It was already mid-May, yet outside a bitter frost held sway—the temperature hovered around minus twenty, and occasional gusts of wind burned our faces, forcing us to bury ourselves deeper into our fur collars. According to an urgent order signed by President Dixon, I was to report immediately to the specified coordinates and bring with me the astronaut Zhang Wei—the very one who had miraculously survived aboard the orbital station and managed to return to Earth.

  The day before, we had thoroughly checked all of the Atlas's flight systems. When we emerged from the shelter the next morning, the world suddenly seemed brighter. The icy fog that had just yesterday enveloped the summit of Clark Mountain in a dense veil had vanished. And the low clouds racing past the highest peak now seemed frozen motionless, forming bizarre, solidified waves.

  "Could it be warming up?" Zhang wondered, thrusting his hands deeper into the pockets of his fur jacket and gazing doubtfully at the gray sky. "Professor, look up there!"

  I raised my head and froze. The dense leaden clouds had torn open in several places, and through the gaps, as if from giant spotlights, streams of blinding sunlight poured forth. Golden rays, piercing through months of gloom, fell upon the snow-covered cliffs, and for an instant they blazed with pure, untouched radiance.

  "Like after a summer rainstorm," Zhang said admiringly, and for the first time in a long while, genuine joy sounded in his voice. "Get your camera, Professor! You can capture some unique shots!"

  "I think the surviving astrophysical observatories are already recording this phenomenon," I replied, not taking my eyes from the sky, but feeling a small, long-frozen corner of my soul thawing somewhere in my chest.

  But the gaps quickly sealed. The edges of the tears glowed first orange, then dark crimson, as if celestial wounds were filling with blood. Within a minute or two, the clouds closed again, darkened, returning to their former leaden-gray, hopeless appearance.

  "It looks like someone tore a blanket to shreds and then hastily sewed it back together," Zhang said wistfully. "Whatever you say, Professor, those rays of sunlight inspire hope. The slightest bit, but still."

  Shrugging, I silently strode toward the Atlas, leaving behind this brief, deceptive flash of light. Hope was far too expensive a commodity in our time.

  All the way to Washington, I tried to imagine what that once-majestic city of millions now looked like. Since the time of the first nuclear bomb tests at the Nevada desert range on January 27, 1951, the destructive consequences of this weapon had not yet been fully comprehended by humanity. Scientists, it's true, had warned: more people would die from the hunger and cold following the catastrophe than from the direct effects of radiation and explosions. But controlled tests were one thing; targeted strikes for the direct annihilation of all life were quite another. They had ignited a fire of unprecedented intensity! In cities, its intensity was many times greater than in forests. Metal burned, concrete burned, everything that could burn, burned.

  Our country, in case of a large-scale crisis, had for years been creating colossal food reserves. For millions of fellow citizens, shelters had been designed and built—underground complexes, bunkers, and autonomous survival zones. On paper, everything looked flawless.

  I even recalled one of the civil defense drills that the government periodically conducted in the capital. Back then, it resembled more a carefully organized excursion for a holiday picnic than a rehearsal for the end of the world. A leisurely, almost measured evacuation: long, bright columns of buses, private SUVs, and trucks draped with national flags, accompanied by police cars. People smiled, chatted, took photos on their phones, and shared vivid snapshots on social media. The children's faces were especially joyful—for them, what was happening seemed like an adventure, an unusual outing, something like a game.

  Those who didn't have access to government special shelters booked places in advance in commercial complexes built "with the latest technology." These structures resembled underground hotels more than anything else: shops, bars, swimming pools, recreation areas, artificial gardens. All of this had a very distant relation to a real shelter, aside from the fancy name and impressive advertising brochures.

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  Of course, real shelters did exist—functional, austere, designed for survival, not comfort. But a pass to a shelter alone wasn't enough. One also needed to be able to reach it amidst the general panic, traffic jams on the exits from cities, and accidents. For some reason, no one took this into account.

  All hopes rested on the early warning system. It was assumed that it would give people time. But even if these systems had worked perfectly, no one considered the simple and frightening reality: what would happen when millions of people simultaneously rushed out of cities in their personal cars?

  There was no chance whatsoever of reaching the shelters within the short time remaining before the strike. In the traffic jams that would inevitably form, escaping not just in a few minutes or even hours, but in a few weeks, would have been a miracle. The asphalt arteries of cities would have instantly choked, turning into immobile cemeteries of metal and human victims.

  Understanding this well, many ordered private shelters—small, with limited food supplies, air purification filters, and fuel reserves. They were built right in private gardens, in the yards of private houses, within the city limits. These people harbored no illusions—they knew that in a critical moment, they could only count on what was nearby.

