Yet, there were survivors. A small percentile who were in the right place at the right time, or who were in locales where the rad blasting did not occur and the nuclear rains did not fall. Slowly, hesitantly, in packs and pairs over the long years following the conflict, men and women painstakingly crawled out of the wreckage. They looked with weary eyes upon the new world their leaders and their hidden agendas had wrought.
Overhead, the sky had changed from a bright blue to a smoky purplepurple being one of the dozens of colors the sky took depending on which section of the former United States one lived in. Everything was losteven the color of the sky; an eternal reminder that things would never be the same again.
These survivors bravely decided that, yes, while most everything of value had indeed been turned to shit, there was still life to carry on.
Staying alive at all costs was such a frank, unadorned methodology that it revolted some. Still, it was better to wake up tired and paranoid than not to wake up at all. The world wasn’t a very nice place to live in anymorein fact, it was worse than ever before.
The current incarnation of what some called “Old California” would have been unrecognizable by using the old maps. From the air, this stretch had been transformed into the multitude of floating hot spots called “The West Coast Islands.” Any sane man stayed as far away from them as possible. The former California coastline had been hit hard at the beginning of the war by a planted barrage of earthshaker bombs, seeded from Soviet submarines. These seeds of death had been left behind to decimate their intended targetsthe many winding fault and fracture-lines of the lands underneath the waves of the Pacific Ocean.
At the same time these hidden devices had been activated in conjunction with the sneak attack in the Soviet embassy in Washington; the Cascades, from Mount Garibaldi in British Columbia down to Lassen Peak in California were showered with ICBMs and sub-launched missiles. The combination pulverized the entire stretch from the lower regions of Washington State past Los Angeles. The volcanoes from Mount Rainier and Mount Saint Helens and Mount Shasta literally blew their stacks, blasting rock and magma into the arid sky.
The San Andreas Fault opened like a cheap zipper on the back of a jolt-addicted whore.
Today, if one came inland from the West Coast Islands, all that was left in the resculpted southwestern United States was desert.
One section was notorious. The Barrens. A place of heat and sweat.
There was nothing here in this festering hellhole to greet a visitor but a few valiant, brittle attempts at flora and faunaand, in this particular area, an innocuous gray half dome rising from the sand. The one-story building had no windows or doors. The only apparent way into the place was via a rectangular shaped portal. The portal was smooth, without any kind of handle or other sort of push/pull opening system. A single numeric keypad with a red liquid crystal readout display was recessed into the wall next to the entry way.
These types of code protected portals were familiar to the group of seven people who had disappeared inside the nondescript bunker-like installation.
The people who had just arrived weren’t in the Barrens for the view, nor did they give a damn about the single dwelling jutting against the orange mustard color the sky had chosen for today. They knew what was inside the dome, and what was below the placid, boring surface. From the crumbling to dust protective body suits in the labs down under, to the red and white strident warning signs, to the emergency decontamination chambersall of this and even more evidence was housed withinpointing to this lonely lair as being the nest of a plague sower.
A happy home for the most deadly of biological weapons.
Chemicals were used in the conflagration that sparked the end of the civilized world, but used far less than might have been intended once the nuclear fire began to burn relentlessly across the globe. More intelligent denizens of the appalling new world that followed suspected that mere radiation couldn’t account for the perverse genetics that had been spawned after skydark. A released biological agenta single mutagen or perhaps an infinite number of dozens from unknown originsapproached the truth more about the many humanoid mutations that had come about following the holocaust.