This is unproofed, unedited, and largely written on my phone. I had no time to make sure its canon compliant, so help there would be appreciated, but damn it, it's done.
Hell Hath No Fury
Sargent Davis hated the woods.
He'd never understood all the fairy tales of children wandering deep into the woods and getting lost off the path: you couldn't
go wandering off the path in the deep woods without a damn machete. Not in the swampy woods between Detroit and Toledo, anyway. The forest floor was choked with shrubs and brambles that would rip at your skin and clothes. The bugs were everywhere the moment you left the sun: literal clouds of mosquitoes being the most common and the most maddening, but he'd seen enough of the familiar bull's eye rash caused by Lyme Disease to know the ticks hiding in the undergrowth were the real danger. They didn't make a vaccine for that, and medicine was always scarse.
His squad looked as miserable as he felt, fighting his way through the thorns, mud, and fallen trees. The Vics had naturally retreated to the shelter of the woods they'd been foraging almost all of their food from when the shells started raining down, and the gunners wasted no time in proving how very little protection those woods offered. Trees had come crashing down by the dozen, their trunks shattered to splinters in the bombardment, and the Vics had desperately tried to use the fallen timber as cover until they found out the artillery could blow that up too.
The Victorian lines were broken. To stay by the Raisin, within easy range of the Commonwealth guns, was suicide. So they retreated back toward La Salle and the tangled mess of trees and brush that had once been small thickets of wood but had grown wild and strong when the humans around it had diminished. And as they retreated, the Victorians found Sargent Davis and the rest of Toledo's soldiers charging north to meet them.
The battle was already won. This was just cleanup. Victorian soldiers were fanatical, and for all their insanity, Davis had to admit they knew their way around a woods. Leave them to hide in here, they'd just pop out later and wreck havoc while they tried to go out as heroes. They weren't smart about it, but damn if they weren't persistent. He'd talked with them, even trained with them during the abortive alliance. He'd never liked them, hell, NO ONE liked Victorians...but what choice was there? Ally with Victoria, or get killed by Detroit. Or the Commonwealth if they survived Detroit. Or Victoria itself if they held off the Commonwealth. The only winning move was to make a deal with the devil, everyone could see that.
Only they'd all been wrong.
That thought was what kept him going through the brambles, over the fields of splinters, even as hundreds of whining insects swarmed for their drop of blood. It had always felt wrong, standing side by side with the damn Vics. Watching half his damn squad get put on 'reserve' because the Victorians couldn't stand the idea that a woman could shoot just as well as a man. Laughing at their jokes about any inhabitant of Toledo who wasn't obviously a white, God-fearing Christian. Pretending not to see when some of the Victorians got back late to their camps because they'd been having 'fun' with the locals.
He'd been itching to shoot them for weeks.
There were drops of blood and the occasional torn thread on the path the Victorians had hacked to force their way into this particular set of woods. The artillery had made following that path easy, but Davis knew better than to take the easy route. The scouts had spotted squads of Vics going in for days now, dragging their wounded with them, which meant they had to be somewhere. If the artillery and squads coming in from other parts of the forest hadn't gotten them first, anyway.
"This is stupid, Sarge," hissed Taylor from his right. "They've all run out the other side to go get themselves gloriously killed charging the Commonwealth. I haven't heard a shot in an hour."
"If you want to risk the next one you hear being the one that blows your head off, then be my guest and stand up," Davis hissed back. "If not, we stay low and slow. I want to see them before they see us."
As if on cue, a bird whistled ahead of them. It wasn't a bird, of course, but Adams was a hunter in her spare time and could do a perfect imitation of one when she wanted. Davis suspected she'd spent a lot of her enforced 'reserve' time taunting the Vic's foraging parties with it, but considering how little Adams talked he'd never be sure.
He crawled quickly along the ravaged ground, getting whipped in the face by a thorn branch for his trouble, until he slid beside where Adams was scouting a dozen or so yards ahead of the rest of the squad in the cover of the tangled brush. She said nothing, just pointed silently ahead.
