He can hear Yang Rong’s heartbeat. It pulses as erratically as the pounding rain, as loudly as the skies rumble overhead. The colonel runs at well past twenty-five miles an hour – impressive, considering he has Noah on tow – but those wolves are speeding at thirty-five.

Above them are plain fields and in the far distance, several rows of dilapidated homes. Unfortunately, they’re all unlikely to withstand the pack of aggressive canines able to topple through the walls in one jump.

Noah can only see the pack gaining distance – three of them, or perhaps it’s four, he can hardly tell from how painfully his vision is distorting, the blood rushing up to the top of his head while hoisted upside-down. He doesn’t blame Colonel Yang for throwing him on top of his shoulder like this, but he does feel sick from crashing vertigo and… the familiar sensation of warmth seeping on the back of his thighs.

Yang Rong is keeping him balanced (as best as he could, anyway) with his injured arm, the one that had been bitten at just minutes ago. The dark-furred, sharp-tailed, four-eyed wolves are no doubt radioactive and if their strange appearance doesn’t give it away, then their six-inch molars do.

With some expert maneuvering, Yang Rong reaches into his backpack and takes out a smoke grenade. He pulls out the pin and unhesitatingly tosses it behind them – blindly, like he’d already calculated the trajectory beforehand – and continues to speed up.

The grenade detonates, a familiar pillow of smoke rising up to hide their retreat. An explosion rings in the middle of the smog, setting the near vicinity on fire.

“…Colonel Yang,” Noah chokes out mid-run, “your arm—"

“What?!” the colonel yells at him. Impressively, his syllables remain steady despite the rough sprint. “I’m telling you to not complain! So what if my arm is near your ass! This is a life or death situation, so I’d much prefer you to make yourself useful and guide me on where to go, rather than to focus on such insignificant things! How delicate can you be, huh?!”

“Your arm was bitten,” he gasps out, completely ignoring whatever jargon the other man is spewing out. “You need to cut off the wound before the infection spreads.”

“You’re telling me to cut off my arm?!” The colonel hops over a fence. Immediately afterward, a wolf rams straight into the latticed steel frames, bending and snapping them into strange coiled strings. The impact is strong enough to send shockwaves throughout the five-meter fence. “If I cut off my arm, I wouldn’t be able to hold you like this!”

“Not cut it off,” he says weakly. “Theoretically, you’d only need to rip the top layer before it’s too late.”

“Then let me tell you that—” Yang Rong dips behind a home, temporarily shielding them. “—That your Rong-ge is sturdy and hasn’t had negative symptoms for the past twenty-seven years.”

“You are an idiot,” Noah tells him, on the verge of passing out. “If left untreated, even you will die.”

“You haven’t died yet, so why would I?” A hint of laughter in his tone, a hint of something else more enigmatic, but it’s gone when a heavy gust of wind rolls past them, bringing with it a surge of water droplets.

In his limited peripheral, Noah catches a subtle movement below them. He lifts his head slightly to see a hoard of porcupines – or squirrels, judging from their bushy tails – emerge from a hole underground. The small creatures accumulate in a crowd one after another and while such creatures may have once been harmless three decades ago, the ones in front of them… are definitely not.

Spiked tails, elongated limbs, sharp, heavy nails that could potentially chop a pine tree.

“Colonel Yang—"

“What now?!” the man shouts at him again, already running off to another location.

“There are squirrels—"

“Squirrels! Squirrels are cute, alright?!”

It is then that the squirrels prance toward them and the colonel realizes how not cute they are. The quills on their tails elongate a deadly four inches, the tips of them covered in strange metallic goo that seems to fizzle when the rain touches.

“Fuck!” Yang Rong lets out a loud curse before picking up speed – if that were possible, considering Noah can hear the wind break behind him. “Directions. Little kitten, tell me where to go.”

Noah would like to tell him that his vision is limited to thirty degrees and to the ground beneath them, not to mention how his eyes are overworked and strained. He can barely open his eyes to the disequilibrium – he’s even surprised he hasn’t vomited yet.

“—Left,” Noah, extremely close to passing out, manages to cough out. “Go left.”

Yang Rong makes a sharp turn to the right and Noah is… confused. They both head down a slope, passing through the fields and into a more coniferous area. They run through trees stripped down to their barks, past decomposing pinecones and over browned-out shrubs.

“I said—go left,” Noah chokes. “You’re going—ugh, the wrong way.”

“It’s right!” Colonel Yang yells back at him. “I’m going the right way! Didn’t you tell me earlier to go this way?!”

“I said left, not right,” he tries to emphasize despite how shaky he sounds.

“This is my left!” The man continues the descent downward while yelling profusely – he doesn’t hold back on his volume at all. “Can’t you be clearer on your instructions? For someone so intelligent, you’re certainly incapable when it comes to trivial tasks like navigating. Is it really so difficult to—"

“I meant my left,” Noah cuts him off sharply, feeling more annoyed by each passing, harrowing second. “I’m obviously speaking in a first-person perspective, Colonel Yang, so if you’ve any consideration at all, you would understand to cater to my—"

“Why would you give your perspective when I’m the one leading?!” Yang Rong sounds out. “It is obvious that you should see from the driver’s perspective when riding a vehicle – is it not the same logic we run by here?”

“If I had to see in your perspective, I’m afraid I’d lose more braincells than necessary,” he growls back. “Why would I project you onto myself? Has the infection spread so quickly to your dimwit head already?”

