Morning sunlight spilled across the winding mountain road.
Ryan steered with one hand, glancing in the rearview mirror at the Valley of the Gods as it vanished completely between the peaks. Spencer's death marked the scattering of the last embers of the old Umbrella era.
Jill's voice came through his phone. "Ryan, the TriCell activity in Africa is getting louder. When are you planning to move in on them?"
"No rush. Let them dig up a little more useful material first." Ryan rolled down the window, letting the cold morning air pour into the cabin. "Jill, that village in Eastern Europe we've never been able to locate. Any new leads lately?"
"Same as always." Jill sighed, frustrated. "The satellite imagery over those specific areas is still a blur, and every recon team we've sent has gotten inexplicably lost somewhere on the perimeter. That place is shielded by some kind of magnetic field, or something even more sophisticated."
"All right. If you can't find it, then I'll swing by there myself before heading to Africa. Try my luck." Ryan said it casually. "I've been here a while now, always dealing with monsters. Never took a proper vacation. You hold down HQ for a bit. I'll treat it as a taste of the local culture."
Once the call ended, Ryan pulled over in a small border town and swapped out the sleek black trench coat for an utterly plain blue windbreaker.
If it was a vacation, he might as well look the part.
For the next two weeks and change, Ryan traveled like any ordinary backpacker, drifting east.
He listened to street musicians play the accordion on the sidewalks of Vienna, and he drank rich dark beer along the Danube in Budapest. No zombies, no conspiracies, no calculating whose head the next bullet was going into. That long-lost looseness went a long way toward loosening the permanent tension in his nerves.
He was ambling along like that when he finally drifted into a small inn on the Romanian border.
"Hey, man! Thanks so much. If you hadn't stepped in, that grumpy innkeeper probably would've thrown us out."
In the inn's lobby, a young American in casual clothes and with a sunny short haircut was looking at Ryan with genuine gratitude.
A moment earlier, the guy had nearly gotten into it with the innkeeper because he couldn't make heads or tails of the wild local signage and menu. Ryan had stepped in and smoothed it over.
"Nothing to it." Ryan waved it off, his gaze drifting to the woman standing behind the young man. Something about her felt oddly familiar.
She was wearing a cream-colored trench coat, with a gentle, intelligent air about her, and she gave Ryan a polite smile and a nod. But to Ryan's eye, her seemingly relaxed stance instinctively kept a defensive posture, one that could snap into action at any second. That was the muscle memory of an agent who'd spent years walking the edge between life and death.
"I'm Ethan Winters." The young man stuck out his hand enthusiastically. "This is my wife, Mia. We got married not long ago, currently on our honeymoon tour around Europe. Though the roads and accents in Romania are worse than the Texas desert."
The instant he heard those two names, Ryan's eyebrow twitched almost imperceptibly.
Ethan Winters? Mia?
He hadn't expected to run into them here. The village coordinates he'd been hunting for months without success, it looked like this might finally be the break.
"Ryan. Just a traveler wandering around." He shook Ethan's hand and greeted them both with a smile.
"Ryan, are you touring Europe too?" Ethan's eyes lit up, as if he'd just caught a lifeline. "We're planning to head deeper into the Carpathians next. I hear the nature up there is incredibly untouched. Since you're on your own, if you don't mind, why not travel together? With a helpful guy like you along, it'll definitely be more fun."
Mia chimed in softly beside him. "Yes, Mr. Ryan. Ethan's a decent driver. We can split the gas."
Watching this enthusiastic newlywed couple, Ryan laughed quietly to himself.
What a fun coincidence. One was an "ordinary engineer" who hadn't yet been chewed up by life, and the other was a covert operative for The Connections.
"Since you're so insistent, who am I to refuse?" Ryan nodded. "As it happens, I wanted to take a look at the mountains too."
...
Two days later, the off-road vehicle Ethan was driving pushed deep into the Carpathian Mountains.
As the elevation climbed, the surroundings grew increasingly grim. Ancient trees shut out the sunlight, and a year-round fog draped the peaks like gray gauze curtains.
The car's GPS had lost signal hours ago. They were navigating by old paper map and by Ryan's directions, feeling their way forward.
"The fog here is worse than London. And the temperature is dropping way too fast." Ethan grumbled and turned on the heater.
"Just keep this speed. It'll be dark soon. We'll look for a place to camp in that hollow up ahead." Ryan sat in the back seat, arms folded across his chest, eyes closed as if dozing. In fact, his attention had been fixed on Mia in the passenger seat the entire time.
For the whole ride, Mia had played the picture-perfect wife, but Ryan had long since picked up on the faint sounds of her fiddling with some sort of miniature communicator whenever Ethan stopped for gas or went to the restroom.
Night fell.
The three of them holed up in an abandoned ranger's cabin that offered some shelter from the wind.
The mountain night was bone-cold. Outside, the wind howled, occasionally laced with eerie sounds like wolves baying. Ethan had driven too long that day, and after eating some dry rations, he slumped against his sleeping bag and passed out.
Two-thirty in the morning.
Ryan, propped in a corner of the cabin, opened his eyes.
Almost at the same moment, the faintest rustle came from the other side.
Ryan didn't move. In the depths of his dark eyes, a glimmer flickered as his X-ray perception activated.
Mia was extracting herself from her sleeping bag, moving with exquisite care. She glanced at the sleeping Ethan, something complicated and apologetic flickering in her eyes, then pulled on a dark coat with practiced efficiency and fished a compass-shaped device with a faint red glow from a hidden pocket in her pack.
She didn't go for the front door. Instead, she slipped nimbly through the old, broken window on the side of the cabin, and in an instant, like a night cat, she melted into the fog outside.
Finally taking point, huh.
Ryan stood up and rolled his shoulders. His bones let out a sharp crack.
He pushed the door open and followed at an unhurried pace.
The fog in the forest cut visibility to almost nothing, but for Ryan, with his X-ray vision, none of it mattered. He could make out Mia's silhouette clearly from several hundred meters back.
Like a patient old hunter, he kept an absolutely safe distance, and the dead branches and leaves beneath his feet didn't make the slightest sound.
Mia moved fast through the darkness, and her route was strange, deliberately skirting every ordinary mountain path.
After about an hour, they passed through a stand of trees hung with bizarre totems of dried grass and animal bones. The terrain ahead dropped away sharply, and the view opened up.
Ryan stopped at the edge of a cliff and looked down.
In the huge basin below, an ancient, decaying village reeking of death lay quietly under the bleached moonlight.
The buildings belonged to centuries past, and on the mountain rising behind the village, a massive Gothic vampire castle thrust up from the rock, as if looking down on everything.
Ryan watched Mia stow the device, take a deep breath, and follow a hidden path down into the village the locals called forbidden.
"Found it."
Hands in the pockets of his windbreaker, Ryan stood looking down at the village blanketed by the Megamycete, the corner of his mouth slowly curving into an interested smile.
[Read 50+ chapters ahead on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]