Despite everything, the dawn still came. The skies had gone from navy to hazy gray, and crimson tinted the edges of a few eastward straggler clouds like fiery embers or drops of blood. The horizon lightened until it settled upon a shivering silver shade. Then, reliably and like an old friend, the sun crept above the waters of the distant bay.
It was a small comfort, sometimes. Alex had never been one for metaphors or philosophy – the fact that the planet's rotation cyclically created the illusion of a blazing ball of gas travelling across the sky had absolutely no relation to the turnout of upcoming events. The city got brighter on a predictable basis, but the future did not, and the fact that people cited those situations as intertwined was just another reason why humanity was completely unfathomable.
But it was a constant, something he could rely upon. There weren't many things he could be sure of; he was too accustomed to hatred and betrayal for that. So it was… nice, somehow, to watch the skies lighten and herald the return of life to the streets below. Even as the mid-October days grew shorter and he held a condescending dislike for the crowds, it was gratifying to see. Buildings fell and people died; safe and serene zones of the city on one day could crawl with the disease the next, and see the military carve out their centers upon its ground a week later. But day and night were predictable, if nothing else.
He needed some stability right now.
The burgeoning red zone in Gramercy had been prematurely ended; the night had passed in a blur of violence, butchering everything that burned with the unnatural heat of the infection. He had encountered more of the strange new monsters along with a few hunters and many infected civilians in the slow process of dying; to top off the killing spree, he'd torn apart a starter hive with nothing more than his muscle-engorged fists.
Then, in that still, shivering hour that bisected the dawn and the dead of night, he'd headed north and west towards another of his familiar haunts.
He'd watched the sunrise from the Empire State Building's pinnacle. It was as far removed from the ceaseless chaos below as he could get; high, even for him, as he'd perched on the structure's decorative spire. The air was thin at such altitude, and cleaner than usual, less laden with smog. It helped clear his mind, just a little. It was also extremely visible – after all, it was only the single highest point in the city. While it was a painfully obvious spot to be seen at, he'd learned early on that no helicopters wanted to shoot at the building. They'd fly circles around him, but as far as firing went, it was often a stalemate, barring a few experiences with some of the more ruthless Blackwatch pilots. He hadn't seen any this morning, though, so it was a moot point.
The rare serenity from on high could not have contrasted more sharply with how he felt. And those thoughts had followed him down to earth, inflamed sharply less than two blocks westward as he soared over the roof of Penn Station – where everything had begun. They boiled still as he knelt in the shadows of an abandoned apartment's roof in Midtown West.
New monsters. Evolution. The city, getting pranced upon like a giant playground, millions of lives forming the rope in a collossal game of-tug of-war. Pariah, Greene. Himself. All linked together by the virus's gripping tendrils. Everything. How could any of this be stopped? Where did he fit in? What was the virus? Greene's voice, all that time ago – "The reason." His question still stood – for what? Both intrinsic and incomprehensible, the subject cast long and toxic shadows that thoroughly blackened every inch of his mind.
There was no point wasting thought on blame. He'd been naïve and weak, and Pariah had used him to escape his captivity. He'd been unprepared, and he hadn't been able to stop Greene from being pulled out of his body. Both were his fault, by at least some measure. Fine. The past was done with; as much as he might wish otherwise, there was nothing he could do to change it.
What he could do, though, was change the future. The next time they met, he wouldn't be weak, he wouldn't be unprepared. He'd be ready. He'd strike them down and burn the pieces.
…Yeah, that was a lot easier said than done. He growled and buried his face in his hands. Fuck the world.
Knowledge was a weapon in its own right – a hand to guide his many tools of death when force alone fell short. And it was an easy enough thing to gather. He ripped secrets from his enemy's brains, at the price of immortalizing their loves and hates and dying screams along with those few useful tidbits. That toll had become both easier and more excruciating to pay… but what if nobody knew the answers? What if there was nothing there to take?
This was the conundrum he pored over in the crisp midmorning air, upon a filthy roof and a crumbling emergency staircase. Everything in his arsenal was useless when faced with Pariah's will. How was he expected to fight when he couldn't get his own body to obey him?
And for once, the answers came from within.
It was a feeling, a desire – another eddy in his swirling sea of repressed wants. At first, he paid it no mind, brushing it aside as he'd trained himself to. But while hunger and violence retreated with little resistance, this ugly, twisted little sentiment persisted, cropping up in his thoughts again and again whenever he thought of Pariah, of Greene.
