The unthinkable happened five years ago and now two writers have set out to find what's left of America.New York, Washington D.C., San Antonio, and parts of the Central and Western states are gone, and famine, epidemics, border wars and radiation diseases have devastated the countryside in between.It was a "limited" nuclear war, just a 36-minute exchange of missiles that abruptly ended when the superpowers' communication systems broke down. But Warday destroyed much of civilization.Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka, old friends and writers, take a dangerous odyssey across the former United States, sometimes hopeful that a new, peaceful world can be built over the old, sometimes despairing over the immense losses and embittered people they meet.In an eerie blend of fact and imagination, Strieber (author of "The Wolfen" and "The Hunger") and Kunetka (author of "City of Fire: Los Alamos and The Atomic Age", "1943–1945" and "Oppenheimer: The Years of Risk") cut through the doublespeak of military bureaucracy and the rhetoric of the 1980's peace movement to portray America after Warday.Best viewed with CoolReader.
October 28, 1988. Warday.
It lasted only thirty-six minutes and when it was over, much of the earth remained untouched.
But in those thirty-six minutes, a world had been destroyed.
Seven million Americans died in the immediate blast. Millions more would die of radiation, famine, and disease during the next five years. Millions also lived, strung out across a country that knew it had been hit—but not why. Or where. Or how.
In the days and months that followed, an America blacked out by the breakdown of its communications systems and wrestling with the demands of an unprecedented emergency struggled first for survival.
Later it would seek answers—seek to find out how it had happened, who had survived, what was left.
Five years after Warday, the answers have yet to be found. America is still a strange place, filled with haunting relics of the past, constant reminders of what was lost. But survival is no longer in question. It is time to take stock.
And so, five years after the missiles detonated, two survivors set forth on a trek across America. Determined to find out what has happened to the rest of the country, theirs will be a journey of discovery filled with pain and hope.
From Texas to California, across the vast distances of the Great Plains, into the once-bold centers of commerce and power along the eastern coast, and through the small cities and rural hamlets of the South—amid pockets of resurgence and remnants of destruction, they will hear America speaking: remembering the past, willing the present, longing for a future.
A work of fiction that reads like fact,
The survivor’s tale is the essential document of our time. All of us have them; even babies have them. To be born now is no guarantee that you will not be touched by Warday. Indeed, birth makes it certain.
So we are all survivors, and those of us who actually lived through that day carry our histories with us, our stories of how we did it, of what particular luck or strength or cleverness saw us through.
We are not the people we were on that sharp October day in 1988. I see the change in my wife and son, certainly in my collaborator, Jim Kunetka. And in all whom I know. Sitting here with my pad and paper, I find that writing about it evokes obscure and powerful feelings. Am I bitter, or angry, or simply sad? So much of what I saw as basic to life is gone; what I counted valuable, worthless.
I have my own particular artifacts of that time, mostly small things and mostly relating to the security of my former life. I have been marked by the economic disaster as much as, or more than, by the radiation. In the final analysis, for so many of us, the closed bank and the worthless money are truer expressions of Warday than is some distant mushroom cloud. My last stock statement from Shearson/American Express, for example, is probably my most treasured talisman of the past. It reminds me of the fragility of complex things. Somehow, age has given it beauty. I can imagine that such a thing, covered with symbols and symbolic numbers, associated with a mythical time of plenty, could one day become an object of worship.
I open the document, smooth it out. My feelings about it are so strong that they are almost silly. I have sat staring for hours at the anachronistic names: Raytheon, General Foods, American Motors, Dow Chemical. I got eighteen gold dollars in the distribution of ’90. How ironic that nine hundred paper dollars will now buy a house. In 1987 you could spend more on a suit.
