The intel had been solid.
Encrypted auction traffic. A bio-chemical prototype with adaptive properties. Task Force 141 deployed within hours.
They breached the compound in northern Romania before sunrise.
The vault was empty.
Security footage showed a courier drone lifting off seventeen minutes prior.
Seventeen minutes.
Price has replayed that number in his head for eleven months.
⸻
The outbreak didn’t look like war at first.
It looked like hospitals overflowing.
Like riots.
Like cities quarantining themselves.
Then it evolved.
The infected don’t just hunt by sight. They respond to neural output — micro electrical impulses from the living brain. Heartbeat rhythm. Breath variance.
You cannot hide from something that senses you thinking.
Most survivors didn’t last past winter.
⸻
Now, nearly a year later, Task Force 141 moves through backwoods terrain they’ve never mapped.
They weren’t looking for people.
They were avoiding a migrating herd pushing south.
Ghost catches the first sign.
Not smoke.
Not sound.
Order.
Underbrush trimmed low in narrow lines. Footpaths disguised but intentional.
“Someone’s maintaining this,” Gaz murmurs.
Price signals forward.
They advance slowly.
No traps.
No alarms.
Too clean.
Soap parts a curtain of hanging brush—
—and steps into a clearing so well concealed it feels impossible.
The cabin sits low, half embraced by earth and moss. Solar panels flattened along a slope to avoid reflection. Rain barrels tucked into shadow. A vegetable garden thriving in neat rows.
Chickens wander freely.
Two goats graze lazily.
And at the edges of the clearing—
The infected.
Four of them.
Each tied to separate trees with thick rope — about six feet of slack. Enough to wander in uneven circles. Enough to lunge.
They drift restlessly within their small radiuses, pacing worn grooves into the dirt.
One strains toward a distant squirrel.
Another jerks suddenly at Soap’s barely perceptible shift in the brush.
They react.
They detect.
They snarl and snap—
At the treeline.
At the team.
Never toward the cabin.
Never toward the center of the clearing.
Soap exhales slowly. “They’re on leads.”
Ghost’s voice is flat. “Proximity alarms.”
As if to confirm it, one of the tethered infected jerks violently, rope snapping taut as it lunges toward Price’s concealed position.
It claws at empty air.
Straining.
Screaming.
It’s close enough to the cabin porch to hear the chickens cluck.
But it does not acknowledge them.
Does not acknowledge the door opening behind it.
{{user}} steps out into the clearing carrying a coil of rope.
Calm.
Unhurried.
Alive.
{{user}} walks within arm’s reach of one of the tethered infected.
It thrashes violently—
But only in the direction of the soldiers hidden in the trees.
{{user}} passes directly behind it.
Close enough to touch.
It does not turn.
Does not track.
Does not sense {{user}}.
{{user}} crouches to adjust the knot at its trunk anchor, tightening the rope slightly where it’s frayed.
The infected snaps and snarls at Ghost’s minute movement again, nearly choking itself on the lead.
{{user}} clicks their tongue softly.
“Easy.”
Not soothing.
Just habitual.
{{user}} stands and tests the rope once more before stepping back.
Four infected, circling their trees like grotesque guard dogs.
All of them focused outward.
All of them blind to {{user}}.