He gritted his teeth, finally recognizing it. Virulence. Beneath his carefully maintained inert exterior, pathologic agents swirled inside – diseases necessary for his preternatural strength and ability to regenerate, but also things that would tear apart the world in short order if they escaped from under his skin. Which was exactly what the virus wanted – an organism below reasoning or thought, it followed the only prerogative it had. And the Blacklight virus did not want to stay locked up inside a single body.
Well, it could go fuck itself. He wasn't going to play god with the world like his former self. He wasn't going to spread the virus. He wasn't Greene.
Greene and her hive…
The realization came slowly, pieces falling into place as he recognized what he had been fighting his damnedest to ignore all along. Petals of the truth spread open one by one, a flower unfolding in the morning light. It was a very spiky, twisted flower with grey blooms, and it probably cannibalized other flowers – no, cannibalized was the wrong word, so maybe it was a genetically engineered killer mushroom pretending to be a flower – but the comparison still stood.
He was Blacklight. He was infected. There was no escaping that, and he knew it, had accepted it long ago. Had even done so gratefully, in the face of the even more damning alternative. But the virus was more than some substance that gave him powers – it was something that set the parameters for his existence, something that both sustained him and drained him, something that fought against his conscious mind more often than not these days. And there were some things that he couldn't stamp out at all. He could stop himself from acting, but not from feeling. From craving.
He was vulnerable because he wanted a hive, somewhere within the twisted depths of his viral mind. He responded fervently to Pariah's whim because his instincts wanted to submit, as long as it meant being a part of the collective.
But in some ways, even that felt unnatural. Because he was different, not only in conscious mind but in genetic dissonance. Because he was not created to follow, but to lead.
If he wanted Pariah to stop controlling him through the Redlight hivemind, he was going to have to make his own.
Well, that was just fucking perfect. He groaned.
He'd keep searching. It wasn't feasible – a perfect case of the solution being worse than the problem. Manhattan would be freed of Redlight and promptly slaughtered by its genetically engineered counterpart. As a disease, Blacklight was apparently ten times more lethal than its predecessor. Everyone in Penn Station had died within minutes. He'd eaten people who'd seen the security camera footage – the virus had only taken half a minute to bring people to their knees, frothing at the mouth and coughing up blood. Humanity wouldn't stand a chance.
What if I controlled it? came an insidious little thought.
He shook his head violently. No, he wasn't going to allow himself to get a taste of that. He didn't… trust himself. He knew what he was and how to – vaguely – carve out a definitive 'him' from the hodgepodge conglomerate of his mind, where raw Blacklight ended and the recreated Alex Mercer began. An entity outside of his nastier instincts. He knew how to keep himself in line with how things currently stood. And he knew his limits. There was a difference between choosing to consume somebody and stopping in the act. As he'd recently proved to himself, barring complete internal hell, he could choose to ignore his would-be prey. It was hellishly difficult at times, but wholly possible if he steeled himself. But trying to pull out after beginning to consume a person was impossible. It was more than losing control over his feeder tendrils, it was losing control over his ability to reason. If infection was the same way…
There had to be another way. He'd have to see if Dana had come up with any new information the next time he saw her.
Judging by their last conversation, he had a sickening feeling that he was going to have to give her some information of a different sort before she helped him out again.
And that was… crushing. Horrifying. Something he just couldn't face, all the while knowing that the longer he pushed it off, the worse things would be.
Not that the outcome would have ever been any different. He'd seen it with Karen, with Ragland – the terror and disgust. They didn't understand – whether to betrayal or subservience, it drove them away, cut off any chance of a vaguely amicable relationship. There wasn't a semblance of equality; just pure and unadulterated fear of the unknown. And to see that on Dana's face… might just kill him. He didn't know. He didn't think he could stand it.
But if he left her to find everything out for herself, what would she uncover? What conclusions would she draw? The world viewed him as a terrorist, a monster with no greater motive than to kill everything in his line of sight. She might see something twisted, something worse than he truly was…
He laughed at that, a sound as bitter and cold as ice. Worse? That was a hilarious thought. Worse how? The truth was about as horrible as things could get. Nothing she could find would come close to touching upon the true horror of his story. Maybe she could have grown to accept his habits, through denial if nothing else. But the fact remained that he had been posing as somebody she loved. That he wasn't who she loved.
