noise, like vast sheets of paper being shredded. Slowly, my father loosened his grip on us and we rose slowly and shakily. Everyone was just standing there with this blank look of shock. They were all staring in the same direction.
Rising up over the distant city like some terrible demon was an immense column of red and orange and black smoke, billowing up over the entire landscape. The entire horizon was a line of glowing red.
Everything was on fire.
No one said anything at all. I wished they would, I wanted someone to say something, anything. But no one did. They simply stood by and watched as the smoke demon gorged itself on the last remnants of our home, and the horizon writhed in agony.
Everywhere I looked there was debris. A line of heavy army trucks parked in a line had all been overturned. One was upside down. Strewn across the roads were the crumpled remnants of cars and vans and pieces of houses that had been sent flying through the air several dozen miles before coming down, killing and injuring many. There was this weird humming sound coming from the bits and pieces of metal lying around. I put my hand to my cheek, and felt shocked at the tingling soreness there. It was like it was sunburnt. Most of the city must have been dead. Even most of those who had heeded the warning had dithered and moved slowly. In an instant everything I had ever known was gone.
I don’t really remember the events of the days which followed too well. It was all a confusion of long marches, the backs of trucks which smelled like old boots, the holds of an ancient freighter which stank of cabbage and diesel oil. Always in the background was the constant sound of children bawling.
The war was over. It had all ended in a final spasm of violence that left a dozen cities like ours in ashes. No one I ever asked in the aftermath ever seemed to have the same story. Some said it was a dissident faction of the army, others a psychotic group that had seized an airfield. Or a ship that had refused to surrender. What did it matter what had happened? Or why? There were two million of us, spread across the continent, in between the ashes of what had been society. I spent virtually the whole of my teens in a vast sprawling refugee camp. For a long time it was all I knew.
Years passed. Slowly people began to rebuild. There were sporadic visits from UN doctors. They would come in in their white painted helicopters, give cursory examinations, hand out tablets and pills, tick their clipboards, and then fly out again. There were show trials on TV in the common rooms in my teens. Hatchet faced men stared into the distance without emotion as the sentences were read out.
Very slowly, things got back to normal. In time, limited scholarships were made available for the children of the camps. I was one of the lucky few. I excelled. Given my history it may have been inevitable that my chosen major in university would be the effects of fallout on the environment. Strontium levels in soil, particulate buildup in lung and bone tissues. It was a college outside Saint Petersburg, the new capital. Few people there ever quizzed me on what happened, thankfully enough. Perhaps they sensed it was something I never wished to talk about. No one ever really did.
When it was announced that research teams were being assembled to venture into the blast zones I signed up. I’m still not sure why. Perhaps it was my way of closure, going back, to finally understand. One thing that had stayed with me all those years, that had haunted me, was the utter silence on that morning, as everyone had simply stood wordlessly as the gigantic debris cloud slowly dissipated. There was something too accepting about it. Perhaps a part of me wanted to go back to the ruins to demand some sort of explanation, for that morning that had split my childhood in half.
The team leader who briefed us was an elderly physicist named Orlov. He had a strong Saint Petersburg accent and a grey mustachless beard. He had a tendency to pace about the room as he talked slowly and deliberately, hunching slightly as he went, which had the effect of adding a kind of grave urgency to his words. Then he would pause and place both his palms on the desk when he wanted to place a particular emphasis on something.
“As terrible as the final day of the war was,” he said, “this does present to us an opportunity to study the effects of mass destruction devices on urban and suburban areas.” He really did talk like that. “Nobody has set foot into the ruins for over eleven years. Our mission, when we arrive, will be to take samples of soil and air, and to make what observations we can.”
Most of the other members of my group were undergraduates like me, all volunteers from other universities. All of them were there for their own reasons. There was Sven from Stockholm, tall, beefy, thick chin beard and brown hair always tied back in a ponytail. He had a tendency to talk slowly, in measured tones. He also had a liking for practical jokes, as some others of us had discovered to our cost. There was Zoë, his girlfriend, short, stocky, with short curly blonde hair. She was originally from Dresden, but had been studying in Stockholm. I suspected that Sven was only here because she had talked him into it. There was Sarah, an undergrad from UCLA in California. Her father had been a physicist at Berkeley. She would not say what it was he had done there. She was the only one who had made any real effort to talk to me so far. There always seemed to be something strangely apologetic in her tone. The others seemed somewhat wary. Whilst they were not actually hostile as such, always I sensed a distance between us. I was a child of the camps. The only one who had experienced wars effects firsthand. At first they had been fascinated, but then that had turned to a kind of bafflement. They could not understand why I would want to go back there. It made them uncomfortable, I think.
We were flown to the edge of the blast zone in a couple of UN Chinooks. We landed near a row of modern dome shaped marquee tents, these ones gleaming white. Always white. As though it could somehow make things alright just by its very presence, reframe the past, wash out the bad.
I had a very strange feeling landing back in that place. A part of me fancied it to be the same spot where I saw the flash on the horizon that had signaled Childhoods End. Of course, I could not be sure where it was I had stood on that morning. In reality, I had played and replayed the events so many times it had all taken on the quality of an ancient photograph, one that has been copied too many times. Every time it seemed to grow a little more distorted, a little more unreal. In the end, you simply remember remembering it.
After they dropped us off the helicopters almost immediately took off again. They would not return for ten days. Across our ruined country were a thousand other places they needed to be. There were no real roads in this remote part of Russia, so everything had to be airlifted.
We had another two days of final orientation. First we were given a presentation on the immediate effects of the explosion, to better prepare us, they said, for what we would see as we approached Ground Zero. It was all done through a garishly bright three-dimensional animation delivered to us on a large flat screen which took up an entire wall. Orlov’s Saint Petersburg accent washed over us in flat liquid tones as he outlined the effects of the blast. The screen showed an idealized cityscape, myriads of tiny cartoon blocks in a grid work of streets. From somewhere in the center a glowing sphere emerged which spread outward and swallowed up the tiny blocks.
“As we have discussed previously,” he began, “ninety five percent of the initial energy burst comes in the form of light and short wavelength x-rays. These are absorbed by the surrounding air extremely efficiently, which creates the fireball through heating. This then undergoes rapid expansion, and at its maximum reaches a temperature some three times greater than the surface of the sun. As the bubble of the thermal pulse spreads out, every material that it touches - steel, concrete, glass, everything - melts and travels on the outside of the expanding heat bubble as a thin layer of white hot liquid. At about nine and a half miles, the fireball is one hundred times brighter than the sun at noon. At this range it can still cause first and second degree skin burns. As it cools and fades, the materials also cool and condense in place, leaving a series of circular ridges which lie beyond the edge of the obliteration zone.??
? On the screen the white bubble slowly faded away. All the tiny city blocks had turned red.
“Then we have the shockwave, which arrives about sixteen seconds after. As this was an airburst, the initial wave reflects off the ground to form a secondary wave. These combine to form a reinforced Mach front, which persists for about three seconds.” A second sphere expanded outward, erasing all the city blocks from existence. “Seconds later, one hundred and fifty mile per hour winds rush back in to fill a hot vacuum several miles wide. This is what then gives rise to the classical mushroom shape.” A dark grey circle collapsed inward and curled up and around itself into an idealized mushroom cloud.
It was all very neat and clean. If I closed my eyes I could still see the red-black smoke demon rising over the land. It had haunted my dreams.
“Nothing remains inside the innermost ring but a vast plain of ash,” he went on. “We will be the first to venture into the blast zones since that fateful day. And so we will be the first to see what remains, from close up.”
From around me in the darkened room I could feel a few of those sitting closest to me shift slightly in