Chapter 3

The network was home to a lot of useless information, but what mattered to most people were the announcements that came through in real time. Still, for most of them, it wasn't worth gritting one's teeth and bearing the static and barely distinguishable mumbles that was silence in the language of the wireless for an announcement of impending doom. Places like the research institute over in East Russia depended quite heavily on such information, but they practically worshipped science despite the horror it had wrought. There were plenty other places that gave no stock to it at all, who saw science as something that brought as much ill as it did benefit and wasn't worth depending on. And then there were places that actively abhorred it, but the most western settlement in Russia was made up mostly of the indifferent.

And then there were some who took advantage of science - its advances, its regressions and its blunders - for their own agenda. Once, they were called contractors. Now, they've been affectionately dubbed "Bounty hunters" because they were trained in a variety of skills and sold or offered them to the highest bidder. Simone was one such bounty hunter, and one of the few people who bore the static from the wireless to reach the gems underneath.

And she listened closely to those mumbles. Many weren't aware of it - a dirty trade secret, so to say - but more often than not, normal conversation got picked up with the static and transmitted. It had something to do with the wiring slowly corroding but she honestly didn't care why. It was a goldmine of information - and far more relevant information than what a certain microbial species looked like under a microscope when they had neither external microbes nor microscopes to bother with. Or not the microscopes used to look at microbes in their full glory anyway. They were tailored to other things now: molecular structure, soil components, other fancy chemical things left to the researchers to try and correct the mistakes of their predecessors. Not that many expected something to come out of all that, two hundred years later when they were more or less used to the new world which was like a regressed, dystopian version of the old.

But that didn't matter. Simone was searching for any sliver of a hint: information that could guide her next course. Because she was between jobs and nothing interesting had happened for a while. The East Russia Research Institute had moved from growing sea lettuce to modifying their soggy cucumbers so they wouldn't be as soggy anymore. A colony in central Russia had lost a few limbs to the wolger pack nearby because they denounced anything that came from the advancement of science, and that included regeneration treatment. The registry was deferring their annual trip to Russia for fumes detected in the Greenland area. A precursor tremour had been detected off the cost of East Russia. An earthquake with a magnitude of eight a little more inland, hitting the colony that accompanied the East Russia Research Institute and sixteen lives had been lost. Which consequently caused the registry to push their trip to Russia back up, because an earthquake that had already happened was a little more important than fumes which may lead to a volcanic eruption in a week's time.

The registry would skip over the other colonies in that case, and return later. If she met them she'd at least save them a second trip but it was a long road and not very high yield. But there wasn't much that would be considered high yield. She could always thin down the wolger pack on the way to increase the spoils. The people there wouldn't take up guns themselves or accept their use, but what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them and that wolger pack would.

That decided, she packed her things up. Like all bounty hunters, she travelled light because she had no roost in any one place to return to. She had her hoverbike for that - and a better model than the ones security used because the whole colony was made up of stubborn men and women who wouldn't take the advancements found in other places. She wasn't that picky. No bounty hunter who made a living could really afford to be. Catastrophic things rarely happened: the sort of thing that suddenly threw everyone into a panic because they were far too used to the roles handed down to them.

She kept an ear towards the wireless as she loaded her hoverbike. The last things were weapons: a long range rifle, a closer range handgun and a long hunting knife just in case in a sheath on the back of her waist so it didn't get in her way when she sat saddle. And she was just slinging the rifle over the handlebars when she heard the, quite clear, announcement, and she blinked in surprise. Because HeLa running loose really was the sort of thing that no-one was prepared for, because it hadn't happened in the new world.

#

Boris, in the end, passed his shift over and Nelly and Tony flipped for it. Nelly lost, and so Nelly wound up finishing off the night and watching the sun come up. It was a non-exciting shift: not a single target to be shot. She stared out into the horizon and wondered if something about HeLa had frightened them off.

