A low, involuntary gagging sound escaped Michael's throat, a primal reaction he barely managed to stifle by clapping a hand over his mouth. The taste of his earlier, frugal breakfast threatened a reappearance. The source of this violent nausea wasn't the truck's lurching motion or the stench of its cargo, but the image now burned into his retinas, magnified and clarified by the binoculars pressed against his face. He had finally seen it clearly—the Infected.
The creature, which moments before had been a hunched, nondescript figure in a tattered cloak mimicking a scavenger's pose, had shed its pathetic disguise the instant it realized its lure had failed. What was revealed as it gave chase was a study in biological horror. Its face retained a ghastly, parodic semblance of humanity, but it was a canvas of pure, feral malice—a twisted grimace of endless hunger, the mouth a cavern lined with jagged, bone-white fangs that seemed too large for its skull. But the face was almost a mercy compared to the rest.
From the neck down, it was a living tapestry of corruption. Not an inch of unblemished skin remained. Instead, its torso and limbs were a grotesque cluster of swollen, purplish-black nodules, each the size of a ripe grape, pulsing with a vile inner life. As the creature moved, launching itself forward in a startling, loping gallop on all fours, some of these pustules ruptured, weeping rivulets of thick, brownish fluid that left slick, dark trails in the dust. The sight triggered a deep, instinctive revulsion that had nothing to do with rational thought. It was the sheer, overwhelming wrongnessof it.
Raoul's decision to flee had been an act of superb survival instinct, proven correct with every passing second. The Infected moved with a speed that defied its grotesque form. It wasn't the blurred, almost supernatural swiftness of a high-level Aura warrior like Jinx, but it was a terrifying, ground-eating gallop, a predator's sprint that closed the distance with shocking efficiency. Like a nightmarish fusion of ape and hunting cat, it propelled itself forward in powerful, bounding leaps, each one covering meters of cracked earth. In under a minute, Michael calculated with a cold knot in his stomach, it would be on the wolf-kin.
But Raoul was not alone. As the distance between the hunter and its prey shrank to fifty meters, the fleeing guard was within six hundred of the convoy—the outer edge of the Garand's effective range. The sharp, authoritative crackof a rifle shot split the heavy air. Through the binoculars, Michael saw the Infected flinch, a preternatural twitch to the left. It wasn't enough. The round slammed into its right shoulder, spraying a dark puff of matter and fluid. The creature didn't even stagger. If anything, the injury seemed to fuel it; a new, more intense ferocity blazed in its sunken eyes.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
The sharpshooters on the roof found their rhythm. Each shot struck home—a leg, the other shoulder, a grazing hit along the ribcage. The cumulative damage began to tell. The creature's relentless charge faltered, its speed bleeding away until it was merely outpacing a bicycle, not overtaking one.
"Cease rifle fire! Conserve ammunition!" John's bellow cut through the gunshots. "Archers, nock! Close-quarters, prepare to engage!"
The convoy became a hive of grim activity. Raoul, lungs burning, pedaled the last desperate stretch as the Infected, now a scant twenty meters behind, let out a wet, guttural snarl. Just as it entered the archers' range, John loosed his own arrow with a shout. "Loose!"
A flight of ten arrows, fletched with scavenged feathers, hissed through the air. They arced over Raoul's head, not aimed at the Infected's current position, but at the spaces it might dodge into—a tactic born of countless skirmishes, executed without a word of command. The creature tried to jink, but three shafts found their mark. One, with a sickening thwack, punched clean through its torso, the steel tip protruding from its chest in a spray of dark gore. A mortal wound for any natural beast.
Yet, the Infected did not fall. It did not retreat. Pain and injury seemed only to sand away the last remnants of anything but mindless rage. With a final, convulsive surge of speed, it closed the last few meters, its stinking, taloned hand stretching for Raoul's back.
In the cab, Michael's mind blanked. The crisis, the imminent death of a man under his command, triggered a panicked, unthinking reflex. He fumbled his pistol from its holster, shoved it out the window, and fired.
Bang!
