Readings...

IV
Among Mortimer's books were science fiction novels, some
of which supposed the details of the apocalypse. Mortimer had
selected these with wry irony. Popular methods whereby the
world would snuff it: aliens, collisions with comets or meteors,
plague, nuclear holocaust, robots rising against their masters,
various natural disasters and so on and so on.
Mortimer's favorite: space bureaucrats demolishing Earth
to make way for a hyper-space bypass.

No single thing had doomed Mortimer's planet. Rather, it had
been a confluence of disasters. Some dramatic and sudden, others
a slow, silent decay.

The worldwide flu epidemic had come and gone with fewer
deaths then predicted. Humanity emerged from that long winter
and smiled nervously at one another. A sigh of relief, a bullet
dodged.

That April the big one hit.

So long feared, its finally happened. The earth awoke, humped
up its spine along the San Andreas. The destruction from L.A. to
San Francisco defied comprehension. The earthquake sent rumbles
across the Pacific, tsunamis pounding Asia. F.E.M.A.immediately
declared its inadequancy and turned over operations to the
military. The death toll numbered in the millions, and nothing- not
food nor fuel- made it through West Coast seaports. The
shortages were rapidly felt across the Midwest. Supermarkets
emptied, and no trucks arrived to resupply them.

Wall Street panicked.

Nine days later a Saudi terrorist detonated a nuclear bomb in
a large tote bag on the steps of the Capitol building. Both houses
of Congress were in session. The president and vice president and
most of the cabinet were obliterated.

The secretary of the interior was found and sworn in. This
didn't sit well with a four-star general who had other ideas.

Civil war.

Economic spasms reached the European and Asian markets.
Israel dropped nukes on Cairo, Tehran and targets in Syria.
Pakistan and India went at it.
China and Russia went at it.
The world went at it.

It was pretty much all downhill from there.

Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse
- Victor Gischler