It's been roughly five years since our world fell to pieces. I am writing this down in the only notebook I've seen in five years with a small collection of pens I've managed to glean from the wreckage. This is my story.
Honestly, I was lucky I even managed to survive the Great War. Not only did I survive the initial war, but I survived the fallout and the crumbling of human society as well.
I attribute my survival of the initial war to my imprisonment. The day before the nuclear attack, I had been incarcerated due to being, well to be honest, a murderer and I had been sent to a strong maximum-security prison. While at the time it seemed like my life was over, the imprisonment was honestly a blessing in disguise. The huge bastion that surrounded my own and I played a large part in protecting us from the outside world as everything fell apart around us.
And fall apart it did. After the bombs fell, everything changed. I remember every single detail as if it had happened just yesterday. I had been recumbent on my bed, looking out the window. One minute, the sky was its normal blue, but the next it was filled with enemy planes. I watched in silent horror as each plane released a bomb, acting out what appeared to be a cleverly drawn out stratagem.
I remember the first impact of the very first bomb. I watched as it exploded in a fiery explosion, releasing thick black smoke into the air in the formation of a massive mushroom cloud. After this one was released, many more followed suit. The noise was near deafening, even to me and I was miles away from where the bombs were exploding.
The bombing went on for a few days before it finally reached us. Up until that moment, my fellow prisoners had been content to simply grouse about the outside warring. However, these complaints took a drastic turn when a bomb exploded near our prison. The irate complaints turned into cries of fear.
Many more days of constant bombing passed. It was the United States against our enemies, and nobody knew who was winning. About a month after the initial bombings, we were informed of the millions of lives the nuclear war had taken, including those of both brave soldier and innocent civilian. The news also took the chance to warn anyone who remained alive not to leave their homes for the outside world was not just dangerous because of radioactivity: men and women were murdering friends and strangers to survive. The world had quickly turned into a barbaric and dangerous place for anyone to live.
Fearing for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, the wardens and anyone who worked at the prison just up and left, leaving us prisoners to fend for ourselves. At first this seemed almost liberating as the formerly imprisoned now had free reign over an impenetrable fortress, but this quickly took a turn for the worst.
Try as they might, the prisoners could not grasp a spirit of concord. Instead, life in the prison became disarrayed as the prisoners fought about everything. After an especially frenetic event in which starving men fought other starving men in a bloody battle, things at the prison became even more violent and horrifying than they had been before. The things that happened to my fellow prisoners are too gruesome to describe, even for a murderer. Just know that many died at the hands of a friend during those long fearful months.
After many months of fearing for my life, I finally decided to leave that horrible place. It was not easy and resulted in more than a few justifiable deaths.
As I took that first step into the new outside world, I was overwhelmed with the destruction that surrounded me on all sides. I knew that the world that I knew was gone, but I had not been prepared for this. This world looked as barren as a desert, the ground being brown and cracked, with only a few dry shrubs in a few locations. The buildings that had been near the prison had been demolished to piles of dingy gray rubble.
Covering the road were many seemingly abandoned cars. Several parts had been removed from them, and even the windows had been smashed in. When I peered into one, I was surprised to find that it had in fact not been abandoned. A skeleton was lying in the drivers seat. As I turned to inspect the backseat of the car, I was even more horrified to find a smaller adolescent skeleton lying down.
Giving up on finding any human life near the prison, I had no choice but to head for the nearby city in the hopes of finding survivors. The journey would have taken less than 2 hours in a car. Walking, however, took an entire day. I walked for miles without food and water in the brutal heat of the day.
Once I had finally arrived in the city, the full exigency of the situation hit me. It was here where I saw the full extent of the destruction that the bombs had wrought. Many buildings had been reduced to disturbingly large piles of rubble. The roads were covered in cars and the skeletons of pedestrians. It was a truly horrifying scene.
If I thought I had been unprepared when I saw the terrifying results of the war, I was even more so unprepared when I ran into a man whose flesh had atrophied, leaving his muscles and sinews bare to the world. This man is what you likely now know as a ghoul: a person who miraculously survived the nuclear bombings and fallout, at the price that they had to live in a slowly deteriorating body for the rest of their existence.
When I greeted him, he greeted me with a mordant glare, his eyes filled to the brim with anger and hatred and a startling lack of humanity. Out of nowhere, he ran at me, screaming incoherent words. This man, as I would later find out, was one of the many ghouls who had succumbed to feral instincts, marking him as a feral ghoul.
Frightened half to death, I ran as fast as I could to get away from the monstrous humanoid. I ended up in a general store, blocking the door behind me so that the ghoul could not come after me. Desperate for another human, I explored the general store. Much to my disappointment, I found the skeleton of a person who, from the looks of the clothing that still draped their skeleton, had been the cashier.
This was the breaking point for me, I admit. For months on end I had lived in fear. I knew that deep inside I had the makings of a brutal killer and fearing for my life made me pathetic. Furious at this new world and the dangers within it, as well as with myself, I immediately decided to gather supplies. I would not go out without a bang. I would spend every waking minute fighting for the life I had rightfully earned.
The first thing I did was gather weaponry, for in this new age the only way you can survive is through bloodshed. After gathering my supplies, I went off in search of fellow humans.
Here I am now. I've managed to survive five years of living in a barbaric society. I've managed to find more humans and together we are heading out West to California, where we hope to try and rebuild society. If you are reading this and you are interested, head for California.