The little train soon pulled away. Under the overseers' whips, the workers were remarkably efficient. The numb looks in their eyes as they carried corpses, as naturally as hauling logs, showed that they were all seasoned hands.
Of course they were seasoned. If they did poorly or angered their superiors, they would most likely end up in the cages next time.
Steam drifted away like a cloud of smoke along the elevated tracks. Deathstroke and Magik turned their attention back to Kill-Enemy. The big bear rummaged through trash the way a bear might dig honey from a tree hollow, with an adorably clumsy charm.
Of course, there were no bees in the Middle World. Even if there had been, they would have long since mutated because of radiation and other causes.
After another round of gifts falling from the sky, many wasteland monsters joined the trash-scavenging ranks. They emerged from the shadows of garbage mountains everywhere, crawling or rolling toward the spots they had chosen, then silently began digging through the refuse.
For some reason, Su Ming could see despair toward life and that familiar numbness in the monsters' eyes. They seemed to know they would die sooner or later, with no hope left at all.
Twin-Stab Demons, Sharp-Tooth Monsters, Shadow Demons, and other Giant Creatures appeared beneath the tracks. If they encountered one another elsewhere, they would engage in brutal Predator battles, with the victor devouring the loser to fulfill the historical mission of natural selection.
Yet here, they were like friendly neighbors. When they met, they even exchanged weary glances before quietly returning to their separate trash piles. They had none of the bearing of apex food-chain monsters, looking more like abandoned stray dogs.
They were even worse off than dogs. There was no fighting, no snatching, not