Chapter 1: William James Botkin

It wasn’t the first time we’d buried someone important. And certainly, it wouldn’t be the last. But as ten of us stood by the freshly-dug grave, each saying our final goodbye, it had dawned upon me how much losing him would mean to our small town. We could barely survive as it was - and with the man we’d referred to as “Preserver” dead, there was a good chance that we’d fall into chaos for the third time in five years.

We were used to a hard life, and were well averse to the fact that we were not alone in our struggle. It had been 20 years since what most of the outsiders called “The Collapse,” and the stories they’d told, the struggles they’d faced, and the roads they took just to get here was nothing short of heroic - and at the same time, it was horrifying. Preserver had come to our town - no, our country - about five years ago, right when we had our first brush with domination. We’d fought back, but lost many, many badly needed members - and it was Preserver that had brought us through that domination, and led us to fend off against the second bout in a convincing fashion. And now, through a means we didn’t understand yet, he’d been taken from us. Accusations were just getting ready to be hurled left and right, and those of us that were still level-headed would be placed with the burden of filling his shoes. The future would be awful, but for myself, it couldn’t be as bad as the past.

I’d been born in Marathon 42 years ago, to the name of William James Botkin. I’d worked in the pulp mill by the shore from when I was 18, and left when I was 20, just a year before the Collapse. I’d grown tired of Marathon, and wanted to experience life in a busier place. I’d bought a car, said my goodbyes to my family and friends, and headed south. It was the longest drive of my life; 10 hours on the road, stopping only for food. Upon arriving in Toronto, the first thing I did was get a job at a factory on the east end. It was there that I started hearing about the talks - the rumblings of dissent. At first I ignored them; I assumed that nothing that big could ever succeed. But as I listened in on the backroom meetings in the factory, and the secret get-togethers in basements, the more I started to believe. The problem was that nobody, including the leaders, knew when to expect action. They had only a rough timeline of what was suspected, and it was on that timeline that they prepared their followers. I had been working in the Toronto factory for nearly a year, going to meetings for six months, when it became very apparent that the Collapse was going to happen. I remember that I became exceptionally nervous upon the news - while others became very excited. I tried and I tried to believe what I was being told by the leaders - that this action would not just be confined to us, and that such an overthrow would allow us - the people so looked down upon - to build and fix the world for the better.

It was at that time that I was trained to use a handgun. Back in Marathon as a teenager I’d hunted deer and moose with my father, so I was well adept with guns - as long as they were rifles. Learning to use a handgun didn’t take long, but the method in which I was supposed to use it was foreign to me. I was ‘trained’, so to speak, in battle plans, how to walk, how to hide, how to use my urban surroundings to my advantage. At the same time, the leaders assured all of us that we were not alone. They assured us this would be the moment that humanity defined itself.

It wasn’t until the final month that I really started to believe them. The hardest thing to do was to convince myself we weren’t alone, and that we wouldn’t be steamrolled as soon as the Collapse began. But it was only a month before - just one month before the Collapse - that I really started to believe the leaders when they said we weren’t alone. Up until then, doubt filled my mind, and the words “I’m out” lingered on my tongue.

It certainly wasn’t anything the leaders said that cleared my doubts. At times, their dreams and visions just became so hard to grasp and understand that I tuned their voices out. I was in too deep to walk away - at least to walk away without being killed. Instead, it was in the final month, when the news started reporting isolated moments - what they referred to as ‘incidents’ - and what the US leaders referred to as ‘terrorist uprisings inside the homeland,’ that I began to understand how big this was. The earliest was in Chicago - small at first, and quickly crushed - but then it would sprout up a few days later in Kansas City - then New York - then Vancouver - and by the second week, small pockets of the ‘resistors’, as they called themselves, were popping up all over North America.

The damage they did was minimal - and often they would be apprehended by authority and thrown in jail. But there was resilience in their actions - the big cities could handle the pockets, but news started filtering in from overseas about Europe’s struggles with larger pockets of resistence, and in North America smaller towns were either being slowly conquered, or were in fierce fights for supremacy.

