Jingle Bells played in the background as an epic snowball fight raged between Team Red and Team Blue on the northern end of the golf course on the outskirts of Bloomfield, Iowa. The fight wasn’t chaos, it had rules similar to dodge ball. One team on one side of the battlefield and the other team on the other side. The battle lines had been marked with flags. The scores were tied 9 to 9. This was the tenth and final round and neither team was giving the other an easy win.
Each team had eight players at full strength. Eight people were now in the Dead Zone, a place for those who had been killed in action by snowball to wait until the next fight to join their team. Three players currently remained on Team Red and five on Team Blue.
Nineteen-year-old Kyle hurled himself onto the snow-covered lawn and rolled away from a barrage of snowballs that landed and exploded in white mist where he had just been a second ago. He wore the red beanie of Team Red. His two surviving compatriots were ten and thirteen years of age respectively, brothers Scott and Marcus.