Alice is 48, Arty is 16. For Alice it’s a dream come true. She had scratched out a living as a professional petty larcenist, and she lived day to day and hand to mouth in bars and other places where men were friendly. There were plenty of them, just ask her – her stories reminded you of the Canterbury Tales – rough and vernacular, but with a lyric sweetness of a woman looking for love. Arty doesn’t know anything about anything, but he is instant in his response to her touch, and there is a grocery warehouse in the town that makes urgency to think about the morrow a lot less urgent.
Bob and Carol and Ted are in for nothing but trouble. Bob, in a fit of jealousy, shoots at Ted, misses, kills Carol. The end.
Robin and Marcia and the kids, Stacy and Mountbatten, survive. Mountbatten had just finished reading ‘Swiss Family Robinson’ as part of his early antiquities studies in school. Robin was an accountant, Marcia had been a securities dealer. Stacy had always been pretty insecure – her new braces didn’t help, and her hormones were kicking in, too. Much better than Chevy Chase’s ‘Family Vacation.’ In the end, it all works out OK.
Rest-In-Bliss Nursing Home was where you dumped off the old folks if you absolutely couldn’t find anywhere else. Elsie, 85, and Ed, 102, are last seen in their chairs, slumped over and dangling by their straps and wishing the worthless staff hadn’t run off. Too bad, Elsie and Ed.
Years of being environmentally aware and active campers, hikers and outdoors people had given Stephanie and Boyd all the experience they needed to survive in the wild. In fact, they were camping out in the wild of winter when the sky lit up and the earth rumbled. They knew what it was, and stayed put in relative safety until they ran out of food. While walking back towards town Boyd stepped on a metal walkway that had a fallen power line across it. The power was off everywhere except for the fuel cell powered uninterruptable power supplies that had become commonplace since the deregulation of the power business a hundred years ago. This one wasn’t connected to anything, just resting across the metal walkway. Boyd completed the circuit. Phffft!
Nikki and Tyrone were playing in a concrete culvert on the playground. The concussion knocked them unconscious but the concrete shielded them from the flash and initial radiation storm. They were lucky. Another survivor with a car saw them and carried them away before being overcome with radiation sickness. Tyrone’s granddaddy had had some shoeboxes full of antique video games and an old computer from the early days. When no one was looking he had glued himself to the screen and with joystick in hand tried to rid the world of all the evil people. Nikki, 8 and Tyrone, 7, now find themselves in a deep ravine and find food and shelter in an old Civil Defense station left over from the 50s. The video games did Tyrone no good – all the evil people were gone. Nikki and Tyrone learned what they had to learn.
“Okay, dude, let’s get out of here.” This was the big one. Survivalists Red and Buck had spent their lives planning for this eventuality. They jumped into their customized off-road vehicle, heavy with extra fuel, and charged out of the parking lot headlong into a van coming from the other direction, and together they vaporized into a fireball.
For days Tanya had wandered the streets. Dead people and parts of people were everywhere. Swollen bodies, rotting bodies, putrefying bodies at the bursting point, held together tightly by stretched jeans and t-shirts. Bodies whose clothing had been blown off by the blast. Young bodies, old bodies, bodies of children. Tanya could hardly breathe through the stench – ghastly, ghoulish, grisly, gruesome – she had run out of words to describe what lay before her eyes. She knew she wanted to get away from it all and had done everything she could to put some distance between where she had been and where she was headed. The further away from Washington she got, the better, she thought, and she headed for the hills west of the Capital.
SOUTHEAST NORTH CAROLINA COAST 