The world didn't end with a bang, or even a slow, creeping whimper. It ended with a cough. A simple, dry, hacking cough that echoed across the globe before anyone truly grasped its lethal symphony. We called it the Crimson Rot, not for the color of the symptoms, but for the swiftness with which it bled society dry. It wasn't a complex pathogen; it was an efficient one. The initial symptoms were misleadingly mild: a headache, a fever, that persistent, irritating cough. Most people assumed it was a severe flu season, dismissing the early warnings from fringe scientists and overwhelmed doctors.
The truly terrifying part of the Crimson Rot wasn't the fatality rate, which was horrifying enough, wiping out close to eighty percent of the global population; it was the speed of transmission. It didn't need bodily fluids or close contact. It was airborne, transmitted by microscopic spores that could linger in the air for hours and settle on any surface. A single sneeze in a crowded place was an execution sentence for everyone present. Within two months of its first recognized outbreak in a densely populated megacity, the infrastructure of the civilized world had collapsed. Governments crumbled as leaders and essential workers succumbed, power grids failed, supply lines snapped, and the silence descended.
I remember the last moments of normalcy with a painful clarity. The frantic news reports, the panicked shoppers emptying grocery shelves, the sudden, unsettling sight of military vehicles patrolling quiet suburban streets. Then, the power went out for good, and the screens went blank. The world shifted from organized chaos to utter, primitive silence, broken only by the occasional distant scream or the guttural roar of a starving dog. We were reduced, in an instant, from sophisticated beings to mere survivors scrabbling for canned goods and clean water. The rules of society were rewritten in blood and necessity, and the central truth became brutally simple: if you weren't actively surviving, you were dying.
The transition from a society of plenty to a world of scarcity was jarring. Within weeks, the corpses were everywhere—in their cars, their homes, and littering the streets where they'd collapsed trying to flee the spreading contagion. There was no time for funerals, no manpower for mass graves, just a grim, practical need to avoid contamination and move on. The air itself felt heavy with the ghosts of the past. The post-apocalyptic landscape wasn't some Mad Max wasteland initially; it was just our world, quiet, decaying, and suddenly deadly. Every standing building was a tomb, every quiet street a potential trap. This is the new reality. This is how we live now.