Calloused hands massage one another. They ache in the knuckles from the settling pressure of coming rain. On Doyle's fingers, he can still smell the residue from the rifles he cleaned earlier. A smell, no amount of scrubbing could erase.

Unlike the civilians of this district, he had a job that meant life or death for himself and the living souls that resided here. His hands needed to be as quick as his eyes at all times, no matter how old he was getting and how harsh his arthritis set in.

Three hundred and eighty-five days passed behind the barbed wire, with no promise to ever return home.

No longer did there exist a printed calendar to cover the year, the months, the days. These were the years of starvation, disease, and endless bloodshed.

Nothing belonged to him here. Nothing counted in the tally of empty days that passed.

The sniper rifle at his side, the scope gave him an extended sight to do the one thing in this life he'd ever been good at—to kill.

His existence counts in notable events since the carrion virus took an unknown patient zero, then spread across countries from new host to new host.

First: the emergency news broadcast came, where he got the call for him to return to his duty. Second: searching for her. Third: when the country divided, even within states, and drew territory lines. Fourth: Never finding her. Fifth: when the first district, then the next, fell victim to the infected. Sixth: when the districts began turning on one another. And now, there was the seventh event in James Doyle's life. This day. The day they found another survivor.

She'd been out there, after all this time, on her own.

Rumors abound, Doyle listens to the chatter over the radios. From the rooftop of his designated building, he watches the boxy military truck roll through the emptied streets.

He lifts his rifle, his scope lining the cross-hair over the vehicle. Aiming it, he tries to spy on the newcomer that kept the district buzzing with new life.

Hope, awe, excitement—each civilian face he scans beams a rediscovered light. His scope travels over the buildings, finding hope that not all is lost out there beyond the district fences.

Nothing this exciting happened these days in District 1, dissociated from the rest of the surviving world, the boredom could onset madness. Ironic, really, with the dead abound beyond the wires of their home, starving to rip them all apart.

"Can you see her?" One of the soldiers asked from the radio device planted in his ear.

"No. You?" Doyle replies, his cross trailing the boxy vehicle till it passed out of sight behind another stretch of tall buildings.

"How did she make it out there?" Another soldier's voice chimes in over the frequency.

Static—it's the soundtrack to their thoughts. Doyle's own unspoken cage rattles among the men and women from all Army units and ranks. Never again could they take leave, could they retire. Forever indebted to his service, it gave Doyle purpose. In this purpose, however, it brought the constant waking nightmares triggered by the slightest of things.

The blowing of dust on the breeze would do it. Or, a tantrum scream from a child, or even the sight of stretching fire—whatever time his subconscious thought it best to rehash his troubled past reminded him at all times that he'd never escape all he'd seen and done.

Though they can't see him at his post, Doyle shrugs to the last rhetorical question voiced by another soldier.

Across the way, he watches the figures in matching camouflage on each of their rooftops. It's a familiar sight, one that should by every right trigger him too, but it offers him nothing but comfort. It's in seeing their distant figures that he knows he's not entirely alone.

Their rifles aimed; they try to get the view of the survivor hidden from bare sight.

Doyle replies finally, "I'm sure she's not the only one out there. Who knows? Maybe she wasn't even alone...not till recently, anyway..."

He thinks back, knowing if it wasn't for his brothers in uniform on those not-so-distant posts, that he might be in that new survivor's place below. Groups, people in general, outside of his uniform, didn't blend well here, not in only district life, but in this time of horror.

Before the Carrion times, civilians didn't know death as they did. In this new world, those who had always walked in nightmares thrived. Civilians, especially Americans of the first-world, hadn't lived through current wars. Nor did they wear the scars in their minds both day and night.

In the wake of the plague, he found what he thrived in, what he'd been born to do. His true calling—while most find nothing but loss. Doyle, however, lost everything long before this. He'd lost his home. He'd lost his son. He'd lost her.

***

Bloodshot, tired brown eyes stare out the window at District 1.

The only district Sophie ever dared to surrender herself.

In a trail of tears behind her, everything else she cared for wet the earth. They'd made it so long out there on their own. They'd scavenged and crawled through these endless days to find life when no one else did out there.

As she sat now, she's skin and bones. She's cleaned, clothed, fed, and probed in every inch of her body. They found no bites, and she didn't even bear surface scars from a life that should've riddled her with them. She's void of disease too, but she's well acquainted with feeling so violated.

