Daniel sighed as he pulled into the tiny gravel lot, easing the SUV in beneath the trees that screened it from the narrow park road. The park itself was nothing special. An abandoned stretch of municipal land that had slipped off the city’s priority list years ago. Overgrown paths, half-forgotten signage, and enough neglect to discourage casual foot traffic. That was all it needed to be.

  The Survivalist had moved on from under the bridge, his camp occupying a shallow copse of thin trees just off the path, visible if someone knew where to look, forgettable if they didn’t. The man himself sat in his battered folding chair exactly as Daniel remembered him. Still, relaxed, and completely unbothered by the approach of another person. It was almost eerie, how much everything looked the same, despite now being on the other side of the city.

  Up close, the Survivalist was the same as he'd always been. The ratty tactical vest and layered, threadbare clothes, kept because they still worked, the rough, unpolished boots, the tattered, fingerless gloves, covered in all the same stains and scuffs. His face remained hidden behind scarf and bandanna, leaving only jaundiced eyes visible. They tracked Daniel’s movement with quiet attention. The pale, waxy skin beneath the fabric looked worse than before, not dramatically so, but with the steady decline of a body that had been failing for a long time and was no longer pretending otherwise.

  “Evenin’ Partner. See you made it through in one piece.” the man said easily.

  Daniel nodded as he stepped closer, the weight of fatigue sitting heavy on his shoulders. His expression was sour and he didn’t bother hiding it. The Survivalist didn’t seem to care. He remained affable, relaxed, joking in that same low, drawling cadence as Daniel lowered himself into the camp chair opposite him.

  “For better or worse.” Daniel said, snorting quietly. He shrugged out of his backpack and set it down between them. He opened it and laid out the contents with deliberate care. Hard drives wrapped in cloth. Printed files sealed in plastic. A small pouch of jewelry and gems that caught the firelight. Everything he had taken from the hospital that mattered, arranged in one tight, controlled spread. “There wasn’t a lot to find. But you knew that, didn’t you?”

  The Survivalist laughed softly as he slid one of the cooked fillets onto a battered tin plate, then speared the other beside it. “Naw, I had no idea, Partner. I just find ‘em. I make no guarantees about what ya might get out of ‘em.” He shrugged with one shoulder. “Nature of the business we’re in, ya know?”

  Daniel hummed, unconvinced but conceding the point even if it did nothing to make him feel better. “Maybe. Just feels like I didn’t get shit for the effort. That place was a hellhole.” He leaned back in the chair, letting it creak under his weight. The Survivalist nodded along.

  “Sounds like it.” the man said. He tugged his scarf down just enough to expose a recessed nose and cracked lips, then shoveled a chunk of meat into his mouth. His teeth were yellowed and broken, ugly in a way Daniel found difficult to look at directly. “Still, it don’t sound like ya got nothin’ for yer troubles. Why doncha show me, maybe we can make a deal.”

  The words were casual, almost throwaway, but the man’s eyes told a different story. They locked onto Daniel’s with a sudden, focused intensity that cut through the easy tone, sharp and appraising. Daniel had the uncomfortable sense of being measured in that quiet moment, not just for what he carried in his pack, but for what he was worth beyond it.

  “I… got some things, yeah.” Daniel said. He shifted slightly in the chair. “Before that, though, I need to know if you can exchange for cash.”

  The Survivalist froze for the briefest moment, before a curious gleam appeared in his eye. “Oh?” The word came out slick and oily. “Findin’ yer pockets a bit light for the mundanities a’life?”

  Daniel didn’t answer immediately. He simply nodded once. The Survivalist chuckled, low and quiet, as if something about the exchange pleased him. Whatever had crossed his mind stayed there, unshared, a private amusement Daniel had no access to and no way to read.

  “I understand ya, Partner. We all got bills to pay, eh?” He said quietly, his tone dry and probing. “I feel yer pain. I can, of course, handle such a… transaction. Truth be told, I’m surprised you ent come to me for this before. After all, that mundie job a’yers seems to’ve run its course, eh?”

  Daniel grunted, the uncomfortable sense of the man knowing more about him than he would have preferred rearing its ugly head once again. “I need cash all the same, at least for some of it. And some of that information you said was on offer too.”

  The Survivalist nodded genially and set his empty plate aside. He wiped his mouth with a dirty sleeve and leaned forward, opening the green crate just enough to retrieve several ledgers. They were thick, handwritten, and worn from use.

  “Of course, of course. I'm more than happy to fulfill yer needs. I offer a fair cut’a whatever ya mightn’t have for me.” he said. “Barring fifteen percent off the top, fer my own expenses, a’course. Just the standard, Partner.”

  He grinned. “I’m honest injun, and fair’s fair.”

  The haggling was quicker than Daniel had expected. There simply wasn’t as much to argue over this time, and both of them seemed aware of it. The Survivalist flipped through his ledgers with practiced ease, numbers settling where they would, while Daniel kept a close eye on the spread.

  When it was done, the outcome was clear enough. Daniel ended up with thirty thousand dollars in cash, neatly bundled and counted out. On top of that, he walked away with eight bronze, nine silver, and three gold tokens, stacked and packaged in a pouch that jingled with the weight of the metal. Not nearly as much as the last time, but he wasn't surprised by that. Most of the gems and jewellery had gone into the cash, though there had been a few choice pieces there. He didn't know what their true value was, and finding out would have invited... questions.

  The largest exchange had been the research data. Three platinum, clean and simple, with no haggling attached to it at all. That alone told Daniel how valuable the Survivalist considered it. When the man finished sorting the coins and pushed them forward, Daniel noticed the count didn’t line up with what he’d expected.

  There were four platinum instead of three.

  “A reward,” the man said lightly. "For dealin’ with that big plant problem."

  Daniel stared at the extra coin for a long moment, suspicion tightening in his gut. He turned it once between his fingers, weighing the implication more than the metal. In the end, he took it and tucked it away. He didn’t have the luxury of being picky, especially when he still couldn’t account for why the man had decided to be generous.

  That decision was easier knowing he hadn’t handed over his only copy of the data, an expensive choice, as it turned out. Daniel kept a mirrored set of everything he’d pulled from the hospital, secured and out of reach. The Survivalist had offered double the value if he’d get rid of that second set, pressing the point just enough to make his interest clear. Daniel had shut it down immediately. He’d lost everything from the Hargreave job, and he wasn’t going to start from zero again. The man hadn’t argued, only letting the disappointment show for a moment before moving on. Daniel hadn't bothered asking how he knew it was a copy in the first place.

  The coins didn’t last long.