But… His hands clenched into fists. He owed it to her. Definitely after all of this time, days and nights stretching into weeks of trying to put aside reality and hiding what he truly was. He'd entered her life and irrevocably made her a target; she'd gone from having an ordinary and probably happy routine to becoming a prime bargaining material for one of the country's most deadly and underhanded forces. The damage was done, and he couldn't undo that, but neither could he ignore the fact that his interference had barred her from living a normal life. Perhaps even permanently. And even after all he'd taken, he still hadn't allowed her the truth. He'd reasoned that it was to her benefit, that she'd be happier in ignorance. But it was glaringly obvious. The benefits were mostly his. He was a creature outside of human guidelines; he could take without giving. But not from her.
She deserved to know what kind of monster she was sheltering under her roof.
He closed his eyes. It was time to give her the truth.
0o0o0
Age was a confusing thing for Alex Mercer. Little of it seemed to apply to him, just a few bits and pieces - it was actually pretty absurd, it he stopped to think about it. Entirely ignoring the fact that he was a possibly-immortal construct of viral cells… He was a three-month-old that usually appeared to be aged around twenty-nine years. He had a predominant mindset that didn't seem to correlate well with either age, or humanity, for that matter, but it was superimposed over the experiences of hundreds of lives. A few thousand years' worth of memories, barely his.
He felt about a thousand years old now, as he stood before the door to apartment number 604. Everything was suddenly surreal, like he was moving underwater; detached and disconnected, making no more sense than familiar, habitual patterns. Mechanically, fingers curled over the knob. Hesitated. Turned it anyway. Patterns that were the only sketchy guidelines of humanity that he'd managed to hash out.
Pushed it open, stepped forward. Patterns that were about to break.
Dana didn't greet him – just gazed at him with an expression devoid of all usual warmth. For once, she wasn't at the computer, but sitting cross-legged on the sofa, an empty coffee cup beside her.
Maybe she was angry about what happened earlier. That was fine – he was used to anger; at least that was something he could understand. Maybe she'd just ignore him. He could handle that. Maybe he wasn't about to lose the only thing he could call his life. He avoided her eyes and strode past her resolutely, not sure where he was going.
"Alex."
He nodded stiffly in acknowledgement, not managing to face her. Damn it, why had he come here? Panic kindled in his chest; this had been a mistake, bringing his own doom upon him. Why the hell was he doing this on his own volition? His hands, jammed into his pockets, clutched tightly at the pseudo-fabric. His breathing sped up and his senses kicked into overdrive. The door was a few paces behind him; the window was closer, but took a few seconds longer to unlatch and pry open. Or he could forgo those fumbling moments and simply tear his way free of the walls that seemed to be closing in on him –
"Alex, look at me."
He did, and she trapped him with those sky-blue eyes.
"We can't go on living like this. We need to talk."
"And why can't we?" he asked plaintively. "Don't you think you might just be happier keeping your eyes shut? Do you ever stop to think that the truth might not be this… shining beacon of happiness, and – and of liberation that you build it up to be?"
"…I'm a journalist." She scowled. "Do you think I have to answer that question?"
"But this isn't just a job. This is our lives. When you know, there's no turning back. No forgetting. No returning to where we used to stand."
"That's why it's so important," Dana broke out. "It is our lives. It's real, it's closer to home than anything I could try to write a scoop on. How… look, maybe the truth is as bad as you're making it out to be. But not knowing it is just as bad. Sometimes I can't sleep at night, just trying to figure out all of this hell out – and because I don't know what's going on, I'm probably dreaming up things worse than you really are. Or I'm hoping that things are better than they are, when I know they're not. But it's driving me insane. This isn't the right way – I just can't keep hiding from the truth forever. I deserve to know it, Alex. Let me make my own decisions. I know you don't like to talk about what happened, but… just stop torturing me like this!"
That stung, but at least it stung in the right place. If Dana was really and truly unhappy… He gnawed on his lip, another one of those pointless human habits that had leached into his mannerisms. If Dana was upset, then that was more important than any of his own woes.
He felt like he was signing his own death warrant with the words; turning himself in to Blackwatch, kneeling before Mother, throwing himself into the bay and waiting the long, agonizing weeks it would take for his body to dissolve away. "What do you already know?"
