Carlos was dreaming.
He was back in Brazil playing on the outskirts of his village. His mamãe had told him not to play by himself in the forest, but he was seven, almost eight, and was going to be a soldier any day now. Even then, he'd known who he would become.
He spotted an armadillo. It was a favorite game of his to sneak up on them and yank their tails before they could notice him. He lay completely still waiting for the animal to pass when he saw the jaguar.
The beauty of the creature that took his breath away.
Its spotted fur gleamed in the light, every inch of the silky animal was tensed. Its eyes were the most beautiful of all. They glowed golden in the dim light of the forest, seeming to gaze a million miles away.
When he had seen it as a boy, it had pounced on the armadillo, its powerful teeth ripping easily through the armored plates, and it was only luck, or maybe God, that had somehow kept Carlos from the predator that day.
But in his dream, the jaguar's gold gaze was locked on Carlos. As it stalked closer, Carlos felt a sharp bite on his wrist. He looked down and screamed as an infected dug its decayed teeth into his flesh. He was an adult again, wearing the reinforced armor from UBSC but it did nothing to stop the bites of the diseased. They multiplied around him as the lush rain forest burst into dust. He fought the horde, his limbs unnaturally heavy. There were too many of them.
The deadweight of the bodies dragged him to the ground. He heard a faint beeping and looked down. It was a bomb, blinking its countdown.
The jaguar crawled on top of his armored chest. The golden eyes of the jaguar bored into him, filling his entire vision as the beeping of the bomb kept time with his thudding heart beat.
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
One.
When Carlos awoke, the bomb was still beeping.
Apart from the tiny blips, it was unnaturally quiet. That was odd in itself. Even before the infection spread, he had always been surrounded by noise. Battlefields were never quiet, except when everyone was dead.
Now that he thought of it, wasn't he supposed to be dead?
His brain tried to remember after the bomb. Nothing. Not that he should remember anything. He should be dead.
But if he was dead, it shouldn't fucking hurt so much to breathe.
He opened his eyes. He was in a white hospital room. No scuffs on the floor from shoes, no nicks on the wall from the hospital. The beeping wasn't a bomb, it was a heart monitor. It blipped cheerily, annoyingly.
No sounds of movement in the next room. Even in the most secluded rooms, a hospital was full of the living and the dying. And recently, those in between.
Carlos closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Nothing in the past five years had made any sense, or occurred in any logical pattern. Why should death be any different? All that mattered is that he wasn't one of those things.
"Ah, Mr. Olivera. How nice to see you awake." The quiet voice broke his reverie. Carlos' mind, honed from years assessing threats catalogued him. Thin, balding, with the slight slouch of a man who worked indoors and had kept his physical activity to shuffling around a lab. His gray eyes seemed distant, but Carlos knew that look.
It was the same one a jaguar had before it pounced on its prey.