AN: If I owned Prototype, the sequel would have never switched protagonists and the cutscenes would have been longer. Having said that, enjoy!
Night fell heavily upon the streets of Manhattan.
Once, the place had often been dubbed with the moniker of The City That Never Sleeps. Lit brightly at all hours, there was no darkness in New York, only two types of day - the natural one of the sun and the resplendent glow of headlights and nightclubs and neon signs. There was never a break in the rivers of people that crowded the sidewalks and streets.
A year ago, somewhere amidst that constant thrum of life, all hell had broken loose.
Some balance had been shattered, and New York City had tumbled blindly over the precipice, falling halfway into a horror film and halfway into hell. It was the sort of thing that only happened in stories; apocalyptic myths of doomsday and armageddon, legends as far removed from modern day reality as midnight was to high noon. The skies had burned a bloody red, the sunlight filtered by airborne corruption. Men clad in malevolent black raiments had patrolled the streets, claiming to be saviors as they gunned down innocents and monsters alike - gunned them down and laughed. A strange sickness turned people into mindless, aggressive zombies, and beasts with empty sockets and gaping mouths roamed the streets, spreading the anathema. And a demon had soared above the chaos, a creature with weapons for hands and eyes of cold fire. Its motives were unfathomable, but the fear it engendered was supreme; if it wanted you, there was no escape. It was immensely powerful, agile, and fast, leaping from building to building among the tainted clouds and leaving a trail of absolute destruction in its wake.
The infection was over, the nightmare dispelled, but life was a far cry from the norm it had once known in the Big Apple. Even if the Infected had been mostly destroyed, the quarantine lifted, and the area deemed livable, not everything had been repaired from the utter devastation that had been suffered. Not all buildings had been rebuilt, with offices and convenience stores shoulder-to-shoulder with collapsed ruins. Not all streets were safe to walk upon. Not all of the rubble had been cleared, and the disposal teams were still finding skeletons underneath the remnants.
The nights had once been loud in Manhattan, but now they were silent. The Sleepless City had fallen mute upon dusk once more, at last admitting that it needed its rest and recuperation. In some ways, the quiet was peaceful - a far cry from the screams and sirens that had once drilled a constant, frenetic rhythm in beat with the chaos.
To the figure that leaned against the cold brick walls of a decrepit alley, the silence was oppressive.
In the cloudy shadows, the man might have been a gangster, or any of the less benign denizens of the big city. Even near the beginning of one of New York's famed warm summers, he wore several layers of vestments; faded jeans, an off-white tee, a steel-hued hoodie, and a dark leather jacket with a red insignia looping across the back. The punk outfit could have been sleek once, but it carried enough grime and stains to have been dragged across a couple city blocks. Most of the figure was covered by his choice of clothing, but what could be seen of his hands and neck was deathly pale. Overall, he was lean; with his skin being the sickly ivory that it was, he bore a deep resemblance to a plague victim.
A light grey hood obscured most of his face, but what could be made of his features was drawn and chiseled, his chin coming down to an aquiline point. He had prominent cheekbones, and his complexion was just as pale as the rest of him, sharp shadows betraying some level of exhaustion. Silver-blue eyes peered just under the rim of the hoodie, their gaze unnervingly intense. They, above all else, were the sign that belied truth about him, were one to look hard enough. No eyes could look so predatory, so focused, that they seemed to emit a glow.
He called himself Alex Mercer, but that was hardly the only name he'd been known by. Some called him Blacklight, some DX-1118 C, others ZEUS. And there were always the less specific ones - terrorist, monster, murderer. He wore a human face and preferred a human name, but he was truly anything but. He was a sentient virus, a virtually immortal living weapon that could lay waste to cities on a whim and consumed others to survive.
But he was human, part of him. And that consciousness cried out in unspoken revulsion at the thought of being nothing more than a disease, the bastard child of science and immorality. It grasped at an identity, something solid and identifiable to hold it from tumbling into the void of being subhuman. And so he was Alex Mercer, long after he knew that he was not, that he was only as much Alex Mercer as he was every other person he'd assimilated.
He had not known a peaceful existence. His first memories - the first ones that were truly his - were of waking up on a morgue, several seconds away from being vivisected. He'd panicked and fled into a squadron of soldiers. He'd pled with them and they'd riddled him with bullets anyways. He'd survived, somehow, with a series of unsettling, even terrifying realizations unearthing themselves. And that had become the story of his life, for a while.
Back during the struggle, he had wished to be left alone.