"Well…" She sighed. "Too much. Not enough. I… I've looked for stuff about you on Blackwatch's caches, but everything on Zeus… you, sorry. Seriously, they hardly ever use your name. Anyway, it's more than locked up. It's just not there. I can find footage of you doing a ton of crazy shit, but information? There's nothing there that I hadn't already figured out. I knew you had something to do with the virus. You're not like the other Infected, but… you're infected. You were special – something they did to you, that thing you were trying to find out. We've both been trying to avoid that, but it's been pretty obvious. You weren't immune to the disease – you just weren't catching it because you already had it, didn't you? The viral detectors; why else would they have tried to use them to find you? You mentioned the hivemind more than once, like you were a part of it. I noticed all of these… I guess I just tried to ignore them.
"But you know what really got me thinking?" she said quietly. "That one time, Cross called you a 'thing'. Not a guy, a person, a man – a thing. And I tried to rationalize it to myself for a while, that he was just pissed off – righteously so. But that's not the sort of name you really call anyone, is it? Oh, sure, we can swear at each other all we like, but we don't stoop down to calling other people 'it's… things. That isn't natural. And it occurred to me that Cross knows a lot more than I do."
"In some ways, he does," he replied hollowly.
"Yeah, well, this is one of those things. And I'm determined to change that. Alex, look." Her voice had taken on a sort of pleading note. "No more secrets. I need to know the truth. No matter how horrible it is, I'll listen. I'll try to understand. Just… please, trust me. You're my brother. That's stronger than all of this."
It's not, because I'm not! he wanted to cry out, as if that might explain his silence without incriminating himself beyond the point of no return. But that critical misunderstanding was why he'd managed to be with her this long, and a frantic desire to drink in that companionship while he still could held his tongue for a few seconds longer.
At his lack of forthcoming information, that softer undertone left her words. "I want to know the truth, and you owe it to me, Alex. No more lies. How can you do everything that you can do and still be human?"
This was it. The moment he'd been dreading, the inevitable confrontation with the truth – the only enemy his weapons were useless against. He could practically feel something breaking inside of him, and he wondered, not for the first time, why it hurt, why she was so wonderful and caring and different than everyone else, and maybe that in and of itself was why he had to lose her. Alex closed his eyes.
"I'm not."
She blinked. The words 'come again?' hovered at the tip of her tongue.
"I'm not human," he admitted wretchedly. "Yes, I'm infected. Technically. It's deeper than that. The Walkers you see on the street, the Infected, hell, Elizabeth Greene herself – they're more human than I am."
"Alex, you're not making any sense."
"Nothing makes sense… but they were human once. They were people that got caught up in all of this madness and lost themselves to the Redlight virus. They were human before the virus burned them out. I'm not. I never was.
"Dana, listen." He felt like he was dying, struggling through a cloud of Bloodtox that thickened with every word. "I'm going to tell you everything I know about myself. Myself and… the person I used to be. I'm warning you, though, you're not going to like it. You'd be much happier if you could forget ever doubting who or what I was. Even if you just leave this point alone and try to live with it. The truth sucks. I'd forget it if I could."
His sister's stony silence was as good of a response as he was going to get. He sighed. "There are two ways I can go through this – chronologically, which would get straight to the point but probably wouldn't really make sense, or I can give you the scattered pieces of information as I learned them. It's a long story, and not an enjoyable one at all, but maybe… maybe you'd be able to realize why I did what I did back in the first Outbreak. God knows, everyone else thinks I was wrong. Sometimes I'm even inclined to agree with them. But I was desperate… and desperate men tend to do crazy things. Like your brother did."
"If you're going to start narrating yourself in third person, at least be consistent about it. You're making me cringe here."
Inwardly, he sighed. That was the Dana he knew. And the one he was about to drive away. "I'll get to that. Now, which way do you want me to crucify myself?"
She rolled her eyes. "Drama really does not suit you. Tell it from the start, like you saw it. I definitely could use some help understanding all of this crazy-assed shit."
"…All right." He took a deep breath, remembering an incomprehensible haze of strobe lights and fiercely throbbing pain. "It started on July twenty-seventh, the same night that Blackwatch tried to go after you. Well, things had gotten rolling a bit before then… but for me, that night – that's when it all began."
