Thunder Road

World War III started on Christmas Eve, 1954 when the MacArthur administration ordered an A-bomb strike on Leningrad. It ended with a tense peace treaty signed aboard the locomotive-city Stalin 1 as it roared across the tundra. That peace lasted eight months, until a mushroom cloud appeared over Wichita and the first Mobile Expeditionary Force made its beachhead in Siberia, leaving the ground blackened under the wheels of their warcycles.

Fifty-three years and six World Wars later have turned the USSR into a network of switching stations from which locomotive-cities journey on rails to remain one step ahead of The Bomb. In the U.S., costal megalopali churn out war materiel to shovel into the Western Front of Siberia and the atomic battlefields of central Europe while the Information Superhighway keeps inventors, innovators and engineers plugged in and on the move, under the all-seeing eye of the enigmatic AI, BURMA-Shave.

The bomb-ravaged American Heartland has been largely left out of the equation, falling prey to unchecked corporate land-barons and motorcycle-riding, nazidope-smoking MEF veterans ravaging the wastes. Some small towns have become fortresses, while others have followed the Soviet model and taken to the road, with clans roaming from one corp-compound to the next. Route 66, Interstate 70 and a dozen other superhighways have become the new frontier, where fortunes can be made with grit, cunning and a steady hand.

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