FOREWORD

by Ten To Midnight--Free(Lit)

  A few of her colleagues nodded agreement. Olney was only ten miles southwest of Johns Hopkins. It was closer to Washington, but still upwind of the radioactive fallout. She seemed to remember that the facility was protected against fallout in any case.

  The only dissenting voice was that of Dr John Shelby. He was the Assistant Director of Cardiology, which made him Jo’s number two. “I’d like to know who’s going to turn all these people away to Olney,” he pointed out. “We’re not talking about an ordinary emergency here. We’re going to be dealing with a lot of hysterical people, many of them psychologically devastated by what’s happened. Even those with minor cuts and bruises will demand immediate treatment. And the burn injuries…”

  “But a lot of themwon’t be hysterical,” Rosenberg pointed out, cutting him short. “They’re the ones we should be thinking about. They’re the important ones.”

  Sandler furrowed his brow. “I don’t understand.”

  Rosenberg explained patiently. “I’m talking about all the people that will be bringing in friends and relatives, but won’t be too badly injured themselves. A lot of those people will have cars, you see.”

  “And?” Foster shook his head in confusion.

  “And,” Rosenberg elaborated, drawing out the word, “we could draft them in to assist us with moving patients to Olney.”

  Sandler’s mouth opened into a silentAhhh as comprehension dawned. “You mean like a shuttle service, right?”

  “Right,” the neurosurgeon said. “And those who don’t have cars can help out here. I’m sure we could find plenty of things for them to do. Perhaps some of them will have medical experience. Who knows?”

  “Good idea,” Sandler agreed.

  Jo noticed how much Rosenberg’s suggestion had improved the morale of those around her. Suddenly, there was some small cause for optimism.

  Until Shelby spoke.

  “One thing we haven’t thought of, boss,” he remarked dourly to Sandler. “How do we know that we’ve seen the last of the bombs?”

  PLEASANT RIDGE, MISSOURI

  The screams and cries so prevalent a few minutes earlier had now been replaced by a chorus of anguished moans and pleas for help. Beth was starting to realize that she was one of the few people in the vicinity who hadn’t been seriously injured. Actually, she hadn’t been injured at all. But that didn’t stop the tears from streaking her face. Her wounds were internal.

  Cathy was still sprawled out on the roadside, having been drifting in and out of consciousness since the blast. Beth had no idea what to do for her. The nearest hospital was over forty miles away and even if she could get her there, it would more than likely be overwhelmed with patients whose injuries were far worse than those incurred by her mother-in-law.

  “Hang in there, Cath,” she whimpered, stroking Cathy’s head. “It’ll be okay.” And that was perhaps the biggest lie she had ever told. In the distant south, a string of mushroom clouds were deteriorating into stratospheric towers of black smoke, beginning to lean towards the southwest. Beth didn’t know a hell of a lot about radioactive fallout, but she figured that if prevailing winds were blowing the clouds southwest, far away from her, then that was where they would carry the fallout also. With that in mind, she quickly checked the northern horizon for any clouds that might be blowing fallout in her direction. Fortunately, there were none. None that she could ascertain, anyway.

  But in spite of such small graces, she was still stuck on the Interstate in the middle of nowhere, with nowhere to go and no way of getting there. Enough of her fellow drivers had been injured or killed by the blast that the roads were now clogged with stationary vehicles, many of them ablaze. With the power lines dead, the flickering glows of myriad fires provided the only means of illumination, casting eerie shadows over a grisly scene.

  She felt so alone, a feeling that was amplified as she took a mental inventory of her loved ones:

  - her cousin Barry in New York City. He was Beth’s only living immediate relative. She had no way of knowing whether the Big Apple had been spared. Probably not, she figured. Hopefully, Barry hadn’t known too much about it.

  - Martin, no doubt exacting revenge at that very moment for what had been done to America. He probably knew he wouldn’t be coming home. Not that there was much of a home for him to return to.