Now, neither Infected nor military actively chased him. No viral detectors blared to strip away his disguises and point him out as a fugitive. The helicopters that patrolled the skies were employed for news footage and supply delivery rather than searching air raids that rained hellfire down upon him. Now, he could recline in the streets in what he'd come to consider his true form, and for the most part, he went unrecognized... except he was no longer alone. In his fight to discover, escape, and ultimately survive, he had consumed dozens of people. Yes, he might have been the only person in that particular alleyway, but it no longer felt like it. He had traded one lack of privacy for another.
The chorus of voices in his mind still cried out, unable to be shut out or silenced; each one a tangible weight on his shoulders for every life he had stolen and could never return.
Some, he could justify. There had been no shortage of corruption and sadism within the ranks of those he had brought down during his search for answers. Heartless scientists with no grasp of repercussions outside the laboratory (like him, once upon a time), traitors who sold secrets to the highest bidder, cowards who sacrificed their men like playing cards to put off the certain death that had come for them anyway.
But others... there had always been the soldiers with wives and families who'd obeyed their orders long after they knew they were doomed, cases of mistaken identities from his patched and fragmented network of information. There were those who had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, unfortunate enough to cross his path while he was under fire and desperately needed to replenish his biomass. And some, he could not recall ever having consumed at all, Blackwatch and civilians mingled together in a red haze of frenzied hunger as he'd lost himself to circumstance and the primal roar of the virus within.
Looking back on those days, almost a year later, it was hard for him to imagine what he had done. It was true that he still felt the hunger, but it was mostly abated compared to what it had been like when he'd fought in an active warzone, constantly needing to absorb others as he'd damaged and lost his own biomass. He had done what needed to be done, and yet sometimes, he felt as though he'd been no better than the other Infected, wreaking havoc and slaughtering with reckless abandon in a quest that had led to more emptiness than before.
The aftermath - the conscience - had hit him suddenly after his coincidental reanimation, as he'd sat on a rooftop and gazed over Manhattan - a city he knew from memories that weren't his own, and a city he'd seen fall apart. As he'd watched life going on from the proverbial above, sluggishly scabbing over the wounds, the realization of his own culpability had hit him like a ton of bricks. He had saved the city from certain destruction, but he had blood on his hands. Sometimes, when he occasionally ventured out into the daylit streets, passerby he'd never known would stir recognition, and the souls within him cried out. He'd stolen these citizens' family and friends, and unlike before, it mattered.
Sometimes, he missed the war.
A virus wouldn't necessarily be inclined to bear a conscience, but now that Mercer had time to sit back and think rather than throw himself into the once-constant maelstrom of action, it was inevitable that the clamor of ideals and ultimately human notions would get to him. He might have saved the city, but he'd unleashed several kinds of hell on it at the same time. On several inescapable levels, everything that had happened to New York City in the first place could be attributed to himself. He had set Greene loose. His former incarnation had unleashed the Blacklight virus to begin with, damning the city and his sister alike for a nihilistic last 'screw you' to the world. And he had killed. Oh, how he had killed. He held no illusions - he was not a hero, nor had he ever been one. He had sought answers and revenge, not to save Manhattan and place himself on a pedestal that he could never mount.
Frustratingly enough, that bothered him.
He'd been created to destroy; years had seen Blacklight cultivated into a truly lethal weapon, the worst plague to blight mankind since the Bubonic. And destroy he did; he was an anathema, dooming everyone he got close to, tearing through humans and Infected and machines alike in a mindless blaze of kill, kill. But what if he no longer wanted to destroy? What if Zeus no longer wished to rain down fury from the heavens, what if a disease lost its will to propagate? What then?
Alex knew he could never be hailed as a saviour, but it was growing increasingly difficult to live with his past, where he'd harbored concern mostly exclusive to himself. Sometimes, he felt like giving in and yelling out, "What the hell do you want me to do about it?", but he doubted he'd get a response.
The worst part was, he was starting to second-guess himself. This new conscience crap was worming its way into the past like a cancer, only more exquisitely painful as it devoured him from the inside out. If he had been a better person, would Dana have been terrified of him? If he'd acted differently, would she be lying inert in a coma, her awakening uncertain? Was there something he could have done?
Disgusted, he turned slightly and dug his fist into the wall behind him, watching the brick crack and mortar degrade into dust as it buckled under the immense pressure. Beneath the immediate manifestation of his consciousness, several thoughts - not his own, never his own - chimed in that he needed to see a therapist. He tuned them out. What they hell did they know? If he wanted to break things to ignore his problems, then it was one of the less destructive and more socially acceptable things he'd done.
