“The animals went radioactive. They were covered in boils and thick plaques knives couldn’t slice through. The hunting wasn’t one of our great concerns. Instead, we worried that the radioactivity might be contagious. If the animals became irradiated just by strolling past a copper pond in the early afternoon, what would happen if we drank the red water? We couldn’t know. It seemed that the houses were radiated, the sidewalks and chimney stacks. The trees released puffs of decaying ions into the air. If we breathed enough times, those isotopes would degrade further in our lungs, their chemical collapse causing a cataclysmic chain reaction of anatomic proportions.”
