[A/N: I haven't been to Manhattan, though I would like to. So you can imagine this story's geography probably gets fuzzy really, really fast. ^^ Wiki is a very underrated fanfiction tool.]
Monster's Playground
Chapter 3
I
Finding supplies that hadn't already been looted, contaminated or out and out destroyed took more time each day. There weren't any fresh produce any longer, and today he had simply raided a supermarket that had been too close to a hive for any human looters to chance and took as many cans of food away as he could carry.
The hospital itself was fairly well stocked, and the canteen had already become a makeshift soup kitchen, thanks to Ragland and his patients. Alex contributed now and then, but at the most part, so long as the patients kept away from Dana, he didn't really care what they did. Looters and the military had – so far – kept away from the hospital.
Careful to keep the biomass under control, Alex walked into the hospital. The woman at the reception was one of Ragland's first successes after Dana, his vaccine modified by whatever he had learned from the serum. All of the current hospital staff were volunteers, either from Ragland's patients or returning hospital staff, and he smiled tersely at them as he walked past. He had kept a low profile once the hospital had become steadily more crowded, and most of the staff knew him only as 'Dana's brother'. He found that it suited him. Human panic and fear was annoying to deal with, and it could be dangerous with Dana in close proximity.
Dana wasn't in her room, and a brief search of the wards didn't turn her up. Concerned, Alex checked Ragland's consultation room, then the courtyard gardens, and finally the canteen, where he was relieved to find her seated at the back.
His relief dissipated somewhat when he realized she was talking to Cross.
"Here," Alex dumped the plastic bags of canned food on the table, glaring pointedly at Cross, who had the gall to smirk at him. After Cross had intervened in an altercation between patients fighting to get vaccinated, he was being perceived as the hospital's default security force, and someone had even found him a discarded Kevlar jacket, which he wore open over a white shirt.
The shirt stretched tight over muscle and scars, and Alex hated it. For some reason, he couldn't stop staring at the faint ridges that scar tissue made under the cotton. Human reflex, perhaps.
"Baked beans," Dana said happily, rooting in the bag and seemingly oblivious to her 'brother's' temper. "Give it to the counter people."
Alex scowled. "They're for you, not the rest." He didn't just get chased about by a couple of hunters on the rooftops and dodge strike teams for a handful of freeloading rabble.
"We have to share," Dana insisted firmly, picking up the bags with some effort and pressing a light peck on Alex's cheek that made him flinch. "Thanks for your effort, big brother."
Startled, Alex didn't move to help her, though a patient did, once she was a respectable distance away from him. Staring at her hand over the food to the counter, Alex sighed, then glared at Cross when the specialist chuckled. "What?"
"Your sister is a good woman."
"You stay away from her." Alex frowned as Dana began to chat with the counter people – a chubby, elderly woman and her skinny pole of a son, both recent recipients of the vaccine. As he started forward, Cross caught him by the elbow.
"Sit down, Mercer. They're just people."
Mercer stared pointedly at Cross' hand until the specialist removed it, putting his palms up in a gesture of mock surrender. "If you go after her and make a scene, she'll only get upset with you."
"I'm trying to protect her."
"You've consumed a lot of people, Mercer. A lot of memories. I'm sure you can cross reference something." Cross shrugged, sipping at a glass of water and turning back to his bowl of unidentifiable stew. "You want people to trust you, you have to give them a little space."
Despite himself and his instincts, Alex grudgingly sat down on the bench, if at an arm's length away from the specialist. "It's not safe here."
"No." Cross agreed. "But it's not a bad place. I never liked hospitals, though." Cross' missing fingers were ugly, scar tissue-ridden stumps just above the knuckle, but the specialist seemed unselfconscious. "Bad memories."
Alex stared a moment longer at the stumps, then at the Kevlar jacket. The way Cross had just said that- "What was it like, getting the nanotech?"
"I don't remember." At Alex's sidelong, disbelieving stare, Cross snorted. "Yeah, the first thing I remember is waking up in a GENTEK lab, thirty-eight years old, didn't know who I was, didn't know what I was. I only knew my name from the military dog tags that I was wearing." Another spoonful of stew, and a thoughtful, "I've been thirty-eight for forty years."
"Didn't have family?"
"Don't know. Seems I volunteered. The nanotech rewrites you from the inside out. It's an artificial reboot. Makes you faster, stronger."
"Makes you lose things."
"Could be. Maybe I didn't have anything to lose." Cross finished eating, slowly. "Didn't want to find out."
"Isn't that running away?"
"You're the expert on that, I guess," Cross said, almost playfully.
Alex ignored the jibe. "The rest of the Wiseman team was like you?"
"Similar. I was the oldest. They've come and go."
"Didn't have any attachment to them?"
"Personal attachment? No. Can't afford to." Cross jerked a thumb behind him, in the general direction of the entrance to the hospital. "Not with what we hunt. During the downtime, we go our own ways but do the same thing; drink hard liquor and find easy women." At Alex's frown, Cross added, "It's not as bad as it sounds."
