End of Days

The nuking of Atlanta had transformed the politics as well as demographics of Georgia. Once the peach state became a member of the new Confederacy, the old South had become a nuclear power. Wielding the ballistic missile submarines that had been stationed at Kings Bay, the reborn Confederacy had held the remnants of the Federal government at bay. The detonations of a handful of nukes over Mexico City and a few other Latin American capitols had ended the war. Nuking the Panama canal had effectively ended the invasion.

Even California had reluctantly allied itself with the New Confederacy in return for technical support and petroleum from Alaska. However; California had joined the alliance only after the more conservative factions had won that state's civil war. It had been a close run thing. The nuking of the coastal cities including San Francisco and Los Angeles as well as Sacramento had dramatically altered the demographics of the state and hence the balance of political as well as military power. Surviving the aftermath had also been an intelligence test that had culled the population of the useless idiots who'd once dominated the state. While the aftermath hadn't been as bad as Lucifer's Hammer, it was estimated that fewer than one in twenty Californians had survived.

Unfortunately; most farmers hadn't stockpiled stabilized fuel as the Armadillos had. Of course unlike the Armadillos, most farmers hadn't preserved their four decade old antique tractors. George's lovingly restored, John Deere forty-thirty had become more his working machine. Most farmers had modern tractors that had diesel engines but with electronically controlled fuel injection. Most modern tractors also had power shift transmissions that were electronically controlled. The complex logistics web that had once supported the international supply chain was no more. Replacement computers remained mostly unavailable. With few functional tractors, most farmers wouldn't be planting much this spring or harvesting next fall. Most farmers wouldn't be growing much beyond feeding themselves, their extended families, and maybe their neighbors. The famine was going to get even worse next harvest rather than better.

The shortage of fuel wasn't the only problem contributing to the global famine. Most of the surviving fertilizer plants which depended upon natural gas as feedstock to fix Nitrogen were just shit out of luck. The chemical plants that had produced herbicides, pesticides and fungicides that had once boosted crop yields were also destroyed or off line for lack of feedstock. The magical agricultural technology that had once enabled the mass transformation of fossil fuels into an abundance of food that had once fed eight billion people was no more. While the Armadillos were still farming, their crop yields were only a fraction of what they'd once been. Much of their crop land had been repurposed to growing feedstock for biodiesel. Now people such as the Armadillos were essentially transforming crops that might have been other people's food into their fuel to maintain some level of mechanization.

The global famine had been exasperated by the disruption of international trade. Most industrialized countries such as Australia, Canada, and the United States had produced enormous surpluses of food. Most of Europe and Asia had been at least self sufficient. However; most of Africa, South America, central America and Mexico had been dependent on food imports. With minimal supplies of oil to fuel ships and no navies able and willing to suppress piracy, international trade had effectively ceased. Latin America and Africa had suddenly lost the ability to import food just as their domestic crop yields were plummeting. The idea of continuing to ship donated food to third world shit holes had become ludicrous. The vast majority of the people of Africa had died even though only Cairo and the Aswan dam had been nuked. Most of Latin America, including Mexico, had suffered a similar fate.

It was doubtful that even a couple of billion people had survived the aftermath. It was likely that the global population would continue to plummet. It wasn't that many centuries ago when the total population of the planet had been only a few hundred-million people. The human population was gradually reverting to the natural carrying capacity of the planet.

Any doubt that the Armadillos were blessed was dispelled as they passed some freshly plowed fields. In the second field, a group of people were struggling to get a premature head start for a spring planting. They had probably found the archaic, one bottom, horse drawn plow in an antique store or decorating someone's yard. They obviously hadn't been smart enough to polish the moldboard.

The team of a dozen, naked men and women who were hooked up to the plow looked like scarecrows. They were struggling to pull the plow through the half thawed soil. George noticed that while all of the draft animals were Caucasians, the warmly dressed, obviously armed driver and overseers who were whipping them so enthusiastically, were Black. The initials "BLM" emblazoned on the overseers' coats were an eloquent, concise explanation of the social dynamics.

