Warday

There was a sense of urgency in our feet. After all were being sent home by what was left of the government of the United States. Most of us called places like Cincinnati, Flagstaff, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, New York city our home. It made sense to call places like that home for we lived there for decades but the leftover government disagreed. It was August and it had been roughly six months since Warday happened.

Lasting only for 36 hours, it was a short lived and mostly unsuccessful nuclear exchange between world powers that crippled life in most of the northern hemisphere and giant part of Asia. Russia had acted out of assumed aggression by United States and the United States had responded with equal force: a collective of 20 warheads were exchanged from each side, along with circuit crippling EMP bombs going off in the hemisphere. No one really knows why, but a similar exchange between India and China also left those two countries at a literal standstill. Though even lesser amounts of warheads were exchanged in that encounter, the population density multiplied the damages done by radiation and broken communication systems in the two countries. EMPs on all four countries had destroyed all kinds of electronic equipment. This rendered useless most cars, radios, television sets, airplanes, cellular phones and home appliances as well. Most warheads in fact had not even gone off, if the papers around the world were to be believed, most warheads never made it to their destinations and were diffused and destroyed by effective satellite systems. But the inevitable happened.

The Pakistani, Turkish and Iranian ambassadors immediately presented India and china a secretive treaty of non alignment, non-involvement, and non aggressive between the three nations. This was their contingency plan of sorts. Tragedy did strike Pakistan, as it couldn’t escape some of the exchange between China and India. Several non nuclear, but nonetheless lethal 50 megaton bombs had fallen in Punjab and Sindh…effectively wiping out 67 million Pakistanis. Again due to population density even in the rural areas, the damage was extensive by all means. It is estimated that 22 million had died as a direct result of the non nuclear warheads, while about 13 million others perished escaping the “great fires� that followed the bombs. The strike to the rural Pakistan was so bad that people started dropping like flies. At first, starvation started wiping populations within the cities as the farmlands were rendered useless by fires, but that was soon followed yet by another type of inherent secondary disaster that usually follows famine: disease. Simple diseases like the common flu took lives by the hundreds within days. What was left of the Chinese government, had took responsibility and apologized for the “accidental� release of bombs on Pakistan. The Pakistani president and the parliament had more to worry about at that point then to get angry at a Chinese mistake. They were arguably glad that unlike Russia, the United States, China and even India, they still had a functioning federal government body intact. The government was now acting out of Peshawar, which was the new Capital of Pakistan. Islamabad was mostly engulfed first by the fires, and then a wave of airborne flu, and then by looters and gangs. It was completely abandoned once the heavily radiated and exposed Sikh refugees…survivors of the Indian Punjab….started pouring in by the thousands looking for relief. No type of help was available on their side of the border, as anarchy reigned with no signs of a surviving Indian government. Most of the refugees had assumed that china had decided to take over the world and in fact won the war. Most of them had had a healthy dose of radioactive material and were dying by the hundreds every day. Doctors and volunteers in hospitals of Rawalpindi and Islamabad had given up hope and eventually fled west to Peshawar. Lahore wasn’t any better. One of the 50 ton bombs fell directly in the middle of the city and rendered the entire infrastructure in the 10 mile radius useless. What wasn’t engulfed by fire was looted.

Most of the religious and faithful in Pakistan had seen the recent developments officially as the end of times. Most of the faithful had left by boats and airplanes to Saudi Arabia, to the holy land. The paranoia was rampant among the overtly religious who in fact started the trend, adding to the chaos already present among the impressionable public. The Saudi authorities could do little to stop the influx of millions of religious, mostly poor Pakistanis. Many ferries had sunk in the haste. 4 million additionally had died in those tragedies. That fact did not take into account the hundreds of thousands of private boats that took off for Saudi peninsula that never made it. It was reported that the government was collecting as much gold as it could muster up, as the global economy, which revolved around the dollar and the intricate euro currency system, started collapsing a few months after Warday. Most of the intellectuals, scientists, professors of established caliber were transferred to secure facilities in Gawadar, Quetta and Peshawar. Karachi was able to survive the brunt, but only a third of it remained as “the fires� took out most of its suburbs.

Dawn and The News group, which had setup shop in Quetta and regrouped as a single entity, started reporting roughly 6 months after the bombs went off in Pakistan. This was around the same time when we started arriving. We owe them a lot for spreading awareness of our arrival. This facilitated the warm welcome we received from the people of Pakistan. The government of the Eastern United States had started to enforce forceful deportation of foreigners as a necessary task. This included pushing and bullying the Chicanos out of the remaining cities of the Eastern United states. In the southern United States, a free Hispanic state had erupted known as Aztlan, stretching from El Paso, Texas to the border of California. The United States left without a central government, broken, and without its agricultural produce, affected Mexico the worst. Mexicans starved as supply lines from the states stopped. The Mutated New Diseases (MND) migrated among populations from the states into Mexico and killed off millions. Most notably the Cincinnati flu, which by far took the most lives of any recorded disease in the world. Their lands famished, population diminished, and their tourism industry tarnished, many Mexicans immigrated to Aztlan. The authorities in Aztlan were supposedly very organized and did allow many Mexicans to immigrate. Most were turned away however. Aztlan had its own constitution and a ready army of volunteers, the Los Angeles times had reported. The Chicano government and Native Americans of Aztlan gave Anglos the same treatment the Hispanics were given in the Eastern and Western United States. At best, most were kicked out to Texas…at worst you can use your imagination. The Eastern United States tried to deport us to Aztlan, but the Hispanic state declined.

It didn’t affect our situation. If anything, we had come out ahead. Things were getting from bad to worse back in North America, and many of us were looking forward to making a better life in Pakistan. We were deported; even citizens of the United States, we were deported by the hundreds and thousands. There was a bright side to this as most of the people coming back were educated, professional and with some amount of wealth. Turkish naval ships escorted us from throughout the Mediterranean and Pakistani warships escorted us from gulf of Persia to the port of Gawadar. The relocation plan was established by the Pakistani federal government to situate most of those arrivals at Gawadar, Quetta or Peshawar. This was the state of affairs after a few months after Warday.