"You're not putting a good light on your job offer." Sympathy was a foreign emotion; it kept him talking, and Alex wasn't sure he liked it.
"I didn't think you were even going to consider it," Cross shot back, with a faint smirk. "But if you are, I could wax lyrical on the health care, good pay, food and lodging-"
Alex snorted. "And when you get eaten by monsters, no one will miss you?"
"I'm sure we'll generate some paperwork somewhere," Cross deadpanned, wiping his mouth. "Should be out of your hair in a couple of days. After that-"
"After that, we're even." Alex leant back against the table, avoiding Cross' eyes. "And if I see you, I'll kill you."
"Sounds a little less convincing each time," Cross drawled, getting up from the bench.
The only reason why, Alex thought as he watched Cross walk away towards the communal sinks to wash his plate, he didn't immediately kick the specialist across the canteen for that remark, was because he didn't want to start a panic.
II
His uneasy truce with Cross ended rather abruptly late afternoon on the fourth day, with the crunching roar of APCs and jeeps pulling up with muddy scars into the hospital courtyard. Alex tensed as he watched from the second floor wards, by the window, and nearly generated claws on impulse when Cross padded silently up behind him.
"Party's over."
"Maybe." Alex scowled at the soldiers crawling out from their easily breakable toys.
Cross sighed, shoving his hands into his jacket, as though thinking things over, then he closed his eyes and rocked back on his heels. "A hell lot of civilians in here. A hell lot less, once they realize you're around."
"Shoot first, aim later?"
"Hah." Cross pushed past him, heading for the fire escape. "You and your sister, get out of here. I'll talk to them for as long as I have to."
"What, you're just going to let me go?" Alex said, incredulous – and not a little skeptical.
"Sure am. There are kids in this place. If a firefight breaks out, I don't want that sort of blood on my hands."
"It'll just be a splash compared to the last three weeks," Alex noted bluntly, but Cross merely smiled his enigmatic, annoying smile and offered a half-wave over his shoulder, trotting down the stairs. Alex sprinted for Dana's room, only to find her trotting towards him, looking worried.
"I heard that there're soldiers."
"We've got to go." Alex grabbed at her elbow. "C'mon."
"What about Robert?"
"They're his friends."
Dana shot him a disbelieving stare, and dragged him back to the window. The leader of the soldiers, a stocky, tall man tanned the color of weathered brick, was arguing with Ragland. Hospital staff and worried civilians were huddled behind the middle-aged doctor, like chicks behind an angry hen.
As they watched, Cross jogged out of the fire escape on the ground floor, hands held high above his head, coming to a stop when the leader pushed Ragland roughly aside and stalked towards him. Alex wished he could hear what was being said-
"What are they saying?" Dana murmured.
"Who cares?" Alex shook himself mentally. He couldn't get distracted. Dana was the only important one. "Let's go, Dana. He can take care of himself."
"No, look… they're arresting him!" True enough, the leader gestured at the other soldiers, and a couple of them marched up to Cross, pulling his arms behind his back and cuffing them together, shoving him towards the jeep. Some of the staff shouted, stepping forward, but froze when the soldiers raised their weapons, herding them onto the courtyard. "You've got to stop them, Alex."
"They'll find us here. We'll worry about that once we're someplace safe." Watching Cross get frogmarched to the jeep caused an uncomfortable, restless curl of ice within him, and Alex set his jaw, resenting the unwanted, irrelevant emotion.
"No, you can't.. okay, okay, let me get my laptop!" Dana ran for her room, scooping up her laptop and stuffing it into the nearest bag, along with the charger and her mouse. Alex slung the bag over his shoulder and picked Dana up, despite her yelp of surprise. There was a balcony on the next floor from which he could – possibly – try to glide onto the next building. As he took the steps four at a time and burst out onto the balcony, Dana pressed her face into his hood, her arms trembling.
Three blocks away from the hospital, she curled her fingers into his arms. "Okay. Okay. Let's get to street level. Traveling like this makes me want to puke."
"Don't do it on me." Alex hesitated, looking around them. This wasn't one of the good areas. Fires and infected creep had long destroyed any landmarks his memories could remember, and even though the denizens of this part of town were humans, they were looters and thieves and worse. "Few more jumps first, okay?"
Dana shuddered, but she nodded slowly. "All right. Head towards Alphabet City. I read on the net that it's back up and running. Normal running."
"We don't have money," Alex reminded her. They couldn't afford to rent any place in anywhere 'up and running'.
Dana chewed at her lower lip. "Okay. Okay. You decide, then. But get me a gun."
"Guns won't stop infected."
"That's what you're for, right?" Dana said snappishly, staring back over his shoulder, at the looming bulk of the hospital. "Shit. I'm so sorry, Alex. You had to get me out of there and… shit."
"Don't be," Alex said curtly, wondering why Dana was apologizing. Worried about Cross, maybe. "Cross can take care of himself."
"You saw him get…" Dana cut herself off, her fingers tightening over his shoulders. "Okay." Another deep breath. "Yeah. I guess you never did go for the dependent types."
