novelraw Chapter 443: This Isn’t Ominous At All
Chapter 443: This Isn’t Ominous At All
Sera watched the edge of the city fall away in the side mirror.
Concrete turned into cracked asphalt. Cracked asphalt turned into pale dirt. The buildings grew smaller, then sparser, and then they were just gone. The last CDC tent and its flapping plastic walls disappeared behind them, swallowed by the heat haze.
From there, even the weird roadblock didn’t interest her much. The men spoke a lot, but they didn’t really say anything. By the time they got on the road again, Sera was waiting for something big to happen.
It had been too quiet lately, and while the human part of her liked it, the creature under her skin really did not.
She leaned her head back against the seat and let the movement of the truck roll through her bones. Zubair drove with both hands on the wheel, his shoulders were loose, and his eyes steady. It was almost like he was worried that something would go wrong.
She continued to watch him as the sun touched the side of his face and cast a hard line along his jaw.
He was attractive in a way that called to both sides of her... only she had no idea how to move on from the gridlock she seemed to find herself in. She wanted to move forward, but she wanted all four men in vastly different ways and for different reasons.
Shaking the thoughts from her head, she put her non-existent romantic life on the backburner.
There was still so much to be done. People needed killing, labs needed to be burned down, experiments needed to be freed. But she refused to rush to the ending and not enjoy life along the way.
Adam wasn’t going anywhere; the labs were still going to be there... why couldn’t she see everything she had never seen before. This was a whole new world for both her and her creature, and they were determined to take their time and live a life they hadn’t been able to before.
Freedom had a taste, and she was savoring it.
Her creature hummed in her veins. This is better. Roads. Heat. Space. No more plastic. No more cages...so much to see and do and kill. I approve.
Wind pushed dust across the glass, but eventually, the long drive started to getting boring.
Sera slid her hand along the door and tapped her thumb against the armrest, more to give the creature something to sync with than anything else.
She could feel the truck humming under them, feel it as Luci shifted his weight in the bed and shook out his fur. Hell, she could even feel his nails clicked faintly on the metal.
"I want something new," she said at last. She knew that it wasn’t possible, and she didn’t want to sound like a spoiled child... but there was only so much of the boredom she could take.
Lachlan shifted in the back seat. "New how?" he asked. "New like ’normal food and quiet’ or new like ’screaming and problem solving’?"
She let her eyes stay half closed. "Not CDC. Not zombies. I want something different... a different flavor."
Her creature brightened. Yes. Not frogs. Not crawlers. Something with teeth that thinks it is a hunter. Something that we can hunt and kill and eat.
Zubair didn’t say anything, but his hand tightened on the wheel for a second and then relaxed. He understood. He always understood.
They drove past a long stretch of fencing that held a herd of cattle. The animals stood in the heat, heads low, tails still. Some had tags in their ears. Some didn’t. None of them moved.
Alexei watched them through the window. "No reaction to the truck," he said. "They should startle. The sedation dose is heavy."
"Someone out here is still trying to manage everything," Zubair said. "Even the cows."
"Trying," Aerenyx repeated. The word had a thin layer of contempt. "This region keeps everything quiet. It fears noise."
Her creature snorted. Noise is good. Noise tells you what wants to die next.
Sera let her lips twitch.
The road rolled on. Fencelines. Dry grass. Empty mailboxes. A few houses sat far back on the land, their windows dark or boarded. No cars in the driveways. No smoke. No people.
The emptiness finally hit a point where her patience reached its limit.
"There," she said.
Zubair’s foot eased off the gas before the word finished leaving her throat.
She tilted her chin toward a gap in the roadside brush. A flash of metal had caught her eye. The truck ahead sat half on the dirt, half in a shallow ditch. One door was open. The windshield was cracked.
Luci lifted his head the same moment she spoke. His ears tipped forward. His body went still in that focused way that meant he had decided something might be important.
Zubair coasted the truck to a stop. Dust rolled around them, then settled.
He put the engine in park. "You want to see it?"
"Yes," she said. "I want to see that."
Her creature purred. Something screamed here. Something bled. Let’s find out what.
She opened the door and stepped down onto the baked earth. The heat pressed against her bare feet through her boots. The air tasted dry and faintly metallic.
The abandoned pickup in the ditch had a homestead plate on the back bumper. The driver’s door hung open. The keys dangled from the ignition. A hat lay upside down on the ground nearby. The air around it tasted stale and wrong.
Lachlan stepped out and walked to the front of their truck, shading his eyes with one hand. "Well," he said. "This isn’t ominous at all."
"Focus," Alexei said.
Zubair came around the front and joined her at the edge of the ditch. Tire tracks were obvious. Beneath them, another set of marks dragged across the dirt. Thick grooves. Deep, uneven impressions where feet or bodies had scraped through.
"Dragged," he said. "Not walked."
Aerenyx crouched and let his hand hover a few inches above the ground, testing the air. "Three. Possibly four things were dragged," he murmured. "And they were not conscious for most of it."