The last humans left alive in England were barely teenagers, unsurprisingly. Their generation had grown up knowing that the end of the world was coming soon, their teachers taught them all that they could in the hopes that most would survive and another generation would remain to resurrect civilisation.
These children had no such plans.
What they had known as civilisation had meant them being cooped up in sweaty lead-lined rooms, told time and time again that every adult before them had somehow screwed up the planet and it was their duty to fix it all or they would die.
It wasn't exactly inspiring, to say the least.
As much as they had been prepared, countless doomsday scenarios drilled into their heads until they could spew all seventy-six major survival aids word-for-word, they were still unprepared for a world without people. A world now full of birdsong and silence, roads crowded with cars that nobody would drive again and cities reeking of rotting food from restaurants whose patrons went in the night like almost everyone else.
The children took nothing from the cities they walked through, intent on reaching the wilderness.
Humanity's last hope wanted nothing to do with their past, choosing instead to make themselves something newer, better, greater than anything before them. The children chose to embrace the end of all that they'd known with open arms and in return it took what little semblance of humanity they had left.
They became the next best thing - from them came the unimaginable and behind them the world wept.
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