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| Bleak, no? |
1. We'll All Get Pretty Salty
After all natural food sources are destroyed and refrigeration becomes impossible, you'll have to rely on canned food to survive. The only problem is, most canned food is obscenely high in sodium, which is why it preserves so well. The more you eat, the more salt gets into your body, and without reliable clean water to regularly flush your system, your blood pressure will skyrocket. Heart disease and strokes will be the norm in post-apocalyptic America, killing more people than machete attacks and zombie bites combined.
2. Thanks for Nothing, Tree
The life-ending gas doesn't just affect humans; it destroys plant life, too. At least 80% of the world's trees will be killed off by the Jamaican bombing. This will have several large scale and important impacts on your life. When the trees die, their leaves will drop and will not grow back, offering now buffer from strong post-apocalyptic winds, which are obscenely cold because of apocalyptic winter (more on that later!). Because these winds will be stronger, they'll uproot these dead trees easily, ripping the roots out of the soil. This makes trees unstable, and it also makes it nearly impossible for them to catch and trap water. You can count on more mudslides and floods in post-apocalyptic America.
3. Your Tax Dollars at Work
Because the thick, green gas will blot out the sun, the average temperature is going to drop all across the country. The chemicals in the air will also wreak havoc on the natural precipitation system. One of the byproducts of this will be an excessive number of potholes in paved roads, caused by frozen precipitation expanding in the soil beneath the pavement and weakening the surface. With no road crews to fix these potholes, streets will be completely useless as transportation ways, even on foot. It'll be like walking through a detonated minefield.
4. Free as a Bird (Sort Of)
When the bombing starts, it'll be quick and severe. The actual apocalyptic event will be over in a matter of minutes. But the poison gas will be contained to the lower levels of the atmosphere, meaning many commercial flights will be above the fray. If you're on a plane, you'll get a great view of the end of the world!
That's the good news. The bad news is, with no one left on the ground to guide your plane in, and with hundreds of other planes scrambling to land, there's about a 97% chance your aircraft will collide with another one and/or the ground rather than land safely. Your survival victory is likely to be short-lived.
5. A Super Result
Eventually, we'll all try farming again, even though we know the soil's pretty irradiated from the gas and from the nuclear meltdowns that happened when there stopped being people around to manage the power plants. But hey, people gotta eat! We'll grow vegetables again, and these vegetables will contain harmful, sometimes nuclear properties. Some people will die instantly from eating them. Others will feel no harmful effects. But a small subset of the remaining humanity will actually benefit from this radioactive food. They'll exhibit small benefits; a bit of extra strength, slightly higher defenses against sickness, etc. Eventually, these improved humans will breed with other improved humans, and the strengths will become greater with each passing generation until we breed our way into a society where one in every 20 people is a superpowered individual. After as few as 150 years after the apocalyptic event, the world's society will have superheroes and supervillains whizzing around and engaging in various superpowered dealings.
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