  Ammo came first. The Survivalist, predictably, had something lined up. An automated loading press, scavenged from somewhere Daniel didn’t ask about. The thing was massive, the size of a small refrigerator, all steel and precision machining. Two gold tokens secured it, delivery to Daniel’s hideout included. It could measure powder, seat the projectile, crimp it cleanly, and dump finished rounds into a hopper with mechanical precision. Daniel had buckets of spent casings from the training rounds, easily counting in the thousands of rounds. A single silver bought him enough machined military tips to keep him supplied, so long as he exercised some restraint. He still bought another thousand factory-new rounds to be safe.

  Setup would be his problem, but that was for later.

  Grenades came next. He wanted frags to add to his kit-list, after seeing how useful they were, as well as flash to replace what he'd used. He liked having the options, and the exoframe upped the amount of gear he could haul significantly. He added specialty shotgun rounds to the pile as well, grenade rounds and fresh dragon’s breath shells, to replace what he'd lost, plus some extra.

  After that came the magazines. He traded in the five-round Saiga box mags for ten-round double-stacks, to double what he had on hand as far as ammo went and keep him in the fight longer. He’d nearly died more than once after running dry and being forced into a reload at the worst possible moment. That mistake wouldn’t happen again.

  The rest of his silver went toward armor repair and refit, a straightforward expense after the condition it had come back in. It was worth it, though, as the jaundiced man had offered an upgrade along with the repair. Apparently there had been some parts that were developed with the Phalanx armor in an understanding of the spatial limitations, of which the Survivalist had managed to get a hold of in the intervening time. A back mounted magazine for his magazines, from how it was described, mostly lust a metal shell that curved around his lower back that had a springplate. Accordingly, he was told he could put the magazines in, and pull them when he needed them. Granted the Survivalist would need to make adjustments so they could fit his P90 mags in there instead of whatever they were originally fitted for, but it did solve some of the spacing issues, especially when he offered one for the other side of his back fitted for the new Saiga mags.

  The Survivalist promised it would be ready by Monday, cleaned, adjusted where needed, and returned in working order. Hopefully the addons worked as advertised, but he was assured they were removable if not, and if it were the case, the man would be happy to make adjustments for free. Somehow he doubted that, but it was what it was.

  His last gold went into the exoframe. Titanium-carbon armor panels for his thighs and groin, replacing the kevlar pads he had been relying on. It cost storage space and required custom fabrication, but it addressed a weakness he couldn’t afford to ignore. Strap points were added as part of the build, so he could at least hang things on them as needed.

  All of that was secondary, though. The real prize was information.

  Umbrella at a wholesale level was out of the question. Even the smallest departmental compendium ran thirty platinum, a price that put it well beyond his reach. Dossiers were cheaper, but only in relative terms, and even those carried a cost that stung. Daniel complained anyway, more out of principle than any expectation of a discount. The Survivalist only shrugged and reminded him that he had bosses of his own, and that pricing wasn’t his decision to make. Prices were prices, and some doors simply stayed closed no matter how much you wanted them open.

  In the end he'd had to make his decisions based on practicality. The Spencer Mansion was an obvious, easy choice. That was coming up in little over half a year and marked the beginning of the end. It would do, for now, and even if he couldn't get a map to the underground labs that dotted the city proper, he did get a dossier on one of the men who would know. Birkin, his wife, and his family were added to the list, and he'd picked up one on that fat bastard Chief Irons, who he remembered was some kind of psychopath. He'd wanted something on Wesker, too, but to his shock that dossier was more expensive than everything else he'd gotten combined. Ten platinum on its own.

  In the end he'd had to triage what he had to work with, and Wesker, while dangerous, was a known quantity. Irons was a much more problematic person, since, if his dim memory served, the man was at least somewhat responsible for fucking over the city when everything went bad. The Birkins came as a set, and aside from being a couple of dyed-in-the-wool mad scientists, seemed relatively normal. He'd need to think about how to make use of that info, but just having faces to put to the names made a difference.

  That still left him with one last platinum, but he was hesitant to spend it on one of the small fries that seemed to infest the lower echelons of the Umbrella apparatus. In the end he kept it. It would be useful once he had a more concise direction to point his ire, something the Survivalist seemed to be deeply, deeply amused by.

  000

  Rebecca sat in the tiny café at the edge of town and stirred her coffee until the steam stopped rising from it. The building itself was small and plainly kept, a handful of mismatched tables, a short counter, and a chalkboard menu that looked like it hadn’t changed much in years. A few locals sat scattered through the room, eating in silence or talking quietly among themselves, nobody paying her any real attention. It was the sort of place that existed because it served the same people every day and didn’t need anything else.

  She usually found that comforting. Today, it only left her with too much space to sit with her thoughts, and nowhere for the unease to go.

  She didn’t like feeling keyed up, and she liked it even less when she couldn’t point to a clear reason for it. Barry’s call that morning had been short, direct, and wrong in a way she couldn’t quite articulate. He’d asked her to meet him out here, well off the beaten path, because he had something to discuss, and he’d offered nothing beyond that. For Barry, that lack of explanation was strange enough to make her uneasy, and the longer she waited, the more that unease settled in.

  It wasn’t the kind of thing Barry did. He was blunt, straightforward, and usually loud about his concerns, even when he tried to soften them. When something bothered him, he said so. When he worried, he checked in directly and expected straight answers in return.

  Since Danny’s recent absence and return, the two of them had kept in touch in that exact way. Barry asked how she was holding up. He asked if Danny was safe. Rebecca answered carefully, choosing what to share and what to hold back, not really sure how to broach some of the things she'd learned, not sure how to share it, or if it was even hers to share. She thought Barry understood it, being a private person himself.

  That unspoken understanding had held so far. This call, asking her to meet somewhere out of the way and refusing to say why, cut straight across it. Whatever Barry wanted to talk about, it wasn’t something he was willing to say plainly, and that alone was enough to make her uneasy.

  The only upside was the café itself. The food was good, the portions were generous, and nobody here looked like they cared what anyone else was doing so long as the check got paid. She made a quiet note to bring Danny here sometime. He liked places like this, the kind of spot where the menu was honest and the vibe wasn’t trying too hard. Heh, vibe. One of his weird little words that she'd found herself adopting. The thought brought a small smile to her face, distracting her for just a moment.

  Even with that, her nerves stayed put. She’d ordered hash and eggs because greasy food at least gave her stomach something concrete to deal with. She ate slowly, chewing slowly, more from a mechanical need than hunger, and kept checking the door without wanting to admit she was doing it. When Barry still hadn’t shown by the time she finished her coffee, she refilled it and tried to focus on anything else.

