For at least 20 years, I've been haunted by the book _Earth Abides._  In it, a massive epidemic, a sort of super-flu, kills most of the population of the earth. Maybe a couple of hundred people survive in the US. There are other books with the same theme, but that's the one that I re-read from time to time. When I travel a crowded highway, I picture it empty of cars.  In a shopping mall, I mentally erase all of the other people.  Stories of bioterrorism make it worse.  I see dozens of opportunities to infect a large number of people with an unstoppable gengineered virus. More recently, I'm seeing the germ of a story here.  It's back in the queue, not banging on the door and demanding to be written, but it's definitely there.  First person, diary format.  (Which I've never done before!) What would *you* do, if everyone around you died?   Would you try to contact other people?  How?   Would you stay where you are living now, or pack up the books and the cats and move to somewhere else?  What if, like some of us, you are semi-disabled?   What sort of maintainence do nuclear power plants need?  Will they shut themselves off if certain things aren't done, or will they do a Chernobyl and spread radioactivity to everything downwind?  (There is such a power plant not too far away, but I'm too chicken to call them and ask

Would you stay where you are living now, or pack up the books and the cats and move to somewhere else?  What if, like some of us, you are semi-disabled?   Cities would provide fruitful scavenging grounds for supplies

Nuclear power plants won't (generally speaking) run away if unattended.  The opertors at Chernoble had to a *lot* of things dead wrong to get the results they got, and much of the resulting problem was the graphite fire they got, not a runaway nuclear reaction.  So far as I know, the USSR was the only country that built graphite-cored power reactors. IIRC the UK used graphite-cored reactors at Windscale in the 1940's and early 1950's for plutonium production and experimentation

re-read from time to time. When I travel a crowded highway, I picture it empty of cars.  In a shopping mall, I mentally erase all of the other people.  Stories of bioterrorism make it worse.  I see dozens of opportunities to infect a large number of people with an unstoppable gengineered virus. More recently, I'm seeing the germ of a story here.  It's back in the queue, not banging on the door and demanding to be written, but it's definitely there.  First person, diary format.  (Which I've never done before!) For a whole lot of discussion on this

When I travel a crowded highway, I picture it empty of cars.  In a shopping mall, I mentally erase all of the other people.  Stories of bioterrorism make it worse.  I see dozens of opportunities to infect a large number of people with an unstoppable gengineered virus. <more snipped One of my more surreal experiences was walking through the old Willow Run airport after it closed down.  Ticket counters, signboards with departures and arrivals, information kiosks, concourse gates, everything.  Empty.  Totally empty.  Runways, taxiways, hangers, fire station