Cas awoke with a start and, once again, her hand rose to her chest before she did anything else. Her head drooped with a sigh as pressed her fingers against the precious package taped to her. Then, and only then, did she wince, rolling her shoulder and rubbing it. She looked around the tac-van and saw Henna, a half-smile crossing her lips. She sniffed as she noticed what Henna was doing.

"Where'd you find the camp stove?" In the light of the rechargeable lantern, she accepted the metal bowl, filled with the hot food Henna had found. "And the rations. God, I never thought I'd live to see the day I'd look forward to eating this shit."

She began to shovel the food into her mouth as though afraid that someone would take it from her. Her eyes looked toward the windshield and the darkness outside and then at the racks of weapons, the boxes of ammunition and everything else. Taking inventory, making sure they still had everything. After that, she seemed to relax. If only a little.

"I found an abandoned military camp. They just left everything." Henna poured coffee into a tin cup, placing it beside Cas. She had already eaten. "I managed to siphon gas from the vehicles, found these ration packs, the stove, water. They just left it all."

"Any sign of a fight?" Cas wiped her mouth, noting Henna's shake of the head. "Then something else happened. A recall? I don't know. Everything has become so fucked up. Wait! I can't hear anything. Where are we?"

"In the mountains. I drove off trail for a few miles. I thought the bumping around would wake you, but I guess you were that tired." She leaned back, reaching over to the driver's seat, and pulled a folded map toward her. "Near as I can tell, we're around here. Somewhere. I don't think there's a Screamer for miles."

Cas reached over for the map, laying it to her side as she continued to eat. Putting the mess tin aside, Cas leaned over, her forehead creasing as she traced a finger over the map. She unfolded a little more of the map and continued to trace her finger toward the north before tapping a specific point. She took an absent-minded drink of the coffee, smacking her lips in appreciation.

"Let's assume you're right. That leaves a little over a hundred clicks to the extraction point." Rising to her feet, Cas moved to the front of the van, looking out across the pitch black landscape. "It doesn't matter how far we are from the Screamers. It's not distance, but me staying in one place that's the problem. They'll be coming."

"Yeah, well, if I continued to drive, we'd have crashed. I needed sleep, too." Henna joined Cas, looking up to the sky and the stars that looked so clear and bright, out here in the wilds. "The Screamers, if they are coming, will have to walk. We just need to drive away. You'll be fine. We'll get there."

"They won't walk." Still rubbing her shoulder, Cas returned to the weapons racks, checking them. It seemed like some kind of physical mantra for her, to check and check and check. "They'll run the entire way."

Henna sat down in the driver's seat. Only awake for a few minutes and Cas had returned to her constant need to keep moving. Not only to avoid the Screamers, but in little things. She never stood still unless she was doing something with her hands. Never sat for long. This whole experience had made her twitchy, unable to relax fully for a second.

Their shoulders had touched as they both looked out of the windshield and Henna had felt the flinch. Both hers and Cas'. So much had happened in the years since they had last seen each other, but that physical, visceral attraction remained. If only Cas' personality had matched her physical beauty, but they had both struggled long and hard to reconcile that. Cas knew what she was like and if Henna couldn't accept it, that was Henna's problem. Until Henna had called it a day.

What Henna had with Carla was a far different beast. Deeper. Less physical and more intellectual. More intense and satisfying in so many ways. Henna and Carla connected on a far more stable level, something that could last for their entire lives, had the disease not taken Carla. They certainly had the physical side, but it was more loving, appreciative. With Cas, that physicality was far more primal, furious, fleeting.

Now Henna could feel that primal urge for Cas once again. She despised herself for it. At first, the kiss had meant little. A frisson of excitement amidst a frenetic, life threatening event. Now, here, she could feel that bubble of attraction every time Cas moved. She crossed her legs and thought of Carla. Carla who had become something so very different from the woman she loved.

After running over the Screamer, Henna had thought little about it, at first. It had become nothing but a 'thing' that had acted like some kind of monster. Moving despite injuries that would have ended the life of the person they had once been. Later, as she had driven in silence, her thoughts had turned to Carla. She had become a screaming, demonic beast in the presence of Cas. The first Screamer Henna had seen act like that. Did Henna consider her lover as something other than human, as she had the Screamer she had run down?

