Two and a half kilometres away, Mrs Annie Watson, with Peter and Josh in the back of the Ford Focus, slammed on the brakes as the car in front came to a sudden stop, the driver blinded by the flash of the nuclear explosion. Looking over her shoulder to chastise the two children for fighting had saved her from being blinded herself, but not from careering into the back of the now stationary car in front — the car’s crumpled front, cracked windscreen and exploding airbags testament to the violence of the collision. Shocked, her body thrown forward into the tightened seat belt and air bags as a car hurtled into the rear of her car, her first thoughts were for Josh and Peter in the back. As she twisted round, free of the now deflating airbags, to check on their safety, their eyes wide open in panic, the shockwave struck. Sudden and violent, a hurricane force blast flipped the car over in front, its upside down chassis flying over the car as her Ford Focus was thrown up into its flight path, locking the bonnet with the upturned Vauxhall, a second, third and fourth vehicle piled into the coupled cars forming an entangled mass that was in turn engulfed by the collapsing buildings around them. Annie managed to reach out to her two children for a mere few seconds before the buckled roof, deformed by the weight of the cars on top, mixed in with chunks of masonry and other debris, pressed down, compressing their fragile bodies, literally squeezing the life out of them. All along the road, hundreds of cars had been similarly destroyed. A few of the many drivers and passengers, although trapped and badly injured, initially survived. But none would make it out alive. Not because of the second and third nuclear bombs that struck the city, or the fallout that would slowly irradiate them, but simply because there would be no one able to help or in a position to initiate a rescue. In fact, any rescue attempt anywhere in the city was unlikely to appear for weeks, if at all. The last of the Watson family, along with 400,000 others, had just ceased to exist. Of the remaining population of over two million that lived in the Birmingham, West Bromwich and Dudley area, three quarters of a million had received injuries ranging from crushing injuries, third-degree burns and high doses of radiation to minor injuries. Any injury was unlikely to receive treatment, unless administered by friends or family.
The nuclear ball of flame detonated a kilometre above northeast London, over a million degrees of heat at its centre, vaporised all it touched. Expanding out to a radius of one kilometre in the first second, reaching two kilometres in less than ten seconds, the now 6,000 degrees centigrade fireball ignited anything flammable in its path, consuming everything on route, eating into flesh and bone, hungrily engulfing all that lay before it in a deluge of hot, fiery gases, laying waste to all it touched. The searing heat stripped away clothing and flesh, leaving blackened, broken corpses.
Lawrence brought his hands up to his face, seeing and smelling the roasted skin as his fingers melded with the bubbling flesh on his face. But he felt no pain: there were no nerves alive to signal the agony that lay beneath the surface. However, as his clothing smouldered and his flesh melted, shock and then unconsciousness took over. A woman close by screamed again and again, barely audible above the noise of crashing buildings and the roaring rush of air as the raging fires in the centre of the city sucked in more and more oxygen. Her screams were not from pain. Like Lawrence, Meihui felt no pain. Her screams were brought on by the spectacle of her flesh melting before her eyes, before she too lapsed into silence as her body succumbed to shock, then oblivion. Neither would survive that day, but would be consumed by the ever-growing firestorm.
Further afield, running towards his home, overtaking other panicking pedestrians, Mike saw the route ahead of him light up as if he was under the beam of an extremely powerful searchlight. Resisting the temptation to slow down and look back, he pumped his arms up and down even harder, picking up speed, a sense of dread driving him forward, but to no avail. The hurricane-force wind, levelling buildings in its path, picked him up by his legs and carried him in its destructive grip, smashing his body into the side of a multi-storey car park, fracturing every bone in his body. Beneath him, another pedestrian was pinned to the concrete facing, his body peppered with shards of glass and debris. The man died almost instantly. Any person not under cover was thrown around like a rag doll. The tempest continued on, tearing asunder every building blocking its way, wreaking havoc.
Oliver Price was proud of his fallout shelter, following some of the advice and plans provided in every daily newspaper for a full week. The pamphlet he and his family had been provided with by the Government, Protect & Survive II, was a carbon copy, with a few minor amendments, of the older Cold War booklet issued in the sixties. When the peace talks over Ukraine had broken down, it had been hurriedly issued by the Government a mere two weeks before the bombs struck. It had been his bible. The closet under the stairs of his family’s four-bedroom detached house had been recommended as the ideal location for a shelter. Inner doors from two of the bedrooms had been placed up across the entrance of the small room, padded out with two single mattresses, and a wall of sandbags stacked up against those. Oliver Price had even sandbagged the treads and risers and placed props inside the closet to shore up the wooden stairs and the additional weight above their heads. He felt his family couldn’t have been more secure. The minute the sirens had wailed, he and his family, pre-warned by a BBC emergency broadcast, had fled to their temporary abode, tuning their battery-powered radio to the emergency station. They sat in their cramped space amongst their contingency food supplies, cans of beans, tins of chopped ham with pork, soup, sausages, peas, along with a bottle of their favourite Reggae Reggae sauce to give some added spice, and other items they considered essential to their survival should the unlikely nuclear event occur. Large plastic containers of water lined the walls. First-aid items, consisting of various medicines and bandages, and placed there by his wife should they be needed, were stowed on shelves. Oliver was confident they had enough provisions to last them for twenty-one days, the time recommended by the Government before you exposed yourselves to the contaminated outdoors. They laughed and joked in the dark, treating it as a game with their two teenage daughters, confident that no one would be insane enough to release nuclear weapons. Their older daughter, Alexandria, complained about not having a signal on her iPhone whilst Sophie tapped away on the family iPad, ready to test them all with a recent quiz game she had downloaded earlier. They saw nothing of the light that blinded many in the city, lasting only a few seconds but taking away the eyesight of many of the citizens caught out in the open.
The thermal pulse and blast wave quickly followed; first engulfing their detached home in a heat storm that defied anything they had ever seen or experienced before, smoke pooling under the ceiling as the door and window frames fed the flames. More was to come as the blast wave followed, shattering any remaining windows, pulverising walls, collapsing the roof, timber, masonry and tiles crushing down on the Price family’s meagre defences. Although the blast extinguished the fire, once it had passed, smouldering flames reignited and a firestorm raged through that part of the city. Heat, dust and radiation penetrated the partially breached shelter, the family coughing and spluttering as they fought for breath, looking up as the stairs creaked and trembled above their heads, debris from the upper floor and roof struts bearing down on it. But it mattered not. The firestorm that followed engulfed their house, and many other homes in the area, consuming the oxygen at a phenomenal rate, feeding the flames, raising the temperature and replacing the life-giving air with carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. Oliver, along with his wife and two teenage girls, gagged for breath. However, sucking in a vacuum, their eyes bulging in the dark, their hands clawing at the walls, scrabbling to get out of what was to become their tomb. They were slowly asphyxiated. But they were not on their own: tens of thousands had just been killed in the local area. Across the length and breadth of the country, 47 million people had either been killed outright, were in the process of dying, or would be dead before a month passed by. The majority of the remaining population, some 20 million people, had been, or would very soon be, exposed to radiation sickness, starvation and a future that could only be described as grim.