The mutation has spread.

At first, it only hit the adults, making strange things happen. They all soon died. Their bodies couldn't handle the MORF. Mononucleosis Oliguria Reflux Fasciculation: a disease that first made your throat swollen and raw, followed by an inability to urinate, then puking your guts out, and then finally you twitched and had involuntary muscle spasms. Alone, each disease was nothing, something cured in a bit of time. But MORF was more than that. It had the ability to kill.

And many were killed. Anyone well over the age of twenty had a body that couldn't survive the stress. People under twenty with young bodies eventually learned how to develop a solution to handling the disease. After a couple of weeks of bed rest they would be back to normal.

No, scratch that.

Better than normal.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I should start with the Day that was the End.


Date: June the twentieth, 2123. It was a holiday. The birthday of our 53rd president, President Arnold. He was the president which gave robots equal right. I didn't care much about it, but it was a national holiday since he was assassinated five years later by a rouge cyborg. Go figure.

I headed home after hanging out at my friends all day. My small apartment was only big enough for two bedrooms and a bathroom. But it was only Mom and me. Dad had skipped town years ago. So what, he hated me anyway.

Mom was sitting on the couch, watching the TV special about the Life and Times of President Arnold. Every adult was forced to watch it to “further their educations on the ways of the society”. I’m just glad I didn't have to watch the stupid episode.

I went to sleep. I don't even remember the bomb dropping. Actually, I doubt a lot of people do. I was slipping in and out of dreams when my bed started shaking and a blinding light woke me up. We thought it was an atom bomb or something. My mom ran to my bed and held me close. I was still half-sleeping, not awake, not in a dream.

Why couldn't it have just been a dream?

Within an hour, the city was in pandemonium. The bomb passed but there weren't any fires or people burning to death. No, it was so much worse. News casters got the information and blocked every station, then filled it with tales of woe. New York was on lock-down. I lived in one of the tiny apartments in the middle of the city. We couldn't go anywhere.

I don't remember much of that day. Then again, why would I want to? The news said that a bomb was dropped in New York, New York with an infectious viruses that contaminated the air. Transmitted by wind and by touch, the government closed off the city. A large cloud of dust and the virus began to cover the sky, creeping over the entire city. A cloud we couldn't escape.

The old people went first. Their bodies couldn't even handle the first signs of the MORF plague. When their throats swelled up, it cut off their oxygen supply. Anyone with a large open wound died, too. The virus made the cuts extremely infected leading to blood clots or worse.

Soon, the middle aged adults began to die off too. The first week of the plague, before it even had a name, I sat with my mom in our apartment. Alone. I had left the apartment for some reason and when I came back I found her dead. She was laying propped up against the wall and her skin had broken open, covering her in blood. A single hand print of blood was right above her head.

There was no way to give my mom a proper burial, so I had to cremate her myself outside. The streets were bare because everyone was too scared to leave their houses. The worst part is, I couldn't cry for her.

Maybe it was for the better that she died earlier on. My mom was too nice to handle the sort of stuff I had to do to survive. Once, when I was running low on supplies, I ventured outside to see if any stores were still open. I went to the large Walmart that was close by. There was barely any food left, but there was enough for me to grab and take home. On my way back I saw a man that looked extremely hungry. He asked for me to spare him some food, but I refused him. Then he pulled out a switchblade and started to come after me. I dropped the food and grabbed a pipe I found in an alley and smashed his hand. It was broken and mangled. I ran back home and double locked the doors with no supplies to show for my venture outside.

But I sadly couldn't remain alone in my apartment forever. I ran out of food completely in another month and then a couple of gangs who roamed the streets broke in. I managed to escape by getting out the fire escape, but I had lost the only thing that had really kept me alive so far.

Eventually, I found my own “gang”. It was a bunch of kids like me who had been kicked out of their homes by guys with weapons and had nowhere else to go. We made a hobo camp under a bridge and we always had someone keep watch. There may have been thirty of us to begin with, but we were dropping like flies.

I had given up. I was sure that my life was ruined. There was no safe place left for me to go. There was hardly ever enough food. I wanted to end my life before I went through the MORF cycle that I knew would kill me anyway. But I couldn’t do it. You see, humans are stubborn beings. We want to live. So when it came my time for the MORF, I was more broken than ever. I had to go through it without food and without shelter.

My MORF cycle took about a day. Longer than most. The pain was awful and it only grew worse with every second. I could feel myself dying.

Back to now.

Obviously I lived. Otherwise, I wouldn't be telling you my little sob story here. So, I went through the MORF then somehow woke up two days later. I was laying in the pile by the river which was full of dead bodies. My group had put them there because otherwise they would just fill the roads and take up all the room. I screamed and screamed from all of the bodies around me. Rotting flesh, half opened eyes; it was a horror movie.

I ran back to my group at the bridge. A couple of kids screamed or cried or fainted. I hadn't been close to any of them, but I knew that a couple of them had dragged my body to the pile, so my death was known.

So how was I alive?

To be honest I didn't have a clue. Some kids called me a witch and found some pitch forks. Then they realized how medieval they were being and figured it had something to do with the science of MORF. Meanwhile, I was changing. I noticed how I could sleep less and remain as awake as ever. I could run faster, jump higher, and I was smarter, even.

More people in the group began dying off. Only one or two of them returned like me. Another month gone and only ten other people remained. I don't think any of them even new my name. We kept everything a secret now. I don’t think I even remember my own name.

I have a new clan now. The MORF's. We are the survivors of the plague that swept the city. And now, the MORF has morphed us. We are the elite. The strong.

We wander around. We live nameless. We do incredible things. The only survivors of the virus are the people in my clan, a girl my age (17), her boyfriend that is almost twenty, a boy/girl pair of twins, both twelve, and a little boy no older than six. An unlikely group, but we make it work.

We can lift cars with one hand, run over water, solve impossible problems. We're special.

The city's been locked down for a year and a half now. There is a giant black cloud that blocks the sun everyday, all day. Army personnel stand guard around the perimeter to make sure we don't escape. Us MORF's have tried escaping but we're not fast enough to dodge the bullets that the army shoot at us in their ridiculous gas-masks and gloves. They're obsessed with breaking New York City off from the rest of the world. To kill the disease. The government is waiting for us all to die out.

But they never suspected that we would survive.

And now we're going to take our city back.