Washington just wasn’t what it had once been, Patrolman Keith Glass decided, as he ambled down one of the streets. In some ways, the city was safer than it had ever been, patrolled not only by the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia, but by countless neighbourhood watches, guardian angels and self-help protective associations. The streets might have been almost empty of traffic, but they were also empty of drug dealers, thieves and rapists. In theory, none of the associations had any law enforcement powers, although some of them had been deputised by the police, but in practice they tended to drive away undesirable people. The streets had never been safer and children, enjoying the quiet streets, played freely with their friends. As Glass passed a park, he waved cheerfully towards some of the other patrollers, receiving everything from a wave to a salute in return.
He checked his gun and other equipment out of habit as he turned down a new street. The people who’d lived in about half of the houses on this row had deserted the city and gone to live in the countryside, where they’d had relatives who farmed. Looters had tried to steal their worldly goods in the chaos following the invasion, but they’d been arrested and shipped to prison camps somewhere outside the city. There were high-priced lawyers arguing that the looters hadn’t received a fair trial, which was true enough, but Glass, who’d been there when they’d been arrested, wasn’t sympathetic. As far as he was concerned, if the looters spent the rest of their lives in a work camp, they deserved everything they got. They hadn’t needed the televisions, computers and jewels that they’d tried to steal, but had merely wanted to sell them on the black market. They were hardly starving misguided kids.
The noise of a passing car caught his attention and he smiled. The police were still allowed some of their patrol cars, but not many of them, while only the fire and ambulance services were allowed unlimited fuel. Civilians didn’t get any fuel unless they had a really pressing need, while the handful of Army vehicles in the centre of the city — he believed — got as much as they needed. Glass didn’t begrudge them that, even though he rather missed his own car; if the aliens landed in Washington, they were going to need all the fuel they could get. He looked upwards, into the clear sky, and shook his head. There hadn’t been any aircraft flying overhead since the invasion had begun. It reminded him, too much, of the days just after 9/11.
His radio bleeped once, a noise he hadn’t heard outside the drills; air raid alarm. A second later, the sirens that had been rigged up started to blare, warning that the city itself was under attack. Glass threw himself to the ground, remembering Rome and how the entire city had been destroyed, and crawled as fast as he could towards shelter. There was no bomb shelter, as far as he knew, in the area, but if he could just get some cover…
The shockwave blasted over his head. If he hadn’t been sheltered, it would have killed him, either directly or by picking him up and throwing him against a wall. The fury seemed endless, and, before he could even catch his breath, the firestorm roared past. He found himself praying, desperately, as the storm raged past him, his mind summoning up visions of radioactive poisoning and worse. It ended, suddenly, and a torrent of noise crashed into his mind. He could hear and smell burning…
He pulled himself to his feet, feeling his body tremble, and stopped dead. The entire street was devastated. Buildings had been shattered, windows had been smashed, cars had been thrown over and set on fire… the sight was impossible to grasp as anything, but a collection of separate images. Burning vehicles, smoke and flame rising from all over the city… and a towering mushroom cloud, billowing up in the air. The aliens had spared the White House in earlier attacks, for some reason, but now… now, unless he was wrong, the aliens had chosen it as ground zero. The damage was so absolute, the entire city reduced to rubble, that he couldn’t even see where to begin. As far as he could see, he was alone in the city, the only survivor of the blast. He checked his radio, hoping against hope that it would work, but it was dead. Either the EMP or the landing on the ground had knocked it out.
It was agony to move — he’d been wounded by the shockwave, although not badly — but he managed to walk down towards the end of the street. It was growing harder to breathe as smoke and flames built up, fires spreading rapidly from house to house, while there was nothing to stop them. He remembered vaguely that nuclear blasts sent out a wave of heat that set everything on fire, or thought he did; it was hard to think of anything practical in the midst of so much devastation. He might have been completely wrong; perhaps the nuke had simply triggered off horded fuel, or maybe…
The screams pulled him back to himself. They were coming from only a short distance away and he forced himself to run towards them. When he reached the house, he discovered a young black girl, her face brutally scared by… something. Blood ran down her cheeks, marring what remained of what had once been a fashionable outfit, while one eye looked to have been sealed shut. Glass was no stranger to violence on the Washington streets, but he’d never quite seen anything like it, not even in a horror movie. The movies couldn’t detail the sheer horror of a nuclear blast against unprepared civilians.
“It’s ok,” he lied, catching on to her hand and gently checking the remainder of her body. She was well beyond his ability to treat; he realised, numbly, that she needed a proper hospital. It crossed his mind that it would be kinder to snap her neck now, but he pushed that thought away with an angry curse. “I’m a policeman; I’ll get you out of here, somehow.”
“You can’t,” the girl said, and gasped into a fresh round of sobs. “There’s nowhere to go.”
It was deathly quiet in the bunker.
Paul had expected that the aliens would retaliate in some form for the human use of nukes. It was their only real choice. Israel was probably on the verge of using them themselves, while they were pushing up against the Pakistani border and disrupting Europe’s development by holding the Middle East. They had to make an object lesson and, after Rome, no one had doubted that they had the capability. It would have been almost impossible to prevent them from striking back… and the alien craft that had bombed Washington had done so almost without being detected. That should have been impossible…
“The National Guard and the militia have been deployed to seal the area,” General Hastings said, his voice grim and very controlled. “They should start bringing people out of the city soon enough…”
“But where are we going to put them?” The President asked, bitterly. It was yet another shock to his system, Paul knew, one that might prove fatal. He had never expected to have to cope with a war on such a scale… and he’d been the one who had authorised the use of American tactical nukes. “How are we even going to save all the injured?”
We can’t, Paul thought. It was easy to say that there were so many hospitals, doctors, nurses and trained first-aid volunteers within the blast zone, but that hardly meant that they could handle such a catastrophe. The medical personnel would have been hit by the nuke as well, so they might need medical attention themselves, while all the normal effects of a nuclear blast would be taking their toll. Fires would be spreading out of control, roads would be blocked and rendered impassable… and people would be fleeing in their thousands in hopes of avoiding radiation poisoning. So far, at least, it seemed that the alien nukes weren’t that radioactive, but anyone caught up in the blast needed medical attention, attention they weren’t going to get. Worse, if they got out of the city carrying radioactive dust in their clothing, they might spread it further into the refugee camps.