waiting, for you

The sun sets early in the Northern hemisphere. Four past noon and the last vestiges of light are billowing from the horizon. Auroras are dimming in the sky. For those in the city, nighttime is rest and inactivity. For expeditionists, soldiers and for those who reside in the slums, the cold nights are battlegrounds to hunt and gather, to find food and survive.

The soldier is roughed up. He’s missing one arm and his left cheek is scraped raw. He grunts and pulls himself up with a makeshift cane, a long iron crowbar. He pants heavily.

His crazed black eyes focus on the child in front.

“A brat?” he says roughly. A moment of pause and then his mouth curves into a distasteful smile. “Little girl, wait. You’re from the slums, eh? I ain’t expecting much but you got anything for me? Medicine and a place for me crash over.”

She peeks her head out from the wooden signpost. The girl had been hiding ever since. She shakes her head and answers carefully. “…Yu Ying doesn’t know English.”

“You got a car? How ‘bout some food, eh?”

“I don’t know,” she says.

The man sounds irritated. He limps forward but he looks back frantically, determined to escape from the predator on his tail. “Look, I don’t know a fucking thing you’re sayin’ but I need 'help' a’ight?” He gestures with his one hand and emphasizes again, “H-e-l-p. Take me to where you live, yeah?”

The girl shakes her head again. She’s obviously frightened by the raucous squawks and shrieks coming from the bird, 'the predator,' a distance away. The man in front of her, too, is coming on too strongly with the way he rushes toward her, looking all ragged and scuffed. He’s sporting a nosebleed, and his abdomen and the empty socket of his left arm are oozing out a vile mix of red and green goo.

Yu Ying screams and runs away, though he’s close on her tail.

“Brat!” he howls at her.

“Go away, go away!” The girl squeezes her eyes shut and runs as fast as she can toward a house.

The man laughs as he chases her down, his intentions manically clear. “So you live here, you damned girl! Let me in with you, yeah? I’m not asking for much but a place to stay.”

“—Yu Ying!” A boyish voice calls out to the child in front. He’s crawling out of an underground opening. The steel flaps are unlocked, and the chains are untied – they were always thorough with the security, but today is an exception. “I told you to not go out!”

“Tang-ge!” She wipes the tears from her face. “Y-Yu Ying was waiting…”

The young teenager understands her predicament the instant he sees the blood-soaked man lunging toward them, his rifle pointed not at the bird anomaly behind him but at the two of them.

“Kid,” the man croaks out, “let me in.”

The man is obviously showing signs of infection – crazed, unfocused eyes, unnatural hemorrhaging, bulbous bruises that are starting to purple and blister. His cheek is almost melting off his face, like acid had gotten through and disintegrated his pores.

Ming Tang decisively grabs the little girl and pulls her inside. He quickly turns to close the opening, but the man, derailed and aggressive, loads his rifle and shoots.

The pain crashes against the side of his leg and Ming Tang drops onto the floor.

---

The mutated pheasant extends its wings. Each feather is harder than a rock. With a deafening cry, it slams Noah into a wooden fence. The harsh recoil skids him ten feet on the ground. He had braced for impact and the result is a long-running gnash from forearm down, scraped raw and peeled. He coughs out a mouthful of blood, clutches onto his gun, and shoots.

The silencer dulls the bangs but not the bird’s raucous cries – any near creature would come rushing into the fray, attracted to the scent of blood. Noah intends to end it quick.

He had noticed it – the junction between the creature’s wing and body is one of the only areas not covered by feathers, and so he had risked almost the entire magazine pelting at it, hoping at least one or two bullets would hit. Anomalies have weaknesses but some hide it better than others. The mutated willow ptarmigan, for example, is so bulked up by feather and fat that it’s near impossible to pierce. It’s either the eyes or the underwing and Noah chose the latter, more conspicuous target.

It drops dead to the ground.

Noah takes a few more shallow breaths before getting up shakily. How unlucky could he be to encounter a trillion anomalies in a single day – he will need weeks to recover. The pheasant shouldn’t be in this area. He frowns as he wipes the blood on his mouth. He has a haggling suspicion that something is… off.

It’s not just that the bird had visible external injuries, either. He was surprised by the holes already embedded into its skin but what’s more startling is the number of bullet shells that he had found in the area. Huru is not usually this loud.

He picks up his backpack and staggers frontward.

Behind a wooden shack, behind a pile of wheat, the door to the bomb shelter is wide open. The bricks covering it have been moved and the chains have come apart. A young teenage boy is crawling out of the ground.

Noah’s pupils dilate.

Then he sprints forward, throws his bag aside and scales the distance in two seconds. He didn’t know he could channel his strength this intensely onto his legs.

“Ming Tang,” he shakes the boy harshly, “tell me what is going on 'right now.'”

“…Noah,” the boy replies raspingly, “don’t go inside.”

“You—” Noah’s eyes drill into the injury on his leg. He grabs the boy’s ankle and lifts it to see. A bullet wound. “What is this? We do not have guns in the shelter. Ming Tang, 'who did this?'”

Noah is exceedingly scary when he’s tense. Chills envelop the air and even Ming Tang, usually composed, is at a loss of what to say. Noah doesn’t allow him time. He needs 'clarity' and he needs it quick and concise, else he will personally run down the shelter.

