(Wrath-06)-Smoke & Dust (2012) by Chris Stewart

Author:Chris Stewart
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Mercury Ink
Published: 2012-12-02T07:00:00+00:00

Interstate 495, West of Washington, D.C.

Sometimes they ran, sometimes they walked, and sometimes Sam and Bono stopped to rest while adjusting their backpacks. They stayed on the roads, knowing better than to try to cut through the backyards, fences, highways and barriers that made a cross-country hike through the city virtually impossible.

As they ran, they were shocked at the state of the city. To their left, thin trails of smoke still rose from the downtown area. They knew what it was like down there, the rescue efforts under way, the death and destruction. Both of them shuddered, thinking of the devastation just fifteen miles to the east. The nuclear warhead was small and had been detonated too low to generate an enormous cloud of radiation, and most of the radiated material had already blown away in the wind, but being so close to the detonation still required them to move cautiously.

Once or twice the soldiers stopped while Sam pulled out a portable radiation detector. As he worked, Bono looked up, covering his eyes to protect them from the sun.

“You notice anything?” he asked.

Sam didn’t look up from his work as he answered, “Like the fact there are no airplanes in the sky?”

“Yeah. Like that. Dulles is just west of here. Reagan International and BWI to our east. On a normal day, you’d be able to count dozens of aircraft landing or taking off.”

Sam kept on working, hooking a small wire from a portable battery into his portable radiation detector. “Guess that makes this, what, an ‘un-normal’ day.”

Bono grunted. “Yeah. Pretty much ‘un-normal.’ I mean, how weird is this? Civilian air travel within the United States is a thing of the past. The military birds will keep on flying—I’m guessing most of them were hardwired to protect against EMP—but civilian airliners, they’re all but gone now.”

“I’m just glad I wasn’t in one when the blast hit,” Sam said.

Bono lowered his gaze, looking east. He knew that most of the residents of Washington, D.C. were surprised, even shocked, to discover that, having survived the initial blast, their lives wouldn’t immediately come to an end. It was a common fallacy, the thought that nuclear fallout would kill everything within an enormous radius of the explosion. Bono knew that wasn’t true. Yes, many would die. The total death toll wouldn’t ever be known, because it would take many years as a result of the radiation exposure. But he also knew that most Americans expected downtown Washington, D.C. to be uninhabitable for a thousand years, which wasn’t the case. The half-life of the initial contamination was relatively short, as little as seven hours for the worst of the radiation. The city was located near the eastern coast, where the prevailing winds blew from west to east, which meant that most of the nuclear fallout had already blown out to sea. The area upwind of the explosion received little radiation. Cities west of Washington, D.C.—Fairfax, Falls Church, Arlington—had not received any fallout at all, and wouldn’t, if the west winds kept blowing for another week or so.

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