Andrew Blade

Life After- A Sorta Nation Prepping RP

>.O Screw anything west.

The Long Road Home

Jason Chambers. 28. Staff Sergeant, Squad leader. United States Army Rangers, 3rd Battalion.

Staff Sergeant Jason Chambers joined the United States Army at 18. He liked to tell everyone he was following in the footsteps of his older brother- Steven- and wanted to serve his country, but in reality, he was more driven by a burning desire to seek vengeance against the terrorists that had taken Steven's life.

Ten years later, Chambers would have no idea if he had been able to kill the men that had put together and planted the IED that killed his brother, but it didn't matter. He was on his third tour of duty, this time in Kandahar province, when his platoon uncovered a bomb-making set up. They were attacked almost immediately upon the discovery.

While they had killed most of the enemy and taken several prisoner, it was not without casualties. Chambers had lost his Bravo team leader, and several of his soldiers had been injured. Most would return to the field eventually, but several would not. Chambers was one of those that were unlikely to fully recover from his injuries.

Shrapnel from a grenade had buried itself in his spine, while the concussion from it had torn his right arm out of its shoulder socket, destroying tissue and bone in the process. He had also caught two bullets- one in his right knee and another in his left arm that had traveled up his radius and shattered his elbow. The round in his elbow had been smaller, but the bullet that struck his knee was from a machinegun chambered in 7.62x54. It was a miracle that the doctors had been able to keep it attached, and it was still questionable if he would ever be able to use it again.

Grateful to be alive, but furious at being taken out of the fight, Jason Chambers has a long road ahead of him to recover. His physical injuries may heal, but the scars on his heart and mind were formed even before he had been in combat.

The Long Road Home

Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Ramstein Air Base, Germany.

The last few days (or was it weeks?) had been hard to keep track of. Sergeant Chambers remembered their patrol had discovered evidence of a bomb-making facility in the tiny village they'd been sent to investigate. Before they were able to start apprehending potential suspects, gunfire and explosions rang out. From there, he could recall he had been shouting and directing his squad to cover, then calling in to his platoon sergeant to set up suppressive fire. After that, it was a blur. He knew that he had engaged targets with aimed shots, and that at least one of his men had been hit by sniper fire. He also remembered getting hit more than once, but everything was such chaos, he couldn't remember if it had been a bullet, a grenade, or something else that had brought him down. Something had hit his plates, he remembered feeling the brutal thump, but then other things had broken skin, and from the sensation of pain he could remember, likely bone.

His men had gotten him into an MRAP, and a little later some medics had hovered over him. Then there was a helicopter ride. Then he was in a hospital. He didn't remember being lucid whenever he awoke- a lot like waking up several times in a night but going right back to sleep after.

At least he was somewhere safe, though. He knew that, and it allowed him to relax, as much as he could, anyway. Pain seemed to emanate from all over his body, but it felt distant, like he was feeling it from far away. Opening his eyes, Sergeant Chambers looked around and took in a sterile environment with dim lights and a Thomas Kincaid painting on the wall. He was propped up in an uncomfortable bed with tubes and wires and some kind of apparatus attached to him. He felt something restraining his arms and legs, and when he looked, his right leg was lifted up off the bed, with small cables coming from it. A sling held his right arm against his chest, with a heavy, cold pack wrapped around his shoulder, while his left arm was in a full cast stemming from his palm all the way up to his shoulder.

As soon as he saw the extent of the damage, the pain started to hit him, with a dull ache coming from both his arms and his chest, but strangely enough, he couldn't feel any pain in his knee. Looking at the bandaged and casted-up limb, the gears in his head started to turn and he glared at his foot, propped up at eye level. Gritting his teeth, he willed his toes to wiggle, but nothing happened. In horror, his eyes darted to his right leg- which seemed to be uninjured beneath a blanket- and he tried to lift his knee. Again, no response.

Immediately his mouth went dry and he could feel his heart racing. He wanted to call out, but he didn't think anyone would hear him. looking down at the arm draped across his chest in a sling, he saw a remote control under his wrist and tried to maneuver himself to grab it, but his shoulder was so stiff and sore that he broke out into a sweat just trying to turn and shift his forearm. Tears of frustration, rage, and panic began to stream from his eyes. His fingers were working, and he used them to painfully try to walk his hand toward the remote attached to the frame of his bed with a thick power cord.

Before he was able to find and grab it, though, the door to his room quickly opened, spilling in light from the hallway outside, and a woman in pale blue scrubs rushed toward him. He looked up at her with confusion, terror, and anger in his eyes. Chambers mouth opened, but he didn't know if he wanted to ask a question- too many flooded his mind at once- or say something to express his frustration. All he could muster was an incoherent strangled gasp that just managed to escape his dry throat.

