Mark robber's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

Mark crouched on the flat grey ground and forced his breathing slow. Running blind had almost cost him everything. If he moved again, he had to move smart. He needed to know where the things behind him had already been, so he could go anywhere else. He found their trail by accident. A long smear of dried yellow crust ran along the ground, pressed with claw marks and a deep, dragging groove. It looked like armored tracks, curved and heavy, scraped into the dust by something built low and wide. The crust glowed faintly. Wherever it led, they had been. Mark turned his back on it and picked the opposite way. He still felt exposed. So he doubled back to the edge of the corruption and pulled loose a matted hunk of yellow fur from a dead patch of growth — sticky, bright, awful. He smeared it across his jacket and hood. If their eyes hunted for grey movement, he would be the wrong color. If they hunted for yellow, he would be one of the herd. It was disgusting. It was also quiet work. Moving low, he spotted it in the distance: a huge pale structure rising from the flatness, lit by a soft blue glow that the yellow seemed to bend away from. Mark pressed himself against its cold stone wall and finally exhaled. He did not know what the building was. But the hunters were behind him, their path mapped in his head, and for the first time in three days he had chosen a direction instead of fleeing one.