  Barry finally came in after she was well into her second cup. He looked awkward the moment he stepped inside, scanning the room like he wasn’t sure he should be there. When he spotted her, he forced a smile and walked over, but it didn’t reach his eyes. He sat down and started making small talk, the usual filler he used when he was buying time. How are you, the weather, the Sharks, anything that kept the silence from pressing in.

  Rebecca answered because she was, in a lot of ways, the same, but the awkwardness remained, hanging over them like a guillotine. Barry Burton didn’t get awkward, and it was so weird seeing him trying to find his words, but she gave him the time he needed. She almost appreciated it, since it let her put off whatever this was for a few more seconds.

  “So how is he?” Barry asked, and she didn’t have to wonder who he meant.

  Rebecca exhaled and looked out the window for a beat, watching the cars roll by in the morning light, taking the time to pick her own words. Barry was Danny’s friend too, and he cared in the way he always did, steady and practical. Still, things felt more personal now, and she didn’t want to turn Danny’s private pain into something public. It didn't feel right, but still…

  “He’s…” she hemmed a moment, before seeming to settle on something. “He’s tired. Very tired.”

  Barry’s expression tightened. “Was he hurt again?”

  Rebecca nodded, small and reluctant. Barry let out a long, tired sigh and rubbed a hand over his face like he was trying to keep something bottled up. Frustration, maybe? At Danny lying about having things handled, or anger? No, it wasn't that, Rebecca decided.

  “I was afraid of that. How bad was it?” He asked, finally.

  She struggled for the answer because she didn’t have a neat one. Danny had come back alive, which mattered most, but alive didn’t mean fine. “Not… not great,” she said, and she hated how weak it sounded. “Not as bad as last time, but… but bad in different ways.”

  Barry leaned back, watching her closely without pushing too hard. “And from the sound of it, it was something… complicated.”

  She realized that she was really starting to hate that word. Still, he wasn’t wrong, and she just shrugged. “Yes, and no, Barry. He came home mostly whole, even if he was bruised up again. No, it was… other things.”

  “Like what?” Barry asked. When she didn’t answer right away, he tried another angle. “Was he sick again?”

  “No, it’s not like that,” Rebecca said. She pushed her eggs around her plate, not hungry anymore but needing her hands to do something. “I think he stayed out longer to heal up before coming home.” She looked back at Barry and made herself say it plainly. “He’s been using herbs. Has been for a while, really. You can tell, if you know what to look for.”

  Barry sat up a little. He didn’t interrupt, but she could see the concern tighten in his posture.

  “How bad do you think it was?” he asked.

  That was the question, wasn’t it. Rebecca hated that she didn’t have a clean answer, because Green Herb and its variations didn’t work like normal medication. People responded differently. Some recovered fast on minimal doses. Others needed more to get the same effect, and the more you needed, the closer you got to the edge of what your body could handle.

  She and Danny were both in the category where the herbs did their job, but never cheaply. They responded poorly compared to most people, which meant they had to take more to get the same effect, and that carried a cost even if few liked to acknowledge it. The body didn’t build resistance to the herbs themselves the way it did with some drugs, but the inherent toxins were still there, and they only cleared out of the system so fast.

  Taken once in a while, even in higher doses, that wasn’t an issue. Taken every day, it became something else entirely. The strain built gradually, stressing the kidneys and liver long before anything obvious showed up. It was like overusing painkillers, safe enough in isolation, dangerous when it turned into a routine. You didn’t feel it right away, and that was the problem. By the time it caught up to you, the damage was already done.

  “Bad enough that he still had open wounds and serious bruising all over,” Rebecca said.

  That was what scared her most. Herbs attacked every issue at once, and widespread injuries made them less efficient. Targeted damage healed cleanly. Widespread damage spread the healing thin, like dividing a limited resource across too many demands. Worse, herbs interfered with other medications that needed to be filtered out later. Danny didn’t know that. He didn’t have the background to know it, and no one around him was likely to tell him unless she did. She only wished she'd caught it sooner, or she would have had that talk already. She would make the time.

  Before he caused his kidneys to fail, preferably.

  “Jesus,” Barry said, and the word landed heavily. “And he hasn’t said anything to you about it?”

  Rebecca waved her hand back and forth, frustrated and tired. “He said some things, tried to answer without really answering, but he tried. He’s convinced that whatever it is I won’t believe him and… and I wish he would trust me, just a little.”

  “Is he still calling it ‘family issues’?” Barry asked.

  Rebecca shook her head. “No, but… look, I don’t know if I should talk about it. He was… he was really paranoid about it.”

  “Paranoid? Do you think it’s related to-”

  “The nightmares? I don’t know. What he told me was out there enough that I had some doubts, but at the same time, well…” Rebecca looked at Barry helplessly, hating how powerless it made her feel.

  Barry crossed his arms and considered her for a moment. “Maybe he has a reason for it.”

  Rebecca felt the shift in the conversation before Barry moved. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded file, careful with it, like he knew exactly how badly it could go the moment she saw what it was.

  “Take a look at this.”

  Taking the file, Rebecca opened it, and immediately shot Barry a hard look. “Have you been spying on my boyfriend?” The folder answered the question before he could. Photos of Danny. Notes on his background. Phone numbers. Addresses. Personal details that she didn’t like seeing on paper, and didn’t like even more because she hadn’t been the one to gather them. “What the fuck, Barry?”

  “Rebecca, before you go off the handle, just listen, okay?” Barry said.

  She held his gaze for a long moment, letting the silence do the work. Barry looked smaller under it than she’d ever seen him, despite his size. She didn’t soften, but she did give him the chance he asked for.

  “I started looking into him not long after we spoke,” Barry said. “I know, it’s a massive breach of just about everything, but I just wanted a heads up if there was something that might follow him home. You remember how evasive he was about everything.” He paused, then added, “I wasn’t going to use it to burn him, I swear. I just wanted to look out for the guy. He’s my friend too. I didn’t want to see him hurt.”

  Rebecca looked down at the file again and forced herself to scan it as data, not a personal betrayal, even if it really felt like one. That didn’t make it feel better. “But I’m not seeing anything weird here, Barry. Not even a parking ticket. Get to the point, please.”

  Barry nodded once, as if he’d expected that reaction. “But that’s the point, Rebecca. It’s all perfectly normal. Perfectly clean. No reason to look at it at all.” He leaned forward slightly. “Until you call the numbers, start running down the leads, investigating things. Then the holes start showing up.”

  Rebecca’s eyes moved back over the page. The details were tidy. Too tidy. Barry kept talking, methodical now that he’d committed.

