Title: After August

Author: JennifferButterfly

Summary: There was only one thing he could do, and that was watch his friends die all around him.

Author’s Note: I want Foreman to be the center of a fic for once.

Warnings: Character Deaths

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He didn’t talk to anybody for a month, a year, two years, and now, four years after it all began, he finally opened his mouth to tell the story he’d kept inside for so long. It wasn’t like him to be so detached from everything, but then again, it wasn’t like him to be so alone. There was always somebody he had. His family, his coworkers, some girlfriend, but now he had nobody. Foreman sighed, stood up from the card table in the middle of the community room, and approached the caged nurse’s station that sat in the corner of the dreary space. To say the men and women inside of it were shocked by the frail, black man’s movements would be an understatement. Foreman hadn’t talked to anybody in four years and had been catatonic for three of them. He sighed and closed his light blue robe around his body some more. After a very calculated moment of thought, Foreman looked up and faced the woman sitting at the desk. “Can I talk to some one?” His voice was soft as it should be for talking to no one but himself for many years. He’d also gotten skinny. Not because the food was bad, but just because he was never really hungry anymore.

The woman nodded, not sure of what to make of the man in front of her. Should she smile for joy at the fact that he was suddenly active or should she look at him with dismay, knowing that what he wanted to talk about would be a hard experience to relive. She settled for the middle ground, a meek smile and small nod. “Of course, Eric. Wait a moment and I’ll get Dr. Schneider.” She said in her English accent. Everybody had an English accent here. Foreman remembered when they first brought him here and they informed him that his new home was St. Rose Hospital in Woolwich, England, a small town outside of London. Still, where he was didn’t change the fact that he wasn’t where he belonged. True, he belonged somewhere where he could get help, but it wasn’t where he wanted to be. He wanted to be in New Jersey, he wanted to be at Princeton Plainsboro. That was an impossibility for more than one reason. First off, there was no way he could be discharged from this place in his current state. Secondly, he couldn’t go to Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital when he was practically incapable of even diagnosing a case of the flu. Lastly, there was no Princeton to go back to. There was no Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, there was no Princeton City, there wasn’t even a lower New Jersey. In reality, the people left in the United States were lucky that there was still a US to live in. The states west of the Mississippi River were lucky to have taken the least of the blows, though they were still hit.

Investigators never found out why Princeton, or any of the other random towns in the USA were attacked that day. They soon just assumed that it was the enemy trying to hit them wherever they could. Of course DC went down along with Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado; Offutt Air Force Base, just south of Omaha, Nebraska; Naval Training Command in Great Lakes, Illinois; and San Diego, California, where one of the bigger American Naval bases was. West Point was among the places slaughtered that day as well, just as two-dozen random towns that had nothing but innocent people in them were. The government would later say that, after investigation, they found out what occurred during the weeks of August 5th through August 14th 2007 was nothing more than a multitude of well planned attacks the enemy played out. The US couldn’t defend itself all that well, not when half of its military bases were simultaneously attacked. The idea of counter strike was out of the question for the same reason.

“Eric?” Foreman snapped out of his long train of thoughts and looked to his right. Standing next to him was a tall white man with dusky light brown hair and a pair of wire framed bifocals. He had his hand on Foreman’s shoulder and looked at him over the top of his glasses with both curiosity and caution plastered on his face. “Eric, Nurse Shelly says you want to talk.” Foreman nodded. “Well come on then, let’s go to my office and you can tell me what you have to say.” Dr. Schneider’s voice had more of an Irish hint to it, but you could barely find it audible after he’d spent so many years in England. With a gentle pull, he got Foreman to start moving and the two headed to his office. A male nurse followed a few feet behind. He’d sit in with the other two just to be on the safe side since no one was sure what a man who’d been withdrawn for so long would do. The three didn’t have far to walk, Dr. Schneider’s office was only down the hall from the community room on this floor. Inside was quite pleasant with out being overly decorated. It felt homey with out so many decorations that you would think it was a fancy old world study. Foreman took a seat on the black, cotton fabric couch while Dr. Schneider sat across him in a similar armchair. “OK, Eric. What do you want to talk about?”

“I saw them die.” He said in his soft voice as he picked at his cuticles.

“Who did you see die?”

“My boss, his boss, his friend, my coworkers. I saw them all die. Some went fast, some went agonizingly slow, but they all died. I don’t know why I was spared, all I know is that I and only I was saved during that time of hell. I’ve been piecing together what happened four years ago, and now I finally got the whole story. Some of it had to be dug out from the buried regions of my mind, some thoughts have plagued my mentality everyday since it happened, but either way all thoughts and memories are finally here, ready to be shared. All I have to do now is just tell somebody and then maybe I can finally be freed from this inner prison I’m in.” Foreman paused and looked up to face his psychiatrist. “Their deaths can’t be hidden forever, somebody besides me needs to know how they left all of this behind.” He let out a small laugh. Maybe from madness, maybe from years of keeping everything in, he let out a small, non-resonating huff of air that could be construed as a timid laugh. “It’s time to tell somebody what happened. Time to tell somebody my story, their story… our story.” Foreman took one more steadying sigh before he began the story, “It began four years ago this August…”