Hades, Kansas, Part I by Pete Anderson - HTML preview

Hades Kansas is a work of fiction. Any

resemblance to any entity or person, either living

or dead, is purely coincidental. No corporation or

entity mentioned in this work is presumed to

have either endorsed or vetted this work, and any

and all trade names, copyrights or patents are

property of their respective owners and no

affiliations are either expressed or implied.

ISBN: 9781301970674

Copyright 2013 Pete Anderson,

www.peteandersonbooks.com, all rights reserved, no portion of this work may be

reproduced or stored in any form without express

written permission from the author.

This is a work of fiction in the genre of what is

commonly known as alternate history, where

things that have occurred in the past in our

timeline are not such here. The Soviet Union

never fell, North Korea is almost as strong

militarily as China, and many other countries that

are at least quasi-allies in our time are uneasy

truce-keepers at best. World War II ended with a

nuclear holocaust for both the Nazis and an

unrepentant Japan, and warhead proliferation

began soon after. Into this uneasy stalemate

came ever more radical world leaders with

agendas that threatened the safety of every

human on Earth. Then one day …...........

My name is Rikard Karl Wagner and this is my

story.

The year is 2017 and the world lies in ruins.

North Korea stole bioterror weapons from a

poorly defended Soviet research facility and

mixed them before firing them at the United

States with intercontinental range ballistic

missiles they had developed mostly in secret..

For the population that isnt dead already, the

bioweapons have rendered most a living

nightmare, a bizarre zombie-like existence

where they neither eat nor sleep often, and

biologic functions are reduced to almost

nothing, giving an appearance of sleep-walking

and cold, grey-waxy skin. A few of us are

resistant to the effect and we still don't know

why. The most terrifying thing is the effect it

has had on plants. They have simply stopped

growing, neither dying nor living but caught in

a cellular statis, a floral netherworld. Most of

the coastal cities are gone, hit by megaton

warheads in a massive surprise strike by the

Soviet Union, precipitated by their belief that

the bioattack left us vulnerable. They were

wrong. Boston, Philadelphia, New York City,

Washington, the Carolinas, Portland, Los

Angeles, San Diego and many others are just

glowing nucle

ar wastelands. The Soviet Union

has ceased to exist entirely -