It was already mid-May, but outside a bitter cold persisted—the temperature hovered around minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit, and occasional gusts of wind burned our faces, forcing us to burrow deeper into our fur collars. According to an urgent order signed by President Dixon, I was to report immediately to the specified coordinates and bring with me the astronaut Zhang Wei—the very one who had miraculously survived on the orbital station and managed to return to Earth.
The day before, we had thoroughly checked all of the Atlas's flight systems. And when we emerged from the shelter the next morning, the world suddenly seemed brighter. The icy fog that had blanketed the summit of Clark Mountain just yesterday was gone. And the low clouds that had raced past the highest point now seemed frozen in place, forming bizarre, frozen waves.
"Could it be warming up?" Zhang wondered, thrusting his hands deeper into the pockets of his fur jacket and looking doubtfully at the gray sky. "Professor, take a look up there!"
I lifted my head and froze. The dense leaden clouds had torn open in several places, and through the gaps, as if from giant searchlights, streams of blinding sunlight poured down. Golden rays, breaking through months of gloom, fell upon the snow-covered rocks, and for an instant, they blazed with pure, untouched radiance, casting long, strange shadows.
"Like after a summer rainstorm," Zhang said admiringly, and for the first time in a long while, genuine joy sounded in his voice. "Get your camera, Professor! You can capture unique shots!"
"I think the surviving astrophysical observatories are already recording this phenomenon," I replied, not taking my eyes off the sky, but feeling a small, long-frozen corner of my soul thawing somewhere in my chest.
But the gaps quickly sealed. The edges of the tears glowed first orange, then a dark crimson, as if the sky's wounds were filling with blood. Within a minute or two, the clouds closed again, darkened, returning to their former leaden-gray, hopeless appearance.
"It looks like someone tore a blanket into shreds and then hastily sewed it back together," Zhang said wistfully. "Whatever you say, Professor, those rays of sunshine give hope. The slightest bit, but still."
Shrugging, I silently strode toward the Atlas, leaving behind that brief, deceptive flash of light. Hope was too expensive a commodity in our time.
Throughout the flight to Washington, I tried to imagine what this once majestic city of millions now looked like. Since the first nuclear bomb tests at the Nevada test site on January 27, 1951, the destructive consequences of this weapon had not yet been fully comprehended by humanity. Scientists, it's true, had warned: more people would die from the hunger and cold following a catastrophe than from the direct effects of radiation and the blasts themselves. But controlled tests were one thing; targeted strikes for the direct annihilation of all living things were quite another. They ignited a fire of unprecedented intensity! In cities, its intensity was many times greater than in forests. Metal burned, concrete burned—everything that could burn, burned.
Our country, in case of a large-scale crisis, had for years been creating colossal food reserves. For millions of fellow citizens, shelters had been designed and built—underground complexes, coverings, autonomous survival zones. On paper, everything looked impeccable.
I even recalled one of the civil defense drills that the government periodically conducted in the capital. Back then, it resembled more a carefully organized trip for a holiday picnic than a rehearsal for the end of the world. A leisurely, almost measured evacuation: long, bright columns of buses, private SUVs, and trucks draped with national flags, escorted by police cars. People smiled, chatted, took pictures with their phones, and shared the vivid snapshots on social media. The faces of the children were especially joyful—to them, it all seemed like an adventure, an unusual outing, something like playing war.
Those who didn't have access to state special shelters booked places in advance in commercial complexes built with "the latest technology." These structures resembled underground hotels more than anything else: shops, bars, swimming pools, recreation areas, artificial gardens. All of this had a very distant relation to a real shelter, aside from the fancy name and impressive promotional brochures.
Of course, real shelters did exist—functional, austere, designed for survival, not comfort. But a pass to a shelter alone was not enough. One also had to be able to reach it amidst universal panic, traffic jams at city exits, and accidents. For some reason, no one accounted for this.
All hopes rested on the early warning system. It was supposed to give people time. But even if those systems had worked perfectly, no one took into account a simple and frightening reality: what would happen when millions of people simultaneously rushed out of cities in their personal vehicles?
The chances of reaching the shelters in the short time remaining before the strike were nonexistent. In the traffic jams that would inevitably form, escaping not in minutes or even hours, but in weeks, would have been a miracle. The asphalt arteries of the cities would have choked instantly, turning into immobile cemeteries of metal and human victims.
Understanding this well, many ordered private shelters—small, with limited food supplies, air filters, and fuel reserves. They were built right in private gardens, in the yards of private houses, within the city limits. These people harbored no illusions—they knew that in a critical moment, one could only rely on what was nearby.
