Dateline—October 23, 2029

The 6:30 AM alarm buzzes on as she fumbles for the snooze button, thankful for a few minutes more sleep, and also grateful that the power stayed on all night.  Her mind wonders to those in rural areas that have almost no electricity anymore, and how they are able to cope with it.

The continuing militant attacks on the power grid are making blackouts happen more and more often, even in the larger population areas, at least what is left of them.

Rising at the insistence of the alarm, she looks out of her third floor window, onto the city streets below, which use to be crowded with taxis and delivery trucks, but she sees only closed businesses with broken store-fronts, and litter blowing down empty streets.

She briefly remembers the sounds and smells coming from the coffee shop on the first floor, and the nearby bakery, with the aroma of freshly baked bread wafting through the neighborhood, but the smell today is nothing to even want to remember.

The Iranian-made nuclear device that destroyed the Financial District in New York and sent the US economy into the death spiral took care of that forever.  Now there is very little food available from any source, and since the collapse, no one has any money to buy it anyway.

Which reminds her that she needs to get moving to get in line at the bread store down the street as soon as she can, since today is bread day for those with a last initial of “N” on their ID badge.  If she tarries too long, she will have to do without for three days and hope she can be lucky enough to buy some before they run out again.  That is, of course, unless the former military and police officers protecting the store don’t get it first.  Who can blame them?  They have to feed their families as well.

The rioters that stormed the nation’s capital after the government defaulted on its China debt and could no longer issue Social Security and assistance checks only added to the problem of the shortages that incited the riots.  Once the government was destroyed, leaving no leadership at all, pockets of marauding gangs took over state and local authorities and either killed the police or forced them to flee to save their own lives.

The looting and burning that followed effectively shut down all commerce in cities across the nation, forcing businesses to close and leading to the officially-announced 70 percent unemployment rate, which is probably a low estimate.

The poor and the elderly were eliminated early, either starved to death or murdered by those wanting to steal what little they had.  Gangs with black-market weapons smuggled in from Mexico quickly took over virtually all the cities, and while some pockets of resistance still linger in the South and Mid-West, their numbers are growing smaller each day.

After her cold shower, she flips on the radio and hears the news that President Choblinski is arriving in the country today, and is promising his new citizens a brighter day is coming soon.  He plans to revive the oil and gas industry in the former US, and use the profits to build a stronger military to clean up the streets of The American Republic and make them safe again for all Russian citizens.

Passing the window, she sees the line is already forming at the bread store, so she has to get going.  Turning off the radio, and grabbing her coat, she wonders if there was something we could have done differently ten or twenty years ago that could have prevented all this.

She wonders if our country’s leaders at the time did all they could do, or did they just squabble over petty differences and fail to protect the best interests of the nation.  Could the decisions we made as a group back in, say 2016 or 2020, have led America down a different path to a different outcome?

She was only in her teens at that time, and paid little attention to politics, but she remembers arguments about leaked videos and wiki-somethings, things that seem trivial in light of where America is today.  No matter, she thinks.  Too late to do anything about it now.

With a tear in the corner of her eye, she locks and bolts the door behind her, and makes her way out into the new world.