Chapter 6.

~Christian~

The service road narrowed between a drainage ditch and a row of abandoned cars. I signaled for the convoy to slow. No one spoke. Even the radio seemed to have gone quiet after the voice said Elsa’s name.

“You recognize the voice?” I asked.

“No.” Elsa held the report against her chest. Her fingers had gone white around the paper. “But it knew my surname.”

I wanted to tell her I’d keep her safe. The words would have been easy, and useless. “We’ll treat it as an unverified transmission. We don’t split up, and we don’t follow a voice off the road.”

She let out a careful breath. “Good.”

The first sign of the checkpoint was a line of dark marks across the asphalt. They were gouges, deep enough to catch the light from our headlights. The marks ended at an overturned military vehicle. Its doors hung open. No bodies. No movement.

Elliot raised a fist. The convoy stopped. Two soldiers moved to secure the perimeter while Sara and I assessed the overturned vehicle from a distance. Elsa remained beside the following vehicle, watching the road and the surrounding tree line.

“Anything?” I called.

“Not enough to identify what made those marks,” she said. “They could be from equipment or an impact. Don’t call them claw marks just because that’s what you’re expecting.”

She was right. I hated that the distinction mattered and was grateful she made it anyway.

We moved forward in pairs. At the checkpoint, one barricade had been pushed aside. A dark smear ran from its metal edge toward the roadside, then stopped where the pavement broke into gravel. I kept my eyes on the windows and the tree line. The stillness felt wrong, but wrong wasn’t evidence.

Sara found a bloodied ID badge near the guard post and went pale. I motioned for her to stay back. She pointed to the name. “That’s one of the ambulance crew.”

Elsa came closer, then halted at the line of red on the badge. Her shoulders locked. She closed her eyes for one second, breathed in through her nose, and opened them again. “Don’t pick it up bare-handed. Photograph it where it is. We can decide what to do after we know who it belongs to.”

I took the photo. She did not look away from the badge, but she didn’t force herself closer either. When she asked Sara to describe the name, Sara did. Elsa wrote it down with a shaking hand and kept going.

That was courage. Not the absence of fear. The decision about what to do while it was there.

A tapping sound came from the ambulance parked near the east gate. Three knocks, a pause, then two more. The soldiers raised their weapons.

“Hold,” I said. “No one fires unless there’s an immediate threat.”

Sara moved to my side. “I know that vehicle. It was the second transport.”

Elsa stayed behind the soldiers. “If someone is inside, we need to know whether they’re injured and whether opening the doors could expose us.”

I looked to Sara. She gave a small nod. We approached slowly, calling out. The tapping stopped. The rear doors were secured from the outside with a length of chain. There was no seal or transfer tag.

“Someone wanted the doors kept shut,” Elliot said.

“Or wanted whoever was inside kept there,” Elsa replied.

I cut the chain while Sara and a soldier held the doors. The smell hit first, metal and dust and something sour. Sara covered her mouth. I saw no one on the floor. Then a man shifted behind the bench, raising both hands. He wore a torn checkpoint uniform, one sleeve dark with dried blood.

“Don’t come closer,” he rasped. “They’re still outside.”

Sara recognized him. “Mikael? Where’s the rest of the crew?”

“Gone. I don’t know if they’re dead.” His eyes moved over us and stopped at Elsa. “You brought her.”

I stepped between them, but Elsa spoke before I could. “Who told you my name?”

He dug into the inside pocket of his uniform and pulled out a sealed evidence sleeve. “This was in the cab. I was told to get it to the hospital. The officer who gave it to me said it belonged to Dr. Harper.”

Elsa didn’t reach for it. “My father?”

“I don’t know. I just know that name was on the instructions.” He held the sleeve out, his hand trembling. Inside was a torn strip of a printed page. At the top, barely legible through the plastic, were the words: HARPER, FIELD OBSERVATION, EASTERN SITE.

Elsa stared at it. “That could mean anything.”

“Yes,” I said. “It could.” I kept my eyes on the sleeve, not her. “We document it here. No one opens it until Decker or another qualified person clears the handling plan.”

She looked at me, and something in her expression softened. Not trust, not yet. But she saw that I was listening.

Mikael tried to stand. His knees folded. Sara caught his shoulder before he hit the floor, then guided him onto the bench without letting his sleeve touch the bloody one. Elsa asked the questions she could: when the crew disappeared, whether anyone had been bitten, whether he had touched the page. He answered in broken pieces. He had heard a noise outside, seen movement near the gate, and then found himself alone. He didn’t know what the marks on the road meant. He didn’t know whether the people who vanished were infected.

The answers were not enough. The evidence was not enough. But Mikael was alive, and the convoy had found the second transport.

A distant crash rolled across the checkpoint. Everyone turned toward the tree line. Something moved between the trunks, too low and too fast for me to identify. The soldiers lifted their weapons.

Elsa’s hand closed around the edge of my vest, not to stop me, only to steady herself. I covered her hand with mine for one brief second. She looked down at our joined fingers, then met my eyes. Neither of us pretended it meant more than it did.

“Back to the vehicles,” I said. “Now.”

As we pulled away, Mikael gripped the seat and looked at Elsa. “There was another message in the cab,” he said. “The one who left the page said if you saw it, you’d know where your father went.”

Elsa leaned forward. “Where?”

He swallowed. “The north gate. But don’t go there. That’s where it came in.”