With but the clothes on his back the rat continued his way thought the beating sun. The light from that insufferable star beat down with such intensity, he wondered if maybe he was an ant in the greater scheme of things and that some unseen entity was focusing it's magnifying lens upon him. He had no idea where we was supposed to go or how he was going to get anywhere in the scorching heat. Cicadas chirruped their incessant chorus in the heat. Their loud songs echoed off the brown and baked grasses of the prairie.
	The rat found himself wandering the expansive grasslands after his home was destroyed by the most awful store he had ever experienced. The wind was like razors and no rain fell. Lightning flashed and thunder crashed and his house, which was once sound and held all he owned, was suddenly torn to pieces. His belongings lifted by the winds, some of which were targets of the lightning which streaked across the sky.  The only water that fell was from the rats eyes, filled with sorrow, anger, and frustration as those deep brown orbs beheld what seemed like Hell being brought upon Earth. He wasn't sure what happened next after that moment. It all blurred together; debris, and lightning, fire, and wind all dancing together in a destructive waltz all though the night.
	When day finally broke the rat surveyed the area. Nothing was salvageable or worth trying to salvage. Unable to cry he picked himself up from the piles of rubble and made his way down a road to the village over the hill. Upon reaching the crest of the hill, he was the village, it fared no better. Debris was scattered everywhere. Smoke was rising from some areas , but the rat found himself reluctant to continue down into the wreckage. The path was strewn with ripped pieces of flesh and partial corpses, some impaled upon the most bizarre of objects; a table leg or a piece of a spigot. In the distance he hear several loud noises, and at first he thought they were fireworks or maybe small explosions, but then he realized that those sounds were gunshots.
	Sounds like that were things best to avoid. They meant there was trouble and he was in no condition to get into any more trouble than he already had. He quietly backed away down the crest of the hill from which he came. If he stayed upon the path, he realized he might find himself in more trouble if others were now slave to the primal desire to survive. And while the rat's desire to survive was also reaching that level, he tempered those wild thoughts with the thought that aside from some clothes, he had nothing to defend himself with. He left the path and walked off into the grasslands.

	Where do you go? 
		What do you do? 
			Who do you trust?
	
	 All these questions swirled in his mind like the storm that set him on his journey. Surely, this disaster didn't happen everywhere. And what exactly happened?
	As he continued his ambling way over grassy hills, he ran into a grove of trees, green and untouched by calamity. He settled down under the biggest of them and found himself hungry. Without anything to eat, he closed his eyes and imagined a modest meal, and then drifted off into a starvation-fueled slumber.