"Damn," Greg muttered as they stepped back outside.

"What?" Izzy asked immediately, hand resting on the butt of her pistol, looking around.

"Nothing, it's just colder. A lot colder," he replied. "It's not a good sign. And it's getting windier, too."

"Crap," she muttered, looking at the sky. He joined her in doing so. Was it darker? It was somewhere in mid-afternoon right now, or it should be, however long this planet's days lasted. They seemed approximately Earth-normal, but with weather like this, it might as well not matter. "Should we stay?" she asked uncertainly.

"No," Greg replied, "we should press on. We need that part and it could just be getting colder. I don't really feel like getting in the habit of hesitating every time the wind blows."

"I'm not being cowardly," Izzy said harshly. He looked at her, surprised, and she stared back at him, angry, then suddenly she lost the expression and sighed. "I'm sorry, that was...rude. I just thought you were, you know...insulting me."

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like that-"

"No, I know. Let's just start walking," she said, and abruptly set off.

He followed after her. He'd never quite seen this side of Izzy before. During their interactions that didn't involve shooting bullets at alien assholes, she'd been usually polite, sometimes warm, and at worst a little cold, but not outright hostile. What did that mean? He thought they were doing well: she was at ease around him, they'd been flirting, she'd kissed him. Maybe he was misreading the situation? He wasn't known for his social intelligence.

They walked for about ten minutes before he couldn't keep his silence any longer. "Izzy, did I do something to piss you off?"

"No," she replied immediately, as if she'd been expecting the question. She shook her head. "It has nothing to do with what you've said or did. I'm just...okay, you know how some people get terrible wounds, and instead of healing properly, they never seem to completely heal, and hurt so bad if they get hit the wrong way, even if it's just someone bumping into them on accident?"

He nodded. He'd seen that before. It was a lot less common than he imagined it was hundreds of years ago, with modern medical marvels, but medicine couldn't cure everything, and honestly, some scars stayed painful, no matter how many treatments you gave them. "Yeah, I know what you're talking about," he replied.

"So that's what it's like for me in a way, only with how my perception of people thinking I'm weak or stupid or something. I had to put up with being second guessed, talked down to, or outright insulted for so long that I've built up a good armor against it. Mostly I can ignore it, or throw it right back in their stupid faces, but sometimes..."

"Sometimes you get hit in just the wrong way, and it hurts like hell."

"Yeah. Even if it's an accident. So again, you didn't do anything wrong. I mean really, it only happens anymore with people I..." she hesitated.

"People you what?"

"Trust," she said finally.

"Oh." He paused. "You made that sound like it was hard to admit."

"You can't see why someone like me might hesitate to admit that I trust someone else? People you trust betray you more easily...I mean, not that I think you're going to betray me."

"No, I get it. It's understandable. I trust you, too."

She hesitated, looking like she wanted to say a little more, then just nodded. "Good. I'm glad." She shivered suddenly. "Goddamn it is getting cold," she muttered, looking angrily at the sky. The wind was gusting more powerfully now, and it had teeth, the cold chewing into them despite their newly acquired helmets (although they hadn't changed armor yet, they had at least put the helmets on, and discovered they still mostly worked, and came pre-loaded with a map of the island). The farther on they walked, the more paranoid he became about the cold.

Was another storm on rapid approach?

He could understand Izzy's reaction at least. No Marine wanted to be called cowardly or timid, even through implication, (or maybe that was worse, it was almost easier to take when someone just said something straight to your face, rather than them trying to be sly and BS their way around the insult just so that they could have plausible deniability when you called them out on it). He genuinely hadn't meant that, he was more concerned about becoming too hesitant himself. The situation was dire, and could actually turn lethal extremely quickly. But they still had things to do, and it was a hell of a thing to balance getting stuff done and taking risks against taking unnecessary risks, or too few. A lot of the time, all you could do was roll the dice and hope.

It felt like he was doing that a lot just lately.

* * *

"Man, this place looks like crap," Izzy muttered.