  “The numbers don’t go anywhere. Not one of them,” Barry said. “The records of where he went to school, where he lived, all that was immaculate, except when I went there and personally asked the neighbors, none of them ever recalled there being a family named Carter around them, and the plot where their home was located was a vacant lot. I even dug up the property records, and there never was a home there to begin with.”

  Rebecca’s grip on the file tightened. Her first instinct was anger at Barry for doing it. Her second was anger at the implication. Neither one gave her an answer. “So what, Barry, are you saying Danny doesn’t exist?” she asked, and she hated how sharp it came out.

  “Maybe he changed his name, maybe he was running from something, or wanted to get away from someone,” she added, trying to keep the thought grounded. “I’m not saying it’s not weird, but this is starting to sound…” She stopped before she said the word.

  Barry didn’t fill it in for her. He just kept going.

  “I called in a favor with a friend of mine,” Barry said. “He works in the Fed, and can get at certain files that normally aren’t available publicly. Daniel is real, and that’s his real name. But nothing else is.” He took a breath and pushed through. “He has a social security number and a birth certificate, but the mother is listed as Jane Doe and the father is blank.”

  Rebecca ran a hand down her face, the motion more tired than dramatic. She looked back down at the paperwork and felt the ground shift under assumptions she didn’t realize she’d been standing on.

  “And there’s nothing between that and the moment he moved into my apartment building?” she asked.

  Barry shook his head. “No, there was, but none of it is verifiable. His high school diploma was from a school in Maine that burned down, losing all of its records in the process. His license, all of his IDs, his paperwork? All of it is immaculate, but none of it has a starting point.”

  Rebecca stared at the file in her hands like it might bite her, then set it down carefully as if that would keep it from changing anything. She kept her voice steady because she had to.

  “So what’s it all supposed to mean, Barry?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, Rebecca,” Barry said. “This is either the world’s worst paperwork fuckup, which I highly doubt, or someone built Daniel’s life to be as unobtrusive and untraceable as possible. And I don’t know which is worse.”

  000

  Alyssa Ashcroft stared at the crumpled scrap of paper in her hand like it might bite her. And honestly, it just might. That was the nature of it, wasn’t it. Because that number led to the strange, handsome man she’d met not a week ago, while taking part in what was the worst mistake of her life. Daniel, no last name given, was a mystery, one that she’d almost ached to solve since they’d parted ways after spending a good portion of their night dodging terror, torture, and very likely a gruesome death if anything went wrong at all.

  The problem was that he wasn’t just a question she could satisfy with a quick call and a couple of answers. Everything about him was wrapped up in what had happened at the hospital, and she couldn’t separate the two. She kept replaying the way he’d moved through it all, the way he’d acted like he already knew what kind of night it was going to be, and that only made the number in her hand feel heavier.

  When she wasn’t crying, hyperventilating, or having what could generously be called minor breakdowns over the living nightmare she'd somehow survived, she’d been turning everything she’d thought she'd known over in her mind. The list of terrible truths she’d walked away with was long and ugly, and none of it fit into the world the way it was supposed to work. The very idea that the dead could come back to life, it was impossible, and she had trouble squaring that circle even as she had a thousand live examples of it happening.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  The sheer insanity of it all pressed down on her whenever she let herself think about it too hard. The idea that any of it was real made her want to stay in bed and never get up again. If not for the man in that armor, the one who’d quite literally dragged her back from being eaten alive or worse, she had no doubt she’d be dead right now. Another unexplained disappearance. Another body that would never be found.

  At the very least, she owed him that. The debt felt heavier the more she thought about it, because he hadn’t just saved her life. He’d stepped into something monstrous and dealt with it so she didn’t have to die screaming in the dark. Knight in shining armor was such a stupid phrase, but it stuck anyway, shotgun included. And yet, despite that, she’d been paralyzed since getting home, stuck between gratitude and terror and the crushing weight of what survival actually meant.

  Managing the nightmares alone was a full-time job. Sleep came in fragments, if it came at all, and when it didn’t, she drowned the quiet with alcohol until she could force herself into unconsciousness. She knew how bad that was. She didn’t need anyone to tell her. The amount she’d been drinking scared her, but not as much as lying awake with her thoughts did.

  Worse than that was what came after. Once the fog lifted, once the pressure and delusion and whatever else had been layered over her mind finally cracked, she remembered everything. Not just flashes, but the full chain of events. Arriving at the hospital when it had still looked almost normal. Being taken. Being violated. Lester’s voice, his hands, the way he treated her like a thing rather than a person. Every grim detail in between.

  Now she had to live with it without the buffer of dissociation protecting her. The world looked the same, but she wasn’t insulated from it anymore, and that made everything sharper and harder to tolerate. It didn’t help that her professional life had imploded alongside everything else. Her reputation was in shambles, largely due to her own mishandling of the situation, and she knew it. She’d been demoted twice, shoved off to an opinion desk that barely mattered, and even that was on its last legs.

  Most of the people she worked with had stopped taking her seriously. The respect she used to command, the kind that came from years on a major desk and a track record that used to speak for itself, had evaporated. In its place were thin smiles, careful avoidance, and the quiet assumption that she was no longer someone worth listening to.

  She’d gone from being trusted with front?page calls and long?term investigations to being sidelined, her seniority the only thing keeping her name on the roster. Meetings happened without her. Decisions were made before she ever heard about them. Younger reporters spoke over her without even realizing they were doing it, because to them she was already part of the furniture.

  The mailboy got more consideration than she did these days. At least he still delivered something people needed. Alyssa hadn’t produced anything worth a damn in months, and everyone knew it. The unspoken truth was that she was being tolerated, not valued, and that tolerance was on a clock. Seniority could only protect her for so long before someone decided she was more liability than legacy.

  Now that she wasn’t half-psychotic from stress, insomnia, and fear, she could start clawing her way back. In theory. She still had contacts. She still had friends who might answer the phone. She wasn’t completely sunk. But the reach she’d once had was gone, and rebuilding it would take years. Years she wasn’t sure she had, even if nothing else went wrong.

  That was the impasse. On one hand, she could keep her head down, rebuild slowly, and pretend she didn’t know what she knew. Eventually, maybe, she’d be relevant again. On the other hand, she knew things now. Terrible things. The kind of things people didn’t just get fired over, but the kind that got them killed. Living with that knowledge felt like its own sentence, and she wasn’t sure how long she could do it. How long she could ignore it, pretending everything was fine while burying her head in the sand.