At the hospital, they drained the blood not wasting away in the lungs and took out the brain and heart and hooked them both up to tubes filled with salts to keep them alive. Then, once the sun was up, they burned Louis' corpse and watched the smoke rise up and colour the blue sky with a brush of grey. Everyone saw the empty cage. Everyone knew. The horror tales of their youth were suddenly proven true.

And the three lead researchers gathered in the top-most room of the research institute and waited to hear back from the council. Static interrupted the silence, and initially it was a genial thing, like listening to the wind rattle chains or blow plastic cartons about. But then it began to grate on their nerves, like the oppressing sort of silence tended to do. Dina winced every time there was an extra-large burst, and finally she shook her head and said: "Can we at least play a game or something? I'm going to get grey hair sitting like this!"

"You can close off Louis' profile," Claire suggested. None of them had gotten around to that yet.

Dina scowled at the other woman. "Something distracting," she snapped. "I don't want to be reminded of one of our security guards crushed by his own bike because a two hundred year old science experiment picked now of all times to get loose."

"We'll never know what it was," said Paulo, cutting through Claire's potentially snippier reply. "Whether the cage got damaged in the earthquake or something in HeLa was awakened and he proved strong enough to escape with the right motivation regardless of the cage. And it doesn't matter. What matters is what we do now and it's the same with everything else that fails, and every other person that dies."

Dina closed her eyes. Claire hummed a little and turned away. She was older and more experienced, after all, and more callous as a result. It was disappointing and a little sad to lose a young member of the community and especially to something that may have been preventable if only they'd checked the cage more thoroughly – but Paulo was right in that aspect. They'll never know, now, whether the cage had been damaged at all.

Silence slunk in again and, finally, Dina made a noise of annoyance and rolled herself over to the computer. There were a few from yesterday's sixteen deaths as well and she wrapped those up quickly. Paulo had entered most of the information there and it was only the tedious bits. But Louis' profile was untouched: it looked like the profile of any living person and she gave it a long hard look before changing the status to deceased. "Determined cause?"

"Bleeding into the abdominal cavity and lung pleura," Paulo replied automatically. Dina slowly typed it in: haemothorax and haemoperitoneum, with the precipitating factor being crushed by a weight of – "How much do the hoverbikes weigh?"

"Who cares?" Claire sighed. "It's custom to dissect everything but it won't make it any easier to understand and just that much harder to – "

The static spiked again, but this time for longer, and then there was a voice, male and clear and addressing them. "Council to East Russia Research Institute."

Dina, already at the computer, replied: "East Russia Research Institute, this is Dina Wright receiving."

#

"We're doing what?" Boris cried. "Chasing after HeLa? After someone died?"

"And a security guard to boot," muttered Nelly. "I thought the council likes to avoid suicidal missions."

Dina cast her a sympathetic look. "Look on the bright side," she offered, though she didn't sound as though she believed her next words herself. "It'll be a bit of an adventure." She paused, then added: "Claire asks if you can bring her something interesting back. Some new species we haven't got documented, or even a pregnant known one."

"We'll do our best," said Tony, the only one with a schooled expression amongst them. "Though we can't promise anything. It might not be a good idea to have the additional weight for a long distance run."

Dina shrugged. "I'm just passing on the message. The east guards will take over here – it's easier for them since they still have a full four so they can split the shifts down the middle." She stared at them. Boris looked a little frightened. Tony looked the same as he always did. Nelly's eyes seemed to be masking a deep dread. And it was understandable, expected. They'd all grown up in a world where the wastelands screamed death, and they'd screamed that since before they were born, before their parents or grandparents were even born. "The council wouldn't send you guys unless they think you'll succeed." It was the same argument Paulo had given her. "They don't waste lives."

"Think." That was Nelly again. "They think. They don't know. Wasn't it the council who said the cage would hold HeLa? And now it seems that might never have been the case at all."

Dina fought the impulse to hug her chest. There was no clipboard to mask the action, or pillow to add comfort to it. It was uncomfortable: the situation, the scene. That was an old time saying too: 'the grass was greener on the other side.' Change wasn't exciting at all – and it seemed that Nelly at least was thinking the same.

