Harkes doesn't say anything. He just stares at her. It takes Wren a moment to realize he's speechless.

"Harkes." She snaps her fingers. Nothing. He's freezing up like it's his wedding day. "Harkes."

Her voice has a new timbre to it. A lung-rattling growl that should come from a tiger, not a person. They both jump. It echoes around the room. Alien. She nearly doesn't recognize it as part of her voice. But it does the trick. Harkes stops making fish eyes at her.

"Yes." He swallows audibly. "Yes, ma'am."

"You bit?"

He shakes his head.

"Good. Give me a sitrep."

"We're fucked."

She glances at the Bowler. "Details, corporal."

"Came back for KAR." He sucks in a raspy breath. "Then that fuck herded all these fledgelings into us."

The Kill and Retrieve order puts something to rest inside Wren. Vampires take great delight in torturing anyone who hunts them. KARs are just as much for morale as they are for the integrity of operations. You turn, you burn. It's the vow they make to each other.

"Sorry." Harkes watches her closely. "We didn't catch you in time."

She looks towards the far side of the room. It sounds cavernous, the air smells of wet stone. This place isn't man-made. The implications are endless, but a treacherous squeeze in her throat still commandeers most of her attention. Harkes smells like a $100 steak, but a wave of tenderness still washes over her.

"Save it for my funeral," she says gruffly. "Now let me look at you."

He coughs. "Yes, ma'am."

Wren's eyes adjust to the gloom well enough to give Harkes a good once-over. The way he guards his ribs tells her they're at least bruised. She gently slips her hand under his stab vest. No distention or bulging around his abdomen. One hit from a centennial vampire can break bones, rupture organs, and spread disease. It's happened before. She pulls her hand away and tightens up his vest. He sucks in a sharp breath, but doesn't make any other sound. His right leg is bent at an odd angle. A soaked black patch on his calf has a telltale peak.

"Is it bad?" Harkes asks in a small voice.

She squares her jaw. "Your mic working?"

He groans. "Smashed my radio pack."

It only occurs to Wren to look at her own. It's gone. Of course it's gone.

The Bowler remains still so Wren fishes out her Individual First Aid Kit. The IFAK shows no signs of tearing or contamination. She trades her old gloves for a sterile nitrile pair, carefully pulls his pant leg out of his boot, and rolls it up over the wound. He makes a strangled noise.

Bone juts out of his skin. Bloodied and ivory, pale even in this light. An open fracture. The poor bastard. Wren's mouth suddenly waters. This makes her hungry. Like a whiff of fried food after a long shift. It's the exact same feeling. And it's revolting. But the craving to dig in doesn't go away. It just mixes with the urge to vomit. She can see herself as any other fledgeling: biting down, throwing up, and then eating it all over again like a dog. Tearing into her team after leading them into a fucking slaughterhouse.

It takes a moment to lock that down. Refocus.

Wren inhales shakily and hopes Harkes doesn't hear it. She glances at the Bowler again, keeps an ear out for anomalous sounds, and then concentrates on what's in front of her. Blood seeps up from the around the bone. Not immediately fatal, but blood loss isn't their only enemy, either. She rips open antimicrobial swabs and cleans the wound as best she can. It's only buying time. The chance of an infection is high. Cruoris isn't airborne, but vampires always try to spread it with dirty weapons, and she can smell the blood in the room. If by some miracle the cruoris virus doesn't gain a foothold, there's plenty of other pathogens to take its place. She applies the Israeli pressure dressing, careful not to jostle the bone, and pulls the pressure bar as hard as she dares. Harkes grabs the back of her stab vest instinctively. His breaths escape in feeble little puffs.

"Quit being a bitch," she mutters. "If Mila can give birth to your nine-pound elephant child without an epidural, you can handle a bandaid."

One of those feeble little puffs sounds like a laugh.

Once the dressing is wrapped and hooked, Wren applies the splint roll, and ties it all off with a triangle bandage. There's only one thing left to do: postexposure vaccine. The autoinjectors in her kit are still intact. She stares at the dose of CruVax and wonders if it can still help her. It's a weak thought and she pushes it aside. These needles carry cruoris antigens. It's only half the treatment. Harkes will need human cruoris immune globulin, but her kit doesn't have an IV. If he doesn't get HCIG within a few hours, he's dead. Or worse, he's not. She jams the needle into his thigh and it beeps to confirm the dose is administered.

Wren packs everything up before looking at Harkes. "Still here?"

He nods, but his eyes look a little glassy.

"I'm going to lift you up."

"'S mam."

She slides her hands under his thighs and back, scoops him up, and makes sure his injured side is snug against her. Harkes is taller than her, but he feels as light and fragile as a newborn bird. He cries out in pain, then he bites down hard on it. Shivers wrack his body. His voice echoes around them and the answering silence is deafening.

