here a little over a year before the war began.  Like many others, they had been lured by the great reforms Franklin had made.  And admittedly, they did have a better life than they’d had in London — for a while, at least.  Their misfortune began when her father was killed in a car accident — her mother was three months pregnant at the time.  The baby girl was born three months after the war started.  Then, when she was five years old, her mother was killed for speaking out against the war.  Like most orphaned children of the war’s “traitors,” she was thrown into the streets to fend for herself.  She became a pickpocket and all-around thief in order to survive, and was a heroin addict by the time she was 10.

         “You know I would never ask you to hurry this, Kirsha,” the man replied.

         “Of course you wouldn’t,” she said with another smile.  “That’s not the kind of person you are, Sashen.”  She stood up on the angel’s shoulder, opened her eyes, and stretched.  Sashen watched her carefully, with a slightly worried look in his dark eyes.  After a moment, with an almost cat-like grace, Kirsha hopped from her perch and landed in front of him.  “If you were,” she continued, “you never would have saved me.”

         Like Kirsha, to say Sashen’s life had been changed dramatically by the war was rather an understatement.  Like her, his family had come to this country hoping to find a better life that what they had.  But unlike her, they never did find it.

         He had been born five years before her, to moderately successful parents in Tokyo.  His father was a businessman, and his mother stayed home to care for their young son.  While Kirsha’s parents had been young, Sashen’s were both older-his mother was 35 when she gave birth to him, and his father had been 50.  When he was five years old, his father died of a stroke.  Shortly afterward, his mother — dissatisfied with the lack of jobs available in the city — moved the two of them to a small town in Connecticut just a month before the war broke out.  Unfortunately, the job opportunities there were no more promising.  But because most of their money had been used for the move, she had to take a job as a secretary at the local school, where she barely made enough to make ends meet.

         Despite their financial problems, Sashen was a fairly happy child, although a bit quiet.  But all that changed when, on his 10th birthday, his mother’s school was bombed, and she was killed.  It wasn’t until years later that he discovered there had been no secret military headquarters located there — it had been one of the targets selected because of Franklin’s leaked false information.

         Since his mother had been a “patriot,” he was placed in a government-run orphanage in upstate New York, where they took advantage of his newfound anger and began training him as a soldier and an assassin.  When he was 15, he left to become a bounty hunter — which had become a very profitable profession during the war.  He was quite successful at this and amassed a great amount of wealth in just five years, although no one but him really knew just how much.

         One day, he received an assignment that, though it didn’t seem like it at the time, would once again completely change his life.  It seemed a bit strange, but it sounded like an easy job, and it was worth quite a bit of money — which was even paid to him in advance, since the government obviously thought it would be incredibly simple, as well.  The target was just a girl — a homeless, 15-year-old heroin addict — and the orders were, as always, to kill her on sight.

         The target was Kirsha.

         It took Sashen less than a month to track her down.  It puzzled him why there was such a high-priced death sentence on someone who was such a common occurrence in those days, but he didn’t think too much of it.  The government said they were trying to crack down on criminals like her, but that was an obvious lie — to this day, no one really knows why they considered her so dangerous.

         The instant he saw her, he immediately felt sorry for her.  She looked ragged, but surprisingly not as dirty as one would have expected.  Her bronze hair was long, dull, and a bit shaggy, but it was clean and untangled.  Her clothes mostly hung off her body because she was so scrawny, she had dark circles under her dim green eyes, and the needle tracks from her years of heroin use were visible on her pale arms.  But she wore a small silver locket that contained a picture of her mother holding her when she was about three years old (probably the only object of any value that she owned, although she would never part with it, no matter how desperate she was).  Overall, she really did look quite pathetic.

         Sashen caught his first real look at her when he had stepped out into the alley in front of her.  His gun had been raised; ready to follow the orders he had been given.  But when she looked at him, he saw a touch of sadness in her otherwise lifeless eyes, and he froze.  She didn’t try to run, and it seemed she had already accepted her fate and was actually willing to meet her death.

         He couldn’t kill her.  He was never sure why, but there was just something about her that made him refuse to pull the trigger.  Instead, he holstered his gun, grabbed her hand, and ran.  They kept running for years — Kirsha often said they ran until they couldn’t run any more, but she always did have a flair for the melodramatic — and didn’t stop until the war was over.

         Sashen shook his head and frowned faintly.  “But I wish,” he said quietly, “that your daily dose of peace could require somewhere on the ground.  You know how I hate heights.”

         Kirsha stood on her toes (she was only five feet tall, so the top of her head only came up to his chest) and kissed his cheek.  “You don’t have to come with me, you know,” she replied.

         “And what if you fall?”

         “You’d catch me if I did?”  She sounded a little surprised.

         “Of course I would.”  He put his hand on her slender waist (she had never really regained all of the weight she should have after all her years on the streets), and they started towards the stairs to leave the church.  “If I wanted to lose you, I would never have stopped myself all those years ago.”

         She smiled slightly.  “I suppose not.”