“Gd to know you’re friendly, but I think you’ve got bigger problems right now.” I said in my gruff, hoarse voice, unused for most of the st three years. It was always rough getting used to speaking again after so long in seclusion. Seemingly satisfied that she wasn’t going to have to immediately fight her rescuer, the woman ceased her frantic struggling and y quite still while I methodically unraveled her.

  When I finally pulled away the st of the parachute, we each got a good look at the other. She was stunningly pretty; her blue eyes were the color of a deep pool, her hair was auburn and cut short, messy from the flight helmet she had managed to knock off in her struggle. Her flight suit did little to hide her form; I could easily make out the soft curve of her full, womanly ass and the stiff bumps of the nipples capping her generous breasts, even through the jumpsuit and likely a shirt and bra. It was seriously cold in the mountains this time of year.

  I helped her to her feet to find that she, like most people, stood slightly shorter than my five-foot ten-inches. I had at least a couple inches on her, and she gave me an appraising, shocked sort of look that quickly morphed into fear. I could probably guess why. I was sure I looked like some sort of monster with my scraggly beard and unkempt hair.

  “Are… are you immune?” She asked me. My brow furrowed. What kind of a question was that? She asked the same question again, backing away from me.

  “Immune to what?” I asked. Her mouth hung open for so long, I was forced to point at the column of smoke rising from her downed aircraft to snap her out of it. “Do we need to tend to that?”

  “Fuck, yes. I need to retrieve the bckbox. You might as well come with me, now. We’ve already been too close for you to not get infected. If you’re extremely lucky, this might be the best day of your life.”

  I raised my eyebrows incredulously, and she blushed at the reaction. “Not like that. Ew.” Then she csped her hands over her mouth. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean that, I just… you… You look like you haven’t showered in days.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t have a shower at my pce. Look, I left my gear over at the supermarket, so I need to grab that before we go running out to the crash site.” My tone was, perhaps, a bit harsher than the situation called for. She politely ignored it, and motioned for me to lead the way, so I turned to do just that. A hiss of pain turned me back around, and I saw her heavily favoring one ankle. She returned my look of concern with one of fiery pride, and pressed her weight down on the injured joint, gritting her teeth with the pain but continuing to walk forward.

  I rolled my eyes and moved in front of her. “You’re not going to be able to keep up on that.” I pointed at her ankle. She gred at me without responding, and I sighed before turning to walk on. When she tried to put weight on her injured ankle, however, she gasped in pain and nearly colpsed. Despite the incredible pain she was in, she managed one gnce of deepest loathing before relenting.

  “Fine. I’ll wait, but you better have a look in the store and see if there are any painkillers left.” She grumbled before swiping the snow off the top of a rge rock and settling herself onto it.

  Once she was down, I started towards the supermarket’s parking lot. Painkillers. I was sure I could get some, but the almost mummified hand that was waiting inside the store gave me pause. I wouldn’t have to go by it though. It was to the left of the entry, and I knew the painkillers would be to the right with the rest of the medications.

  At the front doors again, I paused. Clearly, something was seriously wrong. A dead body in the supermarket, all the abandoned cars in the parking lot, and a fucking pne crashing right outside town had brought nobody out into the streets to gawk. She asked if I was “immune.” Had some sort of disease infected the entire town? Was that why the military was here? Whatever this “Lazarus” that she joined was, it certainly didn’t sound like it was harmless.

  Shaking the thoughts off for now, I pressed my fingers into the gap between the sliding doors and pulled. They slid to the side with minimal effort; they weren’t locked. I pulled a fshlight from my backpack and slid inside. I tried to keep my eyes to the right, away from where I knew the body to be ying. It was pointless, however. Immediately to the right, just out of sight of the front door, there was another body.

