{"id":241,"date":"2023-07-27T14:48:57","date_gmt":"2023-07-27T14:48:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.314stories.com\/?page_id=241"},"modified":"2023-07-27T14:49:17","modified_gmt":"2023-07-27T14:49:17","slug":"after","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.314stories.com\/?page_id=241","title":{"rendered":"After"},"content":{"rendered":"

Once it was all over, there were still a few pockets of humans remaining.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I guess this is how extinction feels to the on-the-ground animals.\u00a0 Slow enough to see it getting away from you.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Fast enough to feel out of your control.<\/span><\/p>\n

All those things people had been telling us for years? Most of them came true. The thing is, so did many others.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Summers. Kept getting warmer.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Slowly, at first.\u00a0 Like, oh, this is annoying.\u00a0 A little scarier each season. Each new year. When it was 130 degrees, those people who could still move did.\u00a0 Migration.\u00a0 Flocks to the north.\u00a0 Like a trail of haves. The advantaged ones could keep buying new paths farther north.\u00a0 To the places that used to remember cold.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But that was all after the storms.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If those hadn\u2019t erased more than half the people, I think there would have been even more fighting about who got to occupy space up north. Most people got left behind in the frenzy.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

News stopped predicting the weather. By that point, it felt like the only news worth watching; but it was also like reading your obituary while on the up-side of the ground.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those storms were funny things. Popped up in weird places.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

How a tornado hit the coast.\u00a0 How there was enough water to have such a large inland hurricane. Strange. I was little older than a kid then, but heard stories about how it was not always this way.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know how people caused all that.\u00a0 What a mess.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Of course, that was after the illness. Or illnesses.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Even before it got too hot to live there, it was the illnesses.\u00a0 So many plagues destroyed the cities.\u00a0 People stayed away from them for months, just waiting for the smell to dissipate. All those bodies.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Just rotting.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Nowhere for them to go. No one wanted to touch them.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

After the cities died, the people from farther out places.\u00a0 Took sorties into the paved canyons.\u00a0 Gathered supplies. They always had the best food\u2013so many canned goods, so many stores still stocked with stuff that lasted.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

You just had to watch out for the pets.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The deaths of all those people did funny things to the dogs and cats in the cities. They went from scavengers to predators. You would think a little thing like a house cat would not be scary. Them things were like venomous snakes.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Their saliva so infected.\u00a0 They would bite you and just trail along behind you, waiting for infection to set in.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Scary stuff.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the pockets of people that were left, there were self-sufficient farms, mostly run by ranchers and farmers who already knew how to do that stuff anyway.\u00a0 They had all the fuel they wanted because a lot of them had land above fossil fuel reservoirs.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

No more competition. No more regulation.\u00a0 They could use what they needed, when they needed it. Cost only the sweat of their brows.<\/span><\/p>\n

Funny how the thing that so many people said was going to be the end of us\u2013 those oils and gases\u2013might be the only thing keeping some of us going.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This is evolution at work.<\/span><\/p>\n

I hope the humans that come out of this are born smarter. Knowing not to make all those mistakes all over again.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Once it was all over, there were still a few pockets of humans remaining.\u00a0\u00a0 I guess this is how extinction feels to the on-the-ground animals.\u00a0 Slow enough to see it getting away from you.\u00a0 Fast enough to feel out of your control. All those things people had been telling us…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":191,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-241","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.314stories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.314stories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.314stories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.314stories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.314stories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=241"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.314stories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":242,"href":"https:\/\/www.314stories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/241\/revisions\/242"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.314stories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.314stories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}