Some point later, Betty knows she's a mutant. It's been weeks of searching, months of unbearable pain, and no one who went out into the radiation so early should be able to be living and breathing. Her hands were never even frostbitten, even with all the snow and cold. She's a survivor.
And now she's survived being mutated.
She wakes up one late evening with the sun just setting and Betty struggles to her feet and faces the sun. Something is missing. It feels like there's a gap, a hole, nothing where something – anything – should be. And then it hits her. Her skin's not on fire anymore. It doesn't feel as if she could tear her own skin off. Her skin still prickles uncomfortably, but the mind-numbing pain doesn't exist anymore.
Awestruck, Betty peels off her jacket despite the cold air and runs one hand across the skin of the opposite arm. Immediately, she freezes, torn between being amazed and horrified.
Her skin is sticky.
Not enough for her skin to come off at her finger's touch, but enough that she can feel it. She feels an urge to run to the nearest science facility to observe herself and what the radiation did to her skin. Her head still pounds, her stomach still tumbles around, but her skin doesn't burn and it's sticky now.
Betty unconsciously checks her hair, too, and is amazed to find it sticky, too, and no longer in strands. It's all clumped together and it reminds her of those old cartoons where hair seems more like a helmet than hair. She pulls a clump out and stares, shocked and amazed and a little terrified, too, at the bright pink clump of something in her hands.
She lifts it to her nose and sniffs it. It smells sweet, like candy, and Betty wonders if the candy that stuck to her as she wandered through the radiation-soaked rubble caused this.
Looking to the sun, Betty ponders this until the sun is long gone. She eats some corn from cans she'd discovered a while back, and stands there, thinking until the novelty wears off and she's not as terrified. This world – unless it was only her country attacked – would no longer have as many scientists as it should.
She has to find survivors.