He shook off his dismay and set himself to the task for which he'd emerged.
The animals had to be alive, yet, or they were doomed. He'd always regretted the haste in their preparations that had precluded preparing survival vaults for the food animals. The best they'd been able to do, before the Day of Devastation, was herd the stupid beasts into caves and pile the entrances with loose rock, hoping the animals would dig themselves out only after the worst fury of the War had passed.... Rik threw off the bitter memory, abruptly, as his ears detected a tiny buzz of sound.
He dropped to the ground and lay still, watching to see what sort of beast would appear. It sounded larger than the animals he remembered. "I must be near a waterhole," he reasoned. "There's a pathway here, made by many animals passing this way...." he mused, studying the narrow, flattened track that he'd spotted in the night-chilled sand.
Then he saw something coming slowly up the trail, a thing much larger than the animals he remembered.
It was a long moment before he realized what it was, and smiled. Then he reached out his hands and had it. It buzzed loudly in his grip until he pounded it to silence on a rock. By the time he'd returned to the pump chamber, he'd managed to prise it open, but its contents—mangled by the smashing upon the rock—were barely fit to eat.
"It's better than I could have hoped," he said to Zina, when they and the others had picked the thing clean. "Life promises to be much more exciting, infinitely more sporting in this new age outside the vaults. With care, we can survive until our engineers rig up some whip-rays and herding-claws again."
"It will be fun," Zina agreed, smiling with grim anticipation. "I enjoy a challenge in the hunt. Who'd have thought the animals would have come so far from the caves!"
It was hours later that the bus company grew worried about their missing vehicle, and started an investigation. But they could find no trace of the bus, anywhere, and it remained a mystery until the day everybody suddenly knew what had happened.
But that was far too late.