Danny stoked the firepit in front of him, making it burn hotter and brighter. There was still some time until the skewered bird that was roasting on top of it was ready by his estimation.
A couple of weeks had passed ever since he led Hank and his men back to the factory.
The events that followed their arrival went mostly as he had expected. Luke safely joined the survivor’s camp and the food crisis the settlement was going through was entirely alleviated, much for Hank’s glee and stupefaction.
As he prodded the embers with a stick, Danny smiled while recalling the memory of the towering man standing there, at the gates of the factory, with his mouth agape after seeing for himself that the compound which had been crawling with undead at one point was truly and utterly silent, devoid of any enemies.
The looks that the hulking man gave Danny after realizing that he had not been lied to and that the younger man had, in fact, delivered his promise had been very amusing to say the least.
During the entire process of recovering the supplies and loading them into the trucks, Hank kept pestering him for more details about the factory clearance and how he had managed to do that.
Did he have allies hiding somewhere? Did he have some weapons cache that Hank didn’t know about stashed around those parts? Maybe he discovered some inherent weakness of the zombies that could be exploited?
Still, no matter how he was asked, Danny kept his silence and merely smiled at Hank’s unrelentless curiosity. On his part, the camp’s leader made use of every angle he could think of to get some information out of Danny’s mouth.
“If you have a way to make dealing with zombies easier, tell us and I will reward you handsomely,” and “think of the children back at the camp. Don’t you want to help them?” were some of the things he said in order to sway his contracted help.
Yet, Danny remained unmoved even if some of his arguments did shake him a little. He had a soft spot for children and mothers in general given his own upbringing, but he made sure he did not let it show.
From what he knew of the shrewd older man, he could not afford to show any cracks in his stoic façade or he would never hear the end of it. He was sure that if Hank got even a whiff of his bias, of his own reluctance to say no to children, the commander would definitely double down on it, exploiting it as weakness in their future negotiations. Danny really did not want to be put on that position so better to keep his own views, opinions and predispositions to himself.
Danny slightly rotated the spit above the fire to make sure that his meal would be evenly cooked.
During these last couple of weeks, he learned that some types of food got rarer and harder to find. Scavenging only got you so far.
After all, once you got past the perishables - which had mostly spoiled by now after a month of societal collapse -, all that remained in stores and supermarkets to be picked up in terms of food were preserved goods.
Obviously, some things like corn and other vegetables, fruits, tuna and cereals were easier to find, as such goods with a long shelf-life were common items on any random supermarket’s stock. And in large numbers as well.
Other things, however, not so much.
Particularly, meat only became scarcer as time passed by, turning into some sort of luxury good at Hank’s settlement. Not that it affected Danny’s diet all that much.
When one had the arm’s strength, sense acuity, and accuracy which Danny had, hunting for game in the forests was a piece of cake. The empowerment of the soul crystals made it a simple affair for him. Any pebble at the side of the road became an able weapon capable of killing perched birds in one hit. Danny hardly missed his throws and he was only getting more proficient with this method of hunting as time passed by.
Besides, the electronic devices he carried on his backpack thankfully contained plenty tutorials and guides on hunting, trapping, gathering, butchering and other survival-related skills, methods and techniques.
There were many subjects he had overlooked when he was preparing for the upcoming Apocalypse at the time he downloaded those books and guides, but survival skills were not one of them.
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By now, Danny had already spent quite a few hours learning how to catch and process his own food and though he was no master hunter, he was pleased with his progress and recently developed skills all the same.
‘At least I won’t have to go hungry if the local spots for scavenging food suddenly dry up. As long as there are enough animals to hunt, then I’ll be fine.’ He thought.
Speaking of animals, he finally solved a question that had been on his mind for quite some time. That being whether or not animals could ‘zombify’. The short answer to that question… was no.
Danny thought that it should have been obvious in hindsight, to be honest.
