Nostalgia
There’s this memory Pike has. It’s from before Jackson.
She was threading her way through a forest in Montana. It was early, cold but clear. She had no trail, just the sun and a rusting compass and a map that had been folded and refolded so many times it looked like graph paper. Her ankle was sore from a misstep the day before—she had been careless in tracking the blood of a whitetail doe. But her stomach was no longer hollow and she had another hide for winter; fair trade in her mind.
She emerged into a clearing.
With a sigh, she sat down with her back to the tree line. She looked up at the clouds and let her mind wander.
She was so lost in her thoughts that she didn’t realize that someone had walked past her.
Pike’s intestines coiled tight as her blood frosted over. She slowly turned her head to look. Whoever it was—they hadn’t made a sound. But they had been within arm’s reach of her.
Standing twenty steps away from her, in the shade of a pine, was an infected.
It was looking at her.
She didn’t move.
It was grey and scaly and naked; its clothes had fallen from it years ago. Its head was heavy with horns of coral and plates of bone. A single eye bored out from the depths of that great mass, wide and unblinking and terrible. Its breath misted between teeth like broken porcelain.
It was looking at her.
Pike forgot to blink. She wanted to reach for her gun, but at this angle the holster was pinned between her and a rock. Her pack was out of arm’s reach. She stopped breathing. She began to move… slowly. So slowly.
Its eye narrowed.
Pike stopped.
It inhaled—and Pike steeled herself, awaits the scream to summon the horde that will twist her joints apart and pull the limbs from her body—but instead it heaved a great sigh, dissipating like steam into the morning air.
And as soon as it appeared, it turned and quietly walked away into the forest.
Pike covered the most ground in a day she ever had, after that. She didn’t sleep that night, either. Just had her gun in her lap and stared into the darkness and waited.
She never told anyone this story. No one would believe her.