  And then there was the other option. Call Daniel. Get involved. See what he knew, what he was willing to share, and start building something that might actually matter. The kind of exposé that tore the lid off the whole rotten system. The kind that might end with her dead in an alley with two bullets in the back of her head. She wasn’t na?ve enough to pretend otherwise.

  Still, the thought lingered. Having her name attached to the story that brought down the most powerful megacorporation on the planet might be worth it. There was a bitter satisfaction in that idea she didn’t bother trying to deny.

  And beyond all of that? Fuck them. They could quote her on that. After everything she’d been put through, after the hell she’d survived because one of their lunatics had been allowed to run free, she didn’t owe them shit, and she wasn't going to let them dictate what she would or wouldn't do. Lester hadn’t even lived to see his little experiment through. She’d been discarded, just another pet project that stopped being useful. That burned almost worse than the abuse itself.

  None of that changed the fact that getting more involved was a bad idea, objectively. Whatever Daniel was mixed up in, there were bodies attached to it. People killing each other over the truth was a line you didn’t cross lightly. It was a small comfort that he hadn’t shot first, but it didn’t erase the reality of it. The men who’d come in on that helicopter had been shooting to kill. If Daniel had gone down, she had no doubt she would have followed.

  She still might, if they managed to identify her. Things had been chaotic, and she’d been masked, but she wasn’t na?ve enough to believe that made her safe. Cameras were everywhere now, even in places people assumed were blind spots. Blood had been spilled, and blood had a way of sticking around longer than anyone wanted. Anything left behind could be cataloged, cross?referenced, and quietly filed away.

  If any of it survived, she could already be on a list she didn’t know existed, flagged without ever knowing until it was too late. Even if she wasn’t, getting involved meant accepting that it could happen anyway. It meant living with the knowledge that a knock on the door, a strange car parked too long outside, or a sudden silence on the other end of a phone call might not be paranoia at all.

  When she said it out loud, that mattered less than she expected. Because at the end of it all, she was a victim, and she hated that. She’d been made one by the same system that let Lester do what he did, that allowed whatever horrors Daniel had faced to exist at all. That system wasn’t going to stop on its own. Someone had to push back.

  Whether that someone was her didn’t really matter. What mattered was that she wasn’t going to stay scared. Not now, not ever.

  With that, she punched the number in, fingers steady despite everything running through her head. The phone rang once. Twice. A third time. Each beat felt longer than the last, just enough time for her to reconsider and just short enough that she didn’t.

  “Hello?”

  “Daniel, it’s Alyssa. I’m in.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line, the silence stretching as if he were weighing the words the same way she had. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  She would never be a victim again.

  000

  The day had been going long, the sun already slipping toward the horizon as Daniel moved through the city along a loose route he’d already mapped out in his head. It looked like wandering to anyone watching, but every turn was deliberate. His eyes tracked streets, alleys, closed storefronts, places that looked forgettable enough to matter later. It was quiet work, the kind that blended into the background. To him, it was preparation.

  He was checking locations he’d already marked out, confirming which ones actually worked on the ground. Each stop was meant to answer a specific question: how easy it was to reach, how visible it was, how quickly he could get in and out if the streets were clogged or people started paying attention. The places that stayed on the list were the ones that could hold a small amount of supplies without standing out and that offered more than one way to move away from them. If one cache was compromised, it couldn’t take the rest with it.

  He also had to keep the pattern from being obvious. If he placed everything along the same routes, he’d be building himself a trap. If he placed everything too far apart, they wouldn’t be useful when time and efficacy mattered. The goal was to build a coverage net that let him move around without needing to go running back to the hideout when it all went tits up for more bullets or herbs or whatever. A handful of points across the city, spread in a way that gave him options, and stocked with enough supplies to refresh him when he needed it most.

  The hospital had driven the point home harder than anything else could have. Inside, it had been chaos layered on top of bad design. Halls blocked by debris. Doors that wouldn’t open or couldn’t be opened safely. Entire floors rendered unusable by that massive begonia, its growth turning the open halls into dead ends. Navigation had been a constant problem, one that had cost time, energy, and nearly his life more than once.

  The city wouldn’t be any better once things started to fall apart. Traffic would lock up first, abandoned cars turning main roads into choke points within hours. Emergency vehicles would gridlock with civilians trying to flee. Buildings would become traps as power failed, elevators stalled, and stairwells filled with smoke, debris, or people who couldn’t move fast enough. Places that were easy to cross on a normal day would turn dangerous the moment panic hit, with crowds, barricades, and improvised blockades cutting off routes without warning. He’d always understood that in theory. Applying it to reality had him plotting on how to make it work for him.

  He’d toyed with the idea before, half-seriously, of setting up supply points around the city. Small caches. Ammo. Medical supplies. Possibly weapons, if something was lost or damaged. Places he could fall back to without having to carry everything on his back all the time. The problem had always been money, though. With his meager funds being chewed up preparing for the immediate future, he'd never had the flexibility to set up the caches the way he wanted. Now he could.

  He had cash, enough to cover rent and expenses for a while, and enough left over to start thinking long term. As long as he was careful, anyway. Thirty large in untraceable funds gave him a lot of room to move around, so long as he was careful about his spending. He doubted anyone would care all that much, at least for now. Someone would notice, eventually, maybe, but he had bigger concerns than a little financial crime.

  He found himself caring less about things like taxes, paperwork, and clean trails than he once had. The clock was ticking, whether he liked it or not. He knew what event kicked off the beginning of the end. Sometime after a string of murders drew attention to the area, STARS would be sent out to that damnable lab, most of them would die, and the rest would be discredited. Then the city itself would repeat the cycle after a bunch of Umbrella blackops manage to fuck the pooch trying to recover another of the alphabet viruses. By the second week of October the city would be a crater in the ground. But it all came back to the Spencer Mansion itself.

  Up to this point, he’d avoided even looking in the direction of the mansion. It wasn’t paranoia. It was common sense. If there was any place Umbrella kept close tabs on, that was it. Cameras. Patrols. People paid to notice things. Tripping that wire too early would be a disaster.

  Fortunately, he wasn’t walking in blind anymore.

  Two platinum coins had bought him a near-complete architectural file on the mansion. Not everything. The lab information was missing, predictably, but the rest of it was enough to matter. Floor plans. Structural layouts. Access points. Enough to build a working map with some educated guesswork.

  The file also made it clear how the place had been designed to control movement. Long corridors that forced you into choke points. Decorative rooms that doubled as dead ends. Stairwells were positioned so that moving between floors wasn’t as simple as it should’ve been. It wasn’t just an old rich man’s vanity project. It was a building built to slow people down, to make them spend time in spaces where they could be watched.

