It was incredible really. Every time there was a zombie movie, with a few rare daring exceptions, pretty much all the zombies were adult males. In recent years women had slowly begun to creep in. The reason for this by movie standards was of course logical, zombies still looked human, and blowing the heads off corpses of women could offend some people. Ironically, one of the earliest black and white horror films, involved a scene where a mother was attacked by the zombie of her own eight year old child. But these had long since slipped under the radar.
Weather it be zombies, vampires, werewolves, or pod-people, children were always immune to the virus, or always died from it, or seem to mysterious vanish from existence. And don't even get started about pregnant women!
When Catherine Snow and Maurice Chakat had created their virus, they had overlooked many details, and had been naive in many ways, and had put only minimal tactical thinking into their quest to upgrade the human condition into something more tolerable. The sex drive phase not burning itself out like it was supposed to was just one of many.
Catherine Snow and Maurice Chakat had screwed up another way. Since they were so focused on the 'fat cats' and 'The Man' and of course 'The Government!' who would oppose creating a world where their species would have only one gender, and their 'free love' ideal, that had blindly stopped to even remotely consider what their virus would do to the prepubescent or the pregnant.
To the pregnant, the changes were surprisingly safe, the unborn child would simply become a chakat waiting to be born from their mother.
There were some surprising effects on the young and the innocent however.
Francis lived in a small community in the mid-western united state, the big 'nowhere' . . . which was Catherine had chosen it via dart board to sent the virus there to begin with. It could be hit by an atomic bomb and the rest of the world wouldn't find out about it for a year.
To create 'reserves' of the Chakat who could transform the rest of humanity, who thought personal choice was the total and absolute truth, just as humans three hundred years ago had thought 'racial superiorty' was the total and absolute truth, and three thousand years ago thought that 'might makes right' was the total and absolute truth.
In the end, maybe the Chakat would be replaced by a new truth in another thousand years. Every civilization in history had always thought itself to be at the peak of wisdom, understanding, and moral-code.
The virus didn't need to be transferred by sex, this was known, but it wasn't really give much thought beyond 'dry sexual fluids can spread the change' and didn't give one thought to the other body fluids the human body had.
Francis was alone, she had only her father, and few fair weather friends. She was a curious child however. And when a package came in the mail, with no personal address, only to their home, and with no return address, she was too young to know about mail bombers or such other horrible things that the Chakat would erase from the world.
She opened the box, only for a tiny device inside to release a fine mist into the air, that smelled funny.
Francis was confused. She got even more confused brownish gold fur grew over her body, and this confusion grew as her ears moved to the top of her head, and her face began to look like a kitty's. Then her hair fell over. She was panicking like she knew she should be. This was like a new game. Or maybe a dream. She pinched herself. Okay. Not a dream. She looked at herself in a mirror as she changed. Then . . . then taur part of the Chakat transformation happened… and Francis saw hir new strange thing between hir little legs. And that hir clothes now itched like crazy until shi took them off.
Looked at hirself and giggled at hirself. Shi noticed a little note in box reading, 'You are now a chakat, please spread your new gift to everyone you possibly can.'
Francis didn't need to told twice. The small girl didn't suddenly grow into an adult, she didn't suddenly feel things well before her time. Instead, she just new she had to give this gift to everyone, and felt an idea of how.
Shi went into her backyard, and heard a couple of voices behind hir house's wooden white fence.
Shi peaked over, Francis saw a couple of boys chatting among themselves, and spat on both of them. Their hair already beginning to change color. Spit was a body fluid too after all.