Prelude to the Fall: Part 2

There was a third group, of course: we didn't change at all. At least, no one could ever demonstrate any change. No immunity factor was ever discovered, and no one ever satisfactorily explained why we were not affected. For awhile they thought it was related to blood type, and then we heard something about a possible vaccine combination, but that all proved to be wrong. It didn't really matter, nor change anything. We became knows as Watchers, and were the only ones who could really appreciate and catalogue what was happening to everyone else. The rest were busy with far bigger problems.

"Witnessing the fall of mankind, and the birth of a completely new world .. that was left to us."

I'll tell you right now, at the time, it was very distressing, even depressing, to be one of the people not changing. Everyone else, it seemed, was part of it .. whatever it was. Us? Nothing changed for us! We were left out of everything. We were suddenly much weaker, in a more violent world. Where others started to show new strengths and abilities, we were the same as we always were; only lower on the food chain. We were spared the tortures of the regression, though, and that was a blessing. The watchers were arguably the best off of everyone, but it didn't feel that way at the time. It felt just the opposite. I was young and stupid, perhaps, and didn't really appreciate what a gift it was to be left out of it all. I know for a fact though, I was not the only one that felt this way. Something magical was happening, and we were locked out of it all.

When the changes started, I was still in high school. The day after it showed up, when I arrived at school, everything felt different. The social order began to splinter rapidly, and friends of many years suddenly stopped talking to each others. This was not a rule, as there were exceptions: some seemed to become even closer. Certain people found themselves strongly attracted to others, in both a tribal and mating sense. New cliques formed almost immediately, as did new couplings; they were strangely fierce, too. In one single day, everything was re-shaped. Everyone was suddenly much warier of everyone else, new teams had somehow been formed. Everything had been turned on its head. In part, it was as though we all expected to be attacked by one another. Of course, as we would later find out, this was for good reason. I should also note that this change was not limited to students: it impacted the teachers just as strongly. Although they were able to veil it ever so slightly, it was not hard to see that some people were straining to be in close proximity to others.

"Something happened one day, in the library."

It was the first incident I was personally aware of, the first of many, though it was kept fairly hushed up for at least a couple of months. Our library had two floors. On the top floor, there was a balcony, where you could sit and overlook the whole room. I wasn't there, but apparently two kids were arguing over something on the bottom floor: one kid shoved another. The brother of the "shovee" happened to be on the balcony, and saw this kid, the shover, who was a fair bit larger, push his younger brother to the floor. I'm told this kid, with no hesitation, jumped over the railing, dropped fifteen feet, did some sort of a roll, and, with one motion, ripped the other kids throat out. The story gets hazy at that point, so I can't say what exactly what happened after that, other than to say the police were called, and eventually the kid was subdued and taken to jail. The odd part was, he didn't have a weapon.

I'm told that as they were putting him into the police car, the officers were all yelling "WATCH HIS HANDS! WATCH HIS HANDS!"

No one quite knew the deal at the time, but it later came out that this kid was one of the first to show physical symptoms. He'd grown himself a set of claws.