Warday
Whitley Strieber
 The novel opens with Strieber's account of a nuclear attack on New York City in October 1988. He is on a bus when he experiences the initial blast. Strieber also witnesses the flooding of the subway system due to a tsunami that was triggered by a nuclear detonation at sea. Strieber makes his way to his son's school, where he is reunited with his family and shelters there. During this period, Strieber survives an attack of radiation sickness. Upon his recovery, he and his family leave New York for San Antonio which they soon discover was destroyed as well. They eventually settle in Dallas, where he becomes a news reporter for the Dallas Times Herald. Five years later, Strieber and Kunetka decide to document the effects of Warday on the United States. They travel through devastated southeastern and southwestern Texas, then the newly formed nation-state of Aztlan in the former American Southwest, and conduct interviews with the Aztlanian foreign minister and citizens. From Aztlan, they sneak into California which was unattacked and became a self-governing, authoritarian, police state. In Los Angeles, they conduct interviews while trying to evade the omnipresent police. They go to San Francisco where they reunite with an old friend of Streiber's, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and are ultimately captured, arrested, and sentenced to years of hard labor and imprisonment. While en route to prison they escape, and flee California by train. By train, they travel and conduct interviews across the Midwest, taking refuge whenever highly radioactive duststorms&mdash;caused by dustbowl conditions as a result of the nuclear bombings of the Dakotas&mdash;happen. After visiting Chicago, they continue east into Pennsylvania and into what remains of New York City, where Strieber, overcome with emotion and at great personal risk to himself, visits what remains of a very dangerous Manhattan to visit his old apartment. The book ends with Strieber and Kunetka back in Texas facing an uncertain future.