Beneath the layers of refuse and the frantic, panicked kicking of Mike’s boot heels, the roaches stirred from their slumber. Moments before, they had been a background presence, a quiet chorus of chewing and movement through tunnels of rot, but the sudden injection of his terror transformed them into a riot. He felt the shove inside their compact bodies, a command that was foreign to them overriding their simple instinct to hide. With a desperate mental push, he urged them outward and away, and the mound of broken plastic beneath him trembled as the colony broke its stillness.

  A black wave boiled forth, antennae flicking and shells flashing with an oily rainbow sheen under the sickly light. Hundreds and then thousands poured from the seams in the trash, worming from under rusted plates and exploding out of the foam rot of the hanging mattress in a sick flood that surged toward a single point.

  The predator had a mere fraction of a second to register that the world had changed. Its eyes, slick and wet lenses in the dark, tracked sideways with confusion twitching through its hackled shoulders before the swarm struck. They crashed into its muzzle like a thrown blanket of living grit, scrambling over lips and jamming themselves into the edges of nostrils or clambering up the hollows where fur gave way to bare mutant hide. They dove for warmth and moisture, seeking protection in the soft tissues of the eyes.

  The Scrap-Wolf jerked in mid-lunge. Instead of jaws closing around his neck, its snout cracked into the dirt inches from his ear. Toxic slurry splashed against his skin, cold and stinging, as the beast yelped a strangled sound that had no place in such a massive chest. It thrashed its head, whipping mud and roaches in violent arcs. He felt the tiny minds wink out as they were crushed under paws or smashed between teeth, their deaths brushing faintly across his awareness like a snapped string. There should have been pity for the creatures or perhaps disgust at himself, but he found only a hard, brittle satisfaction beneath the tremor of his terror.

  He was still alive.

  His body remained frozen, but the paralysis began to crack at the edges, spiderweb fractures spreading through the hold the System had on his limbs. Perhaps the crystal had finished enough of its binding process. He did not question it, for questioning was a luxury for those who thought they might see the morning. His fingers twitched, and then his wrist jerked against the sucking pull of the mud.

  He dragged one elbow in, feeling the tendons in his arm creak like overused cable. Numbness burned away from his muscles, replaced by pins and needles so sharp they felt almost electrical. Above him, the wolf howled a ragged and garbled screech, its front paws clawing at its own head and tearing bloody furrows in an attempt to scrape the vermin away.

  "Come on," he croaked. The sound was not a word so much as a strip of sandpaper dragged over stone, and his throat burned with the effort. "Move, you useless shit. Move."

  His other hand listened this time and clenched into a weak fist. Mud sucked at his back as he forced his spine to arch, and every motion sent lances of pain from the places where the crystal had burrowed through him minutes before. His chest felt wrong, as though the meat had been rearranged and organs nudged aside by something that had no right being there. The System hummed in the background, not audible but present as a pressure at the base of his skull, watching.

  He rolled. The motion was clumsy, more of a fall sideways than any conscious control, but it scraped him out of the direct shadow of the wolf’s thrashing bulk. The beast reared, blind and snapping at phantoms, while its claws churned trenches in the sludge where his ribs had been only moments before. Roaches fled in flailing tides whenever its jaws found them, but more kept pouring forth, driven by the panic still crashing through their little brains. His awareness tagged them one by one like raindrops against sheet metal, and there were so many that they blurred into a constant pressure. He had never thought much about insects except as something to smack off his food, but now they were the only reason his lungs kept hitching air in and out.

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  Belly-sliding through the dirt, each drag of his knee and elbow felt like a personal apocalypse. Chemical burns licked at the cuts along his sides where the crystal had entered, and sludge seeped beneath his tattered shirt to set his skin on fire. His right hand hit metal, perhaps a length of snapped pipe or a stripped beam, and he grabbed it like a drowning man clutching a float. Fingers scraping against rust, he used the leverage to haul himself up the incline of the crater, boots slipping as his toes searched for debris solid enough to push against.