#

He dashed until there was that strong earthly smell all around and no flagpost rising out of the soil to direct him. The place that had bound him was long since past - behind or in front or left or right. Now he stood in the plain dead land and took pause. His flesh burned; the poison sat close to the surface there, and the skin sizzled and blackened but just as quickly reformed. It burned, but it burned less than the iron so no whine passed his lips because of it. Moving was bearable.

Standing still for an extended period though was unbearable. The poison snuck in deeper then, reaching the muscles. Perhaps it would eat down to the bone as well. He crouched, and the stinging grabbed his the thick skin of his palms as well.

The earthly smell came from all directions and equally strong, so he simply pressed on forward, and that was in the direction opposite to the rising sun.

#

The three hoverbikes skimmed the wasteland in single file. They'd chosen the old 'hiding numbers' tactic, even if the footprints they stepped in to were only figurative. Tony was at the lead, at seemingly random points explaining about the Kurgan hypothesis, the Slavic tribes and other trivialities buried into the history of Russia. Nelly was silent initially, but soon enough began to volunteer comments of her own: facts Tony had mistaken or left out – and perhaps that was his intention, to draw them in to conversation – but Boris passed the first hour wedged between the pair in silence.

"It's not good to brood," said Tony, finally speaking directly. "And there's no point to it."

"I'm not brooding," Boris returned. "I just –"

"Saw someone die," Nelly finished from behind him. "A co-worker no less. And we're not doctors. It's not part of our job description and it's not something we've seen before."

Boris was silent a moment, and Tony spared a glance behind him before eyeing the horizon. They all had their rifles ready but he'd be the one to shoot of it came to it. He was in front after all. "It's HeLa," Nelly said flatly. "It is, isn't it?"

"Yes," Boris replied. He glanced at her. Her lips were pursed. "I emptied an entire round into him and he didn't go down. How are we supposed to drag it back?"

"We're not dragging it back," Tony corrected. "The council just wants to be sure that HeLa in the wild won't be a threat to any of the colonies on the continent. We're simply observing the situation. Objectively observing."

Nelly made an indistinguishable noise. Boris wondered if Tony had meant to emphasise the 'objectively'. But he said nothing, and neither did Nelly.

Tony sighed. "Once you get old, your own child could die and it feels like the wind passing by. But that's no reason to bury things when you can feel." He glanced back again.

"It's a strange world." Nelly's voice was softer now. "There's a book, you know. Written over three hundred years ago. Or maybe some adaption of it. Something about magic rings and stuff. And there's a king. And his son dies. And he says: 'no father should have to bury his child.' But no-one thinks like that now. Because we give birth and then our kids grow up without us, with mothers whose job it is to raise everyone's kids."

Boris processed that. Her tone was almost nostalgic. Sad. "Do you have a child?" Surely, he would have known if she did.

"No, I don't. And I don't want one either."

Tony let the conversation veer off. It didn't matter what the topic was, after all, so long as they were all talking.

#

A new smell began to permeate the earthly one. It was vaguely familiar: something he recalled from that immeasurable time in the cage above the earth, at the mercy of the wind and the little white humans that grew so much bigger up in that brief glimpse up close.

Curious, he loped closer. Moving hurt less than staying still and he'd picked that up quickly enough, and so he kept moving, in a zigzag as he came closer and the dichotomy of smells became stronger.

Alive. The smell was alive. And warm-blooded. And lying innocently in the sun, looking curious as he, the unknown, approached. And they were calm until he sprung at them, because alive and warm equalled delectable in his mind, and it lit another burning in him: in his gut.

So he sprung, and ripped at the fur clumsily under his claw like hands. It was like the bars. They wouldn't budge - except the creature was alive and that meant it didn't burn like the iron but it fought back, squirming and scratching and screaming: a high-pitched scream that was softer and unlike what he'd heard before. Humans were loud. Loud and more fragile: he still didn't smell blood and now the others had sensed the danger and sluggishly attacked. They were large and dark brown, and they bowled him over, knocking him off his prize. But he was still clinging to the fur, and he felt the fingers snap and heard the audible snap that said they'd broken again and bone took longer to heal, but he also caught a waft of blood mixing with the scents of earth and alive and these large creatures.

