After the Bomb

What would happen if a world wide calamity occurred which destroyed most life on earth? How would people survive? What would be left? What type of society would the survivors build? What would the world be like three hundred years later? “After the Bomb” is about a group of college students who survive such an event. Their survival is purely a result of happenstance and blind luck. The students have no idea what caused the calamity. After they survive the initial event, their true challenge begins. How will they survive in the long term? They have almost no resources and only limited survival skills. They must learn to forage for food and find shelter. They search for other survivors with only limited, and unsatisfactory, success. The shattered world begins to rebuild itself. Foliage begins to grow among the burned out ash that remained after the fireball. Animals, insects, fish and birds begin to appear, slowly at first, but in increasing numbers as time goes by. Human survival becomes easier, but is always a struggle. Over time, traces of past civilization fade away. Mechanical devises stop working. Metal corrodes. Wooden and plastic objects break and rot away. The students must learn to make everything they need to survive. Relationships develop which eventually lead to families, and to friction among the families. The survivors split into family groups and scatter to other habitable areas. In time, the initial survivors perish, leaving generations of offspring behind them. With only a limited gene pool to start with, the families eventually develop into very different looking groups of people with languages that differ almost as much as the groups appearances. Two of the groups live side by side and continue to associate with each other. The others drift further apart over time, until they have only limited contact. In time, recollection of events before the calamity fades away. Humans have lost the ability to read and write and in the absence of writing, history is passed from generation to generation orally. Legends always start with the phrase “After the Bomb” and are passed from generation to generation around the evening camp fire. Most technology, as we know it, ceases to exist. The families’ survival is dictated by their ability to obtain food and shelter and by the seasons, weather and assorted other natural events. The story ends three hundred after the beginning. A family elder is guiding a group of young men through a dense forest when, under the intense questioning of his inquisitive son, he realizes that neither he nor anyone else has any recollection of anything that occurred prior to the disaster. Humanity had started over. Mankind was no longer the driving force at the very top of the food chain, but was merely another player, effectively equal to all the other predators. Though the humans hunted and fished for their survival, they had only a negligible impact on the other species. The air was clean and the waters ran pure and clear. Mother Earth had healed herself.