Zhang Tianyuan quietly watched the five charred finger bones hanging from the windshield.
Ten minutes earlier, they had belonged to a Darkseeker that had leaped onto their vehicle.
But by now, that creature must have already melted away.
The Darkseeker attack had come to an end.
The Darkseekers that had swarmed them had either evaporated outright or escaped into the surrounding buildings, surviving the ordeal.
"It's incredible. They clearly look like flesh and blood, yet they evaporate so quickly under such a tiny amount of ultraviolet light..."
Wu Yisi and the others had relaxed by now, too, and began discussing the Darkseekers' tendency to evaporate under ultraviolet light.
Bai Xu and Instructor Yin also clicked their tongues in wonder. "Too much ultraviolet exposure can cause skin cancer, sure, but I've never heard of it burning a person out of existence."
Mie Juan pursed her lips in the driver's seat and glanced up at the finger bones almost directly above her head, as though finding them an eyesore.
The machine gunner held a standard-issue rifle and laughed. "We've traveled through spacetime, and the apocalypse has happened. What's so strange about something like this turning up?"
Zhang Tianyuan returned to the command seat in the middle of the vehicle and picked up the radio handset. "How's the radiation testing coming along? How much longer?"
Someone soon replied, "We've collected outside air samples and are analyzing them. We expect preliminary results in another two minutes."
"Understood. Carry on."
Zhang Tianyuan put down the handset and chatted with Bai Xu and the others while looking at the tall buildings outside the window.
"Be careful when we get out. Those Darkseekers that escaped into the buildings are probably still watching us from inside."
Bai Xu came over and peered out through the window with him. "That's right. Something just moved on the fourth floor. Those Darkseekers still haven't given up."
Wu Yisi frowned. "Should we take any other measures, then?"
"Don't worry," Instructor Yin said steadily. "As long as we keep the lights on, they won't dare come near us. If they want to keep watch, let them."
Zhang Tianyuan agreed. "Instructor Yin is right. We just need to stay away from the buildings when we get out and be careful not to let them drag us inside."
As soon as two minutes were up, Zhang Tianyuan received a report.
"No abnormal radiation or dust detected. It's safe to
get out."
Only then did Zhang Tianyuan and the others undo their protective suits, click open the doors, and step out.
Outside, they breathed air that was fresh but carried a faint stench of decay.
Many cars were parked along both sides of the street. All their windows had been smashed, their contents rummaged into disarray. Fallen leaves, dust, and Darkseeker footprints covered their roofs.
The high-rises on either side loomed dimly without a single light. Even the wind blowing out of them carried the odor of decay, and from time to time, Darkseeker howls could be heard in the distance.
Only now did Zhang Tianyuan feel that he had truly arrived in the apocalypse.
This was the real apocalypse.
There were probably very few humans left alive.
Instructor Yin took a deep breath. "There's no stench of corpses in the air. It looks like some time really has passed since the apocalypse."
Bai Xu said, "Probably. If the apocalypse had only just happened, with millions of people dying in a city in a short time, the stench of corpses would fill the whole place. Since we can't smell any now, the bodies must have decomposed completely."
Wu Yisi added, "I don't think they decomposed. Those Darkseekers ate them all..."
"Just look at how excited they were when they charged at us. You can tell they're familiar with the taste of humans."
Everyone fell silent.
Imagining the Darkseekers gnawing through millions of corpses in a city, Mie Juan immediately felt like throwing up.
She was just a driver. She couldn't stomach imagery that graphic.
Zhang Tianyuan took a flashlight and walked toward the communications vehicle nearby.
This vehicle could not only maintain individual communications among the vanguard team members, but also broadcast or receive radio signals.
"How are things here? Have you picked up any signals?"
Zhang Tianyuan knocked on their window. The engineer inside rolled it down and raised the radio in his hand.
"We're searching for signals with the onboard equipment, and we're using the little radio, too. We should pick something up soon."
He had barely finished speaking.
The static from the communications engineer's radio suddenly vanished, followed by an urgent, forceful voice speaking Chinese amid distorted crackling.
"Comrades... Central People's Broadcasting Station... affected by the KV Virus... our nation faces mortal peril... we now call on survivors..."
The radio cut out so badly that they could not make out a single complete sentence, but Zhang Tianyuan and the others listened with intense concentration, barely daring to breathe.
Only after it had played through once did Zhang Tianyuan look at the people in the vehicle and say, "Work out exactly what that broadcast says, right away!"
With that, Zhang Tianyuan went to find the exploration team, his mind weighed down.
They were preparing to explore the surrounding environment and streets.
They had unloaded four wheeled robots from the truck and were preparing to deploy them.
In Zhang Tianyuan's era, they could have simply sent up drones to scout, quickly and conveniently.
But the timeline of "2012" was still in 2008. 3G was only beginning to develop, and small drones were nowhere near as convenient as the ones he knew.
In terms of practicality, they were inferior to these wheeled robots trailing network cables.
Zhang Tianyuan returned to the vehicle to wait for news from the communications team, while informing the others who had returned of the situation.
Everyone fell silent.
Several minutes passed before Instructor Yin said, "We've confirmed now that quite some time has passed since this world's apocalyptic crisis. I suggest we find a way out of the city."
"There are probably hundreds of thousands of Darkseekers in the city now. If they gather together, we might not be able to hold out."
In the movie, it might have seemed as though the enormous city of New York held only a few dozen or a hundred Darkseekers, a very small number.
That was because the protagonist had only provoked the Darkseekers in a single building-just one Darkseeker group!
Normally, New York was filled with ghostly wails and wolfish howls every night, frightening the protagonist into sleeping in his bathtub.
In reality, megacities like the Imperial Capital and New York were natural gathering places for Darkseekers. With a mutation rate of 9.8%, having hundreds of thousands or even a million Darkseekers was hardly a stretch.
Zhang Tianyuan agreed with Instructor Yin's suggestion. After determining their direction, he immediately ordered the convoy to set off and head out in that direction.
At the same time, the communications team reported the contents of the apocalypse broadcast:
"Too many people have died in this spacetime. The official organizations are already falling apart. The broadcast warned people about the KV Virus's characteristics and precautions, then called on them not to remain in the cities, but to head into the wilderness or to the last survivor bases."
"Where are the bases?" Zhang Tianyuan asked urgently.
"In the grasslands to the north, the plateau to the west, and the deserts..."
"But we're not sure whether anyone is still there."