Seven million Americans died in the immediate blast. Millions more would die of radiation, famine, and disease during the next five years. Millions also lived, strung out across a country that knew it had been hit—but not why. Or where. Or how. •

In the days and months that followed, an America blacked out by the breakdown of its communications systems and wrestling with the demands of an unprecedented emergency struggled first for survival. Later it would seek answers—seek to find out how it had happened, who had survived, what was left.

So, five years after this "limited" nuclear war, two survivors journey across America. They — and you — will discover what is left of our way of life: the depth of the devastation — and the hopes of a new society desperately struggling to be born.