Chapter Text
Ontario, Canada
The company had not been prepared, equipment-wise, for a vertical extraction. They’d been mobilized quickly, supplies thrown together from a basic list that had either not included climbing equipment or been half-read by someone in a great hurry. It had been a call from someone claiming to be a lab assistant from the World Health Organization--something you didn’t overlook in the darkest hour of a pathogenic outbreak even if the man on the other end of the line hadn’t dropped some very heavy names.
The caller said that the owners of those names were all barricaded in a hotel that, to his knowledge, had no infected victims inside. But two weeks was more than enough time for someone to fuck up.
“I’m getting heat signatures from every floor, Commander,” Mikasa reported grimly from her position on the roof of vehicle three. They were lined up on the far side of the street, four humvees idling in a row like heavily armed ducklings. “They’re not putting off enough heat to be living humans.”
“How many signatures?” Erwin asked. They had a thermal imaging camera in humvee one as well, but they were using them one at a time on rotation to maximize their battery life and Erwin was keeping an eye on the road ahead of them as well as the hotel across the street.
“Fifty to a hundred on most floors,” Mikasa reported. “More on the first floor. It’s difficult to count them.”
“Have you spotted anything living?” Erwin asked.
There was a pause, presumably while Mikasa scanned the floors more closely. Then, “Negative, but we would have to circle the building to be sure.”
“Turn the camera off until we stop again.” Erwin ducked back into the vehicle and motioned to Mike to start driving. “Slowly,” he said. “We have several hours until sunset.”
The atmosphere in humvee one darkened by degrees as, one by one, they checked each side of the building, making a full circuit of the block and turning up nothing more promising than a good deal of exceedingly active dead folks.
“Drive around one or two more times,” Erwin instructed. “Then we’ll have to regroup.” He was not willing to send anyone in there, not even a small team, on the off-chance that someone was still alive. The risks were too great in the face of such a significant unknown no matter how far they had come.
“This has been happening too often,” Nanaba said, climbing out of the back to settle between Mike and Erwin with their rifle ready. “Overland travel just isn’t practical anymore. Not when situations can change this quickly. We’re wasting all our resources on hopeless missions.”
Nanaba was correct, of course. Erwin had made several successful extractions in the beginning before the situation tipped in favor of the dead, when the living were still scattered among them in equal number, still fighting. By the look of things when they passed through Connecticut and New York, there hadn’t been any fighting on the east coast for a long time.
“This will likely be one of our last,” Erwin told them. “At least this far inland and in this manner.” There had been talk of following railway lines as far as they could, eliminating the amount of time they spent towing stalled vehicles out of their way, but the routes were haphazard and the tracks didn’t always lay over flat, dry land. Obtaining an actual train was an option, but that presented its own unique set of challenges.
“Wait, hold this position,” Erwin said suddenly, his thought processes halting with the sudden shock of hopeful anticipation. Mike pulled to a stop, staring at Erwin quizzically.
The commander stood up again, skirting around Nanaba and putting his head back through the open hatch on the humvee’s roof, squinting at the sixth-storey window where he thought he’d seen some purposeful motion behind the gleaming reflection in the glass. “Mikasa,” he said. “Point your thermal camera at the sixth floor, closer to the right side of the building and tell me again what you see.” As he spoke, he counted windows quickly, arriving at the one he wanted and adding, “Eighth from the right.”
“What is it?” Nanaba asked impatiently from below, looking like they were a couple seconds away from standing up and joining Erwin on the roof.
“I’m not sure. It might be nothing.”
Nanaba frowned up at him, but Erwin didn’t see it. He was frozen in place, all of his attention focused intently on that one tiny window like a cat that had spotted a lizard.
“Commander--” But Mikasa didn’t get to finish her sentence. A heavy-looking wooden chair leg had just punched through the glass for all of them to see, raining twinkling shards onto the sidewalk below.
“It’s a living human,” Mikasa confirmed, her vocal pitch as even as it had ever been. She recovered quickly from things like this, and Erwin figured it had less to do with having seen a lot of strange shit and more in line with her prevailing personality. He appreciated that about her, whatever it was.
As they watched, the chair leg paused in its position in the window, then slowly withdrew, its wielder likely struggling with the weight. A hand shot out, using a three-ring binder to knock the jagged remnants of the window from its frame, then a head followed, hands resting on the sill so the figure could lean out and call to them in a vaguely German accent. “The windows here are remarkably shitty for such a high-end hotel. What use is a locking mechanism when you’ve painted the window shut anyhow?” The voice barely carried across the street, but it was discernable.