“How ironic, little kitten, because I am positive that you are also—"

“If you’re going to keep talking nonsense—”

“Nonsense! How am I speaking nons—"

“Can you just—!”

At the sonic speed they’re going, Yang Rong miscalculates and almost crashes into a tree. He maneuvers himself so he skids awkwardly on the muddy ground, turning his body in an attempt to diminish the impact. However, his injured forearm is pricked by an extended branch – then, while completely distracted, Yang Rong loosens his hold on Noah, who consequently topples down painfully onto the tree bark, sliding lower onto the ground.

One sequence of events after another, all of it happening so quick none of them had time to brace. Pained groans fill the air and Noah swears he’s hit the back of his head so hard he blacked out for a good five seconds. He thinks it may have been five minutes with how off balance he is, how long it took for him to see clearly again.

The objects in front of him have turned into woozy blobs and Colonel Yang, who he registers to be in the near vicinity, is but a strange moss of black. He has to blink several times to recover.

“…Crap,” the man says hoarsely from above him. Yang Rong has one knee by the side of his thighs and one hand extended to pat on his cheek. He checks his condition with a small frown. “That was my fault.”

“Of… course,” he replies shakily, struggling to stand back up. “You should have… taken… the path without… trees…”

“Yes, yes, if you say so, little kitten.” The colonel concedes to him just to appease. “Don’t move just yet.”

They’re both breathing heavily, coming down from adrenaline high. It’s not only Noah who’s feeling worse for wear – the colonel, too, looks more fatigued by the second. His black shirt is almost in tatters, the pockets torn, patches of sturdy polyester ripped by the seams. Raw wounds are visible underneath the soaked shirt.

In this angle, Noah can see the red-brown clots more clearly than before. On his abdomen is one injury, by his torso is another, and then on his forearm… is a dark wound, still covered in wolf drool and pieces of tree bark. The area is unsanitary and flaked with dirt.

It is strange – not the uncleanliness of it, but the way the laceration almost closes up before his eyes. Where the blood clots in the center appears an earthy-brown layer of tissue. The fibrils condense thicker, darker and the human skin around it shrivels up.

A small glint of something ironlike, a carapace made of bone and mineral, foreign and strange.

Noah grabs his arm – Yang Rong lets him – and leans in to scrutinize. The flimsy layer hardens into scaly sheets before covering the entirety of the wound. Extremely unnatural for human skin but there are no signs of radiation elsewhere – no other strange marks spreading up the colonel’s forearm, no contortions, nothing a radioactive patient would suffer.

Noah’s eyes widen. Disbelief and confusion. “…Colonel Yang, what is this?” He trails a finger over the area, tentatively, feeling up the keratin skin. The ridges are hard. “You—"

He quickly reaches over to unbutton the top of Yang Rong’s shirt, tugging the fabric outward so the other scars come into view. He drills his focus onto another raw cut – this one, however, doesn’t show any strange symptoms.

Noah furrows his brows. “You… how do you feel?”

“Hmm?” The man is oddly relaxed, just watching as Noah undoes another button of his shirt and stares intently at his chest. “How am I supposed to feel, exactly?”

Noah traces over another spot – a decade-old mark by the sternum – and says hesitantly, “Were you infected just now? This mark is normal… No, it doesn’t make sense for it not to spread.”

Then, upon hitting sudden epiphany, he widens his eyes again and reaches forward to touch the colonel’s neck. Right by the jugular, by the spot Noah had once dug a knife into, there are no signs of scarring – and it should have some signs of injure, despite Yang Rong’s alpha constitution.

“I haven’t remembered wrong,” he says with a frown. “I did hurt you here.”

“Noah,” the man says with a teasing smile, “isn’t it inappropriate for you to touch me like this?”

They are a mere centimeter apart and Noah is angled forward, breathing hotly down his neck. Yang Rong has settled to rest his hand on the tree trunk behind, enclosing them in an unfamiliar, almost-embrace. The man leans forward – bumps their chests against each other – and drops his voice into a low whisper by his ears, “Should I show you something else interesting?”

Just then, a low rumble in the near vicinity.

The two of them are instantly alert, their eyes scouring the area for threats.

Noah sees it first – a muskox two feet away. It was so close to them they didn’t even notice. Its brown, clay-colored fur is camouflaged with the surroundings, making the creature look like any other boulder on the road. He’d only noticed when the wind brushed against its fur.

The anomaly is massive – perhaps it’s why they missed it so naively, opting to focus on the smaller, unforeseen threats.

Colonel Yang is still scouting even when the muskox lunges toward them both – and it is fast, exceptionally so for its size. The millisecond before its horns make contact with human flesh, Noah throws the colonel down onto the ground, swerving them both to avoid.

“Behind you…!” His actions are quicker than words. The two of them topple into mud and debris, narrowing avoiding the blow by a fraction of an inch.

Colonel Yang immediately parries the next blow with his dagger, but even then, he struggles to hold the weight of a three-meter, one-thousand-pound ox. The creature’s stomp is strong enough to cause mini earthquakes. Yang Rong and Noah are still laying on the ground, twisting in uncomfortable positions to dodge.

The ox’s foreleg smashes a hairbreadth away from his face, leaving a frightening print on topsoil. Noah kicks upward, hoping to damage its underbelly but as expected, the attempt is nigh. The creature’s skin is so tough the force rebounds onto him – he feels it even through his combat boots.

The colonel gives the order.

“Run!”