The creatures caught the blood scent and made a collective whining noise before fanning out and disappearing behind dunes of sand. The injured one was slower, and by then HeLa was free and with one uninjured hand and two good legs and teeth that had fortified themselves a little after fighting his way through the bars. He caught the beast again and this time it did not get free: it was alone now, abandoned after the stain of blood and large but not largely strong. And now that the skin was broken once it was easier to break again. His broken fingers caused stabbing pains but he had a good hand and his teeth and it was much easier when the creature slumped and didn't move again.

#

Their course headed straight into the west horizon where the sun was starting to slink over to, and they caught a few creatures along the way. Wolgers and tibers and berolves - alone at first, then in pairs and they worried they were reaching a colony of wolgers soon because they hadn't seen anything else for a while. Nelly was the one in front now, with Boris at the back. And they'd had a few sips of water scattered over the ride but hadn't stopped.

It was an inherent problem in the design of the hoverbike that made them unwilling to stop, because if they stopped the bike would sink onto the sand and it would eat away at the metal coating like it would eat at their boots if they went barefoot. The hovorbikes weren't as durable as the buildings, and they themselves weren't durable enough to keep the poison out for any long period of time elsewise they'd have walled themselves off and searched for a way to survive recycling the soil they decanted before it was all polluted and useless. But they'd found no miracle building material like that, and they'd had to make do with clustering in the middle of safe territory while working out ways to last long enough for a breakthrough. Whether it was a way to take the land and seawater out of the equation completely, or retract the poison, or nullify it, or live up in the clouds or even up in space - but according to predictions from the registry, unless they made a major breakthrough with the mankind would die out before the path to space opened up.

Which in essence meant that, unless they stumbled upon that miracle, they could only try to last as long as possible against inevitable extinction. And that meant leaving the dead to the past, meant marching on in to the present, meant shooting an average of four to five creatures a day - and they'd shot more than that already and the day was far from over.

"I hear something!" Nelly called, gripping the hoverbike with her knees and freeing the rifle. Boris heard it a moment later as well: a high pitched cry, muffled by softer noises that became clearer as they drew near. The sounds of a scuffle - and of a frightened herd because they saw the shadows fan out: a black speck becoming a brown smudge and then a spread as they scattered.

"Catch the centre ones!" Tony called from the back. "Boris, you take the left ones if they get too close!"

Nelly fired three shots in quick succession. Her first shot hit the one coming right at them and the others forked away. Her second one caught another but the third missed, because so quickly there was nothing directly ahead and neither Tony nor Boris had to fire at all. The creatures all ran away from them. Not toward.

But they'd been running from something else first, Nelly mused. They must have been, to appear in a drove like they had. They were all gone now though, except the two she'd shot. One was still moving, making whining noises that made them all grit their teeth. She withheld the mercy shot. The creature didn't look like a tiber and they were the biggest species in the area - or what they knew. Might be a new species, even though that was a bit of a stretch based on simply size. They could be thriving more when they were several hours away from civilisation than when they were in shooting range. Though, if that was the case, it wasn't very smart of the animals to hole themselves up. A large number like that, and they'd turned tail and run. As though they could fire enough to take out twenty odd beasts before they were bowled over.

Wedged in the middle, Boris got the honour of jumping down from the hoverbike, and he winced before landing lightly on the creature's chest. It whined and squirmed but Boris threw his arms out and steadied himself, less sorry now because he'd had a face full of wasteland dirt once upon a time and that skin was permanently stained black since. It had made him bawl like a baby too, on his first and second day of the job and he'd pushed the button to switch out early and he thought Nelly at least would have laughed. Except he'd underestimated Nelly because she didn't laugh. He'd gotten her character all wrong on that aspect.