The small pops and snaps of brick crumbling was suddenly offlaid by a roaring crash. Alex froze, old habits hastily dusting themselves off for action. The wall he'd been toying with had not been damaged enough to warrant anything near such a sound, and the echoes that blended with the ongoing original noise bespoke of something else. He focused - it did appear to come from behind him, but also a fair ways to the left, on the edge of SoHo.
Do I check it out? It wasn't a question worth forming.
Instead of taking the streets like any person with a hint of sanity, he turned to the slapdash and partially mutilated brick behind him, took a step back, and launched himself up the building's side. Whether or not he was sane was questionable, he mused as he sprinted upwards, but when it came down to the nitty-gritty, he didn't exactly fit the classifications of 'person' either. Brick crumbled and glass shattered under his feet as he dashed vertically, taking a final leap as he reached the edge and skidding to a halt between two deeply stained smokestacks. He wondered idly what the police would think when they found the possibly abandoned building missing an entire column of windows. It brought a ghost of a grin to his shrouded face. Property damage had never exactly bothered him. If anything, it felt like payback, a petulant 'in-your-face' to the military that had insisted on chasing him. It had been a while since he had been tormented by them, but it didn't mean he forgave those past wrongs.
Shifting his biomass, he crossed the roof and launched himself into empty space, arms outstretched in an ironic parody of a superhero. The air whistled underneath him as he glided from one side of the street to another, dropping to a much lower building on the other side. For whatever reason, some people were infatuated with the concept of flight. He didn't understand it. It was just a necessity, another form of transport. He was not going to give rides.
The 7-11 he stood on didn't offer much of a view, so he hauled himself up the seven-story hotel next to it, waking up several guests in the process.
One of them would end up having to pay for her inexplicably broken window.
From the scaffolding of the Double Tree, he could finally see what had caused the noise. A couple blocks southeast, one particularly precarious wreck had finally succumbed to gravity. It hardly mattered. Structures fell all the time. Occasionally, it wasn't even his fault. But as he turned to continue his wanderings of the city, he heard something beneath the rumbling echoes. A cry.
I honestly don't give a damn. It's not my problem. Whoever was stupid enough to be out and about at night is - damn it. The train of thought was cut off, derailed, and sent crashing into a cliff face when he realized he was already halfway up his second building in that direction.
One of the perks of nighttime - and why he did most of his roaming then - was because of its unexpected emptiness. Some unspoken but generally heeded curfew had materialized during the Infection. His days, he spent wandering with his head down, watching from rooftops or the farthest corner of some cafe - never for food, just to watch the current of life flow ever forward and pretend that maybe he had a place in it, just for a moment - ignoring the people he'd terrorized and the military he'd slaughtered, and being ignored in turn. Always wearing a different skin with every new sunrise, a wolf sorting through the pelts of his victim sheep, existing in a repetitive cycle of lies that had allowed him to fade into a near obscurity. But the nights were different. He was a drifter, but dusk was something he could truly call his own. He could run, jump, climb, and destroy freely; nobody was there to watch and persecute him, save the occasional sleepy and underpaid police officer.
But that also meant that there was nobody else around to answer the reedy, muffled wail that emanated from the wreckage he was rapidly nearing, and the new 'conscience' garbage more or less obligated him to deal with it himself.
It was a fairly impressive collapse, he noted as he jumped off a vacant office building, causing a massive crater in the asphalt of the site of the wreck. He remembered that the structure in front of him had been a hive once. The infection's probing tendrils were long gone, leaving great gaps in the metal frame; the building's skeleton had been massively weakened. Part of the front side had given way entirely, now resting on the ground in a massive tangle of planks and rusted metal frames.
There was definitely a person under the wreckage. He could hear quick, stertorous breathing from the pile, and as a general rule, rubble didn't breathe on its own.
"Hello?" he called. Was there some sort of standard rescue dialogue he should have been following? Blackwatch protocol for this sort of thing mostly consisted of sticking a gun into the rubble and finishing the job. "Can you hear me?"
He was immediately assaulted by a panicked, high-pitched, and extremely female voice. "Yes, and it really really really hurts! Help me, please!"
Mercer could see the victim's infrared outline under the rubble. Much smaller than an adult - he wasn't an expert at proportions, but the person couldn't be older than seven or eight. What the hell had a kid been doing out here in the middle of the night? Then again, not every waif and urchin had a mother or father to look after them anymore. He knew all too well about that.
