Rot from Within

Before the war, before the collapse, San Francisco had already begun to rot from within.

The streets, once vibrant with culture, innovation, and restless energy, had transformed into a gauntlet of despair. Tents sprawled across sidewalks and parks like a second skin covering the city, stretching from the Tenderloin to SoMa and beyond. Blue tarps flapped in the wind, plastic and cloth shelters clung to buildings like ghosts refusing to leave.

Every block bore the weight of desperation. Human figures slumped on corners, their bodies hollowed out by fentanyl and lost years. Some stared blankly into the void, unmoving. Others twitched or wailed, caught in drug-fueled nightmares. Needles littered the gutters like dead leaves. The stench—of sweat, smoke, rot, and urine—hung thick in the air, inescapable.

Honduran drug gangs had moved in with surgical precision, carving the city into zones of control. Entire neighborhoods were handed over to them—either through apathy, fear, or outright corruption. The police had retreated, handcuffed by politics, bureaucracy, and their own exhaustion. City leaders made speeches and held press conferences, but no one walked the streets they spoke about. They had long since abandoned them.

The cartels operated openly. Armed lookouts perched in housing project windows. Street dealers in designer sneakers and bulletproof vests passed out baggies like candy—fentanyl-laced pills disguised as medicine, or powder that could kill with a breath. Locals called it the “white death.” Those who refused to move or comply were threatened, beaten, or vanished.

Businesses shuttered. Families packed their cars and fled eastward in caravans. Downtown became a hollow core—gleaming towers surrounded by collapse. Even tech giants, once the rulers of the city, had begun to quietly pull out, sending workers remote, leaving office blocks empty and cold. San Francisco had become a city of echoes, ruled not by governance or law, but by fear and fentanyl.

People prayed for order. For something. Anything.

But the collapse didn't come with fire or a bomb. It came with silence. With the last honest person leaving. With the final neighborhood falling. With the collective shrug of a city that no longer remembered what it had once been.

And then, everything fell.

Now, those few who remained could still remember the days before the war officially broke. They remembered the tents, the glassy-eyed addicts, the lookouts with radios, the politicians who smiled while the city bled. They remembered how it happened.

And they vowed, if given the chance, they would not let it happen again.