How in the hell had things gone so bad so quickly, Aaron Winters thought as he listened to the distant gunfire and watched the smoke rising only a few blocks away. Their own neighborhood was silent, he was almost the only person in the entire block, everyone else had left the previous evening and that morning.

Aaron was a former programmer and now a website designer, age 35, happily married with a Wife and two children. 5 years ago they'd finally been able to put a deposit down on their house in a good area, she'd gotten an office job and he worked largely from home, occasionally traveling to other states on contract work. Life was good and looking brighter all the time, until the economic downturn began after the Middle East wars ended. Now, their house was worth cents in the dollar, their savings were almost gone, unemployment was rife.

Crime was the only growth industry.

He'd just returned from shopping before the nightly shooting started. As usual the emergency services didn't respond, the only time they were seen these days was when they cleared the Bodies and Car wrecks from the roads each morning. They never entered the burned buildings; they would have been shot down if they had. After 3pm they disappeared completely and weren't seen again until after dawn the next day. You could forget about receiving help from them if you needed it, you were on your own, they only grudgingly answered calls, and the answer was invariably "we're too busy to attend".

Several months before, he'd gotten his wife Barbara and two Children, Cassandra and William, out of the area to a safe place in the Country, where the Predators never went. He'd only returned to their house to take a few remaining mementos of their previous lives and shop for needed items, constantly on the watch for people hanging around traffic lights, stop signs and doorways whenever he did so.

The ultimate purpose of a Government was to protect its people from Invasion and Attack, and the US Government was deliberately allowing both, he thought as he sat on the balcony of their house for the last time. But in a few hours, all going well, things were going to abruptly change...

The US as it was known was winding down, deluged in a morass of economic and criminal decay, subtly dying a little more each day. The population had been slowly introduced to the changes which were destroying them, exactly like the proverbial Frog in hot water, unaware as the temperature slowly rose around it until it was too late. The same thing had happened all around the World but the population had by and large been inured to the changes and refused to take notice as one nation after another was destroyed, either from within or by invasion as necessary. Large parts of all cities and most suburbs had become absolute no-go areas law abiding citizens steered clear of. Taxes had risen sharply and pushed businesses under, all to pay for foreign wars. In response, President Bush had instituted economic 'reforms' consisting of borrowing like never before, which the country and the entire world were now paying for.

-Snip