"ZEUS is heading your way. It's sticking to the rooftops so look out above," the voice coming in over the radio sounded decidedly shaky, which did nothing to calm his nerves.

The helicopter had been following ZEUS for twenty minutes now, herding it towards their position. Until now he had believed what he had heard repeated so many times, that ZEUS was the codename for a whole terrorist organization, a cell operating from within New York. They all dressed the same to convince people that they were one man who was impossible to kill.

The past twenty minutes had ruined that for him, listening to the reports coming in from the helicopter about how ZEUS was moving along the rooftops left only the most terrible rumors he had heard plausible. That ZEUS was a monster, a living weapon escaped from the lab where it had been held, that it was the embodiment of the virus ravaging the city, that it infected everything it touched and would continue on its rampage until it was destroyed or there was no one left for it to kill.

Waiting was the hardest part, giving him time to consider all of the terrible stories he had heard from men who had claimed to know someone who had seen ZEUS first hand.

Each time an update came in from the helicopter crew he felt his stomach sink as he learned how much closer ZEUS was to their position. It was like watching a tidal wave rushing straight at you with no possibility of escape to higher ground.

"It's a block away from your position and closing fast. Wait, wait. It's stopping…it's…"

He looked up towards where the helicopter was, hovering over where ZEUS supposedly was, wondering why the guys in the helicopter had not simply fired upon whatever building ZEUS was standing on, crushing him under tons of rubble.

"Holy fuck!"

The helicopter rose abruptly and veered away, but it was too late. As he watched helplessly something hit the helicopter, completely destroying the rotors and sending the helicopter plummeting from the sky.

All around him the others were staring dumbstruck at the place where the helicopter had been just seconds ago.

Something darted across the rooftops, a blur heading straight towards them.

"That's ZEUS! It's here!"

All around him, his fellow Marines, the men he had served with, trained and fought alongside, now ran around in a mindless panic, or just stared and watched death heading their way.

One of them had the presence of mind to remember his training and start shooting at ZEUS, but ZEUS was either moving too fast to be hit, or really could not be killed, for it kept coming closer, never stopping, never slowing down.

His own gun was nowhere to be found, it must have slipped from his fear numbed hands, for he found himself unarmed, unable to do anything other than watch as ZEUS took a running leap off the top of a building then fell like a stone.

Now he found himself able to move, to run, but it was too late. By the time he turned to try and flee the shockwave from ZEUS' landing knocked the breath from his lungs and sent him sprawling to the ground, falling flat on his face.

The pain must have caused him to pass out, for the next thing he knew he was being lifted from the ground by impossibly strong hands. The fingers of whoever was holding him were literally digging into his shoulders, he could actually feel his bones grinding against each other.

Unable to breath through his nose, he could taste blood and his whole face was sticky with blood from his broken nose.

One of his eyes was swollen shut, but he could see well enough to recognize what it was lifting him off his feet.

ZEUS had him.

Under the shadow of its hood he could see cold blue eyes.

"I need answers. You know where someone who has them is."

A drop of blood fell from his face onto ZEUS' and where it landed the black and red things writhed beneath its skin. Elsewhere he could see similar strands rising up from ZEUS, reaching towards him as though in anticipation of further blood being spilled.

"I won't – "

His words ended in a scream of pain as those red and black strands surged forward, digging into his skin and working their way deeper, seeking…

o0o

Yet again Alex Mercer woke up shaking from a nightmare where he saw himself through the eyes of one of his countless victims.

Just like each of the other times he had such a dream, upon waking up, he was wearing the form of a dead man rather than his own.

A moment's concentration and he was back to as he should be, but he was too wound up, too nervous to try and get back to sleep. After all he had been through he felt pathetic to end up like this, sitting along in a dark room in an abandoned building, too afraid of what nightmares he might have to try and get back to sleep, but there was no helping it.

He was a grown man, more than that, he was a monster, a killer virus, a living biological weapon and he was afraid of dreams like some little kid.

Nightmares like the one that had awoken him were not even the worst sort, nor were the ones where he would wake up with his hands shifted into claws or blades, or his entire body covered in living armor, reminding him of what he really the worst sort. Once he had even destroyed the place he had been sleeping in when he sent spikes tearing through the walls and floor of the room, but that had been nothing.

Then there was the absolute worst kind of dreams, where he relived the best moments of another person's life and woke up into the real nightmare. To be a woman on her wedding day, or a man watching his son graduate from college only to wake up and remember that the person in the dream was not you, was in fact dead by your own hands was too much.

