Chapter 3: Bright Eyes
The big waste was home to all manner of living things. Humanity’s grip on hierarchy of the wild was very loose since the end of the skirmishes. The disfigured mutants known as Blights controlled most of the geographical space, making use of well organised underground tunnels and fortified outposts that had an unparalleled network of communication. As these blights were primarily soldiers and excavators during the skirmishes, their training put them ahead of desperate human scavengers too poor or unskilled to live in an advanced ‘Citadel’ or even a more modest ‘Shell’. They would be killed, hunted and enslaved by the Blights. Humanity had turned their backs on them and they had no intention of showing compassion in return as a society.
Some humans were in bandit gangs or worked as well armed mercenaries that made them less vulnerable to the Blights, but apart from rival gangs the biggest threat to life was the wildlife itself.
There is little information on what kinds of weapons were used in the skirmishes; reports range from wicked science to arcane magic but the effect they left on the world is undeniable. They changed the very makeup of the creatures that survived it. Large cat like creatures with gills dart through the waters like trout. Oversized bloated Rhinos spew toxic waste during mating season. Squirrels combust into flame as a self defense mechanism and a flytrap will snatch a person walking by and drain the volume out of them, leaving them as powdery husks so light they are carried by the harsh winds or buried by the pale sand. Almost everything was a carnivore, food crops were hard to come by and were more valuable than any drug. So the creatures of the waste adapted to live off flesh, the food chain was circular. Everything was eating everything.
A large wolf-creature with white eyes dashing across the plains was about to become one of them.
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She wasn't completely certain why she was running but she was finding a lot of peace in her aimless high speed. Her silver-white paws seemed to barely touch the sand as she sprinted gracefully towards her unknown destination. Her powerful shoulders fit sleekly atop her toned forelegs covered with a sleek coat of shimmering white-grey fur that matched her pale grey-blue mane. Her eyes were focused, yet free and breath was strong but measured. Her appearance did not match the toxic, fragmented background of the waste, but she moved through it as if she were it’s ruler.
Her midday run began to find direction as her powerful stomach began to churn and gargle with the oldest urge of any living thing. Hunger. Letting her nose become her targeting system, her instincts cycled through the proximate scents for the best source of food. A few caraceses in one direction, probably too rotten. A nearby source of water to be kept in mind to visit later. A burning smell, maybe an explosion or two...but it was masking another scent, one of another animal. No, two animals covered in the stench of panic and desperation. The two sources were becoming close, directing her to the meeting point direction. A live hunt maybe? Perfect source of food for the wolf. Her speed increased to a breakneck pace as she closed in on the curious pair of whiffs. Her eyesight was good but it was far behind her sense of smell, her crystal white eyes left the job of locating to her much more adept nose, and it was doing a fine job.
Finally, even in the harsh uncomfortable sunlight and the dusty air, her vision began to perceive a shape in the distance the source of the smell, a tasty body of living meat. She came in such a speed that the target didn’t even have time to react. The sheer impact of this powerful wolf beast’s tackle snapped the target’s neck and most of its spine. It was lifeless before it flopped to the ground, turned over. She wasted no time in taking her first bite. There was an audible crunch of gnashing jaws crushing bone. She had caught a tasty lizard.
She was so busy feeding she barely noticed the badly wounded, barely conscious human right next to her, quivering with his eyes closed. None of this mattered to her, as she was hungry.