Greg sighed as they came to a full halt in front of the two-story structure. It did, indeed, look like crap. Several of the windows were broken out, the garage door was open about halfway, and the whole thing looked like it had been built about a hundred years ago, and no one had done a whole hell of a lot to upkeep it.

"Hopefully it has what we need," he replied.

They settled into their standard procedure, first making a complete circuit of the structure's exterior, ensuring that nothing was waiting for them. Although really anything could be waiting in the treeline that sat about ten meters back from the rear and sides of the building. This island seemed to have a lot of dead forests. Once they were about as sure as they were going to be that nothing was outside, they turned their attention inwards.

As they approached that stuck-open garage door, Greg's instincts twitched. He hesitated about the same time Izzy did.

"What-" he began, then something cut loose with a growl from inside.

"Crap," Izzy whispered harshly, pulling out her pistol.

He did the same. It sounded like a varg. He heard padding footsteps suddenly, more than one set, and then...nothing. They backed up a few feet, waiting. There were definitely vargs inside the garage. The pair stood there beside each other, pistols at ready. For several seconds, nothing happened. The wind blew. The tension mounted.

And then a quartet of vargs raced out from beneath the half-closed garage door in a gray blur. Greg's pulse spiked violently and painfully as he opened fire. The first shot was good, nailing one of the vargs dead on in the skull and dropping it in a spray of alien blood. It hit the blacktop and skidded, but the others were so fast. Izzy managed to clip one's face, which sent it running and yelping. The other two barreled onward like gray-furred bullets. Greg kept firing but they were too fast and suddenly one of them was upon him.

He felt his body react faster than his mind and pistol-whipped the creature directly in the face while simultaneously sidestepping. There was an awful crunch and the creature hit the ground behind him. He whirled around and saw it trying to get back to its feet, but he didn't give it the opportunity, aiming and firing, putting a bullet in the back of its head. Twisting as he heard another yelping whine and feet beating the blacktop, he saw the final varg rushing away after the other that had fled. Izzy was reloading.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"Fine," she replied tightly.

"No bites?"

"No bites," she confirmed. "You?"

"I'm fine," he replied after double-checking. He let out his breath in a long sigh. "Goddamn. Too close."

"Too close," she agreed quietly.

"Let's get inside before they come back."

She nodded and they ducked carefully into the garage. Greg studied it quickly as they entered, finding a mostly empty room with a lot of crap proliferating across all the open spaces. There were two repair bays, both of them vacant, and a lot of shelves, tables, boxes, and desks all along the outer wall of the room.

"This is gonna take awhile," Izzy muttered.

"Probably. Since you know what we're looking for more than I do, why don't you start the search, and I'll look through the rest of the building and see if there's anything worth taking, or worrying about," he suggested.

"All right."

He stepped out of the repair area in through the only other door, finding himself in a little reception room with a TV bolted to the wall, a row of uncomfortable looking chairs beside a frozen water dispenser, a broken vending machine, and an empty coffeepot. There was also a front desk with a pair of doors behind it. One led to a squalid bathroom that didn't have anything of mention in it, and the other led to a narrow stairwell. He moved up it, weapon at ready, and pushed through the door he found at the top.

It led to a small apartment, he saw. Clearing it out, Greg found the main room to be a combination living room/bedroom/kitchen/dining room, and also found a small closet, and a full bathroom that wasn't a whole hell of a lot bigger than the one downstairs, only sporting a small shower cubicle as an addition. Obviously this was where the mechanic had lived. It didn't look like the happiest of places, but it probably saved a lot of money, at least. He wondered where this mechanic was now. If they were dead somewhere on the island.

There was a really good chance of that.

The place was secure and, like pretty much everywhere else, cleaned out. Maybe the mechanic had seen the situation for what it was, loaded up on supplies, and gone walking down to the military outpost. Only to find nothing there. Or maybe they'd teamed up with whoever was there, and they had gone in search of help or a way to restore power or even a way off the island. After the search, he returned to Izzy, who was still rooting around among the crates and shelves.

"Any luck?" he asked.

"Not yet," she replied.

"All right. I'll help you look."

* * *

An hour later, they had good news and bad news.

