Northern Houston is a desolate, dense, and dangerous zone that spans from the Houston River in the south to the North Sam Houston Parkway in the north. It contains the vast majority of Houston’s Pre-War skyscrapers, most of the city center, and plenty of suburban sprawl, making for some quite variable urban terrain. If not for being a toxic hellhole with winds that can strip flesh from bone, it would be a bastion of post-war civilization. The eastern border of Northern Houston is The Haze, a toxic region of chemical spills and radioactive fumes that can blow into the zone on windy days, posing a serious threat to anyone caught in its path.
The Haze is a truly massive swath of land, though its not defined as a zone for a variety of historic and cultural reasons. Its most relevant to North Houston thanks to local wind patterns. The Haze’s ground is covered by a thick toxic sludge made from raw crude oil, processed heavy and light oils, and even refined products like gasoline, diesel, and kerosene. Other industrial chemicals are mixed into the oil sludge as well due to various chemical refineries which once lined the river. Even worse, the sludge is heavily contaminated by radioactive waste from transport barges which were taking spent nuclear fuel up river to a storage site during the Great War.
The Haze’s floor sludge emits a vapor which tints the sky visible green, is mildly radioactive, and heavily floridating. For those who don’t know, that means its a superacid which loves to eat carbon based materials very fast. In other words, the haze melts things made of flesh within mere hours and corrodes everything else slowly. Except glass. It eats glass almost as fast as flesh.
Fortunately for everyone, the acid winds are infrequent and fairly low in terms of acid concentration. This has preserved the pre-war ruins in Houston’s city center and for a good few miles in the Haze’s direction, but form then on it’s a gradient of melting steel, glass, concrete, and wood until there’s naught but a thick crusty layer of materials which were once buildings.
Few people choose to live in this desolate and inhospitable region, but there are still plenty of pre-war supplies to be salvaged further down wind from the Haze for those brave enough to risk it. The environmental hazards are supplemented by a group of riot police robots which are still functional to this day by means unknown and a gang calling itself the the Northside Raiders. The Northside Raiders ironically live in Southside, but make use of Northern Houston as their proving ground, hangout, and supply stash. They are believed to live off the untapped supplies of Northern Houston, but even if they have, they’ve not even touch a percent of the entombed treasures over their 30 year existence.
In terms of the pre-war infrastructure, most of the city center is left standing. The older buildings all collapsed during the Great War, but most of the newer buildings (including its towers) had been reinforced to weather the pressure wave of a nuclear strike and stand to this day. The towering ruins of the Houston Heights district are particularly notable, as are the remains of the Sam Houston Race Park and the Greenspoint Mall.
Many factions within the wastes long to claim one of the city’s old towers for themselves. If there were any practical means of obtaining food, ammo, and water (Which would need to be imported as the ground water is inevitably contaminated by fluorine.) someone would doubtlessly move in and establish a community in short order. A community most people would give 50:50 odds of collapsing in its first year.