“There was a man who got in.” Ming Tang tries to be calm, but he’s shaking from pain. Even his tone is faint. “He was infected and he… turned. So Noah, don’t go inside.”

Noah goes inside. To be more precise, he 'bolts' down the stairs, his heart pounding from tension, his mind blank yet overwhelmed. He hadn’t imagined any scenarios that would await him when he arrives.

Splotches of blood down the halls, bullet clippings on the planks. A child’s arm dismembered. The dainty communal room, awash in red. More limbs and then cries that have gone silent. There is a wheelchair toppled over, then an elderly grandmother sloppily skewered in half. Bits of her organs have coagulated into an ugly, gruesome mass. The floors are no longer clean.

In the middle, a ravenous thing. The build of a human but the shape of a beast – protruding wings, iron-hard claws, burly, tattooed body. It was once human, probably, but the infection had punctured the man so deeply he’s become nothing short of a monster.

It feasts on a young girl. Wu Shan, age eight, had a button nose and a pair of beautiful brown eyes that didn’t roll backwards like that – lifeless and gone.

If the beast notices Noah, it doesn’t react. It seems to cackle, however, with every crunch and grind of its teeth – and Noah thinks it’s mocking him. The scent of blood is so strong and so 'foul.'

There’s deathly ringing in his ears and before he knew it, he had flung forward and stabbed it once, twice, thrice. His fingernails have turned into claws, rupturing the creature’s neck, ripping the wings out of its body, brutally mutilating it into pieces. He slams it onto the floor and grabs it by the chokehold. He 'knows' he’s crazed when he feels nothing but numbness, and then the 'coldness' takes over – the slaughter isn’t enough.

He needs to see that thing torn into shreds, burnt into ashes and sent so far away it will no longer be there to touch a single strand of their hair. His primal instincts are telling him to 'protect,' to 'kill' and he follows more the latter than former.

Cold, glowing eyes. He gets more feral when he registers more of his surroundings. There’s a child’s hand sprawled on the overturned bookshelf. The desk he’d so painstakingly helped build is now splintered into pieces. The wax candles have been long extinguished.

Noah remains bloodthirsty and he hears absolutely nothing. A hand tugs the hem of his shirt. He only pays attention to the way he’s puncturing holes into the creature’s stomach, sliding his entire hand in and then pulling out grotesque blobs of flesh and more, as if he wants it to heave out everything it’s eaten.

“Stop,” the person behind him whispers. Ming Tang is sprayed with the residues over and over again. “Noah, calm down…”

He does stop, but only when there’s nothing left for him to disassemble anymore. Noah, crouched on the ground, finds it difficult to regain control of his mind.

“Noah-gege,” a child’s soft voice reaches his ears, “are you here?”

He turns.

Amidst everything, a frail little girl lies on a pool of carnage. She has rips on her cartoon pajamas, a laceration on her collar, a hole in her chest. When Noah brings himself closer, he can see her scabs are swelling. Grimy discharge – a sure sign of infection.

She reaches out and touches his head. A pair of soft, white ears had migrated to the mid-regions. It perks out from the tufts of his silver hair, and though it’s mostly hidden, the placement is unnatural. For a 'human,' at least. Noah looks nothing short of an anomaly – strange ears, glowing eyes, pasty skin, the melanin sucked away so much he looks ashen-white.

The human physiology hasn’t evolved to withstand extreme radiation and though Noah might be an exception, the changes are 'odd.' Not entirely beastlike – his lateral skull isn’t modified to accommodate ears – and not exactly humanlike either – for his ears have shifted upward, grown pointier, and is now covered in silver-white fur.

His hearing distorts. Shrill ringing, his auditory canal extending to the upper sides of his head. The morph is 'painful,' so much he feels his skull distorting and breaking him in one go.

His countenance has always been pale but not hauntingly so. And then, in this form, if he doesn’t concentrate to retract them, his bloodstained nails will be sharp enough to kill. His physical changes have always been daunting – to other people and especially to himself when he sees them.

Yu Ying rubs her small hands on his ears. The close contact makes him slightly shifty.

She says, marveling. “You have cat ears, gege.”

He cups her hand and lets out a placating hum. He doesn’t correct her. “Mn. Is it scary?”

“Ying Ying waited—” Her whole body shakes. A second later, her face scrunches up in hurt and sadness. It’s like watching a rotoscope, where Noah sees frame by frame the pain she’s in, the tears tracing down her cheeks. She begins to sniffle, “I waited a long time. You said you will come back s-soon a-and—gege it hurts. I am scared...!”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “You waited a long time and ge didn’t come.”

“I am s-scared!” she sobs out. “What should I do… gege, help me… it hurts!”

“Ying Ying, don’t be afraid,” he murmurs, bringing their foreheads together. “You are very brave.”

“Am I going to die?”

A part of her cheekbone has flaked off. The sclera of her eyes is beginning to darken gray. The earlier stages of infection are always the most gruesome to see. The victim deteriorates at such a speed. Yu Ying’s consciousness is fading out and there’s some sort of brutality taking over, making her look frantic and deranged.

“...” Noah places a palm over her eyes. Then slowly he reaches for the rifle slung on his back, points the muzzle close to her temple and says softly, “It will be alright.”