“Here the birds don’t sing, the trees don’t grow.” Here the dosimeters go off the charts and go mad, radioactive ruins shimmer with a dead, ghostly light under a dead sky; every breath shortens life by a day, and radiation sickness cannot be cured—by protective suits, bomb shelters, or even underground metro tunnels.
1000 X-RAYS PER HOUR—even 30 years after the atomic war of 2012 and the coming of the Great Darkness—an Moscow riddled with nuclear craters is absolutely unfit for life.
But the farther from the capital you get, the lower the radiation levels, the more surviving people and hungry mouths there are. And that means desperate Trackers—scouts, scavengers, marauders—will have to keep making deadly raids onto the Moscow ashes, right into the HEART OF DARKNESS—in search of what?
Underground stores of strategic reserves?
Arms depots?
Underground military bases?
Or something even more important?