[November 2065, Huru Village]

Dilapidated dwellings, run-down cottages and a population of zero – ghost villages are common. The dirt and debris are even more pronounced during sunrise. It’s ironic that the flourishing golden-orange sun, once a beacon of joy, is now a deadly radioactive orb to be avoided at all costs.

Don’t stand under it for and don’t stare at it, the hearsay goes, else the hallucinations will make the sun blood-red, representing the birds that have dropped dead during migration, the sea creatures that’d turned into sea dragons, humans who’ve turned into something else. That much is true.

A young man runs inside a half-destroyed structure.

He sports an injured palm, the blood dripping from the cracks to his shaky fingertips. The time is breaking dawn and he’s still outside, ransacking the place for food, medicine, anything he can get his hands on. The disappointment shows when all he sees is a pack of stale, ten-year-old cookies, expired cereal, and a pile of vegetables so rotten they may as well be fertilizer.

He sighs, rakes a clean hand over his ice-gray hair, and stares out the window. The wind shifts and a pile of autumn leaves rakes over the ground. It’s rare that plants can even be found – since changes to the geodynamo, most bushes, trees and vines were wiped due to chronic radiation. There is merit in a place like this, so far up north and blocked by mountains that the sun doesn’t contaminate as quickly.

A decade more, and then earth may be rid of all flora. That, or the radiation-contaminate crops will turn into man-eating monsters – not too likely but a nightmarish thought for sure. Noah thinks it sounds like something out of children’s books, back when those were in demand thirty years ago. The more he stares off into space, the more his mind wanders to a thousand and more troublesome things, like say, the fact that he’s broke, stranded, hungry and being hunted down by a pack of sheathbills.

At least he thinks they’re sheathbills, but these things look less bird than salamander. Disregarding the fact they can fly, their forked tongues are covered in venom and their popped-up eyes are synonymous with amphibians. He’d shot one of them earlier on the way here, only to be mobbed by a dozen more – and so is his predicament, running for his life, carrying nothing but a torn canvas backpack and a pistol with two bullets left.

It is widely recognized that all anomalies – regardless of the host creature – are bloodthirsty. Perhaps three decades ago, there’d be herbivores still roaming the lands but now, in destitution and extreme natural selection, all of them have become carnivorous. It’s been hypothesized (hundreds of thousands of experiments) and later concluded that the radiation has changed their metabolic process.

All of these anomalies require fresh sustenance and now, humans are a hanging off the cliff of doomsday, dangling perfect as prey.

As for Noah…

He does not want to be eaten today nor any other day for that matter, but a single mistake and he’s done for.

He’d grown accustomed to the way the anomalies behave and act out here, though even he hadn’t accounted for a flock of birds to be pecking at a dead man’s body. Noah had followed the revolting scent to the source and then found that there were numerous bodies all around, all decayed and laid like on a preservation site. The sheathbills were storing food for the coming winter.

He’d been spotted by one when he stepped on a leaf and proceeded to run for his life. The things are vicious – they hadn’t even fallen when he struck them with a large wooden board. He’d gotten splinters on his palms and bloody scrapes on his knees when he’d rolled on the floor to dodge.

Now he’s hiding inside a wooden cottage, a place so old he’s unsure if the roof would collapse on him. Noah shakes his head of any miscellaneous thoughts and remains on high alert. Ideally, he’d be able to make little noise and outrun the lurking birds. However, he has zero idea where any of them are right now. He needs to cause a distraction.

He quietly picks up a rusty bucket – the first object he lays his eyes on – and prepares to throw it out the window. Noah senses a rustle of the wind, the slight change in temperature, and he immediately swings the bucket as hard as he can. It launches toward a lawn mower and before the metal clanks to the ground, he rushes out to make his escape.

The powerful slam is heard on impact followed by cacophonous caws. The mutated birds identify the source and flock toward the collision – there are more of them now. Fifteen, maybe twenty. Noah’s breaths come out raspy as he bolts the other direction, passes by five more houses and hides in the corner of another. His heart strums loudly.

