Note from the Author: First, you should know this is a work of fanfiction. The basic universe in which it takes place is the creation of Stephen Michael Stirling, who is a highly capable author, in my opinion among the world's very best.

Next, a key element in this universe is an even known as the Change, which kills a lot of modern technology, such as gunpowder, and any thing electronic. Mechanical items without any electronic components often can still work. March 17th, 1998, is known amongst the survivors as the Change Day.

Finally, to my knowledge, there is in eality no City of Dornesse, Iowa. This place is my own creation, entirely fictional.

For more information, I suggest reading [i]Dies the Fire, The Protector's War, and A Meeting at Corvallis, in the listed procession.

Now, this is only the first chapter, and it is not finished, which is why I am posting it here. Some constructive reviews would be wonderful.

Now, on to the first installment.

WARNING!!!: This story contains descriptions of violent combat, etc...[/I]

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Wednesday, March 18th, 1998
6:00 A.M.
Change Day + 1

Nearby the City of Dornesse, Iowa

From his vantage point atop the low hill, James Steward could see the raider’s camp fires, half a dozen still lit, out of the two dozen originally there. That was a good sign, signaling him that most of his prey was sleeping, not expecting an attack. That was fine by him and his party. The more absolute the shock, the more effective the attackers would be. He had long studied military history and believed very strongly in a phrase once uttered by a man he believed was one of history’s few genuine military geniuses, Napoleon Bonaparte.

“Never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake,” he muttered quietly. He raised his hand to his face and wiped away caked sweat and mud.

“You say something, Steward?” The whispered question caused James to turn his head to look at the speaker. Isaac Kleinerman, until yesterday a quarterback at Dornesse High, sat in a low crouch just a few feet down the hill behind him.

“I was just making an observation, Isaac,” he replied quietly. “You can come up, if you’d like. These bastards are all drunk, or sleeping. Only stay low.”

Nodding silently, the nineteen year-old rose slightly with a smoothness one only expected in people much smaller, covering the distance between him and Steward in total silence, a long-handled axe held lightly in one hand as he moved. He settled next to Steward quietly in the prone position and looked down at the camp below.

“How many, do you figure?” he whispered.

“Maybe thirty,” was the reply. “They’re not very organized, so we can’t really count fires here, but I’d say thirty, based on how many hit the school yesterday.”

Kleinerman grimaced at that, and Steward joined him. When all the technological devices had stopped working early yesterday morning, it had taken a distressingly short time for a lot of deviants and malcontents to start looting, using the strange circumstances to make a lot of innocent people’s lives miserable. Many were escaped criminals, but, a disturbingly large portion had been just common citizens, succumbing to the moment and deciding the life they had known was gone, so why not just break things? Before very long, the looting had changed to outright raiding and killing.

Dornesse Junior/Senior High School had been targeted by a raid around midday. The men had been armed with improvised weapons, knives, clubs, axes, and so on, but even so that had been enough to overwhelm the students and school faculty. Several teachers had been killed, and students also, and the raiders had taken several of the female students. Nobody had any illusions as to precisely why, but angry as it made them, at first nobody thought a lot of high school kids and teachers would be able to do anything.

Until, that is, one James Steward came along. A fairly quiet but intelligent student, James had a reputation as an aficionado of all things military, and of history in general. When he learned the faculty was not going to do anything to help the captured girls he got so angry he had to be physically restrained from attacking the principal, George Cole, accusing the man of being a gutless coward, shouting loudly that he wasn’t going to do anything about it because he was too afraid. Cole had retaliated near as angrily, furiously asking Steward if he had any better ideas. “What are we supposed to do?” he had inquired. Steward made his position plain with two words. “Fight back.” It had all snowballed then, even when an irritated Principal Cole had issued directions forbidding any rescue mission. He insisted it had no chance at success and they had to stay focused on what they had left. He could not keep the situation in control, however, and people, mostly students, began volunteering to help in the rescue effort and making preparations to move.

