This time she wasn't going to settle on a plan that was 'good enough'. She'd been lucky with the leeches and everything else the first time, but she didn't want to count on luck again. Knowing where she was going and how to get there was one thing, being able to actually get there was another. Little as she liked the idea, the time had come for her to figure out what the leeches could do.

She made another trip to the library, this time to get several books on training dogs and cats, figuring that the leeches were smart enough, or at least aware enough of her and their surroundings that some of the same ideas would be applicable.

Her first tests were simple, but vital, seeing if she could make them gather and disperse on command. In the beginning, their efforts were disorganized, but they got the idea surprisingly quickly. She'd started out with verbal commands, 'come', 'go', 'there', 'here', and so on, which she realized were unnecessary once she and the leeches got the hang of things. They were responding to her thoughts rather than words, picking up on nonverbal signals. By the end of it, she only had to think of a place in her apartment and they'd gather there, passing the information from individual to individual as they went.

Because she wasn't sure of what else to do she, rewarded them for a job well done by taking a long shower, letting them play in the falling water. It was as much a reward for her as it was for them, but to some extent the two were the same. The leeches liked to play and she found the shower to be relaxing, so everyone was happy.

From going places, she moved on to retrieving things. A large enough group of leeches was capable of moving small objects, something that would have helped her if she'd been able to do it during her first venture into the woods. She could have ordered a group of them to stick with the camera and hide it, so that it wouldn't have been found and make it easier for her to find.

Hiding was another thing she worked on with them, testing their mimicry abilities and getting a number of good photographs for Professor Rice in the process, proving that they could change their colors to match their surroundings. Again, they were slow with it at first, but they caught on quickly until their default state when they weren't with her, was to blend in with their surroundings as best as they were able. That was a huge relief for her, since she'd worried about what would happen if someone broke into her apartment when she was out. This way, they wouldn't see the leeches unless they really looked for them.

It was important since she was spending a great deal of time away from the apartment, going for walks through the woods, testing her own abilities to get around and find her way. The last thing she wanted was to end up genuinely lost. If that happened, there was no telling how long she'd end up wandering. The tests turned out to be a good thing, because she hadn't really thought about what walking alongside the railroad tracks would be like. She'd figured that it would be faster and easier than going through the woods, which it was, but it was also hotter and dryer, walking over crushed stone and sand was difficult, and the leeches didn't like being so exposed, especially when the sun was out.

So she came to the conclusion that she'd have to start as early in the day as possible, walking for as long as she could right next to the tracks and then going into the woods, and walking parallel to them when the sun got to be too much. Calculating things as best as she was able, she figured that she could cover twice the distance near the tracks compared to in the woods, which meant, no matter how she figured things, the trip would take a full day.

During her practice trips, she tested the leeches as well, letting small numbers leave her or carrying spares in her backpack, filling it with damp paper towels to keep them wet and happy. She could get the spares to climb out and cling to her clothing, changing colors to break up her outline and help her hide. They'd gotten good at it, enough that they could retain their shape while changing colors, meaning that they were less likely to disperse like they had during her first misadventure. She'd practiced letting them do that since, not in the woods, but in the safety of her apartment.

She'd sit down on the sofa, and later, when she trusted them a bit more and had a better feel for how to get them back together, in the bath tub, and carefully urge them to spread out. They'd pull away from her and she'd start to fade away, the leeches no longer mimicking her body, and instead matching their surroundings. The fading was good, very important to her, not just because it made them vanish faster, but because the first few times they hadn't camouflaged themselves, as they reached the point where there were too few of them to properly mimic her, and watching her body start to dissolve into leeches was horrifying. Then there'd been the time that the phone rang during it and she'd gotten up before enough of them had returned, meaning that when she reached for the phone, she'd gotten a look at a mass of leeches shaped roughly like her arm positioning themselves as best as they could to let her grab the phone. There were
enough of them, and they were moving enough that she'd gotten glimpses of bone between them. She'd ended up standing there, staring at herself until the phone stopped ringing. The reminder of what she was had been enough to set back testing for a day, as she paced the apartment, desperately trying not to think about how there was nothing left, just leeches.