This house isn’t particularly pleasing to the eye, either. There had to have been a fight that took place a long while back. The window is cracked and on it is coagulated blood, dried perhaps weeks ago, and now dark brown and unsightly on the wooden panes. Rainwater had washed away a portion of it, but some are left trailing down the cracks.

Noah turns away, prepares to run yet again, but is abruptly stopped by the sight of a young girl, barely five years old, carefreely walking on the abandoned road. She sees him too.

She stops, stares, parts her mouth and says, “Woah…”

Then she runs up to him – Noah is frozen in surprise – and she tugs on his bloody sleeve as if beckoning for him to bend down. He does (he’s unsure why) and she steps on her tiptoes, extends a small hand to ruffle his silver hair, poke at his cheeks.

She says again, more giddily, “Woah… so pretty…”

“…” Noah allows her to have her fun for a few more seconds before gently guiding her hands away. He clears his throat. “…What’s your name?”

“My name is Yu Ying!” Her eyes light up and she sounds extremely happy. “Gege, you speak Chinese!”

“Yu Ying,” he says, “what are you doing here?”

“I am looking for someone,” the little girl says. She fiddles with the hem of his sleeve and then stares curiously at the wound on his palm. “You are bleeding? Does it hurt?”

“Who are you looking for?” he asks.

“I am finding my daddy. He is big and tall… umm, taller than gege, about this much…” Yu Ying stretches out her hands. There’s a large gap – did she mean her father is a whole five inches taller than he is? Noah isn’t short, but it certainly is a blow to his ego. The girl giggles, “But he’s not as handsome!”

“Are you alone?”

“Alone?” She tilts her head cutely to one side. A black ponytail flops along. There’s a patch of dirt and a tiny blister on her forehead. She’d fallen somewhere and gotten scraped. “Yu Ying isn’t alone.”

Noah hums, takes out a small handkerchief and wipes the dirt off for her. “Where does Yu Ying live?”

She had gotten completely attached to him and it’s only been a minute since they’d met. Noah isn’t particularly good with children, but it doesn’t quite matter – the little girl is wholeheartedly charmed by his ‘pretty-colored hair and eyes’ as she so forwardly told him.

Yu Ying holds his hand and leads him down the block. “Hehe! I’ll show you… Yu Ying lives right there… behind that big, brown house. Mhm, I live with granny, Fenfen, Shanshan, Qiao-jie, Tang-ge…”

She rambles on and on incessantly about her family, which is evidently large enough to form a whole civilization. A part of Noah’s brain is telling him he’d gotten roped into an abduction – once he passes the house, he’d get ambushed by an army of hunky men – but on the off chance, he also doesn’t want to leave a small girl like her alone in the wild. They might be tailed by the sheathbills any time now, and Christ is the child adamant on talking about her whole extended family tree.

“Shh,” he puts a finger on his lips and tells her to quiet down, “Yu Ying, don’t speak, alright?”

Thankfully, the girl nods fervently, even zipping her mouth to showcase just how well behaved she is. The naïve child doesn’t understand the danger they’re in – Noah thinks it’s a bit refreshing how disconnected she is from the state of the world. He had never experienced the same.

He glances backward and his eyes harden. The mutated birds are taking flight again, their large eyes already zooming in on the both of them. The creatures have exceptional dynamic vision and a wider field of vision, being able to see small details three times better than humans can.

Noah exhales slowly and gestures for Yu Ying to climb on his back. The little girl is confused but still wholly happy about it.

“Hold on tight,” he whispers. “Close your eyes, Yu Ying.”

Then he runs, pushing himself to his limits as the wind breaks against them. He doesn’t need to turn to sense the creatures swooping in on them, their tongues extending out to gulp them whole. If wrapped by their tongues, the chances of escape are nigh and not to mention, the venom stored in their glands are lethal – he’d seen it happen to an unsuspecting traveler, watching as they were chewed alive, their skin searing purple and red.