Nothing stirs. The Bowler lays inert where Wren dropped him. He's at least a century old, old enough to achieve biological immortality, but even mature vampires can't shrug off massive blood loss and a C-spine injury. Still, she gives him a wide berth as she heads towards a faint smell of fresher air.

The room looks to be some sort of cave system. Now that everything's quiet, Wren hears faint drips of water. She can smell water, too. At least, she thinks she can. It's like someone's dialling up the volume of the entire planet. Every smell, every sound, is intensely complex. And it's not stopping. She can feel Harkes' heartbeat throbbing against her forearms. His breath carries a tang of coffee. Shitty overprocessed coffee with a metallic aftertaste. And an underlying flavour somewhere between pork and beef. A relentless umami note that stirs up the worst protein craving she's had in her life. She grimaces and her tongue presses up against the back of her teeth. It sets off an itchy pain in her gums. Her teeth are coming loose.

Wren focuses on her breathing and walks as quickly and quietly as possible. The smell of fresh air slowly strengthens. The cavern narrows until they're in some sort of tunnel. Smooth, water-carved rock steadily turns rougher and narrower. Great gouges line the walls.

"Sergeant," Harkes whispers.

She pauses and he tentatively reaches out and drags his hand across the nearest gouge. It's a near perfect fit.

"G.O.!"

Gunfire echoes down the hallway. Yelling. Blackness....

They look at each other. The memory ghosts between them. Wren pushes forward, but the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. This tunnel is at least six feet high and four feet wide. It's not the work of an ordinary vampire, not even a centennial like the Bowler. This is something else.

Wren clutches Harkes close until he gasps in pain. She grunts an apology and speeds up her pace. The tunnel continues to slant upward at an increasingly steep angle. The air changes, too. It's fresher, but increasingly layered. She smells something very sharp. Ammonia, maybe. Blood. Cordite. Metal. Plastic. Something strangely chalky, but not like mould. An absolute kaleidoscope of metallic fragrances like lavender and coconut. Artificial scents? It's all so strong, it makes her dizzy. She breathes through her mouth, but ends up tasting half of it, too.

The obnoxious smells only become stronger. Soon a light bounces off the tunnel walls. Harkes shifts in her arms and, despite the spasm of pain that rips through his body, he unholsters his sidearm. She hugs one side of the wall and angles them both so they can see anything before it sees them. Sounds start to bounce off the walls. Scuffling, metal clicks, electric hums and crackles. As they get closer, she hears whispers, feels a collective but sternly suppressed fear. A shared discipline in the face of an enemy that can enslave them with a single scratch.

Their backup.

No. She forces herself to pause and correct that thought.

Harkes' backup.

She looks down at him. He stares at her with those big green eyes. They're glassy again, but not from pain. Not from physical pain, anyway. Her throat clutches tightly in response. The grief takes her by surprise. There's so much sensory input, so much noise in her brain, that it's easy to avoid what she's about to do.

They've served together in this mess for eight years. Harkes, Montana, Tomlinson, Acosta, Moore, Ashwood.... Each one lifelong military, handpicked from different branches to act as a stopgap against the world's most dangerous pandemic. Each one skilled, decorated, and an honour to fight beside. But by Christ, she'll never say so. She'd rather blow a cactus than give her arrogant six-foot brats any credit.

Leading them is 2% soldiering and 98% parenting.

Was.

Leading them was 2% soldiering and 98% parenting.

She repeats the thought in past tense so it will sound true, but it doesn't. That awful squeeze in her throat won't disappear. It pisses her off. Leadership is not her role now. Her role is to get Harkes to safety and then die without incurring anymore casualties. That's how this needs to end. That's how she does right by her team.

Because at least one of them is dead. And that's on her. And she's too much of a coward to ask Harkes about it because he's looking up at her like a kid being dropped off for his first day of school.

"Eyes front," she says quietly. "You know what's about to happen."

He turns away. "Yes, ma'am."

A roughly oval opening peeks above the tunnel floor like a sunrise. Wren takes a step forward, then another. Everything feels slower and heavier. Her feet might as well be mired in concrete. But she keeps pushing forward. She sees sandbags, UV lights, even a .30 cal. Constellations of gun barrels point at her. At least 10 helmets peek up from behind the barricades. Behind them, the vaguely familiar hallway of a hospital. The main power is out.

No one's saying anything. No one's ordering her to stop. No one's pulling the trigger.

Wren steps carefully around broken glass and spent casings. None of the rifles track her movement. The helmets don't move. Her nose stings with the onslaught of different smells. It's enough to make her stumble. She steps around one of the barricades and....

They're dead. They're all dead.