@honorandpride

The Long Road Home

OOC Post

Ban the Person above you

@foster
Extra-banned for suggesting you made a joke, when- in all reality- it was a poorly veiled attempt to pretend you could do subtle humor.

It's not subtle if it's only in your head.

@luna_maria

Also extra-banned for using ALL CAPS and not appreciating anatomical humor.

Ban the Person above you

Banned for: using the word "colon" and not making a joke about it.

Life After- A Sorta Nation Prepping RP

0300, Somewhere between Omaha and Wahoo, NE

"I still can't believe we're actually doing this," Genevieve Tyler sighed as she gazed out the passenger window of the Nissan Sentra she had bought with her ex-husband several years ago. The single mother hated driving at night, and so she'd made Dean get behind the wheel for the short trip. Despite eventually agreeing with her ex that things really were probably only going to get worse, she had been arguing with herself for the last several hours about the decision to join Dean's paranoia.

"Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you..." she reminded herself, using one of her ex's obnoxious quotes that he always used to support any of his overzealous ideas that she was pretty sure he indulged in because he was a child in a grown-man's body rather than out of a sense of safety or security. In this case, though, she was able to draw a little bit of comfort from them while she tried to push down the nerves that were spreading from her stomach.

Wahoo was a relatively small town, bigger than most of the other rural towns in Nebraska, but a small fraction of the size of the cities in the state, like Omaha, or Lincoln. It served as the county seat for Sarpy county, with a courthouse and a jail, along with some of the other governmental buildings that came with such an appointment. The reason Dean and Genevieve were heading that way in the thick of the night, though, was the National Guard armory stationed there and the massive trucks they had in their motor pool.

Dean had been a member of the Nebraska Guard for about seven years now, serving as a vertical engineer with the Wahoo unit, which Genevieve always thought was a fancy way of saying "carpenter." He had deployed once with them about five years ago. They ended up building some schools around the capital city of Afghanistan. That was all she knew, though. She had never bothered to try to get very close to any of his friends or their families in the unit, especially when it became apparent that they weren't going to stay together. When he first said they were going to go to his unit tonight to prepare for the coming panic, she thought he was crazy enough to try to get into the armory's vault and steal guns. The plan he had, though, sounded much simpler, but she couldn't believe it could be as easy as he had made it sound.

As they pulled into town, Dean turned off the headlights, navigating under the glow of the moon and stars with the occasional street lamp helping show the way. Now that they weren't on the highway, he wanted to draw as little attention as possible, and that meant keeping headlights from shining past windows. It wasn't too long before they turned down a side street adjacent to the large, deserted brick building he had come for. Just past the parking lot of the armory, a chain-link fence topped with razor wire held over a dozen military vehicles, most of them ten-ton dump trucks usually used by his unit of engineers to transport materials to and from work sites.

Something so bold would never have worked if he was trying to avoid being caught. Dean was sure that the balaclava over his face and the scarf and hat over his wife's wouldn't do much to hinder any investigation once the authorities began to track down the party responsible for stealing two military trucks. Night-vision-capable cameras would record the whole thing. By the time they would find him, though, if they were more interested in tracking down and arresting him than dealing with any of the other problems that were going to pop up, then he was wrong, and he'd go to jail and the world would hopefully go back to normal.

Parking his ex-wife's Sentra on the street down the block, Westin shut off the engine and got out, dressed in his multicam-pattern Army uniform. If anyone was going to see him in one of these trucks, it would be better if he looked the part. He had given his wife one of his zippered tops as well, but hopefully nobody would inspect her outfit very closely. None of his pants fit her frame, and she didn't care enough to try to make the disguise look much more convincing than just a uniform jacket and a patrol cap that were both too big for her.

With a large pair of bolt cutters in hand, Dean quickly went to work, cutting off the large padlock that held the gates to the motor pool shut. From there, he opened the gate, wincing as it squeaked on its rusting hinges, and walked quickly toward the nearest ten-ton dump truck. They used air brakes, and would need a few minutes to fill the tanks with air before they would be fully-functional. Luckily, these new models were all outfitted with automatic transmission. It might take a bit of getting used to, but if he allowed her the time, Genevieve would adjust to the sheer size of the truck and be able to follow him on the road without much difficulty.

Climbing up into the cab of one, and then the other, Dean started the engines on both with the push of a button. The only mechanism preventing them from being stolen was a steel chain looped around the steering wheel that was attached to the floor. Once again, Westin's bolt-cutters went to work while the noisy machines sputtered, waiting for their tanks to fill.