The enthusiastic whippings suddenly ceased when the driver and overseers were dropped by a rapid succession of precise headshots. George might have chastised Leon who was sitting in the backseat right behind him. However; the semiautomatic, M1A rifle had been equipped with a suppressor. No one who wasn't nearby would notice much less recognize the noise. The obvious shame on the African American rifleman's face made any explanation for the break in discipline unnecessary.

Leon had become one of the Armadillos only because he'd been accompanying Deke and Deidra's boy home on a leave from the Marine Corps. The kid had joined the Corps to escape the gangs of Chicago. Thanks to the dismally low arrest rates achieved by the police, Leon had a minimal criminal record in spite of his many youthful indiscretions. The armed robberies and drive by shootings that he had committed would have been far more lethal if he had committed those crimes after he'd been trained by the Corps.

As the pickup passed the scarecrows, Leon tossed his pack full of meat jerky and cheese to the freed slaves. Hopefully; they wouldn't be to phobic of radioactive fallout to eat the cheese. With a half-life of only eight days, the concentration of radioactive Iodine-one-thirty-one had long ago decayed to nearly nothing.

Hours later after the sun had set, George downshifted again as he slowed to evade yet another cluster of stalled cars that had been abandoned on the highway. Fortunately; the second nuke attack against America with high altitude detonations that maximized the electromagnetic pulse effect had occurred during the middle of the night when traffic had been minimal. The highway wasn't a parking lot. He downshifted again just before cresting a hill. With the transfer case in low range, the pickup was at a slow crawl.

The city of Chicago slowly came into view. Even in the moonlight, it was obvious that the city looked as if it had been nuked even though it had been spared. Most of the high rise buildings were burned out husks anyway. Civil disorder had been just as destructive and deadly as a nuclear weapon might have been. Many of the skyscrapers had collapsed, just like the World Trade Center. Any imbecile who claims that fire can't melt or at least weaken steel has never worked in a foundry or a blacksmith's shop. The mostly peaceful pyromaniacs had been far more successful than they had hoped.

George was suddenly overwhelmed with guilt. He glanced at the two women who were squeezed in between him and Deke. They'd both been born and raised in Chicago. They were two of the very few refugees who'd escaped when the chronic rioting had so suddenly escalated into a genocidal civil war after the local gang bangers became vassals of the Haitian invaders. While Mary was obviously Black, Alice was half Caucasian. The Haitians had systematically exterminated mulattos as well as mestizos after they reconquered the Dominican Republic. They'd been just as vicious towards people of Chicago who were of mixed race as well as European or Asian ancestry.

Mary and Alice were their guides. In spite of the then on going divorce proceedings, Mary's estranged husband had died to evacuate his family. Now George was endangering them because he needed them to navigate Chicago. Their dark complexions just as the rifleman's might also enable them to defuse hostilities even though George and Deke as well as everyone else in the pickup were lily white.

The two women weren't helpless. Mary was holding the almost politically correct, Remington eight-seventy shotgun that her then estranged and now dead husband had given her. The seemingly old fashioned gun was somewhat slow to reload. However; when loaded with six rounds of double-ought buckshot in the tubular magazine plus one in the chamber, the pump action shotgun could put the ballistic equivalent of almost three, thirty round, standard capacity magazines for an AR-fifteen in the air without reloading.

Mary now held the shotgun with calm confidence rather than the nervous revulsion that had been so obvious when she'd first arrived at the Armadillos' redoubt. She'd became far more experienced with the weapon when the rampaging jihadists from Michigan and Wisconsin, intent on looting, pillaging and raping, had attacked the Armadillos. It had been a close run thing. While most of the Armadillo riflemen had been expert marksmen, the hoard of rampaging fanatics who survived the repeated fusillades had tenaciously advanced to within a hundred yards of the barricades. While a shotgun was far less precise than a rifle, Mary had been able to inflict multiple wounds on multiple rioters with every round. The psychological impact had more than compensated for the lack of precision and often delayed lethality.

