"Ugh, house clearing?" Sophie said. "Can we get like a summoned creature to do that for us?"

Stella shrugged, then readied her spear.

"Here we go!" Bob said, opening the door.

This door, like many others of its lot, swung open easily to reveal an empty house.

"This would be so much easier if we could just nuke the houses from orbit or something," Sophie said.

Stella charged in.

"No gods, no masters," she whispered, darting a look at the first room inside of the two story dwarven building. This, among the many that they had raided, had to be the house of someone with small children.

Sophie let that one go. She followed right in, whispering to herself.

"Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss..." She said, backing up her friend. They moved in as a team.

Two dwarves lay dead on the floor of a kitchen. Sophie made a note to return there. Both were gray, and her standard protocol was to double tap them. Bob pulled security as Stella stabbed first one then the other in the base of the neck.

The second floor had obvious notes that it had been a family home.

"This is a child's room," Sophie said, clearing it. She left the next part unsaid.

There wasn't a child in the bed or the closet. Sophie breathed a sigh of relief. This building in particular looked more well to do that some of the others she had seen. Sophie wasn't familiar with the dwarvish military markings that she kept finding, but she knew that they at least looked significant to whoever had lived here. Something nagged at her. Both of the dwarves downstairs had been dead for a while and the door had been closed tight.

There had to be a reason that both had been face down in the kitchen, next to each other.

"Hey Stella, Bob can we head back to the kitchen here? Something is strange," she said.

"Sure," Bob said, following along.

Sophie rolled the dead dwarves over. Both had a small sized indent in their foreheads. There was a bit of blood in the wooden floor over a square that was a bit off center from the room. It was made from a darker wood and looked like it had been covered by a carpet.

Sophie knelt, feeling around the floor.

"Sophie, what are you?" Stella said.

The sound of a latch being undone stopped them all in their tracks. Sophie unlocked the trap door, lifting it up into the air. Stella raised her spear.

The trap door opened up into a large underground basement. Sophie used her elemental powers to summon a small light in her hand. She looked down and gasped. There was enough food there to make a backwoods prepper ejaculate on sight. The large basement had rows and rows of shells with jars and bottles. In the center of it all was a dining table and a dwarf.

A living breathing dwarf child lay on the table. Sophie held her breath even as she saw it take one. It was faint.

"Bob there's a living dwarf down there and-" She said.

Bob flew down the steps that had definitely been made for smaller legs. The lower level had to be twice his height. Sophie almost ran after him, but stopped, remembering the protocol. They always left someone in the back to pull security. Stella motioned for her to go.

Sophie took the initiative, taking the stairs down four at a time. Stella had ice magic and that was about the extent of her magical abilities. Bob was the group healer at least for the scouts. Sophie had a variety of powers that could help in a pinch, but she wasn't sure that her medicine skill was up to snuff.

In a flash, Stella was at the child's side, feeling for a pulse on the radial artery. Bob had a palm around the child's neck feeling, while his head was on her chest.

The table that the child was laying on was almost certainly designed for a dwarf as had everything else in this city then which meant that as she bent over to feel it, she could feel her back hurting. She was going to pay for this later but it was well worth it.

They spent an eternity there listening and feeling for a pulse and a heartbeat. She didn't even know that she was supposed to get up. The hospital trained her on emergency procedures but had been so long and she had not expected to have to use it on a dwarf of all things. But dwarves were quite similar to humans in many ways. So if she was alive?

If she was alive, Sophie could do something about it. She could help. Then maybe this would all be worth it even more than it was.

It started with getting her to safety.

Getting her to safety, then they could worry about all the rest. Bob got off of his position and looked at her. Of course, neither one of them wanted to be the first to talk. In that moment, something passed between them. Bob tried to wake the child. The little dwarf girl rolled over.

"Not now mom," a soft voice said. "Ten more minutes."

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

The dwarf rolled over. Sophie took a glance at Stella. She was still there in the light.

"Take her out? She's delirious," Bob said, putting one arm behind her head. "Let's bring her back to camp. Anthony will know what to do. Between him and you we should be set."

With a table working as a makeshift bed, she realized that the girl was laying on a thick blanket.

"Use the blanket?" Sophie said. "Like a stretcher?"

"Sounds good. Uh..."

"I'll take the top, with her head as we go up the stairs. You take the bottom," Sophie said.

"Is that because..."

"Because I'm a top, yeah," Sophie said, gathering the blanket in her hands and getting into position. "And proud of it."

"Alright, let's go," Bob said, grabbing the girl's feet. "We're going to need to mark this house, because this is too good to pass up."

"Agreed. On three..."

----------------------------------------

Anthony examined the dwarf girl. He really wished that he had a blood pressure cuff, a thermometer, a monitor and a bag of saline. Oh and all the other stuff that he could get only in a hospital. He would love to run labs on the girl, but seeing as how she was a different species, her normal would probably just make him even more confused.

