(Working Title)

Sample: Chapter 1 & Chapter 2

Chapter 1

Civilization ended sometime during the early part of the 2150th decade A.D. The world was still here, changed, but life as a whole carried on. However, most of the human population did not.

The Berlin Wall still stood in 2151 A.D., but the last historical record of it is a photograph and headline reading The Great Wall of the Eastern Bloc, and a map with a line indicating it spanned from the Baltic to the Adriatic. The Soviets celebrated their grand gesture as “protecting the Communist path from the Capitalist pigs.” The Wall now enclosed Czech, the eastern half of Austria, known now as Austerovenia, and Slovenia, into the Bloc.

No one really knows who launched the first of the world changing bombs. What is known is that only three successfully landed. Many were actually thwarted by counter measure, and somewhere around seventy were able to be launched before a complete breakdown in governments began. It only took two years for every national government to fall into a state of chaos, one year later less than an eighth of the world population remained. That number was still near one billion, but the heavily populated areas where the hardest hit.

People were cast to far reaches, and only those that invested in the Shelter Corporation, or had some other connection to the company, had a safe place to go to when the bombs started to fly. Cramped quarters, artificial light, barely recycled air and water, and at some of the shelters the food was a protein pudding that was stockpiled in freezers for decades. It wasn’t a safe place to remain for the years that the scientists estimated before the surface would be safe again.

The surface wouldn’t be safe again, but the history books tell us that it never was.

 

✦✦✦

 

The three spots hit were the main population centers of the three most advanced countries of the time. Our geologists and historians have been able to piece together the events leading up to and the resulting effects of mass societal breakdown.

One of the bombs landed somewhere between New York city and Washington, D.C. in the United States Commonwealth of North America. This was enough to dismantle any semblance of government in the commonwealth as panic and radiation spread across the mainland of North America, and dropped most of New Jersey into the Atlantic. The only report to make it out of the D.C. area was by a man so badly burnt by the radiation that when he did make it to a hospital they just pumped him full of morphine until he died, his last words were “I ran.” The medical professionals wrote this down, but just remarked it as the man being delirious.

A second bomb struck close to Moscow in the United Soviet States of Major Euro-Asia. Satellite footage shows the bomb being knocked off course by a flock of seagulls, when one of them dented the panel that housed the control module. Not much else was known about the second bomb. However, we did know that all signs of life in Moscow and St. Petersburg was completely wiped out within 3 months of the detonation.

The third bomb to strike dirt landed squarely in a small park in the middle of Beijing, currently the capital of the Sino-Asian Incorporation; a collection of 24 South Asian countries including China, India and a large chunk of Australia that was claimed before the U.S. intervened. Beijing was completely leveled, it’s believed by a U.S. bomb, but it’s known that a Soviet bomb was detonated directly over Beijing only minutes before the direct hit landed. This, of course, prepped the area for the greatest amount of destruction by a single bomb.

In what was left of these large countries it was thought that they could be revived, like a big, nation sized heart transplant. The only problem faced was that every available city center that remained thought they were going to be the prime location to restart the government, but each one was wrong.