Pilgrimage to Hell

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 initial shock wave, already losing momentum, was renewed, strengthened, fortified. A firestorm developed. Hurricane-force winds hurled the superheated fire-mass around until the very air itself seemed to ignite. The Potomac River was sucked up into the fiery sky in a vast, roiling waterspout that evaporated even as it rose. Dust and ash and pulverized debris cut off the sunlight, as though someone had thrown a switch. Immense damage was sustained in Baltimore, Hagerstown, Fredericksburg, Annapolis. The city of Washington, along with its inner and outlying suburbs, was wiped off the face of the earth, leaving only a crater large enough to house a few Shea Stadiums and a lot of seared rubble.

It is now, of course, clear that this was merely the climax to the first chapter in the grim saga of the end of Western civilization. For the catastrophe was not the result of a sudden mistake on someone's part, an ill-understood order or a chance accident. There had to be a prologue.

Some might argue that the prologue began to unfold when Karl Marx first met Friedrich Engels and began to postulate an alternative political creed to that which held sway in the early nineteenth century. Others might push the jumping-off point further back in time: to the French Revolution, say, or the teachings of Rousseau and Babeuf. Or perhaps the insurrectionary sermons preached by the fiery hedge priest John Ball prior to the Peasants' Revolt in England in 1381 were indirectly to blame. Or even...

But this is academic. Although the roots of the virtual destruction of a global way of life must necessarily lie deep in the past, the actual concrete and significant causes clearly took place within a generation of the moment of disaster.

The history of the last fifty years of the twentieth century is one of general gloom shot with stabs of light. Perhaps one could say the same about the history of the world since man first shuffled out of the caves and began to hunt and gather and till the land. But so much happened during the twentieth century, and so much of it happened so fast, that a good analogy might be of a car on a long downward slope whose driver suddenly discovers that the fluid is running out of his brakes. No matter that the slope is a gentle one; once momentum has been achieved, a certain point reached then passed, there is no stopping the downward rush that very soon becomes headlong, irreversible, terminal.

The United States, deliberately isolationist in between the First and Second World Wars and yet historically jealous of Great Britain's high global profile during and before that period, was swift to change its foreign policy and seize the guardianship of the Western world from the 1950s onward.

During this time atomic power became more than just a science fiction cliche; West and East glared at each other during the Cold War; tensions eased as detente became a political priority; pacts were signed, treaties ratified; an arms race began, got out of hand; black-gold blackmail became a hideous reality when the Arab oil states became greedy for power; money markets throughout the world rocked and teetered; enormous economic depression arrived, stayed for more than a decade.

In the 1960s and 1970s America got its fingers burned in Southeast Asia, fighting a war that, despite what later apologists maintained, could never have been won. In the late 1980s to early 1990s, the same old story was rerun in Latin America, for the same old reasons. This time, however, the stakes were higher and the face cards more evenly distributed. For a time the world tottered on the brink of a Third and probably final World War. In the end, both superpowers, Russia and America, backed off. For the moment, mutual face-saving became the order of the day.

In 1988 President Reagan was succeeded by his vice president. The crisis in Latin America had slowly grown during Reagan's two terms of office, but it was his successor who, early in 1992, had to face the Soviet leader Mr. Gorbachev across a table in Geneva so that both could pull back from the brink with as much grace as could be mustered.

One might have expected that a grateful U.S. electorate, later that year, would have returned the Republican leader for a second presidential term with a thumping majority. But the electorate is notoriously fickle. In 1992 the Republicans were skinned by the Democrats, led by an aging Democratic figure, a long-time politician from a family of political stars, a man with a terrible driving record in his native Massachusetts.

The American public had had it up to its collective back teeth with the GOP. Over the previous twelve years there had been too many close calls, too many near disasters. It was time to turn to a symbol of the past, time to revert to a New Frontier style of politics.

But the presidency of this East Coast aristocrat — whose political acumen, never particularly strong in the first place, had been frayed and shredded by years of self-indulgence and self-pity — was an unmitigated disaster. After four years of inept rule, verging at times on the catastrophic, the electorate demanded the return of the devil they knew, and in 1996 the previous President, in any case still regarded by the mandarins of his own party as a sound, even muscular, choice, took the country by a landslide and became, for only the second time in American history, an ousted President who returned to the White House in triumph.

But this had little effect on the global situation, and toward the end of this man's second term, in the spring of 1999, there occurred an event that was to have a shattering effect on the course of world history. Or what was left of it.