The next day, she'd went back to practicing, forcing herself to ignore the fear and disgust, and allowing the leeches to spread out, seeing how far she could let them spread without losing her focus. It was hard, the idea confusing to the leeches and something she had a hard time wrapping her head around, since it relied so heavily on them acting with her instead of just following instructions.

She learned the trick of it though, keeping enough of them as close together as possible, and not letting the others wander too far, that way her thoughts remained clear, even if her senses got hazy. The leeches let her compensate though, letting a few wander farther from the others, sending back information to her.

It wasn't much or terribly clear, but it was enough to let her know if an area was safe, and if she should pull herself back together, or so she hoped. Her biggest test, the best one she could think of, was to submerge herself completely in the bathtub so she couldn't hear anything other than the sounds of the water moving, and see if a group of leeches in the kitchen could let her know when the microwave timer went off. They could, and it was, for them, a very rewarding trick, let her know so she could get up and they'd get warm food. They liked food that was warmer than room temperature, so she'd taken to microwaving their dogfood. They were good at it, though she wasn't sure how well they'd manage in other situations. She wasn't confident enough to try any tests outside the safety of her apartment.

She trusted them, but only so much, because the fear that something might happen to make them leave was still very real. She could call them back to her, but what would happen if they decided that they didn't want to? They were smart enough to decide something like that, and she'd be helpless to stop them if they did.

So far, they hadn't and that was going to have to be enough for her.

The way she was working with them meant that she was becoming more aware of them as well, to the point where, if she focused, she could feel the leeches that made her, directing their movements, which was helpful for eating, but not much else. It was still something she worked with, because having it so that they were able to watch her back was useful. Maybe when she went back to the training facility, they'd end up alerting her to some danger that she was unaware of, because they did tend to focus on different things than she did.

An example of that was the dead deer they'd encountered while walking next to the train tracks. She'd already suspected that her sense of smell was pretty much gone, because smell and taste were tied so strongly together. Proof was how she hadn't noticed the deer at all, despite it being rotten, torn apart and full of flies.

The leeches on the other hand, had picked up on it and gotten her attention. She wasn't sure of how they'd done it, all she knew was that there was something very close to her that she absolutely had to look at. She didn't know what or where, she just knew it was there and the leeches guided her eyes to it.

She recoiled in disgust, not sure why the leeches wanted her to know about the deer. Her first assumption had been that the state of it had reminded them, on some level, of the zombies and that they were warning her of what they thought was danger. Then she felt it, hunger.

Indistinct and easily ignorable, she could have walked past the dead deer without looking back. There was no urge to fall on the rotten thing like an animal, tear into it the way she'd seen zombies do with their victims. It was simply a matter of the leeches being hungry and aware of food nearby.

She'd been planning on eating anyway, had a sandwich in her backpack if the extra leeches she'd brought hadn't gotten to it.

It turned out that they hadn't and, keeping nausea at bay with the thought that the leeches had eaten far worse things, she grabbed one of the deer's legs and dragged it into the woods.

There, in the shade, she opened her backpack to let the spare leeches out so they could eat. Turning away from them and trying to ignore the buzzing of the flies, she ate her sandwich while the leeches ate the deer.

A picnic in the woods with friends.

It was a behavior she wanted to reward though, because she decided that it was better to have them let her know they were hungry and let her feed them, than to risk having them decide to deal with things on their own. They were already causing enough trouble with that back at the apartment, having continued to explore the walls and slowly wipe out the building's rodent population. She could tell they were ranging farther and farther to hunt, and that it would only be a matter of time before they started getting into her neighbor's apartments. It was a surprise that they hadn't yet.

