Samuel was washing the dishes one October morning when he first felt a strange, out-of-place feeling, as if he had left the place in which he belonged and could never return, as a man does in the first days of a life sentence. The feeling would stalk him as an unseen predator for the remainder of his life. At the time he recalled being twenty-one. He had recently finished his mandatory stint as a conscript for the Republic -- lasting two years. His father was important and his mother was irrelevant, so he managed to land an easy position in the engineering corps instead of training as an infantryman. If worst came to worst, he would be assigned to a tank or air corps as a repairman for the duration. Easy, bloodless work.

The unsettling feeling lasted some minutes and passed without warning or trace, as he would come to realize it was wont to do. His father often told him that the news was not good, that the company for which he worked was in the wrong area of the country, and that he should move at once. As usual, he treated his father's advice as sage and useless. He went on washing his dishes. Soon they were all done. Samuel lived alone and had lived alone since he graduated from the Service a couple of months ago. It had taken him some time to get a job on his own merits, mostly because of his accent. Most companies were somewhat hesitant to hire anyone who was a member of 'his kind'. It always seemed rather arbitrary to him, but soon his father's pull came to bear. He was an intern with one of the terafirms. What, exactly, his work did, he was never entirely sure. But for the week or so he had been at work, he had the same job.

He was to use the Zone 3 Mainframe to compute data using predefined formulae.

Samuel was mostly part of the Conico Conglomerate -- a part as tiny as a mite, they seemed always to remind him -- for the Zone 3 Mainframe. He had moderate experience with computers, and he liked them. Liked to mess around with them a little. His job was to make sure the Zone 3 Mainframe, a persnickety yet extremely modern thing, remained in good and working order and gave whoever Conico was contracting for the numbers they wanted. It was not difficult work. He had good hours and they paid him well. And for the most part, he liked doing whatever it was he did. At times he did wonder, though -- was he making cars? trains? steel? missiles? candy? He settled with the unsettling but generally amocable conclusion that he would never be privy to the knowledge of exactly what was heading through the Z3M, why, and for whom.

He had a good job with good pay and good hours, doing something he liked doing. Why did he feel so out-of-place, then? Again, he realized that he'd probably never know. The feeling passed, and he realized at once he had missed a single black porcelain plate on which rested, almost ridiculously incongruous, six or seven lumps of old noodle. Samuel was a bit of a perfectionist, so he realized he couldn't leave the black porcelain plate undone. He scraped at it for some time, but the noodles, for the most part, would not budge. For some minutes he would pick at them with his fingernails, and they seemed after a fashion to be baked into the plate itself. While his ministrations gained fervor, he felt something warm and fuzzy brush up against his left leg.

It was Nicky, a black shorthair which he had adopted upon leaving the Service. A cursory glance at the area Samuel had set aside for the cat revealed water which seemed reasonably clean but a distinct lack of food. Setting the plate aside for a moment, he turned around and opened the wooden cabinet immediately next to him (as was the custom at that time, kitchens tended to be notoriously small), and found no canned food particularly cat-oriented. With a bit of a sigh, he closed that cabinet and opened the refrigerator; one used to less cramped surroundings would have been impressed by the fact that both could not be open at the same time, but Samuel was not such a person. He extracted a half-empty can of Proseham from the top shelf and a spoon from a nearby drawer, and with no particular effort served Nicky two generous spoonfuls of the canned meat. The cat seemed momentarily offended, as he always did when not given cat food, and proceeded to eat it with great relish.

In a moment of personal abstraction, with the can of Proseham in one hand and a dirtied tablespoon in the other, he reached fruitlessly for the telephone, intent on calling Annika to arrange dinner, and was suddenly and rudely interrupted by a tremendous explosion which knocked him into the refrigerator, the cabinet, the sink, the bartable, and finally the kitchen floor. The explosion was soon accompanied by many increasingly closer ones, which ran along a line he later surmised to be the C rail, stopped at a spot he later surmised to be Threeblack Railhead, and then continued gamely on. The shattering of windows and the shrieking of shells, men, and animals rung in his ears for a time until he heard little save a ringing surge. It occurred to him that he had left the black porcelain plate unfinished, and as soon as the blasts passed his house he rose, intent on scrubbing it clean.

He had nearly scoured the black porcelain plate entirely when he heard a hard rap on his door -- two solid blows, as Mr. Isako was wont to give when introducing himself. "Samuel?" The voice was, surely enough, that of Mr. Isako.
"Yes, Mr. Isako?"
"Art thou in good humor?"
"Yes, Mr. Isako."
"Prithee quit this anon right. There is nary a moment to spare."
Samuel nodded sharply, not particularly caring that Isako could not see him. With a few steps, he was at his front door; with a few gestures, he had unlocked it, revealing the harsh face of Mr. Isako. He had two or three small cuts about his head, sown with little shards of window-glass. He seemed not to notice them or at least not to care about them. "Are you all right, Mr. Isako? You seem to have gotten cut up pretty bad."
Isako looked at him. "The glass woundeth my face, but it toucheth not my resolve. The neighborhood hath been decimated by what seemeth to be cannon. We are in sorest need of capable hands that we may clear the ruins and bring to care him who hath fallen injured."
Samuel took a moment to translate Mr. Isako's words. His elders said he sounded drunk; it was truly difficult to describe how his elders sounded, but it was usually just breathy and abnormal. He looked Mr. Isako over further; all that caught his eye was a shovel in one hand and a revolver at his hip. The revolver made him faintly nervous. "Why are you armed?"
"Looters." The one-word response spoke volumes; Isako was old enough to remember looters in chaotic situations, but in Samuel's entire life he had never run into a lack of civil order except in the urban-quarters drill that was part of every conscript's training. Isako nodded sharply and withdrew, leaving Samuel to find his own affairs. Besides a hundred dollars, all that he had on his person which he saw fit to carry was a pistol and accompanying ammunition. He knew that the threat would be enough, and that carrying it would not require him to draw blood.

