The entire world lies in ruins. The human race has been almost completely wiped out. Radiation renders half-ruined cities uninhabitable, and rumours say that beyond the city limits there is nothing but boundless expanses of scorched desert and dense thickets of mutated forest. But no one knows what really is out there.
As civilisation draws its final, shuddering breaths, memories of humankind’s former glory are already obscured by a thick fog of fantasy and fiction. More than twenty years have passed since the day when the final plane took off. Corroded, rust-pitted railway tracks lead off into nowhere. The great construction projects of the final great age lie in ruins, destined never to be completed. The airwaves are empty, and when radio operators tune in, for the millionth time, to the frequencies on which New York, Paris, Tokyo and Buenos Aires once used to broadcast, all they hear is a vague, distant howling.
It is only twenty years since it happened. But man is no longer the master of the earth. New creatures born of the radiation are far better adapted to this new world than human beings. The human era is almost over. Those who refuse to believe it are very few, numbering mere tens of thousands. They do not know if anyone else has been saved, or if they are the last people left on the planet. They live in the Moscow Metro – the largest nuclear bomb-shelter ever built; in the final refuge of the human race.