The good news was that they'd found the part, and they would at least be able to try to turn on the snow hog now. The bad news was that they'd gambled and lost on whether or not they could get back to the outpost today, because while they were looking, another storm blew in and turned the outside world into a frozen white hell.

"So we're spending the night here?" Izzy asked as they looked out the front window of the reception area.

"Yep," Greg replied. "No way in hell we're risking that."

"We've got these helmets now..."

"I still think it's too dangerous. We already gambled and lost once, I'd rather not push our luck. Right now, we're in a safe place. There was another wood-burning stove and a decent supply of firewood upstairs, and a bed. We can settle in for the night, and hit the road at daybreak, provided the storm has died down."

"All right," Izzy said after a moment of contemplation. "Let's see this apartment."

They headed upstairs. He got a fire going while she explored the squalid apartment. "Pretty small, huh?" he asked.

"I've lived in worse, admittedly," Izzy replied.

"Yeah, same," he murmured.

Once the fire was going, he found a pan and started frying up some of the imitation beef they'd gotten from the outpost.

"What's for dinner?" she asked, taking off her pack and boots and sitting down on the bed.

"I am going to attempt to make hamburgers."

"Holy crap, seriously?"

"Yeah. I've got this fake beef here that I can make into patties, and there are some not completely stale buns here, and I even managed to find some ketchup and mustard packets in one of the drawers. So these should at least resemble hamburgers."

"No cheese?" she asked.

"There's cheese spread in the MREs..."

"I think I'll be okay without that."

He had to agree. Minutes went by. The apartment went from cold to tolerable, then from tolerable to actually kind of comfortable. While he cooked, Izzy double-checked the area, locking down the door at the base of the stairs, then the apartment's front door itself. She checked the windows, making sure they were locked, and pulled the heavy curtains that rested over them. Once the food was done, they sat together at a tiny table and ate and drank some of the cans of Supernova he'd taken with him. He'd also set a few bottles of water near the stove to heat up, since he really wanted the opportunity to wash himself again.

A shower would be paradise, but even just a simple wash went a long way.

They didn't talk much over their meal, and he had an idea that something was weighing on Izzy's mind. Finally, she spoke. "So..."

"So?" he asked.

She chewed on her lip for a moment, studying him. "When I sleep with someone, I'd say about three quarters of the time, I can tell right away afterwards if I like or don't like them. Then, maybe another twenty percent of the time, it takes a little bit longer to figure out. But then there's five percent that's special, and they're so rare. I haven't run into anyone in this category for a few years. What makes them special is that I like them so much, that I get paranoid that I'm missing something, and I need more time to figure out what that is, or if I'm just being overcautious. And...you are in that particular category."

"Oh," he said, after a moment.

She laughed and rolled her eyes. "Wow, you like underwhelming responses, don't you?"

"I more...don't know how else to respond. Um, I'm glad that you like me so much. Have you found anything concerning?"

"Honestly, no. You seem really...genuine. You have a lot of good qualities. And I do feel like I've gotten to know you decently well over the past three months. So...I'm not really saying that I'm prepared to be in, like, a full-blown relationship, I mean, if that's something you're even looking for, but...I would like to keep this going. Would you?"

"Definitely," he replied, because he did. He liked Izzy a lot. He could see that she had a few...hangups, but who didn't? And as much as he liked her, he respected her more. "I would very much like that."

"Okay, good. Now, one other thing...it doesn't matter much right now, because it's just the two of us, but I would like to keep this exclusive, emotionally and sexually speaking...even though I'm admitting now that I'm not sure if I'm ready for a full-on relationship. Which I realize might be kind of unreasonable, but nonetheless, are my terms."

"I'm okay with this. You're worth waiting for," he replied.

Her smile became less cavalier and more genuine, and even shy. "Well...thank you." She lost it suddenly. "But I'm holding you to this, Greg. Cheat on me and I will kick your ass."

"Deal," he replied, which made her laugh. "I've done some bad things, but I can at least say I've never cheated."

"Good then. So, uh...you wanna have sex?"

"Do you need to ask?" he replied.

"I guess not."