The next day, the news began reporting on the sudden increase in allergies that seemed to have gripped the nation. And then people started dying. The young woman who had so enjoyed that beautiful spring day was among the first to die. An autopsy revealed an aggressive new virus as the cause, a virus that was totally unknown. The medical and scientific world threw themselves into discovering what it was and where it came from, but the more they studied it, the more questions they had. It started out as a kind of respiratory infection before spreading to every other body system and wreaking havoc until the body could take no more and simply shut down. Once diagnosed, a person had only weeks to live at best, days in the worst cases. But what made it so deadly was that a person could remain asymptomatic for weeks or even months before becoming symptomatic as they inevitably did. Weeks and months that a person could still be transmitting the virus.
What began as mild alarm soon grew into full on panic as the virus spread across the globe. Within weeks it had invaded every continent except Antarctica and within months there were cases in every country. The drastic measures that countries began to adopt seemed to do little to stop the spread. Occasionally the number of positive cases would slow, but they never stopped.
For the next two years, the virus ravaged the world. Every time scientists thought they had found a way to contain it, it would evolve again and the number of sick and dead would skyrocket once more. Mass graves became normal as the death toll increased and cemeteries and morticians became overrun with the dead. And as things worsened, the dead were left to decay where they died in their homes. There was no one left to collect the bodies, it was every man, woman, and child for his and herself.
But as the human population declined, other life flourished. Without the threat of humans, many endangered species began to slowly recover. Forests began to grow and spread, slowly swallowing up villages, towns, and eventually cities. Buildings began to crumble, the revived plant and animal life speeding up their decay. The skies above once smog covered cities began to clear as factories ground to a halt and cars remained permanently parked. Five years after the outbreak, human life had ceased to exist on planet Earth. Animals and plants ruled the once thriving cities abiding by the only laws that remained: the laws of nature.
A young fawn followed its mother from the ruins of an old parking structure, lifting its face to the warm sun. It was a beautiful spring morning, the sun shining, birds singing, trees blooming, in short, a perfect day.
