In the next day, as soon as the sun came out, the vehicles dispatched.
The row of vehicles raised dust in the abandoned street as they crossed the rocky terrain.
The fleet was composed of 20 trucks carrying coal and 10 other vehicles carrying only personnel, including an armored tank, and Mark was sitting by the side of the driver of a coal truck. He took the smallest toothpick this time.
~sigh~
Sighted Mark. 'Well, at least I will have a chance of finding more mutated animals. Also, I don't have to bear with all that bullshit that goes on the personnel trucks, thought Mark, remembering the last transportation mission. There was a guy that everyone wished to kill because he snored like a pig,
'A dying pig!' thought Mark, remembering about the guy.
Thinking about pigs, he recalled John, and was glad that he didn't say his goodbyes. That glutton was a crybaby and would do a tantrum if he knew Mark was leaving the base.
'I hope he remains safe. He is a good guy, a bit sentimental for my taste, but a good guy.'
...
Time on the road went fast, and soon night came.
The fleet stopped to raise a camp, and Mark went to help.
"How many days until the next base?" asked Mark, because he knew this trip was multi-base trip. They would stop at several bases during the route.
"Four days I think, I'm not sure either, I just drive...." said the driver that came with Mark. "... I heard the sergeant say something about it yesterday, but I'm not sure myself..."
Mark furrowed his brows and asked, "Why do you say that?"
The driver made a thin line with his lips as if eating a lemon and pointed up with his index finger. Mark looked up and immediately understood what the guy was talking about. A meteor shower risked the sky, and in the apocalypse, a meteor shower only mean one thing, 'More beasts! Dammit!'
Since the first wave of meteors, from time to time, in a irregular way, but constantly, more meteors fell on Earth, and all of them had beasts inside.
The meteors itself caused little to no damage at all. The problem was that they fell everywhere, no matter if you had made a stronghold or cleaned a city from beasts, in the next day could be 10 more beasts in there.
The military made all they could to research the meteors and understand what was happening and all they could find was they were coming from a dark corner in the space beyond the Kuiper belt, and that was the reason they were covered in ice before reaching Earth.
Before hearing that, Mark didn't even know that the Kuiper belt existed. For him, the solar system was only the known planets, such Earth and Mars.
"I still remember the first time I saw one of those meteorites smaller than a coin crash against Earth... those beasts growing in size in the blink of an eye, from nothing to a monster of 2 meters, full of arms and four eyes, at that time we didn't have named them yet..." said the driver.
"It was a troll?" asked Mark, recognizing the features of one.
The driver nodded and continued to put his small tent on the ground.
"My first time was a runner..." said Mark.
It was the time he saw an entire squad die to a single beast.
"The thing was hungry. They all are when they 'land', but that one, I never saw a runner as deadly as that one."
"You are lucky to be alive then," said the driver.
"Not exactly. I was among the dead ones, but a guy called Frank thought the contrary and brought me back to the barracks. My heart had stopped for who knows how long, but the doctors brought me back to life. I still have the scar on my back. My guess is that the runner was already full when he attacked me," said Mark, biting his lips.
The talk ended there. No one liked to talk about those kinds of stories in the army. They had already seen plenty of that to need to talk about it.
Mark set up his own tent and went to the sergeant to know the time of his patrol shift. It was 3am.
'How lucky,' thought Mark. Recently, his luck seemed to have taken a fancy for the bad.
...
Time passed as usual and his first night on the road went normal with nothing major happening. They were still on a rocky terrain and the beasts preferred to stay close to vegetation. Also, the meteor shower didn't hit their region, so no beasts came to hunt them while they slept.
In the next day, the fleet of trucks set off on the first rays of sun just like the previous day, and by the time the sun was going down Mark finally saw dense vegetation, as small lines of trees formed on the horizon.
The trucks stopped and Mark went outside to stretch his legs, "I guess they don't want to camp inside that forest up ahead" said Mark, to the driver by his side.
"Who would be that crazy?" asked the driver, but Mark knew it was a rhetoric question, but even so, he replied in his mind, 'Me?', he was half-joking and yet not joking at all, it was at that moment that Mark noticed that his mind-set had changed from survival mode to a hunter mode.
He was not more just hiding from the beasts, now he was doing reckless things to be able to hunt mutated animals, and the bigger reason was because Mark knew that he was running against time, soon everyone would know about the mutations and he will lose that bit of advantage he had right now.
"Lets set up the tents. My feeling is that this night will be a very long one," said Mark, because he knew that just this few miles away from that forest were not enough to make them safe.