Chimera

Chapter Twenty: Camila

-Alice.

It took one day for everything to change. There have been so many nuclear bombs. Lots of cities in America destroyed, but San Francisco luckily wasn't. Near us, LA was hit. The blast wave didn't reach San Francisco, but Dad said that the radiation could still affect us. And he said that the disease is still spreading. I asked if anyone was immune and he said the statistics show only one in a few thousand were safe or some scary statistic like that. If this bombing doesn't end everything, the virus will.

I'm terrified. I haven't seen my friends and I worry about them. I watched the news to see if the city was OK. They said that while San Francisco wasn't hit (so my friends are still alive), there's been a lot of looting and crime. Then the screen went black. No internet has worked since then. A little while later, the electricity went out. But dad has a generator in the lab, so it came back on after a few minutes. That means I can have the lights on and hot water, but the internet isn't working on my tablet.
Dad's hasn't come out of the lab. I don't know what he's doing. Pretty much every hour, a plane lands and people walk out and enter the lab. One day, one of the people was surrounded by guards with guns. I caught a glimpse of them and I couldn't believe my eyes. I think it was the President. I have no idea what the President could be doing here but dad must be doing something big. I just stay in my room now.

It feels like the world is falling apart. It's... deteriorating. And not slowly. It's getting destroyed in a big way. It's a great deterioration.

-Alice.

I've decided to come back to this diary, hell knows why. I guess it reminds me of my old self, from before everything happened. So how long ago was my last entry? Five years. It feels more like twenty. I'm afraid that if I don't keep going with this thing, I'll forget how to write altogether, though that's the kind of skill that's not much use now.

So I guess I need to catch up on everything. The world is so different now. I don't even know if you could call America a country anymore. Everyone's alone, just a collection of settlements made by survivors. We're lucky that no-one's found us here in our hidden glade and that the fields provide enough food to live on.

For those that somehow survived the bombs and violence and disease without a glade like ours, there were even more threats. The animals had mutated into monstrous beasts, strong enough to prey on humans. Most people were defenseless. They needed help, or the radiation morphed beasts would kill them all.

So my dad and his organisation made a decision: to fight fire with fire. If they couldn't create something to defend humanity, humanity would just have to defend itself. And since the collapse of most technology, with all the factories destroyed or not in use, firearms and bombs were no longer produced. My dad had to turn to biology, to create a weapon within us.

Using genetic manipulation, they combined the DNA of animals with humans to create a new genetic code. That gave humans animal genetics. The two species DNA held together with contrived proteins and acids. The idea was to give humans an easy, built-in way to defend themselves and give them some animalistic advantages. The Mutation was then modified to only surface at fifteen, when people were old enough to fight, so there weren't any two year olds running around as lions. They wouldn't have enough focus and willpower, and they could harm others around them, or even lose themselves to their animal hunger.

Then Dad and his team turned the ability into a transferrable mutation, encapsulating the Chimera Mutation in an infectious agent based on a contagious virus which could spread via any organism, human or animal. The Chimera Mutation spread like wildlife through humanity, until everyone could morph. As a side effect, most animals had become strange hybrids due to the binding nature of the Mutation.

Well, that's about it. And this is going to be my last day in the glade, my last day hiding out in this safe place. Dad is rounding up the survivors nearby. He has plans to make a settlement a few miles away from San Francisco, where there's a few fresh lakes. Dad doesn't want to abandon progress and civilisation, he wants it to keep going. And he wanted to remember our Mexican heritage, so he is going to choose a spanish name for the settlement. I thought Las Lagos would be pretty good, because it's centered around a lake. Anyway, I'm going to help out with building some shelters for the survivors. When it's finished, Dad says he wants to be Mayor. Imagine that! One of us Norwood's as a Mayor!

-Alice

And Camila dropped the device. It clattered, its screen remaining intact even as it collided with the hard floor. Camila's mind reeled. The world swirled around her, the room blurring. She stumbled to the side, her feet clumsily tripping over each other, and bent over, trying to get to the ground before she fell.

"How?" she gasped.

"Well... it could be a coincidence?"

"No. It said the city was Las Lagos. It's no coincidence."

"But that means-"

"Yes. It means that Alice is Umbra Norwood's grandmother."

Hi, Sylver-frost here. And today, in this strange, ancient laboratory, a massive discovery is made! But while Camila and Lance delve into the powerful secrets of the past... what can they learn about the future? And what about the more immediate questions. How will they persuade people to escape Los Lagos? How could they ever defend themselves against a Hydra?

If you've enjoyed reading this story, don't forget to vote, comment and add it to your reading lists. I will be adding a new chapter every day. If you have any tips for how I can improve my writing, or what I did well this time, please feel free to tell me (in a nice manner). Thanks so much for reading my story!

Thanks again, Sylver!