F.E.A.R.

F.E.A.R. Prologue

The year is 2035, but that's not where this story started. It started with a terrorist attack in 2001. It's a narrative that crippled a great country that, at the time, was known as the United States of America. There isn't anything united about it anymore.

On September 11th a terrorist organization hijacked four passenger airliners and crashed them into New York's monumental Twin Towers, a field in Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon in Washington D.C., the building that housed most of the U.S.A.'s intelligence. Thousands of people died and, of course, a flame known as war was fanned into existence. Thousands more died, cities leveled with bombs, scandals erupted, peace was won. And lost again.

In the year 2018 The United Nations council announced that the U.S, Germany, And the U.K. were working together to produce a weapon of peace. They promised to produce a bomb that had no harmful effects to the environment or animals, unlike the atom bomb, this bomb was suppose to deliver damage to human DNA only. The press went wild, and many people condemned the idea, many said it wasn't possible, many more thought the project was probably already completed.

It wasn't, but experiments were already well underway and were finished to satisfaction by 2020. In 2021, Charles Mannish, the President of the United States was assassinated, and America prepared to drop the first F.E.A.R. Bomb.

The purpose of the bomb was to scramble human DNA and in the process turn it into something harmless, depending on the individuals DNA sequence they might end up a flower, they could be a beetle. The U.N. argued that there would be no deaths, so it was a peace bomb. Not biological warfare. No one really liked the idea, but the civilians could only watch from their living rooms as the first three F-bombs were dropped on the Middle East, and televised.

When they struck the ground, everything went wrong. No one turned into a dandelion. But within twenty-four hours plenty of people had turned into actual lions. Well, not actual lions, they simply developed parts of the animals. All kinds of animals. People everywhere in the Middle East and Europe began to change. Cats, dogs, snakes, elephants. A baby with scales here, an old woman with bat-like hearing there, however, while in some ways animalistic these individuals kept their human minds intact, the press referred to them as Changelings, Modifieds, and sometimes Weres.

Unfortunately, these changes only happened for about twenty percent of the world's population. Oh, that's right, it became an epidemic and it affected the whole world in less than a month; spread through bites received from others infected with the F.E.A.R. bomb's virus. About five percent of the population stayed human, seemingly immune to its effects, the other seventy five or so percent also developed animal characteristics, but lost their humanity in the process, they spiked high fevers, then seconds or even hours later they would change, becoming wild, driven by the virus to infect others, they fed on surviving humans, and hated the other mutants that had kept their humanness, hunting and killing them for sport, out of anger.

The press called them Ferals, They were fast, strong, and always hungry, even resorting to eating each other once most of the humans had gone into hiding. The Changelings had learned how to use their new strengths and were no longer easy game.

Now, in 2035, most of the earth's societies have crumbled, and while most cities remain intact, civilization has not. Most Ferals won't venture into more populated areas so the human stick to the cities, working for Changelings in exchange for protection. What little government there is is made up of Changelings, but mostly they operate in gangs, constantly fighting for control of whatever city they inhabit. My story begins in New York City, in a struggle for dominance like the world has never seen...