Even if he never went too deep into urban areas that used to be densely populated – as doing such a thing would be simply asking for trouble considering the huge numbers of zombies which no doubt currently roamed the streets and creeped inside the buildings -, given the many small towns he passed by and even his week-long stay at Lakeview City soon after the start of the Apocalypse, he should have seen zombified cats and dogs at the very least if it was at all possible.
Just think about it. Even if we disregard other types of animals one could commonly find at cities, like birds in general, rats and many others, cats and dogs are fairly common pets.
Therefore, quite a few houses should have one or two lying about, but ever since the start of the Apocalypse, Danny had not seen any walking around – dead or otherwise. It stands to reason that if they could be transformed into zombies, then he should have spotted a couple by now, right?
In any case, he only got visual confirmation a week ago, when he came across three zombies feasting on the corpse of a golden retriever. After quickly dispatching the three heartless undead, Danny resigned himself to the thankless job of opening the skull of the departed canine and searching for a crystal inside.
His search did not bear fruit however, as there was no shiny stone amidst the brainy bits of the dog. That, in itself, revealed two things to him:
First, animals – at least dog-sized animals – attracted zombies much like humans did. That could only mean that they also produced an aura around their bodies formed from leaking soul power, since he had already learned that this was what drew the aggression from the undead.
Second, dead animals did not turn into zombies. At least, he could be certain that the most common ones did not naturally ‘turn’.
Tutu had already told him all that time ago that soul power had an intrinsic relationship with intelligent lifeforms, and was most often found in sentient beings. From that, Danny concluded that, while animals could draw some measure of soul power and bleed it into the environment, the quantities were not enough to form a soul crystal upon death and consequently raise their own variant of undead.
Yet, he still could not say for sure if smarter animals like dolphins or larger ones like bears, for example, could zombify. Tutu himself had told him that sentience was not a requirement for the appearance of soul crystals, but more of a reliable point of reference from countless tests and world explorations – or better yet, invasions if we are being entirely honest. Face it, even in human history, the encounter of two different civilizations frequently ended in conquering and enslavement, not to mention an entire alien species arriving at your home world uninvited.
In any case, Danny was just glad he would not be facing any flying zombie cockroaches in the near future. Yikes, can you imagine the horror that would be?
His conclusions were validated a few days ago when he met Tutu once more as the demon confirmed his theories.
Though it had not been 15 days ever since he last met the demon, considering that he felt completely fine after anticipating their meeting last time, added to the fact that his blood-count medical home kit indicated that he was perfectly healthy, Danny once more summoned Tutu before the deadline arrived.
He still owed the demon another 7 installments of blood tribute until he could ask Tutu about other subjects. The sooner he got rid of his debt, the more he could learn. Better to speed it up if he could then.
This time around, the demon had been in a less giving mood though. Tutu refused to elaborate any more on the issue of the power stages even if he had been willing to do so during their last encounter.
Danny could not complain too much however, as he knew that the matter was outside the scope of what they had agreed on. He had acted shamelessly once and got away with it, but it seemed that it would not happen a second time.
If Tutu wished to keep his secrets and limit his handouts to a one-off kind of deal, then there was nothing that Danny could do about it other than shrug his shoulders and wait for his debt to be cleared off before revisiting the subject once more.
Anyway, just because their talks were limited to the subject of crystals, it didn’t mean that there was nothing else he could learn. Even though their talks did not yield any other particularly groundbreaking revelations, speaking with the demon still helped him better understand soul power and its intricacies.
It was still very much confusing and astonishing to him how such an ethereal and hard to perceive energy source could have such magical and powerful effects on reality.
Though it seemed disconnected from our world – particularly due to the thousands of years of human history that went by with little perceivable inputs from such a mystical source – it was anything but. Danny knew that after millennia of Earth’s reserves of soul power being drained by both invading groups, soon this magical force would start leaving its mark, not only on the populace of living beings that called Earth home, but also on the environment as whole.
He could not fathom what changes such interaction would bring to his surroundings, but he had enough things to worry about for now to care for such long-term consequences.