Written sometime halfway through 1999 by Mark M Cagnacci, this puppy is © Mark M Cagnacci. Send me Feedback at Skonar@Yahoo.com. Whatchu waiting for? Read this already! =D

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New Refuge - Prologue (Original Draft)


The city is dead...

Long live the city...

New Refuge... Its a big place.

It survived the fifth and sixth world war, built on reclaimed ground over the Atlantic after sixty percent of South America was defined a nuclear hotground in 2114.

Two or three thousand kilometers in radius. Alive section is maybe, one, one and a half thousand. Power grids cut out last fall, and anywhere that was cut off died within weeks. The atmosphere renewers failed, the food growing labs stopped functioning...

The city council promised that the tragedy won't repeat itself, that the other parts of the city will get a better power grid, rebuild the populace.

I drove out there on my bike once, made sure I had a filter and a few bottles of compressed oxygen. I drove for days, had to ration out my own food. I eventually reached the edges of the city, all slums, covered up in old Radiation shields. From the days when there was still sunlight to burn us. No radiation can pierce the clouds of smog, pollution, fallout, whatever. According to rumour the smog had somehow built a semi-solid layer around the earth. It was impossible to find out anyway, you could send up a balloon and it would start getting eaten away by the airborne acids. They tried to send up an old shuttle, but it came down again, the skin eaten away.

Anyway, I drove, and I drove along a partially worn away highway, and after I left all civilization behind, I found the black desert. Miles of blackened and scorched sand, on the horizon it met a black sky. I kept on driving, eventually I saw something in the continual night. A roadsign. I shined my bike's searchlight on it, and I read, '3 Km - New Hope.'

TO BE CONTINUED...