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Prologue

When the world ended on Thursday, October 17^th, everyone ran blind and screaming with panic that it had finally happened, that Armageddon had finally been visited upon the sons and daughters of man. The optimistic were shocked; the pessimistic vindicated. The religious said it was the time of the Rapture. So as they waited for Jesus to call them home, the rest of us concentrated on staying alive.

No easy thing with the fallout.

The marauding militias.

The roving gangs.

The National Guard and special police units whose job it was to put them both down. Martial Law was declared country-wide. People were gunned down in the streets. Raped. Murdered. Assaulted. It went on and on.

And if all of that wasn’t bad enough, by the end of the first week?seven days shy of Halloween?nuclear winter descended just as the theorists had always predicted. So much dust and debris had been tossed up into the atmosphere that the sun did not come out for almost a month. It was sheer blackness during that time and bitter subzero cold. And snow. It snowed for weeks on end.

In the Midwest, the survivors-hardy northern types-dealt with it the way they dealt with it every winter. They burned wood. They scavenged pellet stoves, kerosene heaters, anything to keep them warm.

Then the sun came out again.

Just a ghost of it for the first few weeks. But then as the debris rained back to earth, much of it charged with deadly fallout, the sun assumed its ordinary cycles and though it was still cold, it was much warmer than it had been. And at least it wasn’t pitch black twenty-four/seven.

Towards the end of December, a weird heat wave spread across the country and the snow melted and the rains came. Disease, which had been kept in check for the most part by the cold, went absolutely viral, raging in every population, creating pandemics and plagues and the already teetering civilian populations began to die off in numbers.

But some of us stayed alive.

And this is how we did it.

YOUNGSTOWN, OHIO

1

When I close my eyes, I can still smell Youngstown.

Isn’t that funny? I grew up there, played high school football there-go Blue Devils-and worked there, got married there…but now after all that, I can only remember the stink.

That invasive smell of rot and refuse.

It crawled up your nose and down into your belly, so that even with your eyes closed you knew you were in the city-rotting garbage and burning wood, fuel oil and the unburied dead. I figured, back then, that I should’ve bottled it, kept it on a shelf somewhere so that if the world ever started turning again, then I could pop the cork anytime I was feeling low and take a whiff. Then I could say to myself, yeah, maybe your life sucks, but it don’t smell like Youngstown.