The front tire of Raoul's bicycle exploded. The wolf-kin's face, a mask of exhausted determination, transformed in mid-air into an almost comical picture of utter, profound bewilderment as he and his machine were upended, tumbling in a cloud of dust. Michael had a perfect, frozen-moment view of it: the wide eyes, the mouth forming a perfect 'O' of surprise. As Raoul hit the ground with a grunt, the Infected, momentarily confused by the sudden crash of its prey, was upon him.
But that moment of confusion was all John's archers needed. Five more arrows, fired at point-blank range, slammed into the creature. They took it in the throat, the eye socket, the base of its skull. It stumbled, a pincushion of feathered shafts, its charge finally broken. It took a dozen hurled hand-axes from the close-quarters fighters, thudding into its bulk with meaty chops, before it finally, convulsively, went still. Its terrifying vitality extinguished at last.
As the convoy rolled onward, the air in the cab was thick with silence and the faint, chemical cool of the struggling air conditioner. The passenger seat now held Raoul, the "lucky" survivor, nursing bruises and a deeply wounded pride. His ruined bicycle was in the back. Michael, who had nearly gotten his own man killed, stared fixedly at the heat-shimmering horizon, wishing fervently that the seat would swallow him whole.
Five kilometers later, the walkie-talkie crackled again, making him jump. "Lord, three figures, right flank. Look like scavengers. Your orders?"
For a heart-stopping second, Michael's foot twitched toward the accelerator, a primal urge to flee from any more surprises. He mastered it. The mission. He keyed the mic, his voice tighter than he intended. "John. Send one. Cautious. Very cautious this time."
John dispatched a guard renowned for his pedal speed—a long-limbed man who could outpace the wind on a good day. This time, there was no horror lying in wait. Three male scavengers, their faces etched with a mixture of fear and desperate hope, approached at a jog. The ground was now hot enough to fry an egg, Michael was certain, yet two of them were barefoot, their soles as tough and cracked as old leather.
They didn't wait for questions. As one, they prostrated themselves in the blistering dust before the truck's grille, their foreheads nearly touching the burning ground. "Hail to the ruler of a hundred kilometers! Lord of Cinder Town, the generous and merciful Harry Potter Michael!" they chanted, a well-rehearsed litany of feudal submission. They kept their eyes firmly on the dirt, not daring to look up.
"Rise," Michael said, the word feeling strange. "You know of me?"
"Of course, Lord!" the boldest one piped up, still not raising his head. "What scavenger in these parts hasn't heard? All dream of a place in your town! Though the terms are strict… a man needs a family. Widows are a prized find in the ruins these days, let me tell you."
A flicker of pride warmed Michael's chest. He was making a mark. But the warmth died when questioning revealed they had, days ago, seen a group matching Zhang Tiezhu's description heading south. Of their hidden base, they knew nothing. After refilling their water-skins from the truck's tank—a act of kindness that left them weeping with gratitude—Michael turned the convoy south.
The pattern repeated through the afternoon. More scavengers, more vague sightings pointing south, but no concrete location. As dusk fell, they sheltered in the lee of a wind-scoured hill. The night was a symphony of howling wind and biting cold. Huddled in the cab, surrounded by loyal guards taking shifts in the freezing dark, Michael gained a new, humbling appreciation for the sheer, grinding endurance required to survive a single year out here, let alone a lifetime.
What are you hiding, Zhang Tiezhu?he thought, staring into the star-flecked blackness. And will we find it in time?
Dawn brought a break. Within half an hour of setting out, they encountered a grizzled scavenger named Steve. His story, told in a rasping voice, changed everything. Years ago, lost and chasing game, he'd stumbled upon a hidden valley, accessible only through a narrow fissure in the rock. In that valley lived a group of people. All of them, he said, had hair black as a raven's wing, eyes like dark pools, and skin the color of old parchment.
And the direction? Not northeast, where they'd been searching. Not even directly south.
Steve pointed a grimy finger back the way they'd come yesterday, towards the southwest. The complete opposite direction.
A secret, indeed. And one Zhang Tiezhu and his people had guarded with a deliberate, misleading trail. The question of whynow loomed larger, and far more ominous, than the vast, empty landscape ahead.