This short science fiction story takes place in 2045, at the end of the Third World War. This story mainly focuses on the effects of nuclear devastation on the world. Enjoy!

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It was November 2045, and the Third World War had just ended.
It had been just over an entire century since the Third Reich crumbled, since Adolf Hitler took his own life before the Allies could take it for him in the Nuremberg Trials, since the end of the war crime that had the European air smelling of burnt flesh and soot.
Finally, after eleven eternal years of relentless, violent rancor, the tides of war had calmed and, eventually, stagnated.
Dark times had befallen the world, due to the catastrophic results of the world’s powers launching nuclear warheads at each other. It left some places burning with fallout, while it left many others entirely decimated.
A global population that had once numbered above eight billion had been greatly reduced to a measly ninety-nine million within a decade, exterminated from history like the dinosaurs that had once roamed the land millions of years ago.

Former U.S. Soldier Tyler Rivers, who had fought in the war from the first gunshot to the last, turned forty-eight on the twelfth of June that year. He returned from the battlefield his hometown of Seattle, Washington, which was now lifeless and torn asunder from nuclear holocaust. The city that formerly was bustling and vivacious was now reduced to nothing but rubble, smoke, and burning civilian corpses.
The only structure resilient enough to withstand the violence was the Space Needle, though it was now derelict, a lonely shell of its former self, colored a dark grey by years of dirt and soot, which the explosions lobbed at the city and others around it.
Rivers looked upon his hometown and began to weep for the cost of the innocent, civilian lives that a uranium bomb decimated in 2038.

Virtually all of the cities in the world became this way, at some point or another, even those of the countries that were not involved with the vicious war, such as India, Sweden, Brazil, and Canada.
Shanghai was destroyed in 2044 by a Chinese missile gone awry.
Mumbai was wiped off the face of the Earth by the Russians in 2042.
Moscow became vaporized by the Germans in 2039.
New York City had been in the same shape as Seattle since 2034.
With many of the world’s largest cities gone, the world’s population decreased dramatically…enough to bring it back down to ninety-nine million, which was how it was in the 1780s.

The remaining people of Earth had to repopulate, which was easy to do, but there was a roadblock: Where do they go from there? Where would they live? Almost all of the world’s cities were obliterated between 2034 and 2045. Would they have to rebuild? Rebuilding the entire world would take many decades and generations to do so.
It was either rebuild or go out, like the many species of animals and plants that were made extinct in such short time.

At that moment, Rivers and many of the other remaining people of Earth began to reconstruct their cities and help restore them to their former glory. They continue to rebuild to this day, in 2078, and they will continue to do so until 2113.