Urban Wars

For other uses of Urban, see Urban (disambiguation).

Urban Wars – A violent period of urban unrest; also called “Urban Revolt.”

Timeline

• Robert Lowell was around twenty during the Urban Wars and he was 71 years old in Creation in Death (2060). 2060-71+20=2009 so the Urban Wars had been going on already several years. He told Eve, “During summer 2009 body collectors had to give number for bodies ‘cos there were too many of them for proper identification.”
• “Between 2012 and 2016, and the dawn of the Urban Wars in Europe...”
• "In the year 2016, at the end of the Urban Revolt...".
• September 25, 2023 - The Urban Wars were basically over...
• The Urban Wars ended nearly forty years before (c. 2020).

Descriptions

• “To say the world was in disarray is the least of it. Looting, burning, bombing, indiscriminate killings, rapes. At first it seemed the police and the military would quell it, all would right again. People locked themselves in their homes or fled to the countryside to wait it out. But they didn’t quell it, and it didn’t right again, not for a very long time. It became a tidal wave of rage and violence that wouldn’t be stopped.”

• To Eve, Summerset said, “You’re too young to have experienced the Urbans, or to remember the dregs of them that settled in some parts of Europe after they ends here. In any case, there were elements there, too, that civilians – so to speak – didn’t need to know.”
• During the Urbans bodies were laid out, piled up, stacked up, depending on the facilities. And covered. Sheet, drop cloth, plastic, whatever was available. Usually, their clothes, shoes, personal effects were taken. Mostly these were recycled to other people. It’s “waste not and want not” in wartime.
• “Dead everywhere,” according to a man who had been a teen in New York during that time.

• Summerset spoke of how those bodies and body pieces that came in, who couldn’t be identified, were listed by number until disposal. “We kept logs, listing them by any description possible, any personal effects, the location where they’d been killed, and so on.” In London, they wrote the number and estimated date of death on the body; “there were other facilities that used that same basic method” including “a handful here in New York.” “There were other methods in other areas, and in some of the worst areas only mass burials and cremations without any record.”
• In New York, the morgue truck (“dead wagon”) - with a driver and usually an assistant riding shotgun - picked up bodies for delivery to the morgue. “Loaded up corpses right, left, and sideways. Got a live one now and again somebody took for dead.” At the scene, the driver wrote the sector onto the body, which might have been stripped by looters; then at the morgue the doctor assigned a number, which was also written on the body, and recorded it in the log book.
• The dead were cremated or buried in mass graves, without any funeral service.

• The Home Force did have documented billets and clinics in the city but there were any number of unofficial locations used, and used temporarily. More that were destroyed or subsequently razed (see also Stealth).

• “The Urban Wars started later and lasted longer in that part of the world (Ireland). Even when I was a boy there were pockets of it still being waged, and certainly the results of the worst of it were still in evidence.” He remembered the bodies, the sound of gunfire screaming through the night, the wails of the wounded, and the sunken eyes of the survivors. “Those who had,” he continued, “had in abundance. Those who didn't, suffered and starved and scavenged...”
• “When I [Roarke] was a boy in Dublin there were still some pockets of fighting, holdouts from the Urban Wars. Those who were too angry or entrenched to stop. Now and again there’d be a bomb, homemade boomers, that were unreliable at best. In a car, a shop, tossed through someone’s window. It was a fear you learned to live with so you could go on with your day-to-day.”

• The preferred killing tool of twenty-first century street gangs during the Urban Revolt was a sleek, palm-sized weapon.

• The RS-fifties were the official weapon of choice during the Urban Revolt and into the third decade of the twenty-first century.

• The Ruger P-90 was a sleek combat weapon popular as home defense during the Urban Revolt. Light, compact, and fully automatic.

• In the year 2016, at the end of the Urban Revolt, before the gun ban, there were over ten thousand deaths and injuries from guns in the borough of Manhattan alone.

• Nobody's used “conspiracy to slaughter” since the Urban Wars.

• She'd never tried one of his auto-assault rifles. It might be interesting to experience how a cop took out an enemy during the early days of the Urban Wars.

• The ARK-95 was an Urban War era military weapon, now banned, that was used for riot dispersion. The Fixer had amassed fifty of them for Cassandra in Loyalty in Death. Roarke has one in his collection.

• For a time after the Urban Wars organs had been a prize commodity on the black market.

• During the height of Urban Wars illegal experimentation on the dead and dying was quietly accepted.

• One of the quick-fix buildings that had been tossed up to replace those that had crumbled or been destroyed around the time of the Urban Wars. The plan had been for fast, temporary housing to be replaced by more solid and aesthetically pleasing structures within the decade, but several decades later, several of the ugly, sheer-sided metal buildings remained in place.

• September 25, 2023 - The Urban Wars were basically over when Apollo, a terrorist organization, took responsibility for blowing up the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. Eight thousand people, military and civilian personnel, including children in the care center, were killed; there were no survivors.

• Paul Lamont's father fought in the French Wars before the family immigrated to America (his father was a saboteur and specialized in explosives for the Social Reform Army).