He wasn't one for sugarcoating. "I woke up in a morgue," he said bluntly. "Some scientists were arguing over my body. I decided it was a good idea to let them know I was alive when they got ready to vivisect me."
Dana's eyebrows shot up, but she refrained from voicing the barrage of questions that had clearly already formed.
"I didn't remember anything. Hell, the only reason I knew my own name was because it'd been tossed around when they were talking over me. When I got up, they freaked out and ran. I tried to go after them – I was as confused as hell – but I couldn't keep up. It was like trying to learn how to walk again. Probably was. I was hurting, too. Didn't know why, until I looked down and realized my chest was full of bullet holes."
She'd seen him take worse on leaked Youtube vids, but she couldn't hold back the shocked whimper that rose unbidden at that image.
"They were definitely real – I mean, I was in a fucking morgue – but for whatever reason, I wasn't dying. They weren't even bleeding, even though pretty much everything I was wearing was smeared red. I could still breathe, still move… it was hard to think, but I was still pretty conscious, you know? I followed those scientists outside of Gentek, but before I could go and ask what the hell was going on, a helicopter landed and a bunch of soldiers got out. Didn't like the look of them, and the pair of scientists didn't seem to happy either, so I hung back. Next thing I know, the new guys have shot both of them in the head. Then they see me. And start shooting. Hurt like hell, but again, I just wasn't dying. I… I didn't know what to do. I ran away. Jumped a few fences, found a dark alley, but then that helicopter showed up again and I had to start running.
"I ended up getting chased all the way over to Chelsea, not too far from that place we ended up using as a safe house. I couldn't believe I was running so fast – and when I was finally getting used to that, I started running up walls. And kicked a helicopter out of the air. And threw a taxi. Jumped off of a forty-six story building and got right up. Got shot dozens of times. It was just… surreal. And painful. I was holding my own, but I just couldn't keep running, not when everything started hurting more and more. It was like I was getting shredded every time I moved. And those soldiers weren't letting up. Every street I turned, more were waiting; whenever I tried to get to the rooftops, a helicopter would open fire and force me back to the ground.
"But I was so weak. I couldn't run anymore. I crawled into an alleyway and waited to die."
"Alex!" His sister was horrified.
He held his palms up. "Obviously didn't happen, or we wouldn't be talking right now. And the entire Infection would never have happened, actually. Huh. But death and I have a 'play hard-to-get' relationship… not that it didn't try. A soldier found me. I was helpless, I couldn't move. Couldn't resist. But you know Blackwatch. Shoot first, ask questions later. He put a bullet through my head, just like that. Didn't matter. The end just wouldn't come, and I still hurt like hell.
"I wasn't even thinking, it was on reflex. I was just so angry, so sick of running… I just got up and killed him. Didn't take any effort. Grabbed his neck, threw him to the pavement. And my body just…" His voice was low, even huskier than usual. "He was the first one."
A convulsive shiver ran through Dana's body, but she made no move to back away.
"I thought his memories were mine at first, like I'd just spontaneously recovered from amnesia. But when I saw him pursuing me, saw it through his eyes, I knew the difference; that he was somebody else that was somehow in my head. The memories… they're not easy. I was still trying to sort out everything that was going on up there when I heard his commander approaching. And I just… turned into him, shifted into the guy I just killed. Knee-jerk reaction, didn't know how I was doing it." He looked down at his hands. "Still don't, not really.
"Anyway, the officer started yelling at me. Wasn't really sure what to do with him, but when he grabbed my shoulders and started shaking me, I realized that I was still… hungry. Or something. Whatever it is. I know that probably sounds sick, but I had no idea what was going on, I hurt like hell, I could just feel that consuming the guy would make me feel better, and those men had been trying to kill me for no reason – none I knew, anyway."
"I know," mumbled Dana, gnawing at her lip. The fear and pain, she could empathize with enough, but the thought of her brother plunging his tentacles into another human being and devouring them still chilled her to the bone. "I'm trying to understand."
He sighed. "Thanks. I know it's probably hard… Well, I consumed that soldier too. More memories. But these were more specific. And frightening. I had a sister. His men were going to kidnap her. You know what happened from there."
She nodded. "So… you didn't remember me on your own, then?" A twinge of disappointment nibbled at her chest, try as she might to suppress it.
