The army scout opened his eyes and looked around. He couldn’t see much from his prone position. His heart was pounding, forcing blood through his veins so hard he could hear the slush… slush… slush… sound throbbing through his head and neck. As he tried to move, he realized that he was lying on a slant, his head halfway down into the entrance of the underground way station.

Desperate for air, he gasped heavily, the hot, acrid air burning his throat and lungs as he inhaled. He coughed and the jerking motion made him realize that he was at least partially pinned down by something. Forcing his eyes open, he gazed up into the bloated afternoon sun, partially obscured by low flying clouds.

As he gazed upward, he began to remember what had happened. This collapsed structure he found himself in was the entrance to an underground way station ten miles outside of Nashville. He was on his way back to the capitol after a yearlong exploration of the northeastern states. He’d spent the day underground, protected by the gentle earth from the ravages of the cruel sun (not that he really needed it – when he was by himself, he traveled by day or by night as it suited him since he remained magically unaffected by the lethal radiation).

He remembered that it had been early in the evening. He was the last man climbing out of the dirt tunnel. His mind was filled with images of that dead world north of the Confederacy, of all those magnificent, ruined buildings and highways that would never be used by anyone ever again when the bomb went off, right over the center of the city.

Of course, it blinded him completely, and he staggered backwards and fell over something. Then a tremendous rush of searing hot plasma whooshed through, burning everything and collapsing the roof down on top of him.

The fact that the sun was shining now meant that it had been at least a day since that notable event – maybe several. But, once again, his unusual constitution had interfered to save him. He remembered his skin burning in the hot fiery wind, but it was healthy and tan now, and there was new stubble on his head where his hair had burnt off. That simple fact proved to him that the nuclear destruction of Nashville had been no dream.

He thought briefly of his mother, whom he’d not seen for a year or so. She had been living in Nashville, a consort to the President, Colonel Sattersby himself, so she was probably dead, along with the rest of them. He sighed with a deep sadness as he remembered her lessons on how to hide his unusual ability to heal quickly. Those lessons had stood him in good stead as an adult and a member of the Confederate Army, and now she was gone. He doubted that even she could survive being compressed into that crater that took up most of his view to the southwest despite her special healing abilities.

‘Go to the mountains,’ she’d told him when, at fourteen years of age, he’d been sent to military school with the other children his age. ‘If anything happens, go to the mountains in Colorado. You have friends there.’

There had been an image imprinted in his mind with those words. The image was bright in his mind even now. If there were any survivors in this mad world of death and destruction, they would be there.

He decided to travel by day despite the hot sun. In that manner, he could avoid any human survivors, as they would only appear at night to scavenge and hunt for sustenance. The sunlight played too harshly on their frail bodies for any of them to disturb his daylight travels.

It took almost four months to walk from Nashville to the mountains of Colorado. When the distant mountains became visible, radioactive craters that burned and sickened even his robust constitution seemed to completely surround the place where he knew he needed to go.

Circling around to the south, he discovered a freshwater sea that let him go around the radioactive areas, so he was able to swim along the poisonous landscape until it was behind him. Once on dry land again, he had to cross over the steep mountains, again discovering several nuke craters that he had to find a way around.

The obvious concentration of missile strikes told of a terrible war that had been fought here. Evidently others had known about this secret hideaway his mother had imprinted on his mind so many years ago, and had either tried to get in, or had attempted to destroy it completely.

At long last, he came to the entrance, or at least, within visual sighting of where it had once been. An intensely radioactive crater where he knew the entrance had been brought the finality of mankind’s destruction home to him.

He gave out a great cry, both physical and mental, desperately needing someone to answer him. For a brief instant, he was certain that he’d felt a response, a mental recognition of some sort. But it was just an echo of his grief bouncing off the mountain as did his voice.

Except for a few pathetic survivors hiding away underground, there was no one left anywhere. He could feel in his mind that no one lived inside that mountain. If anyone ever had, they were long gone by now, or they had died, there.

He watched the sun move down and cleave itself against the jagged edges of the land as it set behind the mountains. A deep purple cloud layer formed as the light disappeared, and swallowed up the few stars, the moon and the dancing lights of the aurora borealis as it swept from west to east.

He walked in the near darkness until he came to an abandoned house he had noticed earlier in the dead forest, and spent the night there, listening to the wind and a short rainstorm. There was the sound of crickets before the rain, but no coyotes or wolves.