She had something they all wanted—what everyone wanted. Something that her fallen friends had too. In hiding, those who would hurt them couldn't find them out there in the wild. They couldn't drain them dry, experiment on them, cut into them or take their lives for the sake of science—for the sake of a cure.

Her kind avoided districts, avoided other survivors, because of these violations of the living. Sophie didn't trust these strangers, but she had to surrender to district hands to save her life. Still, she's formed knots from the tormenting memories, all rehashed from her upbringing. She recalls the hands covered in latex that puddled up in her shade of crimson. The linoleum stench still stung in her nostrils, the smell of antiseptic and the imprinted trauma of an underground world.

It all drove her to nothing but the void, a perpetual silence formed in her rescue here at District 1.

Assimilate into a district of regular survivors? Sophie didn't think she'd be capable. She wanted peace, solitude, to be alone. Now, more than ever, all she had was herself. It all went full circle, round and round, back to the loneliness that she thrived in. At least on her own, she was safe from being something other than an object.

A cold set in her bones, and piques of goosebumps rose when the military truck bucked into an awkward stop.

They were taking her to her new little living quarters. What used to be apartment barracks for soldiers in this fort, she's told, is now home to civilians and military alike. It's absurd and laughable should she have been a person to laugh in such a way again. It was an illusion of luxury, with nothing but a view, she's sure, of all the dead bodies puckered into the barbed wire fences around the district.

Soon, this district would have the extensive results of her blood work. They'd know what she was, and she'd no longer have the freedom she desperately wanted. The guards—these soldiers of nothing more than babysitters now—would be up her ass till they got those results. They'd harass her, imprison her—as her obsessive father had long ago.

Her eyes feel hot, her face scorches. She'd cried. She'd cried harder than she could remember when she found the last of her people dead.

Ripped apart by the infected, their weaker fences crumbled under the horde that drew in from the noise they'd been too comfortable with making. They'd celebrated—Sophie's birthday no less—and all but Sophie paid the ultimate price.

The bites—one, maybe two or three, did nothing to them over the years—but no one was invincible to hungry zombie teeth. They'd been untouchable for a time, but they became too comfortable, cocky even. They forgot that the world wasn't safe anymore for laughter and dancing.

Finding a moment to herself in the bathroom, she sat on the closed lid of the toilet. Sophie cried in silence. As she did, she felt the scream scratching in her throat. A small shriek escaped her as air struggled to fill her lungs. She covered her mouth to guard the sound from the soldiers outside the door, where they would continue to linger until she was in the clear with her blood work results.

"Miss Grey?" One of the escort soldiers knocks.

"Please..." She chokes out, then swallows hard to control her tone, "Just a minute."

"Miss Grey...we need to take you back to the medical center. You're free of infection, but they want to speak with you..."

To the small window, she looks, wondering if escaping through it meant certain death. Or the beginning of a search for a new, impossible start.

***

From the second floor, Sophie's escape looked ominous as she glared downward to cracking pavement. Though several levels scaled above her own, it made her drop no less comforting.

From another view, far higher, focused the sharp eyes of her spy, a spy of the district, like the other men on the rooftops. Their orders are to watch, to report the newcomer taking flight.

James Doyle had the proven track record to shadow over the rest in this sector. His rank, his medals, showed them all up without offering a single morsel of the carnage in his past. In his mind, the past needed to stay buried with the rest of the miserable world.

The woman escaping through the window gave him pause to follow orders. How could he rat someone out who went to such lengths to try and escape?

Struggling to hold down the walkie's button, Doyle bites his lip, then curses under his breath at the troubled woman.

As another sniper spots her and calls her out to the ground units, Doyle watches the woman climb down on shaking legs. She clings to the window's ledge, then to any protruding pipe or stone she can reach. Doyle is on the edge of his roof as he watches her drop the dangerous distance with unpredicted finesse.

Abandoning his post against his best judgment, Doyle has to get to this woman before she causes further chaos.

He may have been a soldier and a proud one at that, but following exact orders blurred when the dead took over. He had the district's vitality to protect, and any other form of disgrace no longer mattered. Dishonor hardly came to those now who were in such high demand, who had no other choice. Soldiers, like him, could never be anything but soldiers for the rest of their doomed days.

On the hunt for the woman on the ground, he takes the stairs down his assigned building. A race ensues to head her off, and he presumes that for now, he's in the lead.

His fellow soldiers in their blinded posts miss her as she dodged their scopes in the streets. All it took was one successful view from a skilled sniper's lens, one bullet, to end it all should an order from up high command a dreaded "shoot to kill."