  From the clothes, I would guess it was male. The skin, where it remained, looked like it had been shrink-wrapped to the bones. Large sections of white bone fshed under my light. I finally wrenched my eyes from the sight of him, and controlled myself long enough to get to the little pharmacy shelf. I saw two more bodies on the way there, and forced myself to ignore them. I felt sickness and anxiety flooding my core, and I moved quickly to get through the store before I lost my breakfast.

  I packed my pockets with as many different painkillers and first aid supplies as I could. My pack had a basic kit in it, but these extras could come in handy before long, if my instincts were to be trusted. I also grabbed a pair of crutches before I hurried back out of the store, not even gncing at the floor as I gave the dead man a wide berth. As soon as I made it to the parking lot, I violently vomited.

  I wiped my mouth on the tail of my shirt, then packed the first aid supplies into my bag and shouldered it before heading back to the pilot by the ke. I offered her the painkillers, which she gratefully accepted along with the water from my backpack. She dumped a handful of them into her palm and tossed them all into her mouth, swallowing with two rge gulps of water.

  I knelt beside her in the snow and began uncing her left boot. She hissed in pain again, but otherwise didn’t comment. Pulling the boot off was the most difficult, but she was made of stern stuff. Certainly sterner than me; I absolutely did NOT have a high pain tolerance. I slipped her sock off next and examined the ankle. It was swollen but, despite the pained grunts issuing from her lips, it had its full range of motion. I didn’t think it was broken.

  I took a long ace bandage from the supplies I’d looted and used it to wrap her up before pulling her sock back on and trying my best to gently push her foot back into her boot. Eventually she gave up at my meek attempts, and grabbed the boot from me. She shoved her foot back in and swore loudly before looking daggers at me.

  “Don’t be such a fucking pansy.” She snapped.

  “I was trying not to hurt you.” I responded, defensive, and her face visibly softened.

  “I’m sorry. Thank you, but I’m not made of gss. They made sure of that in boot camp.”

  I nodded and handed her the crutches before helping her up. Once we had them adjusted to her height, and the painkillers started kicking in, we made our way up onto the main street and through town, towards the smoke still filling the air.

  “The bckbox is designed to survive a crash.” She said absentmindedly as we walked. “As long as the fuel tanks didn’t rupture, which we would probably have seen by now, the fire shouldn’t get hot enough to damage it.”

  We continued in retive silence for a while; the huffing of our breathing and the sound of the crutches were the only noises in the ghost town. When we had walked as far down the road as was prudent to make good time to the crash, we turned off and started crossing the field that it had gone down in.

  “We’re lucky it dove so rapidly after I bailed out.” She remarked. “If it had gone straight on out, it could have flown much, much further before finally coming down.”

  “Why did it crash?”

  “Most likely? Because that bitch Kendra didn’t repce the fuel injector like I told her to.” She sighed heavily. “Not that we had one to repce it with.” We walked in silence for another few beats before she spoke again.

  “What’s your name?” She asked, looking over at me. “I don’t think we formally exchanged them.”

  “I’m Solomon. Solomon Vine. You?”

  “Captain Rosalie Winters.”

  “What’s Lazarus?” Rosalie stopped walking at this question. I stopped too, turning back to look at her. “What?”

  “How do you not know what Lazarus is?” She asked in a whisper. “Have you been living under a rock?”

  “I’ve been living up a rock.” I joked, pointing up the mountain, into the treeline.

  “Seriously? You don’t know what’s going on? You look like… this… all the time?” She gestured at my rumpled appearance and I felt the heat rise to my cheeks.

  “Like I said, I don’t have a shower at my pce. Or any running water, in fact. It’s a trapper’s cabin up the mountain from here. I can only stand to scrub myself outside in the cold so many times a month, and I haven't had the funds or the time to get plumbing installed yet.” I grumbled, quickly losing my appetite for this conversation.

  This time Rosalie blushed and muttered an apology before trying to brush past it. “We’ll talk about it ter. We need to get that box as quickly as possible.” She set off in a determined limp, and I followed behind her.

