Las Cruces, New Mexico, from the West across the Rio Grande with the Organ Mountains in the background.
"When the sun no longer shines, when the stars
drop from the sky and the mountains are blown
away, when camels great with young are left
untended and the wild beasts come together,
when the seas are set on fire and men's souls are
reunited, when... the record of mens' deeds are
laid open, and Heavan is stripped bare, when Hell
burns fiercely and Paradise approaches; then
each soul shall understand what it has done."
-The Qu'aran, 81st Surah
It took them an hour and a half to reach Las Cruces. On the way, Smoker asked Brother Edgar to explain to him the difference between the "good" Doomsayers and the "bad" ones.
At high noon it seemed that Hell was burning fiercely indeed, with the sun on the pavement beneath their wheels and the washed-out desert all around. The technical traveled first, with the rig following behind by 40 yards or so.
The old city of Las Cruces was sandwiched between the Picacho and Organ Mountains, in the Mesilla Vallay on the east bank of the Rio Grande. Many of the survivors in the Las Cruces area settled on the northern edge of the city in an area where the former Shalam Colony once existed.
5 miles out from Las Cruces, the small convoy slowly passed by the remains of the Las Cruces Aerospaceport. Nothing remained after being slammed by a 10KT tactical nuclear strike. Sand, rock and debris were sprayed across the Interstate, including the shells of a few burned-out hover-tanks, hover-APCs and several wrecked trucks from a large convoy that had been caught in the open in the Interstate by the nearby airburst. (As it was an airburst, there was no blast crater.)
Continuing east they crossed over the Rio Grande and descended to the valley floor. When they came this way yesterday, they had a guide that knew a shortcut around the downtown. Without the guide they had to take the long way around the downtown on the Interstate, or risk getting lost once they left it.
Las Cruces hadn't been hit with a Ghost Rock bomb but by a 300KT nuclear weapon delivered by ground-launched cruise missile (GLCM). On Judgement Day the entire Mesilla Valley and nearby White Sands CAAFB was the scene of vicious see-saw battles between the LatAm and SA armoured and walker forces. The low airburst over the city could have been courtesy of one side or the other either determined to retake the already shattered ruins or deny them to the enemy, no one knows. The rest of the valley was now barren except for native vegatation, as the complex and sophisticated drip-irrigation system supplying Rio Grande water to the many farms was damaged by the constant fighting and destroyed by the nuclear attack.
They circumnavigated the downtown via the Interstate, thus avoiding the worst of the blasted ruins of the Old City of Las Cruces and the downtown. Even so, it was a long detour and an eerie quiet settled over the travelers. They became nervous and jumpy; shadows were twisted into threatening figures, windows and door gaped in destroyed buildings.
They had taken a shortcut before and hadn't come this route on the way out. Some unknown madman had lined the Interstate with thousands of sun-bleached skulls along the guardrails on both sides, grinning at the passing travelers as they slowly passed by wrecks that had been towed to the side to clear the route. The keening of the burning Ghost Juice and throbbing engines became louder and more noticeable in the silence. They were very glad to finally leave the ruined city behind them.
http://tinyurl.com/24f2pjp
(You are approaching Shalam Colony from the direction of the Interstate to the East. See above map link.)
Shalam (a corruption of "Shalom") Colony was one of a number of utopian religious settlement based on the "Oahspe Bible", a new testiment written in 1882 by John Newborough, who founded Shalam Colony. Several such "Faithist" communities were formed according to these principles, and Shalam Colony was the largest of its day. Built on fertile land close to the eastern bank of the Rio Grande in 1880 it was abandoned under mysterious circumstances in 1907. They left behind solid stone communal buildings and an irrigation system that predated electricity.
After the Big Bang, a band of survivors occupied the structures of the old religious community and managed to plant the fields after repairing the sturdy stone buildings. They were close enough to the Interstate to have access but far enough away to not be tempting targets for passing Road Gangs. The original Shalam Colony had been periodically flooded out by the nearby Rio Grande, and while the river had been tamed for centuries again it overflowed its banks, providing nutrients for the fields and water to be used for later irrigation.
When they last saw the Shalam Colony settlement, it was a thriving community of 80 or so well-armed individuals with some salvaged heavy weapons. As they approached eastward through the town of Dona Ana along West Thorpe Road from the Interstate, they could see from several miles away columns of greyish-black smoke drifting into the sky. Buzzards circled over where the colony was located. Nothing moved around them, no animals or even the wind.
This message was last edited by the GM at 12:18, Wed 07 July 2010.