In a spectacular and bloody coup the Soviet leader N. Ryzhkov was gunned down, in the corridors of the Kremlin itself, by hardline Stalinist revisionists. Most of Ryzhkov's key associates, inherited from his predecessor, Gorbachev, who had died in a plane crash in the Urals in 1993; were shot, and for six months the USSR was racked by a civil war far more atrocious in the short term and far more damaging in the long term than that out of which Soviet Russia had agonizingly emerged back in the early 1920s. The upper echelons of the Soviet army, in particular, were decimated.

The coup had been masterminded by KGB chief V. N. Pritisch who, it was rumored, had already disposed of the previous head of the KGB, V. Chebrikov, five years earlier. Chebrikov, a close ally of both Gorbachev and Ryzhkov, had died of a brain tumor and been given a full and impressive state funeral; however, some said a lethal injection, administered by Pritisch himself, had helped Chebrikov on his way.

Pritisch was a hard-liner who detested the West, favored the bleaker aspects of Stalinism and was determined to revert to the original Marxist-Leninist line of total world revolution leading to total world domination. On the other hand he was as much of a pragmatist as any serious politician, and although it might be supposed that the bombs that destroyed Washington were detonated at his instigation, this was by no means the case. Pritisch needed time to plan, a ten-year breathing space, after the short but savage mayhem he had inflicted on his own country, in which to develop his global strategies. The bombs that destroyed Washington gave him nothing.

They were the work, in fact, of a secret and even more extreme junta of disaffected senior internal security officers who, for five years or more before the Pritisch coup, had been plotting not simply for revolution but for outright war. This group, headed by two shadowy figures in the Soviet hierarchy, B. Sokolovsky and N. D. Yudenich, were fanatical purists who believed that over the past generation there had been too much humiliation and marking time, too little action. They called themselves vsesozhzhenie, or "terrible fire."

Their grievances, real or imagined, were many. The fat-cat corruption of the Brezhnev era had, they felt, never been entirely eradicated, even under the brisk, no-nonsense rule of Gorbachev. The gradual erosion of influence over the lesser partners of the Warsaw Pact and Russia's European satellites during the 1970s and 1980s worried them. The growth of consumerism, the importation of decadent, Western-style petit bourgeois values into western Russia appalled them.

But if the domestic scene was one at which they looked with sour eyes, the international scene, and Soviet foreign policy in general, seemed to these philosophers of the "terrible fire" one of gross mismanagement, a succession of blunders and embarrassments.

The disastrous intervention in Lebanon during the mid to late 1980s had led a number of Middle Eastern allies to back away from Soviet influence right into the welcoming arms of the United States. The tactical retreat from Afghanistan in the late 1980s had been, for them, a humbling experience. And the return of Soviet forces in even greater numbers only three years later had merely resulted in an even more debilitating and long-drawn-out war of attrition with the rebels that still smoldered into the late 1990s.

The bloody holocaust that had swept South Africa in 1988-9, when President Botha, after three years of vacillation, finally offered the black population limited as opposed to universal suffrage: far too little, far too late, had been a shambles politically as well as literally, for the victorious, Marxist-oriented African National Congress had turned its back on its Soviet mentors and accepted aid from the increasingly capitalistic China.

The back-down over Latin America had been, the vsesozhzheniethought, nothing short of an act of cowardice. And the assassination of Fidel Castro in 1993, probably engineered by rogue members of the American CIA, had not been dealt with at all with the firmness — the sternness, even — that was, the plotters felt, required. The subsequent uprising had been put down by the Cuban army with no help from the Soviet Union, who were still uneasy, so soon after the Latin American crisis, about cruising into dangerous waters. The fact that the U.S., for the same reason, had not poked its oar in when for a couple of weeks Cuba had been theirs for the taking, proved that the Americans were just as stupid as those who sat around the mahogany conference tables in the Kremlin.

The gradual spread of Islamic fundamentalism from Iran into Turkmen and Uzbekistan had slowly but surely, like a relentlessly insidious maggot, reached up into the southern parts of Kazakhstan: extremely sensitive territory. On the other side of the Golodnaya Steppe lay some of the most secret military establishments in the whole of the USSR.

All in all, the past thirty years seemed to them to have been a time of confusion and disorientation, a time of feeble men and feeble policies. In spite of the massive strides forward in agriculture, historically the weak link in Soviet domestic affairs, the huge leaps in industrial manufacturing and, more important, technological development in outer space, there seemed to those of the vsesozhzhenieto have been a loss of direction. A loss of faith in the old Marxist-Leninist ideologies. A loss of purity.

Purity, it was argued, could only be regained in the heart of the fire. Fire cleansed. The world must be set alight.

