Vajra stood in the middle of the car graveyard like the only living thing in a field of corpses.
Shen Cong glanced at the Plastic Rabbit — quiet now, still low, that changed vocalization continuing in its throat — then checked the AN/PPS-15A display. Nothing moving on the scan. The infrared was still offline, so anything cold-blooded or stationary would be invisible to him. The atmosphere in the clearing pressed down with a particular weight, the kind that came from two months of seeing nothing and then suddenly seeing too much.
He grabbed the telescope and the Activity-infused handgun, opened the roof hatch, and climbed up.
From four meters of elevation, the full picture came into focus.
This had been elevated ground before the storm — a natural high point that had acted as a collection basin for everything the wind had been moving for a month. The arrangement of wreckage wasn’t random. The densest concentration sat at the center, where a dozen or more vehicles had been driven together and compressed into a single twisted mass. Moving outward from that center, the density decreased evenly in all directions, the wrecks becoming more scattered, more isolated, until they trailed off into the terrain beyond.
Radial. Like a pattern made deliberately.
Or like a crop circle.
Aliens getting bored?
He dismissed that immediately. If there were aliens, surely they had better hobbies. The more useful explanation was the same one he kept coming back to: Activity. Every vehicle out here was primarily metal. Metal had a relationship with Activity that other materials didn’t. If something had generated a significant Activity event at this location —
He was still working through it when movement in the telescope caught his eye.
Two creatures, emerging from behind a section of wreckage to his left. One resembled a Teddy bear dog — curly-coated, compact but wrong in the proportions, moving with the particular aggression he’d come to associate with mutated animals. The other looked like a pig, except that a pig didn’t typically have tumorous growths along its shoulders and flanks, and a pig’s tusks didn’t normally exceed the length of a human forearm, curved and gleaming with the same dark silver sheen as every Activity core he’d ever collected.
They were biting each other with genuine commitment.
Shen Cong was back inside Vajra within three seconds of spotting them.
He watched from the cameras for a full minute. Nothing else moved. The two creatures were focused entirely on each other, which told him something — if there were larger threats in the immediate area, neither of these two would be wasting energy on a territorial dispute. The ecology of the space, such as it was, suggested the biggest things here were the dog and the pig.
And he was out of Activity-rich food. The Gnawrat meat had fully spoiled days ago. The Plastic Rabbit and the blowfly experiment both required feeding. He needed fresh kills.
Neither of them can breach the armor. Let’s go.
He hit the ignition.
Vajra roared into the clearing, dozer blade leveled, pushing wreckage aside as it went. The noise was considerable. He’d learned enough about mutated creature psychology to know this wouldn’t frighten them — if anything, it would provoke them.
He was right. Both animals broke off their fight, turned toward the approaching vehicle, and started screaming at it. The Tumour-Pig’s vocalization was impressive. The Teddy-Dog’s was higher-pitched but no less hostile.
Fifty meters out, Shen Cong braked and cut the engine.
Vajra went silent.
The two creatures screamed at it for several seconds, then appeared to collectively decide that the metal box wasn’t worth the attention, turned back toward each other, and resumed fighting.
Shen Cong stared at this for a moment.
They’re ignoring me.
He felt nothing in particular about being ignored by mutated animals. Their intelligence levels had been consistent across every specimen he’d encountered. What mattered was the tactical situation.
Fifty meters. Slingshot range but low stopping power. Handgun ammo is finite. Crossbow might not penetrate that pig’s shoulder mass. The fang-tipped arrowheads aren’t finished yet.
He looked at the four javelins racked along the cargo wall. Rough-finished, not yet calibrated, but the Activity cores were set and the tips were sharp.
Time to find out what they actually did.
He climbed back to the roof. Neither animal noticed him.
He picked up the first javelin, channeled Activity into the tip until he could feel it saturate, settled into a throwing stance, aimed at the Tumour-Pig — larger target, better for a first test — and threw.
Crack.
The javelin crossed fifty meters in what felt like no time at all. The breaking-air sound it made was new — a sharp, sustained shriek that the speed and the Activity together produced. He hadn’t heard that before.
It missed. Hit a scrapped truck chassis ten meters past the pig and punched straight through the chassis plate, burying itself to the rebar stub with only the tail end showing.
Both animals flinched. Looked around. Went back to fighting.
Shen Cong’s face was warm.
Ten meter error on the first throw. Noted.
He picked up the second javelin, adjusted his release point to account for what he’d felt in the first throw, and tried again.
Crack.
This one went into the exposed earth about a meter to the pig’s left, almost completely disappearing into the ground on impact.
Closer.
He picked up the third javelin, let himself settle, ran back through the last two trajectories, made the adjustment, and threw.
Crack — thud.
The javelin took the Tumour-Pig in the left shoulder blade.
The Activity-infused tip hit bone and kept going. The force behind it — one and a half bull’s worth, focused to a point the size of a spear tip — drove through the shoulder mass and pinned the animal to the ground. The Tumour-Pig’s scream was something he didn’t have a comparison for. Louder than a slaughterhouse, more continuous, the sound of something very large and very surprised being told it had lost.
Shen Cong stared at the result.
He’d seen the fang-knife split a Gnawrat’s skull in a single pass. He’d understood intellectually that the javelins would hit harder. But watching a creature roughly the size of a water buffalo get nailed to the ground by a thrown spear from fifty meters — that was a different kind of understanding.
At close range, even the prehistoric crocodile would feel this.
He had a weapon for it now. That thought settled something in his chest that had been unsettled since the flood.
The Teddy-Dog, to its credit, did not appear to register the Tumour-Pig’s situation as a threat to itself. It took the opportunity to close in and start feeding, tearing off chunks and swallowing without chewing.
That’s my food.
Shen Cong already had the fourth javelin up. He ran the trajectory math from the previous three throws, adjusted, threw.
It missed the Teddy-Dog by the width of a hand — passed close enough to part its curly fur — and put itself into the Tumour-Pig’s already-pinned body, finishing what the third javelin had started.
He put the javelin away and unshipped the crossbow.
The pseTAC-24 — a limited-run model, the most powerful hand crossbow in commercial production before the apocalypse, 500 feet per second bolt velocity. He’d paid three hundred and sixty thousand yuan for it through channels he’d preferred not to think about too carefully. Before the Activity enhancement, he’d barely been able to cock it. Now it was a standard tool.
He aimed at fifty meters. Pressed the trigger.
The Teddy-Dog was down before the sound of the release finished registering.
Two animals. Two shots. Combined elapsed time from first javelin to second kill: under four minutes.
He climbed down, stowed his weapons, moved Vajra forward until the dozer blade was positioned to collect both carcasses, and sat for a moment before getting out.
The hunting had been straightforward. But that wasn’t why he was here.
The Plastic Rabbit had been trying to reach this place for days, throwing itself bloody against its cage. Two mutated animals had been fighting in this exact location. Something in this car graveyard had drawn all three of them.
He needed to know what.
(End of Chapter 17)