The End of Peace

People are still in shock from the bullet that was just fired from the tank. Suddenly, one of the rioters noticed that the bullet was headed their way. The others, hearing it, quickly ran away to escape the place where the bullet hit. Some of them entered the building they were surrounding during the riot.

Inside the building, Noah observes the situation from behind a window. Instead of moving away and escaping, he stays watching the situation in detail, learning that no matter how fast people escape, the explosion and the shock waves that would arise after the impact of the bullet would reach them all. Right after that, the bullet hits the center of attention, leaving a huge explosion and throwing the people who stayed outside the building around with the shock waves, and a large part of the building is destroyed.

Two hours have passed since the bullet hit. Everything around is destroyed and completely on fire, in an environment invaded by a dispersed but dangerous and radioactive smoke. Inside what remains of the building, Noah wakes up affected by the smoke and sees a nurse attending to some injured people who survived the explosion. They all have a mask on because of the radiation from the smoke, which was contained in the bullet and expanded with the impact. Noah gets up and runs to help the nurse. The nurse gives him a mask to protect himself while he heals the wounded. Suddenly, a woman appears at the entrance saying that she found someone alive outside.

Noah and the nurse leave the building and look around. Suddenly they see the body of an adult moving, and on it, a strange, motionless, deformed being. Both of them, along with the woman, run to help him. The adult wakes up and sees the three in front of him. They help him up. During the help, the adult man feels something on his left hand. He sees that he had a severed hand on his legs. Upon learning who that hand could be, he turns around abruptly, dropping the deformed body that was on top of him. He looks at the body in detail and realizes that it was his son, who died from the impact and the mutations generated due to exposure to radioactive smoke. The man grabs him in his arms and begins to cry.

Days later, on a television inside a shopping center, a newscast is broadcast narrating the event that happened in the town that was bombed by the tank's bullet. Among the people watching the newscast was Nathaniel, the person to whom a plumber had told that the planet's water was running out. There he meets the plumber he met that time, who wonders what they are watching on the television. Nathaniel explains to her, highlighting a phrase written in the newscast, which says "The end of peace."

From that moment on, armies around the planet prepared to begin the expected third world war, which was also called the resource war.

In this war, the goal was to make the winner the future distributor of the scarce amount of water that existed at that time. All countries, including those that did not have an army, participated in the catastrophic conflict. Some tried to ally themselves, however, the fight to take control of the water separated them all, including the great powers.

During the course of the war, the world's large cities were quickly evacuated because they represented the greatest expense of the water resource, and their inhabitants were moved to places with less concentration of people. However, these cities did not last long and all of them were reduced to ghost towns in just a matter of time.

An unprecedented economic crisis affected the planet, bringing inflation not only to products that contained water, but also to those that were not related to this resource. The dollar and the currencies of many countries were devalued in the blink of an eye, sharply increasing the cost of human life and survival and considerably increasing poverty throughout the world. The world returned to the barter system.

Many people died due to the serious consequences of the war. Among them, the child who was mutilated by the radioactive gases from the tank shell bombing the first town destroyed by military weapons after a long period of peace and harmony. The father of that child suffered greatly from his loss.

Water became increasingly scarce on the planet. The war left many places completely uninhabitable due to the firing of multiple nuclear and radioactive weapons in different areas of the planet. In addition, the contaminated air from these affected the climate, expanding the existence of huge deserts throughout the world, where most of the poor people lived and who have lost their jobs and their means of support. Among these people was Nathaniel and his wife, the plumber. They were one of the few couples who managed to get married during the enormous conflict, and also one of the few who would become a family, because the plumber was pregnant. Nathaniel exchanged his wife's plumber's cap for a glass of drinking water to hydrate her. Near them was an old woman questioning her religious beliefs because of what the planet is going through, tightly squeezing a rosary with both hands until it broke.

Religion also did not resist the effects of water shortages and war. During the first five years of the war, in a church in the Vatican, several missionaries were praying to their Catholic god for the return of water. However, one of them realized that no matter how much they prayed, the water would never return. He questioned the existence of his religion and his God, even complained about the uselessness of prayers in this world crisis, and then ended up committing suicide by shooting himself with a gun to the head. Little by little, all religions gradually declined until there was not a trace of them left. Their believers abandoned them, leaving them without even a single person devoted to them, losing their value in today's society.

All this happened during the first ten years of the resource war. As time passed and the war developed, the planet and its humanity gradually deteriorated. And at the end of the eleventh year of the war, all reserves of fresh and drinkable water that remained at that time were completely exhausted, leaving the planet without a single drop except sea water.