And not in ten years' time. Or twenty. Or a hundred.

Now.

in the U.S. there was unease at the Pritisch coup, alarm at the subsequent show trials that dragged on through the spring of 2000, and then a ground swell of pure panic as it was realized that the face of Soviet Russia had undergone a complete and utter transformation, an almost total reversion to the stony, obdurate, uncompromising mask of Stalinism.

The strong feeling in the country was this: the Republicans, in general, were politically right of center; the Democrats, in general, were politically left. Better, therefore, to go for the party that might — just might — find some common ground with the new rulers of Russia than the party whose inveterate and historic belligerence might — just might — upset the Soviets into doing something drastic and irreversible.

The American electorate could well have gotten it right. There could have been some kind of cobbled-together short-term accommodation with Pritisch, although Pritisch himself viewed matters in the longer term and had made up his mind that within a decade the entire world scene must be transformed.

But this, too, is academic. The vsesozhzhenie— who also called themselves the obzhigateli, or "igniters" — had other ideas. More to the point, they had contacts in what remained of the armed forces. Owing to the Byzantine and intensely secretive nature of the Russian power structure, much could be done with those who hated Pritisch as much as they hated the West.

And much was done in the final quarter of the year 2000. Plans were devised. Preparations made. Secret orders given and carried out. A state of readiness was achieved.

All culminated in the long-range remote-controlled detonation, by a small group of spetsnaz — special forces — of the three Washington bombs.

The plan of the obzhigateliwas, briefly, as follows: once Washington was out, the three main U.S. space stations were the primary targets. These would be destroyed by particle beam weapons from a variety of killer satellites directed by the two central Soviet space stations. A minute at most.

The U.S. and the NATO countries would then have to rely on the rather more antiquated sky— and ground-based early warning systems still in operation as backup to the extremely sophisticated SDI "loop." First priority, then, was the huge 767 Fortress flying in a figure-of-eight pattern above the American Midwest, the DEW Line "golf balls" stretched across the Arctic landscape from Alaska through Canada and across to Greenland, and the new NORAD bunkers situated beneath the dusty terrain of New Mexico — the old NORAD complex, deep within Cheyenne Mountain in the Rockies, had been taken more than a decade previously by a curious and obscurely funded government controlled "energy" department, which also ramrodded a number of other locations to be found — or, it was profoundly to be hoped, notto be found — in the continental U.S. and elsewhere. Once these and four key communications facilities in Europe and Turkey had been taken out — the Deluge.

Although "terrible fire" was made up of ideological purists who planned for Armageddon, even they did not wish for total destruction. There were to be degrees of conflagration. Although certain places, mainly in North America, Europe, the Middle East and China, were to be made practically uninhabitable for generations, other locales — in America and Europe — were not to receive a full-scale "dirty" missiling. There had to be something to inherit when the obzhigateliemerged from their bunkers.

Once the human command chain had been wiped out and early warning systems rendered inoperable, nuclear forces targets were next in line: ICBM and IRB sites, storage areas, sub bases. After that came the conventional military targets: supply depots, naval bases, air defense installations, marshaling yards, military storage facilities. From there it was logical to move to civilian and industrial targets: factories, petroleum refineries, ports, civil airfields, electronics industrial bases, nuclear reactors, areas where coal was mined and steel manufactured, power stations and grid centers, important cities. Some cities were to be wiped off the map, others neutralized by the latest "squeezed" enhanced-radiation weapons, now capable of delivering a very "clean" and short-term packet to within, quite literally, meters of their targets. Certain areas were to be drenched with chemicals.

On the face of it, all seemed simple enough.

But from the start, things went drastically wrong.

The vsesozhzheniehad been aware that whatever happened, a large degree of "knee-jerk" retaliation against the USSR was unavoidable. They assumed, however, that by decapitating the U.S. power and command structure at a stroke, retaliation would be minimal. They knew that once the President was dead, the Vice President would take over; if he died, the Speaker of the House of Representatives would then be in command. And so on down a designated chain of civilian successors numbering — or so it was thought — possibly a dozen. After these had been eliminated, the U.S. would be akin to a chicken with its head cut off.

Unfortunately for the Russians, their intelligence was fatally out of date. Even as far back as the 1970s, command of the U.S. could pass to as many as sixteen civilian successors, as well as a number of top military advisers. This figure had been upped to twenty-five civilian successors during the Latin American crisis of the early 1990s, and the number of military advisers had been raised, as well. Further, it had been decided that one-third of this group could never be within one hundred miles of the President at any given time. Thus, decapitation was virtually impossible.

