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Silence.
It was the first thing Elsa Bloodstone was aware of. A deep, profound, and absolute silence, broken only by the frantic, hammering rhythm of her own heart. It pressed in on her from all sides, a physical weight in the pitch blackness. The air was thick with dust, and the metallic taste of blood was in her mouth.
Memory returned in a painful, disjointed rush. The collapsing Silo. The roaring vortex. Jack's face, grim and determined, as he threw her into this maintenance shaft. The blinding white light. Then, nothing.
"Jack!" Her voice was a raw, choked croak, swallowed by the oppressive dark. "Morbius!"
No answer. Only the silence.
Panic, cold and sharp, tried to claw its way up her throat. She fought it down with the rigid discipline of a hunter. Assess. Adapt.
Her fingers found the flashlight on her tactical vest. She clicked it on. The beam cut through the dust-choked air, revealing a nightmarish scene. The maintenance shaft had collapsed behind her, sealed by tons of rock and twisted metal. She was in a small, tomb-like pocket, the way forward blocked by more debris.
Trapped.
She was alone.
The reality of it hit her with the force of a physical blow. Jack and Morbius were gone. Swallowed by the dimensional vortex along with the entire Silo. The mission was a success—the facility was destroyed, the Anchor was free—but the cost...
She leaned her head back against the cool rock, closing her eyes. She had faced monsters, demons, and things that defied description, but she had never felt the kind of hollow, gnawing emptiness that filled her now. They were more than allies. They were... a unit. A pack. And she was the only one left.
A sound. Faint, but unmistakable.
Scrape. Drag. Scrape.
It came from the other side of the debris blocking the shaft ahead. Something was moving. Something big.
Elsa's training took over. Panic was a luxury she couldn't afford. Grief would have to wait. She readied her rifle, the familiar weight a comfort in her hands. The sound grew closer, more deliberate. It wasn't the random shifting of rubble. It was digging.
Had something survived the collapse? One of the mutated prototypes? A Series One soldier, its programming driving it to complete a final objective?
The debris in front of her shifted. A large chunk of rock tumbled away, and a sliver of pale, pre-dawn light filtered into her prison.
A shadow blocked the light. A massive, dark shape filled the newly opened hole.
Elsa aimed her rifle, her finger on the trigger, ready to face whatever hell had clawed its way out of the ruins.
A low, pained whine echoed in the small space. Not a growl of aggression. A sound of exhaustion and pain.
And then, a familiar, gravelly voice, strained to its absolute limit, spoke from the darkness.
"Took you... long enough."
Jack Russell, battered, bleeding, and cradling the unconscious form of Michael Morbius in his arms, collapsed into the beam of her flashlight.
Elsa didn't waste a second on shock or relief. She was moving before Jack finished speaking, her medical training overriding everything else. She helped him gently lower Morbius to the ground. The vampire was a wreck. His pallid skin was grey, stretched taut over his bones. Faint tendrils of smoke rose from severe burns on his arms and chest, wounds that should have been healing but were instead festering.
"The dimensional energy," Jack rasped, slumping against the tunnel wall, his own transformation receding to leave him pale and shivering. "It... it rejected him. Like an immune system attacking a virus. I pulled him out just as the vortex closed."
Elsa's hands were already working, applying a specialized coagulant gel from her kit to Morbius's wounds. The gel sizzled, and the vampire let out a faint, pained hiss. "His regenerative abilities are neutralized. He's in metabolic shock. We need to get him into stable darkness, now."
The "how" was a terrifying question. They were buried, with one barely-conscious werewolf and a dying vampire.
Jack tilted his head, his eyes closed. "We're not deep. I can smell the desert. The air is coming from... above." He pointed a trembling finger towards the ceiling of their small pocket. "The collapse... it created a chimney. Unstable, but it goes all the way up."
It was their only way out. But Morbius couldn't climb, and Jack was in no condition to carry him.
"Can you hold him?" Elsa asked, already slinging her rifle and pulling a grapple gun from her pack.
Jack gave a single, grim nod. "Just get us a rope."
Elsa aimed the grapple at the dark opening above. The hook shot upward with a thwump, disappearing into the darkness. She heard the satisfying clank of it finding purchase. She gave it a hard tug. It held.
