Chapter Twenty-Eight
Nuclear Winter
If the greenhouse effect is a blanket in which we wrap ourselves to keep warm, nuclear winter kicks the blanket off.
Morning brought a sickly and feeble yellow-gold sunrise that attempted futilely to emerge through the smoke filled air and the snowfall hadn't cleared the air of noxious substances. When one looked where the majestic Sunset Valley City Hall had once stood, a monolith of civic pride and duty, it was canted at a thirty degree angle into the ground above where the nuclear weapon had detonated, the ground turned into molten liquid into which the city hall had sunk.
The inhabitants of the bunker; the Eight, all had their tasks to deal with, but morning brought a ravenous hunger that needed to be sated by food and each had their own problems to worry about. Hildegard spent time making sure that the refrigerator was stocked with food and thus spent a lot of time at the teppanyaki grill, cooking up repast after repast. Luckily their fridge kept things for a long period of time and it was rare for any of the meals to last long enough for it to spoil: it usually ended up in someone's gullet long before then.
Autumn Cusack fed her daughter, Amanda. Haruo fed his son, Andrew. They each had their own individual high-chairs and were fed separately. It didn't stop them from hurling the bowls on the floor however. And some of the morning was spent in cleaning up the resultant messes created by the toddlers. That seemed to be the usual order of the day: 1. feed and water kid, 2. watch bowl get hurled to floor, 3. clean up mess. Life couldn't be better...really.
...and the night brought its own share of dangers; radiation warped animals and bone-chilling temperatures on top of the radiation, despite the fact that it was lessening every day, was still not in the safe ranges yet to go out without protection. The sensors on the building were reading the environment and what it was telling Noel and the rest of the occupants was that it was still far from safe. They would be in the bunker for quite some time. The skies had to clear to dissipate the radiation from the ground and they hoped that it wouldn't leach into the groundwater. The soot in the air was also a hazard and they needed to be careful to not breathe it in. The strontium 90 and other radioactive elements could cause a whole multitude of problems down the road even if the effects were not immediately apparent.
...so it was just safer to ride it out in the bunker. At least they had four-foot thick walls; the Sunset Valley mayor had told the contractors to build the bunker to withstand at least a five-megaton blast wave and the thickness of the bunker walls would keep radiation out.
But there were also joyful times within that bunker. It was when the two toddlers aged up to children. They had a joint birthday party (besides they were only a few days apart). And it allowed the Eight to not worry about what was going on up top for a while. The birthday party was a welcome distraction. And for Haruo, River, Mickey and Autumn, it was bittersweet knowing that they were bringing new life into a world that was harsh and unrelenting; and the fact that they would all have to figure out how to survive when it came time to emerge from the comfortable cocoon of the bunker.
Horace and his plumbot friend also took the opportunity to go top-side and scout out the area and to maintain watch over the front door of the bunker to make sure that there was nobody that was causing damage to the bunker doors. The bunker doors were the weak points of the bunker since it was where entry to the main bunker was possible. And as such, they needed to make sure that the entry way was guarded. And the radiation didn't affect the plumbots so they were the perfect ones to go up topside to act as guards.
The multiple explosions of nuclear warheads throughout the world, had caused soot to be blown into the atmosphere and it circled the globe on the tradewinds. Since Sunset Valley was north of the tradewinds, the westerlies carried the soot and radioactive dust through, some depositing on the ground and causing problems with anyone even attempting to start a garden on the surface. And it was also hard to say just how long the nuclear winter was going to last. Luckily for the bunker inhabitants, they had a garden indoors and growing vegetables was not a problem for them, just so long as they rationed out a certain percentage of seeds and plants to regrow their stock. It was their supply of meat that was going to be a problem.
If the radiation levels didn't go down as quickly as they'd hoped, they'd be subsisting on a vegetarian diet and that wouldn't keep their energy levels up as well as it would be eating meat-based protein. Haruo wouldn't be happy eating vegetarian. He preferred his meals with a heaping helping of dead animal. The lack of that would really put him in a bad mood. The carnivorous side came out since he was a werewolf. In fact when he'd turned the rest of the bunker occupants, they'd all had a ravenous hunger for raw meat. Hopefully Phil would get the skill needed in order to grow hamburger and steak plants, they would definitely need those to survive.
Just being topside was a game of Russian Roulette. Considering that the earth was being bombarded by meteors. Luckily they weren't of a size large enough to cause irreparable damage to the planet; the humans had done enough of that themselves by nearly blowing themselves off the face of the planet. But it seemed as though earth had planted itself right in the center of a cosmic shooting gallery.
The bunker inhabitants considered themselves lucky that they were safely underground. At least they didn't have to worry about a ten ton rock dropping on their heads like those unlucky enough to be left up topside; at least the ones that were radiation resistant, that is.
...and while the rest of the bunker slept, Horace and his fellow plumbots did research and kept watch over the bunker to keep everyone inside safe.
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