He'd had practice since and kept his balance easily enough this time. His hand twitched at his hip but he stayed the instinct. It didn't have a flat nose, but rather somewhat rounded, and smooth. The fur was a different brown than anything he'd seen as well. And the chest a bit more barrelled - though it took him a moment to realise because the beast was still squirming and whining in pain. But that wasn't dangerous. Just annoying. Dangerous was throwing him off and springing on him and attempting to take a bite out of his neck because there was a nice supply of blood to be had from there, or maybe a bite out of the deltoids plump with meat instead.

This creature didn't look ferocious like that. Didn't look capable of such ferocity. Like a baby, almost. Though he hadn't seen many babies in his lifetime. Parents saw them. And Mothers – the women who raised all the kids and who were different than the mothers who gave birth to them. But they were much smaller and more fragile than this creature. A wolger's ribs would have cracked under him but he'd heard no such noise and the beast was still squirming about and making that high-pitched whining noise.

Boris glanced at his companions. Tony had a rare grimace on his lips and Nelly's eyes were darting all over the plains – or, rather, everywhere but her victim.

Boris returned to the beast. He couldn't make out any other obvious differences, but that was something the researchers would determine when they got the chance. And for that, the creature didn't need to die. He took a phial of blood and a bit of fur and skin and put the two bottles into his pouch before mounting his hoverbike once more. The exercise was done and as he started his bike's engine again, the creature flopped onto its belly and began to crawl.

There was a strange noise in the air. Something interspersing with the painful whines of the creature before them. Something…

"I wonder if that's what made them flee," said Nelly. Her eyes were distant as she stared into the horizon.

#

Raw meat was a novelty, but to HeLa they tasted little different to dried out meat and soggy vegetables. The differentiating factor was that there was more of it: not a tiny sandwich that vanished into some corner of his shrunken stomach but more than he could consume.

And he was quick to consume all he could, and more than what was tolerable as well. He felt clumsy when he finally gave up, stumbling as his feet touched the soil and began to burn again.

He wasn't desperate to run now. He could stay on the beast he'd felled. Eat his fill again when the gnawing returned. There was no cage. No loud noises and the other beasts, making those whining noises, had fled and vanished into the horizon. It was peaceful. He could be at peace.

But then other sounds drew near. Snarls where the sun was starting to slip. Pops and rumbling in the other direction that for some reason sounded familiar -

And then they came closer and he recognised the sounds. And it brought back the memories of the swinging cage and its constant burn and the loud noises the shots blasting him this way and that. And he covered his head and roared, and when he toppled and felt the bases of his forearms burn he picked himself up and loped away from that undesirable familiarity, towards the still unfamiliar snarls.

And the snarls turned out to be beasts, not passive like the one he'd felled and others he'd frightened away but ferocious and starved. They fell upon him before he'd taken in their appearance - their yellow eyes and almost blackened fur - and he fought back, scratching and beating with his nails and limbs. But they were twenty odd and he just one, and it didn't take them long at all to rip him from limb to limb. He howled in pain at their fangs tearing into his flesh and, when those tender parts of him felt soil, they burned even more painfully. He was back in the cage, suddenly, in those quiet times where there was far too much wind to keep the metal bared and he couldn't help but scramble widely, hoping the gap in the bars would give way to freedom and forcing his limbs through until one of them twisted and snapped and broke clean off. Except it wasn't the bars burning deep past his skin and into muscle and nerves and vessels gorged with blood. It was teeth sinking right in, and between those teeth and the soil like salt in wounds, there was no part of him granted some reprieve.

But he was HeLa. So long as a cell of him remained, he'd return and through no conscious decision of his own. The beasts would eventually leave his scraps - even just bare bones - and move on, and he'd reform.

But that knowledge didn't make the pain of being torn limb to limb any more bearable. And until they did get right down the bones, his nerves would scream.

#

They edged closer to the snarling. Nelly was still in front and her eyes darted all over, trying to catch the danger before it came, trying to work out what that snarling was, and why so loud when they could see nothing at all.

And when she caught something on the horizon, she shot and it didn't move at all. Closer, they realised the beast was one like the ones that had fanned out in fear before, and it was dead with a chunk of its chest missing and blood colouring the brown fur of the breast a deep, vibrant, red.

