Flaca A Coyote's Tale.

Flaca: Prologue

Cino was a small mining settlement, or rather it was a town that actually resided inside of a huge, and vast working salt mine. Its namesake was long abandoned and left to ruin on the surface. The small village in the hot dry Northeastern New Mexico plains had migrated to its artificial subterranean location. The reason for the move was the need to escape the conditions created by the 5th and final global conflict that brought humankind's lofty, and advanced civilization to a near stone-age level.
Before the devastation it was home to worker's who manned a station where robotic automated trains would leave their cargo for trucks to pick up. After the end of the wars when the trains, and trucks stopped coming they had to reopen the salt mines that hadn't been used in centuries. This gave them a dual advantage of protection from the conditions of post-war America, and a commodity to trade.
The settlement was populated with all types of 25th century people, some mutated from the wars of hundreds of years ago, and animals that had also evolved from the same devastation.
Because of the nuclear and biological weapons of the war, the native animal population of the great Southwest had been through a torturous twisting of their genetic code. Some of the animals were descendants of animal experiments that were forced to evolve.
In desperation governments were losing massive amounts of human ground troops in the war from the deadly efficient super weapons in use. They began to volunteer and recruit scientists at the point of a gun. They forced them to come up with more morally objectionable soldiers to continue fighting the faltering ground war. The government laboratories of New Mexico sprouted many failures of these experiments as well as their successes. The genetic altering viruses used to evolve the animals into more militarily useful tools of war had then escaped with along with the test subjects.
In the end, the final end, nuclear weapons were finally unleashed, and at that horrible conclusion the last battle faded, and with it the last vestiges of civilization. the surviving people losing their comforts became more like the animals some more savage, this bringing them into bizarre, and erratic balance with the intelligent animals. All these elements combined eventually would leave the surviving world unrecognizable, and awash in mutations.