Alice was even more comfortable and proficient with her AR-fifteen. Her father had often taken her to the shooting range and even junior matches before the estrangement. The propaganda not withstanding, the five-five-six by forty-five millimeter cartridge was renowned for its gentle recoil. Even a child could shoot the rifle. Alice had taken great pride in being able to shoot five round groups at a hundred yards that were so tight that the twenty-two caliber bullet holes often overlapped. The prepubescent lady had always worn pretty pink dresses to the gun range just to remind the boys that they were getting their asses kicked by an adorable little, African-American girl. In recent years she'd become expert at putting bullet holes in people rather than paper.

Surveying the ruins of downtown Chicago inspired George to check the reading on the radiation meter just to be certain. Perhaps Chicago had been nuked? The military grade instrument was far superior to an improvised radiation meter constructed from a tin can, tin foil and fishing line. The accuracy was superb. Radiation levels were acceptable.

America had been fortunate. The Russians had never launched the massive counterforce strike against America's land based missiles that everyone had expected. The surface detonations of thousands of half megaton nukes had never happened. The expected fallout that might have killed tens of millions of Americans, assuming that they hadn't been sheltered, had never happened. Radiation levels this far East from the cities on the West Coast that had been nuked had never been a serious health threat.

The seven-ten rule of radioactive decay had also been asserting itself. For every seven fold increase in time since America was nuked, the radiation levels had decreased by ninety percent. The radiation levels had decreased by a factor of ten during the first minute after the detonations. The radiation levels had dwindled by another ninety-nine percent during the next hour. Radiation from nuclear fallout had decreased just as dramatically since that day of detonations.

Unfortunately; there had been a sudden spike in radiation levels in recent weeks. The Professor, or perhaps the Wizard as many of the Armadillos referred to him, had analyzed the isotope ratios of certain elements. The detonations, probably with an aggregate yield of only hundreds of Megatons rather than thousands, had occurred only a few weeks earlier.

Somewhere in the world, someone had gotten themselves nuked. With no reliable intelligence, the list of suspects was long but not distinguished. Rampant nuclear proliferation had made reliance on deterrence even more problematic than it had been during the cold war.

Ukraine certainly couldn't be responsible, at least not directly. Putin had nuked them thoroughly in retaliation for the nuclear missiles that had been launched against Moscow and Saint Petersburg. However; Ukraine had covertly extracted vast quantities of Plutonium from the wreckage of the melted down reactor at Chernobyl. Some of the Plutonium had been sold to Poland and Germany and possibly certain billionaire oligarchs that had never been identified. Putin had nuked most of the major cities of Europe in retaliation for emulating Ukraine's attack on Russia.

Of course the most likely culprit was Russia. Russia had possessed the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet. Perhaps Russia had felt compelled to nuke Europe or China again?

The nuking of the Three Gorges Dam with only one missile had unleashed an epic flood. Many cities as well as over a hundred million people had been flushed out to sea. China's ability to rival Russia economically and militarily had been destroyed with only a single warhead! Russia's vast nuclear arsenal had effectively deterred China from promptly retaliating. Perhaps China had belatedly launched a retaliatory strike?

The list of likely suspects was extensive. The Ottoman Empire might have succeeded in fabricating nuclear weapons of their own after expending the weapons that they had confiscated from the American arsenal at Incirlik Airbase. The retaliation for being nuked by the Persian Empire had been perfectly understandable. It was also possible that Pakistan and India had gone nuclear yet again. One couldn't ignore the possibility that the Korean war had gone nuclear again either. Brazil and Argentina had been incipient nuclear powers before the war. Perhaps they'd gone nuclear on each other? It was also possible that one of the legacy nuclear powers had nuked Brazil and Argentina preemptively just as Australia had been nuked.

One couldn't rule out the possibility that an Israeli submarine had somehow survived these many months. Although Israel's nuclear forces had already retaliated for the Second Holocaust, six million Jews had been systematically and brutally murdered that Purim. A second, belated wave of retaliatory strikes would be understandable. Alternatively; Israeli forces might have belatedly retaliated for the nuking of New York that had killed most of the world's surviving Jews.