"Uh huh." Alex tried to parse Dana's slang, cross-referencing them slowly with his memories, then realized it was a little late to reverse the damage and glossed over it instead. "I think Hudson Heights is still being re-occupied. We can probably find some place there while we figure out how to leave Manhattan."
"The Heights? That's in the new gangland zones right now."
"It has space the last I saw, and it isn't in an infected or military zone," Alex pointed out. "But I'm open to suggestions."
"If we had some money I could probably get us out on one of the ferries. Only way to leave without having to go past the checkpoints." Dana hissed as Alex took another jump, squeezing her eyes shut until he landed. "Fuck, I hate that. My stomach just crawls into my shoes to whimper and die."
"How the hell am I supposed to get money?"
"How should I know?" Dana said irritably, still stressed. "Rob a goddamn bank?"
There was a pause, then Dana groaned. "Did I just give you an idea? Alex, please tell me I didn't."
"Actually-"
"We are not going to rob a bank!"
III
"You're a bad influence."
"Uh huh."
"I'm now a career criminal."
"Uh huh."
"I'll never be able to get a normal job ever again."
"Mm-hmm."
"There was probably CCTV in that thing."
"Yeah."
"You're not," Dana moaned, "Being helpful."
Alex rolled over onto his side on the couch. He didn't need to sleep, but sometimes – not now, admittedly – lying at rest was… calming. "You were happy enough to spend the money."
Dana muttered something indistinct and probably rude, even as furniture moved. Place a woman in a post-apocalyptic setting with martial law and zombie monsters, and she would still want to arrange furniture.
The couch faced a blank television with no reception and a street bustling with nervous humans. Alphabet City was back up and running, even if the landlady who had agreed to house two tenants with no luggage and no referees insisted on rent up front and had looked even more frightened when Alex had dug a wad of bills out of his pockets. Few of the actual shops had reopened, most still boarded up or destroyed, but street stalls had been set up, and from the second floor up, Alex could smell hotdogs. The constant buzz of voices in his mind faded to a faint, soothing murmur.
Figured.
Dana leant over the couch, staring upside down at him. "Hungry?"
"I don't get hungry." Consuming humans had been more of necessity and healing than actual hunger.
Dana pulled a face at him. "I'm hungry."
"So that was your subtle way of telling me to go out and buy you something."
"No, that was my subtle way of telling you that we're going to go out, to one of those cafes, sit down, and have a normal meal together for the first time in five years, give or take a few months."
"Didn't I say I don't get hungry?"
"You can eat, right? Have a goddamn salad."
He wasn't sure he could eat. "Fine."
"Better than you moping in here."
Alex found himself being dragged out from the bare rented room with peeling, faded cyan wallpaper into the bare narrow corridor outside with peeling, faded turquoise wallpaper, down creaking, breakneck steps and out into a street that stank of cigarettes, sweat, and recent poor plumbing.
The café that Dana chose was no better. Alex rested his feet on the thick duffel bags stuffed with cash under the rickety table and picked at the tasteless bowl of soggy chips. Salad was not on the menu – root vegetables were more readily available than perishable greens. Dana, however, ate her hotdog of stale bread and unidentifiable meat with every sign of relish.
"You're still moping."
Alex glared at her. The place stank, and the packed crowds and noise was making him edgy.
"I can take care of myself," Dana continued, a little indistinctly. "I've always done it. Up until recently you were never around unless you needed something. I'll get a gun. You don't have to watch me all the time."
If you want people to trust you… "All right." Alex supposed that even… after, he had left Dana alone now and then, while he had run errands for Cross and scrounged around for answers with GENTEK and Ragland.
Seeing Dana in the coma, and feeling helpless to do anything but rely on Ragland to come up with an impossible vaccine, however, had made him protective. He hadn't enjoyed that sense of impotency.
Still, when Dana smiled warmly at him, Alex couldn't quite take back his words. "Good. I'll keep digging. You can go check on Ragland or something." Or Cross. The words hung unspoken but distinct between them. "If you're hanging over my shoulder all the time, you'll drive me crazy."
"He offered me a job in the military. Cross, that is, not Ragland."
"It's kinda weird how you keep referring to him by his surname," Dana remarked, but grinned when Alex scowled. "Yeah, it's like that, huh?"
"Dana…"
"Okay, okay. Job in the military. Sounds great. Especially after they tried to nuke us all to hell."
"Yeah. I didn't bite."
"Or is there another branch, or something? There has to be some reason why he got arrested." Dana said thoughtfully. "Want me to look it up?"
Memories told Alex that even if he said no, Dana would do it anyway. "He's in something called Blackwatch. The Wiseman team. They hunt infected. Lance outbreaks."
"Maybe the military is looking for a scapegoat."
"You watch too many movies. There's a billion dollars' worth of nanotech in his bloodstream." Dredged memories from consumed GENTEK operatives informed Alex that he probably wasn't even exaggerating.
"He's a walking computer?" Dana whistled. "That's cool."
"It's a gross simplification-"
"Well, you know what people do to computers that stop working the way they should," Dana said quietly, tapping at her temple. "Reformat, reboot."
-tbc-