Somehow, this growing resistance was unforseen by the governments - but when looking back on the actions that happened, it’s hard to see how they could have been so blind. The reasons were all there - oil was getting dangerously low in supplies, which was creating tension between oil-consuming nations and those that drilled for it. At the same time, the rush for alternative fuel sources was largely unsuccessful - although scientists actually managed to get a car working on corn oil, it was exceptionally inefficient, and used too much corn. People didn’t see it as a solution; just another problem. Most common people weren’t aware of how dependant the economy was on oil - from cars, to manufacturing goods, to food processing, oil was in virtually everything the world had built and used. This was what the Collapse was closely related with - when oil became more scarce, companies couldn’t afford to manufacture as much materials. Production started to drop world-wide, with the exception of a few nations, and companies started to lay workers off. People were finding themselves with more and more time, and less and less money. Crime was rising at the same time as unemployment did. The governments, usually expected to take care of its citizens, stuck to their rhetoric while trying to find alternative fuels - but alas, found out that to find a replacement that could take the place of oil in its entirety was exceptionally expensive to implement as smoothly as oil was. Dissent grew for politicians; weeks before the Collapse officially began the Russian president was murdered - and there were attempts on others, with the South Korean leader being critically wounded. In many ways, the world was falling apart right before everyone’s eyes.

While the uprisings grew in smaller towns, the North American governments started sending armed forces to restore order. While it was effective in quelling the resistence in those areas, other groups started to flare up in the larger cities when the army was off in other towns. Around this time, America sent some of their forces overseas to take the oil ‘by force.’ This choice turned out to be the most costly of all - and for many is considered to be a major reason the resistance actually managed to succeed, so to speak. As the troops were quickly deployed overseas, the resistance took advantage of less homeland defence and over the course of a few days, four major cities fell into chaos. When New York City was first attacked in fourteen different places on August 9th, the Collapse started.

The president tried to quell the violence - by declaring martial law. All at once, the entire United States of America was sent under military control - and troops started rushing in to the four Cities with one intention in mind - stop the resistance any way possible.

The problem was that many ‘ordinary’ citizens had started to join in - not necessarily the resistance, but in the chaos. The combined frustration of a nation was bubbling over, and their opposition was the army.

Our pocket of resistance went into action at this time. Officially we took to our plan on August 12th - we were first targeting a local gas stations, hoping to send them up in flames and causing the tanks to explode. Our leaders commanded us, the followers, to shoot anyone that tried to stop us. There was 21 of us in total - how we hadn’t been found out was a combination of luck and incompetence from authority - but at 6AM, we met at our starting point and took to the streets.

All I had in my hand was a handgun, and attached to my belt was a hunter’s knife for “close combat.” I was appropriated with the task of providing cover fire for one of the two guys that was planting the explosive. We’d been deployed in teams of 5 - with one guy acting as reconnaissance, going ahead of all of us with only a cell phone.

Our team hit the streets at 6:43AM - I remember it so well because I was nervously looking at my watch the entire time - and we received a call on the way at 6:48AM. I sat in the back of the car, which drove down the Toronto streets very calmly, and stared out the windows. Toronto had its share of violence - two other pockets of the resistance had struck nearby - and I saw the damage they’d done as we drove past a burnt out garage.

We arrived, one block short of our target, at 7:15. The five of us got out of the car and immediately took cover behind an old strip-mall. I looked at my explosives guy, who went by the nickname Mickey. He was an particularly average looking man - about my height, a little pudgy but certainly not overweight - and a lot of stubble on his face. He returned my nervous smile that I gave him, and jingled the detonator in his pocket. We gathered our wits and started to head down the block, walking as casual as possible. We were about half way to the station, nobody saying a word, when a car drove by, the driver giving us a peculiar look at he passed. To our horror, he pulled into the gas station and started to fill up.

Within twenty seconds, I knew we would be right where he was - and as soon as he saw five guys approaching on foot, one of two things would happen - he’d either pull a gun, or try and speed off. Unfortunately for us, it would be the first. We walked onto the gas station’s property, and the bald, middle aged man turned to face us.

Shoot him, my mind told me. I knew he would be in the way of our plans, and he could easily identify our faces. Mickey gave me an anxious look, one which the other three team members echoed. I kept walking closer, feeling my courage plummeting. The gun was at my back - all I had to do was pull it and shoot - but I wanted to get as close as I could. I was praying he’d get spooked and try to speed away.

When we were only 15 metres away, all hell broke loose. The bald man was watching us intently - and must have seen one of the team members reach for a gun - because he threw open his door, jumped in his car, and through the window I saw him grab a gun. A big gun.

The next moment happened in slow motion. I’m not sure who fired the first shot - him or us - but as the glass shattered around his car window, we ran for cover. Of course, the closest hiding spots were behind the gas pumps, but those were particularly explosive. In the middle of trying to find cover, I pulled out my handgun and delivered a few shots. Mickey and I hid behind the wall of the gas kiosk, while other team members hid behind pumps.