A lot about them surprised her, even as she learned more and more about them and their capabilities. Marcus hadn't been anthropomorphizing when he'd written about them in his notes. They were very aware, very responsive and to some extent, they clearly knew what they were doing, that actions had consequences. Yes, they were eusocial and had imprinted on her, but there was far more to it than that. They had an awareness beyond what they shared with her, one that was continuing to develop. They'd learned how to turn the tap on in the kitchen when they wanted water or were just bored, though she had to take over to get them to turn it off, and they were working on doing the same with the bathtub. They would hold her place in what she was reading if she put the papers down, try to fetch small objects for her, all little helpful tasks that they carried out without her directly willing them to do so. It was reassuring and slowly, they had stopped terrifying her. They were still disgusting though and she didn't think that would ever change.

She'd never be able to think of them as pets or treat them with genuine affection the way Director Marcus had, but she was no longer in a constant state of fear that they might attack or abandon her.

o0o

Today was the day, a misty September morning, just cool enough to be a reminder that fall was on its way. She set out bright and early on the first bus, making it to the railroad tracks just as it was starting to warm up. Pushing herself, she was able to make it, what she estimated was, two miles before the sun got to be too much and she had to head to the woods, and stick to the shade. From her practice runs, she knew that she'd be able to make it halfway to the facility, some time shortly after noon, then she'd have to take a break and wait for things to cool off. Depending on how cloudy it was, and how far she made it before needing to stop, she'd have to wait for around two hours, less if she made really good progress, and was close to the area where water collected in the ditch next to the tracks. If she was lucky she could rest for just an hour, drink all the water she'd brought with her and hurry to the marshy area. There she could refill her water supplies and wade through the ditch until the sun had gone down enough for her to go back to the tracks.

No matter what happened, she'd be walking back in the dark, but she'd be walking next to the tracks and that would make the trip back the easiest part of the whole thing.

A combination of luck in that it got cloudy again, and underestimating how much ground she could cover, meant that she ended up making it much farther than expected, enough that instead of resting in the woods she pressed on and made it all the way to the ditch.

As far ahead of schedule as she was, she decided to reward the leeches. Finding a particularly shady area near the edge of the ditch she sat down and let them relax.

There was a moment of confusion until they realized her intentions, that the ones making her, as well as the spares in her backpack, were free to explore. She kept enough together that she was fully aware of her surroundings, but the leeches making up that group was constantly changing as they went back and forth. What they noticed, and what she noticed, were utterly different things. She watched as small black birds with brightly colored wings flew between the reeds in at the edge of the ditch, startling dragonflies. The leeches played, working together, trying and failing to catch fish and frogs. It was a game to them, more about the attempt than actually succeeding. They were creative though, trying to chase fish over to where others waited in the reeds, sneaking up behind frogs or trying to get them to jump in a specific direction as part of an ambush. Eventually, one group got lucky and managed to corner a fish, which got the attention of all the others. They finished eating the poor thing in seconds, mouthing at the bones and feeling them long after the fish was gone.

Encouraged, more of the leeches attempted to catch fish, not because they found them particularly tasty, that much she could tell, but because they wanted to try it for themselves.

It was shocking how smart they were, an intelligence apart from her own that somehow managed to work in perfect synchronization with her. Somehow, they'd brought her into their collective and she'd been able to maintain her sense of self. If it had been ants, or bees, or termites, things that were actually supposed to be eusocial, she'd say that she was functioning as a surrogate queen, directing some behaviors while the rest of it was largely autonomous. With the leeches, there was no telling

It was frightening and complicated, something she doubted that she'd ever fully understand or even want to.

Letting the leeches play for a bit longer, she took out her camera and took a few pictures of what they were doing, figuring that if she had to, she could send them to Professor Rice, proof that they were working together to hunt. She wondered what he'd have to say to that, what he'd think of the leeches, her leeches as he called them.

Because if things ended up as badly as was possible, and she did end up stuck in a lab somewhere, it might be easier if one of the people researching her was someone she knew, albeit only from phone calls and letters.

There was no reason for it to end like that though, the training facility was waiting for her and she was sure to find something to use as proof there.

Pushing those negative thoughts from her mind, she stood up and called the leeches back to her. The sun had gotten a bit lower in the sky and even though it was still unpleasantly hot out, she could get moving again.

The leeches returned without complaint and she was on her way.

Sticking along the edge of the woods, occasionally wading into the ditch to keep the leeches happy, she walked on for another hour before something made her stop.