  When we got closer, it became apparent that the aircraft was not on fire at all. The smoke was rising from a shrub nearby that seemed to have been set on fire by one of the engines before it went out completely. The nose of the pne was buried completely under a huge snowdrift, the consequence of it plowing into the earth and sliding for several hundred feet.

  We approached the front of the pne and Rosalie said, “It’s going to be down in the cockpit. I don’t suppose you have a shovel in that thing?” She motioned at my bag. I grinned, shrugged off the pack, and produced a folding trench shovel that my great grandfather brought back from World War 1. Rosalie watched in awe as the ancient tool emerged. Despite being well over a hundred years old at this point, I had kept it in immacute condition since my grandfather handed it down to me.

  It unfolded with a heavy snap as the pins locked into pce, and then began digging. Even with the advantage of a shovel, it took the better part of half an hour to remove enough snow to reach the cockpit. The canopy and seat were missing from her ejection, and the interior had filled with snow. I dug in the area she indicated, and soon came up with a smallish bck box, which had a handle on the end next to a fshing green light and an antenna.

  “Thank God!” Rosalie excimed as I handed it to her. “Finally, some luck! They’ll be able to track us with this, but we should start moving away from here. If it’s on the move, it will be obvious that the wreckage was found. Hopefully that will put a fire under someone’s ass to recover us.”

  At that precise moment, a low growl sounded from the other side of the jet. We both froze, and heavy footfalls crunched the snow as a bck bear emerged from behind the aircraft. It looked at us and growled again, standing up on its hind legs. It was at least six and a half, maybe seven feet, tall and had to weigh at least five hundred pounds. It roared a challenge at us, the bone-chilling sound rattling my ribs inside my body.

  Rosalie backed away slowly on one crutch. She had dropped the other to reach down and pull out her sidearm. In a near-blind panic, I dove for my pack, ying in the snow where I’d dropped it. I shoved my hand all the way to the bottom and fumbled around for the canister of bear spray I kept in there. She pointed the pistol at the bear, and pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  The chambered round failed to fire, and Rosalie swore as the bear dropped down to all fours to charge her. She fumbled with her weapon, trying to clear the offending round before the bear could reach her. Her sudden terror was making her hands shake, and she actually dropped the weapon while trying to fix the jam.

  I yanked the bear spray from my pack and, with my heart in my throat and adrenaline coursing through my veins, threw myself between the two of them, letting loose with a long stream of the chemical irritants. The bear roared again, this time in agony, as I got it right in the eyes. It slid to a stop, pawing at its face. It shed out with one massive paw, and I had to push Rosalie over to get us far enough away to avoid getting mauled. It snapped its jaws, and I hit it again with the spray, catching its nose and mouth this time. Finally, deciding that they were more trouble than they were worth, the bear turned and lumbered off, heading for the tree line.

  When my breathing had returned to normal, and I was sure I wasn't going to piss myself, I slowly got back to my feet and helped Rosalie up onto her one crutch. I retrieved the dropped firearm and gave it to her before retrieving her other crutch as well. She looked visibly shaken, still trembling as she holstered her weapon, her eyes as wide as they could go.

  “What the fuck was that?” Rosalie asked in a whisper.

  “It was a bear.” I responded unhelpfully. I had the bizarre desire to burst out ughing, but I contained it in favor of shocked numbness.

  “Aren’t they supposed to be, like, hibernating or something?”

  I actually ughed, then. Not the full-bellied howling that the adrenaline demanded, but a low, mirthless chuckle that reflected how close we had just come to dying. “I’m pretty sure a crashing jet can wake even the deepest sleepers. I doubt we’ll be seeing from that one again though. They really fucking hate this stuff.” I wiggled the can of bear spray at her.

  “Let’s get out of here, please.” Rosalie said firmly, but with obvious discomfort at how close she’d come to being a snack. “We’ve got enough fucking problems with this virus; we don’t need to add any more wild animals to the list.”