It took him a second, but Davis quickly spotted what she was trying to point out. The forest floor ahead was covered in blankets, tarps, and canvases of every description. Most were in dull colors or had been smeared with mud to make them harder to spot at a distance. He'd seen the tent cities the Victorians erected when there weren't enough houses for them to be 'hosted' at, and sans the dull coloring as a crude attempt at camouflage, this definitely looked like what was left of one. The tents were collapsed, their occupants apparently already gone.
He made to speak, but without warning the edge of the distant camp suddenly burst into flame. The fire spread like a wave, rippling with unnatural speed from one canvas to the next until the entire thing was ablaze. He hadn't noticed all of the fallen tents were touching, but it was obvious now.
"Holy shit," he whispered to himself. He nudged Adams, and she made a cry to signal the squad to quickly move up. The Vics might have been burning their stuff to keep it from being captured (though the last thing Davis wanted was their shitty excuse for camping gear), but that just meant some of them were still here. He gestured to the left, where the inferno had begun, and his squad quickly and silently moved to surround it.
Six figures were standing there, silhouetted against the fire. They were obvious once Davis and his squad had fought through some of the brambles separating them, and they clearly weren't trying to hide.
They also weren't Victorians.
Five women stood at the edge of the burning tents, staring into the hellfire. They were obviously pale and gaunt, their skin sticking to the bones of their faces in a decidedly unhealthy manner. They wore long, woolen dresses of the style Victorians like to see: skirts that went all the way to the ground, sleeves that went all the way to the wrist, and collars that covered the neck.
Modest. They even wore white caps or bonnets. In the light of the fire, Davis noticed that their clothes were flecked with the dark red stains of dried blood.
One of the women was on her knees, weeping. Another just stared into the fire as though hypnotized. She made to walk forward, into the mounting conflagration, but a woman beside her with a calm, stern face grabbed her arm and stopped her.
"Its not for you," she said, barely loud enough for him to hear. She glanced at a fourth woman, who was glancing nervously between the fire and the woods, as if she expected an army of vengeful Victorians to surge out at any second. "Get her up please. The smoke will draw attention, and we need to be gone by then."
"I dont care," said the last woman, her mouth split in a feral grin. "I want to watch those bastards burn."
Davis' eyes shot to the burning tents in horror, and he sprang into action. He stood up, rifle at the ready, and his squad emerged from cover enough to show the women they were outnumbered.
"No one move! Hands where I can see them, right now!"
The nervous woman shrieked in fear and almost jumped into the raging fire. The one staring hypnotized at the fire merely turned and cocked her head in confusion. The stern woman just sighed and glanced at his rank patch.
"We aren't Victorians, Sargent."
"That doesn't mean you aren't dangerous." He glanced at the final woman, who glared back with more fury than he'd ever seen before. "What is this place?"
"It was a Victorian field hospital," replied the stern woman, her tone one of great exhaustion. "If you could call it that."
"Where are the Victorians now?"
"Gone." She gestured vaguely northward.
"Did they take their wounded with them?"
"No."
Davis steeled himself and asked the question that had forced his hand the moment it had occured to him.
"Are there people in that fire?"
The woman look back at him and her calm voice dripped venom.
"I promise you, Sargent, there are no
people in there."
Davis looked from the burning tents to the various expressions of sorrow, rage, determination, and pain on their faces...and lowered his weapon.
"Fair enough. If you'll come with us, we can take you-"
"We've had more than enough of being taken places by soldiers." She pulled off her white cap and threw it into the dying inferno. "If you really want to help, forget you even saw us. Let what happened here burn to ash with everything else."
She turned and walked off into the smoke and splinters. One by one the others followed, throwing their caps and bonnets into the fire before vanishing into the wood.
The one with the bloodthirsty smilebwas the last to go. Not content with throwing away her bonnet, she ripped off her entire dress like it was made of wriggling centipedes and hurled it as far as she could into the fire with a feral snarl.
Then they were alone.
Davis turned back to his squad gravely.
"Hand me the radio, I've got to call this in."
"Sarge?"
"We found a Vic hospital but we're too late. Bastards burned their own wounded to keep us from getting them. Gotta call that in."
"...I guess we do."
"Sounds like something those crazy Vic bastards would do, though," said Travis.
"Sure does. Crazy Vic bastards."