  Knowing that didn’t solve the problem, but it did let him plan around it. It let him decide where he would avoid lingering, where he would push hard, and where he would need to expect trouble even if the map looked straightforward. He didn’t have the lab layout, but he could at least keep the above-ground portion from eating time he couldn’t afford to waste.

  More importantly, it came with documentation on the puzzles.

  Spencer’s obsession with overengineered security was well documented, but seeing it laid out in exhaustive detail was something else entirely. Some of it was straightforward. Keys. Crests. Lock-and-door nonsense that existed more to slow people down than to actually stop them.

  Other elements were worse. Shaped panels. Weighted mechanisms. Interlocking gears buried inside walls. Things designed to deliberately obfuscate the way through. The file didn’t just list the puzzles, either. It described the dependencies. A key that didn’t matter until you’d found a crest. A crest that didn’t matter until you’d solved a mechanism. A mechanism that didn’t matter until you’d carried an object across half the building. Spencer hadn’t built security. He’d built a system meant to exhaust intruders, force them into repetition, and keep them circling inside the structure until something else dealt with them.

  Daniel didn’t have the luxury of playing along. If he got bogged down, he ran the risk of falling prey to the horrors that would no doubt be crawling the hallways. That meant he had to look at each puzzle and decide, ahead of time, whether it was something to solve properly or something to bypass entirely.

  That was before accounting for modern additions. Cameras. Checkpoints. Armed security that lived on-site. The place wasn’t just a lab facility. It was effectively a dormitory complex, built to house an army of scientists and staff for extended periods. Bedrooms. Dining areas. Storage. Parking facilities. All of it enclosed by a perimeter wall that cut the property off from the surrounding forest.

  Forewarned was forearmed, or something close to it. Either way, the conclusion was the same. His current loadout wouldn’t be enough on its own. He could brute-force some things with a crowbar, but not all of them. Integrated locks would laugh at that approach. Thermite would solve a lot of those problems quickly, but it came with tradeoffs. Noise, for one, but also incendiary heat that probably wouldn't play well with the all-wood flooring. It was a blunt tool, effective but dangerous. Breaching charges were another option, more controlled but harder to source. They had their own risk profile, but they could be shaped to whatever he needed, and were quick to do their work. They also required knowledge, careful handling, and some way to get the plastique needed for each explosive. Getting them would mean either making them, which took time and materials, or finding someone who could, which brought its own problems.

  He didn’t need a full demolition kit. While the idea of just blowing holes in the walls to cut down on his travel time was attractive, it wouldn't do to bring the building down on him because he blasted the wrong support column out. He needed selective capability. Something that could open a path when the alternative was spending twenty minutes working a mechanism in a hallway that might not work anyway. Something that could clear an obstruction when the map said the only other route would send him halfway through the building trying to find an alternate route.

  He’d need to make decisions, and he’d need to make them soon. Better to be overprepared than under, especially when the building itself was designed like the deathtrap it was. One more thing to think about, but it felt good to have a plan in the works, even if it was just theory right now.

  On the upside, Alyssa had called back, and she'd sounded committed. There was a lot to talk about, but she'd been very clear on the fact that she was going to be a part of this and see it through to the end. She was in. All the way in. He didn’t kid himself about what that meant.

  Her help came with risks, mostly to her, but it also came with leverage he didn’t have. Alyssa was a reporter, and she had contacts, sources, and connections that would make getting the word out, if and when they had something solid to work with. She knew how to dig, how to verify, and how to get people talking in a way that he just didn't. Hopefully through her, there would be some more options opening up that he could explore.

  He’d set up a meeting later in the week to see what she could actually bring to the table. If she had real connections, he could use them. If she didn’t, then at least he’d know where the limits were. Either way, he needed someone outside his immediate circle, someone who could pull on threads without dragging Rebecca into it, or any of the other STARS.

  If nothing else, he was hoping she knew someone. An investigator. A fed. Anyone with teeth who wasn’t already in Umbrella’s pocket. It felt like a fantasy, but at this point he couldn’t afford to dismiss possibilities just because they sounded unlikely.

  “Daniel?”

  The sound of his name yanked him out of his thoughts hard enough to make his stomach drop. He turned, already schooling his expression into something neutral, and spotted the last person he wanted to run into.

  “Daniel Carter. I thought I spotted you out in the crowd.”

  Albert Wesker approached with an easy confidence, dressed in a sharp black turtleneck beneath a black suit jacket and slacks. Immaculate, as always. Sunglasses still on despite the fading light. A genial smile in place as he closed the distance.

  “Albert. How are you doing today?” Daniel said, taking the offered hand. The handshake was smooth, practiced, perfectly normal, the sort of greeting that didn’t linger. That almost made it worse, because it gave nothing away.

  “It’s been a lovely day, thanks for asking. I admit, I wasn’t expecting to see you out here in the cold, though.” Wesker fell into step beside him without asking, matching Daniel’s pace with casual precision. “Heading home?”

  “Yeah,” Daniel said. “I was just enjoying the colors. Getting my steps in and all that.” He let out a small chuckle that stayed carefully unremarkable.

  Wesker nodded, as if it all made perfect sense, eyes forward rather than on Daniel. “Getting what you can before the snows hit? Take it from a native, once we start getting it, it won’t stop until mid-spring. We’ve been lucky this year.”

  “So everyone tells me,” Daniel said. “I figured it’d be good to enjoy the clear streets while it lasts.”

  “Mmm. I hear you,” Wesker replied easily. “There’s something nice about being out and about that you just can’t get on a treadmill.” He laughed, the sound light, as if this were nothing more than idle conversation between colleagues passing time.

  Daniel hadn’t noticed when his pace had shifted to match Wesker’s. The realization came all at once, sharp and unwelcome, and he forced himself to keep his stride even, his expression neutral.

  “True that,” Daniel said. “I hate to run, though. I wanna get as much in as I can before the temperature drops. Word has it it’s going to be brutal tonight.”

  “I understand,” Wesker said. “I should be heading off myself, but before you go, could you convey to Rebecca that I’d be happy to come by for Thanksgiving?”

  Daniel froze, the words landing heavier than it should have.

  “Thanksgiving?” he asked.

  “Oh yes. Didn’t she tell you?” Wesker tilted his head, a brief flicker of confusion crossing his face before smoothing away. “Ah. Forgive me. She mentioned you were out of town for a few days. I suspect she’ll bring it up eventually. You know how she can be.”

  “Right. Yeah,” Daniel said. “I’ll tell her.”

  “I appreciate it,” Wesker continued. “A shame, really, but many of us don’t have local family or can’t travel for the holidays. It’s nice that she’s organizing something for the team.” He smiled faintly. “And I presume you’ll be there as well?”

