Nuclear Winter

Unsettling News

Juliet made the journey to Straith's office escorted by Captain Jager. Apart from his pale complexion and sullen looks, she enjoyed the captain's company. He was quiet but funny, and he always made sure that she was feeling good. It saddened her that he hardly smiled.

The facility was typically military, from the hard concrete structure with no windows to the art that lined the hallways. All U.S. Army standard. They saw no one on their way to the Colonel's office and the hallways echoed silently.

They finally reached the stairs to the office. The door was red and the stairs looked like they were part of an amphitheatre. Jager helped her up and knocked once. A deep voice boomed from the other side of the door.

"Enter."

Captain Jager opened the door and allowed Juliet to step across the threshold. As she did he put a hand on her shoulder, she looked up at him and nodded once. He smiled gratefully and closed the door behind her.

Juliet walked into the room and saw a man standing and looking out of a window. In front of him was a silent vista of mountains with snow on the peaks. It was snowing outside, but it was unlike any snow she had ever seen. It was dirty grey, and there must have been a strong wind because it was blowing all around. The sky was grey and overcast, letting only a small amount of light through.

"It is a depressing sight is it not Corporal Cullen?" The Colonel said. His hands were clasped behind his back and she could see the swirl of cigar smoke curling up into the air.

"There seems to be something not quite right about it sir," she stated.

He turned and she found herself looking at a middle-aged man, tall with broad shoulders, looking remarkably fit and lean for his age. He had straight blonde hair, cut in a flat top military fashion, and once again had the same pale skin that Captain Jager had.

"Yes, it has been like that for a while now." His voice rattled around in his throat as if it wasn't supposed to be there, but Juliet found that she quite liked the sound of it.

"Anyway, I am forgetting my manners." The Colonel said. "My name is Colonel William Straith, and I am in charge of this facility." His extended his arm and Juliet took it. He had a firm handshake, which comforted Juliet. Men with strong handshakes usually had a purpose, and she was hoping that the Colonel would share his with her.

He gestured to the chair beside his desk.

"Sit." He said. "I hope that you have found your care adequate." He smiled and took a drag on his cigar. Juliet nodded and thanked him. He walked over to a small cabinet and pulled out a bottle and two small glasses. To the glasses, he added four small cubes of ice and then half-filled them. He placed one in front of her and kept the other for himself.

"Being from Tennessee I thought you might appreciate a little taste of home Corporal."

Juliet nodded and took the glass. She sniffed letting the aroma of the liquid fill her nostrils. Jack Daniels. She put the glass to her lips and took a sip. She let the whiskey flow over her tongue and then swallowed; the sensation warmed her from the neck down to her stomach.

"I'm sure that I don't need to tell you to not tell Captain Jager about this Corporal, whiskey would not be on his list of medicinal remedies for what you have just been through."

He took a final drag on his cigar, and then put it on the ceramic ashtray sitting on the side of his desk.

"What exactly have I been through Colonel?" She asked. Her voice was a little tense; she was beginning to get frustrated now. She had been told for the last week that she had been through something horrific, yet Jager had refused to tell her. If Colonel Straith gave her the same line about pay scale she would scream.

The Colonel leaned back in his chair and looked at her thoughtfully.

"I think you are smart enough to realise that things are a bit different to when you were put to sleep."

"Yes, sir." She agreed, nodding.

"We all have pale skin, and the atmosphere doesn't quite look right."

Again Juliet nodded.

"Corporal, you have been asleep for one hundred and fifty years. The reason we have pale skin and that the atmosphere is strange is because we are in the middle of a nuclear winter. The human race hasn't been outside in over fifty years, which gives us our pale appearance. We currently have a vitamin D deficiency."

He paused here letting the information sink in. Juliet looked bewildered, she shook her head as if the action would make what he had said untrue.

"What...how did it happen?" she asked.

Colonel Straith sighed when she asked this as if going over a subject long thought of as a waste of time.