Erwin, who was also accustomed to some strange situations, barely blinked. “Are you alone?” he asked just as quietly.
“In this room, yes. Though I’m not sure about the rest of the building. Did you come in response to our distress call? I had no idea that Moblit had gotten through. Is he with you?”
Erwin hesitated, wondering if perhaps he should wait until later to get into this. “We went first to the coffee shop where the call originated,” Erwin said finally. “No one was there.” No one living, anyway. Erwin hadn’t known that the caller’s name had been Moblit, much less what he looked like. He may have been among them and he may not have been.
The doctor seemed to understand this perfectly well. “I see,” she said, almost too quietly to hear. She didn’t seem like she planned to say anything else about it, but then she spoke up again suddenly. “He was my lab assistant. There were a lot of us at the time and we needed more water than we had. He and a couple others thought they could make it down the street to the coffee shop and back if they hurried.” The doctor snorted. “I was hoping he’d just gotten hung up.”
“I’m sorry.”
The scientist waved it off. “Who did he call?” she asked, looking down at them curiously. “You look pretty legit.”
“My name is Commander Erwin Smith with Special Forces. United States,” he added when he realized that any number of militaries could want to rescue a handful of WHO scientists these days.
“There’s still a United States?” the young woman asked. “Well that’s a relief. I don’t think there’s a Canada anymore and somebody’s got to represent North America. From the sound of those first broadcasts, Mexico sure as hell isn’t going to be around to do it.”
Mexico City had been one of the first hot zones in North America, one of several epicenters that would follow. It happened so early and so quickly that firebombs were never dropped on the city to slow the spread. By the time the rest of North America found out about it, the infection had already spread wider than any weapon could reach.
“What’s your name?” Erwin asked.
“Oh, right. Sorry. I haven’t talked to another living person in two weeks so I was a little excited about it. Romeros are terrible conversationalists, aren’t they? That’s what I’ve been calling them. Romeros.” They laughed at their own joke. “I’m Doctor Hanji Zoe with The WHO.”
Erwin let out a harsh breath through his nose. They’d been given a prioritized list of names based on each scientist’s skill set in the event they had to make evacuation decisions based on professional value and Hanji’s name was right at the top. At the risk of counting unhatched chickens, at least their primary objective was safe and accounted for. “You don’t know what happened to the other doctors?” He asked.
“Yeah, of course I do. We were all in the same conference room, so I saw most of them get swarmed. I don’t know what happened to the rest. My guess is they were eaten.”
Erwin filed that away to revisit once Hanji was safely inside of their vehicle. “Are you secure in your current position? Have you been bitten?”
The doctor glanced back over her shoulder and shrugged. “The door is barricaded, but there wasn’t much to put in front of it that I could drag by myself. I also believe that the Romeros heard my attempts to get your attention, but I haven’t been bitten yet.”
Erwin mentally skimmed through their options, dismayed to find that they were few in number. They had rope, but no climbing gear, which Erwin would be addressing with all involved parties, including himself, if he made it to the debriefing. “Is there anything up there we could secure the end of a rope to?”
Hanji disappeared from the window for a long time, presumably studying the room. “Of all the rooms I chose to duck into, it had to be the break room,” they finally reported back. Though I guess I shouldn’t complain. The vending machine is probably the reason why I’m still alive. I might have lived without food for two weeks, but I’d have died of dehydration. Still, there’s nothing to tie off to. Maybe the faucet.”
“Is there anything else? The handle on a refrigerator door?”
“Ooh, good one,” Nanaba added unhelpfully. “Very creative, Commander.”
But Hanji was shaking her head. “It’s a mini-fridge.”
“What about the vending machine?”
“What part of the vending machine?” The doctor asked doubtfully.
“She could jump,” Nanaba suggested. “We have several tarps. We could do the fireman thing.”
Erwin had specifically not wanted to touch that option. He’d been looking for a way around it since they started going over potential places for a rope, but as his eyes flitting rapidly over their blueprint of the building he was gradually coming to the conclusion that Hanji Zoe was going to have to jump from a sixth storey window.