"Hurry up!" Genevieve hissed at him, the noise of the two trucks sparking her fear. She glanced around anxiously, positive that it would just be a few moments before flashing lights and sirens would scream around the corner to throw them in jail.

"I'm going as fast as I can," Dean told her in the calmest tone he could summon, "I told you, we have to wait for the tanks to fill up. Once the red light on the dash goes off, we can go. Come here, I'm gonna run you through the basics real quick before I go cut the lock off the other truck and scrounge up as many gas cans as I can find.

Genevieve climbed into the cab and examined the buttons and lights on the panel- which was quite different from the sedan she was used to operating. She made sure to focus on which buttons controlled the lights and the transmission, but past that, she had a hard time following everything Dean tried to tell her. The red light on the dashboard held her rapt attention as well. She knew that as soon as it turned off, they needed to get moving as quickly as possible.

Four minutes later, the dashboard light went dead and Genevieve looked up to see Dean close the driver's door on another massive, tan truck, and start the vehicle crawling forward. His eyes looked toward her expectantly, and she took the parking brake off and set the truck into Drive, like he'd taught her. After a little bit of fumbling, she managed to get the lights on and they were off, headed back toward the city.

Dean wondered how long it would take for someone to get to the armory in the morning and realize there were two trucks missing. He had looped the chain back around the gate again after leaving to make it at least look like it was still locked, but he had his doubts that his deception would last very long. They had a very limited window to pack up as much of their stuff as they could into the beds of these trucks and then stash them somewhere out of view. Neither he nor his ex-wife would be getting much sleep until they parked the vehicles somewhere out of sight, but the alternative was to play it safe and risk getting caught in a city filled with desperation and panic.

"Hello America!" a raucous voice cut into the steady growl of the truck's Diesel engine, "My name's Three Dawg! I'll be your post apocalyptic radio host, as the world goes to shit around you! I'll be offering advice, music, news and more every day until I can't broadcast no more, or this whole mess gets sorted out, whichever comes first!"

"What the hell...?" Dean looked down at the speaker attached to the SINCGARS radio mounted to his dash. A few moments later his phone lit up with a text from his wife; she had heard the same thing and now music was playing over the sound system in her truck as well as his, a system that was usually reserved only for communication between military radios.

While the frequency-hopping function allowed the SINCGARS to pick up a broad spectrum of broadcasts, it had a security feature built in that made it difficult for anyone that didn't have the same security programmed in to listen in on secure broadcasts. With that in mind, Dean pushed a few buttons to transition to non-secure transmission, cleared his throat, and got on the microphone.

"For anyone else out there, this is Ginga Ninja reaching out to anyone that can hear me," he chose a call-sign he often jokingly chose during radio-training exercises because of his dirty strawberry blonde hair. "I've commandeered some heavy-duty vehicles and I'm looking to take care of my family in the coming crisis, but I don't know where would be safe to go. I was thinking of heading up to Montana just because of the terrain and isolation, but it seems now that I'm not the only one paranoid that this is gonna get worse.

"I guess I don't know what exactly I'm trying to say, other than that I think this would be a heck of a lot easier with a little bit of help, and I think I'd be able to offer a significant asset to anyone willing to provide adequate shelter to a family of five. We're heading to go collect all of the useful material we can find, and we're going to be heading out from there this morning to a location out in the country. We're in the midwest currently, with a pretty decent range of travel."

Dean didn't know what exactly to expect, or what the full extent of his plan moving forward was going to be. So far, he had only planned to head back to the apartment, throw everything he could grab in the back of his Tacoma and these two dump-trucks, and then head for the rural community in Iowa he had grown up in. There were several farmhouses and barns that had been abandoned years ago, as well as his parents' house that could offer shelter. His childhood home was likely out of the question, though. If there would be a man-hunt for him and Genevieve over the stolen trucks, he would want to lay low and keep his mom and dad out of it.

Right now, it looked like it might be worth it to see if other options might be out there.

Life After- A Sorta Nation Prepping RP

Me and my group will likely be on the road shortly. I think Dean is going to decide to get a jump on the rest of civilization before real panic takes over.

Life After- A Sorta Nation Prepping RP

Yeah, we're going to be flying solo in our own little stories for awhile, until someone's characters have the gumption to leave home so we can have interactions.

@Dusty

Mine was never set to stay put in one place for very long, I'm sure I'll be on the road before too long.

Life After- A Sorta Nation Prepping RP

Damn, we are scattered. NY, TX, NV, NE, wherever Oakwood is, and wherever the cult nut-jobs are.

Man... Super-Volcanoes and Nuclear war...