As you come into view of the southern tip of the island, “Captain” Harold Clark of the Harbor Rats fishing trawler Defiant chuckles to himself. “You’re gonna die on that island, you realize that don’t you?” he offers up through a scraggly beard, pointing to the rotting carcass of Manhattan. It must have been close to midnight. Difficult to see in the moonless night, the party could just make out the city’s broken skyline in the distance. Concrete and steel pillars stood forlorn in the still summer air, rising like silent, ravaged sentinels out of the calm water of Upper New York Bay.

A thin, salty mist was gathering on the bay, only slightly disrupting the view of Liberty Island that the small craft was just now passing. Not waiting for any reply to his previous comment, Clark continued with a measure of pride in his baritone but crackling voice, “At least Our Lady’s still standing.” He pointed out the port side window of the cramped fishing boat’s bridge, while others of the party looked on from the deck. The Statue of Liberty stood tall, remaining largely undamaged. While the over-pressure from the nuclear blast, not far away at Linden, was enough to injure unprotected flesh, it wasn’t enough to damage the Lady’s steel framework. A few spikes of the monument’s diadem and the top of the torch were missing, but otherwise the symbol of freedom endured. From what the group had been told, the Harbor Rats had protected the monument in the years since the peak of the war. Intel reported that the museum and surrounding buildings had been stripped clean of anything valuable or usable materials, but the Harbor Rats viewed the statue as theirs, and had prevented anything from being taken from the statue herself. That was probably why the group was heading to Manhattan on one of the Harbor Rat boats.

Word has it that New York is a different world these days. Whatever rumors that manage to cross the Hudson speak of a ruined metropolis, overrun with local warlords, gangs, and scavengers. The Harbor Rats were allegedly some combination of those things, a riverine group of salvagers that MilGov had gotten in contact with in order to facilitate transportation into Manhattan. They weren’t trustworthy by any means, but compared to the other scum inhabiting the waters around the Big Apple, they were ‘good enough’; they would at least wait until your back was turned before slitting your throats. So far, they certainly looked the piece. Captain Clark had a classical ‘old sailor’ look to him, minus a few teeth, as though a sea captain had been living homeless for a few years. That probably wasn’t far from the truth of the matter, the group thought to themselves. The rest of Clark’s crew, a pair of deckhands and an engineer, looked as though they’d be as comfortable mugging tourists in a back alley as they were operating a trawler. Beards, tank tops and capris seemed the norm for the crew. Firearms were also present – the 2 deckhands carried pistols in their waistbands, and the engineer had a pump-action shotgun slung across his chest. For now, they remained silent, periodically glancing at the newcomers as you slowly approach your destination.

That destination? A small quay to the west of Battery Park. Even through the mist, it appears as though the landscape of Battery Park changed dramatically. Gone are the varied species of oak tree from the gardens, replaced by what appears to be a sprawling farming complex. Corn and wheat now grow where memorials and monuments once held power, the latter now little more than stumps of concrete and rebar. There’s no one visible as the small fishing craft sidles up next to Wagner Park, but then, that was one of the team’s missions – to conduct a census of the remaining population on the island. An impossible task for sure, but perhaps some measure of success could be had with the remaining goals, starting and conducting salvaging operations on some of the city’s remaining infrastructure, finding out what happened to the last patrol sent to Manhattan, and determining what became of the gold formerly held in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York…
This message was last edited by the GM at 04:41, Thu 19 Mar 2020.