August’s head had been on a swivel since leaving the store. He left the push-carriage and fishing gear behind without a thought and wandered the streets with Rosek, as silent as possible on their way to the rendezvous point.

He couldn’t help but wonder if the other squad mates had encountered the same creatures they had. The idea of reaching the rendezvous point just to find it empty sent a shiver through the rookie. But the fear was irrational. The only reason the situation in the store had been so bad was that Rosek had been without armor. The creature that had straddled and bit him had been unable to cause any damage, and the rest of the crew would have the same armor he did. They’d be safe, despite how bone-chilling the monsters were.

Slow and steady footfalls sounded a few yards behind him. He glanced back frequently. The mech suit maintained pace, but the face exposed by the lifted visor was half-asleep and battered. Her eyes were starting to swell, and her bottom lip was busted. A trickle of blood ran down her chin over an older smear. She’d given up on wiping it away.

Rosek’s left shoulder had been dislocated by a heavy punch. He’d had to pop it back in before helping her into the mech suit. She hadn’t even screamed, but he still cringed at the thought of the popping sound.

They walked along the ruined streets, both visors up, yet they hadn’t shared a single word since leaving the store. August decided to break the silence. “What did you see in the store?”

She hesitated. “What do you mean? You know exactly what I saw. You saw them too!”

“No,” August said. “You said I’d get a kick out of it. Something you found on the shelves.”

“Oh,” her voice softened.

He looked back and smiled. She returned the gesture, but the corner of her lip fell neutral just as quick as it had risen. Her wounds seemed to creak and stretch from the slightest movement. “It was a steering wheel cover made specifically for the Montag Phoenix. That’s all.”

August brought his gaze back forward and thought about it for a moment. It was clear why that one item being available on an empty shelf was funny, but what surprised August was that Rosek could find the humor in it. He’d assumed the colonel had viewed him as an unruly child, a responsibility more than a squadmate. The fact that she was willing to joke about their blunder brought a ray of light to his cloudy mood. He laughed. He tried to hold it back at first, but the emotions of surviving the zombie attack—that’s right. They were zombies, weren’t they?—along with the relief that Rosek wasn’t as angry as he’d thought created the perfect storm for a deluge of uncontrollable laughter.

Rosek joined in, furthering his surprise. Their near-hysterical cries carried up along the building walls. Hers was a beautiful sound. After days of hearing nothing but dolo, zombie growls, arguing amongst the squad, and crash-landing crafts, it was like a drink of water to his parched ears.

“We should probably try to stay quiet,” Rosek said, interrupted by occasional giggles. Her laughter stopped. “Who knows how many more of those things there are.”

He joined her in silence. “You’re right. Might as well close our visors, then. Getting pretty cold.” The sun had slid down behind the wall of buildings.

“You go ahead,” Rosek said, “but I’m still full of…” she hesitated, “guts. I think I’m gonna let this suit air out.”

“Good call.” His stomach churned.

Voices drifted down on a light breeze. August tensed. They were the same low moans as the zombies. He glanced back at Rosek. Her eyes lit up despite the pain it appeared to cause, and she increased her pace. He was going to question her when the voices came again, familiar this time. It was general Wolf.

“We made it,” Rosek said.

They hurried along a gentle declining street, scabbed with dirt and jagged chunks of asphalt, and August sighed in relief when they saw the blue glow spilling from the mouth of an underground parking lot—the rendezvous point.

Inside, Wolf and Sterling were arguing about how long they should stay in the city. The exterminator sucked at a cigarette between retorts. Slupman stared at his twiddling thumbs with nervous ticks in his face, and Dalton West leaned against a fat concrete pillar, dozing. They were greeted by immediate warmth as the firebox sat in the middle of the place, lidless, its blue light free to shine and radiate.

August’s heart started. Belmont wasn’t there. His mind formed an image of zombies ripping her to shreds. He pushed it away as best he could. He tried to remember back to that morning in the church when the general had made the pairings. August had gone with Rosek, the general had paired with Sterling, and Dalton West went solo as he preferred. Slupman. Belmont was with Slupman. The engineer had returned alone. Why did he look so nervous?

He shook his head and commanded himself to relax. Slupman didn’t look any more nervous than he usually did. He definitely didn’t have the horrified look of a man who’d lost his partner to an animated corpse. And there was the blue light. The general would never risk the light if he thought there might be something menacing out there in the streets. He and Rosek must’ve been the only ones to encounter those things.

Wolf spotted them and waved. The rest of the squad turned to look at them and mumbled greetings before returning to their previous state. The general, however, came up the lot’s declining entryway to meet them. “Empty-handed like the rest of us, I see…” His voice trailed off once he looked at Rosek. “What the Hel happened to you, Colonel?”

