Eventually those who survived faded into the countryside.

Then The Empire and Trevor Stone swept west, returning life to the Great Plains, reopening the old Union Pacific rail stations, and pumping new life into McConnell AFB.

The new normal, however, lasted only a few years.

As Trevor Stone exited Eagle One and walked the tarmac on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 19 ^ th, he knew Wichita was dying again. He could see it in the panicked expressions of the soldiers and civilian workers hustling from shuttle buses to commuter jets. He could hear it in the constant roar of outgoing aircraft filled with evacuating equipment and personnel.

This scene of panic at the air base repeated across Wichita. With rail transportation seized for military use, the civilian population became refugees. Horses and carts and the few cars that could find gasoline formed a snaking line out of the city.

Many of those civilians belonged to the ‘groupies’ who traveled with the military formations. These were the spouses and children, friends and relatives of the warriors. Now those loved ones were abandoned as the soldiers and airmen left via rail or plane and their families resorted to more perilous modes of escape. As a result, the desertion rate among the armed forces spiked.

Just as victory after victory during the early days birthed a seemingly insurmountable momentum, defeat after defeat accelerated the downward spiral.

Trevor led his entourage-two Rottweilers, four heavily-armed soldiers, and Rick Hauser his personal pilot-toward a cluster of buildings including a four-story structure that served as a temporary headquarters. This HQ was a part of a cluster of refurbished buildings that stood in contrast to a neighborhood of the base’s facilities that had been destroyed a decade before and not included in the remodeling plan for McConnell.