The wind screamed. Vajra swayed.
This storm hit harder than the apocalypse wind had — debris moving fast enough to dent steel, a constant hammering against the hull that didn’t let up. And the rain hadn’t even started yet.
Through the connection, Shen Cong could feel every impact. Each piece of gravel that struck the outer armor bled off a small amount of Activity — and at wind speeds like this, unprotected 16mm steel plate would have started deforming within the hour. The Activity was the only thing keeping the damage contained.
The storm was also flooding the environment with ambient Activity. Dense, almost overwhelming amounts of it — more than he’d felt since the original meteor impact. Vajra was pulling it in as fast as it arrived, using the incoming flow to offset the outgoing losses.
Absorb. Replenish. Absorb. Replenish.
With his focus cycling through that rhythm, Shen Cong could feel his mental stamina being pushed and rebuilt in real time — not the Activity directly strengthening his mind, but the body the Activity had built providing a more stable foundation for sustained concentration. A stronger frame held a steadier focus.
He kept it up for three hours before he had to let go.
He pulled his awareness back, stretched, closed his eyes. Without his guidance, Vajra kept the absorption process running on its own — slower, maybe a fifth of the speed, but enough to keep the reserves stable for the next ten hours or so.
He rested.
When he opened his eyes, the hammering had stopped. Outside was still pitch black, no light from any direction. He checked the Geiger counter.
Radiation was back up to apocalypse-storm levels.
High radiation, high Activity. They track together. Connected somehow?
Another unanswered question for the list. He filed it and moved on.
Wind down, debris no longer a factor — Shen Cong made his way back into the cargo section to cook. He was working through the Fangwolf meat before it turned; without proper salt-curing, the shelf life was limited, and the small onboard refrigerator could only hold so much. Gnawrat meat too, same situation.
Not that he was complaining. Fangwolf meat meant Activity, and Activity was rapidly becoming the most valuable resource in the world.
He was halfway through connecting the induction burner when the sky outside finally broke.
It didn’t rain so much as the atmosphere simply let go. No individual drops — a solid curtain of water dropping all at once, the sound against Vajra’s hull less like rain and more like standing inside a waterfall. He cracked one of the side viewports and shone his flashlight out.
The beam reflected off the rain wall two meters out and disappeared.
Shen Cong stood there for a moment, flashlight in hand, and felt thoroughly ridiculous.
He’d spent the last several days stressed about water supply. Hauled jugs out of an underground warehouse, planned a route to Hefei partly around finding more. And now he was parked in what appeared to be a developing ocean.
I cannot drink any of this. Radiation levels are completely off the charts.
He shook his head and went back to the burner.
Fangwolf steaks, medium-done, with the last of a nearly-expired pulpy orange drink and half a jar of chili sauce. Propped against the container wall in the dark with the rain hammering the hull, eating a surprisingly decent meal.
The meat had a faint gaminess to it — somewhere between dog and venison, slightly bitter at the edges. Six years of cooking for himself had made him reasonably competent in the kitchen, and he’d figured out by now that more oil, lower heat, and patience made a meaningful difference.
I should find a dog.
The thought connected itself immediately to the Fangwolves — former dogs, almost certainly — and from there to the movie he’d rewatched the previous night. Will Smith and his German Shepherd, the two of them alone in an empty city, dealing with monsters and solitude and the particular weight of being possibly the last of your kind. Shen Cong had found the parallels a bit on the nose when he picked it out of his library.
His situation was similar, more or less. Minus the dog.
Just him and Vajra.
The rain kept coming. By the time he’d finished eating, the water outside had crept past the halfway point on the tires. No sign of stopping.
No wind, no flying debris — nothing requiring active guidance. He opened the laptop, bypassed the games folder, and plugged in a USB drive. Found the file labeled Radio Technology — Comprehensive Reference Collection and started reading.
He’d spent years building his digital library. Three hundred USB drives and fifty-odd hard drives, loaded with reference material across every field he thought might matter — downloaded directly from digital archives and libraries. Medicine, engineering, chemistry, agriculture, electronics. Also several thousand movies, novels, games, music files, and — filed discreetly in a separate folder — other entertainment for long solitary nights. He’d prepared extensively in that department as well. One of the inflatable companions had already seen use on more than one occasion.
He was, by any measure, a deeply unusual person.
The radio reference was dense and he was reading it with purpose. Two goals: modify the AN/PPS-15A to scan for underground movement — being blind to subsurface threats was a serious tactical gap — and upgrade the vehicle’s radio transmitter to push signal further, on the chance that other survivors somewhere were broadcasting.
He preferred radio contact over in-person contact. Lower risk. More time to assess.
The mechanical watch read 11:46 PM on July 9th when he finally rubbed his eyes and put the laptop down.
He did a quick check — opened each viewport in turn, shone the flashlight through. Water had climbed past the three-quarter mark on the tires. Close to a meter of standing water. The chassis was submerged. The sealed modifications were holding, ventilation ports positioned high enough on the sides and top that nothing had gotten in yet.
No idea how long this keeps up.
He wiped his face with a damp cloth, squeezed into the sleeping alcove, and was out within minutes.
That night, Shen Cong dreamed he was an infant. Lying in a rocking crib, his mother sitting beside it, one hand moving gently back and forth. A feeling he hadn’t had in seven or eight years — complete, uncomplicated safety, the kind that doesn’t require understanding to work.
BRRING BRRING BRRING.
The alarm. He surfaced from the dream and lay still for a moment, letting the world reassemble itself around him.
Right. Apocalypse.
He rubbed a hand over his shaved head.
Dizzy. Everything’s moving—
He stopped.
Not dizzy. The floor was moving. Vajra was swaying — a slow, heavy, back-and-forth roll, like being on a boat in mild chop.
What—
He swung his legs off the bunk and put his feet down.
Cold water. Ten centimeters of it on the floor.
Vajra is flooding.
He was on his feet before the thought finished forming, sloshing through the ankle-deep water, scanning the cargo section. The source was obvious within seconds — one of the side ventilation ports, now underwater outside, was letting water push through the seals in a steady trickle.
He yanked the side viewport open.
Water poured in immediately and he slammed it shut.
The water level outside had climbed past the windows.
He did the geometry in his head: if the windows were submerged, and the wheels were somewhere below that — Vajra had roughly one roof rack above the waterline. That was it. The rest was underwater.
He moved.
Top hatch. He threw it open and pulled himself out into the storm.
The rain hit him like a wall. Within two seconds he was soaked completely through, flashlight in his teeth, standing on the roof of a thirty-ton truck that was rocking in a current that shouldn’t have existed.
He swept the beam around.
In every direction: water. Dark, churning water, rain hammering its surface into a constant chop, no horizon visible, no features anywhere. The sky and the flood were the same color and the same dark, despite the clock reading six or seven in the morning.
Vajra was moving — not floating, too heavy for that — but the current was pushing against the hull, and the supports driven into what had been solid gravel were either dragging or slowly losing purchase, and thirty tons of vehicle was behaving like a toy in a bathtub.
This isn’t something I planned for.
He stood on the roof in the pouring rain and genuinely did not know what to do next.
Then, from somewhere out in the darkness — direction impossible to determine, distance impossible to judge:
“GROOOOAAAARRRR.”
Low. Resonant. Not an echo. Something alive, somewhere in the flood, announcing itself.
(End of Chapter 9)