Though she may be tiny and nothing more than an everyday civilian, Doyle didn't underestimate her. Anyone willing to climb down from such heights showed she had nothing left to lose. That alone made her dangerous, outside of the fact that her retreat proved something wasn't quite right.

Whatever it was she was running from, Doyle intended to find out and stop her should she be infected. He descends the last of the winding stairs till he reaches the door and then the shielded outside world.

At the corner of his former post, he waits for her. Rifle strapped over his shoulder; he bears no other weapon but his hands as he catches the flailing hook of her arm.

She cries out, thrashing and screaming against his grip. He tries to quiet her, to contain her fear, then offers, "I'm not going to hurt you! Calm down! Why are you running?!"

As he pulls her into the building, back to temporary shelter, and she finally stills enough so he can see her face.

Those eyes—they're big and dark, pleading, innocent—like the eyes of a child. He can see she hasn't eaten, hasn't known kindness or safety, not for quite some time. It pulls at him, warring with the side of the man inside that still wants to be a dutiful soldier against the man inclined to protect the broken.

"Hey, it's ok..." he coos, still holding onto her arms for the fear she'll strike him or run.

He asks over her newfound silence, "What's your name?"

"Sophie..." she answers as her eyes melt a thin coat of water.

"And why are you running, Sophie?" he repeats in asking her.

She shakes her head, holding onto the bottom half of her face as she starts to weep. Though he can't blame her for it, it's evident to Doyle that her sanity is dangling worse than she was on the side of the building moments ago.

"Because I don't trust them...I don't trust you...military...doctors...people...anyone...they're all the same, more than ever, the world is broken, it's been broken," she breathes in, she breathes out.

Though his eyes may be perfect, Doyle's disabled ear struggles to make out her words. On his right side, he leans in, hanging on the tremors of her breath that utters out, "Please, just let me go. I want to leave this place now. Don't let them take me. I'd rather die."

Troubled by not just her words but the lack of light in her eyes, he can only offer truth in the face of madness.

"People can't be trusted, you're right," he agrees with her, his hand still hooked on a tiny trembling arm. Lighter so, but enough to keep her anchored enough so she'll remain in his custody.

He continues, "But the dead are worse. They're unpredictable, stronger, impossible to survive against alone. And not just the dead, but the elements out there. You'll be on your own. You won't last. No one would."

Though he'd often fantasized himself about leaving the stink of this district behind, common sense proved that District 1 was where he'd never go hungry or cold. Here, there was hope for a better future, for the endurance of the human race.

From his good ear, his radio is abuzz with the missing civilian in his company. When his name radios in, her obedience is enough for him to release her.

Pushing the button of his wire dangling over his chest, he replies after expelling a deep breath, "Where do you need her?"

And with his response, Sophie is a screaming mess again that he struggles to restrain. The other uniforms barge in, taking her, as Doyle follows close behind with an uncomfortable tightening in his throat.

"Where are you taking her?! What did she do?!" Doyle demands, but the soldiers are clueless about following strict orders to return her to the medical center.

"Something with her blood results, Sergeant. We have orders to bring her back to quarantine," a Private replies.

Wondering how she got this far into the district if she's infected, Doyle believes there's more to this than the virus.

Curious about her condition, Doyle remains following. All the while, Sophie fights against them, glaring Doyle's way every time his eyes happen to meet hers.

She's filled with rage, but it's not the Carrion virus he sees within her. It's something else, something that resonates with a fury buried deep within himself. Her frustration is a fire that sparks his own. Underneath all his smiles and compliance, all the jokes and duties, he despises everything he's kept blind to by the lab coats and powers that be.

Strange powers, as it were. The government Doyle worked for no longer stood, so who controlled him if not the government?

With this new civilian and their interest in her, Doyle would demand answers this time.

Should Sophie disappear like the others without explanation, he didn't think he could stomach it, knowing that he's the one who turned her in. Women, he'd noticed, were of the lab coat's most significant interest. Young and attractive, they were gone without so much as a word upon arrival. They always rumored that the virus was the reason for their removal to other districts, but Doyle was no idiot. The patterns in the weaving were brighter and more predictable than ever.

Hands behind his back, he waits at parade-rest-stance in his respect, but defiance riddles with the frown on his face. His green eyes grow darker as his storm brews with paranoia.

Doyle tells the soldiers and medical staff, "Until Colonel Stone or another superior officer releases me, my duty is with this civilian."

As they drag her off, Doyle cringes against Sophie's desperate, animal-like screams of protest.