"Huh!?"
Prabhu suddenly felt the truck becoming several times heavier. ’Is it stuck?’ he thought and pulled harder, but the truck still moved, albeit as if he were pulling it up an incline.
Rudra turned his attention towards Prabhu and Laila, but to his surprise, they had stopped pulling. Their complexions had gone bloodless as they stared into the distance with horror.
Rudra had a bad feeling about this. Uneasy, he turned towards the direction they were looking, and the light in his eyes disappeared.
Rudra was frozen solid, and for a moment, he lost control over his hands and feet.
Feeling that the red tree right in the centre of the town circle was ominous, he thought taking a detour was the right decision, but he didn’t know if that decision was right anymore.
At the end of the site, a building nearly a hundred meters tall stood like a grotesque monument.
This was no ordinary building. It bore none of the cracked walls or bloodstains they’d seen throughout the rest of the town. Instead, the entire structure looked as if it had been transformed into flesh and blood.
The walls had lost every trace of their original appearance, replaced by layers of raw, crimson flesh that covered the entire structure. Crimson liquid flowed from the countless gaps and crevices like streams of water, running down the sides of the building and pooling around its base.
Rudra’s eyes widened as he looked closer. Twisted human limbs jutted from the mass: arms, legs, whole bodies half swallowed into the building’s flesh.
It was a hellish sight that could paralyse even the most vicious criminals, and Rudra was but a structural engineer doing an eight-to-nine-hour night shift at TVS Motors just a week ago.
"Is something wrong?" Worried about why the truck stopped, Lingaraj came forward and asked.
Rudra came back to his senses and looked at Lingaraj.
’Should I let them know?’ He asked and, in the end, decided not to.
People in panic were hard to reason with, and he wanted none of the people in his group to do something stupid in haste.
"It’s nothing. We just suspect there are Krasurs ahead." He said.
Lingaraj’s expression turned sombre, but he didn’t look surprised and walked back.
Rudra looked at the building and didn’t know what to do.
Should he continue, or should he go back?
He was afraid of what would happen if he continued, but with the clouds already engulfing half the town, was it too late to go back?
Not to mention, they would have to cross the lake once again, and he didn’t know what was more dangerous: the situation right before him or the hundreds of flying fish that apparently had humans on the list of foods they could eat.
"What do we do, brother?" Prabhu asked in a trembling tone. Rudra knew he had to make a decision, and make it quickly.
After a fierce struggle in his mind, the creases on his forehead disappeared, and his eyes showed a look of determination.
"Take a left. Let’s not get close to that thing." He said.
Prabhu heaved a sigh of relief, and even Laila visibly relaxed. However, thinking about what was at the end of the other street, she worried.
"Rudra, the next road leads to an empty farmland, doesn’t it? Due to the rain, it might have turned into wilderness. Is it really all right?" She asked.
Hearing the question, Rudra could only shake his head in helplessness. "In front of us is that bloody building. Going towards the circle is that bloody tree. Going west are those flesh-eating fish, and south is the cloud curtain."
"While the wilderness is dangerous, it’s definitely not as dangerous as these things."
Laila looked gloomy, but in the end, she picked up the rope and gave a nod.
Rudra understood her intentions and picked up the rope as well.
With Rudra’s order to push, the truck began to move once again.
Pranay was caught off guard when he saw how Rudra and his group travelled using a truck.
He thought it was an amazing method of travel and thought of hollowing out a truck himself. However, before that, he had to get out of this town.
His group were following behind Rudra’s tracks, but abruptly those tracks took a turn to the left.
"That’s odd. Why didn’t they go through the circle?" Ranga wondered aloud, and Pranay was confused as well.
However, it was not for long before he caught sight of the crimson tree that sprouted from the circle of the town.
"Gulp."
He wiped the cold sweat from his forehead and decisively turned left and continued following the tracks of the truck.
He did not go for long before he discovered the bloody building at the end of the street.
A chill spread through his spine and made him feel like he was locked in an ice cellar.
"What the hell is this?" Ranga exclaimed as he thought the same thing.
Pranay even wondered if it was the right decision to leave the supermarket and follow a random stranger.
However, it was too late to regret it now. Besides, he didn’t think Rudra was lying to him.
Seeing the tracks leading to the next street, he made a decision to take a left.
However, unfortunately, the people from his group had not been travelling with him for several kilometres. Unlike Lingaraj and the others, who cooperated with Rudra without saying a word, these people were not nearly as cooperative.
"I knew we shouldn’t have come, but you didn’t listen. Now look," a middle-aged woman was chiding her husband. "He said he’d be taking us out of the town, saying that there was a mysterious monster coming for us in the clouds. I said his words were doubtful. How could there be monsters in the clouds? But you said you believed him and dragged my mother and me with you."
"But now, instead of going towards the circle, we came to the fifth street, and instead of going straight towards the highway, he is asking us to go into the sixth."
She might just be whispering in the middle-aged man’s ear, but Pranay clearly heard it, and it was not only her who began to doubt. Several people felt the same as well, and the voice of disagreement only got louder.
Pranay acted as if he didn’t hear anything, but when they went into the street and saw a dense, savanna-like wilderness at the end of the street, with distinct tracks of a truck forming a path of two lines, people could not hold on anymore and became noisier.
"Look, look, he’s taking us into a freaking jungle."
"He’s strong. He can survive, but can we survive? So many people died just to defeat a group of mutated rats in the warehouse. How many more rats and critters do you think will be in that wasteland?"
"Listen to me carefully, Venkat. My mother and I will not be going there. You better come back with me, or we will be going by ourselves."
Pranay smiled bitterly. However, he still didn’t say anything, but his expression changed when Suresh informed them that he would not be going with them any longer.
Pranay and Ranga looked at Suresh in shock. "You saw that bloody tower, haven’t you? You saw that crimson tree as well, right? Don’t you know why we’re taking a detour?"
Suresh lowered his head. "I did see, and that’s exactly why I’m not willing to go ahead. What if there’s something else, just like that, waiting in the wilderness?"
"We can’t even escape."
"I think we should go back and head westward instead of north."
"Even if those flesh-eating fish are as numerous as Rudra ji said, it couldn’t be any more dangerous than the wilderness, right?"
Pranay was stunned. Suresh did make sense, but there was still the problem of the cloud curtain. Chandapura Lake was nearly a kilometre from here, and with the cloud curtain on their tails, could they really head west? Not to mention, even if they successfully escaped the fish in Chandapura Lake and the cloud curtain, there was still a dense wilderness waiting for them.
He was about to convince Suresh to change his mind, but to his shock, Vikram, one of the four rain survivors, took Suresh’s side.
The entire group was falling apart, and before he could say another word, they turned and walked away.
His hand hung in the air, and the words stuck in his throat like a knot. He came to his senses when Ranga patted his shoulder and let out a deep sigh.
"They made their decision. Let’s go. The silence is creepy," Ranga said and looked towards the wilderness.
"Besides, Hamsaraga Hospital is only a kilometre from here, right? Let’s camp there for a few days and see how the situation changes."
Pranay nodded reluctantly and followed the tracks with only six people.