VIII
The heavy howl of the wind broke the charred branches of the trees on the eastern side of the mountain.
Zagreb was a great ruin. The city center had vanished into an enormous, smoking crater, and huge columns of smoke confirmed the raging of fires across the few remaining buildings.
Three enormous craters bore witness to the complete destruction of the thousand-year-old city.
Heavy radiation had settled over the city's surroundings, destroying all remaining life at the cellular level.
Zagreb no longer existed even as a ruin, because what wasn't destroyed by the explosions was destroyed by the ever-present fires that no one could put out anymore.
The crackling of fire, as well as the utter darkness of early morning, spoke of the drastic change that had befallen the planet.
The Sun was shining, but heavy clouds of ash had completely blocked its light, while the temperature, at first imperceptibly but unstoppably, dropped across the planet.
The clouds were only occasionally scattered by the odd remaining detonation, which merely lifted new thousands of tons of ash and radioactive particles into the atmosphere.
The world was slowly sinking into the dark of a nuclear winter that would last hundreds of years, and the life they had known was vanishing into the ever-present radioactive ash.
The atmosphere was full of static electricity that turned into massive electrical storms which set fire to still-unburned places.
The planet was dying as it cooled, and the surviving population hid in caves or ruins only to die, months later, of hunger or of illnesses caused by radiation.
The human race was at the twilight of its existence, but it still fought tenaciously for life, like a virus attacked by the body's defensive cells.
But even that struggle was fading as the population shrank and the ambient temperature fell.
Soon that too ceased, when the first flakes of radioactive snow began to fall.
The planet's northern hemisphere was in a new ice age, while in the southern hemisphere radiation and artificial darkness had destroyed all the environment, leaving only ruins and the rotting corpses of starved animals and people.
The planet, still wrapped in clouds of dust, turned just as it had for millions of years before, and as it would for millions of years after the nuclear drama on the surface faded from memory.