Everyone nodded, Mildred last of all, her beads rattling damply.
ONCE THEY WERE our of the lee of the mountain, the wind freshened, driving away some of the light rain. It cleared visibility up to the better part of a mile, opening up the vista of what had once been the city of Washington, one time capital of the greatest and most powerful country that the world had ever known.
The seven friends stood grouped together, staring down at the spectacle.
“Fireblast!” Ryan whispered.
Chapter Seven
From battered, rusting street signs, they discovered that they were in a suburb to the southeast of the city that had been called Forest Heights, standing just outside what had once been the city limits.
The newborn volcano wasn’t the only change around Washington. There was the clearest evidence of massive quake activity, with ribboned, tilted highways and jutting chasms that furrowed the land. It was exceedingly doubtful that anyone who had lived in Forest Heights in the last blank days of civilization would have recognized the place now.
But many of the buildings remained.
Ryan had led them to a street of mainly Victorian frame houses, several of them rotted and tilted, leaning drunkenly against their neighbors. All of them lacked windows, but the companions found one house that seemed sturdy and, at least, still had most of its shingled roof intact. Dusk had come creeping in from over the Shens to the west, and they saw no sign of any human life.
A single dog skulked across their path, halting in a brief show of defiance in the center of the road and baring its teeth. Ryan started to unsling the Steyr, but the animal lost its nerve and scuttled off into the tall evergreen bushes that smothered most of the front gardens.
“Shame. Would have made good eating for tonight,” Ryan said, replacing the rifle.
THEY GOT A FIRE GOING in the hearth of the stripped living room, using dry kindling that Dean scavenged from under the rear porch of the house.
Mildred found a battered pan and filled it from the brimming water butt, slicing up some of the vegetables that she discovered in the overgrown kitchen garden.
Potatoes, carrots and onions, with a few sprigs of herbs to give it flavor, simmered away.
The conversation turned naturally to what they’d seen while standing on the peak of Darien Avenue, looking down across the ravaged landscape.
“Just a big, big hole,” Dean said. “That lake to the west, like the worst volcano in the world had blown its head off. Must’ve been ten miles across.”
“Easy that,” Jak agreed. “See why call it Washington Hole. Just ‘Hole’ for short.”
It had been a gigantic crater, torn from the earth by the nuke bombs and, later, missiles, that had ripped the heart from the capital, and been the trigger for the dark nights and long winters that followed.
There had been no warning of the firestorm at ground zero that had literally blasted Washington into the cold dust of eternal space, slaughtering its inhabitants in the greatest megacull in history. There were precious few survivors after twenty-four hours. Then came the rad sickness with its poisoned claws.
Within a two-week period, the survivors of that first attack were so few that they couldn’t be measured statistically.
The other extraordinary element of the sight was that the winding, warm, brown Potomac had vanished. Its bed scoured out and destroyed, it now formed a huge, lazy lake, miles wide from north to south, covering most of the blasted ruins of the city as well as virtually all of Arlington and Alexandria.
“That looked like one of the biggest shantytown camps I ever saw,” J.B. said. “Around the edge of the crater. Couldn’t see much for the cooking smoke, but there must’ve been hundreds of shacks there.”
“Many of the old cities have their squat camps, don’t they?” Krysty said.
Ryan leaned forward and sniffed at the vegetable stew. “Smells good. The cities? Yeah. But I’ve been to the ruins of Newyork, Norleans, Chicago. Point is that they were all wrecked, but all of them still had lots of buildings left, even if most were destroyed. We all remember what it was like drifting past the scrapers of Newyork. The dead streets and the ghoulies haunting the rad-blighted emptiness. You get squatters in all those places. But I never saw a town that was gone. Like it had never been. Just gone. Gone.”