  Those who lacked the means even for such a solution acted more simply and desperately. They converted the basements of their homes into mini-shelters, reinforcing their house foundations and making additional concrete decking, hoping to wait out the catastrophe there. They stockpiled fuel, candles, food, warm clothing, water—and each lived on hope alone. That he would be the lucky one to survive.

  Hope, which, as time showed, turned out to be the most unreliable of all resources.

  When we took off from Clark Mountain, it was minus ten outside. When, having reached our destination, the Atlas began its descent over Washington, the thermometer already showed minus thirty-five. Although the route had been carefully calculated and stored in the autopilot's memory, I doubted its reliability for the first time, glancing out the porthole. Had we arrived at the right place?

  There were no evergreen pines that once surrounded Andrews military airfield. No flight control tower, no powerful reinforced hangars where aircraft were stored. And instead of the concrete slabs of the runway—only piles of rubble, fused into large monolithic blocks. No technical buildings, no airfield equipment. Only two F-22 fighter jets stood forlornly at a distance from each other. Their metal skin was deeply dented, the paint burned and hanging in shreds, exposing dark patches of corrosion.

  We landed on what had once been a runway, and the frosty air immediately stole our breath, cutting into our lungs with thousands of icy needles. Noticing in the northern part of the airfield an insulated temporary housing module with protruding satellite dish antennas, we headed there. We walked slowly, our faces buried in our raised collars and our noses covered with our palms to avoid burning our respiratory tracts.

  But despite our warm jackets, by the time we arrived, we were completely frozen. Thick black smoke poured from an iron pipe on the module's roof, dissolving into the frosty haze and settling on the snow as fine particles of soot. I pushed the door open. Inside, right on the floor, a fire blazed inside a metal barrel, rusted around the edges. A blackened kettle and a camp boiler hung over the fire, something bubbling inside, spreading the smell of overcooked meat. Two guys in dirty military fur pilot jackets, their faces smeared with soot like devils in hell, sat nearby on crates that had once held aircraft ammunition. With special electric saw knives, they were cutting fighter jet tire treads into pieces, tossing the heavy fragments, smelling of aviation fuel, into the fire. The flames hissed, smoked, but gave off heat—the only thing that now held value.

  Because of the acrid stench, I didn't immediately notice in the corner a powerful mobile aviation flight control center, housed in container modules. Before the catastrophe, such complexes were only placed at strategic sites—their armored hulls protected them, and their systems were powered by a large-capacity autonomous power source.

  "Could you tell me how to get to President Dixon's residence?" I asked, forgetting to greet or even introduce myself.

  "And who are you?" one of them grunted, not even glancing our way, continuing to furiously saw rubber.

  "Professor Ork Ackerman. Summoned personally by the President," my voice carried fatigue and, perhaps, excessive sharpness.

  He finally looked up, squinted, examined me and Zhang, then briefly tossed to his partner:

  "Tom, contact the government. Say these... some professors are here."

  The latter reluctantly rose, approached the console, typed something on the keyboard, and returned a few minutes later:

  "Let them fly straight there. They'll be met. What did you arrive on?"

  Upon learning the Atlas's model number, they merely shrugged—the name meant nothing to them. But they advised entering the route into the autopilot: RR-Alpha "Raven Rock." I memorized it, and we went back out into the icy emptiness where the Atlas stood, already covered with a thin crust of frost.

  From Andrews airfield to our destination, we flew at treetop level, barely skimming the tops of the snow-covered hills. We had just passed the recognizable ruins of the old beltway—of which only concrete rubble remained, discernible only by straight lines amidst the chaos of total destruction—after which the landscape finally lost all traces of former civilization.

  The earth, scorched to sterility, shimmered with an ominous brick-red color. No foundations of skyscrapers were visible, no skeletons of enormous factories—only homogeneous, undulating mounds of fused rubble, as if a giant bulldozer had swept across the entire state, raking the remnants of human activity into formless heaps. It was hard to imagine that once, under this silent, dead blanket, the heart of the nation had beaten: endless streams of cars flowing along roads and highways, cities standing, millions of people living and working. Everything had vanished, was erased, transformed into a homogeneous mass indistinguishable from a lunar landscape.

  The route led us to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Pennsylvania. I remembered these forested slopes from pre-war maps and tourist route brochures. Now they were bare and harsh as lunar craters, covered with a layer of ash and ice. And only one detail of the landscape indicated human presence: on the slope of one of the mountains, now stripped of vegetation, yawned a giant, artificially reinforced opening—the main transport portal of "Raven Rock." Nearby, on a cleared plateau, camouflaged hangars with military equipment were visible, along with several latest-generation anti-aircraft complexes, covered with frost but clearly ready for action—their radars slowly rotating, probing the sky.