Chapter Text
TNW - Teenage National Wipeout
"The teenage national wipeout is England's approach to the mass increase in population which spiked in June of this year. It aims to wipeout young people ages 12-18 particularly targetting secondary schools and youth clubs. Any form of protest or attack on this programme will be silenced and prosecuted accordingly."
Formed in August of 2023
The TNW was designed to keep population numbers down in areas of England. The government investigates areas of high population such as London or Manchester and eliminates the secondary schools there. Refuge camps for teenagers in places such as Brighton or Devon allows teenagers from high population places to seek a place to stay instead of being murdered. These refuge camps range from small abandoned towns to tents on a beach. They usually consist of around thirty teenagers with an appointed leader, usually from the area they are living in. However, many of these refuge camps have been attacked and raided, leaving many unsuspecting teenagers dead from bombs or bullets.
The TNW are most commonly known for their school shootings, where they enter a school during active hours and shoot as many students as they can before they decide to burn the rest of the school down. Many teachers are inclined to let the TNW in, despite their reluctance, as those who refuse the TNW entry, are most commonly found on the memorial stone with the students.
The TNW consists of mostly men over the age of twenty, but they are more inclined to introduce women, and most recently, older teenagers who are willing to provide information for the TNW. The TNW are a volunteer based organisation but the volunteers are not allowed to quit, only retire at the age of sixty.
However, recently, that seems to be changing. Many goveners are questioning the law that was addressed, that was to force every English adult to enlist for a minimum of five years, similar to many armies around the world. This would mean that even parents of these teenagers, may be forced to go out and murder their children. Although, shockingly, most parents are agreeing with this motion, whether it be through force voting or by choice.
TNW has not been in existance for very long, yet it continues to wreck havoc on the country as though it has been here for over a hundred years.
- Felix Morgan
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School never prepares you for the real world.
In an ideal world, we would never have to deal with the outside world until we turned to the ripe old age of eighteen and the education system could give us a final screw you before tossing us to the lions. In this case, the lions being the actual world, where people got jobs and had kids and were happy. Where people got life threatening illnesses and their families would cry at the fact that their biology lessons were wrong. Or that they wasted over ten years learning proper punctuation only to use emojis and slang as the only way to communicate through bright rectangles.
School never taught you how to survive through a crisis. Or how to manage taxes unless you took finance classes, which were only availiable after the age of sixteen. School only showed us poems or movies of wars and made us all write sob stories to the elderly people in the care home who survived world war two, instead of actually teaching us what life was like for them. We got glorified news articles about the latest inflation prices but never the inside knowledge on how single parents struggled through it. Or how we had to donate money like three hundred pounds would be the lottery for a homeless shelter that took care of four hundred at least.
How some jobs were underpaying or some bosses were useless. How some people couldn't afford the medication for the life threatening illness. Or how some people couldn't even afford a phone to call their family or to use in an emergency. How some kids never even went to school and how we shouldn't be brats and how we should be grateful as if the uneducated children were going to become feral wolves and hunt us down.
And through all that, we would be crawling our ways to an untimely death.
School never prepares you for the dangerous people. Those with knives and guns and warrants out for them. Or those prison break-outs or those serving time or those on the death sentence. Or the abused kids gone spiteful. And how my school was not prepared and never would've been prepared for the TNW.
Which was why, my perfectly quaint English school was a part of the teenage national wipeout.
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It happened on a Thursday. Arguably, for most people, the worst day of the week. You were so close to a weekend yet it still felt so far every time you woke up on a Thursday. Or maybe Tuesdays were worse by that logic. In my opinion, Thursdays are the best. They served the best food at lunch in the canteen (pasta and tomatoes) and I had the best lessons. I was born on a Thursday as well, although I don't like to remember Thursdays for that.
I wish I could have another Thursday. Gabriel liked them too. He liked Thursdays because those were the days that he would call his parents, or at least, that's why I think he liked them. I never really know with Gabriel. He doesn't have to call his parents anymore. Not because their dead, or not because he's dead.
