Prologue
None of the survivors knew what triggered the 37-minute nuclear exchange that constituted the Third World War. For the scattered remains of human society that survived the cascading explosions from Chinese, American, Russian and Indian atomic weapons after June 7th, 2012 survivors were more concerned with the immediate threats to their own survival, not analyzing history and trying to apportion blame. With only rudimentary skills and tiny groups of healthy people, declining capabilities to support technologies and economies that provided food, warmth, housing and culture before the cataclysm meant that life gradually became more and more brutish. And in the days, months and years after the apocalyptic war, the future of the human race became a ferocious and savage struggle, marked with acts that in a more civilized age would have been marked as barbaric and criminal.
Chapter One:
Allie Cooke life took a tragic turn the moment when a Chinese ICBM slammed into the air force base outside her home town in rural Nebraska, not because she suffered horrific injuries but because unlike most of her family and her neighbours she survived the blast and the following months of radiation sickness. A college nursing student, she was drafted by the local emergency council that assumed all governmental responsibilities into the chaotic, collapsed medical system. Only 19 years old when the war devastated her country, Allie spent day after day consoling the dying, caring for the terminal radioactive-ill people, all the while grieving for her parents and her kid brother Billy. She knew there was no way they could have got away from the missile's blast zone; Offut AFB had been turned into a molten glass crater, and her family had their home only a couple of miles down range from the base. The only way to get through the numbing shock, the terror, the fear and the aching loneliness was to care for the yet living or the not yet dead.
As the summer of 2012 rapidly turned colder, thanks to the climate changing effects of the worldwide nuclear war, Allie and other people still alive in Nebraska found their lives harder yet again. First electrical power to the hospital she would spend hours each day at was cut after only a few weeks. The generators ran out of fuel, and couldn't keep up with the demand to warm the colder wards. Then, vitally important staff like Doctor Terry Johnson (the only surviving oncologist at Omaha Central) either died from radiation sickness itself, or like an older nurse Allie worked with, Mildred Pierce, collapsed through a nervous breakdown. The young Allie was burdened more and more not just with her personal losses, her increasing responsibilities and her deepening feelings of despair, she was almost overwhelmed by expectations from anyone who believed she could help them. When bandages ran out and the local government delegate refused to requisition more, it was Allie who had to beg him to bend his petty bureaucratic mind. As children and old age pensioners, jocks and invalids, mothers and father, men and women alike grew sick and died it was left to Allie and a slowly diminishing cadre of medical staff to try and keep people alive, healthy, functioning at some level.
By Christmas, probably the most heartbreaking day of Allie's young life, the weak and the sick were almost all gone. Wards and operating theatres that over 6 months had teemed to overflowing with the casualties of a war that had effectively destroyed the functioning USA emptied and grew silent. Omaha's population had declined to only 3% of its pre-war size, and Allie was one of only 3 nurses left on the hospital staff. She'd achieved at times near impossible levels of endurance. She'd suffered and hurt with every death till it numbed her as badly as the cold snows lashing the windows of her chilled room on the third floor. Her cheeks had gone sallow and her eyes dark and hooded. Life in a post-apocalyptic Nebraska was truly ugly and barren of any joy.
Chapter 2
New Years Day 2013 dawned on Omaha Central wanly and with a cruel bite of ice in the air. Allie Cooke was dressed in the same faded nurses uniform she had worn for since the earliest days of her drafting into medical duties, and though she hand washed it every few days streaks of faded blood and other human excrescences marked the uniform. It was 8am according to the old fashioned alarm clock she religiously wound every night, and the promise of a cup of coffee was the only meal she had to look forward to until at least dusk. Fresh food stores had run out long ago, and scavenging bands had stolen much of the tinned food hoarded by the hospital staff in the basement. Hunger gnawed in Allie's belly, but with a mental resolve worthy of someone with far more years and physical strength, she went on duty.