The bugs were making as much noise as ever, but the birds had fallen silent. Last time, that had been the only warning she got of the Umbrella security team approaching.

She froze, listening for sounds of approach.

Sure enough, she could hear something rustling through the leaves some distance away in the woods. Far enough that she couldn't see anything, or even be sure of the exact direction it was coming from.

The sound was moving slowly, hesitantly towards her. Whatever it was, it sounded like there was only one, meaning that it probably wasn't another group of guards, or maybe soldiers, cleaning up the mess. At the same time, the noise didn't strike her as being all that similar to the sounds of her walking through the woods.

Could it have been a deer?

She knew there were supposed to be a lot of them in the woods, not that she'd even encountered one in all her time in Raccoon. No, that wasn't exactly true, there'd been the dead one along the tracks, probably hit by a train.

That sort of thing seemed to happen a lot. During her walks along the tracks, she'd started noticing that there were a lot of scattered, sun bleached bones and occasional tufts of fur. How the deer managed to get hit by trains was beyond her, but it seemed to happen fairly often judging by all the bones.

The sound continued to get closer.

Now the leeches, picking up on her own anxiety, were starting to get antsy as well.

It might be a person. She'd seen enough trash scattered on the ground to know that she wasn't the only one who walked along the tracks. This far from the road there wasn't much, but from where she was standing, she could see some faded bit of plastic and shards of broken brown glass glinting in the afternoon sun.

People came out here.

Normal people doing normal things.

Whatever those were this far out in the woods.

People went hiking, that wasn't too strange.

Maybe she was hearing a hiker.

Maybe they were lost, and that was why they were moving so slowly, having such a hard time getting through the brush.

The leeches had moved from being anxious to interested. She could feel their excitement.

What had them so excited?

Normally they only got this way when she turned on the shower for them, or filled the bath and sat down in the tub with them. Yes, this was bath levels of excitement, the way they got when she was spending time interacting with them.

Or how they'd rear up, falling over themselves from how high they stretched when she brought home cans of liver pâté cat food, instead of their usual dogfood. They knew, they always knew, even when she tried to trick them by thinking about something, anything else. The leeches always knew that she had something special for them. She couldn't hide anything from them and she wished that their thoughts, at least in this situation, were as transparent to her.

Because this was definitely a food response.

What was out there that made them think of food?

The sound grew closer.

In her backpack, the leeches nudged at the zipper, mouthed at the fabric as they tried to get out. Even the ones making her were starting to squirm. The outermost layer remained still, maintaining their mimicry, but the ones beneath writhed against each other, anticipating something that she couldn't figure out.

She caught a glimpse of something through the trees.

Whatever it was, it wasn't a lost hiker, at least she didn't think so. The leeches knew that people weren't food. They'd behaved on the bus, remaining completely still and disinterested. Public transportation was something they were used to, and she hardly even thought about them anymore when she was on the bus.

It was too tall to be a deer.

At least she thought it was. Now that she thought about it, she realized that she didn't know just how big deer were supposed to be.

Could it have been a moose or an elk? Did either of those live in the Arklay Mountains? Chief Irons had talked about hunting trips where he'd shot them, but she didn't know if those had been here or somewhere else.

Why was it with everything she did things that she hadn't thought of, things that shouldn't have been issues in the first place, ended up being problems?

This was at least one she could deal with.

"Hey!"

The thing froze, let out a horrible noise somewhere between a gag and a scream, and then charged her.

A zombie!

This one was different than the others, faster, more aggressive, but it was still a zombie and she could outrun it in the open, which she tried to do.

Leaving the woods, she ran along the train tracks, the zombie following her, its hands raised and claw-like as it made the most horrible noises.

Putting distance between it and herself was easy enough that it wasn't even an issue. The problem was that the thing showed no sign of giving up its pursuit, even as it fell farther, and farther behind. Escape wasn't even a problem, there'd be enough time for her to stop, will the leeches to disperse and hide, wait for the zombie to wander off again. She was fairly certain that it wouldn't try to hurt the leeches, so she'd be fine. The thing was, it would mean leaving a zombie wandering in the woods, near where people went walking. Somehow, she was going to have to deal with it before it hurt anyone. She was going to have to do it, because she was there, and there wasn't really that much it could do to hurt her.

