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Atlas (24 days after)

"Are you hurt?" I asked solemnly. Thunder stopped short and frowned.

"Hurt?" He looked around, locking his eyes on his black-scabbed scars that slashed from belly to tail, then turned to me, shaking his head.

"No...I mean I have injuries, but they aren't bleeding or fresh. I would've noticed by now hence that fact."

"Huh..." I twitched my tiny arms in thought, "Because I caught the scent of T-Rex blood for a moment, I just sworn that it came from you as a guess."

"T-Rex blood?" Thunder's heart spiraled into a jumpstarted race, which clearly pumped itself through his flesh where I could see, "You serious?"

"Yes," I dipped my head with a snort, feeling my tongue dance around between my teeth, "It's a distant scent, but it's fresh. I still think it's you though. I haven't seen a living-" My eyes flashed around, lying low upon the cooling desert horizon, "-Tyrannosaur since impact...beside you of course..."

"You think you could take me to it? To the scent?" Thunder muttered. I turned my head to Feather, feeling a sense of blushing silently as she laid quietly in the shadow of a nearby tree, then looked back to Shadow insecure of myself.

"Okay....but why?"

"Just for curiousity," Thunder hissed between his teeth, with a hint of pride lighting up on his face. I frowned. Why was he so interested in blood all of a sudden? I shrugged, sniffed the air to obtain the fleshy scent, then moved along, dragging my clumsy and tired feet in the dust and ash, while my head stayed low and steady upon the trail.

The T-Rex's quaking footsteps fell behind my own as we walked, and as I sniffed out the blood, I had a gut feeling as if he was hopeful of what he'd find. As if the blood would spell out 'clue' in the burning earth, or 'relief' in another manner. The sky flowed like ocean waves with an invigorating glow of fire, and a face of evil. Darkness spread across the valley floor as we walked, and the herd's scent began to fade farther and farther away, though the blood scent did increase after a while. I weaved past a blackened tree, that apparently to Thunder after his actions threw me off guard, disintegrated when he bumped it with his huge tail.

"Careful," I moaned, focusing on the scent a while longer. It grew ever more stronger than I'd hope, but eventually, we found ourselves within a huge v-shaped valley, surrounded by dead trees, water-less rivers and cracked pieces of the earth. I flicked my head up in a directional movement, then clicked to Thunder, "It's right over there..."

Surely enough, droplets of blood stains still wet and gleaming in the earth, like jewels brushed away by the changing winds, caught Thunder's attention, and the old carnivore cautiously stumbled over to it. I backed away, turning my huge head left to watch him from his hindquarters; sniff out the blood with a harsh inhale.

A frigid unfeeling wind flowed downhill upon my shoulders, then did a figure 8 between my legs before flowing fast and strong past my face and back uphill. But as it passed, I watched it flutter silently through the outer shell of a forgotten corpse, bending it's lifeless limbs low to its brown skin, perhaps enough to snap a few, and threw up tons of crusty dust and debris into the air and over the horizontal split line. It seemed from my eyes that a huge giant's tail brushed up and cleansed the land of its death-filled atmosphere to at least make it a bit lively. The mountains in the distance stood tall, but a bit ramshackled and impotent to this apocalypse. Matter fact, all carnivores were impotent at this point.

Nothing grew.

Nothing breathed.

Nothing truly thrived any longer. But it didn't really matter to me anymore, I was finally getting used to all the death surrounding us.