AN: Any picky grammer/formatting reviews are welcome. This is an old story and the beginning reads a little stiff, but I'm hoping I can fix it.

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Everyone’s dreamed about living in a new-world. Face it, deep down we wish that our lives were full of wonder and discovery. At the peak of the modern era I was seventeen, and I romanticized about such things all the time. In class, during lunch, even before I went to sleep at night.

Most of the time my day dreams involved me and my boyfriend starting a whole new life for one reason or another. See I was a writer, so I had things like that swirling around in my head all the time. They were just that, ideas, nothing more. I didn’t actually want to be stranded on an incredibly beautiful island in the south Pacific with my boyfriend Xan, being saved by him several times from the dangers that lurked in the dark jungles. Although being stranded on an island probably would have been better than what did happen to me. What did happen, I never even saw coming…

I was your typical American teen when I was seventeen. I lived in Arizona, where it was warm year round. My biggest worries were about what to wear to school, how to do my hair, and when I was going to study for an upcoming history test.

I thought I knew what life was like, after all, I’d managed to suffer through seventeen long years and it had seemed like an eternity. I guess I was nice, and politically correct, but I know now that whatever else I was, I was also extremely naïve.

There had been the threat of global nuclear war my entire life. After living with it looming constantly for so long, I didn’t take it seriously anymore.

Seven years before I was born a bunch of doctors invented a type of radiation immunization, just in case everything went to hell. Not that war was the only reason for immunization. By then most things in the US were powered by nuclear energy.

The process of becoming immune basically involved going through a series of injection treatments that started a month after you were born, and ended when you were fifteen. My friends and I often had to carpool to our weekly appointments, even when we were very young. Although having friends along did make it a little more tolerable, going week after week did get old in a hurry.

One of the main catches of the treatments was that you had to start the process when you were a baby, and so there was a cut off date. My parents couldn’t even begin the treatments, they were too old.

The first few years that they tried the treatments lots of kids died because of some weird kind of allergic reaction. Only later was it made safe for almost everyone. Of course there were other measures being taken to preserve the species in case of war. The American species, I mean. After all, there was no equal treatment of outsiders anymore. No one other than the Canadians could get a visa in those troubled days. Trade only occurred between Europe, parts of Asia, Mexico, and Canada. The US only bought goods that came through Canada, because they were considered an expendable part of America.

Yes, there were other measures taken to preserve the species, but most of them I only heard rumors about. One of the most famous being Purification, otherwise known as The Chaos Project.

There were thousands of stories about Pure kids being made back before there was even immunization treatments, but that it had been banned because the result was often something like a super soldier that could end up turning into a homicidal megalomaniac with an IQ several tiers above the genius level. As a child I heard horror stories that kept me up nights straining to hear the footsteps of a Pure experiment that managed to survive to an age where brutally slaughtering lower humans became more than second nature.

I should mention here though, that as far as I or anyone else in the regular population knew, The Pure were only a myth. The only case ever truly documented was a case of a scientist who took nature into his own hands and created a monster that had the potential to be so terrible the child was put down in the interest of general population.

The scientist was Dr. Stiben, and he called his work Purification of the species. Stiben’s Monster, much like Frankenstein’s Monster, was hideous to look at and in the end was the death of not only his creator, but every member of the man’s family and all of his friends and colleagues and their families. The death toll came to well over a hundred innocent people before the thirteen year old experiment was captured and destroyed. The truly frightening aspect was that home videos showed Stiben’s Monster was in most respects a normal, healthy child up until the age of reason. Then came the insanity, the desire to murder and mutilate other creatures until they were no longer recognizable. Then came the switching on of what the scientists who studied the Monster later named The Chaos Gene.

There had been rumors for as long as I could remember that medical files were being examined by doctors, and lists were being made. If you were strong and smart, you might be able to make one of these lists. If you made the list, you would somehow be saved in the event of Judgment Day. That was what it would be called, should it ever happen.

Of course no one really thought it was going to happen. I sure didn’t. Only people who were “the informed” knew when the danger was close. “The informed” meaning they were close to the CIA or whoever it was who knew when things were getting bad. I guess the plan was that as soon as the danger looked close, the people who had been put on the lists would be collected, and taken to a safe place. Should nothing happen, and the situation be resolved, they would be returned to continue their lives as if nothing happened.

I wonder sometimes if they would have told us that we couldn’t talk about where we’d been, even with our loved ones who would’ve worried while we were gone. I know that’s a strange thing to wonder now that it doesn’t matter anymore. Of course I wonder about it anyway. I was going to be a writer, and I had to think outside of the box, examine all the what-ifs.

I still wonder what life would have been like if there hadn’t been a war.

No, war wasn’t the right term for what happened. It was really more of an...

...annihilation.