Ashes, Ashes

This was to have been the happiest day of young Blanche Rouget's life. In Paris, the now-electronic city of love, Blanche had been about to make her debut as a star. Then abruptly, the Black Emperor of South America had told the world of the missiles already racing northward. Panic had broken forth; and then had come the real horror. A vast cloak of darkness had descended over the Earth. And Blanche was hurled into a world gone mad in its death-throes.