Chapter 50: The Ones Who Carry The Monster with human face

Zarek left the old man’s offer alone and returned to his usual routine. Over the following week, he took Elsa and Ayesha outside to hunt, trained them when they returned, and focused on making the most of their progress.

Their progress continued, but the environment they were learning to survive in refused to stay the same.

The first change he noticed was the number of mutants.

Streets that had been relatively quiet were now crawling with them. During one outing, Zarek counted six creatures moving between abandoned cars on a road where they had previously encountered no more than two.

They avoided that route afterward, only to find another group occupying the entrance to a nearby shopping complex.

It was becoming harder to find places where they could hunt without drawing unwanted attention. A fight that should have ended with a single dead mutant sometimes attracted others from the surrounding streets, forcing them to retreat before they could collect anything useful.

The vegetation was getting worse as well.

Roots had begun breaking through the pavement, lifting chunks of asphalt and spreading beneath abandoned vehicles. Thick vines crawled up building walls, while dense patches of unfamiliar plants filled gaps between the structures.

Some had grown so large that they blocked entire passages, their broad leaves hiding whatever lay behind them.

Zarek had initially treated the plants as little more than an inconvenience, but that was becoming difficult when vegetation that had barely reached his knees a few days earlier now covered the lower half of a parked car.

He couldn’t tell whether its growth had accelerated overnight or whether he’d underestimated it from the beginning. Either way, routes they had used safely were becoming harder to navigate.

The mutants were becoming more dangerous, too. Zarek had noticed the difference during their fights.

Some creatures could withstand blows that would have finished their earlier counterparts, while others moved quickly enough to make careless attacks costly.

Elsa and Ayesha were improving, but they still had to work for their kills, and Zarek wasn’t about to let them mistake their recent progress for invulnerability.

Even he had to pay closer attention than before.

The constant detours were getting on his nerves, but he couldn’t deny that the changes fascinated him.

The world’s getting uglier by the day. At least it’s not getting boring.

That afternoon, Zarek and the two women were moving through a damaged commercial district when he spotted several figures in the distance.

He recognized them as the same sort of group he had noticed during an earlier outing. Back then, he hadn’t bothered following them. They were too far away to identify, and he had been occupied with more immediate concerns.

Now that his usual hunting routes were becoming more dangerous, finding out how other people were moving through the city seemed worth his time.

The figures were moving along a street lined with wrecked vehicles, heading away from the more heavily damaged part of the district.

Zarek watched their progress for a while, trying to make out their numbers and whether they were carrying anything.

He couldn’t see enough from that distance.

"Head back to the building," he told Elsa and Ayesha.

Ayesha looked toward the strangers. "Are you going after them?"

"I’m going to see who they are."

"Shouldn’t we stay together?" Elsa asked.

"Not when I don’t know what I’m walking into. You two can get home without me."

He gave them no further explanation. There was little point bringing them along just to watch strangers from a distance, and if the situation turned dangerous, he would rather have them safely away from it.

After watching the women begin their return journey, Zarek moved toward the distant group.

He didn’t follow directly behind them. Instead, he crossed through a damaged building and came out onto a parallel street, using the wreckage and the thick vegetation growing between the buildings to keep himself out of sight.

The strangers continued moving without any indication that they had noticed him.

As the distance narrowed, their appearance became clearer.

Zarek slowed.

Their bodies were wrong.

Thick veins bulged beneath their skin, running along their arms and climbing their necks. The dark lines were much more pronounced than those he’d seen on the upper floors.

On several individuals, the veins had swollen into raised ridges that distorted the skin around them.

One man was particularly disturbing.

Patches of his face looked decayed, the flesh discolored and uneven as though his body had begun rotting while he was still alive.

Similar damage covered part of his forearm, where dark veins twisted through skin that looked ready to split.

Yet the man walked normally, keeping pace with the others.

Another had the same dark veins spreading beneath his jaw, though his skin hadn’t deteriorated to the same extent. The rest showed varying degrees of the same abnormalities.

Zarek watched them pass between two abandoned vehicles, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

He had seen similar veins on the upper floors, but none of those people looked this badly affected.

Whatever had happened to the strangers, it hadn’t stopped them from moving through the city as though their condition were perfectly normal.

Then he noticed their burden.

Several of the men were carrying something between them, supporting its weight with their arms and shoulders.

From a distance, Zarek had mistaken it for a large bundle of material, but now that he could see its shape, he realized it was a body.

A very large body.

He shifted behind the wreck of a delivery van, keeping his head low as the group approached the intersection.

The thing they carried was a monster, its thick limbs and oversized body bringing back memories of the creature that had nearly crushed Zarek to death inside the building.

Then he saw its face.

A human face had grown into the monster’s body.

Only one.

He leaned forward to get a better look. He wasn’t mistaken.

The face was unmistakably human, though its features were distorted by the surrounding flesh. It reminded him of the creature he’d fought, but unlike that monster, this one had only a single face.

Another one?

Zarek watched the creature’s limbs sway as the men carried it. He couldn’t tell whether it was dead or unconscious, and none of the men seemed particularly concerned about the weight they were hauling.

He stayed behind the van as they passed, waiting until they had moved farther down the street before shifting to keep them in sight. Whatever these people were, he wanted to know where they were taking the monster.