She rushed toward the man slumped against the corner, so frantic she didn’t even notice the gun slipping from her hand to the floor.
Ivan picked up the weapon.
He didn’t step forward to intrude, only stood quietly behind her, giving Rebecca a moment of peace.
Rebecca laid her hand on the wounded man’s knee.
Seeing how weak he was, her body trembled and would not stop.
“Edward, God, what on earth happened?!” As his awareness was about to sink entirely into darkness, he caught the anxious, caring voice of the “little sister” of his team.
Some inner strength held Edward up long enough to force open eyelids that felt heavy as iron.
“Rebecca, is that you…” His voice was thin as a dying thread, yet it carried the contentment of meeting an old friend, and a last, lingering love for this world.
“I’m sorry…
I have to go on ahead.
You’re a…
strong girl.
Be careful, the forest is crawling with zombies and monsters…” Partings always come so suddenly, so suddenly that people cannot accept them, yet cannot help but accept them all the same…
Rebecca watched Edward’s eyes fall shut.
Her hearing, her sight, all of it went briefly dark.
Only the images of Edward caring for her in the past remained…
They did not spread out gently like ripples.
They were like blocks of red-hot iron, pressed one after another into the softest place in her chest.
Every scene seared a charred mark into her, and every one of them hurt so badly she could barely breathe.
Those marks layered over one another, not a tender echo but a burning, unrelenting pain that refused to fade.
He had taught her military knowledge, taught her how to look after herself better in battle, told her she was gifted, that she picked up everything fast.
Once, during a counter-terror operation, if Edward hadn’t taken a rioter’s bullet for her, Rebecca’s story might well have ended that very day.
These images did not drift past.
They came crashing down, one after another.
Like lead sinking into deep water, soundless, yet slamming a silent roar into the very bottom of her heart.
Each time she recalled them, it felt as if someone had gripped a fistful of shattered glass inside her chest and was slowly twisting, slowly grinding.
After a while the pain became something heavy, weighing in her stomach, choking in her throat, making her want to vomit and to weep all at once, and yet she could do nothing.
Just then, a warm weight settled on her shoulder.
Rebecca turned on instinct and looked up.
Short, uneven hair, a handsome face wearing a grief that matched her own, lit by the train’s lamps, like the last lifeline in this rainy night.
She rose and threw herself into Ivan’s arms, and began to sob, but it was a stifled, restrained kind of weeping.
She had noticed that those zombies, those monsters, were sensitive to sound.
She couldn’t let her own mistake drag Ivan into danger.
Ivan patted her shoulder gently, offering all the support he was capable of in his current state.
The muffled crying slowly faded with the passing minutes.
Rebecca knew she had to pull herself together.
Only then could she fulfill what Edward had entrusted to her, and lead Ivan out of this dangerous place.
She slowly loosened the arms wrapped around Ivan’s waist and eased back out of his embrace.
Her eyes were red, and though the grief still weighed inside her, she clasped her hands behind her back, narrowed her eyes, and put on a smile brimming with youthful energy.
Then she raised a thumb and gave Ivan a big thumbs-up.
That image would stay with Ivan for the rest of his days, impossible to forget.
Whenever it came up, both he and Rebecca would share a knowing smile.
And then, just like today, they would give each other a thumbs-up.
Composed again, Rebecca took the gun Ivan handed back to her, and the two prepared to leave in the same single-file formation as before.
But at that very moment, everything went wrong.
The dead Edward opened his pupil-less eyes and let out a horrifying sound.
“Aaargh!” He struggled up from the floor and, driven by a raw hunger for flesh, began to close in on where Rebecca stood.
From the instant Edward first stirred wrong, Rebecca had already leveled her gun at him.
But facing her former comrade, her hands shook, her lips clamped tight, her eyes blurred with tears, and she simply could not pull the trigger.
She could only watch, helpless, as Edward drew nearer and nearer.
Little by little the rank, foul stench sharpened from faint to overpowering, and Edward’s face grew more and more monstrous.
Rebecca knew that if she didn’t fire now, she would follow Edward into the same fate.
But how could she ever shoot him…
Seeing that Rebecca couldn’t fire, and Edward now only a step away, Ivan yanked her into his arms.
Then he drove a vicious kick straight into Edward’s knee.
“Crack.” With a bone-snapping sound that set the teeth on edge, Edward lost his footing.
Both legs crashed down hard against the floor with a heavy thud.
Ivan was a little baffled.
Were his legs really that quick, that brutal, enough to snap the man’s bone clean through?
But now was clearly not the time to dwell on it.
Knowing Edward had been crippled for the moment, Ivan looked down at Rebecca trembling in his arms, her eyes full of anguish.
He reached for the gun in her hand, and saw her looking up at him through a glaze of tears.
He spoke softly, his voice carrying comfort and a certain steady confidence, as though everything were within his grasp.
“Close your eyes.
Don’t think about anything, don’t do anything.
Leave it all to me.” Swept up by Ivan’s certainty, Rebecca did as she was told.
She closed her eyes obediently, leaning into his embrace, letting him take the weapon from her.
Ivan didn’t hesitate for an instant.
He aimed at Edward’s head and fired.
With a wet spurt, Edward’s shoulder was torn apart.
Rebecca flinched, her hands gripping the hem of Ivan’s clothes.
After silently offering Edward an apology, Ivan reset his stance.
The shot had gone wide, not out of fear, the “Dullness” in his mind had made him numb to fear.
It was simply that he had never received any professional training in shooting before this.
He held his breath, steadied the gun, and leveled it at Edward’s head.
Sensing that his aim, his composure, and his calculations had all reached their best, Ivan pulled the trigger once more.
“Bang!” This time, Edward never rose again.
This elite of the Bravo Team had finally found peace.
Ivan didn’t know who Edward really was, but the way Rebecca had treated him along the way had stayed with him.
Since Rebecca grieved for him this deeply, then by that measure, the man had surely been someone good.
So Ivan freed his left hand and gave Edward a deep, solemn salute.
This very scene was caught by Rebecca, who couldn’t keep her eyes shut and had opened them in his arms.
A different kind of light shimmered in her lovely green eyes.
It was not the bashfulness of a girl’s fluttering heart, nor the relief of surviving a brush with death.
It was the release of someone who had braced herself alone in a hopeless place for far too long, finally able to lay down her armor.
It was the silent gratitude of someone powerless before the dead, watching another finish the mercy she could not bring herself to.
And more than that, on a rainy night hemmed in by zombies and rot, it was the first time she was certain, that the soft and solemn things in human nature had not decayed.
They were, instead, right there beside her.