"We are going to have some tea and snacks. Um... perhaps," the monster said in a friendly voice. The voice stunned Edna more than if it had killed her alive. "You might like to join us?"

She didn't move.

"Er ... if you don't mind, perhaps we could meet in your room?" the monster said as if it were not a monster.

She still didn't move.

"Er ... do you mind?" it asked politely.

Part of her mouth recovered from the numbness.

"... No, not at all," she lied.

She followed the monster and crossed over the crumbling walls back in to the perimeter that once was her room. The monster and the mutants, as if they were trying to be polite, walked in through the bleached door. Some of the mutants set up a picnic table, and took out couple of nice-looking sandwiches from the bags that Edna thought were carrying their heads. The slug-like monster parked its baseball bat beside Edna's bed, on where she was now sitting. She felt more afraid of the bat than of the monster. The monster handed Edna a nice-looking sandwich with one of its tentacles. She relaxed because of the friendly manner of the monster and thus dared to look up into its face.

"Doctor Sabisco?" she cried out in surprise, "are you really Doctor Sabisco?"

The slug-like monster nodded its head.

"Your body... "

"The radiation," Doctor Sabisco sighed, "mutated all survivors into monsters or mutants. I am surprised it didn't affect you."

"I was hiding under my bed, I didn't know what happened."

"What happened," Doctor Sabisco sank his teeth into the nice-looking sandwich; "was completely ridiculous."

The mutants who still retained their heads nodded.

"It all started with a brilliant idea from the defense secretary who had a keen interest in saving the national deficit. The first day he walked into the office, he commented that there were too many buttons in Pentagon and he started a campaign to simplify them. One of the procedures involved connecting the control buttons of nuclear weapons onto the microwave that the president was using. The logic was that in case of a nuclear attack, the president could still initiate a counter attack without missing his valuable lunch and thus maintain a healthier body to lead the nation."