Devil's Paradise

4: Merlin & Delilah: Survival

The hardest part at the beginning was just staying warm. The winter of 2029-2030 was already heading to be the coldest winter on record before 250 nukes went off around the world on New Year's Eve, followed by several thousand retaliatory bombs. Fort Detrick took an oblique hit which leveled half of Frederick, and burned much of the rest, although the Eton building was untouched. By the time New Year's Day was over, I figure everyone still left in the world was wondering when they would die, too. Sometimes I think the lucky ones got fried in the first attack.

From listening to his shortwave, Tony told me he thought the acting U.S. president, who had been the Secretary of Agriculture when the day started, had panicked, and ordered a full retaliatory strike in all directions. Everyone who had a missile aimed at them got one. Most of the rest of the U.S. got nuked in the responses to that idiocy. Everyone else with missiles launched them all. Nothing was left.

Then the nuclear winter set in. That January, we were scrounging for food in temperatures that sometimes reached seventy below zero. In Maryland.

Those who didn't die directly from missiles or radiation poisoning mostly froze to death in the nuclear winter. If they managed to stay warm enough, they usually starved to death, or died from disease.

Disease. It's such a simple term. You'd think, maybe, that if they had understood the horrific consequences they were preparing for the world, that they might not have been so eager to create artificial diseases.

But then again, the whole war was triple-distilled insanity. I've heard it said that one death is a tragedy, and a million deaths are a statistic. But how do you describe a billion deaths?

Stand on a beach and look at the tiny grains of sand at your feet. Then look about you. Every tiny grain as far as you can see, is a real human being with hopes and dreams and loves and hurts, and maybe even a wife and child. A real human, cut down by a disaster we made ourselves. One of those for every grain of sand as far as you can see.

I couldn't picture it. I still can't. For me, the tragedy was Alicia and Martin. The bigger loss to the world was too much for people to grasp, and so we didn't, in the day-to-day struggle to stay alive.

Eight and a half billion people. That was the world population on D-day, more or less. Two years later, there were maybe forty million, scattered across the entire planet. We lost ninety-nine and a half percent of humanity, and we were still dying. That's a higher percent than the last supervolcano killed, eighty thousand years ago. In terms of sheer numbers, we killed off more humans than had existed in the history of the world before the twentieth century.

Plagues were still sweeping the planet, and birth rates were down everywhere. Several particularly lethal diseases started in the Frederick area. No one knew for sure but most suspected the former presence of USAMRIID and Fort Detrick had something to do with it. Live biological agents meant that a small leak can create a very large problem.

There were no countries left, just independent towns, wherever people hung onto enough civilization to cooperate for survival. Once the weather warmed, there were bandit groups in every region, as people adapted to age-old methods of survival.

Frederick had done better than most, largely thanks to Tony. The old man was a retired Navy SEAL, and that backpack he always carried was his survival kit. He organized the community and showed us all how not to die from stupidity. Those smart enough to listen to him survived, mostly. A lot of those died anyway, from sheer bad luck.

More than that, Tony took me under his wing for some reason, put me up in his apartment, and taught me personally how to stay alive. When I was too much in despair to do things for myself, he grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and kept me alive anyway. I'm grateful, but it's hard to understand why he would do that when so many were dying around us, all the time.

One of our company bigshots, Delilah Witherstick, had also helped to save both the town of Frederick and me personally. She took Tony's expertise and leveraged it, expanding the organization to the rest of the city that hadn't been destroyed. Between the two of them, they got the whole area on track for survival.

I suppose there was one more person who helped, and that was me—Merlin, really, but he was my brainchild, so I got most of the credit, even though he did most of the work.

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