Petre smiled as his two malformed children stumbled and rolled towards him.

"Wretched little things," Manya said from within his right eye, and perhaps even deeper.

"We do! We doO!" Blurt said as he reached Petre's worn-out shoes. He had been the first to mold his black goo into the shape of human lips.

[ pApa maKe uUuP? WaNt uUp! WaNnt up! ]

Blurm filled the quiet around them with a number of wet plops. In all things, she had proven slower than her sibling. She looked as Blurb had that first day in his old apartment. Before his nightmare. Before his change.

"Ugh," Manya intoned, her voice tickling the inside of his head. "I'd vomit, but the two of them would probably eat it."

"Hush," Petre said, not without a smile.

His cuz felt like a different person ever since the blast, and not just because she lived inside the right side of his head. When he meditated, Petre sometimes wondered just how much of her old personality had been manufactured. He had known her for most of his life after all, and it saddened him (Petre had become something of a big baby since the blast) to think it all a lie.

"Papa and woOrm make noiSespeEak?" Blurt asked as he tugged on the hem of Petre's pants. Like his sister (Not that either looked like a boy or a girl), Blurt had yet to develop arms or legs. He moved with tentacles of wet black.

"Lots of noisespeak," Petre said, and he knelt down to scoop up his two malformed children (Because he was a father in a very distant sense of the word).

"You're muttering again," Manya said, and he felt her writhe from within the hole of his right eye. He would never get used to the eerie sensation, a distant tickle that he could not reach. But he knew what it meant.

Blurt and Blurm stuck to his chest like wet wads of paper towel. Neither was larger than his head, and so he scarcely felt their weight as he left them to their cloying touch. The two pulsed with delight at his closeness, and he smiled.

"Good night, cuz," Petre said despite the morning's sun, and he covered his right eye with a piece of torn shirt he had found in their wanderings.

Manya did not answer, and he frowned. The blast had left both of them so weak, and he knew he was responsible.

A bullet-riddled signpost named the town Borhov, and it was empty but for the dead.

Idle cars cluttered the roads. An army checkpoint further down the road remained abandoned. Petre had not heard of Borhov before the blast, but it was a sizable town. They had found a ransacked mall when they had first arrived. There was no power, so the stench of rotten meat and vegetables filled most restaurants. Blurm and Blurt had eaten well those first days.

It was an undeserved and misplaced cockiness, but Petre did not feel even a twinge of fear (He still jumped at sudden noises, but that was an old habit) as he weaved past the many cars and discarded suitcases. He had changed since the blast, and the creature that dwelt within his right eye was only half of the transformation.

Blurm and Blurt excited as they drew closer and closer to their mother. He could feel Blurb, as well, just as he could his arms and legs. In his meditations he tried to move her, as he would clench and unclench his fists, but he always found her massive and immovable.

His two children detached from his chest (Though they left behind a moist smear of black) with a wet pop. He had blocked the entrance to their home-away-from-home with a few cars. Blurt and Blurm slid through the cracks, their gelatinous bodies malleable and fluid.

Petre watched them disappear and was at once beset with a jolt of panic. But it passed. He stood stone-still before the broken-down vehicles (They were stacked on top of one another like bricks) and felt his mind warble.

"Because humans can't lift cars," he said to himself. "Which means if I can move them..."

The first few weeks after the blast had been a blur of violence and self-destruction. Never mind what had happened to Blurb, Manya had carved out the inside of his skull and roosted within.

He would reach inside his own head to try and tear her out, and his thoughts would turn white and silly. He had changed, and he had been afraid.

Four weeks. He still shivered involuntarily when he recalled those first four weeks of weakness and horror. It had been Manya who saved him, saved the two of them. Made him accept the change.

Petre felt a small pulse of warmth (And not the sort that roused his groin) as the children reached Blurb. He dared to believe.

With both hands and a deep grunt, Petre pulled the topmost car down from the stack. He was not powerful enough to lift the mass of metal, and certainly not strong enough to move more than one car at a time, but he could drag them across the ground like some Olympic weightlifter.

His face was awash with sweat by the time an opening appeared through which he could squeeze. They had chosen this particular building, a squat power utility unit, because of its lack of windows and other entrances.

It was pitch black inside, but he could still make out Blurb and the children as though the sun filled the small facility with warmth.

Blurm and Blurt remained motionless atop Blurb's lower abdomen. Her upper torso still retained the same human figure that had bewitched Petre more than a month before. Her lower torso, however, was a swollen mass of death blackened flesh. It erupted into dozens and dozens of small tendrils, each cold to the touch.

Blurb did not rouse as he neared (And her bloated form did not rouse Petre). Her human eyes were half-closed and did not blink. Her round mouth remained a perpetual pout.

The children offered their mother nutrients, but there was never enough. Manya had tried to explain it all to him once, but his mind still rebelled when he dove too deep into his new reality.

All that mattered was that she needed food. The children needed food. Manya needed food. But the blast... the radiation denied them sustenance. If Blurb was to recover and the children grow, they would have to leave these deserted towns. And Petre had been scared.

"But I'm so tired of this," he said as he sat and leaned beside Blurb. She did not visibly react to his closeness, but Petre could feel her fill with a distant warmth.

Tomorrow. They would follow the road tomorrow away from the blast.

Petre looked down at his unfamiliar hands, covered in bloodless splotches of grey skin. And he tried to accept it.