Jesse slowly lifted her head over the window sill and stared across the ruined streets of Riverside and shook her head. There was no way she was going to make it back to the Shelter by sundown, it was too far and the hour too late. If she'd been listening to what everybody told her about watching the sun instead of trusting her watch she would have been okay. She certainly wouldn't have wandered as far as she had from the Shelter.
She took a moment and stared up at cloud filled sky and screamed at the as loud as she could cursing anything that could hear her. A lot of people had become religions as the Holocaust but not Jesse. Jesse had known as soon as the missiles were launched that God was dead. The major cities and military bases had been hit the worst but it turned out it was true what they said in movies or had said in the movies when they still existed. Between the USA and Russia there were enough nuclear bombs to destroy the world twice over. They did. Just in case anything had been missed though England, France, India, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea all pitched in.
In a single horrific day mankind had gone from a worldwide population of nearly eight billion people to a population of . . . nobody was really sure. The best guesses were around sixty million but there could easily have been more. The Americas hadn't heard much from the Old World since the event. There were no ships left, and nobody with the knowledge to build a wooden ship able to cross an ocean. Some people thought that you might be able to walk the Berring Straight again like the ancestors of the American Indian had done, just pass straight from Alaska to Russia on foot. Nobody wanted to test it though.
Southern California once known for it's balmy near perfect weather now averaged just over sixty degrees during the day and dropped below freezing most nights. Going to Alaska . . . well it was past Canada and everybody in Canada had moved south. The men joked that it was so cold in Canada that if you didn't piss into a fire the piss froze inside you and your dick would fall off.
That wasn't the reason that Jesse was screaming at the very tops of her lungs cursing God, Einstein and every motherfucking weapons maker going all the way back to the man who'd first discovered how to sharpen sticks. The real reason she was screaming were the mutates. Monstrous creatures that had been warped by the blasts. Two headed bobcats, wolves the size of horses and worst of all were the Green Jackets, huge insects that looked like wasps. They hunted at night preferring and laid their eggs in human hosts. Jesse was screaming because she knew her fate and there was nothing she could do to change it.
She finished the soul hollowing shriek and grounded herself. Jesse leaned down picking up a piece of rebar that had been sharpened to a point and started trotting in dying light. She felt a pang of hypocrisy holding the makeshift spear she'd cursed only a moment before but that was quickly quelled by her pragmatism. It was the only hope she'd have of making it to the Shelter which was about three miles away.
The Shelter was the only safe place within twenty or more miles. It had once been a prison and it was one of the only structures still standing, a benefit of being built of steel and concrete instead of wood and glass. The walls were thick and the windows were small and covered by iron bars not glass. Even the doors were made of six inches of solid steel, more than any of the mutates they had ever seen could get past. Jesse heard that there were some bears in the great north that could have done it. Supposedly they were now the size of elephants but Jesse believed, wanted to believe, those were just stories. Reality was terrifying enough.
She was less than halfway there when she heard the tell tale buzz that warned her the Green Jackets had taken flight. That was inspiration enough to push down the burning sensation in her limbs and lungs and keep going. Then they began chattering. Nobody was sure if they creatures could really talk to each other or if it was just sound but it was terrifying and Jesse knew they had spotted her.