  The Scrap-Wolf stumbled somewhere behind him, still howling. Its bulk crashed into the crater wall and sent a rain of pebbled slag sliding down after him. Rot-water spattered his back and the smell grew sharper as wolf blood mixed with the chemicals of the pit. His head swam. The roach-minds buzzed, each a tiny itch in his awareness, but they were confused now. His panic was diffusing, and while some still attacked blindly by burrowing deeper into heat and wet, others broke and ran. They skittered off the beast to vanish into more familiar shadows, their simple brains already re-orienting to old hungers.

  His chest shuddered as he gained the rim of the crater. His arms gave out and he flopped onto his side, gasping. The air up here was only marginally less poisonous, and the heat leaned on him like a drunk giant. Above, across the broken plain of rust and rubbish, the closer sectors rose as overlapping silhouettes of junk towers and repurposed cranes, their skeletal outlines hazy in the chemical mist. Nobody had seen. Of course they hadn’t. In Sector 4, no one watched a person's back unless they wanted what that person carried.

  He rolled onto his stomach and forced himself to crawl. Every motion sent new electric fingers through his nerves, the crystal’s cold welded to his bones like some alien infrastructure reinforcing him from the inside. It felt structural and wrong, as if his body had become a frame being welded around new machinery. Behind him, the Scrap-Wolf thrashed more weakly now, its frenzy ebbing into pained, choked snarls. He didn’t look back. Prey looked back.

  He used to be prey.

  The thought came from nowhere, sharp and clean. His mind was still half-submerged in that black ocean of vermin perceptions, and the world he pulled himself over flickered between his own narrow vision and their tiny, alien maps. He sensed heat here, vibration there, the sweet promise of moisture under a crushed drum, or the musk-thread of a rat’s trail cutting across his path. The roaches he had thrown at the wolf were dying. He sensed the fade-out of dozens at a time as the beast finally got its claws into the swarm, smearing them blind across rock and tearing them out of its own face in bloody handfuls. The loss hit him in little pricks that were sharp and then gone. Tiny debts paid in full.

  He felt no guilt. They were bugs. They were his, though.

  That part snagged in his mind. He froze for a heartbeat. Around him, the narrow gully of trash hummed with unseen life, and he could feel it all now. It was not just the ones he had tugged on, but all of it. A background pressure that had been there his whole life, unregistered like the hush one forgets about until it goes away. Now it was all he could hear.

  The wolf gave one last choking bark and then a thud that shook loose rust grit around his fingers. A few more roach-lights winked out in quick succession, then most of the remaining ones scattered fully, fleeing that hot and collapsing mass. He pulled his focus away before their little lives drew him too far into their pointless hungers. He had his own hungers. Survive. Get out of the Dead Zone. Live long enough to understand what had crawled into his chest.

  He dragged himself farther from the crater, using any junk in reach as handholds, grasping twisted rebar, slumped appliances, or the smooth flank of a shattered water tank. His breathing stayed ragged, but he could breathe. His muscles were loosening into something like control, the paralysis crumbling under his stubborn insistence on not dying.

  It dawned on him, slow and sour, as he hauled his skinny carcass toward the maze of Sector 4’s outer heaps. He hadn’t fought the wolf. He hadn’t gotten stronger or faster, nor had he grown claws or armor. He was still the same malnourished heap-rat he had always been, lungs full of cancer and bones like brittle wire. He had survived by grabbing hold of whatever filth already lived here and shoving it between himself and the thing that wanted to eat him.

  He had weaponized trash.

  The thought should have humiliated him. Sector 4 had its stories about heroes with steel implants and plasma cutters, or scavvers who went up-sector and came back with guns that spat lightning. Control of bugs was not in the tales. He remembered the feel of that mass of roaches erupting, their little bodies a living avalanche doing exactly what his terror made them do.

  Schedule update:

  I’ll be dropping three more posts3–5 posts per week