"How are you feeling? You've got so many injuries ..." She paused but Cas didn't turn away from checking the weapons. "How long have you been running? How long has this gone on?"

"I don't know. Two weeks, maybe three." Cas rubbed her forehead, trying to recall, then shrugged her shoulders. "Could be only a couple of days. Ha! I just ... I had to ..."

"Weeks? Where did you start? With vehicles, you could cross the States in that time. Hell, with a helicopter ... I know, I know. What if the pilot turned mid-flight? Yeah. Still." With her hands on top of the backrest of the driver's seat, Henna rested her chin on her knuckles. "This should have ended for you a while ago, surely?"

Cas stopped checking the guns, setting a sniper rifle back in the rack, and leaned against the metal frame. Henna could see a tremble to Cas that she hadn't noticed before. She couldn't possibly begin to understand what Cas had gone through to get to this point. Her bruises, cuts, scrapes, bites, broken bones, all told a tale of extreme danger, but it was only a snapshot. Despite all of that Cas, miraculously, kept going.

"I was just working, you know, fixing and maintaining trucks. My job. Then this SpecOps team dropped in from nowhere. I don't even know how they got there, but they were banged up. I mean, these guys were the toughest of the the tough and they looked ... defeated." Cas flopped back down to the floor of the van, hand running through her short hair. "And they weren't alone. That's when I first saw Screamers moving. Hundreds of them. I don't know, thousands, maybe. They just ... the base ... it was overwhelmed."

Henna moved from the driver's seat, coming to sit down in front of Cas. Cas picked up her coffee cup, taking a sip, but it must have grown cold fast. Henna had found enough cups to fill with coffee and she took the pot off the low-burning stove, pouring then handing the hot coffee to Cas. She had a faraway look in her eyes as she cradled the coffee, taking a sip every now and then, and Henna realised that Cas had had that look right from the beginning. Haunted.

"What happened?" She shuffled closer, her hand resting on Cas' knee. "What then?"

"The Screamers tore through the fence like it was nothing and I reckon if the troops hadn't opened fire, the Screamers would have just ran past to get to the Spec-Ops guys. As soon as the first rifle fired, the Screamers must have seen the soldiers as a danger. Something stopping them getting to this." Her hand touched her chest again. "It became a slaughter. I ... I saw people ripped apart. Literally torn limb from limb. And those SpecOps guys? They commandeered a truck and dragged me along. They needed someone to keep that truck going while they dealt with Screamers."

"Even with people like that, you didn't make it back to the extraction point? Like you said, it's only, what did you say, a hundred 'clicks' from here. That's not that far, surely?" Cas looked right at Henna, staring deep into her eyes but showing nothing of the warmth she once held in them. "What? What am I missing?"

"I was in Germany. We made it to the sea, into a sub. Everything was fine until we neared the US. Anyone turned along the way, we locked them up. Until one turned and we didn't realise it fast enough." Cas shuddered as she remembered what had happened. She kept patting her hand against the package, rocking back and forth. "It unlocked the others, Henna. It had intelligence enough to unlock the others! Everybody died but me. The very last SpecOp soldier gave me this and shoved me onto a life raft, with a radio set to a specific frequency."

Henna couldn't remember seeing Cas carrying a radio. She must have lost it along the way, but if a radio could help Cas, could bring in some reinforcements, could take this burden from her, then Henna had exactly the thing Cas needed. She had found it among everything else left at the military camp. A radio and, the last time she had switched it on, it had worked. She dug under a few layers of crap she had found and pulled out the radio, handing it to Cas.

"Call them. Get someone out here to help you." Henna felt excited for the first time in a while, giddy even. Cas switched it on, running through the frequencies. "You won't have to do it alone anymore."

"I can't." She laid down the radio, reached up for a pistol and smashed the butt into the radio, breaking it into pieces. "The last transmission gave me a coded location and told me to destroy the radio. We think they were listening in and ... What's that?"

Switching the pistol around, holding the grip and ratcheting a round into the chamber, Cas reached over to switch off the lantern. She moved closer to the front of the van, tilting her head as she looked through the windshield and Henna clambered up to do the same. Then she saw what Cas had seen. Like fireflies dancing in the air, leaving yellow after-images.

Flashlights. And they were heading their way.