"Whatever did this might be why they fled," Boris offered. "HeLa?"

"HeLa is more animal than human, then," was Nelly's reply. She spared the carcass a glance before returning to her vigil on the horizon. The smell of blood could serve as a powerful attractant, and the snarls were loud enough that they could no longer talk in normal tones and hope to hear. "It's been a long time, too, since anything was accomplished by keeping him alive."

Tony frowned a little. There Nelly was, going into uncomfortable topics again. Not that he could blame her. He'd gone through a similar phase as well, when he'd tired of the current world and sunk to dreaming about the old one, where they could afford sympathy and morals and waste and luxuries that existed nowhere now. He'd dreamt about wars that gold and women and other glamorous things as rewards, wars where the fighting had an end, and then a long stretch of peace that followed. Where shooting a gun hadn't become routine, something he could almost do in his sleep except he needed his eyes open and mind alert to pick up the shadows moving on the horizon for him to shoot. And where he didn't grow accustomed to hearing whines and howls of pain until the became a part of the background noise, barely distinguishable from the wind and clattering chains and the dull sound of soil raining on metal.

Nelly's musings took a different vein, but she too was at the stage where she longed for a break in the routine, for something to end and something else to begin. She should have been the happiest of all of them at their forage into the wasteland none of them had crossed for over a hundred years, and yet her eyes were lacklustre and her voice coaxing their conversations to drearier waters more often than the norm.

Perhaps it was Louis' death affecting her as badly as it affected Boris, but Tony who'd known all three of them since they were old enough to wander out from their Mothers' wings, was fairly certain it was something else mixed in. The identity of that something however evaded him. Sometimes, she was easy to mistake. In a world where blatant entertainment could be afforded, she might have been an actress or a magician, playing the hearts of the audience like an orchestra. Though she looked far from ready for the stage now, with the misshapen jaw and the scars from her early days as a security guard that would never go away.

Nelly fired suddenly and Tony whipped around to look at her, then the horizon she was focused on with narrowed eyes. "Boris!" he called sharply, and Boris who'd been looking at the carcass looked as well. The horizon was slowly growing dark: a surge of fast moving beasts, almost black in colour. Nelly created a hole in their ranks when she shot the one in the lead. It wasn't the shot that brought it down however, but the ones running astride that smelt the blood and bit the flank of its neighbours. They fell together, snarling and scratching, and the others ignored the scuffle left behind and continued to flock.

"Blood," said Nelly. "It's attracting them!" Her gun was out of pellets and she dropped behind to reload. Boris came up to Tony's side and the two of them fired at the left and right flanks. Three more distracted, two more down - but rest of them still came. Twelve, Tony counted off. And once the others were done feasting on their fallen brethren, they'd come as well. Seventeen. They fired again, and two more tumbled and were swamped by teeth and claws and hungry bellies that gave them a fine display of cannibalism that literature could never hope to live up to.

Nelly joined them and three shots took care of the rest of the flock rushing up to meet them, but then they made a crucial mistake and fired again, at one of the clumps where neighbour was eating neighbour. Nelly and Boris hit the same beast and it fell, hopefully dead, but Tony's hit another clump and the others were too occupied to smell the blood seeping out of the shoulder hole. It was free to snarl at them, and then sprint, and Tony's second shot hit the cheek and only warped the snarl.

Nelly and Boris caught the advance and fired themselves. One hit the chest and the other the head, and the beast only slowed. Only when Tony caught it in the head again, almost exactly where Boris' bullet had gone in, did the creature fall, and by then the early feasters had eaten their fill and were closing in.

"Back up!" Nelly shrieked. She was still partially behind them. "We'll run out of bullets and it's the blood. Back up!"

They fled. None of them were splattered with blood and the plain they left behind was drenched with it. If Nelly was right and it was the blood that attracted them, they'd be occupied for a while in the carnage they'd, in part, self-created.

