Second Variety

The claws were built to win the war, and they may have done it too well. Six years after the bombs, Earth's surface is ash, and the battlefield belongs to self-repairing killing machines that burrow in the rubble and hunt anything warm that isn't wearing a radiation tab. When a lone Russian runner dies outside a UN bunker carrying a request for talks, Major Hendricks volunteers to cross no-man's-land himself.

On the way he picks up David, a silent boy clutching a teddy bear. At the Russian lines he finds only a few ragged survivors, Klaus, Rudi and a hard-eyed young woman named Tasso, and a warning: the underground factories have been designing new types on their own, and some of them now look exactly like people.