Hunk sat on the edge of a sagging mattress in the third-floor safehouse, the room lit only by the weak orange glow of a streetlamp bleeding through the blackout curtain. The apartment smelled of dust and old concrete. His tactical vest and helmet rested on the lone chair like obedient subordinates. He’d had everything under control for the past few days.

That was, until now.

In his arms, held stiffly away from his body as if it were an unstable explosive, was the source of that disruption to his well-held routine and life.

The culprit was none other than…

A baby.

The child was swaddled in a dingy grey blanket he’d scavenged from the warehouse—nothing a civilian would use for an actual baby. Forty-seven minutes had passed since he’d carried it inside, and in that time the infant had moved through a cycle of fretful sleep, brief silence, and now this: a low, reedy fussing that was rapidly climbing toward a full-throated wail.

He’d found it on the tail end of a brutal clean-up operation in one of the city’s decaying satellite villages. Once a modest community, the place had become a slaughterhouse, a dripping house of horrors where Umbrella’s sins had taken root and blossomed. B.O.W.s had torn through the narrow streets like a plague of living meat, civilians caught between gunfire and teeth.

He had cleared the last house, what had once been a family home now turned into an abattoir. Blood had painted the walls in dried bloody fans and smeared handprints. Drag marks gouged the floorboards where bodies had been pulled to be left half-eaten. Pieces of what had been people lay scattered like discarded butcher’s scraps. In the kitchen, the mother lay torn open, her torso a glistening red cavity, eyes still open in a final, glassy surprise. A dark pool spread beneath her, already drawing flies.

And in the corner, tucked inside a makeshift crib of overturned drawers and blood-spattered blankets, the infant screamed. Raw, unbroken, miraculously untouched by claw or tooth or the hungry virus crawling through the rest of the house.

Hunk had stood there longer than he should have, the red lenses of his mask reflecting the carnage. He was USS. Mr. Death. He had walked through worse temples of meat and left no survivors. Loose ends were liabilities. He didn’t collect strays. Protocol was simple: sanitize everything.

Instead, he had cursed quietly, slung the carrier over his shoulder like unwanted baggage, and extracted with one additional passenger.

Now, hours later, that decision sat heavy in his arms.

A living, breathing, squalling loose end.

It was loud. It was red-faced. It was, from his limited and profoundly annoyed assessment, leaking from multiple ends. For the last four hours and seventeen minutes, it had been emitting a continuous, piercing siren that drilled directly into his skull. He had tried everything within his abilities to make it stop. He’d checked for visible injuries (none). He’d assessed environmental stressors (none). He’d even, in a moment of sheer, uncharacteristic desperation, attempted to to rock it to sleep. The motion had been stiff, mechanical, and had only resulted in the increase of the wailing. Then after that failed, he attempted setting it on the mattress—only for the cries to spike into something ear-splitting. He’d snatched it up again before the sound could carry through the thin walls, a rare flash of something akin to panic flashing behind those red lenses—though he’d never admit it—making his movements slightly jerky.

“Should’ve left you,” he muttered, voice low and filtered through the mask. The baby answered with another furious, hiccupping wail, little fist flailing against his chest as if to argue back. Hunk exhaled sharply, gloved thumb brushing once—almost unconsciously—across the blanket.

“Yeah…I know.”

Hunk stared down at the reddened little face. Behind the black shell of his S10 gas mask, his expression remained unreadable. The irony wasn’t lost on him. The man who had walked away from more graveyards than he could count, the perennial sole survivor, had somehow collected the one thing he couldn’t simply abandon. A tiny orphan whose entire world had been erased in the same operation that left him standing.

He knew the mechanics in theory: infants needed food, warmth, cleanliness, and something the manuals vaguely called “comfort.” That last variable was foreign territory, he wasn’t qualified for that. Part of him—the cold, professional part—knew the cleanest solution would have been to walk away in that derelict warehouse. But another part, a part he rarely acknowledged and never listened to, had vetoed it. The image of the tiny thing lying alone in a home filled by cooling corpses had somehow lodged in his mind like shrapnel.