We had all completely forgotten about the gas station attendant, who was taking cover at the same time. I peered around the corner at the bald man - knowing that it would only be a matter of minutes before the police showed up - and delivered a shot. It pegged his tire, missing him by a foot. One team member rushed out from the pump and opened fire, closing in on the car with lightning speed. He delivered a round, gathering the attention of the bald man, who was focussed on peppering the wall I was behind. I looked out just in time to see the bald man turn his gun on the rushing member, who we’d called Billon, and return a series of shots - one of which hit Billon in the arm, the other in his chest. Billon let out a brief cry of pain before falling not four feet from the bald man.

The other two team members broke from their hiding spots; only one holding a gun. The other was Fisher, the man carrying the second explosive. Fisher’s cover, Tucker, fired out three quick shots, one of which clipped the bald man’s shoulder. There was a loud cry of pain - and as I turned to deliver a cover shot, I watched as the bald man swung his gun at Tucker and put a bullet through his neck. Fisher was right behind Tucker as he fell, reaching for the gun. I swallowed hard and broke from my hiding spot, firing off at least four rounds. The bald man twisted his body, rifling off a number of rounds at me. I dove out of the way, feeling a rush of adrenaline and fear all at once. The bullets whizzed by my body, leaving me unscathed but now without anything to take cover behind.

Luckily for me, Fisher was now right on the bald man. The two bodies collided, and I saw the detonator fall to the ground. The bald man and Fisher rolled around for a few seconds, and I heard three shots. Then, there was no movement from either body.

Mickey and I stood for a few silent moments, looking at the 4 bodies that lay sprawled on the pavement.

“Hurry.” Mickey said to me, echoing my thoughts that the police would be soon arriving. We stepped past the entrance to the kiosk and inspected the bodies of Fisher and the bald man to ensure he was really dead. I kicked the bald man off Fisher, while at the corner of my eye I saw Mickey pick up the fallen detonator.

Our ignorance of the station attendant proved to be costly. I heard the kiosk door open behind us, and spun around just in time to see the attendant in mid-swing, baseball bat in hand, coming across the back of Mickey’s head. Mickey lurched forward and hit the pavement hard, while I took a half-step backwards, tripping over the two bodies I was just inspecting.

“I don’t want to die!” I heard the attendant yell at me as he took a running step at my falling body, bat cocked for another swing. I hit the pavement - but with my gun still in hand, I managed off a shot. The bat swung at my head, missing by mere inches - and I saw it fly from his hands, skipping towards the station’s exit. The attendant dropped to his knees, hands becoming relaxed. And with a flop forward, he was dead - on top of me. I squirmed loose, and stood up, quickly coming to see if Mickey was still alive. He was in the middle of taking struggling breaths - and it didn’t take much effort to see that his skull had been cracked open.

“Mickey!” I called to him.

His eyes slowly turned to look at me, and his lips rose to a weak, sadistic smile. “Go, kid. Go while you still can.”

I stood frozen. “No! I can get you out of here, can get you some help!”

His eyes moved from mine to his hand, which was holding the detonators. “Up in flames,” he gurgled. “Go.”

My eyes widened, and I knew exactly what he was going to do. I heard sirens in the background, and I bolted down the street, gun still in hand. I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t look back. I just ran. And when I was about half a block away, the loudest, most horrific explosion filled my eardrums. I saw the light in front of me get exceptionally bright, and then I felt the shockwave. I stumbled as the ground shook - and then I heard the next explosion - which I assumed was the other bomb - and then a series of explosions, which could only be the gas tanks. The shockwave from those lifted my whole body off the ground, and for a brief second I was hurtling about 10 feet above the sidewalk. I hit the cement walkway hard, cutting and scraping my skin as I slid and bounced across it. I saw a giant fireball lifting into the sky, and a massive rush of heat burned all my recently opened wounds. I shielded my eyes as the bright ball lifted high into the sky. I then heard the sound of falling debris - debris I instantly recognized as having the potential to hurt me - and I scrambled for cover in an nearby alley.

When all the debris had fell, I got up, bleeding all over, and I ran. A police car rushed by me on a nearby street, not even stopping to look at me. I ran and ran, not stopping until I got back to my apartment. It was in there, four storeys above the road, that I finally stopped to catch my breath. I looked out the window to make sure no police were on my trail - and about ten minutes later, I heard another loud explosion - which I knew was another team fulfilling their mission. And a few minutes after, another bang - and I realized how deep I was in. Not only had I joined a radical organization, but I had shot - and killed a man. He wasn’t older than I was - but I had killed him. His face, a combination of pain and shock, stuck in my mind, no matter how hard I tried to forget it.

That was the first time I killed someone. At the same time, it was the start of the Collapse in Toronto - but over the next few weeks, I would watch from my window as the entire city fell apart with the rest of the world.