Poderia ser Warday , um romance de Whitley Strieber e James Kunetka, publicado pela primeira vez em 1984?
The unthinkable happened five years ago and now two writers have set out to find what's left of America.
New York, Washington D.C., San Antonio, and parts of the Central and Western states are gone, and famine, epidemics, border wars, and radiation diseases have devastated the countryside in between.
It was a "limited" nuclear war, just a 36-minute exchange of missiles that abruptly ended when the superpowers' communication systems broke down. But Warday destroyed much of civilization.
Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka, old friends and writers, take a dangerous odyssey across the former United States, sometimes hopeful that a new, peaceful world can be built over the old, sometimes despairing over the immense losses and embittered people they meet.
É o momento certo, depois de uma troca nuclear, e eles estão entrevistando pessoas enquanto viajam pelos Estados Unidos. A parte que continua sendo repetida nas críticas é que a Califórnia praticamente não foi tocada e se tornou um estado policial murado que não permite que os aflitos entrem e não permite que os saudáveis saiam.
A cópia Google Books parece Combine algumas das suas memórias. Há um pouco em Nova York envolvendo um homem que está descascando fio de cobre em um traje de radiação:
"Hey, Jenny," shouts a huge man in a filthy radiation suit, "who the hell... whatcha got here, tourists?"
"They're reporters. They want to do a story on the Big Apple."
"The core or the damn seeds?" He laughs. "You stick with me, you guys. You'll see a hell of a salvage. We're takin' out five tons of copper wire a day." He extends a huge hand as the train lurches off. "I'm Morgan Moore. I debuild buildings."
E tem o bit com o avião e o cronômetro:
Suddenly, the kid starts counting backwards from ten. He has a stopwatch in his hand, just visible in the dim light from the dashboard. At the count of one, Maggie guns the motor and pulls her stick into her belly. We shoot upward, all except my stomach, which remains hanging, sickeningly, at our previous altitude.
"Power lines," Maggie comments as we dive back to the altitude of my guts. I look at Jim. His eyes are wide.
"They're flying low," he mutters, "to avoid radar. Since they can't see, they're measuring ground speed against the stopwatch so they can tell when to climb over obstacles."