Post-Bomb
Bolivar woke up on the evening of the 9th on the sidewalk, instead of the apartment kitchen where he had been constructing a sandwich, three blocks away. He had no recollection of who or what had brought him down there, and nor did any of those who made out his fallen figure as dawn crept over.
This might have been partly because many of them were literally, physically blind. Though he was burned down one side and bleeding incessantly from his gums, Bolivar had easily gotten off light, on a relative scale where most of the people at this proximity from the blast center were dead and those who remained were immobile puppets of clammy red stuff dehydrating steadily more from a lack of skin than the deficiency of drinking water. Bolivar helped bandage those he could with what they have, broke into the nearest McD's and stole flat soda and cups, poked drinking straws into the faces of people who had no more lips around their mouths, free-flowing vitreous fluid instead of eyes, and fingers that seemed to have fused together. The pain was terrible. The smell was worse.
The relief teams found him when they found everybody else in the area. His wife claimed him and set him on the path to an incomplete recovery before she filed for divorce. Not because he was burned, unemployed, or miserable but, she said, because he was gay. Though this wasn't specifically untrue, Bolivar was upset. Still, he could not say as much as he would have wanted to. She had been in a coma for a week, tossed into a wall in the shopping arcade where she had been taking her lunch break in the Upper East Side. You can get away with anything, after you've awakened from a coma.
Prognistically, he would never recover fully. Seven sieverts of radiation poisoning was an incredible thing to survive, and even with skin grafts, bone marrow transfusions, and all the care in the world, his immune system would always be shakey at best, his skeleton brittle, and his hair prone to falling out, his system perpetually at risk of seizures. The only thing that really left him was his eyes. And his hands, maybe.
To Bolivar, it didn't take very long for New York City to piece itself back into working order. Comparatively, anyway. Buildings went up, legislation was passed, Evolved discovered, scapegoats maimed, before he could even walk across a street without having to sit down for half an hour. The doctor recommended he move to warmer climes. He reciprocated with recommendations of an unkind nature, and proceeded onward with bovine stubbornness. He did, however, get better. Permanently uncomfortable and every ordinary risk exaggerated a dozen times around him, but better.
Wonderfully, he got good enough that the government declared he had to go and get a job again because they were no longer paying him enough money to sit on his ass and hate everything by himself. He had two dogs by then, a German Shepherd and a Spaniel, former police dogs who made sure he would not hit his head on the corners of furniture if he seized, whom he loaned to the local precinct for breeding purposes. Thusly inspired, and vaguely acknowledged by former co-workers who could barely look him in the eye anymore, he joined the K-9 Unit and adopted an overgrown pup to start and train as a narcotics hound, once his health was determined as adequate for walking patrols.
