I was watching a movie (don’t even remember which one) and it had yet another tech-based apocalyptic setting and that got me wishing for more creative post-apocalyptic worlds. It’s always just tech or sand, so we need to see more interesting ends of days. My story revolves around the Flora Punk Apocalypse.
In the near future, warfare develops a weapon people call The Dust. World war breaks out and Dust weapons spread across the world. Just a few bombs are enough to spread it everywhere so every human on the planet is infected. Most nuclear plants and other dangerous sites that might become catastrophes are shut down in hopes of preventing meltdowns for the few survivors.
Most people when exposed to Dust turn into dust and die almost instantly. Shortly after dying, their bodies rapidly sprout strange plants, vines, and flowers like a rapid burst of evolution. Most die off quickly, but the surviving species thrive. Battlefields, cemeteries, and hospitals soon explode into miniature rain forests.
A very small part of the population is spared from the immediate effects. They’re still infected so they bloom when they die, but they continue living normally until then.
What survivors find out is that the dust that remains is an amazing fertilizer and plants across the world grow super rapidly and in new forms when exposed to it, either during the bloom at death or afterwards when the dust remains for years.
Since most tech and infrastructure remains, the drastically reduced population is able to survive long enough to come together and form small communities (a breakdown of all maps and countries, pretty much just communities and small cities are all that exist now). Plant life has taken over most of the globe and recovers too quickly to clear it out and rebuild in a lot of places.
With all the regenerating plant life and with a renewed environment, the world that builds itself back is much cleaner and has resources and food for all, but the plants have taken over so much that the world’s climate starts to change. Deserts start to disappear the burst of evolution means that plants with all kinds of resistances have moved to areas that were barren before.
The Dust is in everybody's blood, passed on through generations from the first exposure, so this is the state of the world going forward. Communities have to find new ways to handle corpses and terminally ill people because the bloom on death causes damage around them.
People that were in stasis before the bombs dropped are “Clean Bloods” since they were frozen and protected from the war. They are the only few free from Dust and are highly revered and cared for as they're woken up. However, through exposure to the environment, food, and other people, they too will eventually become infected.