  - Patrick. His lifeless body still in the back seat of the Ford Explorer.

  - Cathy…

  The irony wasn’t lost on Beth. She had never liked Cathy, much less loved her, but right now she was praying for the recovery of her mother-in-law. Perhaps her wish for Cathy’s survival was a selfish antidote to her fear of loneliness, but it was much more than that. Reviewing the devastation around her, Beth began to realize that human life had suddenly become more rare and precious than ever.

  “Oh, Martin,” she cried. “Where are you?”

  A few yards away, a middle aged man in a business suit staggered blindly through the frozen traffic, arms outstretched like a zombie, hysteria in his sightless eyes. As he toppled forwards, Beth saw that his back was a pincushion of glass shards. Further along the roadside, a young woman tended to her lifeless boyfriend, who had been crushed between two vehicles. His steaming intestines had poured out onto the asphalt, yet she still continued in her vain attempts to revive him. Just a few yards away from her, an elderly man was on his knees, holding his dead wife’s head in his arms and staring in saucer-eyed horror at the fading atomic clouds.

  And in the distance, secondary explosions periodically shook the ground, like aftershocks following a major earthquake. Or the last spasms of a dying planet, Beth thought.

  “Bethany,” Cathy moaned weakly.

  Beth’s attention returned to her mother-in-law. “It’s okay, Cath,” she assured her. “It’s over.”

  “What… what happened? Were we in an accident?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Can you sit up?”

  “Bit… bit dizzy,” the old woman complained. “I’ll try.”

  With Beth’s assistance, Cathy slowly came upright. As her lucidity returned, she started to take in the scene around her. It didn’t reconcile with anything she’d ever experienced or imagined and, momentarily, she thought she might be hallucinating. But the desperate sounds of human misery were all very real, as was the stench of gasoline and charred air.

  “Oh, my God,” she muttered. “Oh no.” Her eyes turned to the towering atomic clouds that would dominate the southern horizon for hours to come. “Please tell me I’m dreaming.” Her eyes welled with tears. She didn’t understand much about nuclear war, but she did know that nobody had ever directly attacked her country before (Pearl Harbor didn’t count, since that was in Hawaii). And she was smart enough to realize that what had happened would have an irrevocable effect on everyday life for a long time.

  She looked up at Beth, her eyes pleading for her daughter-in-law to erase this dreadful image before her. But Beth could do no more to change what had happened than could the poor boy whose intestines had spilled out (she was thankful that Cathy hadn’t seenthat image yet).

  “Paddy,” Cathy gasped. “Where’s Paddy?”

  Beth opened her mouth, but couldn’t find the words to explain. She shook her head sadly. That gesture told Cathy all she needed to know. To Beth’s surprise, her mother-in-law managed a brave smile. “Well,” she said, a slight tremor in her voice, “it’s probably for the best. I mean, at least he didn’t know much about it. It’s better that he didn’t have to see this. He was a good man, you know?”

  Beth was openly sobbing now. “Yes, I know. A lot of good men have died today.”

  “Well, that’s God’s reward for the good,” Cathy reasoned in a controlled tone. “We must have done something wrong in our lives, because we’ve been left behind in Hell. Judgment day has come, and God didn’t think us worthy of redemption.” It was the only logic that made any sense to her.

  “No,” Beth insisted. “That’s not true. We mustn’t think like that. Life will go
on.”

  The old woman looked again at the blazing, apocalyptic southern horizon. “Perhaps,” she admitted. “But what sort of life will it be?”

  Beth wasn’t ready to tackle that particular issue just yet. She stood up, hoisting Cathy to her feet. “Come on, we have to move.”

  “I don’t want to,” Cathy protested. But her voice was full of resignation. Deep in her heart, she no more wanted to stay in this burning morgue than she wanted to live. She simply wanted to be with Patrick again, someplace where there were no nuclear bombs, no suffering multitudes. Only peace.

  “We have to find help. Come on.” Beth wrapped Cathy’s right arm around her shoulder and together they started to head away from the apocalyptic landscape.

