5.The rise of the mutant beasts
Kahara and Dwax kept chatting away just outside of the augmentation shop.
"I've been meaning to ask, why are you green?"
"It's a forced augmentation. They did this to me, but I don't know to what end. All I know is that I'm strong and green now. According to my hallucination gland, it's chlorophyll. It should allow me to photosynthesize."
Her eyes filled with rage all of a sudden.
" They are using us as lab rats."
Dwax was far more used to getting abused like that. There were companies that used hobos to test their medicines before the war. In exchange, those companies would pay the homeless a meager amount of money. Dwax stood upright and yelled in indignation:
"They didn't even pay us anything."
Kahara looked at Dwax, befuddled. "What a weirdo," she thought.
Quite a distance away, in the wilderness, the bioweapon was doing a different kind of work. The Ulkjen mountain range contained a vast forest. The reason that this region went unmolested was that it was uninhabitable for humans. It also had no natural resources to exploit. The Ulkjen Mountain Range was famous for its fox and rabbit populations. Most of the foxes have died. Even though most of the rabbits have died too, since they multiplied far faster, they were going to regain their numbers in no time.
The rabbits that survived would carry the mutations that had been induced by the bioweapon. Various mutated rabbits were going to overpopulate and leave the Ulkjen Mountain Range once its greenery had been consumed by them.
In a neighboring city, in the lion cage, a male lion tripled in size after the attack. It went into a feeding frenzy when his instincts went haywire due to the genetic manipulation he went through. He ate his entire pack as well as most of the prey beasts in its large enclosure. The people who mutated it were thinking of making a war beast. Such creatures could be used in asymmetric warfare. When people who have nothing decide they don't like the people in power, whether they are right or not, the people in power are ready to pay good money to repel them. That's exactly where asymmetric warfare is hurtful to people in power. The people in power often go bankrupt dealing with a ragtag bunch of militants.
There is where the weapons, like the giant lions, come in. The beast acts as a predator against human beings, systematically exterminating them and liberating the people in power from the headache that is the riff-raff.
It broke through the zoo's walls through sheer power and started to consume the rotten meat outside.
The birds fell when the attack first hit. Insects had died en masse too, but the population was going to rebound, devouring the crops and other flora.
The pod was going to finish the process two days later. Dwax found a hammer in a box in the shop and broke into a nearby house. He threw the corpse out of the window and asked Kahara if she wanted to sleep in a soft bed. He lay on the couch and started to watch whatever movies the people who lived here before had on their TV.
The next morning, Dwax woke Kahara up. She had slept in the bed while he had slept on the couch.
"Kahara! I've found pizza in the freezer. Let's eat it!"
Kahara was the kind of woman who was grumpy when she woke up.
"Pizza for breakfast? Are you stupid? Don't they have any tea? Maybe some olives or tomatoes? Cheese and bread?" Kahara sighed and said,
"Let me prepare breakfast for you. You need to learn how to live as a human being. Not some hobo."
Dwax was a bit disappointed, but he let Kahara do as she wished. She skillfully prepared a great breakfast, complete with buttery eggs and molten cheese as sauce. Seeing Dwax enjoying the breakfast so deliciously filled Kahara with a sense of pride. She was the kind of woman who liked it when other people enjoyed something she prepared.
After Dwax cleared his throat, he told Kahara what he had in mind:
"We must find some canned food until we can sustain ourselves by foraging. Eventually, the food in supermarkets will become inedible."
Kahara pondered for a moment.
"Alright, let's do that. But we need to confirm Warrow's condition first."
Dwax smiled.
"Sounds like a plan."
Two hours later, Dwax was back watching TV. Kahara ran screaming out of the toilet.
"It touched me! It touched me!"
Dwax ran into the toilet to check out what was happening. He was surprised to see a giant cockroach mixed with a giant millipede sticking out from the toilet's hole like a snake.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck."
Dwax slammed the door on its face. It was the most terrifying thing he had seen in his life, apart from existential dread and the sheer force of the bioweapon attack. The millipede-roach inspired a more primal fear in him. In that sense, the monstrous thing was the most terrifying.
He heard something scratching the toilet door.
"Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit."
He picked up a meat cleaver from the kitchen. The cockroach came out of a hole it made in the wooden door. Before Dwax could do anything, Kahara threw an entire couch at it. Stuck in the hole and slammed by the couch, the roach-millipede has been snapped in two. Its green blood smeared on the tastefully ornate white door of the bathroom. Kahara was quite shaken.
"Fuck, fuck, fucking shit, fuck."
Kahara was shivering in fear and disgust. They became far calmer ten minutes later.
"I want to stay guard at Warrow's pod. Can you find some weapons for us, Dwax? It shouldn't just be guns. We should have some things that require no ammo too. A baseball bat or spear would do."
Dwax nodded. He picked up two chef knives from the kitchen. The entire tone of the situation had changed. He couldn't act like he was on vacation anymore. He had to constantly defend himself from the possible attacks.
They left the house.
This was the shopping district, and you could find anything you wanted there. That included a hardware store.
Afraid of an uprising, the previous regime didn't sell many ballistic weapons. The economy and freedoms were not what they could be, and having guns everywhere wouldn't bode well for the government. Dwax thought about the police headquarters. He could probably find guns there, but it was far away. The streets were littered with cars, and one couldn't get anywhere with fully automatic, self-driving cars. It was a half-day walk.
While searching for a hardware store, he found a biomedical store. There was a wheelchair there. Dwax took the slickest-looking one to use it as a shopping cart. When he returns with it, and if his friend Warrow is still paralyzed, he could throw the wheelbarrow away and use the wheelchair instead.
When he found the hardware store, he was fairly excited. He loved the hardware store. The hardware store was where all the manly sh*t was.
He loaded two axes, an electric drill, a nailgun with plenty of nails, and a crowbar. While walking around, he found a security closet and spent half an hour prying open the gun cabinet with the crowbar and the drill. There, he scored a shotgun and two pistols. He also got two boxes of shotgun rounds and five boxes of nine-millimeter ammunition.
He loaded them onto the wheelchair too.
After loading some canned food, satisfied with his haul, he made his way back to the metamorphosis pods. Kahara was waiting there, sitting on a lawn chair. Kahara was happy to see him.
"Oh, thank God, you are alright."
Dwax nodded. He had lost quite a lot of time trying to pry that gun cabinet open.
"Is there anything out of the ordinary, like the thing we've seen upstairs?"
Kahara shook her head.
"There is nothing out of the ordinary. To be frank, I can't handle another giant insect. It's antennea touched me when I was trying to do my business." Kahara shivered again.
"Could you imagine how fucking startled I was? I almost got scared to death." She glanced at the wheelchair.
"Hmm, you got two axes and a crowbar, a nail gun, two handguns, and a shotgun. On top of that, you've brought a wheelchair too."
She thought to herself for a second.
"If Warrow gets well, we should get ourselves two shopping carts to haul our stuff around. Cars are all useless since the streets are littered with corpses and cars. Self driving cars couldn't find a way forward."
Dwax shook his head.
"I think one shopping cart is enough. We shouldn't carry around too much, even if Warrow gets well."