• At election time, city officials made lofty speeches about revitalizing the area (Alphabet City), made stirring promises to fight the good fight against neglect, crime, and the general decay of the ailing sector of the city. After the elections, the entire matter went back in the sewer to rot and ripen for another term.

• Around the time of June 2035, Kenneth Stiles said Broadway was enjoying a rich revival. It was a return to the lights, the glamour, the brilliance after the destruction of the Urban Wars. People were looking for entertainment, for escape, and for heroes who didn't carry weapons.

• It was a simple multiunit, pleasantly if not elegantly rehabbed post-Urban Wars.

• My grandfather went down in the line of duty during the Urban Wars. He saved two kids. They're somewhat older than I am, and they write my grandmother every year at Christmas, and again on the anniversary of the day it happened.

• Atlanta Siege mentioned.

• Ryan Feeney on the Urban Wars: “What is was, was about survival. And it was ugly... Nothing romantic about slitting throats or seeing Fifth Avenue littered with body parts.”

• The building was a squat twelve-story box of block construction that surely hadn't seen its proper share of city maintenance dollars since it had been tossed up after the Urban Wars.

• (Dublin) has come back well from the Urban Wars.

• “The Urban Wars had crushed this part of the city [South Dublin], turned the projects into slums, and the streets into a battlefield... Most of it had been over and done before he'd been born. But the consequences lasted a generation.”

• Wooten's apartment was on the fourth floor of one of the housing structures thrown up as a temporary shelter for the refugees and victims of the Urban Wars. A number of them stood in the poorer sections of the city, and were always slated for replacement.

• During the early days of the Urban Wars, the government had formed the HSO as a way to protect the country, to police the streets and gather intel covertly from radical factions. It had done the job. It had been necessary. And over the years since, some said it had morphed into something closer to a legalized terrorist group than a protection and intel operation.

• Covert operations helped end the Urban Wars, prevented numerous terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, and globally.

• Standing on the corner of Fifth and Forty-seventh (where the jewelry store stood that got hit during the Forty-seventh Street Job). “Got hit pretty hard during the Urban Wars,” Peabody commented. “Easy target, I guess. Conspicuous consumption. The have and have-nots. All that fancy jewelry showcased while the economy took a nosedive, illegals were sold on the street like soy dogs and guns were strapped on like fashion accessories.”

• The safe house on Ninety-second was a post-Urban Wars construction. Cheap, never meant to last. But it had stood, a narrow box of two stories, bumped up against a few more narrow boxes that were all dwarfed and outclassed by the sturdiness of the buildings that had survived the wars, and the sleekness of those built since the hurried, harried aftermath.

• Tina Cobb lived in one of the post-Urban Wars boxes that edged the Bowery. They’d been a temporary fix when buildings had been burned or bombed. The temporary fix had lasted more than a generation. Lewd, creative and often ungrammatical graffiti swirled over the pitted, reconstituted concrete. The windows were riot-barred, and the loiterers on the stoops looked as though they’d be more than happy to burn or bomb the place again, just to break the monotony.

• Summerset served as a medic – somewhat unofficially – during the Urban Wars. Summerset met Wilfred B. Icove Sr. in London and worked for him at one of the clinics there; some forty years ago now [current year: 2059].

• Serenity Bray Massey’s son was reported killed in New York in the Urban Wars. He was seventeen and had lied about his age to join the Home Force.

• The Urban Wars were a chaotic time, and the last months of them here in New York were confusing from a military standpoint.

• It was a little palace of glass and stone, built on the ashes of the Urban Wars. There were a few like it – in size and style – along New York’s rivers, affording lofty views of the waterways.

• ... had put nearly an hour into a paper on the economic and social developments post–Urban Wars.

• ... write a brilliant essay on the sociopolitical ramifications of the Urban Wars.

• Tomas Pella, Dobbins, and The Groom were involved in the Urban Wars.

• He leaned against the wall of the graffiti-scrawled, post-Urban War rattrap that held Bang She Bang.

• It was a miserable post-Urban War building. One of the structures tossed up from the rubble and never intended to last. Its concrete gray walls were blackened with age and weather, scored with graceless graffiti and misspelled obscenities.

• Spanish Harlem was going through a bad time then. Couldn’t bring itself back after the Urbans. We didn’t have enough street cops, not enough on the gang patrols.

• Coltraine’s cop shop (House 42) squatted between a Korean market and a Jewish deli in post-Urban Wars ugliness.

• After the Urbans, there was a push to revitalize, renew, and the Coney Island Amusement Center benefited from that. When Alex Ricker asked him how much of it he owned, Roarke said Alex could find that out for himself.

• Peace Day is the holiday that commemorates the end of the Urbans.

• The house belonging to Jonah MacMasters was pre-Urban Wars construction, nicely rehabbed so it maintained its character, showed a few scars. It looked dignified, the rosy brick, the creamy trim, the long windows - currently shielded with privacy screens.

• Lieutenant Pulliti said the South Side of Chicago was rough back then (c. 2041); it hadn’t come back far from the Urbans. The Stallions were a gang that held sway in that area.

(see also History)

References: