Warday Read online

  Warday

  Whitley Streiber

  James W. Kunetka

  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.

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  Whitley Strieber and James W. Kunetka

  WARDAY

  and the Journey Onward

  This book is respectfully dedicated to

  October 27, 1988,

  the last full day of the old world.

  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.

  Warday: It takes you into a world you couldn’t imagine.

  A work of fiction that reads like fact, Warday is the result of a skillful blending of the talents of Whitley Strieber (author of The Wolfen and The Hunger) and James W. Kunetka (author of City of Fire: Los Alamos and the Atomic Age, 1943–1945 and Oppenheimer: The Years of Risk). Texans by birth, best friends since childhood, and well-versed in the scientific and technological data underpinning the novel, they unite in one voice to depict an America in the aftermath of nuclear war. Though Warday is set in 1993, nothing in it is beyond the possible, technologically or politically. This is what gives the novel its terrifying truth.

  Introduction

  However and wherever we are

  We must live as if one never dies.

  —Nazim Hikmet, “On Living”

  WHITLEY

  A Survivor’s Tale

  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.

  More even than to this paper, though, I cling to the memories of my family. These five years later I still find myself waiting for the phone to ring, expecting my younger brother, Richard, to be on the other end of the line. Richard, the determined, tiny rival, the childhood enemy who became as an adult my best friend, who understood me and whom I understood. Whom I loved. We talked every afternoon, no matter where we were in the world. So now, each day at four, I remember. That is my monument to him.

  New York was my home in the eighties, and I was there on Warday. We remained there through the dangerous twilight that followed. In fact, the only reason I am alive now is that we stayed as long as we did.

  I saw New York in her gaudy evening, and I saw her dead, and so—a little bit—I comprehend. My difficulty is with my childhood home, San Antonio. How a whole place, all of its people, all the details of its life, could just disappear is beyond my understanding.

  Nobody would have put San Antonio on a list of prime targets—nobody except the Russians.

  They thought not of the quiet streets or of the fun we had, but of the repair and refitting facilities at Kelly Air Force Base and of the burn center at Brooke General Hospital, and of the massive concentration of spare parts and equipment in the area. But they did not think of kids running through sprinklers, or of the River Walk or the genteel silence of the McNay Art Institute, or of the enormous, vital, striving Chicano population.

  My family had a history in San Antonio. I was deeply connected to the place; in so many ways, my identity flowed from it. Though I lived in New York, I kept a membership in the San Antonio Writers’ Guild. When I was there I used to walk by the river for hours, and then eat Mexican food at Casa Rio. At age ten, I would sit in my father’s office in the Alamo National Bank Building and look out over the flat, smiling land and dream boy’s dreams, of having wings, or of riding shotgun on the stagecoach to Dallas.

  How can it be that the place where I was formed is gone? The Alamo National Bank Building was a tremendous skyscraper,
or so I remember it. Did it fall over at the end, crashing into Commerce Street, or did it simply disintegrate?

  My brother had just opened his own law office there, on the eighteenth floor. Did he feel anything? Say anything? I visualize him on the phone, hearing a noise, glancing up, then gone. Or was it horrible and slow? Death by fire in an elevator? Or by suffocation in some sub-basement parking garage?

  And my mother. Looking back to the placid life we knew, it seems so impossible that her fate was to be killed in a war. She was seventy-one years old, and for her the end was almost certainly instantaneous. She lived in an apartment house two stories high, of rather light construction. She was either there or at a neighbor’s house at the moment of death. Whichever was the case, there wouldn’t have been the least protection.

  So many bombs exploding simultaneously over such a relatively small area caused the temperature to exceed that of the surface of the sun. People have told me that they heard the explosion in Oklahoma City and Monterrey, Mexico.

  We are the first generation to see places instantly vaporized.

  Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed, but not so completely as this. In a vaporized place, not even rubble remains.

  I understand so very well the thing that impels refugees to cluster at the borders of the San Antonio Red Zone. I myself have thought of going back. And yet the blackened land must be terrible to see, and the smell of it, the stench of millions of tons of rotting ash, almost beyond enduring.

  I have thought of memorials. Many times I have copied out the forty-seven names of the members of my family who died in San Antonio. And I have wondered—are they all really dead? Ours was a prosperous clan. Maybe some of them were traveling. One aunt and uncle, for example, often went to Europe in the fall. Are they there now, perhaps engaged in a new life? They had investments in Germany; they could have got a refugee visa if they had applied for it early enough. But the rest—I have a feeling about them that is common to those who lost people close to them on Warday. They disappeared so suddenly and so completely that they don’t seem dead so much as lost. My relationships with them continue as if they will sometime soon come back and take up the thread.

  We’ve all read and heard about the details of blast effect. But there is one detail that is usually overlooked: the heart does not understand this sort of death, neither the suddenness nor the scale.

  Blast effect has trapped me in a maze of expectancy from which I cannot seem to escape.

  I know a little bit more about blast effect. I was riding a Number 5 bus down Fifth Avenue when the New York Pattern detonated. Of course, I have thought many times about the consequences of the miss. I have wondered what subtle imbalance of technology caused it. And I have thought: a nuclear miss doesn’t mean much.

  The city died of it anyway.

  The bomb that would have exploded about eight thousand feet directly over my head detonated instead on the eastern edge of Queens.

  As I sit here, my yellow pad in front of me, I find that my mind shifts focus from the broad to the tiny: the shin splints I had that day from too much jogging; the breakfast cereal I had eaten.

  October 28, 1988.

  I was trying to remember to call my sister in Houston, to congratulate her on becoming forty-four years of age.

  But Pandora’s Box was sprung, and nobody was going to be making any phone calls for a while.