#

The hungry beasts were gone, feeding on something else, somewhere else. His skeleton had a brief moment's pause, and then began to fill out again and the only reason he didn't scream was that he had no mouth nor voice-box yet to do it with. Neither could he twitch or jerk about in pain or scramble for an escape, because his muscles would take time still. The nerves came first, and then the skin making a sac where blood could flood and speed things up. The muscles would come almost last and he waited what felt like an eternity before he could move again. And when he could, he stumbled up and away, away from the place that still kept the metallic taste of blood under the smell of burned flesh.

It was dark by then. The sun had slinked away entirely and there were no stars. There were echoes still, echoes of sounds still ringing in his ears from the past. They couldn't of course, in theory, because those ears were new, like the rest of him except the bones left to crumble with the poison's tiny teeth, but he remembered those sounds still. And he stumbled in the direction away from them, speeding up slowly until the stinging in his hands and feet were a blur because they barely touched the ground before lifting off again.

And he didn't stop moving until something changed. Smells of warmth. Loud sounds, but they didn't grate him as badly as the previous ones.

#

There were no landmarks in the wastelands except the sun and they'd gone off perpendicular to it so it couldn't help them all that much. Nor could they tell when they'd put a safe distance between themselves and the blood and flesh hungry hounds. Light was starting to fade as well, and they were far away from the torchlight that would have aided their visibility back home. There were no stars as well, covered in the smoke of funeral fires that had wafted west, and the moon would be, at this time of the month, just a sliver amidst the almost greyed out black.

They had their headlights, and their hoverbikes were equipped with lights as well, but who knew if turning them on would wave down hunters in the wasteland. Like those beasts even more ferocious than wolgers, devouring their own injured, before they were even dead. They'd seen cannibalism before, and all of them had a limb gorged before they got the hang of drawing the handgun when one arm had teeth clamping down. Another rite of passage for them. But being caught completely in the dark was not. But the sun hadn't waited for them and its final rays would soon be gone as well.

They'd gone through another rotation and Nelly was leading again. And, intenrally, she cursed the wasteland. The only things they had seen so far were things to hunt, or be hunted by. Perhaps HeLa would come along and be a little change of pace, but aside from that they wouldn't see anything but dunes of soil until the next habitable place a night's away. They had to ride through the night anyway. The hoverbikes would be non-functional by morning of they stopped to sleep. And if they went the right way, they'd be somewhere reasonably safe by morning. And if fortune smiled upon them, they'd have dragged HeLa there as well.

Like they were going to be able to contain HeLa – unless they blasted him to smithereens and dragged the scraps back before they regenerated into a fully functional monster again. It was possible. It was in their marching orders. But it wasn't very likely and they were on a strict time limit in more than one way. The explosives they had would only last them a one way trip. It assumed they'll have caught HeLa somewhere between the two colonies, and that they'd make a straight trip back…and not run into any unmanageable trouble along the way.

She wondered if those hungry beasts counted as unmanageable. They wouldn't go down with a single shot unless the neighbour was hungry and willing to stop for lunch. They hadn't fled from the shots either, like HeLa and who knew why HeLa had bothered running from them when they couldn't kill him anyway? And they hadn't stopped coming for them until they were far out of sight of the blood.

So if any one of them caught a scrape or worse somewhere and started bleeding, those hounds would sniff them right out. And they weren't even the only things out there.

And now she couldn't see the butt of her rifle, and somehow, that frightened her. "I'm turning my light on," she called. Her voice was more or less steady, but she was sure she could feel one of the boys looking in the general direction of her back.

"Use the headlight," Tony replied to her. And she did it, then held her breath. It blinked like a torch in the darkness, marking their position. The animals never did attach their colony in swarms, but it could be very different for three individuals out of their turf.

But nothing happened, and Nelly sighed before focusing on the horizon again. The light illumined her and her companions, but the wasteland remained a wasteland, dark and desolate. Though she could do without the ornaments she'd seen so far. "What I wouldn't do for a flower," she muttered to herself. "Or grass, or a tree."