First things first though, it was the proof she was looking for.

Slowing to a jog, she took her camera out of her backpack, making sure to leave the pack partially open for what she was going to do when the zombie caught up with her.

She managed to snap a few pictures before it was too close. She had no clue how good any of them would be, but there would be time to worry about that later, when she sent the camera away for them to be developed.

Letting go of the camera, letting it hang from her wrist by the strap she'd made for it, she shoved her backpack at the zombie. It grabbed it, biting and clawing at the tough material.

The leeches, ready and waiting, poured out, swarming onto its face and hands, attacking it.

Understanding the urgency of the situation, they didn't even bother to start eating, they just bit and chewed, doing as much damage as they could as quickly as possible. By the time the zombie gave up on mauling her backpack, the leeches were already all on it. At her guidance, they coordinated their actions, focusing on the tendons in its wrists to disable its hands, and chewing through the muscles of its face, so that it couldn't bite. Through it all, the thing continued to advance on her, making to attempt to try and shake off the leeches, even as they started to swarm over its nose and eyes. Even though they'd grown, the leeches were still compressible enough that once they got the nerves out of the way, they could force their way inside its skull through the gaps at the back of the zombie's eye sockets. She could almost feel them, squirming and seeking until they found it. It was a tight fit, but the bone there was thin, fragile. Once the first one got through, others followed, thrashing their way deeper and downwards, doing as much damage as possible as, following her guidance, they sought out the most vital parts of the thing's brain to kill it as quickly as possible.

The zombie's death was, in a way, anticlimactic, it didn't seize or thrash, it simply fell to the ground and lay still and she was glad for that. Thinking of it as a dead thing, a cadaver, had made it easy for her to use basic knowledge of anatomy to deal with it, but if at any point it had acted like something alive or in any way natural, she wouldn't have been able to do it. The way it, like all zombies, mindlessly attacked until it was stopped, made it easy for her, just like the way shooting them hadn't been as horrible as she'd feared it would.

The leeches, satisfied that the danger was gone, began to eat. They weren't hungry, it was more about tasting things to figure out if they liked what they'd found. She let them eat while she figured out what to do with the thing she'd just killed.

Logically, she should go and report it to the police, since it technically was a dead body. Except that would mean dealing with Chief Irons, and that was the last thing she wanted to do.

Especially when, once a zombie was dead, there was no difference between it and a normal dead body, other than traces of the virus that had created it. If she went back and called the police, she'd be brought in for questioning again and she was sure that once again, Chief Irons would deal with it personally and that, one way or another, the situation would turn bad for her.

Maybe he'd try to make it out to be a murder, because technically she had killed the thing, even if it had been a zombie instead of a person at the time, and there was no proof that she'd done it, because the leeches wouldn't be there, and there was no way of telling what had killed it without them there. So she should be safe.

But if Irons tried to make it that she was the killer, then her house would be searched and she hadn't done a very good job of hiding the bones, and the leeches would be there, camouflaged and close to invisible, but they'd be there. What would happen to the people searching her apartment if she wasn't there to tell the leeches what to do?

There was nothing she could do.

She'd have to leave the dead zombie behind.

Other people walked along the tracks, maybe one of them would find it and report it. That might get the investigation going that she needed.

For now, she was going to give up on making it to the training facility for, at least, today. The zombie had thrown her off her schedule and if she ran into any more, there was no telling how long things would take. Getting to the training facility too late in the day wouldn't do her any good, and walking back at night when there were zombies in the area wasn't something she was about to try.

Calling the leeches back to her, she turned around and started heading back.

Consoling herself that the day hadn't been a total waste. She'd gotten some pictures, figured out a fairly safe way to kill zombies unarmed, and made it nearly all the way to the facility. Tomorrow, with a better plan, she'd try again.

There would be plenty of time for her to think of one on the walk back.