It was June, it was a warm day with clear skies when everything started. A big explosion, a cloud of smoke and dust towered over the city, the sound wave shattered the glass of buildings kilometers away. Everyone was looking at their phones, worried faces, chaos flooded the streets, crashing cars and people running showed desperation and panic. In the screens, news playing in a loop:
“Emergency! This is not a drill. Emergency! A biological weapon has exploded in one of the downtown construction sites, please follow police instructions and evacuate the area. Do not return home until further notice. Emergency!...”
Hours passed and you could still see the big cloud in the sky, streets are empty except for ambulances, fire trucks and rescue teams rushing towards downtown. In the shelters everyone was anxious, watching the same channel reporting the same news. Politicians and governments declared martial law and reminded people to stay away from the area, remain calm and wait for further instructions. Terrorism was used by those looking for a reason, those that needed to blame someone but no one knew or could imagine the truth, everyone was confused and terrified.
Days after the explosion the number of victims kept rising, panic started to leak into the shelters, people started to question authorities or abandon the “safety” they provided. In the sky the cloud of smoke adopted a vortex shape and kept increasing in radius, started by covering a few blocks but grew to cover the entire city. Ash and dust started to fall over the streets, it piled up like snow and covered roads, choked engines and clogged sewers. The army distributed face masks, sealed the shelters and installed filters on every air intake trying to protect their citizens. It was a worthless effort.
Army and citizens fought to survive for years but the vortex never changed, always growing, toxic and threatening. After the ash, rain started to pour down, acidic and toxic to the touch. Everyone outside died dissolved by the rain, in the shelters some died from an unknown infection that rots the body from inside. Entire cities vanished before scientists could find ways to protect themselves from the rain or created filters for the ash. Eventually they did but the infection kept spreading and a cure was never found.
After 50 years a brave team reached the center of the vortex, the place of the original explosion. They looked down into the pit and found the answer that everyone had been looking for. It wasn’t a terrorist attack, it was not a biological weapon. When the team came back, they showed pictures of the site, it was a hole on the ground and from it a constant emission of toxic gas. Natural chemicals escaping into the atmosphere and poisoning everything in its way. That is the world I live in, destroyed by those who did not care to listen and survived only by the ones that were lucky to be resistant.
I live in a world where half of the time the sky is covered with a toxic cloud and the other half cries with rain that burns to the touch. The sun does not reach the surface and the air we breathe is poison. Insects are now the main source of nutrients and entire communities have been built on the underground networks of the now dead and abandoned civilization.
Rain feeds small electric power plants that keep our communities running. Studies and improvements are constantly made looking for a solution to the problem that surrounds the planet. Technological advances keep us from extinction, every day we struggle to survive and every day we value more what we had.
That is the world I live in, a toxic wasteland that once had the potential to conquer the universe but instead it was exterminated by their own mother, pushed into the ground to hide like parasites. I live in the ruins of the world we destroyed.
