Reclamation

After the fall, Los Angeles did not simply die—it dissolved, unraveling into a wasteland where nature and toxins fought for dominance.

The city lay in fragments, sinking into its own ashes.
Concrete buckled.
Steel curled like scorched paper.
Neighborhoods once pulsing with life were now skeletal outlines buried beneath dunes of gray dust that drifted like snow through the empty streets.

Nature Returned, but Twisted

Vegetation pushed through the ruins, but it wasn’t the hopeful green of renewal.
It was feral.
Overgrown.
Poisoned by centuries of chemical runoff and nuclear residue.

Vines the color of bruises crawled up the sides of crumbling towers, their tendrils weaving through shattered windows like fingers searching for purchase. Trees erupted through cracked sidewalks, their bark warped and split, leaves slick with oily sheens that shimmered under the dim, storm-blurred sun.

This was not rebirth—it was reclamation by something wild, desperate, and half-mad.

The Storms Never Stopped

Above it all, the sky churned with perpetual violence.
The storms rolled in daily, black and churning, carrying with them winds sharp enough to strip the paint from rusted vehicles and sandblast exposed bone.
Lightning forked across the horizon in toxic greens and sulfur yellow, illuminating the ruins like an autopsy flash.

Rain fell in acidic sheets, carving channels into the dust hills, turning whole blocks into rivers of muddy poison. Thunder shook the earth, echoing through collapsed subway tunnels where survivors hid.

Survivors Became Phantoms

They no longer walked the streets openly.
They slithered through shadows, crawled through drainpipes, traveled beneath debris where the storms could not reach them.
Their shelters—dugout warrens stitched together with scavenged metal—were hidden behind rockfalls or beneath piles of toppled freeway slabs.

Every movement was measured. Every breath cautious.
The storms hunted them as ruthlessly as the old forces once had.

Those who lived learned to read the weather like scripture:
the shift of the wind,
the taste of the air,
the way dust rose in spirals before a downpour.

Silence was their ally, secrecy their shield.

They whispered to one another in low voices, recalling what the city had once been—not to mourn it, but to remember why they must endure. Because survival was no longer just about living day to day. It was about outlasting the corruption that had brought the world to its knees.

Hidden in their burrows, listening to the storms tear apart what little remained above, they clung to a single truth:

The world had fallen, but they had not.