Partners

 An informant tips them off in 2003 to the location of the last major Umbrella facility, an isolated lab complex in the Caucasus Mountains. Since the splintering of the Soviet Union, the facility's in a perfect political dead zone, and too far out in the middle of nowhere for anyone to really notice it.

It's a huge lead, so big that they verify the source but don't question it, and Chris and Jill are on the first helicopter out.

An hour after the first boots hit the ground, almost everyone else in the first squads is dead, killed by loose B.O.W.s before they even got inside the building. The second teams touch down shortly thereafter, and they're able to secure the surface level. Once they've got that on lockdown, they start going further in, where they find a long trail of blood, spent shells, and dead bioweapons that stretches all the way into the heart of the facility.

That's where they find Jill and Chris, slumped against a wall and still pointing guns at the corpse of the T-ALOS. They're the sole survivors of the first wave and the only living things left in the building.

 By the time they let him go, Chris feels like a mummy.

He's got some bad burns on his neck, face, and head, souvenirs from all the explosions he barely avoided, and a couple of Hunters got close enough to take a piece off. The prize injury is from the T-ALOS's barrage of missiles, none of which hit either of them, but even a near miss still filled the room with flying clouds of shattered concrete and metal. The effect is a lot like Chris took a couple of barrels of birdshot from medium range. The right half of his body is covered in small, deep puncture wounds, and by the time he got to the medical tent, he'd bled enough into his cold-weather gear that they had to cut him out of it. They send him back out in a pair of scrubs and somebody else's parka.

Their base camp for the mission is right outside an isolated village in North Ossetia that was probably founded centuries ago by reindeer hunters. The locals are old suspicious former Soviets, their children long since gone for someplace warmer with better jobs, but news that the facility is gone got here slightly before Chris did and they're all but dancing in the streets.

The support crew's set up in a couple of heavy-duty tents and a few trailers on the edge of the village, busy with cleanup. Chris shambles past them, the painkillers and exhaustion both catching up with him, and manages to get most of a bowl of soup down before he nods off at the table in the mess hall. A couple of members of the communications team help him to his feet and get him to a cot inside one of the trailers.

He wakes up twice. The first time is when the trailer's door opens, and he guesses from the silhouette that it's Jill. He immediately goes back to sleep.

The second time, Chris swims up from a confused dream and finds that somebody's undressed him. He's lying on the floor in his shorts, on top of and covered by several army-issue wool blankets, with a small space heater nearby.

There's a warm body on top of him, and he figures out mostly by touch that it's Jill, her hair still wet from a recent shower. She's using him as a pillow, her cheek on his chest and her hair tickling his chin, and Chris puts his arms around her before he falls asleep again.

 By the time he's really awake, the sun's as up as it gets around here. There are enough excited people in the camp that he can hear the constant murmur of conversation through the trailer's walls.

Jill's still asleep, and she's kicked off the blankets in the night. Her T-shirt's riding up, showing off her blue cotton underwear, and one of his hands has migrated to rest protectively on her stomach, just below several layers of support bandages wrapped around her rib cage. He knows from five years ago that getting up before she does is pointless; she'll go limp and try to pin him to the bed, making little nonverbal sounds of protest without actually being awake. Instead, Chris lies there and watches her sleep for what's probably a long time.

When she does wake up, it's all at once. Her eyes snap open, scan the room, and come up to focus on him.

"Hey," Jill says.

"Hey."

"What time is it?"

"Don't know."

"Figure they need us?"

"Doubt it. We're both pretty fucked up."

"Good."

"How're you doing?"

"Sprained wrist," Jill says. "Twisted ankle. Couple of fractured toes, bunch of fractured ribs, a couple of shrapnel hits. This big guy I was with kept throwing himself between me and the explosions."

"You're welcome."

"Didn't ask for your help there, cowboy."

"But you got it anyway."

"You big dope."

"Yeah." Chris clears his throat. "I didn't expect to see you here."

"I wanted to make sure you were okay, but then I didn't really want to leave." She sits up, so their faces are maybe six inches apart. Her hair's dried into something like a rat's nest and there are three stitches in a jagged cut on her forehead, but she's beautiful anyway. "I kinda missed this."

"Yeah. Me too."

She smiles, and leans up to kiss him on the mouth.