About four miles away from the blast site, Claudia Alvaros was finishing her shift as a nurse in the oncology ward of New York Presbyterian Hospital in Queens. She walked to her favorite diner, ready to eat some “breakfast for dinner” and unwind with a Sukoku puzzle before heading home to her cats. Claudia knew a thing or two about the direct effects of cancer; five years ago she had lost her daughter, Diana, to an aggressive brain tumor. The pain of the grief had been too much for her and her husband to bear, and the couple had separated. Unwilling to allow this loss to create bitterness in her life, Claudia had instead used it to fuel her change of direction in her nursing career. Before her daughter’s illness, Claudia had been a school nurse, enjoying a more relaxed schedule and weekends off. After Diana’s death, Claudia did whatever she needed to do in order to transition to the oncology ward; she had to pay her dues at the night shift on the Medical-Surgical wing, but she had finally made it. Now she spent every day helping families like hers to make it through a traumatic experience.
Every day was so rewarding, and also so painful. She couldn’t help but see her daughter in the face of every patient that she worked with. However, every time a family member hugged her and said, “Thank you,” with that deep gratitude that came from having someone compassionate walk alongside them in their tragedy, Claudia found the strength to keep on going. This was one of those days. As her omelet arrived, Claudia bowed her head and gave thanks to God for helping her to be a light to the patients she worked with.
With her eyes still shut, she was aware that there was a bright flash of some kind. As she opened her eyes, she looked out the window and saw several people behaving very strangely, almost drunk. They were holding their heads or eyes and stumbling. A loud sound, almost like rolling thunder, filled the room. Before she could process this odd behavior or the strange noise, several cars crashed into each other. She leapt up from her table to go see if anyone was hurt. As she ran outside, she suddenly saw the mushroom cloud in the distance, and understood immediately what was going to happen to her and the people around her. While she did not know everything about how atomic bombs and nuclear fallout worked, she did know a thing or two about radiation… and she was pretty sure she received a fatal dose.
In that moment, she made the decision to simply help as many people as she could on her way out. She assessed the wounds of the car accident victims; one man’s air bag had not activated and he had a horrible gash on his forehead. Head wounds are notorious for bleeding heavily. She grabbed the guy’s scarf and quickly applied pressure to stop the bleeding. No need to worry about blood borne pathogen exposure today; she would be dead before it could possibly matter.
She talked to pedestrians nearby, calmly saying, “I’m a nurse. I can help.”
Claudia enlisted the help of several passersby to assist her in bringing the injured back to the hospital. The process was slow, as they kept stopping to help those who were most in need. One of the men who was with her was in his upper 60s, old enough to remember the 9/11 attacks. He was calm and helpful, but he seemed very far away; the memories were clearly affecting him, but he was also determined to help his fellow New Yorkers.
When they finally arrived, the ER was already crowded with people, some had injuries from falling debris, several had been in motor vehicle accidents, and a few poor souls were already demonstrating signs and symptoms of radiation poisoning. They were vomiting intractably, disoriented and somewhat delusional; one woman reached up and touched her head, and a handful of hair fell out.
Given the situation, “business as normal” was cancelled at the hospital. All non-life saving activities were cancelled. Surgeons that were scheduled for tonsillectomies were suddenly treating open fractures. Patients that were stable were enlisted to help. There wasn’t anyone who was concerned about possible lawsuits or malpractice; it didn’t matter who was licensed to do what, everyone just pitched in and did whatever they were physically able to do to help one another.
Claudia hadn’t started to have the nausea and vomiting yet; she calculated out in her head that she could potentially live a week or more, given the length of time it was taking for symptoms of radiation sickness to appear. She shrugged off her tiredness, and selflessly began working to triage and to provide comfort wherever she could.
As the 50 kiloton nuclear explosion began to expand into lower Manhattan and Jersey City, it rapidly began to gain in speed, with temperatures quickly rising to 20 million degrees Fahrenheit. Everything within a 2.5 kilometer radius — sky scrapers, buildings, trees, cars, people, everything — was completely vaporized. In an instant, nearly one million people were killed. Four million more received fatal doses of radiation, suffering with agonizing third and fourth degree burns. As the several hundred mile an hour winds swept through the city and surrounding suburbs, it blew out windows, pushed cars into each other and threw tens of thousands of citizens on the streets of New York to the ground and into buildings like ragdolls. The impact bent dozens of sky scrapers in the neighboring boroughs beyond their tolerance levels, causing dozens of them to rip right off of the lower part of the structure and fall into neighboring buildings and then crashing to the streets below.
The initial blast wave dissipated, but the eerie silence that followed was not to last long. There was an immediate reversal as oxygen was sucked back into the blast cloud, and the surrounding firestorms began. The blaze from the blast created thousands of secondary explosions; a multitude of taxis, delivery trucks, and other vehicles (that moments before had been traveling the bustling streets of New York), began to burst into flames. Gas and water mains started to explode, further adding to the chaos and destruction. In minutes, most of Brooklyn, Jersey City and all of Manhattan became a massive cauldron of flames and death. People were being asphyxiated from the lack of oxygen as it was sucked into the firestorm… it continued to grow and consume everything in its path.
Battery Park, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty were obliterated in the blast, destroying one of the most recognizable symbols of America. As the remnants of Lady Liberty fell into New York Harbor as unrecognizable hunks of melted copper, any restraint President Stein may have felt in his response was destroyed as well. More Americans had died in this single act of aggression than at any other time in American history. The Islamic Republic was showing no restraint in their war against Israel and the US, so it was not just time for the muzzle to come off of the American military, but the leash as well.
The Country Responds
The President was sitting in his overstuffed leather rocking chair drinking a cup of tea, trying to relax for a short while and take his mind off of the war and all the responsibilities of running the country. He was watching a movie on his tablet, trying to rest and decompress for a couple of hours. The twenty hour days and the pressures of the war were starting to take a toll on his body; he felt every bit his 55 years of age, and then some. The last time his wife saw him, she had a concerned tone in her voice as she cautiously commented, “Honey, you look like you’ve aged ten years in the past three weeks.”
The President’s head slowly drifted down to rest on his left shoulder, and he slipped into a dreamless sleep. Twenty minutes had gone by when Michael Montgomery, the President’s Chief of Staff, and a few other key advisors burst into the office, startling the President. He quickly glared at the intruders.