The Birth of hunger
The year was 2061, and the world had become indifferent. Technology had vanquished illness, starvation, and even aging to some extent. Yet with every remedy humanity discovered, a new shadow emerged. This time, the shadow did not descend from the heavens, nor from machines rebelling against their creators. It arose from within—blood, womb, and flesh.
It started as murmurs in the medical circles of Lagos, Cape town, and Nairobi. Expectant mothers were arriving with peculiar fevers. Initially, it resembled a new flu—mild fevers, chills, an unusual desire for raw meat. Physicians dismissed it lightly, until the first births occurred.
The infants appeared human— tiny, delicate, wailing like any newborn. Yet their cries were not of vulnerability but of hunger, profound and primal. Within days, nurses were assaulted in maternity wards, their throats torn open by tiny teeth too sharp, too numerous for any ordinary baby. Some infants did not survive the initial week; their bodies decomposed faster than they had formed. But others flourished. They grew swiftly, almost unnaturally, their bones elongating, their eyes glinting with a predator's intensity.
The virus was named: Nexfera. Researchers traced it back to a peculiar hemorrhagic fever discovered in the Congo Basin—something that had remained dormant in animal reservoirs, perhaps awaiting a moment when the human immune system was at its most susceptible: pregnancy. Nexfera did not merely infect. It reprogrammed. It wove itself into the fetus's genetic fabric, unlocking a concealed code.
Children born of infected mothers were no longer human in the purest sense. They were quicker, stronger, and—above all—insatiably hungry. They consumed flesh not as beasts, but as entities adhering to a law older than humanity. The terror did not cease with their feeding. Victims of attacks found their own bodies transforming. A single bite, if it didn't prove fatal, was sufficient to modify DNA, to twist cells into something new.
By 2075, one-third of the global population had transformed. Cities were consumed by flames. Governments crumbled. Those who survived lived as prey, hiding in fortified remnants, terrified of the night and even more fearful of what might be conceived within their own wombs.
Humanity had encountered plagues before. But never had a plague sought not merely to kill but to inherit.