Not that this made much difference in the long run since, as it happened, the eleventh in line of succession that January day was a certain Air Force general called P. X. "Frag" Frederickson — a somewhat gung-ho individual who, if the President had survived, would not have held his position of responsibility under the new administration.

But at twelve noon on January 20,2001, he did hold that position, and at 12:00:46, as he sat at the command console in the windowless 767 approximately one and a quarter kilometers above the city of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, he knew that a mushroom cloud had appeared over Washington. He also knew, as he stared at the flickering kaleidoscope of lights to the left of his seat and at the information clicking on-screen beneath them, that he was now the forty-fourth President, unelected, of the United States.

He did not need to launch into a complex series of button-tapping movements to "find the key," in other words tap out a sequence on the console that would release the lock of a small safe nearby, then tap out another sequence that would spring a drawer containing the authentication codes manual. The general knew all the codes he needed to know off by heart, though he should not have known even one of them. The general had made it his business to know the codes and to keep up with the irregular changes. Although he had absolutely no idea that such a group as vsesozhzhenieexisted, he was in many ways their brother in hatred.

An arctic smile played on his craggy face as he reached out with spatulate fingers and swiftly keyed into the computer a set of high-priority sequential commands. Thus, three minutes and twenty-nine seconds before the two secondary bombs in Washington finished off the work of the first, the United States had launched.

The retentive memory and fierce hatred of a fifty-six-year-old Air Force general did not save the Western world. But on the other hand they certainly screwed vsesozhzhenie.

Within three heartbeats of Frederickson's keying in his last commands, the three U.S. space stations had shifted orbit. Instead of being destroyed they were crippled; even so they were still able to cripple the two Soviet stations. All contact with both was then lost.

The events of the next hour or so need only be briefly told. Silos of varying sizes across the length and breadth of the U.S., the continent of Europe and the Arctic blasted open, letting loose a terrible melange of weaponry. Submarines lurking in the oceans of the world shook almost in unison.

Within five minutes, towns, ports and defense installations in Eastern Europe were devastated. Within fifteen minutes the ICBMs swept in over the Arctic Circle, and entire cities in Russia itself began to wink out, to become smoking heaps of radioactive ash. Military bases and missile sites in the Kol'skiy Poluostrov — Kola Peninsula — Novaya Zemlya, Severnaya Zemlya, Novosibirskye Ostrova, Chukchi and Kamchatka, as well as those deep in the heart of Eastern Europe, disappeared in a flash.

Too late, of course. Just seconds too late. If Frederickson's strike had been preemptive, it would have turned Marxist-Leninist ideology into a dead philosophy, something to be yawned over in the history books.

But there were to be no history books, for even as Russia was disappearing under soaring fireballs and vast mushroom clouds, so was Western Europe, so was the Middle East, so was China.

And so, to all intents and purposes, was North America.

The commercial East Coast was obliterated by the retaliatory attack, as were the industrial belts around the Great Lakes and the petrochemical and defense manufacturing zones strung along the Louisiana coastline. The Southwest — most of Arizona, New Mexico, west Texas — became a land of fire. Cities vanished in the wink of an eye; new lakes were created; forests blazed. The area around Minot, North Dakota, was devastated, as was the Cumberland Plateau that stretched across Tennessee, and central Nebraska. Florida, southern Georgia, Alabama and eastern Mississippi were hit by a rain of biological and chemical agents, sub-fired from the Atlantic. Cheyenne Mountain, no longer considered a high priority target, was hit once, just at the moment when a singular experiment was taking place deep in its bowels.

But the most stupendous destruction of all took place on the West Coast. Here 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 technological breakthrough. Books were useful here. No amount of nuking can destroy every book in the entire world. Knowledge was power over the darkness, the destroyer of ignorance and fear.

For much of the twenty-first century the survivors lived on a knife-edge. It was a hand-to-mouth existence. Yet slowly they learned how to cope with disaster, take each day as it came, adapt. They began to experiment with what they had, discover new ways of doing old things — and discover oldways of doing old things. They began to explore.

Toward the end of the century a man stumbled across an astonishing cache of food and merchandise and survival equipment and weapons. He discovered that this was a Stockpile, laid down before the Nuke by the government of the day. The man learned that there were other hidden Stockpiles dotted across the vast land. He began to trade this material, began to search for more caches, began to travel — at first by steam truck and then, after he'd come across the first of many huge Stockpiles of oil and gasoline, by gasoline-driven vehicles.

At first he did this for purely mercenary reasons, but as the years went by he found that bringing light to dark places had its own reward.

