Them or Us

The Last English Summer

AT THE HEIGHT OF the last English summer, the skies turned black as coal and never cleared. Backed into an inevitable corner by an enemy that had remained elusive and invisible until the last possible moment, the Unchanged military was left with only one remaining card to deal. And they dealt it, unleashing hell and killing millions. Or had they? Had that final, decisive strike been delivered by those who coordinated the so-called Haters? Had they pushed the button? Whoever was ultimately responsible, the end result was the same. As the vast city-center refugee camps all imploded, over the space of a few short days virtually every major city in the country was destroyed in a white-hot nuclear haze.

“A limited nuclear exchange” was an overused misnomer: limited in duration, perhaps, but not in effect. Although the weapons that had been used (mainly tactical, field-based missiles) had relatively low yields in the overall scheme of things, their combined aftereffects proved to be immense and catastrophic. Many thousands of people, predominantly the tightly packed, panicking Unchanged, perished immediately in the initial blasts (collateral damage, they used to call it). Those who had survived the maelstrom were forced out into the wastelands where their enemies waited for them impatiently: relentless, determined, and with an insatiable bloodlust.

The numerical advantage at first believed to have been held by the Unchanged proved to be another crucial miscalculation based on misguided and outdated assumptions. There may well have originally been an average of three Unchanged for each one of the others, but when the typical Unchanged was too slow and afraid to kill even one Hater, and yet a single Hater was so full of brutal hostility that even the weakest of them was capable of killing literally hundreds, that initial statistical advantage was swiftly canceled out, then reversed.

The Unchanged became a vanishing breed. Millions were slashed to thousands by the war. Thousands were reduced to hundreds by radiation sickness and starvation. The remaining hundreds were steadily hunted out and killed.