Adventures In A Wasteland

Prologue

"It's essentially a more complex version of the common cold" said the scientists on the news, spit spraying from their mouths with every letter 'c'. "Just give your kids a hot water bottle and some cartoons, they'll be fine!"

When the mothers tried to keep their kids from school, this was the message that they reiterated. "It's basically a cold, mum, the scientists on telly said so!" They scoffed at their mothers' desperate pleas- that is, until they saw the photos.

The news quickly changed opinions, the scientists appeared again but more baffled and flustered. "The disease has advanced" they would say. "The symptoms are far more severe than we originally anticipated." The screen would cut to photographs of patients sporting bloodshot eyes and flaky skin that was rubbed raw. There were 3 second videos of flatlining screens in the clinical white hospital emergency rooms, and blurry people with hacking coughs, raising a spotted hand to the camera lens, darkening the videos.

The children were naturally pretty disturbed by what they saw, but that didn't stop them complaining when their mothers wouldn't let them out the house at all. "The disease is airborne, I can't risk my sweetie catching it," they would sing, before peppering their child's face with kisses, only to go sob onto their spouse's shoulder at the thought of their children transforming into those that they saw on the news.

Despite their mothers' homemade quarantine, young lovers would sneak out at night to meet each other, exchanging kisses before sneaking home. Their frantic mothers would check their temperatures the next morning only to squeal at the rise, exhausted fathers unable to coax them into calming down.

And that was how it started. A few careless movements by the public that brought on the Apocalypse.

Within 6 months, the surface of earth was devoid of human life. All the cunning folk had buried themselves underground with others that weren't diseased. The upper-class people with cash to spare stocked up on all the drugs, or "cures" they could find and paid for the most extravagant bunkers that money can buy.

Naturally, over time, the landscape changed. Where rambling apartments once stood, there were skeletal structures that scraped the sky. Cities fell into disrepair, just the same as new ones began-bleached, cheap echoes of the grandeur that was there before. Colonies began popping up across the globe- primitive base camps of those that survived what the kids once jokingly called "The Second Plague."

It wasn't a joke anymore.