Being the kind of person who would willingly convert a perfectly O.K backyard (patio, wading pool and a crappy shanty I had once hoped to turn into a sexy sauna) into a state-of-the-art bomb shelter, I had read a few speculative fictions. Most of these revolved around what would actually happen in a post-nuke world. What’s unfortunate about such texts is that they’re usually filled with ads for canned food, water-purifiers and other gadgetry – but little useful information.
To the casual reader, a post-nuclear world would be somewhere between a Mad-Max-esque battleground of mohawk-enthused motorists, thirsty for gasoline, or an equally horrible (but no less comic) wasteland haunted by the hideously mutated husks of the (similarly thirsty) living dead.
I wasn’t really prepared to expect photophobic ghouls to be piling up against my shelter door, but I did have a healthy respect for the mutagenic properties of radiation. Ask any Chernobyl survivor, or go to an oncology ward.
Still. I didn’t expect the pig.