A fire is burning high, swallowing down a small, rural house. Despite the small size of its fuel, the flame extends far into the sky, an arm and clenched fist sending out a signal of the fury building inside the heat beast.
There are screams and shouts from inside the roaring blaze.
Loudest come a mother's wails. She howls with maternal fury as though a mother bear, her entire existence filled with hatred for this threat to the lives of her children. Crawling on the floor, alone, she screams an inhuman challenge, daring the fire to come to her, and if she could do what she so wished, the mother would have surged to her feet and fought the burning intruder with fist and nail and foot. She would wrap her hands around its neck and wrestle it into submission, but she is no combatant. Though she is strong, she cannot fight this threat to her children's lives, and the desperation that builds in her chest rips forth with a contemptuous screech that is heard even over the fire's cackles.
Hers is a violent death, loud with hatred.
Much softer than the mother's screams are a father's rumbles. He kneels against the door to his study, unable to unlock it, and makes deep noises in his chest. His noises are muttered challenges mixed with desperate keens. His children are in this dying house, but instead of by their sides, he is trapped in a sweltering room that is quickly filling with smoke. He shifts his stance, body older than he needs it to be, and renews a previous assault on the door. He throws his too-thin body at it and is rebuffed, only to return with bloodied fingers with which he scratches at the surface of the thing that's keeping him from his little ones. With a final noise, he makes his final sound and breathes his last.
A quiet man in life, he leaves the world with the sound of a bloodthirsty war cry.
The door suddenly bursts open and a middle aged woman dashes from the front of the house, two bundles kept close. One is a small boy, his mouth covered with a shirt and pressed to her shoulder. The other is an older boy, perhaps just reaching adolescence, though he, too, has his mouth covered by a shirt as he breathes huffing breaths of clean air through it and the woman's dress.
Hurrying toward the front field, she is stopped when a truck, one of the few remaining remnants of the type from current times, barrels toward them, barely halting in time not to get dangerously close.
Three men in dark military gear and a young woman in a lab coat jump out and make their way to the woman and children.
"You've got him, then?" asks the younger woman. The elder nods. "Give him here, then."
One of the men steps forward and pries away the small bundle tucked against his nurse's body. The man then carries the young boy to the woman in the lab coat and moves aside.
After passing a few moments assessing the boy's health, the scientist nods.
"He'll do."
Another man steps forward and presses a small bag into the nurse's waiting hands.
"There you are, Judas," he says mildly. "Think you wanna count it first?"
Shaking her head, the nurse replies, "I've no need. Judas' coins were true, if bloodied. So, too, will my own."
The groups parted, then, the group from the truck returning to their vehicle while the nurse and her charge beginning to walk to the nearest neighbor's.
As they reach the truck, however, the woman turns around, facing the men behind her.
"You know what? I've changed my mind. They're a liability; get rid of them."
A purring of guns and a few wretched shrieks later, the truck's driver has his foot pressed to the floor, carrying the researcher and her small squad back to the safety of the laboratory.