“Gege…” Yu Ying latches on tightly to his neck, her voice trembling, “Gege, what’s happening… You are running so fast…”

He grits his teeth and dodges abruptly to the side as a particularly violent bird whirls toward him. He hits a wooden fence and his ankles almost buckle down from the impact. Yu Ying lets out a soft, pained noise but doesn’t complain. Noah jumps over the fence, ducks to avoid a sharp claw – radioactive, he sees a strange, green luster that wouldn’t otherwise be present.

With his amount of experience, it gets easier to tell how infectious some creatures are. Usually, it’s the larger, more predatory creatures with high genetic diversity – for instance, a twin-headed canine or a hundred-eyed bird and dragonfly mix.

These sheathbills aren’t the top of the food chain, but any mutated creature is incredibly dangerous regardless of how highly they’re ranked.

Noah zeroes in at the house in front. “Yu Ying, do you live underground?”

He feels her nodding. “It must be underground. That’s what Ming Tang said. We can’t go outside, or he’ll get angry… but I went outside today to look for daddy. He won’t get angry, right?”

“Next time—” He gasps as he gets clawed on his forearm. He’d maneuvered it so the girl wouldn’t get injured and possibly infected, but even he would have to dress the ugly wound later. The fabric of his sweater is torn to shreds and the skin beneath is gaping raw. The creature, still violently clawing on him, opens its mouth and vile toxins pool on its reptile-like beak. Noah pulls out a knife and chucks it at its head while in motion. The bird emits an ear-piercing squawk and drops to the ground. “…Next time, don’t go outside anymore, hm?”

“What is wrong?” Yu Ying asks worriedly. “Gege, are you hurt? You sound hurt…"

“It’s alright,” he says hoarsely. The knife he’d have to forgo – there’s no chance of removing it while the other birds are gaining on distance. “How do I enter your home?”

“Oh, Yu Ying knows this,” the girl peeps up. “There is a password.”

“A password?”

“Mhm, we knock once, then once, then twice, then um…” Yu Ying pauses a little, “Ming Tang-ge said we have a rule. I am not allowed to tell other people.”

“Ah,” Noah hums. “I understand.”

“But I will tell gege,” she says and then leans down to whisper (conspiratorially, like she’s sharing a secret for him only). “It is moose code.”

He chuckles a little. The pronunciation is cute enough. This Ming Tang, the person who used such an amateur, military-esque way of communication surely is a bit of a brainiac. No time to be amused, however, and Noah barely avoids a forked tongue his way. He feels his left ankle straining per each movement.

“Yu Ying, run to your home,” he says as he quickly helps her off his back. He pulls out a small pistol and takes aim at the closest predator. One bullet crackles through the air, the lack of a silencer making it sound especially frightening to a young girl’s ears.

Yu Ying stays behind him, too pressured to leave.

“Don’t be scared,” he tells her reassuringly, though his voice is strained. “Come on.”

She runs off quickly to the back of the house. Noah sighs softly. Now that she’s gone, he should focus on first, staying alive and second, hauling himself out of here. He has one bullet left, one more small blade, and about a dozen more sheathbills to take out. He holds his stance coldly, his piercing eyes flickering from one pathway to another.

He’d considered his options – hack and slice his way through, lose an arm or leg or both in the process, or make a break to a hopefully intact house, shut the doors and hope they’d give up. They’re both terrible options.

The second bullet impales another bird on the neck. Noah disarms the gun, grabs his steel blade and narrows his eyes. His pupils shrink in the face of danger, his primal instincts kicking in to reinforce his sight. The battle plan doesn’t look feasible. He might die today, but when was there a day he was not in danger?

Subconsciously, he uncurls his fists. He feels pain on his fingertips. Sharp-edged nails are growing in. It would be easier to puncture a hole into their throats. He watches the birds predatorily, feels a canine itch in his head and—

“Gege!” A child’s shout breaks him away from his thoughts. He hears Yu Ying say as loudly as she can. She should’ve been in safe in shelter by now, shouldn’t she? “Gege, come in quick! I am waiting for you!”

Noah pauses a bit.

Really, he… hadn’t expected for this outcome. It wasn’t an option he’d even considered, to be let inside someone’s home, to be accepted instead of turned away.

“…Oh,” he whispers softly, his bloodlust quelling, “then I am coming.”