Parts Unknown
While everyone was hunkering down in the bunker, big sections the earth did a shake, rattle and roll that would make Bill Haley proud. In addition to making California slide into the ocean like the mystics and statistics always said it would, this tectonic boogaloo flooded the southern Mississippi River Valley, creating an inland sea now called Lake Browning that stretches from the southern end of Illinois all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. Between that, collapsed bridges, the lockdown at the Canadian border, and fallout from the hellfire the Russians rained down on Chicago, people who want to stay alive avoid anything farther east than Wisconsin except for a few parts of Michigan.
Of course, nobody's really chomping at the bit to travel to Parts Unknown, as the eastern United States has become known. The sheer density of likely targets in that half of America means that anyone who was lucky enough to survive is likely dealing with a much more dangerous world than even the people of the Boomlands. There are rumors that some of New England survived (and has since come under Canada's control), but otherwise the pockets of livable land are assumed to be few, far between, and generally much less habitable than the West.
The only person anyone can confirm is still alive east of the Mississippi is someone whose survival isn't exactly celebrated by a lot of folks: President Richard Millhous Nixon. We know that Nixon is still alive thanks to the periodic broadcasts that he makes usiing the Emergency Broadcast System. While Nixon is almost certainly surrounded by staff, advisors and military personnel, the President's voice is the only one on the radio. The only specific person Nixon has referenced as surving the bombs is Henry Kissinger, but he has since perished. We know this because during one broadcast Nixon went into considerable detail about how he had killed and eaten the National Security Advisor.
The few people who have tried to make their way east have never returned, and if anyone from the eastern U.S. has made it to the Boomlands, they've kept their point of origin quiet.
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