  October 28, 1988: a clear blue afternoon, just pushing toward five o’clock. While I read the New York Post and sucked a Velamint, the world cracked asunder. I was sitting in the bus, just behind the rear exit door. I remember that it was one of the GM buses, with the darkly tinted windows. All of a sudden it was lit up inside with a chalky brilliance, a strange and unpleasantly hot light that penetrated everything.

  Sudden darkness followed—due to our eyes, of course, being stunned by the intensity of the flash. The driver shouted, “Jesus Christ!” and stopped the bus. I just sat there. We all did. We couldn’t see a thing. I heard a horn honking.

  Then the blast hit. There was no warning, just a sudden cataract of sound and wind. The bus rocked violently. There were deep thuds and shattering noises as pieces of roofing and glass came down. The noise rose and rose until I thought it would never stop.

  People were trying to get out of the bus. I crouched down on the floor. My heart was pounding; I was gasping. I had my eyes shut tight. At that moment I was thinking in terms of a terrorist attack or maybe of the Con Ed plant in the East Thirties blowing up. The thought of a nuclear bomb didn’t occur to me until the noise subsided and my eyesight got back to normal. Then I looked out.

  The chaos was so great that my mind simply went blank. I was vision only. The images swept all thought away. Windows were broken, cars were up on the sidewalk, and people were running, staggering, lying in the street. A dark yellow haze of dust cast everything in eerie light.

  My first clear thought was of my family. My son was in the third grade at Grace Church School and taking an after-school gymnastics class. As far as I knew, my wife was at home. I thought I’d better call her and tell her that there had been some kind of an explosion but I was all right and not to worry. By this time the driver had gotten the doors open. He was trying to restart the bus and not getting anywhere at all. Of course, we didn’t know a single thing about electromagnetic pulse back then. He had no idea that the bus’s electronic ignition had been destroyed.

  Because the bus was broken down, the driver gave us all transfers, and we filed off. A few people went to the Twentieth Street bus stop to wait for another bus. The wind was gone, its roar replaced by the sound of glass still raining down from above, the screams of the injured and the terrified, and a complex mix of car horns, sirens, the hissing of a broken fireplug, and the blue-streak cursing of a hot dog vendor whose cart had exploded.

  Suddenly all I could think about was my boy. I started off down Fifth Avenue at a trot. It wasn’t long before I was turning east on Fourteenth. I knew by then that things were terribly wrong. People were lying everywhere, in every condition. Lots of them were bloody from flying glass, many more livid with flash burns. I did not know it, but I was bleeding too, the blood running down my neck and soaking my shirt like sweat. I’d had a slice taken out of my scalp that I wouldn’t feel until much later.

  I saw gangs of kids coming out of the Fourteenth Street stores with everything you could name in their hands: radios, records, clothes, candy bars. They were laughing and shrieking. I saw one of them get blown almost in half by a storekeeper with a shotgun.

  My mind was still far from clear. I just couldn’t seem to grasp what had happened. There was no reason to think that there had been a nuclear attack, though I kept considering and then rejecting that thought. U.S.-Soviet tensions weren’t high. There’d been no sign of impending conflict, none at all. In fact, the news was full of the reestablishment of detente.

  It was the sky over Queens and Brooklyn that enforced the notion of a nuclear bomb. Through the dusty air I could see ash-black clouds shot through with long red flames. These clouds were immense. They stretched up and up until they were lost in their own expanding billows. There was no impression of a mushroom cloud, but I knew that was what it was, a mushroom cloud seen so close that it didn’t look like a mushroom. The coldest, most awful dread I have ever known came upon me then.

  I knew it for certain: a nuclear device had been exploded at the eastern edge of the city. I thought, My God, the lives. Later it was estimated that a million people had died in the instant of the explosion. Hundreds of thousands more were dying right now.

  I was walking on a grate above the Fourteenth Street subway station when a blast of dank, dirty air from below practically blew me off my feet. It was accompanied by the most horrible screaming I have ever heard, then the nasty bellow of water. Though nobody knew it then, the tidal wave caused by the bombs that had detonated at sea had arrived and was filling the subway system.

  Those screams still come to me in the night.
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br />   A man came up out of the station, wet from head to foot, his right arm dangling. “Agua,” he kept saying, “agua!” Then he made a bleating noise and staggered off into the swaying crowds.

  My mind said: Grace Church School, Grace Church School, Grace Church School. I ran.

  My greatest fear was fire.

  I found the school closed and locked. There were lots of broken windows, but the lower floors were barred. I shouted and the Latin teacher opened the front door for me. Inside, the kids were sitting quietly in the great hall with their teachers.

  “What’s going on?” Mr. Lewis asked me.

  “I think we’ve been hit by an atomic bomb,” I replied.

  He nodded. “We all think that.”

  I went to my boy. He jumped up and flew into my arms, and then started screaming because he saw all the blood on my back.

  The school nurse came over to tend the wound. She said I needed at least five stitches. But what could we do? I ended up with a brushing of Betadine and a bandage.

  The phones weren’t working, so I couldn’t call Anne. It was then that I made the decision that saved my life.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but like all people caught outside during the initial stages of the disaster, I had received a radiation dose. If I had gone out even another fifteen minutes at the height of the fallout period, I would have quickly dosed red and then lethaled. What kept me from doing so was my belief that my wife’s instinct would also be to come to the school and I was more likely to find her by waiting than by searching.

  Not ten minutes later she appeared. She was wearing my felt hat and carrying an umbrella. I will never forget how it felt to kiss her at that moment, to feel her in my arms. And then Andrew said, “Let’s have a family hug.” We held each other, and I told them both what I thought had happened.