Prologue - Live Beats Being Dead.

VADM Toshio Nakamura:

We don't know how many we lost that day. It was more than could be rationalized by a sane mind. That day started off like any other. But the story starts far before the bombs fell.

And by the time that the story reaches where we are at this point, many good men and women whom I served with would fall in combat or were immolated as the missiles reached their targets.

Many whom I would have given my own life to have alive again. Many of them would say the same for me; so that thought would end in a stand-off...

As it stands, we sit in the aftermath of an apocalypse of our own making...that showed its true colors in the White Sands Missile Test Range in Alamagordo, New Mexico and culminated in our complete and utter mutual assured destruction when China and Russia launched their missiles at us and we retaliated in turn sending the world into the depths of calamity never before seen.

Meg, Harm, Mac and myself as well as two teens were all that were left. We found the youngsters in a cave system far enough in that the radiation would have had a hard time reaching them. They had buried their parents who had managed to get them that far inside the cave system before succumbing to the radiation. When Meg and I located them, they were practically feral, having survived by killing anything encroaching upon their cave system. It took a long while for them to trust us.

Sunset Valley was a target and it had been eliminated along with anything of military consequence. It was at least an year hence that we'd gotten there after receiving the all clear from what was left of high-command. There was nothing left of our military - out of what was deemed as the strongest military in the known world, our numbers were down to a rag-tag militia. And morale and esprit de corps went to the highest bidder. How do we build our numbers up from what was now a decimated armed force?

At least we would no longer have to contend with the radiation and the fall-out, but the clouds are ever-present reminding us of what humanity has done to ourselves.

A rather unwelcome change was in the metaphysical realm of possibility. We've been hearing unearthly howls in the distance as well as rumors of human bloodsuckers. And evidently what was strictly in the realm of fantasy fiction is now a very real peril for us humans. The only thing keeping us alive is our cache of weapons and the fact that four of us know how to use them. It is our hope that the two youngsters will follow in our footsteps and learn everything that they need to know to survive this new realm of existence.

Hope is all that we have...and that ultimately it will all come down to survival of the fittest...

Let's just hope that we are fit enough.