out deadly roentgens in a hot rain of fallout.
Using the butt of the Savage, I broke the window, shattering it from its frame.
I took aim.
And as I did so, the six of them out there raised their fists, extending their first fingers, and pointed at me. Their oval puckered mouths opened and they emitted that high droning whine that rose in volume until it was nearly hypersonic, making my ears ring and then hurt, my brain filled with waves of agony.
I jerked the trigger, took out a girl in the middle.
The round caught her dead in the chest and the effect was instantaneous: she was tossed back, the entry wound spilling some black steaming fluid and right away she began to writhe and twitch like she’d just taken hold of a high power line. Black smoke boiled from her, something like blue fire erupting and consuming. She blazed up like one of those snakes you burn on the Fourth of July, just smoking and popping and going to black ash.
That’s how she died.
And before I could sight in on another, they all let loose with that discordant droning noise that was howling and lonesome. Like insects. Enraged insects droning in a desolate summer field. They converged on the house, not running or even walking, but gliding forward with some insane locomotion I couldn’t even guess at.
The rest of my posse were in the room by then, all with guns in their hands. Even Janie who hated guns. The Geiger was clicking away, registering the massive radioactivity coming from the Children.
They were at the door.
A flickering cold light licked around its edges. The door cracked and buckled, great jagged rents running down its face. It blackened, smoke rising from it. Then it blew in and the Children were filling the doorway, eyes lit with a terrible xanthic glow that reflected off their scabrid faces. Lamprey mouths were open to reveal rows and rows of tiny hooked teeth, radioactive steam blowing out in hissing clouds that crackled like static electricity.
A girl stepped in the room first.
Her bare feet sizzled on the dirty carpet, burning footprints right into the fibers she was cooking so hot with radionuclides.
Everyone fired before they cooked with her.
Carl had a Mossberg 500 12-gauge, Texas Slim had a. 50 cal Desert Eagle, and Janie had a. 30 Smith. We laid down a considerable volume of fire, cutting down the Children as they tried to ghost through the door with a glowing shroud of radioactive mist.
We kept shooting until there was nothing left to shoot.
The Children had fallen in a whining/screeching heap just inside the room, pissing that toxic black blood and going kinetic with their own nuclear saturation, burning and twisting, clouds of black oily smoke filling the room. Their flesh went to hot running tallow, then ash. Their superheated skeletons were phosphorescent and arcing with juice, rising up one last time like they were trying to escape the smoldering wreckage of their flesh…then they crashed back down into it, crumbling into fragments.
I saw a blackened skull roll free, smoke rising from it, jaws sprung open as if to scream. It made me think about how close those little fuckers had gotten and how hot they were with radioactivity. One of these days we’re gonna absorb too much and we’ll all be popping with tumors. Gotta happen.
Then Carl grabbed my arm. “Man, we better get the fuck out.” He was holding the Geiger up and it was clicking fiercely. “It’s pretty damn hot in here.”
I followed him out the back way, out into the shadows and consuming darkness of the night.
And whatever waited there.
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.
3
We took time to reload when we were an easy block away, darting beneath an old oak and planting ourselves in its shadows. We caught our breath. Had a drink of water from our bottles. The Geiger was reading forty micro- roentgens which was strictly background radiation. That was pretty normal. Before the war, background rad was something like ten to fifteen micro-roents in your average American city. Now twenty was the low end and fifty to sixty being the high end…of course, that didn’t take into account places like LA that had taken direct hits and were still cooking hot.
“We gotta find us a place to hide out for the night,” Carl said.
Texas Slim chuckled. “It amazes me, Carl, how you get to the root of the problem every time.”
“I got a root for you, asshole.”
“If that’s your root, sonny, then it must’ve been a real bad growing season.”
