Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back — Joe R. Lansdale

They did it -- they launched the damned nukes and the world went pretty much straight to hell. Not many survived, but some of those who did emerged twenty years later, to a world where mutant whales heaved themselves across the blackened, dry seabed of the Pacific, and the roses… oh God, the roses.

“Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back” is a chilling post-nuclear short story by Joe R. Lansdale.