nuclear detonation flash-blinds the young Danny Dahlberg. Oakes witnesses an explosion over Kansas City, walks to Lawrence, takes charge and begins treating patients. Klein, who had hitchhiked as far as Harrisonville, finds the Dahlberg home and begs for protection in the family's basement. Oakes receives fallout reports by shortwave from faculty head Joe Huxley at the science building, but the situation is dismal: travel outdoors is a death sentence, yet patients continue to come. Huxley tries to contact other survivors, with no response. Delirious after days in the basement shelter, Denise runs outside. Klein retrieves her, but they go through a field thick with radioactive dust. McCoy heads to Sedalia until he hears it and its environs are no longer there. He makes friends with a mute man and travels to the hospital in Lawrence, where he dies of radiation poisoning. Oakes bonds with Nurse Bauer (JoBeth Williams), who later dies of meningitis, and converses with a hopeless, overdue pregnant woman who pleads him to tell her she's wrong. The rad count ebbs. Denise bleeds through her skirt in a service in the rubble of a church, and Klein takes her and Danny to the hospital in Lawrence, where a doctor unsuccessfully tries to treat Danny's eyes. In a defiant radio address the President announces a ceasefire with the Soviets, promises relief, and stresses liberty, democracy, and American leadership, set to shots of listless survivors in America's blackened husk, and hospital staff piling up the dead and treating the living by candlelight. Soldiers do deliver food to the refugee camp that's grown around the hospital. They're unable to honor issued chits, and hold food back for other camps, ending in a violent squabble in which some survivors and soldiers are killed. Oakes learns that various criminals are being summarily executed by a firing squad without first being proven guilty, including for petty crimes such as alleged looting. At a makeshift civilian gathering regarding agriculture, a meeting for growing enough food for the survivors lays out grandiose government plans (scrape 4-5 inches off your fields) but is unable to answer Jim's basic questions (with 150-200 acres to a man? Put it where? Farm in what topsoil?) Coming home, Jim is shot and killed by squatters. Denise is balding, bruised, and dying, and Klein too has radiation sickness. At last aware that he has sustained lethal exposure to radiation, Oakes returns to