Full Summary: The Infection is a virus with many strains, some allowing for staggering and recognizable physical mutations. With so many variables and possibilities, there's bound to be some exceptions to the rule, Infected who are not as mentally or as physically damaged as the rest. Does the hope for the cure lie within them? A branch of the government certainly seems to think so. As the world spirals ever further out of control, they actively capture and contain Special Infected, looking for the ones who aren't like the rest, who might very well hold the only hope the world has for salvation. Special Infected like Fletcher, an incompletely Infected Smoker with a fragile but vaguely human state of mind.

But that doesn't stop them from shoving him in a cage, placing him and several others like him at the mercy of a group of scientists and doctors racing against time to find the answer to the world's newest and most dangerous problem, regardless of the price they might have to pay. After all, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few…right?

Nicole used to think so. A brilliant young researcher-in-training and daughter of one of the world's leading researchers of diseases, she knows the price that sometimes must be paid to save the world. But after gradually realizing how human Fletcher and the other test subjects are, maybe that price is something she is no longer quite as willing to pay.

Chapter One

Captured

For the first time in decades, the city was silent. There were no sirens rushing to the scene of one of the many crimes that used to take place daily, no car horns blaring amidst several miles worth of rush hour traffic, no buzzing conversation of thousands upon thousands of people as they walked to jobs, school, home, or on day shopping trips. There was nothing. Nothing but silence.

Or at least, nothing that had once normally been there.

A lone pedestrian shuffled aimlessly down a deserted street, the left side of his body covered in raised bumps and boils, one eye on that side of his face almost forced shut by a sloping, damaged forehead and a large tumor-like growth running down his check to his neck. From his rasping open mouth hung a long stretch of some sort of glistening tentacle-like appendage that swayed back and forth with every step and twitched at every occasional cough. The clothing covering his tall, lithe frame was heavily stained and torn from weeks of being on the street. If he remembered what he had once looked like, he would have been horrified at his disfigured, filthy state, but probably resigned to admit that in comparison to other similar creatures he had seen, he was really not that bad off. The rest of his body was still miraculously intact and growth-free, the small haze of greenish smoke surrounding him was barely discernible compared to others with a similar state, and his skin color had not taken on that terrible gray tinge that seemed so common among the many current city inhabitants (his brain called them Others and he had no reason to think of them otherwise). True, it was no longer a healthy shade in any respect, but at least it wasn't gray.

Maybe that was why no one liked him enough to stick around.

He paused to curiously inspect several huddled forms on the ground, only to lose interest and continue on his way once he realized that they had been dead for far too long and were missing almost half of their bodies. He had no interest in the dead and decaying. Not unless he was so hungry he could not resist a few small bites.

Cannibal.

The fleeting thought made him scratch at his swollen arm in vague confusion, stopping and looking around at the empty street, now becoming heavily shadowed in the dim light of the oncoming sunset. His brain had spat out that word several times before, not that he really remembered. He could hardly recall what had happened that morning. Even still, it made him uneasy, but he could not quite figure out why. It had something to do with food. That much was clear. But there was nothing wrong with food if he was hungry, right?

He started on his lonely way once again, the word and the feeling rapidly disappearing into his confused, shattered mind. Darkness was coming. That was much more interesting. Besides, the strange words were hardly anything new. They came to him quite a bit. It was perfectly normal.

A few blocks ahead and he passed an alleyway where there was movement. He paused in his meaningless wandering and watched as a pair of creatures bit and tore eagerly into some sort of corpse, their faces and fronts and clawed hands covered in blood and gore. One raised its head to look at him as he coughed, its face concealed within the darkness of a hood, but it lost interest almost immediately after seeing what he was and returned to its grisly work. After a moment of sniffing the air, testing their scents for signs of any further danger, he moved on. He knew what kind of creatures those were. They were the ones who made the high-pitched shrieks that hurt his sensitive hearing. They moved with an agility and speed that his body could not match and tore with wicked claws at the other creatures who did not have gray skin or bumps and boils, the ones that his brain called Normal.

Speaking of Normal…

He paused in his step once again, face turned upward as he sniffed at the air. There was a new smell here. The smell he associated with the Normal. They were close, within a mile radius. If he stopped his raspy breathing long enough, he could just hear the telltale signs of the shrieking attack cries of the Others that always heralded their presence.

After a moment of consideration, he decided that he would go see what the commotion was about. He had learned early on that such sounds of chaos often brought fresh corpses, and he was hungry enough for a taste of one of those regardless of the strange word and feeling associated with the thought of it. Just as long as there was something appetizing left. Of course, he had also learned the hard way that getting involved in such things was dangerous to his health and well being, but as long as he kept himself hidden, he would most likely be fine.

Most likely.

The hub of the commotion was a little more than half a mile away. More than two dozen Others were swarming over a small stretch of street, clawing out the ground and sometimes at each other, nearly engulfed in a cloud of green smoke, different than the one that seemed to persistently hang around his body. He sniffed the air curiously, his one good eye observing the scene from a street corner a safe distance away. From what he could see, there were no Normal there, but the green mist certainly smelled like they should be.

Confusion crept into his brain as he tried to figure it out. Whenever he smelled or saw something like the green mist in the past, there had always been Normal around. Always. True, it usually had not been in mist form, instead being rather a liquid, but it was still the same smell if not stronger. Yet there were no Normal in sight. Frowning, he turned his nose up and kept sniffing, searching for any scent related clues as to what was going on. His determination to make sense of things overrode his urge to investigate the strange mist, to fall in line with the Others in their maddened, single minded purpose.

After a few moments, he thought he found it, the answer to his questioning thoughts, or at the very least a possibly meal. It was vague, almost unnoticeable. If he had not taken the time to look for it, he would have missed the smell completely.

