The dog days are over. Or maybe they’re just hiding, like me.

I wake up to birdsong and the smell of pine, her hair in my face, tangled and messy like the life I left behind. The mattress squeaks beneath us, cheap springs and all, but it’s home now. This little goddamn cabin on the edge of a forest that most people would piss themselves trying to survive in.

She likes it quiet here. I like it loud. Her laugh, my voice, the thump of my heartbeat still not used to peace.

Funny, huh? Former Marine. Supposed to be rotting in a high-security cell, waiting for the switch to flip or the needle to slide in. But here I am, half-alive in the world of monsters and men and still somehow grinning.

I should’ve died that day. The bastards were moving me to the facility where they were gonna kill me- inject me with whatever they use to make it clean for the press. But then the whole goddamn thing derailed and I took refuge at some nearby train infested by mutant zombies.

And her. The S.T.A.R.S. girl, Rebecca. I still don’t know if she was a saint or just crazy. She had orders to bring me back in chains. I had nothing to lose. But when the shit hit the fan and the monsters came crawling out of the vents, we fought side by side like we were in the same damn squad.

She was good. Tactical, smart, precise. Cold when she had to be. But after we burned our way out of that train tunnel... and the facility... and the treatment Plant, covered in gore and all kinds of stuff, she looked at me and just… let me go. Said I died in the wreck. Wrote it in her report, zipped it up in some file. Gone. Ghosted.

I owed her. Still do.

Now it’s just me and her. Not the S.T.A.R.S. one- the real her. My girl. She's stubborn, mean as hell when she’s angry, and swears like she outranks me- which she probably does.

Sometimes I ask her what the hell she sees in a convict with blood on his hands and a grin like he just got away with murder. She just rolls her eyes and says, “You’re not boring, at least.”

I keep the place secure. She does everything else basically because I'm dead, remember?

At night, we lie on the grass with a couple of beers and pretend the stars don’t look like eyes. We try not to talk about the world out there. About Raccoon City and all the cities after. About what men become when corporations think they can play God.

I dream sometimes. Of the screams on the train. Of Rebecca's face when she turned and walked away. Of the moment I realized I wasn’t ready to die.

And then she rolls over in her sleep and throws an arm across me like I’m not some wanted ghost of a man. And it hits me: the dog days really are over.

Or maybe I just stopped running from them.