  “Yeah,” Daniel said. “I’ll be there. I’m kind of attached to Raccoon. I guess you could say I'm in the same boat.”

  “I know the feeling,” Wesker said. “There’s something about the city that pulls you in. Speaking of which, there are a few people I’d like to bring by, if that’s alright. Friends of the family, you might say? Would you mind asking if that’s acceptable?”

  “Sure, Albert. I’ll run it by Rebecca, but I figure she’ll see you before I do.” Daniel said, and Wesker gave a shrug.

  “More than likely, now that you mention it. Oh, that reminds me. The Watch is going to be having another meeting the week after Thanksgiving.” The man said, as he turned, “I hope to see you there. It’s nice to have someone outside of the department to talk to about those things, you know?”

  “Ah… yeah sure. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” Daniel said, as he watched Wesker vanish into the crowd, his eyes narrow, and his thoughts on fire.

  Daniel stood there for a moment longer than he needed to, then continued on, his thoughts racing, eyes narrowed, plans already shifting.

  Wesker’s words kept replaying. Thanksgiving. The team. Friends of the family. The Watch meeting after. Each piece sounded harmless on its own, but together it formed a shape Daniel didn’t like. It suggested access. It suggested interest. It suggested that Wesker was comfortable inserting himself into Daniel’s personal space, and that he expected to be welcomed.

  The worst part was that he couldn’t even push back directly without drawing undue attention. Refusing would look strange. Acting too interested would look strange. He’d have to handle it carefully, like everything else, and he hated that even something as simple as a holiday meal could turn into a problem he had to solve.

  000

  Sara ran. She ran as fast as she could, the pitch dark of the woods and the rough ground pulling at her naked feet. She didn’t know how she got here, her head hurt, and she was so cold, so very, very cold. Her last memories had been her stumbling home from a party, just some stupid thing her roommate had dragged her into. She hadn’t wanted to, worn out from the midterms as she was, but Lisa was adamant, telling her that it was just what she needed.

  Those last few moments replayed in her mind in jagged fragments. The argument about staying in, the teasing about being boring, the way she had finally given in because it seemed easier at the time. The words floated back to her in broken pieces that did nothing to help her now, all they were now was a reminder that she had let herself be persuaded when she should have trusted her first instinct and stayed in.

  Then there was nothing. Things got hazy, confusing, terrifying, as she woke up stripped down to her underwear on a mattress under a thin blanket, the icy cold of the woods all around her as she tried to let her eyes adjust to the dark, moonless sky, but it was no use. She hurt all over, from the brush digging into her bare legs, and the rocky, rooty ground digging into her feet. She didn’t know how she got there, but she knew that she couldn't stay, that staying there was death.

  She’d heard sounds, like someone following her, a man, his breathing heavy and hungry, the kind of panting that was more anticipatory, more hungry, than anything else. The memory of that first moment, when she realized she wasn't alone out there, had locked itself into her mind and refused to let go, pushing her into motion before she had time to think about anything except escape.

  So she ran, and ran and ran, and the air dug into her lungs like broken glass with every breath, sharper and more immediate than the numb pain in her legs, her arms, her body. Each step felt like it might be the one that finally sent her collapsing into the dirt, but her muscles kept moving because there was no other choice left to them.

  Her parents had warned her about it, warned her about paying attention to where she went and who was there. Situational awareness, they called it, and she had always thought they were just being paranoid, exaggerating dangers that only happened to other people. Never again. Every careless assumption she had made about her own safety now felt like one more mistake laid on her shoulders.

  The lectures she had half listened to around the dinner table came back now with cruel clarity, every example they had used suddenly sounding less like distant cautionary tales and more like exact descriptions of what she had walked into. She wished she could tell them they had been right, wished she could admit it without the taste of panic in her mouth, but all she could do was keep moving and hope that doing so bought her another minute.

  God, she hurt. She was so cold, her breathing so hard, and the thin silk of her bra and panties did nothing to keep out even an inkling of the chill. It hurt so much, her skin burning in a way she never imagined it could, all over, her chest aching with cramps and her feet crusty with filth and blood.

  She would cry, but she didn’t have the energy for tears. She barely had the energy to stay standing at all, but she did it anyway. Behind her she could hear him, always close, never showing himself, but there all the same, the steady reminder that stopping was not an option.

  The fact that he chose not to close the distance, that he never quite caught up, told her more than any shouted threat could have managed; he wanted this to go on, wanted to stretch out the fear and exhaustion until she had nothing left. She didn’t know why he was doing this, and her throat hurt too much for her to waste the breath to ask why. But this wasn’t just some sex thing, no, this was someone who liked to watch her hurt, and struggle, and fight, and the moment she stopped she knew whoever it was would step out and make her wish she was dead long before killing her. The certainty of that sat in her gut like a stone, heavy and immovable, because she could feel the attention on her back, could feel the way he managed the distance between them with practiced ease. It was not clumsy or improvised. It was controlled, and that terrified her more than anything else.

  So she kept running, kept fleeing, until finally she saw a flicker of light. It was in the distance, so far away, but in the pitch darkness it was a flare of illumination, a single point that gave her something to aim at. Gathering her strength, she started towards it, started running despite the pain in her feet and the fear and the horror clawing at her. She ran, and ran, and ran, until the trees parted and she found herself in a small campground, the sudden shift from blind forest to open space almost disorienting after so long with nothing but shadows and shapes.

  The fire was so hot that it washed over her frigid form, and behind it was a large man, fat, but the kind of fat that had muscle under it. His chubby face was marred with a salt and pepper moustache, and his hair was tight, thinning, and curly. He was dressed like a hunter, a rifle next to him, his clothing a mix of camo and black, and his face carved in surprise as he stared at her. For a second her mind refused to reconcile the terror she had been feeling with the sight of something so mundane; a camp chair, a tent, a fire, and a man who looked more like a weekend outdoorsman than the monster she had been fleeing.

  “Help!” She gasped out, as he rose, and hurried over to her, “Please. Help me! I woke up in the woods and there’s someone out there and I don’t know what they wanna do to me but please you gotta help!” She babbled as she all but tackled him.

  “Calm down, calm down, it’s alright. Nobody is going to hurt you.” The man said, his wheedly voice softly even as he walked her over to the fire. “You’re safe now. Everything is going to be fine.” He said, as he grabbed a blanket for her, and some food from his fire.

