Blood & Brilliance

Chapter 1—The Dark Dawn

They didn’t just stay alive, they stayed worthy of being alive.
They made a world worth living in.

It’s June 15th, 2145. It’s a grim, dark dawn. I can’t see far. It’s not fog; it’s ashy dust moving silently, floating as if afraid of the ground. There’s no sound because the ashy dust absorbs it all.

I heard the deep sound of explosions in Spokane, 200 miles away, but the mountains are between us. The Black Panther robots heard the deep undertones too, and felt the rumbles in the ground here near the foothills of the northern Rockies near what we used to call Glacier National Park. Our Belgian Malinois’ felt the mild ground rumbles, and it made them jumpy.

We used to call it Glacier Village. It was the legal name, but no legal entities remain, so no more Glacier or any national parks. There are glaciers, and they’ll probably grow during the nuclear winters ahead. Our enclave needs a new name for a new time. I’m not calling it Glacier Village anymore. I’m calling it Wild Village. It’s wild now. As am I.

I estimate the ash will get worse and linger because we’re in the rain shadow of the mountains. Rain would clear the air of ash, but now, the ash won’t clear easily because the rainy spring is over. Summer is a time of late afternoon downpours, short, often heavy, once or twice a week, if that.

We’re not in an ash shadow; the ash will stay in the air until clear air from over the northern Pacific Ocean moves eastward, and a Chinook picks up speed and freshens our air. In the past, we’d know if it was raining on the west side of the mountains, but we don’t know any of that anymore because the internet is down, gone, kaput, as my Swiss twin Q would say. We can’t connect with our satellites because of the thick, ashy dust that extends into the stratosphere, blocking solar radiation from warming the Earth.

My people don’t know how long it’ll be before they’re able to go outside or let the animals out to graze. They’re still asleep, I haven’t told them. But it depends on the radiation and the inches of dust that’s settled, rained on, or is blown away by the Chinooks—the Foehn winds of the Rockies. Now I’m concerned about my Swiss twin, Q. We can’t sync up. We can’t do our twin talk, as Marguerite used to call it.

Soon, the entire enclave will know that nuclear winter has started. The temperatures will get lower every day during the next month. The ground has warmth, but without solar radiation from above, the air will take heat from the ground, and the ground will cool slowly. The temperature drops are likely limited to 40°F, assuming the ash is still lingering. If the seasonal winter temperature ranges from 16°F to -30°F, it could be -6°F to -54°F due to the impacts of nuclear winter. But I don’t know. And I don’t trust any analytical data I might have because reality is different. I’m in wait-and-see mode. What use are predictions now? We all know it’ll get colder. That’s why we call it nuclear winter. Wildlife will dwindle, painfully. Death by starvation is brutal. So what if it’s -40 or -50? For me, it’s the unbearable knowledge I know, but can’t say, because it means nothing.