The Gas Chamber of America By Jonathan Olvera November 10, 2025

 The Gas Chamber of America

By Jonathan Olvera
November 10, 2025

My head was throbbing, and my skull felt as though five drills had pierced straight through it. I was unscathed on the surface, yet inside I felt as if I had endured fifty hours of torture. My thoughts flickered like static, and the light around me was no longer light—it was a burning haze that twisted the air and made every breath a negotiation with pain.

The ground trembled beneath me. Somewhere distant, an explosion rolled like thunder under the earth, the kind that you feel more in your bones than in your ears. The smell of gas was everywhere—chlorine, cyanide, and the bitter sting of cocaine fumes drifting over the city like a chemical storm. It was as if the atmosphere itself had been converted into a weapon. I could not tell if this was war or punishment, but I knew it was deliberate.

Above, the sky was dotted with surveillance balloons—pale mechanical eyes that hung like ghosts, scanning what was left of us. The government was no longer functional. No elections, no order, no communications except for the static bursts on old transistor radios where panicked voices tried to broadcast hope. But hope had no range.

Everyone understood by then that Russia was at war, but no one had expected it to reach us like this. It spared no one in the United States. There were no frontlines, no soldiers marching down the streets—only the slow disintegration of infrastructure and faith. Banks became migratory, shifting from data cloud to data cloud. Currency was no longer tangible, only a flicker on a dying screen. The only real power left belonged to whoever could claim ownership of a generator, a gun, or a herd of stray cattle.

The days I spent after that were measured in exposure. Chlorine in the air. Methamphetamine fumes from the abandoned laboratories that dotted the industrial zone. I learned to sleep with a damp cloth over my face, to wake up coughing but alive. The hospitals had been looted and burned. The pharmacies were empty except for broken glass. The police stations—occupied by mercenaries and desperate men—had become holding centers for the unlucky and the inconvenient.

It was not that the government had disappeared. It had fractured, divided itself into warring fragments. Each faction purged the institutions of professionals and replaced them with loyalists, zealots, or opportunists. The kidnappings of children became common. Political figures and icons—the kind who used to speak of democracy, progress, and morality—now turned to greed and violence. They were no longer leaders but predators, feeding on the fear they once promised to cure.

Morality collapsed. Character ethics, community spirit—all of it evaporated under the pressure of survival. What remained were instincts: hunger, fear, and the faint, guilty memory of what decency once meant.

I tried to tell myself that I could not agree with what the United States had become. But the truth was worse—I could not recognize it at all. It was a country overtaken by murder, genocide, and mass incarceration schemes that filled every mind with dread. Entire neighborhoods became open prisons. Buses of detainees vanished into desert routes and chemical refineries that doubled as labor camps. The idea of law became an illusion—justice, a word from another language.

The war dragged on in invisible ways. The media called it an economic war, a psychological war, a digital war—but to us, it was simply the dirty war. Men, women, and children walked willingly into the new gas chambers of America, not because they were forced, but because they were promised something better on the other side: stability, medication, forgiveness. In truth, there was only silence and smoke.

Still, I understood it. I was familiar with this kind of war. Humanity has a long memory when it comes to cruelty, and we are capable of repeating it with stunning precision. The human struggle has always been to survive on the scant fruit that remains after the powerful have eaten their fill. It is a disgusting and unending cycle—to watch people feed on what is indigestible, both literally and morally.

I found myself wondering what kind of person I had become to endure it. Was I still human, or only a machine built to survive? Each day blurred into the next: scavenging for food, searching for drinkable water, finding pockets of oxygen between the fumes. The simple act of breathing felt like rebellion.

In the ruins of what used to be the city center, I saw the last symbols of the old world—billboards promising health insurance, education, and equality. The faces of smiling children, now peeled and faded, fluttered in the toxic wind. A reminder of the dream that had once been America.

At night, you could hear distant screams echoing through the empty streets, mixed with the hum of the surveillance drones. Some said that the drones carried antidotes or rations. Others believed they were equipped with nerve agents. I never knew which to believe, and perhaps it no longer mattered. Fear had become faith.

The people who survived adapted quickly. They learned to live without systems, to trade without currency, to hide without shame. Underground markets grew beneath the ruins—trading clean air, tablets of morphine, cartridges, batteries. Even in the apocalypse, entrepreneurship found a way to persist.

Yet the war was not merely political or chemical—it was moral. The nation had turned on itself, each person defending a private truth while abandoning the collective one. The illusion of freedom had been replaced by the necessity of control.

Sometimes I would close my eyes and remember how the air used to smell—how sunlight once felt on skin before it became corrosive. There were still birds somewhere, though rarely seen. Occasionally a single crow would circle overhead, a dark emblem of persistence.

I kept walking, following the fractured roads south. There were rumors that a new settlement had formed near the border—one where the air was clearer and the laws were written by survivors, not politicians. Whether it existed or not, I didn’t care. The motion itself was hope.

The dirty war had returned to America, and it would not end soon—not for years, not for generations. But even in the poisoned air, there was a strange kind of faith. Not the faith of churches or governments, but the stubborn faith of the living—the belief that somehow, against all odds, humanity could rebuild itself from the ruins it created.

And perhaps that, in the end, was the truest form of civil disobedience left to us: the refusal to die when everything else demands that we do.