But of course no such thing was forthcoming. Just shadows rising like dust clouds on the horizon –

She blinked, then cried out in surprise. She heard Boris curse, and Tony – Tony said nothing at all. She spun around. He was staring behind them. Shadows were stirring there as well. All around.

How? How had they surrounded them?

The wasteland suddenly seemed like a tiny crevice, and they were trapped in it. Trapped in the net those bloodhounds had flawlessly made, however they'd managed it. The light hadn't even been on long enough to attract them and they'd been moving the entire time. The beasts had simply read their movements and raced ahead to lay the net, and they'd obligingly run into it.

"Tony?" Boris' voice was shaking. They could all hear it, his teeth chattering. "Nelly?"

What was she supposed to say? Fly over them? They didn't have wings. They hadn't evolved that far. They hadn't evolved at all, truthfully, for a whole two hundred years since the land became poison to their feet.

And now it had bred creatures like this. Nelly tightened her grip on her rifle. There was more than twenty this time. Far more. Perhaps it wouldn't matter at all if a few died here, just like it didn't matter to the packs that lost a couple of wolgers and tibers and berolves a day, because they kept on growing anyway. And humans, in that aspect at least, were the same. Three deaths meant nothing. Three deaths coupled with the seventeen lost in the past couple of days did mean more, but not a whole lot more. It wasn't things like this that were shortening the string of mankind's survival. It was the poison spreading, stealing away homes and places to build them, and stealing away precious resources.

Someone opened fire. Nelly didn't turn to see which of Tony or Boris it was. She simply followed suit. And they fell, slowly. And were distracted, slowly. But there was still too many. Far too many. Her left hand left the rifle and took the handgun instead. Though the rifle's recoil was harder to manage now, the firepower was what she needed. What they all needed.

But the bullets weren't infinite, especially since how the beasts were using up multiples and a good many of them missed as well. It wasn't just the lighting, the night. The beasts were dodging the bullets. They didn't want to be eaten by their comrades. They'd learnt.

Nelly swerved to avoid one that had gotten too close and shot at it. It already had a wound, and the second only grazed its shoulder. She got a third in its head before it fell, and then there were two more in its place and she fired at them both and backed away – right into another hoverbike.

Something fell and broke, and Boris cursed again. And then suddenly Tony was crying out to them, and the yellow eyes began to come nearer. The firing started again. Nelly was more concerned with the yellow eyes, with what was attracting them so. Blood. It had to be blood, but she wasn't bleeding.

The glass that had broken. The blood they'd taken from the other new beast, the docile one that had been downed before they'd got there. That was attracting the bloodhounds now. "Move!" Tony screamed at them. But move where? Tony behind her. Boris was behind her too. And ahead of her and to both sides were those yellow eyes, closing in, and she couldn't bring them down fast enough.

"Nelly!" Boris screamed, and Tony screamed something too but she didn't hear. Somehow, they seemed further away. Maybe her ears had been temporarily shot. Or maybe it was fear. Or maybe it was the angel of death, gripping her ears so it could rip the veil of life from her face.

Her bike rocked. Her last bullet missed and the rife was ripped off the handlebars and tossed into the sand. She tumbled after it, coughing as the exposed skin of her face burned. The rest of it was covered for now, but she knew it wouldn't last. The hoverbike fell after her.

She crawled to her feet, then was knocked down again and this time the handgun and light both went bouncing away. It was an interesting image, that light: it rolled in a way she'd never seen light do and it was fascinating. But there were paws over her, batting her as though it wasn't sure how to make her bleed and she tore her eyes away from the hypnotic light to face her hunter instead. She could only see the yellow eyes and they were a blur, after the light.

She pulled out her knife and stabbed it in the eye, knowing she was signing her own death sentence but without a care. She heard her name again – Boris or Tony, she couldn't tell which this time – and she was sure. They were definitely far away.

And now she was covered in blood and the meat that would mask their escape. She wretched the knife from the socket and felt the first set of teeth rip into her thigh, and the knife was in her throat before she could scream, leaving a near painless gargle instead.