"Fifty years after you were put into cryogenic sleep China and America went into heated discussions over a small area of the Pacific. We should have known better and stayed the hell away from there, but we didn't. A secret middle eastern terrorist group, who no one knew even existed broke into one of the United States forward bases in Poland after stealing nuclear authorisation codes. They released a nuclear bomb on Beijing, China's capital city. The nuke hit and caused widespread devastation. The Chinese didn't wait to find out the cause behind the nuclear attack and thinking to end all hostilities towards them ordered their nuclear arsenal fired not just onto the U.S.A, but her allied countries as well. Once those nukes were released, every country that owned them was firing them on everyone else. The nuclear winter that ensued pretty much destroyed eighty percent of the life on Earth.

There are rumours floating around that parts of the South Pacific survived the initial fallout, but that is all they are rumours. We have heard no hard evidence to say that this is true. Of course, there are small pockets of the human race that have survived in underground bunkers, and we hear from them from time to time, but as far as anyone knows the human race has pretty much died off."

Juliet sat on the chair dumbstruck, no wonder Jager hadn't told her, they woke her up in the twilight of the human race and she was supposed to be okay with this.

Colonel Straith just sat quietly studying her reaction, picking the right moment to speak.

"But we may have a chance Corporal."

It took Juliet a moment to register what he had said, but he was very patient with her.

"Sir?" she questioned.

"Do you remember what you were doing before you were taken by Leukaemia?"

Juliet tried to remember, sifting back through her memories like trying to take out lumps from the flour. Suddenly a memory flashed before her. She had been standing in front of a machine, punching in coordinates or numbers. She had a vague memory of a shimmering portal but that was it. She told Colonel Straith and he nodded.

"Before you got Leukaemia Corporal Cullen, you were working on a top secret project for the defense department. You worked for the science division of the army Corporal, and you were quite the scientist. You and your Lieutenant, Rory McIntyre, were working on a cutting edge machine that could bend space to create a wormhole. After you died, Rory continued the work, but it went slower than it would have done. It was said that Lieutenant McIntyre finished the machine, but nothing ever came from it because he was killed in a car accident; all the knowledge that you and he had accumulated on it went with him. The only other person who knew anything about it was you."

Juliet looked at him with some recognition. She had remembered working with Lieutenant McIntyre on this project, and they had indeed been close to finishing it before she died.

"How do you know about all this, if it happened as long ago as you say it did?"

Colonel Straith grinned and took a sip of his whiskey.

"You should know better than anyone Corporal Cullen, that the military keeps meticulous records, especially of Top Secret projects, and especially ones that cost huge amounts of money."

Juliet nodded in agreement. Apart from that first sip, she had not touched her whiskey. There was just too much information for her to process without having to deal with alcohol brain as well.

"And what happened to this machine Colonel Straith?"

He grinned at her like a loon across the table.

"The machine is still here Corporal, except it didn't work in the exact way you wanted it to."

Juliet furrowed her brow.

"Sir, I don't understand."

Colonel Straith pulled his legs off the desk and pulled his chair closer to the table. He clasped his hands together and looked at her intensely.

"The machine you designed Corporal was supposed to bend space and create a wormhole that would allow you to travel to different worlds, but something unexpected happened we switched it on. Not only did it bend space, but it also bent time."

Recognition dawned in Juliet' eyes.

"We created a time machine." She gasped.

Straith nodded, beaming with pride, as though his star pupil had just finally connected the dots to a puzzle he had been teaching her to solve.

"And the best thing about it Corporal is that the machine is still operational. We have tried to get it operational, but we just don't have the technical knowledge. As I said, all information on how it worked died with Captain McIntyre."

Juliet sat quietly for a moment, and this time she took a sip of whiskey.

"That is why you woke me up isn't it."

Straith nodded.

"You have a chance to go back Corporal, and stop this from happening. You can warn everyone about what the future holds."

Juliet looked carefully at Straith.

"If I go back, no one would believe me."

"You must make them believe Corporal; if you don't, everything I have told you today will become reality."

Juliet sighed inwardly. No pressure.