The Confederate Heartlands is a compact yet zone that covers the area around Beauthor Bay, a large bay of the Gulf of Mexico created via post-war flooding. It specifically occupies the pre-war city centers of Port Arthur, Beaumont, and Orange as well as the marshlands north of Beaumont up to Evadale. It is a hellish mixture of dense urban centers, pre-war ruins, and swamps. Despite this, it is once of the oldest and most stable inhabited areas within the Badlands.
One cannot discuss the Heartlands without discussing the Gulf Coast Confederacy. The GCC has ruled over at least part of the Heartlands starting just after the Great War, spreading outwards from Orange to slowly take the zone for their own.
Over the last two centuries all surplus goods the GCC obtained were invested in taming, pacifying, fortifying, improving, and settling the Heartlands. They have partially succeeded.
The soaring towers of the pre-war world are coffins. Even if no one died within their glass walls as the bombs fell, ghouls were born. In the first few years after the Great War ghouls were the ones doing their best to rebuild. It took years for the first few ghouls to begin going feral, and decades for most of the ghouls who turned to loose their humanity. Swarms of ghouls pushed humans out of the majority of ruins across America. Perhaps even the whole surviving world.
That’s how it went down in places attacked by conventional warheads. The Heartlands were struck by a prototype “Radiation Dispersion Weapon” intended to kill with a massive pulse of ionizing radiation but leave the target’s infrastructure intact. The weapon was similar to a neutron bomb, or at least, it was intended to be.
As far as anyone can tell it was a pure-fusion weapon. A last slap to America’s face to show their greatest treasure had been stolen just in time for the world to burn. A slap it certainly was. It ghoulified the better part of 187,000 people.
As much as the Confederacy defines the Heartlands zone, those ghouls are critical to understanding the Confederate Heartlands.
The Confederacy spent the better part of a century clearing the ferals out of the parts of each city in the Heartlands they use. Step outside of the safe areas and cleared streets and you’ll be quickly ripped to shreds by the Port Ghouls; a unique and horrifying form of ghoul created by the fusion weapon.
Your typical ghoul experiences necrosis, decomposition, and insect-infestations. They rot over time and require radiation exposure to regenerate their lost tissues and reattach their severed appendages. Port Ghouls do not. Port ghouls lost their skin like any other ghoul. They lost their hair, their flesh is post-necrotic, animated by radiation alongside ATP. They are objectively, scientifically, ghouls.
Ghouls which regenerated their skin. Skin that kept thickening, growing and regenerating out of control, slowly developing into a thick carapace which turned jet black as more and more melanin flooded the undying cells. This carapace is inconsistent, growing over the eyes of many ghouls, developing spines, ridges, or horns, or even all three at once.
When wounded, Port Ghouls regeneration kicks into overdrive, often tapping into long dormant genes left within the human genome. This has resulted in many of them regrowing their feet as ape-like grasping appendages, loosing their ability to walk upright, or developing a tail after a spinal injury. The more common and less extreme regeneration-mutations include greatly enhanced strength. After all, muscles are damaged by use.
Most Port Ghouls are somewhere between a human and a gorilla in strength, all compressed into a compact jet black form which can develop abilities which make them extremely adept at climbing. A wonderful trait for ambush predators that haunt highrises.
Still worse for anyone visiting the Heartlands, Port Ghouls capaces are highly effective armor. They are resistant to all handgun rounds, immune to bladed melee weapons, and can deflect most rifle rounds and piercing weapons. The GCC makes use of armor piercing crossbow bolts designed specifically to overcome Port Ghouls when they engage in culling, purges, or extermination operations. This is necessary if they want to reliably kill Port Ghouls.
There are still nearly a hundred thousand of them. Most are feral. Most dwell in the swamps north of their former home. Many still live in the towers the GCC have yer to clear. Which is most of them.
Even if the GCC hadn’t claimed the Heartlands as their own, even if they had not managed to carve out many permanent places for humanity to thrive in the zone, it would still be a zone. Just with another name. Probably something along the lines of “The Crawling Grave”.
Despite being only technically livable, and even then only in select areas, the Confederate Heartlands still contains valuable resources. The sheer bulk of ghouls alone would have kept its towers unplundered, and these ghouls are far more dangerous than our average post-necrotic human. Especially those who have kept their minds all these years.
Oil and gas deposits can be found in the surrounding swamps and bayous, often with pumping equipment in reasonable shape ready to go. As a result, while the COnfederacy rules the zone and the ghouls define its borders, the Heartlands see a mix of people from all across the Badlands, hoping to strike it rich, make a name for themselves, or even just see how exaggerated its dangers are.
They arn’t.
Especially since all those would-be-Adventurers and get-rich-quick fools fight each other as often as they fight the ghouls. No matter how you cut it, the HEartlands are a warzone. One within the badlands, and thus capable of sustaining enough life to keep the Confederacy’s numbers up no matter how many they loose. The same cannot be said of the ghouls, given they cannot reproduce.
Oneday, humanity will retake the zone. Whoever manages to exert full control over it will have the chance to become one of the most powerful forces in the Badlands.