Nuclear War
Walking through what had been a city up until mere hours ago, I looked through the faceplate of my suit and gazed upon the destruction, thinking of the immense energy the nuclear weapon must have had to release to sweep the city away. A few buildings remained in the far distance but so far nothing had showed up on our thermal sensors, which flickered and even broke occasionally, the radiation wreaking havoc on them.
The ground shuddered as a few of our drones flew over us, getting ready to bomb the next target, which lay ten miles ahead of us.
My detachment's job was to clear unexploded ordinance that the nuke hadn't blown up, and to deal with any survivors that we found. I gripped my Tesla rifle, uneasy at the thought of killing someone who hadn't done me any harm. But before I could think any further the ground rumbled again and an APC, stained with soot and ash, pulled up along side us.
"Anything yet?" Asked the driver, he looked ill at ease, soldiers like us couldn't remain on the front lines for too long before the bleak landscape and constant radiation started to get to us. As I watched, he gazed over the destruction and sighed, evidently saddened by the complete lack of life.
I shook my head and he allowed us to continue ahead, we were always at the front, making sure that everything was safe for the armor and the soldiers following that.
As we trudged along, through the ashes and the perpetual twilight caused by the debris thrown into the atmosphere by the countless nuclear weapons that we had detonated, a voice suddenly sounded in each of our earpieces. It was a friendly feminine voice, much like the one that would have guided people through the steps of withdrawing money from an ATM in the pre war years.
"Attention, a nuclear weapon is about to be detonated, please shut off all electronics, and wait until the weapon has been detonated. Thank you!" I quickly turned off my thermal seeker, earpiece, and Tesla Rifle, aware of everyone else doing the same. Engines from the APCs, tanks and trucks quickly shut off as well. If they were left on the electromagnetic pulse from the nuclear weapon being dropped ten miles ahead of us would short circuit them and hold up the column.
As everything went silent we looked ahead, to where the next bomb was being dropped.
There is no real way to describe the explosion of a nuclear weapon. In the early days of the war, when there was still sunlight, the smoke and ashes had appeared grey and brown, but now, more and more frequently the mushroom clouds were going up pitch black, with lightning lancing throughout the cloud as unstable atoms and molecules split and released little flashes of energy.
This was exactly what happened as the bomb went off ten miles ahead of us, blasting another patch of earth into oblivion. The cloud was huge, seeming to touch the very topmost part of the atmosphere as a hot wind that I could feel through my suit swept over us, knocking a few people over. I leaned against an APC, watching the little flashes emanate from inside the cloud. The sheer thrill of seeing a bomb go off never gets old, especially if you can appreciate the huge amount of destructive energy that it puts out, quite literally disintegrating entire cities full of anthros, although most of the anthros in question were now either dead or fleeing desperately to stay ahead of us.
The cloud stayed in the sky, blotting out even more light than usual as the radioactive particles rained down on us, bouncing off of our suits and filters. As I watched, ash started to fall as well, it was dark grey and fell slowly like snow, so as we walked even further into the city, drifts of the stuff began piling up. The thing about it though was that it didn't pack down at all. When an APC would run into a knee high drift of ash the ash wouldn't crush down like snow or dirt but instead would fly up, so whenever we took a step we would stir up even more of the stuff.
An APC driver switched on his headlights, it was getting darker, and I guessed that night was near. So I turned my own headlamp on, its beam piercing the constant flurry of ash thrown up by my footsteps. As more ash rained down from the nuclear cloud above our heads, there was a sudden blip on my thermal sensor. A few others had picked up the same signal and I signaled them to come to me.
"Come on, its coming from that depression over there." I said and we started off, running as stealthily as we could through the ash, which billowed up to give away our positions. I held my Tesla Rifle at the ready, prepared to give any attacker a jolt, which would at very least stop his heart if not burn him alive.
The blip remained still and as we neared the depression, I edged forwards, remaining low, preparing myself to kill whoever had somehow remained alive through the nuclear explosion. Taking a deep breath, I moved forwards another few inches, then rolled over the edge of the depression and pointed my Tesla Rifle at...
Two children. They were burned, but the hole behind them explained how they had survived. They had taken cover in a shelter and come out at probably the worst time possible. The radiation levels would still be astronomical, it had only been eight or nine hours since the city had been bombed and radiation needed at least two or three days to even begin to disperse. I turned and called the others down into the depression, which had undoubtedly been the basement of a house mere hours before. The children huddled in the ashes, clearly afraid of us.
"Come on, let's go, they're already half dead." Someone said, and I nodded, they were right, spending even only a few minutes in such a radiation heavy environment would be sufficient to give you radiation poisoning. And we were already short on supplies to cure that particular malady. So without waiting any further, we trooped out of the depression, the children's soft sobs accompanying us long after we had left sight of the place.
The cloud was beginning to dissipate, leaving the ash-choked sky slightly lighter but still plenty dark. As we rejoined the slow moving column, I looked around us for what seemed like the thousandth time, each time was the same, falling ash, and desolation, all framed in the odd half light that the nuclear debris allowed through. The ash was still falling, but not as thickly now, and I hoped that it would quit falling soon, I didn't like the stuff and could smell its burned odor through the filters of my suit.
As I walked along, I wiped a layer of ash off of the barrel of my Tesla Rifle, and hoped not to encounter any more survivors. I had only come into contact with a few. In the early days of the war we had rescued them, but now more increasingly we abandoned them, we didn't have enough radiation poisoning medicine and suits for even our own troops, they were expensive to make and broke constantly in the harsh conditions of the front. We couldn't afford to waste any on enemy civilians. I hadn't yet encountered an armed enemy and I constantly thought of how ironic it was that I was participating in the bloodiest war in anthro history yet hadn't fired a single shot in combat. I had shared this with others but they usually didn't listen, having actually fought against armed enemies before. Compared to the others in my platoon I was new, a few had fought in the deserts of Afghanistan, but more had fought in Pakistan and Korea, those were the last conventional wars, radiation free fights that hadn't lasted long before things started going downhill. I had joined in hope of going to Pakistan, but the war had ended while I was in training, and instead of fighting in fatigues, I was now fighting history's first nuclear war in a bulky nuclear suit, holding a prototype electrical gun that fired what looked like bolts of lightning.
Thinking about it, I felt as if it couldn't possibly be real. The world was enveloped in a nuclear smog, and I was on the front lines of that, helping make it all happen.
The buildings that had at least partially survived the blast were drawing near and I knew that once we reached them that's where we would probably stop and set up for the night, setting up Portable Radiation Shelters and the like, perhaps even a screen so that we could watch a movie. Things like that were supposed to keep morale up and although most of the movies they showed us were comedies all they made us do was long for home even more. If that home even existed still.
Thinking of that, I looked at the blurred forms of the distant buildings. They were little more than skeletons, only the titanium frames having survived the nuke. But despite that I was slightly gladdened by a glimpse of proper non-military civilization, no matter how abstract.
It took us a long time to reach the buildings, but once we did, the rear troops wasted no time in setting up a small city of Portable Radiation Shelters and as I had hoped earlier, a screen. We ate, relished our brief time without our suits, then put them back on and trooped out to the area where they had put up the screen.
They were showing Dr. Strangelove that evening.
How fitting, thought I, how fitting.