Abandoned

Jermal lifted himself out of the blasted open hole in the concrete wall of the bridge which he had called home for the last fifteen years. The world had changed in those fifteen years. It had begun with war. Some had called it the new world war, but it had been unlike anything humanity had experienced before. Most of the city-wide damage had been done by small time trouble makers, either in protest of the war itself, or in an effort to spread fear. Not that that had been necessary. Most of the real damage in the war had occurred via biological weapons, some released publicly and quickly, others working slowly from behind the scenes. People didn't die fighting. They simply died, in the middle of streets, in their homes, completely alone from the rest of the world, with nothing they could do to stop it.

Very few people had survived the first year. Infant mortality rates skyrocketed to the point that a child making it to its first birthday was newsworthy. The few who did survive did so more by luck than any other factor. It wouldn't be discovered until long after the war had ended that they carried a DNA strand that made it easier for them to adapt to the change in atmosphere. Because of how slowly the biological attacks had been introduced to their immune system, they had resisted its effects and become immune to the toxic air that had become common place in their world.

Looking over the landscape, Jermal couldn't help but remember what the world had once been like. To be honest, not much had changed at a glance. The buildings hadn't been destroyed. There were still cars parked on the sides of the road. After the biological strikes had ceased in frequency, the sky had eventually turned to a mostly blue color. But all of the metals were now covered in rust, and plants had slowly broken through the concrete and were growing incessantly up every wall the eye could see. Age old graffiti went unwashed, and had persisted for so long that it now was fading away, and most of the colors were already gone. The world had become a much duller, paler place.

But moreso than that, was the lack of people. At one time, the streets and sidewalks would have been crowded with life, loudly filling the air with their talking, their arguing, their laughing. Lights would have been frequent in the sky, coming from and around buildings to keep the life alive even as the sun went down. Cars and bikes would have traveled at high speeds up and down the streets. Workers would complain about the jobs that kept food on their tables.

They had no idea how nice their lives had been back then.