Instead of answering, he looked up. The building was still straining. He could hear the scream of buckling metal, and he knew that the structure was not done collapsing. Another series of beams was dangerously close to falling, and having devoured as many scientists as he had, it took Mercer little time to compute a rough estimate on how long it would take before they toppled, and where they would land. At most, it would be ten minutes, and they too would land upon the trapped girl, give or take a couple of feet. Either way, she would be crushed, and the odds of her getting lucky again were slim.
The odds were slim...
Under the rubble, the girl was still panicking. "Hello? Hello?"
Mercer's jaw clenched as the familiar instinct kicked in, unignorable after having been tantamount in his mind for so long. Kill. Consume.
As things were, the girl was dead. He had no idea why she was wandering outside so late, and alone, at that, but fate had already done her in. Nobody would miss her any more than they would have, had he not happened to be around. Human lives meant nothing. He did not - had never - stood on the same level as them. If they were above him, then he resented them for it, and if they were below him, they were prey. The ropy red-gray tendrils extended themselves from his back, wriggling in their own anticipation.
The factor that had driven him here in the first place argued vehemently against this sudden, darker intent, but it was reason versus instinct. Really, that was all he was, a virus pretending to be human...
The girl's heat signature had gone limp, exhausted by her own struggles. Limp like... a figure on a hospital bed. A morgue...
The decision came to him quickly.
His left arm shivered and distorted as tendrils wove through it, wrapping themselves around the sinews and altering the limb into a chitinous, silvery-black set of claws. Had the girl been able to clearly see her would-be rescuer, she would have panicked and screamed. Luckily for the both of them, her eyes were too blinded by tears to make out the serrated, vicious weapon which Alex had shifted his hand into.
He lifted his arm, the many bladed edges of its armor managing to gleam under a sky that gave no light.
"Stay put," he implored, his once sonorous tones gravelly with disuse. "I'm gonna get you out of there."
Alex thought he could see a nod under the slightly shifting beams. He took another step forward; the asphalt buckled under his weight. "Oh," he added as an afterthought, "and close your eyes."
Without waiting to see if she complied, he lunged forward, tearing into the wood and steel like sheets of rice paper. He hacked and slashed at the trapping beams, slicing them at their joints as he avoided cutting the splayed heat signature within the circumstantial trap. The girl was shrieking, but Mercer had heard too many screams in his life to maintain any impulse to pay attention to them. The metal bars gave way to his claws as effortlessly as butter under a heated knife. He was a weapon, the pinnacle of destruction. But at the same time... maybe there were other uses for a weapon.
The last beam over the figure fell aside. Shifting his arm back to normal, Alex stepped back, pulling his hood back where it had ridden up an inch in his clawing. The trapped person had indeed been a young girl, a skinny little thing with brown hair and wide green eyes. Scrawny - nothing near enough to sate him anyway. Features, inconsequential to him, and yet the countless mothers he'd consumed all agreed that it could have been their child trapped.
He picked her up. He wasn't exactly a gentle person, but he did his best not to break her spine as he checked her over for damage. She seemed to be unharmed, nothing more serious than a couple of soon-to-be-bruises and shallow abrasions.
"I had heard a noise and went out to check it out," she was gabbling, "even though I wasn't supposed to go out of the apartment, and there was this funny noise again and BOOM!" Her energetic gesticulations were rather nullified by being grasped under the arms like a children's toy. "I thought I was gonna die and then you came along! And I was taught that I shouldn't be talking to strangers but I was also taught to say thank you, so, um, thanks, stranger?"
"It was nothing," he said gruffly, finally setting her down. "Just... try to be a little more careful? Manhattan's a dangerous place. You shouldn't go wandering off on your own."
The girl seemed a little put off by her saviour's unfriendliness, but gave him a bouncy nod. Clearly, she wasn't one to watch the news; if she had any idea who he was, she'd be running away screaming. "Okay, mister! I need to get home before Mommy notices I'm gone anyways. Thank you!"
Mercer watched, expressionless, as she made her way back, skipping up the street in a manner rather atypical of one who had just escaped a shocking and fatal situation. So she still had parents, then? She was one of the lucky ones. That she could still afford to be protected and oblivious amidst such desolation. There were many out there who lacked mothers, fathers, spouses, relatives, friends. It was impossible to forget. He knew several of them intimately, moreso than he ever wanted to, knew them through the eyes of the missing.
And now there was one less disappearance, one less casualty of a war zone.
It wasn't penance for what he'd done. It wasn't even close. And yet, it was something. A try. A single step.
The first streaks of orange began to dust the clouds as morning dawned.