Those who lacked the means even for such a solution acted more simply and desperately. They converted the basements of their houses into mini-shelters, reinforcing their home's foundations and adding extra concrete decking, hoping to wait out the catastrophe there. They stockpiled fuel, candles, food, warm clothes, water—and each lived on hope alone. The hope that he would be the one lucky enough to survive.
Hope, which, as time showed, turned out to be the most unreliable of all resources.
When we took off from Clark Mountain, it was minus ten outside. When we reached our destination and the Atlas began its descent over Washington, the thermometer already showed minus thirty-five. Although the route was carefully calculated and stored in the autopilot's memory, I doubted its reliability for the first time when I looked out the porthole. Had we arrived at the right place?
There were no evergreen pines that once surrounded Andrews Air Force Base. No control tower, no massive reinforced hangars where aircraft were stored. And instead of the concrete slabs of the runway—only piles of rubble, fused into large monolithic chunks. No technical buildings, no airfield equipment. Only two F-22 fighters stood forlornly at a distance from each other. Their metal skin was deeply dented, the paint burned and hanging in shreds, exposing dark patches of corrosion.
We landed on what used to be the runway, and the freezing air immediately stole our breath, piercing our lungs with thousands of icy needles. Noticing a heated temporary shelter module with protruding satellite dish antennas in the northern part of the airfield, we headed there. We walked slowly, faces buried in raised collars, noses covered with our hands to avoid burning our airways.
But despite our warm jackets, by the time we reached it, we were completely frozen. Thick black smoke poured from an iron pipe on the module's roof, dissipating in the frosty haze and settling on the snow as fine soot particles. I pushed the door open. Inside, right on the floor, a fire blazed inside a metal barrel, rusted around the edges. A blackened kettle and a camp pot hung over the fire, something bubbling inside, spreading the smell of overcooked meat. Two guys in dirty military fur flight jackets, their faces smeared with soot like devils in hell, sat nearby on boxes of aircraft ammunition. They were using special knives with electric saws to cut chunks from fighter landing gear tires, tossing the heavy, jet-fuel-smelling fragments into the fire. The flames hissed, smoked, but gave off heat—the only thing that now had value.
Due to the acrid stench, I didn't immediately notice in the corner a powerful mobile aviation flight control center, housed in container modules. Before the catastrophe, such complexes were placed only at strategic sites—their hulls were armored, and their systems powered by a large-capacity autonomous power source.
"Could you tell us how to get to President Dixon's residence?" I asked, forgetting to greet them or even introduce myself.
"And who are you?" one of them grunted, not even glancing our way, continuing to furiously saw at the rubber.
"Professor Joel Ackerman. By personal summons of the President," my voice held weariness and, perhaps, excessive sharpness.
He finally looked up, squinted, sizing up me and Zhang, then briefly tossed to his partner:
"Tom, contact the government. Tell them there are some… professors here."
Tom reluctantly got up, went to the console, typed something on the keyboard, and returned a few minutes later:
"Let them fly straight there. They'll be met. What did they arrive on?"
Upon learning the Atlas model number, they just shrugged—the name meant nothing to them. But they advised entering the route into the autopilot: RR-Alpha "Raven Rock." I memorized it, and we went back out into the icy void where the Atlas stood, already covered with a thin crust of frost.
From Andrews Airfield to our destination, we flew at treetop level, barely skimming the tops of the snow-covered hills. As soon as we passed the identifiable ruins of the old beltway—of which only concrete rubble remained, discernible only by straight lines amidst the chaos of universal destruction—the landscape beyond completely lost all traces of former civilization.
The earth, scorched to sterility, shimmered with an ominous brick-red color. No foundations of skyscrapers were visible, no skeletons of huge factories—only homogeneous, undulating heaps of fused rubble, as if a giant bulldozer had swept across the entire state, scraping the remnants of human activity into formless piles. It was hard to imagine that once, under this silent, dead cover, the heart of the nation had beaten: endless streams of cars flowing along roads and highways, cities standing, millions of people living and working. Everything had vanished, been erased, transformed into a homogeneous mass indistinguishable from a lunar landscape.
The route led us to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Pennsylvania. I remembered these forested slopes from pre-war maps and tourist route brochures. Now they were bare and harsh as lunar craters, covered with a layer of ash and ice. And only one detail of the landscape indicated human presence here: on the slope of one of the mountains, now stripped of vegetation, gaped a giant, artificially reinforced opening—the main transport portal of Raven Rock.
Nearby, on a cleared plateau, were camouflaged hangars with military equipment—armored personnel carriers, trucks, fuel tankers—and several state-of-the-art anti-aircraft complexes, covered with frost but clearly ready for action: their radars slowly rotated, probing the sky for threats. Red lights on their turrets blinked in time with an invisible pulse.
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