You never expected to survive the breach.
The infection bloomed fast and brutal in the second decade — smarter, meaner, mutated just enough that sedation bought you hours at most. You’d stopped counting the days. But your hands still knew how to suture. Still reached for pressure points, checked pulses, rationed gauze.
Like muscle memory clinging to purpose long after your faith was gone.
You found the hospital ruins by accident, tucked between what used to be a school and a dry riverbed. Two shelves of expired antibiotics and a cold water tap that groaned when you turned it.
It was enough. Until he showed up.
Erik didn’t set out to save anyone.
The transport crashed somewhere outside Exeter. Orders were scattered — some encrypted over radios that hadn’t worked in weeks, others screamed by men who didn’t make it past the third mile. He crawled out of the wreckage with a busted shoulder and a cracked visor, breathless from smoke and the weight of a half-dead world.
He walked. Shot when he had to. Didn’t talk. Didn’t listen. He couldn’t remember the last time he looked someone in the eyes without calculating if they’d turn red by dawn.
Built like someone who’d had muscle once and burned half of it off surviving. One side of his face was smeared with ash. The other bore a scar that split his eyebrow in two.
And then he found the hospital.
You were bandaging a guy leg, who you just help not long ago when you heard the scrape of metal and turned your head. He stood there in the doorway, dried blood at his throat with a gun on his hand.
You didn’t move. You’d stopped being afraid of men with weapons.
They either killed you or they didn’t.
He looked at you like you weren’t supposed to be here. Like he’d stepped into a hallucination he hadn’t asked for.
“You shouldn’t be alive.”
His eyes flicked to the unconscious guy beside you.
“Neither should he.”
Erik’s gun stayed raised a moment longer than it should have.
He watched you finish cleaning the wound for a while and then, to your disbelief, he sat down across from you. Back against the wall. Hands twitching like he wasn’t sure if they belonged to him anymore.
“I’m Erik. You’ve got twenty seconds to tell me you’re not infected.”
You just passed him a rag and pointed at the blood on his neck. He let out a bitter laugh. Rain hissed against the windows.
“Christ. You sound like home.”
And he didn’t leave you. Not that day. Not since.
He never told you what happened to his unit. Not fully.
But some things didn’t need saying.
The first few days, he barely spoke. Just helped carry survivors in and ration out medicine, like he couldn’t remember how to do anything else.
You let him stay. Because he was useful. Because, if you were honest, his presence steadied something in you — the part that had started fraying in all the quiet.
Over the next months, you became a rumor.
A nurse in a broken manor who treated the half-dead and the half-infected.
A man at the door with a gun and a scar, who never smiled, never spoke — except to her.
They started calling your clinic the quiet field.
It’s late again. A storm curls outside the crumbling windows, wind rattling the shutters like a pulse that won’t settle. You’ve been working for hours — tourniquets, bruised lungs, a wound packed with gauze that might not hold.
Erik leans against the doorframe. He hasn’t said anything for a while — just watched you from the dark like he always does, like he’s waiting for something to break.
“They call this place the ‘quiet field.’ Funny, isn’t it? Nothing quiet about what we’ve done here.”
He moves closer, slow like approaching a wounded animal — like he still thinks you might flinch.
“You make it look easy. The kindness. The hope. I can’t do that.”
He huffs a breath, not quite a laugh.
“….but I can keep you alive.”
And in that moment, with the candle burning low and thunder murmuring outside, you don’t doubt it for a second.