As much control as he had over his body when awake, once asleep where his subconscious could rise to the surface, he became a danger, as much to himself as others.

For that reason he avoided any place where people might be living when he needed to rest. Though dangerous for him, there was no risk to others if he stuck to areas still quarantined due to their proximity to the remaining hives, or too badly damaged for people to be allowed back in.

He paced the apartment, going from room to room, stopping from time to time to look at some picture or trinket, a reminder of the people who had once lived there. There was some comfort in the fact that had not killed any of the people who had lived there, allowing him to believe that they still might be alive somewhere, waiting to resume their normal lives, something that would never happen for him.

There was nothing normal about him, and depending on how he looked at the situation, he might not even really be alive either.

Eventually he found himself in the bathroom, looking at himself in the mirror.

Dark as it was, it was difficult for him to see anything at first, but with a thought he worked the changes necessary to allow him to see in near total darkness.

Though unable to see any color, he knew his eyes were piercingly blue, though he could change that if he wanted to. He examined every angle and shadow that defined his features, all both familiar and strange. It was his face, but at the same time it was just the face of another dead man, the first victim of the strain of Blacklight that he had so painstakingly created. Alex Mercer was really just the first man he killed, without Mercer he was what? a vial of red liquid unknowingly waiting for the moment of release? a collection of DNA more dead than alive, in need of a host to be anything more than what it was?

He knew as much about Mercer as any of the other men he had killed, but because Mercer was first, that was who he considered himself.

With a thought his skin of his arms writhed with red and black tendrils of tissue which hardened into black armor, the bones of his fingers stretching out into organic blades.

How exactly he did it was a mystery even to him, something he had simply known how to do after consuming one of the hunter infected.

Another thought and his entire body was covered in armor.

Again he examined himself. No trace of humanity remained in the contours of what had been his face, even his eyes were gone, replaced by little seed pearl orbs the same color as the armor that covered the rest of him. For the first time he noticed that his mouth and nose were gone when he was like this, but his chest still rose and fell as he breathed. Since he had the time and nothing better to do, he looked himself over, attempting to make sense of what he had made himself into.

Careful examination revealed that there were thin slits in the furrows that ran over his armored form. Those must have been what he was breathing through.

None of it made sense from a human standpoint, it was all just the Blacklight virus' best attempt at an answer to the question of how to survive. Everything about him was dictated by what the virus needed. It did not need to make sense from a human standpoint, as long as it worked it was enough.

He quickly shifted through all of his offensive and defensive forms, noting how the substance that made him shifted and twisted as it flowed smoothly into new, technically impossible, shapes.

Each form felt as natural, or unnatural as any other form he wore.

Next he shifted into the form of one of the scientists he had killed and consumed, a former coworker of his to whom he felt no more attachment to than any of his other countless victims.

Effortlessly he shifted to become a Marine, then a Blackwatch commander before returning to what he considered his true form.

Each form he took felt the same to him, his default form, the face he knew as Alex Mercer, was no more comfortable than any other human face, or even his armored form.

Deciding to try something different, he concentrated on one of the female scientists he had consumed. An instant later he was staring at the reflection of the woman in the mirror. It felt no different, no more or less comfortable, than being a man or a monster.

The next shift he underwent, just to see if he could do it, took a bit more effort than any of the previous, changing the clothing he wore without changing the form. He remained a woman, but now wore his customary black jacket and hooded sweatshirt. The front of his shirt was open just enough that he was able to see the swell of the woman's breasts.

Despite what stolen memories would have had him expecting, the sight did nothing for him, though that may have been because he was the woman he was looking at.

Further concentration on the form he wore and he was naked, still a woman, but the shape of the body he wore was uninteresting, half of the answer humans had to survive and perpetuate the species and nothing more. The form was attractive enough based on his memories, but the part of him that he considered to be who he was found no attraction in it. In the end it all came down to survival of the species and there was nothing appealing about any of that. As much as he thought he should be interested, or at least curious, he felt nothing.

Changing back to himself was a matter of still more concentration rather than relaxation. Tendrils rode up from him, writhing and shifting, the soft, curved form of the woman expanding and hardening into the muscular angles of the man, it should have been revolting to watch, but as with each other transformation, he was unmoved.