Isaac Kleinerman was the first volunteer, followed by Steward’s friend Henry Mills and a lot of others. Steward didn’t want to take everybody, knowing that the school also needed its own defenders, so he carefully selected thirty five. They armed themselves with things like kitchen knives strapped onto broom handles, and old fire axes. For armor they wore a hodgepodge of sweaters and heavy coats. It was not exactly King Arthur’s Knights, but at least the bandits had been equally as ragged.

“You ready to hit ‘em?” whispered Kleinerman; Steward, jerked suddenly back to reality, looked at him and blinked in confusion.

“What?” he asked. Kleinerman rolled his eyes.

“I asked you, should we hit them? It’s almost morning, man.”

“It already is morning, technically,” Steward whispered back. “Yeah, let’s hit them. Let’s head back to the group and make sure everybody else’s ready.”

Kleinerman nodded, and began slowly crawling back down the hill. Following a glance at his target, Steward followed him down to where his fellows were awaiting his arrival, and his command to begin the attack. Boys and girls who had once sat with him in classrooms now stared at him in the pre-dawn blackness on the eve of a perhaps suicidal mission, and hoped against hope they would live to see the Sun rise again.

“Alright,” Steward whispered, just loud enough to be heard by his followers. “Everybody knows why we are here so let’s make this quick. Isaac, you lead your group around to the left side of the hill. Henry, you take yours out to the right. I’ll take mine on to the hill and hit them from above when the time comes. Do we still have the stopwatches?”

His question was answered by three nodding heads as Henry Mills, Isaac Kleinerman and his twelve-person group’s second in command Sarah Carson pulled out three stopwatches loaned to them by the P.E. teacher, Mr. Harold. They were old, windup types, mechanical in nature without any electronic pieces, and had been found to still be useable.

“Good,” he said. “Wind them to five minutes, and start them on my orders. You have that long to get yourselves in to positions. When these wind down, we hit them.”

From there, all three groups split up and went to the places assigned to them. Steward and his group slowly crawled up the hill. Once there they waited, Steward clutching the watch in one hand, and a knife-ended broom handle in the other, silently watching the time.

Finally, the Moment of Truth arrived. His watch ran down.

“Hit them!” he bellowed, at the same time standing up and starting down the hill. When a loud, incoherent scream rose up from behind him he joined in, and before long everybody in his twelve-strong group was shrieking like ghouls. He heard shrieks and screams rising in to the pre-dawn blackness as the groups led by Isaac and Henry swarmed out, attacking in to the enemy camps flanks. A few of the bandits were stirred by the noise, and fumbled in the darkness as they ran out from tents or jumped up from bedrolls, scrambling dazedly in the darkness for weapons and clothing. Some of the girls the bandits had captured were induced to waken by the loud and sudden noise as well, and Steward heard screaming and loud commotion coming from in the tents, but past that, everything blurred.

In the morning, he would only vaguely recall jamming his makeshift spear into a big man in heavy overalls as he struggled to get out of a sleeping bag.

He would remember, somewhat, the searing pain of a knife penetrating the jacket he wore in the height of the fighting, leaving a shallow but painful cut, as well as the blade loosely hanging out from his sleeve.

He would not recall for some time how he had yanked that blade from his sleeve and then launched it into the throat of the man who had stabbed him.

He would recall with perfect crystal clarity seeing his old friend Henry Mills collapse and lay still on the ground with a hatchet stuck in his neck.

He would recall that at some point some of the tents were set ablaze, though he didn’t see how, and he would never truly care.

Beyond that, he recalled additional moments from the fighting, which took long enough a light was growing in the east from the sunrise when the last of the bandits had been killed in the fighting or fled when they realized to stay was to die, but the memory which blazed in his mind for all time thereafter, which would haunt him until he died, was that ten girls had been taken captive by the bandits, and his group only ever found six. What fate befell his four missing classmates, he would not know for some time. A brief search attempt got little results, and before long, they gathered up the rescued girls, some of the supplies that had been left behind by the bandits, and left.

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More Notes: Well, that's it for now! Please let me know what you think about it.