The suit clicked and whirred, and Rosek spilled out. She’d overestimated her own strength. The general caught her and helped straighten her out. Her puffy eyes rolled in her head for a moment as if she were getting a nasty head rush. The rest of the squad either gasped or watched with worried expressions. They approached.

General Wolf glared at August, wordlessly demanding an explanation. The rookie didn’t want to tell the truth. He was worried about what Sterling would say at the mention of zombies. They’d ridicule him or accuse him of lying. The inexperienced rookie who’d done nothing but cause trouble on the mission is now seeing things, they’d think.

He cleared his throat, took a glance at the feeble Rosek, and recited their tale. He began with entering the store, skipped to the part where he’d heard a moan. He omitted the part where he’d thought his name had been spoken. Then he told of seeing the man in the aisle and Rosek calling out, attracting the creature’s ire. He recounted their fight as best as memory allowed and went silent just before the part where Colonel Hilde Rosek had wept in his arms.

“What the fuck?” Sterling’s voice was barely more than a whisper and was the only sound for what felt like hours.

The general strode away and ripped something from his belt. He assembled something quickly in his hands and slammed a lid over the heater’s blue bulb.

“Where’s Belmont?” August asked.

The General looked at him as if he’d just delivered news of Belmont’s death. Wolf glared at Slupman. The engineer put his hands up in surrender. “She sent me here once the sun started going down,” Vern Slupman said. “Said she wanted to look for a few more things.”

“Did anyone find anything useful?” Rosek asked. Her voice was weak, but she tried to cover it.

Wolf escorted her to the firebox and eased her down to the pavement. August retrieved her foil blanket from the mech suit. A nasty stench that brought him back to the dark store wafted from the open vehicle. He draped her, and she nodded in thanks to the both of them.

“We found nothing,” Sterling spoke for the whole squad.

“Same,” August said. “I found a fishing pole but left it behind after all Hel broke loose.” He looked at Slupman. “You said Belmont wanted to look for a few more things. Does that mean she found something?”

Slupman shook his head, then shrugged. “I don’t know. She kept plucking weeds that were growing out of holes in the street or along building walls. I didn’t question it. Just Belmont being Belmont, I thought.”

“We should go out and look for her,” Sterling said.

Wolf lowered his eyes. “No. Not until morning. We can’t risk going out there with those things, and I don’t want to leave this place empty in the event that she returns. I’m not risking sending any one of you because then we might just end up with two soldiers lost. We sleep through the night, hope and pray that she turns up, and if not, we go out looking for her in the morning. The full group.”

Sterling snarled at that but nodded and turned away.

“That being said,” Wolf put a hand on August’s shoulder, “we should see to Rosek’s wounds as best we can. I’m sure we can at least manage to patch her up without Belmont.”

The sound of her popping shoulder rang in his mind. He cringed. “Of course, General.”

Rosek winced about a hundred times during the process. August felt more like a butcher than a medic. Wolf talked him through it, and with the medkit from the general’s belt, the rookie stitched the wound on Rosek’s lip. First, he’d scrubbed it with a piece of cotton dipped in Slupman’s Sanitary Alcohol. She’d groaned at that. He’d apologized a thousand times but got nothing in return—nothing but groans.

He pushed the sanitized needle through the skin just beneath her lip, then through the little flap that hung out of place. Her eyes looked as far to the side as they could, avoiding his. Was he angering her? He didn’t think he was doing that bad of a job. He was going to say something, apologize again maybe, but thought better of it and just finished the job with care.

Colonel Luna Belmont descended the entryway just after dark. She carried an armful of greens and a broad smile that stood out brilliantly on her dark face. August felt a weight of tension leave his shoulders at the sight of her. Wolf approached her. “What’s that in your arms, Colonel? More forbidden medication?” A deep cough broke out from him and echoed through the vast abyssal darkness of the lot.

Belmont’s smile was unaffected. She waited for his coughing fit to end before speaking. “It’s just food, General. Is that allowed? Or do we have to starve now that we’re all out of those Slupman gel-pack disasters?”

Wolf just smirked and tapped the colonel on the shoulder. “It’s good to see you. We were getting worried there.”

“Worried? Why?” Belmont looked around, concern heavy on her brow.

“Something happened out in the city.”

She spotted Rosek, looking small and compact, wrapped in her foil blanket. The medic could only see the back of Rosek’s head, but somehow she knew the mech-pilot was wounded. She hurried over, dropped her bundle beside the firebox. August recognized some of the veggies—Dandelions, skinny radish, chamomile, and blackberries—the rest was a mixed salad of greens he couldn’t identify, but they made his mouth water nonetheless.

