What’s out there to the northwest?

He tied the rabbit’s legs to stop it from concussing itself further, climbed to the roof, and swept the telescope across the northwest horizon.

Rocks. Layered, uneven, going on until the distance swallowed them. Nothing else.

He stood there for a while, thinking.

The pull on the rabbit was obviously real — consistent across every orientation test, strong enough to override basic self-preservation. But why could the rabbit feel it and he couldn’t? What kind of signal was it? An scent trail from another rabbit drifting on the wind?

He rejected that almost immediately. The directional consistency was too precise for a scent. This was something else.

He made a decision. Optimus 1.0 on, weapons loaded, the new javelin in hand — suited up and ready, very little out here posed a real threat to him. He’d go take a look.

He chained the rabbit’s collar to a length of steel cable and climbed down.

The Plastic Rabbit hit the ground and immediately became a taut cable angled northwest, pulling with everything it had. If it had weighed more than it did, Shen Cong might actually have needed to lean against it.

Man and rabbit set off into the wasteland.

He thought of the image from I Am Legend — Will Smith and his German Shepherd, moving through an empty city. Himself and the Plastic Rabbit, moving through an empty landscape. The parallel held, more or less. Would hold better without the chain, admittedly.

The rabbit dragged him seven or eight hundred meters before he called a halt. At that distance, Vajra was barely a shape in the background. He raised the telescope and scanned ahead. Still nothing unusual. Whatever was pulling the rabbit was at least a kilometer out — possibly further.

One kilometer was his self-imposed limit. Beyond that, his sense of safety dropped sharply, and a sharp drop in his sense of safety was the kind of thing he took seriously, persecution complex or not. He’d learned to treat that internal signal as data.

Another hundred meters, telescope sweep, still nothing. He grabbed the rabbit by the ears, tucked it under his arm over its furious objections, and walked back.

咕咕. 咕咕.

It thrashed the entire way. He didn’t engage with this.

Back in Vajra, armor sealed, the familiar sense of security settling back into place, he tied the rabbit up and returned to the driver’s seat. He had work to finish. Once the engine was running again, he could investigate properly — with thirty tons of steel between him and whatever was out there.

July 25th.

Two weeks of silence from the engine bay, and then —

VROOM.

The ignition caught. All three engines rolled over and found their rhythm, the sound deeper than before, something almost contained about it — like the Activity infused into the rebuilt components had changed the mechanical character of the whole system. More power, less noise. An inward kind of force.

The automated control systems were still offline, so he switched to manual. He’d always kept the manual option as a backup — in fact, most of Vajra’s critical systems had manual fallback modes, precisely for situations like this one. He moved the broken display screen aside, fished the steering wheel out from under the driver’s seat, clicked it onto the reserved shaft. Pulled up the floor panel, exposing the accelerator, brake, and clutch. Opened the windshield hatch and slotted in the side mirrors.

Ready.

He pressed the accelerator, eased the clutch, and Vajra rolled forward for the first time in two weeks.

The post-flood terrain was rough going. The water had scoured away most of the fine sand and gravel, leaving irregular rock surfaces, drop-offs, and stones large enough to catch the chassis. Even with 1.5-meter tires, Vajra took several hard knocks on the undercarriage, each one drawing on Activity reserves to absorb. Where the rocks were too large to roll over, the dozer blade pushed them aside or filled the gaps. Where the terrain dropped away unexpectedly, he went around.

He drove to the kilometer mark — the point where the rabbit’s chain had gone taut two days ago — and pulled the cage out of the back.

Simple enough navigation system: watch the rabbit, drive whatever direction it tried to go. He’d built more sophisticated instruments in his time, but this worked.

Three kilometers northwest by north from his repair site, following the rabbit’s heading, Vajra slowed.

A car.

Half-buried in the rocks, barely recognizable, but unmistakably a car — the frame geometry of a mid-size SUV visible under the corrosion and debris. Shen Cong stared at it for a moment.

This was the first vehicle he’d seen since the apocalypse that wasn’t Vajra.

He’d assumed the storm had destroyed everything. Wuwei had been reduced to flat rubble, the landscape stripped to bare rock — he’d formed a mental model of a world where anything not specifically engineered for survival had been erased. And yet here was an SUV chassis, lying in the rocks three kilometers from his repair site, half its structure still intact under the exposed surface.

He suited up, cleared the perimeter, and went in carefully.

The exposed upper section was badly corroded — bodywork, glass, interior, all gone. But the sections that had been buried by the initial storm and protected by the rockfall were different. When he got underneath and looked, there were still components in there. Usable metal. Parts he could work with.

He ran a rope from Vajra’s tow hook to the SUV’s frame and dragged it clear of the rocks, then spent twenty minutes harvesting everything worth taking. The steel stock on Vajra had taken a significant hit during the repairs — this would help.

He confirmed nothing more was salvageable, loaded the haul, and kept driving.

Another wreck appeared within five minutes.

This one was a coach — a long-distance bus, larger than the SUV, half its length underground. He stopped again, suited up again, and pulled another load of salvage.

Then kept driving.

And found another.

And then he started noticing that the wrecks weren’t getting more scattered. They were getting denser. Every few hundred meters, another vehicle. Then multiple vehicles. The debris was accumulating in a direction that felt deliberate — as if the apocalypse storm had funneled everything toward this point over the course of a month of sustained wind.

What is this place?

He rounded a low ridge of rock and stopped completely.

A flat clearing opened up ahead — roughly level, probably a natural depression that had collected debris during the storm. In it, tilted at various angles, half-buried or fully exposed, were more than fifty vehicles. Cars, trucks, vans, a couple of buses, things he couldn’t identify from a distance. All of them rusted, all of them wreckage, arranged by no human hand but concentrated here as if by intention. Beyond the clearing, more vehicles were scattered in loose groups across the terrain in every direction.

This is what the storm built. A graveyard of cars.

He was still processing that when the rabbit went quiet.

He looked over.

It had stopped throwing itself against the cage. It was crouching low, head forward, eyes fixed on something in front of it — except there was only the camera screen in front of it, which was dark. The head wounds had matted blood over both eyes, so it was functionally blind.

It was staring at something Shen Cong couldn’t see.

And the sound it was making had changed — not the frantic goo goo of the past two days. Lower. Slower. Something between a warning and a response.

(End of Chapter 16)