  “Warm up and eat something. We’re a long way from civilization, and it looks like you’re almost blue from the cold. We need to warm you up.” he said, gently, as he sat her down. The cloth of the blanket was rough, and the camp chair dug into her thighs, but she didn’t care. The warmth hit her like a firehose. The tin plate of food was so hot and filling, and the broth was so good. The taste reminded her of pork, but more gamey. Right now it was the finest five star cuisine, though. The contrast between the bitter cold she had been running through and the sudden presence of steady heat made her feel lightheaded, as if her body could not decide whether to shake in relief or collapse entirely.

  “Thank you, god, thank you so much…” she all but sobbed, as he put a heavy hand on her shoulder, “Please, we have to go to the police, please…”

  “One thing at a time, my dear. Eat, first, and get warm. Let's see if I can’t find you something to wear, and then we can see about the rest. Okay, Sara?”

  She nodded, her thoughts muddled, as she took another bite, and another, barely tasting the food now that the worst of the shivering had passed. The sound of him rustling around in the tent felt almost domestic, the sort of background noise she might have heard in a normal campsite, on a normal trip, with normal people. For a few heartbeats she let herself cling to that idea, telling herself that once she was warm and dressed they would just start walking and this nightmare would fade into something she could explain later.

  The illusion held only a moment longer before it started to crack. A stray thought rose up through the fog in her head, small and quiet at first, asking a simple question that she tried to ignore. She took another mouthful to smother it, focusing on chewing, swallowing, listening to the fire, anything except that one detail that refused to go away. It came back stronger, demanding attention. She realized that she hadn’t introduced herself. Not once. She had never told him her name.

  Her fingers tightened around the edge of the plate as she sat there, going back over the frantic rush of words she had poured out when she crashed into him. She had begged, she had pleaded, she had talked about waking up in the woods and someone chasing her, but nowhere in that panicked jumble had she given him anything to call her by. Yet he had said her name as if it was nothing. Sara. Casual. Correct.

  Then she noticed that his rifle was gone from where it sat, and the tent had gone silent. The friendly noise of someone searching for clothes had stopped without her registering when. Only the crackle of the fire and her own breathing remained. She felt a presence behind her, a hot, heavy breathing coming from it, close enough now that she could sense it even before she turned.

  The food sat suddenly heavy in her stomach, the taste that had seemed so good a moment ago turning thick and wrong as the pieces began to fall into place. Every bite she had taken felt like it lodged in her throat, and the warmth that had seemed like a blessing a minute ago now felt like something poured over her to keep her still while he decided what to do next.

  The man was standing behind her, with a massive gleaming revolver in one hand, and a radio in the other. His breathing got heavy, and came from around her, her eyes spotting the glimmer of some kind of speaker mounted to the trees. Suddenly, the friendly look on his face became so much more malevolent, and she stumbled out of the chair, scrambling away. The easy concern he had worn like a mask peeled back without effort, revealing something flat and satisfied underneath, the look of someone who had gotten exactly what he wanted and was already planning the next part.

  “Now that you’ve gotten some of the stiffness out, we can really have some fun. It’s not as entertaining if you’re too tired to give a good chase, you know?” The man chuckled, as he raised the pistol. “You need to run away Sara. Or stay here. It makes no difference to me, my dear.”

  The laughter followed her as she stumbled away, running face first into a hanging body just out of sight of the campfire, and found herself staring at the naked, gutted form of her roommate, Lisa, her throat slit as she hung upside down, her flesh peeled back from her legs, muscles strategically cut away, and she suddenly felt a need to vomit up the ‘food’ she’d just been fed. For a heartbeat her mind gave her the mercy of disbelief, insisting that this could not be real, that no part of what she was seeing belonged to the same Lisa who had dragged her out to that stupid party.

  Her mind tried to reject what her eyes showed her, insisting that it had to be a trick, a mannequin, anything that was not Lisa, but the details refused to blur, and every familiar shape and line of her friend’s body nailed the truth in place. The hair, the curve of her shoulders, the small scar on one knee she remembered from a childhood bike crash, all of it made denial impossible. The realization that she had sat there eating while her best friend swung a few steps away nearly broke her, turning every swallow of meat and broth into a betrayal she could never take back.

  “Oh, I do hope you give me a better chase than poor Lisa did!” The man called out as she forced herself to her feet. She couldn’t think about the fact that… that she’d been fed her best friend… she had to run, had to go had to- the crack of the shot caught her in the shoulder. She’d never been shot before, but the agony was unthinkable as she screamed out, tears dripping from her eyes as she forced herself up. Every instinct told her to curl in on the pain, to cradle the wound and stay down, but the knowledge of what stopping meant drove her upright again, even as her arm hung useless and hot blood soaked the blanket that still clung to her.

  “That’s the spirit, Sara! Just keep running! I’m sure you can get away!” The voice jokingly called out to her as she felt something warm and wet run down her legs. She’d thought she’d peed herself, but there was a sharp pain that came with it, from her lower back. She fell again, and the pain was exploding out from her stomach, but she tried to rise a third time. Her body was coming apart by degrees now, every attempt to stand slower than the last, her breath breaking into ragged sobs that barely sounded human to her own ears.

  She stumbled, this time a hot pain erupting from her ankle, and she wasn’t able to get up again. She landed hard on her chest, and she tried to force herself to move. She flipped to her back, to try and scuttle away, as the man seemed to emerge from the shadows, tutting at her disappointingly. The game had reached the part where she could no longer play, and he regarded her with the air of someone whose entertainment had wound down too quickly.

  “I had hoped for better from the both of you.” He sighed, as he pulled a massive knife from his belt. “I’ve been watching you for a while, you both seemed so feisty, so lively. But here you are, laying like a gutted fish and just as empty. Ah well, what can you do?” He seemed to ask nobody, before grabbing her hair, and she felt a sharp sting across her throat, and knew no more. In her last flicker of awareness there was no grand revelation or final understanding, only a hollow, exhausted disbelief that her life had been reduced to this man's evening diversion, and that all the warnings she had ever ignored had led her straight to him.

  Sighing, Brian Irons leaned down and ran a hand down the glossy-eyed body of Sara Phillips, college student at Raccoon U. She was so young, he lamented, barely in the prime of her life. Still, he figured he could make something nice out of her, and to a lesser extent that Lisa girl, who really was just incidental. She shouldn't have walked in while Irons was collecting poor Sara. Ah well, one had to take their pleasures where they could find them, and he'd been under so much stress lately. This would be just the distraction he needed to add to his... collection. After all, he had the whole holiday weekend to enjoy himself. Perks of being the boss, he chuckled to himself as he grabbed what would be his latest masterpiece. He'd need to hang and drain her, first, but he had time. What a nice Thanksgiving this would be.