A New Bloom

It was nothing like they said it would be.Yeah, sure: there was the mushroom cloud, the heat, the cold, some death, but it wasn’t anything near as tough to get through as they thought. Who you ask? Those people in the government. It’s good to wake up in the morning and know we don’t have any of that anymore.After the blast and once things settled, we realized they were gone. No one knows which one started it, but DC was essentially wiped off the map. Moscow, North Korea, gone.They had no idea that the very thing many of them said didn’t exist is what kept the end of the world from happening.Two words: global warming.I don’t know all the science of it but what I can decipher from the egg-heads all over TV now is that the junk we’d been spewing into the atmosphere made that ozone hole; when the blast happened, that part was weak enough to let the bulk of the bad stuff out and into space.The other thing that didn’t happen was that cockroaches didn’t take over the world. Sure, they survived and got a little bigger, but the real problem are the rats.I guess that’s what we call them but they aren’t like they were before. Now, they are all like kangaroo rats or something. They walk on hind legs, stand about a foot  high, know how to use their hands, and are mean as the dickens. And all they eat is meat. Any kind. Unless you have a good electric perimeter and a gun, you’ll lose any livestock, chickens, or pets to them before you’ll lose them to a hungry vagrant. That’s probably because the rates of homelessness didn’t skyrocket after the blast. The food in the stores didn’t go bad because the grid didn’t fail. The stuff that was closest got radiated but only a few people ate it and it wasn’t distributed, so the percentage of the population that died from poisoning was also minimal.I heard they were going to make each blast site a museum or something, a place people can go to see and memorialize the occasion. I thought about going when it’s done but none of those places is close to my home. Plus, I gotta stay close to keep the fence in good working order. Did I mention the rats? Yeah, Strong suckers.