The only benefit of the noise Screamers made was that you could hear them before you saw them. Not as well with the ear protections, but well enough to anticipate them. That made it easier for the soldiers to lead the way back to the highway and, after an exhausting, fast walk, they caught up with the tac-van and Cas, waiting outside it.

As soon as she saw Henna, Cas raced toward her, gripping her so tight, Henna thought her ribs would snap. After a second or so, Cas pulled back, examining Henna's bloodied nose and then Henna's chest, checking for the package. When she couldn't find it, Cas pulled back, looking at Henna and then the sergeant, who shrugged his shoulders. Henna had never felt more embarrassed, and in the worst possible situation, too.

"Give me a second." She turned away from them all, facing the van, and rummaged in her pants, wincing as she pulled out the package and handing it to Cas. She felt like a child caught doing something she shouldn't. "It seemed safer. More secure. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it."

A muffled snicker came from one of the soldiers and Henna didn't dare look up to see which one had laughed. She didn't doubt that all of them found it funny, maybe even the sergeant too and it felt odd hearing laughter. Apart from a couple of strained laughs from Cas, Henna hadn't heard laughter in months. Humour didn't seem to have a place in this world anymore.

"Load up. Refill your mags. We need to be down this road five minutes ago." The sergeant passed by Henna, but he held his face as straight as she would expect from such a man. He jumped into the back of the van.

The other soldiers joined him, leaving Cas and Henna to clamber into the front seats. They had all heard it, the sound of Screamers approaching, the amount of time it took for them to sense the package looked as though it were reducing every minute. At first, it had taken hours for the Screamers to start chasing the package. Now only minutes had to pass for Screamers to start moving.

As soon as everyone sat in the van, Cas set off at a pace, zig-zagging through the abandoned cars on the highway. Cas concentrated on the road ahead, but Henna could sense a tension between them. After a few seconds, she switched the channel on the radio, indicating to Cas the number with her fingers and waited for Cas to switch, too.

"What's wrong? Are we okay with these guys? Is the package safe?" She leaned forward, trying to catch Cas' eye. "There's something wrong. Just say it."

"I should never have given you the package. It's my responsibility, not yours." Cas jinked the wheel to avoid a rushing Screamer. It bounced against the side of the van, flying back the way it came. "If something had happened to you. If you'd ... if ..."

"No. Don't do that. We did what we had to. We need this van and you were the only one that could fix it. I had to take the package." She looked out of the windshield, looking at the shadow of the mountains against the night sky. "You weren't to know so many Screamers would come. How could you? We haven't seen that many moving in total, let alone in one group."

The storm had passed, moving away toward those mountains that they looked as though they were headed to. Henna looked behind at the other soldiers as they inspected the weapons in the racks and refilled their magazines from the boxes she and Cas had borrowed from the police precinct. That seemed so long ago, now. She found it hard to believe it was only just over a day gone.

The sergeant gave her a nod as he worked and Henna had to smile. Apart from Cas, he was the first person even adjacent to authority she had seen since the beginning. She didn't even know if anyone were still in charge, or whether these soldiers simply continued in their duties through sheer bloody mindedness. Had the President survived? The Joint Chiefs? Congress? She couldn't see all of them being spared from the seeming random spread of the screaming disease, but who was left? Who gave the orders now?

"That was a pretty odd place to hide the package." Of course Cas brought it up. "But very you. Of course, I could never hide it down there. Never anything to hold it there."

She turned from watching the road ahead and winked. Henna knew very well what she meant and felt surprised the army allowed soldiers to go without the requisite undergarments. Then again, Cas was never one to follow rules, which made it all the more surprising she had lasted so long in the army. Henna had never understood what had drawn Cas to joining up, especially as, when Cas did sign up, "Don't ask, don't tell" was still fully in force.