When it happened, I was in Photography. Gabriel was in Photography as well. I never really knew him before the TNW. He tells me about how he can remember everything from that day. I can't. I think it's because of the smoke inhalation. He says it's our different ways of responding to trauma or whatever it was that we went through. Either way, I prefer not to remember much.
I can't remember who my partner was; a lot of my before memories are like that. I think I was with my partner and we were taking photos. I like to think my memory serves me well when I remember that we were laughing and that I was taking photos of my partner for their work. I can't remember who they were. I can't remember if I was studying his hair curls in the light, trying to get the right angles or if it was a girl and I was capturing her freckles in the yellow light.
The yellow light that was now brown. It clouded the sky and on a good day, you may just be able to see the outline of the sun or the moon, whatever you wanted it to be I guess. It's impossible to tell now. Night or day, it's quiet. There isn't much there anymore, only the odd brick or two. I'm glad I left it before they burnt me down too. I don't remember it anyways.
I can only remember the sound. And the pain.
I remember the lens shattering, piercing my cheek a hundred times as it shattered into pieces smaller that her freckles or thinner than his stray hair strand. Now it's over, I remember watching the TNW on the news. How brave and noble these soldiers were for preventing us from spiralling into eternal chaos. They're always in the newspapers now, whether the English ones describing their bravery or the French ones explaining how they murdered people and burnt schools to the ground to make sure that none of us made it to twenty-five.
I knew one of the volunteers. Andrew Axford. He was one of the closest things I had to a friend. He talked to me on multiple occassions and even sat with me in lessons or at lunch one time. We shared a biology class, where we learned all the horrible things a body could do and how our bodies were actually pretty useless. He had seemed happy in school. He didn't seem like he went home every night, praying for the day that he could help kill us all. I had laughed with him; shared stories with him. And he had joined a group that nearly killed me.
I think that is a good reason to end a friendship. I also heard that a friendship can't continue if one of them is dead.
When it happened, it was sudden. Surprisingly there was no alarm. I guess the school didn't have time to set the lockdown alarm off. Or maybe they didn't bother. I passed out almost as soon as the door had been shot off its hinges and the blood had trickled out of my cheek. I had only grabbed a glance at the class that had almost immediately been all shot to the ground. The people closest to Andrew, including Andrew himself, had the grotesque bleeding faces that you only see in the horror movies. I think it will haunt me for life. That one of my only friends pulled a move I had only heard about in the Kamikaze poems, how he had ultimately killed himself just so the school could go down.
The fire department were never alerted, or they were a part of the TNW. I wouldn't be surprised. The smoke of the remenants made it hard to know anything. You can even see faint traces of the smoke from where we are now, although I won't tell you where incase the TNW comes looking for us. All I know is that the literal and rhetorical fires raged on to the borders of England where they were forced to retreat back to their hell-scape of a country.
I think something happened when we were both unconcious. Now that we're in a safe place where there's internet, I realise that unless there was some greater being pulling the strings, that there was no way that me and Gabriel survived. We were involved in the teenage national wipeout, a group of expert terrorists that were paid to kill us. There was an immeasurable chance that we survived, much less without any scrapes. What was most surprising was that none of us were even shot.
Andrew Axford. A suicidal slaughterer. He died to kill everyone else.
Me and the only other survivor will never know if he knew he was going to die or not. I don't know how he was able to stay in the top class of the years when he joined a group designed to kill people like him. I wouldn't be surprised if his big ego prevented his eyes from seeing the shotgun on his temple. It was almost immediately as well.
He had shot the door down with three other men, too large for the average working class man. They had waltzed in, acting like they owned the place until a clean bullet was shot straight into a student's stomach. And then his face. And then his leg. And then the fourth bullet was shot into Andrew's skull. Then all hell broke loose. Or at least that's what Gabriel says happened. I don't know if I believe him, but I have no evidence to support it if it's fact or fake.
I still don't know how we were the only ones in a school of four hundred people to survive until the end.
How Issac Percius and Gabriel Blanchet were able to survive a shooting, a fire and an earth shattering adventure when we were both in the classroom which was shot into first.