  Neither of them knew what destiny might hold in store for them, but north seemed to be a good place to find out.

  FLIGHT UA4171, OVER WESTERN EUROPE

  “This is the Captain speaking. We’re now beginning our descent into Rhein-Main International Airport in Frankfurt. The temperature on the ground is a balmy sixty-eight degrees. Once again, I’d like to apologize for any inconvenience caused by the diversion of this flight from its intended destination. The United Airlines ground staff at Frankfurt will be on hand to assist you with alternative arrangements. In the meantime, please ensure your seat belts are fastened and your trays are in the upright position. Thank you for flying United Airlines, and we look forward to seeing you again.”

  Gellis almost laughed aloud. The Captain’s voice was a study of professionalism, betraying nothing of what he knew. He wondered what the reaction of his fellow passengers would be once they discovered what had happened. The vast majority of those aboard the flight were American. How would they take the news that their nation had been destroyed?

  He was only just beginning to realize how comfortable he’d become until now with the popular, if misplaced, belief that large scale war was a thing of the past. But wasn’t that true for everybody? Ever since the end of the Cold War, society had developed a psychological blind spot to the threat of nuclear conflict. People generally tended to fool themselves that if they ignored the omnipresent danger, it didn’t exist. He remembered when, after the demise of Communism, all things Russian had suddenly become fashionable. Except for poverty, organized crime and an inefficient bureaucracy, he thought bitterly. Gellis had been a student when Mikhail Gorbachev had charmed America, bringing New York City to a standstill with an impromptu walkabout. He remembered the euphoria when, as the last President of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev had signed the INF treaty with Ronald Reagan in 1987. But, like with the moon landings, that initial euphoria had soon degenerated into apathy. By the mid-1990’s, people had stopped caring that Russia still had enough nuclear weapons - most of them still aimed at the United States - to destroy the world several times over.

  Such complacency had not been exclusive to the public, he knew. Even western political leaders had come to believe their own rhetoric that the world had been made a safer place by the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact. They had assumed that the victorious West could go about constructing a New World Order without Russian interference. That was a joke, if ever there was one. Even now, Saddam Hussein was still in power, despite numerous botched attempts by the US to oust him. Milosevic, although assassinated in mysterious circumstances a couple of years ago, had survived the 1999 Kosovan War. And, in the meantime, Russia had been sinking slowly and painfully into anarchy for nearly two decades, while a succession of arrogant western leaders kept reassuring Moscow that if it persisted with economic reform, it would probably pull through. Gellis found it ironic that such platitudes had always been edged with a warning that if reforms were at all tempered, the west would cut off whatever limited economic aid it provided to Russia (a miniscule sum given the sheer scale of the republic’s land and population base, but still enough to ruin the Russian economy were it to be withdrawn). Meanwhile, NATO had rubbed salt into Russia’s already wounded pride by stationing troops in the territories of the former Soviet bloc; primarily Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria and Poland.

  But, until today, wounded pride had been the least of Russia’s problems. Most of its people - the majority who didn’t participate in the black market - were suffering terribly under an economic system saddled with hyperinflation and corruption. Many soldiers hadn’t been paid in months. And, incredibly, the west still showed amazement at the surge in popularity of extremist political movements over there.

  Well, now the west’s self-assured arrogance had been repaid with interest. Gellis derived no satisfaction from that. Both his nation of birth - Russia - and his nation of residence - America - had been destroyed because of the complacency of a few men who had thought they’d known better.

  Those who don’t learn from history are destined to repeat history’s mistakes…

  Gellis lifted his window blind and saw that an awesome red sun was rising over the Eastern horizon.

  It looked as though it was edged with death.

