[ WP ] Every person in the world develops a weird mutation/power the day they turn 16 . Everyone 's powers are always different , some more insignificant than others . You turn 16 , and watch as all your friends discover their newfound ability 's . That is , until you discover the severity of your own .

Children in control of the world. They struck fast. The first kid with powers is nothing but a legend these days; the books are gone and the world ’ s libraries burned. Some say he had the power to control minds, like, actually control people. There hasn ’ t been word of anyone else like that since. The adults tried to cull us. Cut us down in our prime. It was okay at first, because we had powers. They didn ’ t. Whole armies wiped out in waves of flame and hailstones and all kinds of unimaginable horrors thrown down on men we killed because we could. World leaders strung up like pigs and mass-looting. It was one long rushing wave of revolution: a cold, hard revolution. 
 
 It happened before anyone realised what was going on. Fifteen year olds grew up across the country in the most volatile way. When people realised the connection, it was already too late. Some kids tried to stand up and fight, tried to protect the world as we knew it. They foresaw the trouble, the dangers of letting the world burn. There was mass hysteria: susceptible children collected by the leaders of these vicious packs and restrained until their sixteenth birthday. If their power was useful it was either join or die. To most, this ultimatum wasn ’ t necessary: brainwashing and awe fuelled the hearts of young men and women, an opportunity to rattle a sports car down an empty street, burn down a school and enjoy complete and utter freedom? These were all promises. Promises that I had to break. 
 
 They got me when I was fourteen. My parents and I were holed up in a cave in the hills north of the town we used to live. There were four other childless families with us. Most of the other children had been snatched by a marauding gang led by an older student who called himself Blaze. He called himself this before he realised he could spit fire. I watched him roast a girl I had spoken to a few times. She refused him. No one ever even knew what her power was. A lot of the adults had been killed. Rumour had it that Blaze had killed his own. Most died in the attempt to protect their children from war-hungry youths. The ones with us in the cave were people who had lost their children. They looked at me with fear and envy. They knew it was only a certain amount of time before I turned, or worse, that they would come looking for me. 
 
 They suspected that there was a member of the gang whose power was the discovery of other powers, how else had Blaze managed to hunt down and secure the children of the neighbourhood? He was building an army. The first ones to capture children secured their prominent spot in what we all began to call the Power Lottery. No one knows what they ’ re going to get. I once watched a sixteen year old, on the dot of the minute of his birthday, grow fifteen feet and harden like rock. Another spouted horns and cried. I knew they were coming for me, I knew all I could do was agree. They would kill us all if I didn ’ t. 
 
 They came one night when we were huddled in the furthest recesses of the cave, eating the remains of the rushed scavenging we gathered as we hurried through the chaos to the hills. The roads had run with molten rock and ice and kids spawning crows covered the skies in murder. There was no time to get anything else. If they hadn ’ t come for us then, we would have starved before long anyway. Blaze burst through the bushes and tangled rocks we had laid in the mouth and stood looking into us. Sasha, the girl I would later discover had the power to hunt us, stood behind him, her hands aglow. It was time. 
 
 “ I ’ ll come with you. Forget these idiot adults. ” 
 It was all I could think of but Blaze smiled. I watched them all burn that day. I watched my own parent ’ s faces fall as I gave myself up. I watched them burn. It was the only way. 
 
 For the two years or so that followed the day of my capture I was herded across the country, fighting invisible battles with my brain, trussed up in a truck with several other younger kids from my neighbourhood. There was a four year old girl. Another twelve years before her power blossomed and she had already been secured. We never left the truck. Ale-hand, another older kid from school, had the power to feed. All he had to do was touch us and our hunger dissipated. We never had to stop for food. All we had was water. The group was a mechanized child hunting machine. Blaze really struck lucky. By the end of the two years he had gathered up another forty or so children and a long convoy of trucks, all guarded over by his elite team we never got to interact with. 
 
 Two days before my birthday, the date scratched out on tiny notepad I ’ d brought when the world fell apart, the convoy fell. It came as a wind. Death came. It stung my throat and my eyes but the shielding of the truck saved us all. The sunlight stung. The first rays in a long time. Blaze and the others were dead. Their corpses were withered like prunes. Sasha, however, was suspended high in sky by a whirl of fog, only her head visible above the swirl. Our new captives made themselves known. They called themselves the Freedom and Liberation unit, but there were only two present. When I questioned this they laughed. All of a sudden from the plains and the grassy lands about the road a hundred or so sixteen to eighteen year olds rose from the ground. 
 
 “ There is no need to expose ourselves if it is not necessary. ” 
 
 They took us on board. I did not tell them it was my birthday soon. I was happy. These people seemed good. They seemed honourable. We all thanked them for rescuing us and were asked our age. I still did not tell them I was almost sixteen. 
 
 Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. So close. I wondered how it was meant to happen. I was lying in bed, a makeshift bed in the back of one of the trucks commandeered from Blaze ’ s squad. Then it happened. I felt it first in my fingers. Then it was in my chest. A burning. How did I use it? What was it? As I reached out my hand towards another bunk, another child, it burst into a cloud of gas, pallid green against the air, with a loud pop. The other children jumped up and began to scream. The truck halted. In my panic my arms flailed and the pops continued and the air filled with gas and the buzz of a thousand flies and a deadly stench. Arms dragged me out but as they touched me they swelled up and bubbled and rotted. People ran and others forced their powers down on me but I was surrounded by a swirling black green mass of rags and flies. I cried as those around me popped and exploded and were carried away by waves of nauseating death. Happy sixteenth birthday. I am Pestilence. Destroyer of the human race. 