Fresh blood. Normal blood. And it was close.

His nose twitched as it tested the air a bit more, trying to determine the direction that the fresh smell of blood was coming from. He would much prefer the thing was already dead as opposed to something he would have to make dead himself. For some reason, he could never bring himself to actually kill anything like the Others did. Somehow, it felt…wrong. Even more wrong than how that strange word made him feel when he thought of feeding. Wrong enough that he had never tried it.

An unusual movement caught his attention and he looked up to watch it with a narrowed eye. Through a window several floors above the street a block away from where the Others gathered, something thin and lean stuck itself out. A moment later, a small cylindrical object flew through the air a little to the side of the maddened group of Others and with a smash, the glass broke and another cloud of green erupted into the air. The group of creatures went insane, immediately converging on this new development, shortly joined by many more to replace the numbers they had killed amongst themselves in their frenzy.

Forcing himself to ignore the nearly overwhelming smell and focus on the blood scent instead, he turned his good eye to stare at the building that the movement and the small object had come from. It was a few doors away from him, a good block or so from the chaos. He took a few moments more to decide that that was where the blood smell was originating, completely ignored by the Others as they sought after the more overpowering scent.

Good. That only meant more for him.

He took a step towards the building, only to hesitate as a thought bubbled through his swirling mind. Movement had come from that place. So had the strange object that had caused the smoke. He struggled to try to think why such events would be bad for him. Oh. Yes. That must mean that life of some sort was present in there, and since he could smell Normal blood, it was probably Normal life. But then, there was blood. Lots of it, from what he could smell. So perhaps whatever was bleeding was now dying, even if it had moved earlier. It would hardly hurt to check it out. Surely.

He continued towards the building, picking his way carefully down the sidewalk, his gaze switching between his target and the milling group of Infected, many now fighting amongst each other as an outlet for their rage and hunger. They ignored him, and for that he was glad. He didn't really have the energy to fend any of them off if they came to investigate what he was doing. Not that they usually would.

His pace slowed as he came up to the building. The smell of blood was definitely coming from within it. After sniffing about for a bit, he located it wafting into the street from an open side door down a narrow alleyway. Open doors were good. It meant that no one was around to shut them. Eagerly, he started down the alleyway towards the dark rectangle, his stomach churning anxiously at the thought of food. It had been a while since he had last eaten, scavenging the remains of a fresh corpse a day or so back. He wasn't quite at the point where he was hungry enough to try eating long dead flesh, but he was hungry enough not to pass up on a good meal.

And that blood smelled good. Really good.

When he reached the doorway, he poked his head inside first, letting the vision in his good eye automatically adjust to the dimness. It did so rapidly, better than his eyes would have done so before, not that he remembered that. But it didn't take memories for him to focus on an open door across the small, nearly empty room and to realize that that was where his goal lay. The scent was coming incredibly strong from there. Nearly overpowering to his heightened senses. As a result, he took no notice of the dark forms lurking in the corners to his sides. He paid no heed to the fact that the room scented of Normal presences, although they were somewhat disguised by musty cloths and the next room's smell of blood.

He coughed to himself and paced forward slowly, leisurely, satisfied that he could not smell any Others in this room with him. His good eye was trained on the entrance to the room beyond. He didn't even get the chance to see the barrel of a gun raise from one of the dark forms in the corner, the gloved finger sliding into place over the trigger.

There was a muffled bang and he felt something pierce his neck. He stumbled, a hand automatically shooting up to the spot to feel a long, narrow tube sticking out of his skin. His fingers raked at it, letting it fall to the floor, but the damage was done. He felt his legs give way, his shoulder crash into the wall as he slid onto the floor. With a confused sense of horror, a rapid numbness flowed through his body from where the sharp pain had happened. His cry of surprise died in his throat.

Another muffled bang and suddenly he was twitching in agony, clawing at his shoulder where another strange object had lodged itself. He felt more pain than he could ever remember. It jolted his entire body, fired every cell and neuron, even as they became unfeeling and deadened. Even as he felt his mind slowly spiral downward into blackness.

Then the pain was gone and he lay there unable to move, barely able to breathe. He felt panic rise in his chest, choking him, but there was nothing he could do but lay there in the sudden, terrible silence. His body was beyond his control.

Then a strange sound broke through the muggy silence, whispered and excitedly urgent.

"Got one! Looks like a Smoker!"

Smoker?

The word reverberated through his swiftly darkening mind. He knew somehow that the word was referring to him, but he could not quite fathom why. It made little sense in his mind. Only…

When a man needs a smoke, he needs a smoke. Nature of the beast, man…

"Perfect. Get some samples and stick him with the others," said a new voice brusquely, calling from what seemed like the next room over, and immediately the Smoker felt himself being grabbed and dragged across the ground rather roughly. He tried to fight back, tried to escape, but his body was shutting down with his mind closely following. "And make sure you label everything right this time! God knows we ain't got the time to play matching games."

The first voice muttered something nearly indiscernible, his tone obviously disgruntled. After a few moments, the movement stopped and the Smoker was harshly dropped on the floor. He lay there for what felt like an eternity but was really only a few seconds, his sluggish mind frantically attempting to make sense of the situation as little by little his thoughts began to shut down. Then there was something grabbing one of his arms again, and he felt a sharp, pricking pain and an odd pulling sensation in the same spot. His blood was being sucked out of his veins, siphoned into a small plastic tube. Not that he really knew that. All he knew was that he was in trouble. Big trouble.

It was a trap.

It was the last thought he had as he felt his consciousness give way at last to the growing darkness in his mind. And he didn't even really understand what it meant. Except that he probably wasn't going to be happy when he woke up.

If he ever did.