“What happened?” Belmont inspected August’s shabby patchwork with a grimace. She rubbed a caring thumb over the swollen mounds around Rosek’s hidden eyes. August retold his story while Belmont whipped a white cloth from somewhere in her armor like a magician and dabbed at splotches of dried blood August had left behind. “You alright, honey?” She spoke to Rosek softly once August had stopped talking. Rosek nodded slowly. Her bottom lip trembled. August couldn’t stand to look at it, ruined by the zombie’s strikes and his amateur stitches. “What about you?” Belmont asked him without so much as a glance.

“I’m fine,” August said.

Vern Slupman moved back and forth from the vicinity of the firebox and the lot’s entrance, his head on a swivel anytime he approached the dark city street. Talk of zombies must’ve gotten him on edge. August didn’t blame him. The truth was, as long as they were armored, the zombies shouldn’t pose any trouble. Rosek had just been caught in an unfortunate state. But that didn’t change the fact that human corpses were walking around, almost sentient. It wasn’t a fear of pain or dying that crawled over the squad, but a disturbing sense of something unnatural, something that should’ve been escapable by waking in a sweaty jolt.

“Alright,” General Wolf said after a bout of silent contemplation. “Looks like we aren’t safe anywhere outside the dome. I thought the city was free of dolo. I guess I was right, but I was wrong to assume it was free of danger altogether. We’ll leave early in the morning—just before dawn.” He looked at Sterling. “And I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

The exterminator raised his chin slightly, unbothered by the general’s words. He’d been leaning against a pillar like West, watching Belmont and Rosek, no doubt wondering about the zombies and what they looked like. Gilzak horror flicks told many zombie stories. In some, they lurched and swayed slowly, leaving the hero ample time to run off or prepare a weapon. In others, the zombies raced and pounced at their prey, giving the hero no time to even think. August thought back to the monsters in the store. They’d been somewhere in the middle and had moved like normal living humans on their daily walk to work. Not brain-dead slow, but not heart-pulsing fast either.

“I was hoping we could all get a good night’s sleep tonight,” Wolf continued. “I thought we might be able to forgo keeping watch, but oh well. That’s how it is out here, I suppose.”

“I’ll keep first watch, General,” Slupman volunteered as he came down the entryway.

Wolf nodded. “You don’t look like you could get any sleep if you tried, Colonel.”

Slupman let a joyless laugh slip from his nose. “No. You’re probably right. I just can’t believe it. I mean… zombies?”

“I know, Colonel,” Wolf said with a hand up. “I know.” He turned away from the engineer and moved to the firebox. He looked in on the women, then spoke out loud enough for all to hear. “Find a spot and get some sleep, soldiers. We’re leaving this Hel-hole early, and I don’t think we’ll be stopping for a while.”

Sterling and West lay near their respective pillars. August liked the idea of having one at his back, but the heat of the firebox was too alluring. Belmont helped Rosek to a laying position directly before the heater, then moved away to her own pillar after collecting her harvest. Wolf chose a spot beside a fat column closer to the entryway. August lay a few yards from the firebox on the opposite side of Rosek. He would have preferred to be a bit closer to the warmth, but he didn’t want to bother Rosek with his presence. Besides, the firebox had done its job. The area was quite warm.

Slupman held a pistol ready in one hand while the other hung limp in the sling. He left the squad and stationed himself in the threshold of the lot, and stood watch. August watched the engineer for a moment. He’d holstered the pistol and started writing in his journal under the scant light of the moon. August’s eyes shifted to Rosek on their own accord. He observed her slow breathing and was glad to see she’d been able to find sleep so quickly. He didn’t think either of them would have any nightmares. Night terrors couldn’t contend with what they’d seen. His vision drifted, and he joined her in slumber.

He awoke with a jolt. He hadn’t had any nightmare, but a cold sense of dread crept through him nonetheless. How long had he slept? He looked up the inclining entryway and out toward the city. It was still dark. Not even close to dawn.

Slupman wasn’t there. He must’ve taken a little stroll to keep his legs warm, or maybe he’d seen something. August wanted to get up and check on the engineer, maybe offer to take over watch, but something comforting tugged at him and anchored him to his spot on the concrete floor.

Rosek slept peacefully right there beside him. She lay less than a foot away from him, wrapped in her foil blanket, her back toward him, her battered face pointed at the firebox. August smiled. She wasn’t angry after all. He drifted back to sleep.