"Alright. This girl looks like-if she was a human I would say that she's just exhausted. An old time doctor might say that she had the morbs and prescribe her some time breathing in the sea breeze along the coast. If there is some magical effect going on, I'm not able to discern it," Anthony said.

Bob and Sophie looked relieved at his words. Neither one wanted to bring in a dead girl. An unconscious dwarf that seemed to be having active nightmares? That would be preferable to another zombie.

They had laid her down in a shaped room along the outer wall of the staging area. Half of the room was under a tent, the other half was the reinforced outer wall. This let in enough sunlight for them to see in the early evening.

"Do you think...?" Bob said, looking hopeful.

"She's probably dehydrated and given she must have been surviving on prepped food, she might have hypernatremia. We'll need some water for when she wakes up."

"Hypernatremia?" Bob said.

"She's either gotten a bit too salty or less watery. Either one can kill you after a while," Anthony said. "But I don't know without any way to tell. That's just my best guess for what she's going through. When she drinks water, whoever checks her urine can tell us if it's dark brown, that's going to be a bad sign. I did all I could for her otherwise."

"So check her pee," Sophie said. "But don't be weird about it. I'm glad you're not asking me to test her for diabetes."

"You know that-" Anthony started.

"Well aware, boss!" Sophie said, giggling.

"Well if her urine smells sweet also, let me know. I doubt we can fix dwarven diabetes out here but the more we know," he said, putting a hand on her arm as he searched for an artery.

More data would have been helpful, but he had a sense that he thought all that he could and that they had arrived at the right time. A little bit later and they would not have been dealing with the living dwarf. Bob explained the situation with the basement. Anthony was enthusiastic and two and the two of them.

They realized that they were going to have to take a wagon out there to load up all the things. Before they were going to do that, they would have to clear all the nearby houses. There were only about forty houses that were outside of the city for however large it was. There was one giant building that had to be the military academy but all else looked like it was housing for regular old dwarves.

There was nothing else. Flags, crests and heraldry around that little smattering of houses made him think that it was all for hierarchy dwarves or instructors. That this dwarven girl had been in the basement of one of those houses, could be a good sign. The group didn't think that they were going to see any more living enlightened beings. The orcs had been out in the wilderness, far away from anything resembling a town.

"Did anyone tell Andrew? I feel like he might want to know," Bob said.

"About the other dwarf? I don't think we can have that kind of thing over here. It's going to come out eventually, especially if they're the only ones in the infirmary now."

"We don't need to concern ourselves with them right now. When she wakes up. They can talk but it's like why would? Do I think they have anything in common? One lives and works with us."

Both men sat over her waiting for her to make the first move. If they were playing a game of chicken, she would win the World championship. She still had her eyes closed.

Anthony waited on her for the third time today. He might be able to fish out a salty electrolyte solution to give her. Of course she would have to drink it and that would be salty, but she needed to wake up.

A pitcher of water sat next to her. Back in Arva, they had a whole infirmary running, even if it was never full. They also had two patients. Here, they just had one and several cots for the sick to sleep on and around. There wasn't even a special cot for the sick. When they packed up it would go back into the general supply.

It wasn't until she sat bolt upright while Anthony was eating his dinner stew that they confirmed any suspicions.

"Aaaah!" She screamed, a loud noise in a sea of silence.

Anthony, covered his ears and offered her a bowl of stew.

"The hell is this?" She said, looking at him with disdain. "Humans? In my city? Where the hell am I?"

"We're actually not in the city anymore. When we found you, we moved you out here away from The Horde. I'm Anthony by the way. Could you tell me anything about what you've experienced over the past week or so? Because we are here in part to deal with the zombie problem. So..."

She stood him down for a long minute, and really ate the stew deliberately. With each bite she perked up with a little bit more. She grabbed the picture next to the cot and drained it fully. Then her eyes went wide.

"I might be able to answer some questions but first, mister, would you be able to point me to the powder room? All this food all the sudden is making me feel a certain way."

Her eyes rolled around like a mad woman. He couldn't imagine what it would be like to wake up inside of a makeshift Fortress that had just popped up. It wasn't like there was anything to compare it to. Sonya had just gone and made this design herself.

There was a spot in the corner that they used and he pointed her over there. He remembered how Sonia had been very particular about making this work for them. He didn't have a flush toilet but it did have a place where one could sit down and do their business. Because of how the setup had been it was very reminiscent of Earth.

Of course there was tenting around it for privacy, but he was concerned that she was going to lose her shit or something. She had been isolated for at least a week. And if what Bob and Sophie were saying was true then perhaps she'd had to hold up all by herself.

Bob couldn't imagine what she had been through. The situations were reversed. He definitely would not know if he could make it as far as she did on her own. Joe, having lived in a basement for so long, he questions. She had stuck it out. And there was a question of how when everyone else around her had turned into a zombie that but she hadn’t, how did this one woman survive? That would be a question for when she was ready to talk at length. Right now?

"All you need to do is drink more water," He said to the girls.

"No. Beer me," she said.