Then others began to trade, others whose motives were by no means as altruistic. This is often the way.

Now, in 2104 — old style — just over one hundred years after the Nuke in what had once been known as North America, the descendants of those who had not succumbed to radiation sickness or died by violence at the brutal hands of their fellow men and women, look out upon a vastly altered and for the most part hideously strange world.

To the north lies a cold waste where men clothe themselves in furs the year round. Where once the Great Lakes had been, there is now a huge, sullen inland sea, bordered on the northeast and south by a blasted land. From Cape Cod down to South Carolina lies a ruin-choked wasteland to which only now is life slowly returning, but to the north of this seared terrain — New Hampshire — and below it — South Carolina — there exist bustling Baronies, ruled by powerful families who have clawed out territory for themselves over a period of sixty years or so. Here primitive manufacturing industry can be found, a veneer of civilized sophistication. Even electric light. But there have, of course, been no advances. Weapons, tools, gadgets: all these date from the last quarter of the twentieth century, either as relics handed down from father to son over three generations and kept in as workable condition as possible, or as loot from the various Stockpiles opened up over the years.

Where in the South the rich and evil soup of chemical and biological agents vomited across the landscape, there now exist fetid strontium swamps and near-tropical forest, where new and terrible life-forms lurk.

The Southwest has become a huge tract of simmering hotland, dust-bowl territory for the most part, skinned of cacti and even the most primitive forms of vegetation, where 250 mph winds hurtle in from the Gulf. And when by some atmospheric miracle storm clouds sweep across from the Pacific, it is acid rain that falls — pure acid that can strip a man to the bones in seconds flat.

The resculpted West Coast has now calmed down, although it is still volcanic, and far below the earth's surface and beneath the waves there are still tremendous natural forces simmering in uneasy captivity. Stark fjords stab into the mountainous coastline to the north; steaming lagoons lie to the south.

In the heartland of this huge country there are dramatic changes. The Great Salt Lake, already rising dangerously in the late twentieth century, has extended its bounds because of quake subsidence at the Wasatch Fault and the years' long drenchings caused by intense climatic disturbance. It now covers nearly 15,000 square miles and is roughly the area of the ancient Lake Bonneville of more than ten thousand years ago.

Everywhere there are ruined cities overgrown with noxious vegetation where people, of a kind, still live and battle for survival and supremacy among the brooding tree and undergrowth-choked urban canyons. A new lake has formed in what was once Washington State; new deserts have appeared; the Badlands are even worse.

Large areas of the country lie under an umbrella of dust and debris that clings to the atmosphere in strange forms: in some places as a boiling, red-scarred belt of cloud maybe a mile thick; in others as a dense blanket of toxic smog and floating nuclear junk. A coverlet of destruction mantling a land of doom.

Little wonder, then, that the entire continent, north to south, east to west, coast to coast, is known to those who inhabit it as Deathlands.

Three generations have now passed since the Nuke, time enough for bizarre, mutated life-forms to have developed, both human and animal. In some mutants the genetic codes have become completely scrambled, giving life to monstrous beings, men and women with hideous deformities; in others, the rearrangement has been far more subtle. Extrasensory perception and the weird ability to "see" the immediate future are two of the special talents typically possessed by certain mutants.

In all the coastal Baronies, mutants are feared and hated; in some they are hunted down and ruthlessly exterminated. Small groups of "muties" have fled up to the far northeast, to where old Maine bordered old New Brunswick. There are no customs houses now. Here, amid the cool, dark pine and larch woods, largely untouched by radiation showers, they have integrated with the Forest People, isolated and secretive folk who rarely travel.

Far more roam the Central Deathlands, where it's still pretty much a free-for-all society. There is no interest at all in what goes on in the rest of the world. Why should there be? Here is what matters. And now. A fight for survival in what is still a hostile and deadly environment, a grim world of danger and sudden death and teeming horrors from which there seems to be no escape.

And yet, and yet...

Strange stories have been handed down from one generation to the next. Wild hints circulate. It is said that the old-time scientists made certain discoveries back before the Nuke — bizarre and sensational discoveries that were never made public. It is rumored that there are awesome secrets still to be uncovered in the Deathlands, deep-level "Redoubts" stuffed with breathtaking scientific marvels, fabulous technological treasure troves. It is even whispered that there is an escape route: that somewhere, beyond the Deathlands, there lies a land of "lost happiness."

Absurd, of course. Irrational. A foolishly nostalgic dream conjured up to compensate for living a life of horror in a land of death.

Or is it...?