An Afterlife of Rust

Prologue

Have you ever wondered about the end? I don't mean your own singular death. I mean the heart shattering death of everything around you, everything you know, love and everything you have ever seen. Imagine the deaths of everyone you know, everyone you have ever met; including that scruffy stray dog that followed you home after school. Even bittersweet memories such as these are never enough to make you smile when you're alone with your head in your hands, trying to make sense of the world around you, every loss you have suffered and every ounce of pain you have felt that finally forces you to down onto your knees as you clench your chest and question your own survival in such a savage world.

Even thinking about the slightest possibility of losing everyone and everything around you makes you feel like someone is reaching into your chest and grabbing hold of your heart with a vice-like grip so tight you think your heart might violently explode. And that is exactly how it felt when the whole world slowly cracked, crumbled and came crashing down around me.
Everything I knew and loved about the world I was raised in now seems so distant. Looking back into the past and the life I once had feels like nothing less than looking into a mirror as it shatters barely inches from your face as the sound of a gunshot rings out behind you. The broken glass in your eyes become painful, heart wrenching tears as you long for the world that once existed.
You just wish and hope with everything you have left that somehow there may be a very slight possibility that every loss, every death, every cut, bruise and tear are all just some part of a horrible dream that you pray to wake up from every time you lay your head down to rest.
But you never do. You never wake up.
That has been my life almost every day since the shadow of death decided to spread its wings and soar over every conceivable piece of land; nothing short of a fucking nightmare.

I used to wonder about the ways that everything would end. Why it would happen and who or what would cause it. I also used to wonder what would it be like to watch the world end and survive long enough to wake up to a sunrise after everything has fallen apart.
I think I got my answers...

As a kid I used to have terrifying nightmares about war that would scare me so badly I had to stay home because I was to scared to walk to school in case a mushroom cloud appeared over the horizon. I had dreams about invading armies and being chased by foreign soldiers as bullets whizzed past my head, being hunted by helicopters with powerful, blinding spotlights only to be discovered. I felt my heart drop every time as I would have no choice but to accept whatever comes next... But most of the time I would wake up just before I met my grim demise. Extreme emphasis on 'most'. I have woken up after distinctly feeling the numbing shock and excruciatingly painful burn of lead bursting through my flesh, looking down only to see myself leaking that warm, sticky red stuff out of a hole that definitely should not look like that let alone be there at all, that also hurts like a bitch when I try to put pressure on it to try and plug it up. I feel like those dreams showed the true meaning behind the phrase 'wake up dead'.
Though through all of my bad dreams, political theories, anxiety and paranoia, I was somewhat wrong about how everything ended. There weren't any mushroom clouds over the horizon or helicopters buzzing through the sky or even foreign soldiers chasing me down the street; some of these things did eventually happen, but not while the world was turning upside down and inside out.

Water. The world's most valuable resource. Fresh water was once found almost everywhere, even underground and it was clean enough to drink after boiling or filtering or even both if you were as scared of intestinal parasites, such as worms, as I was and still am.
But when almost 20,000,000 men, women and children fell victim to what people now call
'The Great War of 2050 to 2067' their rotting, infected, infested and irradiated bodies were never cleaned up or given proper burials. They just left the corpses there to slowly decompose over time and return to the land.
But this irradiated disease, known simply as 'The Infection', being spread by this rotting and decomposing flesh has forever tarnished the land, its watery veins and the very air that all life requires.
Animals living off the diseased land where this massacre took place became diseased almost instantly, died off and slowly decomposed only to further spread this disease known as The Infection. Fish caught in bad streams where these disgusting rotting corpses had fallen into the water would bloat with disease, turn belly up and end up on riverbanks. When The Infection made its way into the oceans, fishing boats would run aground with literal skeleton crews. Bloated whales would wash ashore and eventually burst, schools of fish and multitudes of sea life would wash up on beaches and spread The Infection.
The one thing that no-one accounted for was the bugs. Diseased flies laying diseased eggs in food, mosquitoes biting diseased animals and proceeding to bite humans, further spreading The Infection. If you were diseased, you wouldn't even turn into a zombie like in those movie we used to watch as kids. Instead you would just slowly and painfully die as your body started to break down from the inside while you were still breathing and walking with a beating heart.