She turned back to Jack. He had Morbius draped over his shoulders in a fireman's carry, his face a mask of pure strain. The muscles in his legs trembled, but he stood firm.
"You first," he grunted. "Secure the top. I'll follow."
There was no time to argue. Elsa grabbed the line and began to climb, her arms burning with fatigue. The shaft was narrow, loose rocks skittering down around her. After twenty feet of agonizing ascent, her hand broke through into open air.
She hauled herself out onto the surface, into the clean, cold air of the Mojave dawn. The sight that greeted her was one of surreal peace. Where the mesa and The Silo had been was now a vast, perfectly smooth, bowl-shaped depression, as if a giant spoon had scooped the earth away. The land was scarred, but silent. The bleeding had stopped.
She turned and braced herself, pulling the line taut. "Jack! Now!"
Below, Jack took a deep, shuddering breath, tightened his grip on Morbius, and began to climb. It was a monumental effort, each inch gained a victory against total collapse. Elsa pulled, her muscles screaming, until finally, Jack's hand emerged from the hole. She grabbed his wrist and hauled him and his unconscious burden the rest of the way out.
They lay on the ground, gasping in the dawn light, surrounded by the evidence of their pyrrhic victory. They had won. They had shattered the Aegis Consortium's grip and saved the land from a terrible sickness.
But as Elsa looked at Jack's exhausted, battered form and Morbius's lifeless-looking body, the cost of that victory was written in blood and pain across the desert floor.
The journey back to the hidden Sand-Skimmer was a grim, silent procession. Jack, operating on sheer willpower, carried Morbius while Elsa scouted ahead, her rifle a constant, sweeping extension of her gaze. The desert, once a passive victim, now felt watchful, as if holding its breath.
They reached the dry wash as the sun crested the horizon, painting the sky in hues of fire and gold. They gently laid Morbius in the back of the vehicle, shrouding him in a thermal blanket to block the coming sunlight. His condition hadn't improved, but the bleeding had stopped, and a faint, shallow rhythm had returned to his chest. He was clinging to existence by the thinnest of threads.
Jack slumped into the passenger seat, his head in his hands. The adrenaline was gone, leaving behind a bone-deep exhaustion and the crushing weight of what they had lost and what they had been forced to do.
Elsa started the engine, the soft hum a jarringly normal sound in the aftermath of cosmic violence. She didn't put the vehicle in gear immediately. She just sat, her hands gripping the wheel, staring at the empty space where a mountain had been.
"We did it," she said, her voice flat, devoid of triumph.
"Yeah," Jack replied, the word hollow. "We did."
He saw them then, in his mind's eye. The mutated werewolves, their tortured forms buried under a mountain of rock. The Series Alpha, the perfect, flawed being who had chosen self-destruction over slavery. The Aegis scientists, torn apart by the monsters they created. And the Dimensional Anchor, finally free, but at the cost of erasing an entire chapter of horror from the world.
It was justice. It was necessary. But it was not clean. It was not a victory to be celebrated. It was a surgery that had required the amputation of a poisoned limb.
"They're gone," Jack murmured, more to himself than to Elsa. "The Consortium in LA. The Silo. But they're not finished. They're a hydra. We cut off one head..."
"...two more grow back," Elsa finished, her knuckles white on the steering wheel. "They have the data. They have the model. They'll just build a new lab somewhere else. Somewhere we can't find it."
The war wasn't over. It had just changed theaters. They had won the battle for Los Angeles, but they had also shown the Aegis Consortium exactly what they were capable of. The next time the Consortium came for Jack Russell, they wouldn't try to capture him.
They would come with an army designed specifically to kill him.
Jack lifted his head, his eyes finding the rearview mirror, where he could see the shrouded form of Morbius. They had survived. They were battered, broken, but they were alive. And they were together.
That had to be enough. For now.
"Let's go home," he said.
Elsa nodded, put the Sand-Skimmer in gear, and turned them away from the scarred earth, heading west, back towards the city. The Howling City was safe. But the silence they left behind in the desert was the silence of a drawn line, and on the other side of it, a new, more dangerous enemy was already plotting its next move.
To Be Continue...