My teeth chattered until they clicked together. Before I could even recover from the shock, the others had closed in above me, leaning over the shattered wall and peering down. All of them smiled with bared teeth; some showed fangs that flashed under the sun.
Those fangs were not human. They were sharper, more pointed, made for killing.
"Oh, there you are." The rabbit-eared one said, raising his hunting rifle and aiming it straight at me.
For a moment my mind emptied, leaving only one single thought. I don't want to die.
No matter how the world had shifted, no matter how many civilizations had fallen, one thing buried deep in the human genome never changes. It is the drive to survive.
Drawing on the last scraps of strength in my body, I forced myself to spring up and run. At least I believed I was running. Even knowing I could never outrun a bullet, I refused to sit still and wait for death.
I had slept in that cryo-chamber—God knows how long—just for the chance to be saved. I did not want to die.
"Catch it!"
The shout behind me made my heart leap, and I ran harder, head down.
Bang!
A bullet whined past my ear. I screamed and clapped my hands to my head, but I did not slow my pace.
"Wait, don't shoot."
The voices blurred behind me. My ears rang from the shot and from the pounding blood in my temples. My mind, still fogged from long sleep, struggled to assemble these fragments into a picture of the new world I had returned to.
Between ragged breaths, I smelled something strange threading through the metallic tang in the air.
It was thick, pungent enough to make my nose wrinkle.
"GRRRRR!"
A deep, resonant growl pressed close to the back of my neck. I sucked in air and ground my teeth, forcing myself to run without daring to look back.
Suddenly the fierce sunlight that had burnt across my skin vanished. Something enormous loomed above me.
When I tilted my head up, my breath caught.
A black hide, like a curtain of midnight, stretched over the sky. A long, massive body blocked the light. The sensation was the same as when night swallowed me into that uncertain cryosleep.
Thud.
The monstrous creature landed in front of me, the concussion trembling through the ground and making my legs wobble. Amber eyes pinioned me to the spot.
Not a cat. It was a black panther. Though it moved on all fours, it matched me in height, almost two metres long.
I had never seen a leopard so vast.
It took a heavy step toward me, claws scraping grooves into the pavement. Its jaws parted in a low snarl, teeth shining like polished blades, as though it could tear me open at any moment.
Gasping, I stepped back, ready to run the other way. The human instinct to survive will not bend to death without a fight.
But something hard like a wall pressed against my back. A blast of hot breath fell on my head, numbing my scalp.
Trembling, clutching my torn clothes, I forced myself to look up.
A towering stag stood behind me. Its antlers curled into elaborate branches. It must have been three metres tall.
"You run pretty fast."
I flinched and glanced left.
The rabbit—perhaps the only one not fully transformed—remained half-human, half-beast. He gripped his rifle like an extension of himself, keeping it aimed at me as a silent threat.
Realising escape was impossible, my legs gave out. I collapsed in a heap, gravel tearing at my knees again, but the pain hardly registered.
"Not running anymore?" The rabbit jabbed the barrel of his gun into my shoulder with a teasing shove. "How boring."
So this was how animals felt when humans hunted them down to a corner. It was not pleasant.
"This one looks different." The voice rumbled above me as the stag shrank back into a humanoid form. "It can run on two legs like we do."
The panther, opposite me, folded its black pelt inward as skin and muscle reformed beneath.
"It's wearing clothes. Might be someone's pet." He said.
The rabbit nudged my chin upward with the cold barrel of his gun. "No collar. Maybe abandoned."
My fingers curled against the dirt, gathering grit into my palm. I was not sure if I was still breathing normally. My chest was constricted, as if someone had tied a rope around my lungs.
In that moment of despair, my mind sharpened with unnatural clarity. The scattered pieces of information finally linked together, forming an answer I did not want to believe.
These are not humans. Not hybrids. Not mutants of humanity.
They are animals that have evolved. They can shift their forms. It sounded like an impossible, anti-scientific tale, but it was happening before my eyes. Denial was meaningless.
Where had this come from? A biological catastrophe? An experiment gone wrong?
I could not speculate. Human logic might no longer apply in a world turned upside down.
"Let's take it back first." The panther pulled a rope from the pouch at his side and stepped toward me, binding my wrists.
The coarse fibers scraped my skin, biting into my already bruised flesh. Pain flared, but I did not dare make a sound.
Judging by the human-like creature that attacked me earlier, and by the way these beast-men behaved toward humans… I could already see the reversal of roles.
If I spoke, I had no idea what horrors might follow.
The panther's amber eyes flicked over me. They retained the wild intelligence of a beast combined with human cunning. The look chilled me.
"At least it looks pretty. Should fetch a good price."
I had nothing left. After the chase and the exhaustion of waking from hibernation, my strength was spent. They dragged me across the ground like an object, no, more like an animal.
Human strength had become something small and pathetic in this world.
I lifted my eyes to the highway that had once stretched proudly across the land, now nothing but ruins swallowed by wilderness. The view was as bleak as the gray sky pressing down on my head.
Where would my fate lead?
Perhaps only God knew.
And even then… only if He still existed in this dystopia.
***