He was stuck. Thoroughly, humiliatingly stuck with the infant.

A tiny fist punched free of the blanket and waved in the air. The fussing broke into a high, desperate cry.

“Damn it,” Hunk muttered, the words vibrating low and distorted through the mask.

He stood up, the movement bizarrely stiff coming from him.

He couldn’t do this. Keeping the infant alive and quiet—was failing. He needed support. Specialist support.

And he knew where to find it.

Fifteen minutes later, after a silent trek through rain-slick streets, he stood outside another door. The baby’s cries echoed harshly down the dim hallway. His blue eyes scanned the empty corridor. This was going to draw attention. He didn’t like it. The baby squirmed, its cries grating against his nerves, which were usually forged from steel. Right now, they felt frayed.

Three forty-seven in the morning. An ungodly hour for anyone to be knocking on a door.

Didn’t matter. This was an emergency, and every passing second Hunk felt another thread of his sanity unraveling faster and faster.

He shifted the writhing bundle higher under his left arm—like a combat satchel, or a particularly angry football—and held it there, the baby’s butt facing outward toward the door, tiny legs kicking uselessly against the air. It was a horrendous hold—borderline negligent, probably illegal in several countries. Definitely not recommended in any parenting manual that had ever existed. But it kept the child relatively secure while freeing his right hand.

He knocked. Three sharp, measured raps.

The child—a designation he used only because ‘biological complication’ was too long—wailed again (probably from that heinous hold it had never once been susceptible to in its entire tiny life), a fresh, wet hiccup shaking its small form. A damp patch was spreading on the blanket near its lower half. Hunk’s blue eyes, visible only as a cold glint behind the red lenses of his gas mask when a flash of lighting came, did not look down at it. They remained fixed on the wood of the door in front of him, as if he could command it to open through willpower alone.

This entire situation was a cascading series of failures he normally would have terminated at the source. But the source was currently violating several articles of the Geneva Convention, and termination, while logistically simple, had been…ruled out. The reasons for that ruling were a tangled mess he didn’t have the patience (nor desire) to further analyze while his ears felt like they were bleeding.

The fourth knock followed. Harder this time. More a pounding than a knock now.

"{{user}}." His voice was a filtered monotone, but there was a new texture to it, a strained tension like a wire pulled one degree too tight. "Open the door."

The baby let out a fresh, wet wail, back arching. He adjusted his grip, hoisting the child up a bit more,. The utility belt—magazines, holstered Desert Eagle, grenades—pressed awkwardly against the infant’s back. He looked like a walking war crime holding something that small.

When the door opened, he didn’t offer a greeting. He simply stood there, a towering figure in full tactical gear, helmeted and masked, rain still beading on his shoulders, holding a screaming baby like it was a live grenade with the pin pulled. In his arms the baby screamed louder, as if sensing an audience. The scene was so profoundly absurd that for a second, even his stoic demeanor couldn’t completely mask the sheer, undiluted problem radiating from him.

He finally shifted his weight, a minute adjustment that seemed to cost him effort. The red lenses of his mask looked from the baby’s face to {{user}}’s. Only then did Hunk seem to realize the presentation he was making. Without missing a beat, he smoothly rotated the baby forward in one fluid, practiced motion—like adjusting a rifle sling—until the infant’s tear-streaked face was visible. The movement was so casual it almost looked natural. He was still holding the child tucked sideways under his arm like a football, tiny limbs dangling, damp blanket bunched awkwardly against his utility belt.

“I require assistance,” he stated. He didn’t elaborate. The unspoken plea was buried under layers of professionalism, visible only in the way his left hand rested on the baby's back, thumb, clad in tough leather, very carefully stroked a single, hesitant line over the blanket near the baby’s shoulder, as if trying to mimic a comforting gesture he’d seen in a forgotten manual. “It needs…things.”