the Earth was tormented into giving birth to an entirely new coastline.
Months before, Soviet “earthshaker” bombs had been seeded by subs along fault-
and fracture-lines in the Pacific. Now these were detonated. At the same time
the Cascades, from Mount Garibaldi in British Columbia down to Lassen Peak in
California—that highly unstable stretch of the “Ring of Fire” that encircles the
Pacific— were showered with ICBMs and sub-launched missiles. The earth heaved
and bucked and burst apart with a succession of cataclysmic shocks. The volcanos
from Mount Rainier and Mount St. Helen’s in the north to Mount Shasta in the
south, and beyond, blew their stacks. Rock and magma blasted into the sky. Huge
rifts tore into the mountains, thrusting deep into the heart of the Cascades.
Vast areas of land and mountain lurched downward massively and the gap between
the Cascades and the Sierra Nevada was breached, the Pacific Ocean boiling
through in spuming waves a mile high.
Within minutes the hugely populated coastal strip from San Francisco to San
Diego had gone, as though it had never existed. The Black Rock Desert was
suddenly an inland sea with mountain peaks as islands. The mighty tremors, the
colossal underground explosions, bucketed on down the fragile chain. Death
Valley, the Mojave and Colorado Deserts were inundated. Baja, California, racked
and tortured by the stupendous quake spasms, literally snapped off, fragmenting
westward, disappearing beneath the churning waves. The Pacific lashed at the
foothills of the Sierra Madre.
Here, the volcanic explosions went on for some years. Elsewhere there was only
silence.
IT LASTED FOR A GENERATION. The Nuclear Winter. Far worse than some had argued;
not as horrific as others had theorized.
There were, of course, survivors. The world was not destroyed, only 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 survive a new
dark 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. Temperatures dropped to freezing and below. Peat marshes,
coal seams, oil wells smoldered and flared fitfully. Toxic rain from soot-choked
clouds lashed the land. Billions of corpses decayed and rotted, became as one
with the poisoned earth.
Slowly, over the years, the survivors dragged themselves out of caves and
bunkers and began to look around them, began to think, as humankind has a habit
of doing, that things were pretty goddamned lousy, but not, perhaps, as
goddamned lousy as they might have been. Such is the unquenchable human spirit,
with its seemingly ingrained philosophy of make do and mend.
Who knows how language survived, but it did, in all its variety. Not only the
language of science, of mechanical things and weaponry, but also of prayer, of
inspiration, most especially of curses. Concepts of measurement—the shape of
time and space—and tattered theories of agriculture, transportation and the
strategies of war managed to prevail quite well through the ravages of endless
social collapse. Rituals of sex and a taste for organized crime still echoed in
one form or another down the years, as did an appreciation of the self, an
understanding about mirrors and the search for the superior person. Literature
and moral philosophy suffered horribly, history became garbled and formal
schooling and worship were lost causes, but throughout the new wastelands
glimmered determined traces of intellectual, psychological and emotional human
growth, thrusting up from the rubble like wild-flowers, though inevitably
mutated. And usually, of course, for the worse—usually in the most terrible form
imaginable.
There were still roads. No amount of nuking can destroy every road in the entire
world. There were still buildings standing. No amount of nuking can destroy
every building in the entire world. Lines of communication and dwelling places;
that was a start. And the survivors built from that.
There were still animals on which one could ride, and which would pull wheeled
vehicles. Then people discovered that, with a certain amount of ingenuity, they
could adapt certain large vehicles so they were driven by steam. That was a