The morning did not break in the Dead Zone. It just kind of leaked in.

  There was no sunrise here to chase away the shadows with a golden hour. The sky above the suffocating layer of smog simply transitioned from a bruised purple to a sickly chem-spill gray. The fog that blanketed the ruins glowed with its own internal luminescence as a pale radioactive green that did not cast shadows so much as it dissolved them.

  Mike opened his eyes.

  He did not wake up with a gasp or a flinch the way he always had in the shanties of Sector 4. There sleep was a liability. Sleep was when the roaches crawled into your ears or the frantic scratching of a junkie trying to pry open your lockbox woke you up. Here inside the rusted belly of the overturned hauler the silence was absolute.

  He lay still for a long moment and listened. He heard the slow rhythmic drip of condensation falling from the metal ceiling and the wind moaning through the skeletal remains of a skyscraper half a mile away. He took a deep breath. The air tasted of copper pennies and spicy mustard. It was toxic. It was lethal. And to Mike it felt like oxygen-rich blood hitting a starved muscle.

  He sat up and the sheet metal groaned under his weight. He looked down at his hands. In the dim light his skin looked pale and almost translucent but beneath the surface the veins were dark and pulsed with a slow heavy rhythm. The scratches he had gotten climbing the fence yesterday were gone. Not just scabbed over but gone. The skin was smooth and unbroken and slightly harder to the touch like leather left out in the sun.

  "Morning," he croaked.

  A squeak answered him.

  Grim was perched on a rusted strut near the opening of the hauler with his nose twitching as he sampled the poisoned air. The rat had grown again. It was subtle but Mike could see it. The muscles around the shoulders of Grim were thicker and bunched under the coarse grey fur like coiled springs. The scar where his ear used to be was a jagged line of white against the darkness.

  Grim did not scurry. He did not jitter. He sat on his haunches and watched Mike with beady black eyes that held a spark of intelligence that was becoming uncomfortably human.

  "You hungry?" Mike asked as he rubbed the sleep from his face.

  Grim chittered a sharp staccato sound that Mike felt in the back of his skull as much as he heard it. It was not telepathy exactly. It was more like an echo of a shared feeling of an empty stomach and a predatory itch.

  Hunt.

  The word was not spoken but the intent was clear.

  Mike crawled out of the hauler and stood up. The fog swirled around his knees cool and damp. He was practically naked and covered in dried mud and the grime of the city but he did not feel the cold. His internal furnace was burning hot fueled by the ambient radiation soaking into his cells.

  He looked out at the wasteland.

  The Dead Zone was a graveyard of giants. This had been the industrial heart of the city before the Collapse and before the corporations turned the planet into a landfill. Now it was a canyon of twisted metal. Massive cranes rusted into statues of despair loomed over mountains of crushed shipping containers. The ground was a treacherous slush of melted asphalt and chemical runoff broken up by jagged islands of concrete.

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  It was ugly. It was broken.

  "It is perfect," Mike whispered.

  They began to move.

  Mike did not run. He stalked. He moved with a new center of gravity and his steps were heavy and deliberate. Before the System he had walked with a hunch to make himself small and tried to take up as little space as possible so the world would not notice him. Now he walked with his chest open and his spine straight. The strength in his legs made every movement feel effortless. He vaulted over a collapsed concrete slab that would have taken him a minute to climb two days ago.

  Grim moved parallel to him as a grey streak flowing over the debris. The rat was fast and moved like liquid mercury over the jagged scrap. He did not stay close but ranged ahead to check corners and sniff into dark crevices as a forward scout.

  They moved West deeper into the ruins and away from the barrier fence of Sector 4. The deeper they went the stranger the landscape became. The radiation here was not just a background hum. It was an active force. Mike saw patches of moss that pulsed with a slow rhythmic heartbeat. He saw insects the size of dinner plates scuttling into the shadows with shells iridescent with oil.

  Mike paused near the husk of an old transport bus. The windows were blown out and the tires long since dissolved. He ran a hand over the warm metal.

  Wait.

  Mike froze. He had not heard anything. He had not seen anything. But the hair on the back of his neck stood up and prickled with sudden static. A cold shiver raced down his spine unrelated to the temperature.

  He looked at Grim. The rat had stopped ten meters ahead perched on top of a crushed vending machine. The body of Grim was rigid and his tail twitched erratically. He was not looking at Mike. He was looking at the alleyway formed by two collapsed warehouses.

  The silence of the Dead Zone changed. Before it had been the silence of emptiness. Now it was the silence of a held breath. The wind died down and the dripping stopped.

  Then came the smell. It hit the nose of Mike a second before the sound reached his ears. Rancid grease. Wet fur. Rotting meat. And underneath it all the sharp acidic tang of chemical bile.

  Click. Snap. Grind.

  The sound of dry bone rasping against grit.

  Mike stepped back and his bare foot found purchase on a rusted I-beam. He lowered his center of gravity and his hands curled into fists. He felt the familiar pressure in his wrist as the bone spur shifted in its sheath eager to come out.

  "Grim," Mike whispered. "To me."

  The rat did not move. He let out a low warning hiss.

  From the shadows of the alley a shape detached itself from the gloom. It was wolf-shaped in the way a nightmare resembles reality. It was huge and easily the size of a small pony with hunched shoulders and a spine that protruded through its mange-ridden skin like a saw blade. But it was the face that made the stomach of Mike turn.

  Half the jaw was gone and replaced by a jagged mass of fused calcified bone. One eye was a milky blind organic orb while the other was a cluster of weeping tumors that glowed like smoldering embers. Thick pulsing veins trailed from its neck like loose intestines weaving in and out of the patches of necrotic flesh.

  The wolf snarled a sound that was half-growl and half-gurgle. Saliva mixed with black bile dripped from its malformed jaw.

  Mike did not run. Fear the cold paralyzing ice that usually seized his heart was absent. In its place was a cold calculation. He saw the limp in its front left leg where the joint was swollen with bone spurs. He saw the exposed muscle on its neck where the fur had rotted away.

  He saw a target.

  Click-clack.

  Behind him.

  Mike spun around. Two more wolves were slinking out from behind the bus blocking his retreat. These were smaller but no less horrific. One dragged a hind leg that was just twisted bone and hardened cartilage devoid of skin.

  They were surrounded.

  "Three," Mike murmured.

  Grim leaped from the vending machine and landed on the shoulder of Mike. The weight of the rat was comforting and a solid anchor in the shifting fog. Mike could feel the heart of Grim beating against his neck fast but not panicked. Excited.

  The alpha wolf, the big one with the calcified jaw, stepped forward and the tumorous eye shrank as it focused on Mike. It let out a bark that sounded like rocks grinding together.

  They charged.