Biohazard

2

The Children.

Who were they and, more importantly, what were they.

Nobody I had ever talked to had any real good answers. But the same radiation saturation that killed adults by the hundreds of thousands and millions did something else to the kids. And not just certain ones, but all kids, anyone under ten years of age for whatever reason…but none older than that. Maybe the onset of puberty made them biochemically infertile for the change. But under ten, well, it mutated something in them.

Your own kids or the kids next door, the charming little girls playing dress-up in the backyard or the rambunctious little boys playing sandlot baseball…they were not human anymore.

They were monsters.

The radiation had gotten hold of them, turned them into deranged night stalkers with yellow luminous eyes and fingers that would actually burn you to a cinder if they got a hold of you. They hunted by night in packs like wolves or vampires, killing anything they could catch. Somehow, some way, maybe because they were young and still growing, their cells had absorbed the fallout, made it part of their natural rhythms. Nobody really knew and most were too scared to find out.

There were survivors out there that thought the Children were ghosts or ghouls, supernatural things that crept out by night to feed. That wasn’t true, of course, but you could hardly blame anyone for thinking it. For it was really hard to imagine anything as scary as the Children. Radioactive fallout was part of life here in the new spooky world. You had to live with it and learn how to detect it, what places were hot and how to avoid them.

But the Children made that difficult.

Because they were, essentially, fallout and fallout that was cunning and evil. Fallout that hunted its victims.

I figured they did it for a reason. Maybe they absorbed something from people, something they needed. It was hard to say, but it had to be something. I knew they were not supernatural even though sometimes they acted that way and they did only come out at night. They were not flesh and blood as we understood flesh and blood, but a different sort of flesh and blood. Something completely alien right down to their blazing hot subatomics.

But they could be killed.

If you put a bullet in them, they’d literally burn up like atomic piles right in front of you. I suppose if you stuck a spear in them the same thing would happen, but if you got that close you’d fry.

So bullets worked best.

The smart thing was to avoid them, to hide out by night and stay off the streets. That was your best bet. I had no idea where they laired themselves for the daylight hours and I honestly didn’t want to know. In the back of my mind, I always envisioned them stretched out like the undead in reactor cores. Nobody really knew.

These days, everyone was afraid of kids because all kids became Children. It was rumored that they were coming right out of the womb like that and pregnant women were being killed on sight by gangs to avoid any more Children being born.

It didn’t bode well for humanity’s future given that the next generation were hideous mutations.

Extinction was only a matter of time.