Henna would have found that far too restricting. A bit like their relationship. Regardless, it seemed the army meant a great deal to Cas. Even now, with the arrival of the other soldiers, Cas' demeanour had changed. She seemed less dour. More hopeful, perhaps? Henna couldn't put a finger on it more than a boost of confidence, as though three extra soldiers had brought hope to their task.

"You're happy to be back around your own kind, aren't you?" She tilted her head toward the back of the van. "If I'm honest, I'm glad to see them too."

"It's not something that can be explained to a civilian. It's like, no matter which service, you know you can rely on them to watch your back because they know what you know. They understand. Even the Air Force, I suppose." She laughed at a joke Henna couldn't understand. "Yeah, I'm glad they're here. Glad they found you in time. I just hope it's enough to get us to that extraction point."

"Ain't no extraction point. Sorry, ladies, for listening in, but we need communications open at all times." The sergeant leaned over the seat, staring through the windshield. He pointed a gloved hand toward an upcoming sign. "Take the left. See, there ain't nowhere to extract to. It's all gone. Everything. Eggheads reckon we got one last chance and that last chance just happens to be the thing you hid so damned fucking well, ma'am."

"But what is it?" Henna knew that ever-present call of 'classified' was about to be used. That or 'need to know'. Still, it would be nice to know exactly what they'd been carrying. "What can that thing do?"

"Haven't got the first god-damned clue." The sergeant crouched, steadying himself. "All I know is, I got my orders and fuck me if it's the only real thing I got left. There's a whole bunch of brains back at base just hankering to get a hold of that thing you're carrying."

That told Henna what she had feared. Everything gone. What that meant in reality, she couldn't be certain, but with the lack of people she had seen, it made some kind of sense. There were more Screamers now than uninfected people. The sergeant only had his orders to cling to. Henna only had her need to help find a cure for the disease so that she could get back to Carla. Cas was one thing, dear to her, despite the way their relationship had ended, but Henna's need for Carla was something else. Deeper.

"When you say everything is gone, what do you mean?" Cas turned her head to scowl at the sergeant but turned back as the sergeant's finger pointed out of the window. "I haven't been in contact with anyone since I got back to the US. What's happened out there?"

"Shit. What hasn't happened?" He adjusted his helmet and Henna could see lines etched into his face, bags under his eyes. He looked beat. How he kept going, as Cas had kept going, Henna couldn't imagine. "Government's gone. Most turned, rest gone. Just up and left. The UK still seems to have some people in control, but for how long, I don't know. Russia, we haven't heard from since they had multiple meltdowns. Japan cut off communication right at the beginning. The human race has become an endangered species, folks. Maybe we'll all be gone afore long."

Cas turned off the road, passing a dirty sign that Henna couldn't read, even as the headlights raked across it. Only one word caught in her mind, 'Facility', but that told her nothing. What they had turned on to was little more than a dirt track, even worse than the one the Screamers had forced Henna off, bumps and dips sending everyone bouncing within the van.

Trees soon began to close in on both sides, hiding the landscape around them as the track followed a lazy, winding path that edged higher and higher as they moved from foothills into the mountains themselves. Everyone had fallen quiet after the sergeant had informed them of events, but not everything he knew, Henna felt certain about that. Maybe he thought the whole truth too gruesome to impart? Or, maybe he simply didn't care anymore.

An endangered species, he had called them. A population circling eight billion and they had come to the edge of extinction, yet all the people were still there. They still lived in some bizarre parody of life, screaming against the world. Henna couldn't believe that that was it for mankind. There had to be more. It could not end like this. Not to the sounds of screams.

Up ahead, she saw a metal fence and a checkpoint, but something was wrong. Cas slowed down, seeing what Henna had seen, and the sergeant returned to his feet, leaning over the seats, close to the windshield. No-one stood waiting at the checkpoint. No patrols circled the perimeter. Beyond the fencing, rising up like some technological mushroom, Henna saw a radio dish, pointing skyward, like a giant version of the Screamers, but her eyes were drawn to the compound just beyond the fencing.

Bodies littered the ground. Hundreds of them, and not a living soul moved.