"Damn this godforsaken weather! Damn this godforsaken place!" Michael cursed, wiping a river of sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He unscrewed the cap of a large plastic water bottle and took a long, desperate gulp, draining the last of the tepid well water inside.
As he drank, a bleached-white skeleton came into view on the cracked asphalt ahead. Michael didn't even bother to swerve. The truck's tires rolled over it with a series of dry, crunching pops, reducing the bones to fragments. He'd been seeing them every few minutes for the last hour—lone skeletons, scattered clusters, sometimes half-buried in the dust, sometimes sprawled in the open. One, the driver of a long-rusted, high-end sports car (its prancing horse emblem barely visible), seemed to speak of a different era, a life abruptly ended and picked clean by decades of scavengers. The first few had unsettled him. Now, after the dozenth, he felt only a numb detachment.
Desolation, deathly silence, and the goddamn, oppressive heat—this was the Great Wasteland, just a short distance from the relative safety of his town. It was only mid-morning, yet the temperature inside the truck's cab felt like it was pushing past forty degrees Celsius and climbing fast. He dreaded to think what noon would bring on this exposed plain. His shirt was already plastered to his skin, front and back. Reluctantly, he cranked the truck's feeble air conditioner. It whined pathetically, offering only a slight reprieve from the suffocating heat.
In that moment, he felt a grudging respect for the raw, seemingly illogical vitality of the Wasteland natives. Through the dusty windshield, he could see his guards, all wearing their straw hats, pedaling alongside the convoy. They moved with a steady, enduring rhythm, seemingly unbothered by the furnace-like air. Most tellingly, their water canteens still looked mostly full.
Since leaving the town, the convoy had driven northeast, the direction the guards on duty that day had reported Zhang Tiezhu's group departing. The recent, increasingly erratic weather had worked against them. Blistering days were followed by nights of howling winds and plunging temperatures. The shifting sands had long since erased any tire tracks the minivan might have left. Following a trail was impossible.
Michael had deliberately kept the convoy's speed low, around fifteen kilometers per hour, to accommodate the bicycles and allow for a thorough visual search. It was a painstaking process, but it should be effective. He was also mindful that the northeast direction might be a ruse. To cover his bases, he'd ordered the two sharpshooters on the roof to continuously scan the horizon with their binoculars, looking for any sign of other scavengers who might have seen the distinctive black-haired, black-eyed group.
They had covered roughly twenty kilometers when the walkie-talkie, casually tossed onto the passenger seat, crackled to life with a burst of static. A moment later, a voice, slightly distorted but clear enough, came through.
"Lord! Single scavenger sighted! On the small rubble pile at eleven o'clock, about two klicks out."
Michael squinted through the heat haze towards the left front. There, atop a low mound of shattered concrete, was indeed a faint, solitary figure. He grabbed the walkie-talkie and pressed the transmit button.
"Convoy, slow to a stop. John, send one man. Just one. We don't want to scare the poor bastard. I have questions."
The minotaur, John, raised a massive arm in acknowledgment. A moment later, a single guard on a bicycle peeled away from the flank and sped towards the distant figure. Michael recognized him—a wiry wolf-kin named Raoul, one of the top twenty fighters in the guard.
Wherever you go, you leave traces.Michael couldn't remember which web novel he'd read that in, or who'd originally said it. But the principle was sound, and it was how he hoped to find Zhang Tiezhu quickly. Questioning a lone scavenger might yield useful information. At worst, he'd have to part with some minor trade goods.
His mind wandered, considering what would be an appropriate offering—something that reflected his status without seeming profligate. His thoughts were interrupted by a sudden, unexpected development.
Raoul, still a good hundred or two hundred meters from the figure, abruptly wrenched his bicycle around. He began pedaling back towards the convoy with a frantic, desperate energy far exceeding his approach speed. Even at this distance, Michael could see him shouting, but the words were lost in the vast emptiness.
Before Michael could process this, John, the seasoned Wastelander, had already grasped the situation. He bellowed orders without waiting for confirmation.
"Bad! That's no scavenger! It's a mutated Infected! Sharpshooters, prepare for ranged suppression! Everyone else, battle positions! Protect the Lord!"
At the minotaur's command, the convoy snapped into action. Bicycles were discarded, weapons were raised, and the two men on the roof swung their Garands towards the distant figure.
Mutated Infected.Michael had heard the term before from the locals. According to them, these weren't the shambling undead he was familiar with from stories. They were something else—warped creatures born from a horrific cocktail of extreme radiation and the insidious, lingering effects of plague-magic. Unlike zombies, they weren't immortal. They needed to eat and drink, consuming several times what a normal person required to survive. But they were the Wasteland's twisted darlings. The radioactive rain and tainted water that would sicken or kill a normal human? They drank it without a second thought. For food, tough, spiny cacti sufficed. Their resilience was that of a mutated beast.
The price for this brutal adaptability was the complete loss of reason. Only the base drives to survive and consume remained. And human flesh, rich in nutrients and salt, was often their preferred prey. The only solace for the Wasteland's inhabitants was that these Infected seemed drawn to the high-radiation zones at the hearts of ruins. Only a few ever wandered into the lower-radiation fringes. But encountering even one in the open wastes was often a death sentence for the unprepared.
Now, face-to-face (through binoculars) with this legendary horror, a morbid curiosity gripped Michael. After parking the truck, setting the handbrake, and killing the sputtering engine, he raised the binoculars hanging from his neck, adjusting the focus to get a clear look at the thing called an Infected.