He stepped outside into the harsh light of the late morning. Taking in his surroundings, he noticed clouds gathering thick on the horizon and plumes of smoke rising from various places about town into the heavens like a crowd of accusing fingers. His front patio had no northern exposure, but he knew full well that was where the trouble had began, and where, God willing, it would end.

The first thing he saw as he descended his stairwell was the fact that the Minogo house had been reduced to smoldering rubble. A few yards from the house sat Minogo himself. Minogo was a fisherman who had signed up to serve in the navy during the War; he fought with distinction for three years and was then captured by the enemy. He held neither them nor himself any animosity, as many had suffered the same fate and they treated him very well. He had just returned home from a brief, unsuccessful trip, which he was forced to cut short upon hearing his mother's illness had taken a turn for the worse and it was all too likely she would die in the hospital. His face was creased and weathered, a map of the hardships of a seagoing life. As a child, Samuel often visited his house with his friends to hear his stories of the War and of the ocean at peace; as an older child, Minogo was always there to dole out advice, kind words, and ribald adages. He was a natural storyteller, a simple man, and Samuel was convinced a good man as well. He had abstractly planned to, when and if he got married, invite Minogo. The man was like an uncle to him; it was only fitting. The expression on his face was heavy but restful, the sort of look one ascribes to a man who has just revealed the final, most terrible secret he has long hidden from the world. He had propped himself up against a light pole, and now sat, entirely motionless, cradling a length of his small intestine.

He began slowly to put it all together. Mr. Isako spoke of artillery, Mr. Minogo had been gutted by what must have been shrapnel. With a great and terrible start, Samuel realized that mere minutes ago, the first blows of the War had been struck -- the War which everyone feared, the War which every crackpot predicted was right around the corner, the War of whose approach his father had only recently warned. He looked around again, scanning his surroundings for a tall building, anywhere with a view. He was struck with an overpowering discomfort with the sort of blindness in which he now lived, and set out to find the highest building in immediate reach.

He soon found it: a large hotel, freshly adorned with a large shell-hole in the west wing. The hotel was a scene of general chaos, and no one bothered asking him where he was going or why. It was an elementary matter to find a balcony, and he looked out towards the north into the ruined city.

Off to the north, he could make out the gray lines that hinted at the Border Line, strings of fortresses on each side of a border between hostile countries. The occasional flash of light came from the gray lines, the faint boom and less faint flash of explosions, and a distant rumble as one of the edifices of concrete and wrath fell. He stood transfixed for some minutes as the air began to fill with the roar of jet engines and exploding rockets. Armor, Samuel guessed armored personnel carriers, rushed out in long and spreading files, through the countryside and towards the Border Line. Sleek jets shrieked down upon them from the north; one took an AA rocket in the tail and was quickly forced into the ground, but the others swept by, shooting missiles and rockets at the vehicles. Many caught fire, some exploded outright, and men spilled out, half-armored and vulnerable. More jets soared over the city itself, bombing areas that held batteries and armories, softening it for a ground attack. As more and more lines were punched through the Border Line, troops and tanks began to pour through as well. The forces manning the line fell back, some in an orderly fashion, some in a rout. He watched them run, run, run, some for only a few yards before being cut down, some for miles, some into the city and past the hotel shrieking incoherently. He had heard from a nearby radio all that he needed to know: the war was here. The People's Republic, backed by the Soviet Union, was engaging in such attacks all along the border line. In some places the line held firm, in others there were already breakthroughs. The regimentalized barking on the radio would turn slowly into booming static as the Soviets began jamming civilian frequencies. He heard a loud shout in french-accented English from behind him: "You there! You're past the conscription, aren't you?"

He turned around to find a man in a tuxedo, looking rather harried. "Yes, yes I am. Why do you ask?"

"They're looking for anyone who is down there. They want to draft any conscripts into a defense force to meet the Soviets when they come here, just outside of the city." The Frenchman gave him a conspiratory look. "You know, it really doesn't seem that any of them have a particularly good prospect for survival."
Samuel sighed heavily. "What do you want from me, then?"
The Frenchman smiled. "We have rifles downstairs. You're welcome to have one, and as much ammunition as you want for it, if you're willing to stick around and make sure that when the Soviets take over the city, they have hell to pay."