George hadn't been surprised by the Second Holocaust. George had joined his Israeli colleagues for the ceremonial, one day hike from the Mediterranean to pour a canteen full of ocean water into the Sea of Galilee. The military ritual had emphasized just how small and vulnerable the Jewish state had been even before the partition. The imposition of a two state solution replicating the nine-teen-forty-eight borders had trisected the already tiny Jewish state into miniscule, indefensible remnants. Combined with a prohibition on civilian gun ownership, the establishment of a Palestinian state had enabled the jihadists to overrun the Israelis in a single day. It had been even worse than the Rwandan genocide.

Fortunately; the radiation meter was indicating a dose rate of less than a millirem per hour. In recent hours, the dose rate had finally been decreasing. The dose rate was no worse than flying in a commercial airliner had once been. Mary had been a flight attendant before that day. She'd spent over a thousand hours a year flying at an altitude of six or seven miles where the atmosphere blocked far less radiation. Alice obviously wasn't a mutant.

George slowed the pickup to a stop so that a dozen scouts could dismount from the cargo bed. The scouts were all wearing improvised winter camouflage fashioned from bedsheets and pillow cases. No one had been oblivious to the historical irony. George thought, "Fuck 'em! They started it!" Then he glanced at Mary and Alice. Martin Luther King's dream had died during the months of civil strife before that day of detonations.

The scouts fanned out to cover their flanks as the convoy advanced to join the vanguard. Now that they had entered urban areas, the inherent dangers of keeping their forces divided seriously outweighed the benefit of the scouts masquerading as a pickup full of random refugees.

George was particularly grateful for the pair of Light Armored Vehicles that now followed close behind them. Although they were obsolete, the eight wheel drive armored vehicles had been welcome gifts from Marine Corps reservists who'd defected from their units. Aside from the thirty caliber machine guns and twenty-five millimeter automatic cannon in their turrets, they were transporting crews armed with Javelin antitank missiles.

The convoy crawled through the burnt out suburbs. The scouts provided extra security whenever George had to use the seriously beefed up bumper that was mounted on the front of the truck to push lessor vehicles out of their path. The LAVs provided welcome over watch as George paused to raise the extension from the grill guard so that the windshield was somewhat protected.

Unfortunately; the pause enabled people to really notice what they were seeing. More than a few men remained where they had been crucified or murdered in even more imaginative ways. Some were hanging upside down where they had been so obviously castrated. Many women remained tied down, bent over the hood of a defunct car where the rioters had taken turns with them. The tableau was reminiscent of a scene in the movie Stagecoach or when the Israelis were finally overrun and exterminated on Purim. The rioters had obviously been on drugs as well as motivated by racial hatred to so indiscriminately destroy as well as kill.

Minutes turned into hours before the convoy encountered serious resistance as they entered the Chicago city limits. What little resistance they encountered was futile. The Armadillos were hoping that starvation had severely attritted the Haitian and gang banger population. Even with attrition, they were going to be severely out numbered.

Fortunately; the surviving gang bangers still favored their Glocks, many with full auto switches and thirty-three round magazines, rather than rifles. The gang bangers, who were all wearing black clothing emblazoned with BLM, still hadn't learned how to shoot. The designated marksmen armed with bolt action hunting rifles who were stationed at the front corners of the dump truck beds usually neutralized the gangbangers from ranges of hundreds of yards away. The gang bangers were seldom able to finish emptying a magazine to no avail. Follow up shots to the head ensured that they were dead. The gang bangers who were armed with AR-15s fared no better. The imbeciles were firing from the hip rather than putting the stock to their shoulders and using the front sight, spraying and praying until they died.

Many of the gang bangers were smart enough to try to fight from fortified apartment buildings. While Grandpa Zurcher was technically the commander of the Armadillos, he valued George's military experience. George had everyone dismount to provide covering fire. However; he wasn't stupid enough to deploy his forces to clear the buildings. Defecting reservists had gifted the Armadillos with several sixty millimeter mortars and a few one-hundred-and-twenty millimeter mortars with ample ammunition. George preferred to expend ammo rather than people.