The water resupply would have to wait. Shen Cong set his jaw and kept driving north.
That night he made camp at a place called Baimu Village — a natural settlement under Yinping Township, Chaohu Municipality, already technically outside the hill terrain. A few more kilometers to Yinping Township, then across the Yuxi River and into Chaohu city proper.
Chaohu was in sight.
The basin protection that had preserved Daguo Reservoir was gone here. Baimu Village was flat ground, and flat ground had taken the full force of the storm. There was nothing left that deserved the word ruins — just an open, featureless expanse where a village had been, the sand gradually reasserting itself now that the flood had retreated, light gusts lifting thin veils of it across the surface and filling in Vajra’s tire tracks as fast as they formed.
He used the remaining daylight to check the tires.
Twenty-two tires, each one a different kind of conversation with the terrain it had been crossing. The rock surfaces had been hard on the sidewalls. He needed to adjust the pressure for the softer sand-and-gravel substrate ahead before the harder surfaces had overstressed something he hadn’t noticed. The onboard compressor had an automatic pressure-setting function — the work itself was mechanical and uncomplicated, two minutes per tire, but he had twenty-two of them and kept interrupting himself to stand and scan the perimeter.
The last sweep, final tire done,充气泵 in hand, heading back toward the cab — and then the sensation through his feet that he’d learned to take seriously. Sand shifting in the wrong pattern for wind.
He was still processing the signal when the Burrower-type creature erupted from the ground directly in front of him.
The collision knocked him backward. He was already drawing the fang-knife before he landed, Activity channeling into the blade on instinct, arm coming up to block.
The creature’s foreleg came down on the knife and was severed at the joint. The rest of the body’s momentum carried it into him regardless, jaws finding the forearm of the Optimus 1.0.
Crack.
The teeth found Active armor. Found it, and stopped there.
One more strike, direct to the head. The pale green fluid that passed for blood in this type went everywhere. Three or four seconds from the initial collision to a dead creature at his feet.
He stood up, pressed a hand against his sternum where the impact had landed, and breathed through it. Without the armor and the Activity-reinforced body underneath it, that collision would have cracked ribs at minimum.
He wiped the green fluid from the armor with his sleeve and looked at the body.
Burrower-type. Almost identical to the first Burrower he’d encountered back near Wuwei, same basic morphology, same sickle-shaped Activity-core mandibles. Slightly different in minor details — possibly a variant, possibly just individual variation within the species. He’d catalog it properly inside.
He picked up the compressor, grabbed the carcass by one hind leg, and started back toward the cab door.
The Spine-cat screamed.
Not its usual angry vocalization — this was higher-pitched, repeated, the sound of an animal that had lost the thread of what was happening to it. Shen Cong reversed direction and went around the rear of Vajra with the fang-knife in his left hand and the handgun in his right.
In the dim wash of Vajra’s exterior running lights, crouched over the chained Spine-cat, was a person.
A woman. The clothing was remnants rather than garments — strips of fabric that had been clothing once, now hanging from her frame in patches, the exposed skin underneath so coated in dried filth that it absorbed the light rather than reflecting it. She had both hands on one of the Spine-cat’s bone protrusions and was methodically twisting it.
The cat had no room to retreat. It screamed again.
“Stop.”
He said it flatly, without the kind of escalation in his voice that meant he was going to say it again and wait.
She turned.
He processed what he was seeing as quickly as he could: a scar that ran from her left eye socket across her face to her right cheek, an old one, healed wrong. The left eye itself had been displaced — pushed partially from the socket by what looked like internal pressure from a bone structure that hadn’t stopped growing where it should have. Four fangs that had torn through her lower lip as they emerged, stretching the skin in ways that skin wasn’t designed to stretch.
The mutation had been working on her. Visibly, extensively, and not kindly.
She stared at him with the functional eye and the displaced one and made a sound that was less a word than a declaration of territorial intent.
He kept the gun up.
“Back. Fifty meters. Now. Or I shoot.”
She didn’t move.
“The cat is mine. Step away from the cat.”
“Eat. Hungry.”
Two words. Recognizable words, dragged out of her with the specific effort of someone fighting through static to access a frequency they hadn’t used in a long time. The muscles around her jaw were working against the fangs, the fangs against the muscles, everything in that face under competing pressures.
She was still a person. That much was clear. Whatever the mutation had done to her — and it had done a significant amount — something in there was still operating on language and recognition and enough social understanding to say don’t kill me and mean it strategically rather than by reflex.
“Back fifty meters.”
She stood up instead and screamed at him. Not words — volume, directed at him, a threat display.
Bang.
The shot took a strip of hair off the top of her head and buried itself in a wall remnant twenty meters beyond. The gun hadn’t moved more than a centimeter in his hand.
She dropped. Covered her head. Made sounds he couldn’t parse as language.
“Fifty meters.”
She looked at the Spine-cat. Looked at him. The hunger in her remaining functional eye was specific and legible — not the mindless drive of the creatures he’d been fighting since the apocalypse, but something that understood it was being denied something and was calculating whether the denial was worth fighting.
She backed up about fifteen meters and stopped. Fixed her eye on Shen Cong and didn’t look away.
He unclipped the Spine-cat’s chain, carried it inside, and sealed the armor.
Through the periscope, he watched her approach the vehicle and begin circling it.
He took the two most advanced pieces of Tumour-Pig meat from the supply section — the cuts that were a day away from being completely unusable — and added a bottle of mineral water, the fresh Burrower carcass, and a set of sports clothing from his supply stock. He cracked the side viewport, deposited everything on the ground, and started the engine.
He drove through the dark, which he hadn’t done since leaving the warehouse compound months ago.
In the rearview camera feed, the woman was already bent over the Tumour-Pig, eating raw. She looked up once when Vajra began to move. Then she looked back down.
A minute later she was too far away to make out.
Shen Cong drove in silence.
He’d spent months mentally preparing for a survivor encounter — running scenarios, identifying threat vectors, establishing decision frameworks. He had the radio message from the Eastern Theater Command as a reference point for what organized survivor groups might look like. He’d thought about hostility and negotiation and resource competition.
He hadn’t thought about this.
A person who could still say don’t kill me and I’m hungry, but who had looked at his truck and gone for the meat supply rather than the person inside it. Whose mutation had pushed through her bones and her eye socket and her lip in ways that served no tactical purpose and probably caused her significant pain. Who was, by any reasonable assessment of her current condition, barely surviving in the strictest sense of the word.
He didn’t feel guilty for driving away. The calculus was straightforward: unknown person, unknown capabilities, clear willingness to take what she wanted, insufficient trust established for any other arrangement.
He also didn’t feel nothing.
He filed the observation alongside the others and kept his eyes on the road.
(End of Chapter 35)