Pilgrimage to Hell
By JACK ADRIAN
There were, of course, survivors.
The world was not destroyed—just a way of life. The global population was cut
down to perhaps one-fifth of what it had been. The ecosystems were utterly
disrupted. The climate was transformed.
In what had once been North America, the survivors struggled to prevail in a new
age of plague, radiation sickness, barbarism and madness. There were days of
seemingly endless night, eerily lit by fires in the sky. Pyrotoxin smogs
blanketed the earth. Fetid strontium swamps created new and terrible life forms.
Two-hundred-mile-an-hour winds hurtled across the landscape, and when by some
freak chance a storm cloud swept in from the sea, it was acid rain that fell—
pure acid that stripped a man to the bones in sixty seconds of shrieking agony.
In spite of this, life returned.
In isolated pockets, survivors fought back against terrible odds. And won.
Sort of.
DEATHLANDS
Pilgrimage to Hell
By JACK ADRIAN
Prologue
THE WORLD BLEW OUT in 2001.
To be precise, at noon on January 20, 2001.
There was an irony that only a very few people fully appreciated. That is, about
0.0001 percent of those who survived.
Back about thirty years or so a science fiction writer called Arthur C. Clarke
had gotten together with a movie director called Stanley Kubrick and made a film
called 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film, the beginning of a series of such films,
had a message. For many who had seen it and read the story in the last quarter
of the twentieth century, the year 2001 had become a symbol of optimism and hope
for the future of mankind. Calmer times were only just around the corner. Peace
and prosperity were assured.
The world blew out in 2001.
So much for fantasy.
THE FULL DREADFUL REALITY began at noon on that crisp and clear January day with
a one-megaton blast in Washington, D.C., power base of the United States of
America and political center of the Western world.
The bomb was not triggered above the city, nor was it the result of a preemptive
strike by a passel of missiles hurtling in through the air defense screens and
hitting the deck.
It erupted without warning in the bowels of the Soviet embassy, in a basement
section that was a restricted area even to the ambassador, V. A. Vorishin, who,
like just about everyone else within a five-mile radius, was vaporized.
Mr. Vorishin was not actually in the embassy at the time. He, along with a
multitude of other foreign dignitaries and a vast assemblage of national and
civic leaders, journalists, members of the judiciary, show biz personalities and
thousands who were just along for the spectacle, was on Capitol Hill, attending
the inauguration of the forty-third President of the United States, a man in his
sixties, a man who had first come to fame back in the early 1980s as a
dark-horse contender for the Democratic leadership, strongly favored at the time
by young voters called “yuppies.”
Within the blast area itself a number of things happened inside a very short
time. The flash, which grew in brightness to one thousand times the sun’s
radiance in two seconds, ignited all flammable materials. The blast hurtled
outward, pulverizing anything and everything that stood in its way. Tall
buildings were uprooted like trees, falling apart as they descended to the
earth, the shattered pieces of masonry, stone, steel girders and glass sent
whirling in a deadly vortex. A tremendous ball of fire, expanding rapidly and
angrily, roared like dragon’s breath up into the troposphere and beyond, fed by
the thousands of smaller conflagrations that had started almost instantaneously.
Incredibly, a few, a very few, of those in the city survived the initial blast,
but they were soon put out of their misery. Within a few minutes two other,
smaller, bombs exploded: one, to the northwest of the city in Bethesda, beneath
a chic art gallery owned by a man whose father had “defected” to the West from
Bulgaria twenty years earlier; the other, to the south, in the basement storage
area of a large drugstore situated in Indian Head, across the river.
The effect of these two secondary bombs can only be described as monstrous. The