Mar

Next in our series of previews for The Day After Ragnarok details the consequences of America’s fateful response to the last gasp of the Third Reich. The Nazi’s mad plan to bring about Ragnarok had come to fruition, but the end of the world, their world, didn’t come in quite the way they envisioned. President Truman and the Allies had other plans. Laden with the Trinity device, the American B-29 Strange Cargo rendezvoused with the massive head of the Midgard Serpent. From the text:

The Device detonated, tearing a piece of the Sun down from heaven and destroying the Serpent’s brain in a torrent of atomic fire. Westover and his crew died instantly. Jörmungandr took a little bit longer than that.

The polar vortex drove strong high easterlies that day, and a plume of radioactive venom hit the upper atmosphere and headed west. It slowly fell out of the sky into clouds and storms, twisters and waterspouts, all headed west. Dark crimson rain fell from Dublin to Denver. Where it struck, the seas boiled and the earth drank poison. And things engendered, mutated horrors born of dragon’s blood and broken strontium atoms. Some coiled down to the sea’s depths; others clumped together and pulled apart ships. Some climbed or flopped or skittered or slunk from swamps and sewers and gutters and ponds and everywhere else rain ran in eastern North America. And some people and beasts drank from those pools and reservoirs before they knew, and some people’s blood changed and they knew it not. Or at least not yet.

But it hardly mattered, not at first, because the fall of the Serpent’s body back into the Atlantic sent up a wall of water a hundred miles high that smashed into the coast from Halifax to Havana. New York, Washington, Boston, Charleston, Philadelphia, Miami (and poor low-sunk New Orleans) all drowned. Montreal and Cleveland and Chicago, and Veracruz and Houston and Caracas, were merely battered. Salt water, flecked with venomous foam, lapped against the Appalachians.

The Serpent’s head, its skull cored out by nuclear flame, kept moving toward Nuremberg where it had been Called, but its dead muscles overshot their mark. The head finally crashed to earth in Egypt—or rather, on Egypt. Its body followed it down, thunderously settling across Europe in a 300-mile wide swath from Scotland to Sicily, and setting off earthquakes 100 miles on both sides of its fallen body. England, the Low Countries, western Germany and Austria, the boot of Italy, coastal Yugoslavia, southern Greece all vaporized beneath the monster’s coil. Wales was not obliterated, a stretch of western France and Savoy could see the sun, Spain survived. (The other side of the tsunami battered Portugal.) Most of the armies of the Western Allies, and millions of those they had come to liberate, died, smashed beneath the scales. The coil across Africa had also come down hard, mostly in the Sahara, although Ethiopia had little chance to enjoy its hard-won independence. Reptilian flesh blocked the Mediterranean Sea and the Suez Canal. The earth trembled, cities around the world toppled and burned. Smoke filled the air. Snow fell in August.

Tomorrow: The Giants Revive

Atomic Overmind News, Savage Worlds, The Day After Ragnarok