  GCN HEADQUARTERS, ATLANTA

  The newsroom had been operating on a skeleton staff ever since news of the imminent nuclear attack had prompted many staff to rush home to their families. Anchorman Jack Sullivan, however, was one of the few who had stayed behind. His wife and kids were visiting relatives in Detroit. Although he had made a telephone call shortly before the attack to ensure they were safe and to tell them he loved them, he knew that it would be impossible for him to reach Detroit given the present chaotic conditions and the Government’s decision to suspend Interstate travel

  So all that was left for him was to continue doing his job, as he had been doing five nights a week since being promoted to anchor two years’ earlier. A junior studio assistant was operating the camera when Sullivan’s face appeared on millions of TV screens around the world. Luckily, enough of the senior production staff had also chosen to stay, ensuring that he still had something to report. But, for the most part, he was winging it. There was no TelePrompTer. The EMP effects caused by a high-altitude airburst over the Gulf of Mexico had knocked out electricity grids throughout the southeastern United States. Accordingly, everything was now running off an emergency generator, the GCN building being one of the few in Atlanta with electricity. He had no idea how many people were picking up this first broadcast of the post-apocalypse era, but it was still his job to deliver it.

  “Hello America and the rest of the world,” he began, his resonant tones as authoritative as ever. “I don’t know how many of you are picking this up, but we’re staying on the air for as long as we can. Many of GCN’s staff, quite understandably, have opted to be with their families at this dark moment in human history. That means I don’t have a script, so please bear with me. Let me begin with what we know for certain.

  “Late last evening, Russian forces used tactical nuclear weapons against enemy positions in the Ukraine. What happened next is still uncertain, but it appears that the Ukraine somehow managed to launch a nuclear strike of its own against Russia, destroying three cities, including the Russian capital Moscow. Soon afterwards, American and Russian forces were involved in an extensive nuclear exchange. How and why this came about is still a matter of speculation, but what is clear is that Washington D.C., Houston and Seattle have been destroyed, as have a number of American military facilities across the country. I understand that a similar amount of damage has been inflicted on Russia.

  “The President and his senior staff are currently airborne in an E-4 command plane, from where he is understood to be controlling wartime operations.”

  Sullivan fingered his earpiece. “I’m just hearing that we’ve established a live link with the Speaker of the House of Representatives, George Halligan. Mr. Halligan is at the secure Mount Weather bunker in Pennsylvania with a number of Senators, Congressmen and Supreme Court judges. Mr. Halligan, can you hear me?”

  Halligan’s voice was barely audible above the crackling interference. “Yes, Jack, I can.”

 
“Mr. Speaker, thank you for sparing the time to talk to us. Firstly, let me ask, how are you?”

  The response was a few seconds coming. “I’m shaken, Jack, as are most of us down here. We’re all worried about our loved ones, our constituencies and our country. Mount Weather was targeted by a single Russian warhead, but fortunately for everybody down here, it seems to have been less than accurate. I believe it overshot us by a couple of miles.”

  “How many people made it to Mount Weather in time?”

  “Not enough, Jack, not enough. Just over half the Senate and House of Representatives are here, and eight of eleven Supreme Court judges. We can only assume that many of those who never made it are no longer alive.”

  The watching audience saw Sullivan swallow hard. “I don’t know how much you can tell us, but how bad was the attack?”

  “We’ve been receiving regular updates from the President’s E-4. I can tell you that we’ve been struck with well in excess of six hundred nuclear warheads, roughly equivalent to five hundred megatons in total, and that American strategic forces have responded in kind. The Russian attack seems to have been concentrated mainly on strategic military targets around the country, but three cities were also hit. Those were Washington, Seattle and Houston. The Russians seem to have deliberately attacked corresponding cities to those that were hit in their own country.”

  “The question that everyone will want to know the answer to, Mr. Speaker, is how did this happen? How did America become involved in what, after all, began as a regional crisis?”

  The line crackled and fuzzed, after which Halligan’s voice could be heard saying, “Sorry Jack, I didn’t catch that. Could you repeat the question?”

  Sullivan raised his voice slightly. “Can you reveal the reasons for America’s involvement in what was initially a localized conflict?”