Final Dawn: Season 1 (The Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Series) by Mike Kraus

familiar. The slowly dawning realization halted him in his steps as he remembered back to primary school when his class studied world history and the first use of atomic weapons.
     
    Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Somebody dropped a fucking nuke on us.
     
    With that realization, the destruction suddenly made sense. Then, another sickening thought crossed his mind. What about the radiation? Leonard froze, debating whether to run back to the processing station entrance and retreat back underground. After a few seconds his shoulders slumped and he kept walking towards the marina. Eh, no use in going back. I’ve been out here long enough that I’ll die anyway . Leonard began to wonder about this, though. He had been out on the surface for several minutes already yet felt fine, aside from being tired. If the area were heavily radioactive, he would expect to start feeling sick and disoriented almost immediately. Yet none of the symptoms of radiation poisoning that he knew about were present. At least not yet.
     
    Doesn’t matter anyway, he thought. If I’ve been exposed, I can’t do anything about it . So Leonard kept moving, finding himself once again in pursuit of a goal that required climbing over, under and through debris and destruction.

2:18 PM, March 29, 2038
    Rachel Walsh
     
    Rachel walked along the highway, heading north with Sam keeping close to her side. He was calmer than usual, as though he sensed that they weren’t going on a normal walk. Even though Rachel hadn’t been around him much, he was always friendly and obedient to her when she was home on breaks and holidays, treating her just like the rest of the family.
     
    She figured that at a brisk walking pace, they’d be able to make it to DC in two or three weeks, maybe sooner if she could find a working vehicle. Fat chance, she thought. Might be able to find a bike, but good luck trying to start a car after this mess.
     
    In addition to the vast amounts of destruction that the nuclear weapons unleashed upon physical objects, they also released an invisible energy wave called an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP for short. This huge burst of electromagnetic radiation was harmless to people but devastating to even the simplest of electrical circuits. By generating huge voltage and current spikes in electrical equipment, even most electronics that were turned off were burned out due to the intensity of the bombs.
     
    The only types of electronics that survived were ones that were properly shielded from the pulses, such as the LED flashlights that were kept in a copper mesh lined locker. Simple electrical devices that didn’t rely upon complex circuitry to work would fare better in the face of repeated EMP blasts, but the scarcity of such simple devices in modern times meant that this didn’t change much of the situation at all.
     
    Thirty years ago, a report was commissioned to investigate the potential damage to the United States if it suffered from an EMP attack. The results of the report weren’t widely covered in the media due to the disturbing conclusion that the infrastructure of the nation was completely vulnerable to even a moderate EMP attack on a limited area. One of the final conclusions of the commission revealed that society would most likely collapse in a week or less if just the nation’s power grid was taken offline for extended period of time due to an EMP event.
     
    Over thirty years some improvements had been made to the infrastructure, but hardening against an EMP event still remained at the bottom of the priority list. Thus, when multiple high energy pulses occurred across the planet, it wasn’t just the USA that suffered from their lack of foresight. If that wasn’t enough to deal with, the blasts from the nuclear weapons themselves dealt a final, fatal blow to just about everything that survived through the electromagnetic pulses.
     
    Once Rachel got a few miles down the highway out of the city, the destruction started to lessen and