“Nanaba, come up here and cover the street ahead of us.” Erwin passed the other blonde as he swung back into the vehicle, reaching for the radio on their dashboard to contact the other humvees. “Sasha,” he radioed to humvee four. “Cover our rear. Auruo, Gunther, Eld, Mike, outside with me. Everyone else, hold.” Erwin cracked the humvee door open and moved closer so he could talk to Hanji in the meantime without speaking quite so loudly. In the strange, post-apocalyptic silence, their voices carried much farther now than they once had, but it was risky to raise them too high. His eyes slid back up the sheer brick wall, where Hanji had just swung one leg over the sill so she could sit while they got their shit together down below.
"How well is your barricade holding, doctor?" He called up.
Hanji made an indistinct sound and looked down at them without any immediate sign of panic on her face. Erwin hoped that continued. If so, this assignment was going to be exponentially easier for everyone. "It's holding for now,” she said. “If you take too much longer, though, I'll be jumping whether you're ready for me or not."
The doctor meant that too. The way her eyes measured the distance between the window and the ground said so. "Do you have anything to defend yourself with?" Erwin asked her.
"A specimen case. But I would jump before I hit anything with it."
Erwin's forehead crinkled at that, but he was a professional. He looked to Eld as he appeared at his shoulder and sighed, nodding slightly. "Get the tarp."
"Yes!" Nanaba hissed quietly from their lookout post. “I’ve always wanted to do this,” they said gleefully as the larger members of their company gathered beneath the window with one of their all-weather camouflage tarps and Mike chuckled somewhat darkly. “Well, I’m not doing this, but I fully intend to spare a glance in your direction when the doctor jumps.”
“Eyes on target,” Erwin reminded them, though it was unnecessary. When he looked back, Nanaba’s eye was dutifully pressed to the scope.
“Is she going to jump?” Eld asked, offering the tarp in his hands to Erwin. It seemed a lot more flimsy now that they planned to catch a living human in it. It was a lot like one of those egg-drop experiments that science classes and summer camps liked to do, except they hadn’t been provided with any bubble wrap.
“I prefer genderless pronouns, if you don’t mind,” Hanji called back down, apparently unconcerned with their current status as the egg in that egg-drop exercise. “Unless you think you can use both male and female pronouns with fairly even regularity. Most people can’t. Their natural tendency is to want to settle on one or the other--”
Hanji continued speaking, but Erwin was more concerned with the ravenous corpses banging down their door than he was with the detailed reasoning behind their choice of gender pronouns. That was roadtrip conversation, not something that needed to be hashed out in the middle of a problematic rescue attempt. The men gathering beneath the window didn’t even seem certain as to how taut they should be holding the tarp. Erwin didn’t say anything to the scientist about their priorities, though, figuring Hanji for a nervous talker. Or some kind of talker. They seemed a little bit thrilled with the entire situation, like it was all a rush, so perhaps it was excitement rather than nerves.
“It would be safer for you if you left the case,” Erwin told them as they pulled a large container from the floor and set it in their lap, swinging their other leg over in preparation to jump. It wasn’t a small item, and looked perfectly capable of doing serious damage if if hit Hanji in the head on the way down.
But the doctor shook their head, chestnut ponytail snapping against the sides of their head. “I would rather leave my legs,” they declared. “My only Romero specimens are in here. I managed to get some saliva from one of the other scientists both before and after they made the transformation. How often do you get that opportunity?”
Eld and Gunther glanced at each other subtly from opposite sides of the tarp, their eyebrows pinched together in the universal acknowledgement of another person’s strangeness.
“Hold the case as close to your chest as you can, then, and try to land on your back,” Erwin instructed as Hanji nodded, their eyes wide as they processed the information. The frenzied commotion going on just outside Hanji’s door was clearly audible, even from the ground below their window. It didn’t sound like that door would be holding for very much longer.
“I’ve got some dead-ass motherfuckers approaching from the front,” Nanaba announced over the radio rather than calling to them. “I repeat. Ten to a dozen dead-ass motherfuckers.”
“Hold your fire until you can’t put it off any longer,” Erwin sent back, feeling Auruo tighten his grip on the tarp beside him as he added, “Jump when you’re ready, doctor.”
He caught the look on Hanji’s face--sick and thrilled and eager and hesitant all at once, their arms wrapped tightly around their precious specimens as though they were the last important thing on Earth. They shot a look over their shoulder towards the break room door, shoving their glasses a little farther up their nose. Erwin had a couple of seconds to realize that he probably should have told them to take those glasses off and put them in their specimen case, but it was too late to say anything. Hanji had already jumped.