The end of the world was picturesque, almost.
It's not every day you see the London skyline tarnished with the thick smoke of death, winding round Big Ben and moving silently over the Thames like a dormant plague. To walk past the gates of Buckingham Palace and hear your own footsteps seems an absurd prospect, but they echoed nonetheless, seemingly travelling for miles. To be truly alone in a city is an unimaginable feat, and gives a person a sense of power which is both god-worthy and crushingly lonely.
When you imagine silence, it comes with the faint buzz of a plane in the distance, the quiet hum of activity outside your door. To stand alone in a street and hear absolutely nothing but a faint breeze swirling your hair hair in circles is something no human should ever have to endure in 2020. It's the year of technology; the buzz of drones, the angry crescendo of a car engine starting, going too fast down a side road. The rustle of sweet wrappers and the dull thud of a backpack rhythmically hammering on a fifteen year old's shoulders as she runs to catch the bus which rumbles so loudly the road seems to shake. The anthem of 2020 should not have been silence, but for many cities, it was.
The year of technology went dark, and the streetlights went out. People cowered inside their houses and lined the streets. People both united and fought against each other, because the human race is fickle and cannot decide if it is bitterly warring or dragging one another back from the brink. One didn't prevail over the other, and perhaps the most human part of the destruction of the world as we knew it was the indecision on who the real enemy was.
Few things in life are certain. When we wake up in the morning, the sun will rise. If we do not eat, we will become hungry and if we do not pay our taxes, we will be sent letters of fury. There is a spectrum of certainty though, and some things may seem far more absolute than others. One thing we knew for sure though, is that no species on earth would handle potential extinction as poorly as humans did.
((Firstly, thanks so much for all the votes and comments on Eyes of the Infected, I couldn't reply to everything when I came back on here but I hugely appreciate all of it. This is gonna be similar in some respects but is ultimately a whole new story. Cheers for reading!))