He was Alex Mercer again, still naked, looking at the other half of humanity's answer to the question of survival. Memories which could have belonged to any number of his victims, again encouraged the idea of examining what he saw, taking note of what should have been most appealing, but why? Any of his features could be changed with a thought, the answers a man possessed to the questions of survival were meaningless to him

Being Alex Mercer was no different than being anyone else. Perhaps the form was more familiar, but there was no spark of recognition, no connection between the man in the mirror and who he truly was. Any connection he had felt to the face of Alex Mercer had been permanently severed by discovering the truth. Mercer was as much of a monster and the virus that had killed him.

He knew from the soldiers and scientists that he had consumed, as well as the more advanced infected he had observed, that the virus tried to shape its victims into something new, its ultimate answer to the question of how to survive. Did he appear as he did because that was the virus' best answer to surviving, or because it was his best answer to what a man should be?

Taking a deep breath and closing his eyes, he decided to try and find out.

It was just a matter of relaxing and clearing his mind of everything except the way he felt when he allowed his form to change. By not concentrating on any desired end result beyond what his form seemed most willing to flow into he hoped to discover the true face of Blacklight, the face he wore before his first victim, when he was just a thing with no need for countless layers of masks and deception.

The sensation of his skin squirming until it erupted into red and black ropes stretching and shifting out from him was ordinary enough that he felt no need to open his eyes to watch. To him the change was as natural and comfortable as anything else he experienced, almost soothing in its familiarity. Besides, if he were to watch he might start giving himself an artificial goal of what form he wished to take.

At last he sensed that the transformation was reaching its end, the shifting slowed and then stopped. Whatever form he had taken, it felt different than the others, as though until this moment he had been tensing his muscles without even realizing it. Now he was completely at ease.

Eager to see what he really was, rather than what he pretended to be, he opened his eyes, or at least he tried to, only to discover that he no longer had proper eyes. He could sense heat just fine, and the difference between light and shadow, as well as feeling the movement of the air around him and the texture of the floor beneath him in a way far more sensitive than had been allowed by the human nerve endings he had mimicked, but that did not answer his question. He wanted to know what a living virus looked like, not how it saw the world.

Sensory organs not analogous to anything possessed by a human changed to become something more familiar, giving him an impossible view of the room. Eyes that he knew to be piercing blue, despite the fact that he could not see color, stared out in all directions at once, embedded in a shapeless mass of writhing, reaching tendrils of tissue.

Realization of the truth brought on revulsion that none of the false forms he had worn could.

The answer his true form gave to the question of how to recoil in horror was to convulse, to pull in on itself, tendrils and eyes retracting, soft sensory tissues hardening into numb armor.

There was no trace of humanity in the thing he had become, the true face of the Blacklight virus was that it had no face. Like all other living things, once everything else had been stripped away, it was just a thing, existing to perpetuate its own existence.

o0o

Once again Alex Mercer awoke shaking from a nightmare, the lashing tendrils that had erupted from his body in his moment of panic already starting to retract.

Plaster from the ceiling rained down on him and large holes had been torn in the walls.

Already the details of what he had seen in the dream were fading, leaving him nothing more than the impression of what he had seen upon entering a viral hive accompanied by a sort of sensory overload, and an intense, but fast fading, feeling of disgust.

With the room destroyed he gave up on trying to get any more sleep that night. Two nightmares in one evening was too much even for him, even if he was unable to remember much of the second. Knowing that it had caused him to lash out in his sleep was enough.

To avoid sleep, he was going to go out for a walk to keep himself occupied until dawn came, with the hope that some further distraction would present itself with the arrival of the next day.

But as he started to walk out the door a troubling realization struck him.

He had not been in a bedroom, instead he was in a bathroom and he had awoken in such a position that he would have to have been staring at the mirror.

If he had been sleepwalking he was even more of a danger to others than he had originally believed, and if he had not been sleepwalking, if his dream had been real…

Though he could not remember anything about his most recent nightmare other than a feeling of revulsion he shuddered. He was unable to shake the feeling that this nightmare would be added to the repertoire of dreams that tormented his nights and the half remembered events of stolen memories that made his days a living hell.

All that he had been through made it hard to distinguish dream from reality, the few memories of his own that he possessed from the countless fragments he had acquired from his victims. In his dreams the line between them blurred further, until he was as much his victims as he was Alex Mercer.

Looking back into the bathroom he stared at the broken mirror, the spider web cracks running through it reducing the image of his face to a jumble of features.

With a thought he shifted to his armored form and found that the new image made neither less nor more sense in the shattered mirror.