Chapter One

Many people believed that the world would end on December 21st 2012. This was according to the Mayan calendar ending on that date.  No one thought that they simply had to end it somewhere, why not in December in 2012. Others predicted, almost annually that the world would end on New Year’s Day.

They were all wrong. Armageddon did happen in January but it was the 19th not the first and it started out like any other day.  The sun was out and warming up the coolness from the winter evening before. The sun was cresting up over top of the Sandia’s and there was a dusting of snow on the ground. It was Martin Luther King Jr. day and many kids were out of school. Some people took a 3 day weekend, nice time to get away. There was the scent of pinion wood burning and you could see smoke rising from the chimneys of near-by houses. No one even remotely expected there to be any type of violence let alone multiple cities being destroyed.

I was standing in my backyard, eyes closed with a hot cup of coffee and smelling the new morning air. The sun was warming and felt good against the coolness of the winter morning. Winters in Albuquerque are generally mild; it gets below freezing at night and up to the forties during the day usually sunny. So there I was letting my body take in the morning sun and something caught my attention. I am not sure if it was a noise or a smell or just a feeling, but I headed through the house to the front door and out into the front yard. Looking up and down the street many of my neighbors were hurriedly packing their things into their cars and trucks and leaving. It reminded me of a movie where the aliens were attacking and the people wanted to get as far away from populated areas as possible so I walked back in the house and decided to turn on the TV to see if there was something on the news that may shed some light on what was happening. Standing in the middle of my living room I was horrified to see that New York City, Seattle, Los Angeles and San Francisco were all been blown up. Not just a bldg or a block but the entire city. The first thing I started thinking was that it was terrorists and they were nuclear devices. I was literally open mouth speechless and spilled my coffee as I sat down.