"Not really, no. I… sort of did. When I thought of Dana Mercer, it was more than a name, a fact… the thought of these guys hurting my sister freaked me out. I didn't even care about hiding anymore; I came as fast as I could."
It warmed her a little, in a very dysfunctional way – that her brother actually did possess a sense of family, some residual paternal instincts from when they'd both been young and he'd looked after her, before he'd grown into something distant and damaged. It was apparent now, of course, but maybe the pre-amnesiac Alex had cared too, and simply hadn't known how to show it.
"So, uh… I sent you to your apartment then, right?"
"Yeah. Ran there, testing out all of the weird stuff I could do – the running, the jumping. I wasn't running for my life or yours, so I had some time to play, to get used to it. To gauge what I could and couldn't do. Get a feel for it, you know? It seemed like there was nothing I couldn't do. I'd run as fast as I could, and then I'd just... try harder, and just like that, I'd be even faster. I'd push myself, and it... I just never reached the edge. I... I still haven't, I think.
"I still got there pretty fast. Then I started getting some real memories, ones that belonged to Alex Mercer. Nothing that made sense, not coherent like the ones before– just flashes, like a TV with a bad signal. There was a picture on the wall… me and a blonde girl on an autumn day. Touched it, saw a glimpse of her pleading with me, somewhere else. A parking lot, a grey sky. Didn't understand."
"Karen Parker?" she guessed.
"Didn't know it at the time, but yeah. Anyway, I didn't get to hang around. Blackwatch was waiting for me there, like you said. Whole place blew up, threw me to the street. Don't worry about it," he assured, seeing Dana open her mouth. "Didn't really hurt me, not even then. They weren't expecting that… sent in a bunch of men, some helicopters. Got away, got the guy who was in charge of trapping my home. Then you'd picked up that lead on Greene… we know how that worked out. My fault, though, not yours. I should have realized the parallels before I went charging after her.
"At this point, I had a little bit worked out. I was Alex Mercer; I had worked at Gentek on a project somehow related to Elizabeth Greene. There were two viruses, Redlight and Blacklight, and Blacklight had something to do with me. Blackwatch had tried to kill me, maybe to keep me quiet about that project, but it didn't work. Whatever they'd done in Penn Station, it had killed a lot of people, and caused me to wake up with no memories and a set of powers that was disturbing me less and less as time went on. They were blaming everything on me, they called me a terrorist… It made sense that they were trying to pin it all on me. They still wanted me dead, after all.
"Then you brought up Karen Parker, just as the Infection began. By that time, I was pretty sure I was infected too, somehow – the viral detectors, everything Blackwatch knew, something..." He hesitated, grimacing at the memory. "Something Greene had said to me. So that had to be why I had these powers… Meeting Karen wasn't like meeting you. I recognized her, but I didn't know how to feel. It wasn't there, it wasn't… it didn't fit, I guess. Still, she seemed confused too, so we had that much in common. I took her out of the infected zone; we found a place near the military, somewhere safe.
"She said she could cure the virus, stop this Outbreak that was starting. She said she could cure me. Getting Manhattan back to normal, I didn't even have to consider that. I wanted all of this hell to stop. But for me… I was scared, I guess. Was still a little freaked out on the eating people front – the memories were useful, but they didn't go away. And I saw the other Infected and feared I was going to end up like them – mindless, deformed. I was changing, getting stronger, and it seemed like it could have ended up going in that direction. So I took her up on it, got her some samples."
"And it didn't work?" Dana gestured vaguely towards him. "I mean, you're still, like… you know."
"Oh, it worked well." He laughed; a short, harsh bark of a sound. "Blackwatch had already gotten to her."
His sister covered her mouth. "Oh. Oh, Alex…"
"She sent me into a hive," he continued tonelessly. "That was when I met Cross – he and his team had set up an ambush. He put up a good fight, better than anyone else Blackwatch had thrown at me, but I came out on top. Still, I was stupid about it. Stopped to gloat, and next thing I know, he'd stuck a syringe full of Karen's 'cure' in my back."
"But… it was a cure, wasn't it?" Dana frowned. "Wasn't that… what you wanted? Was she lying about what it did?"
He scratched his chin. "No, not really. But killing the virus meant killing me. She failed to mention that minor detail. I was a fool for wanting to get cured, besides. Without my abilities, Blackwatch would have no trouble killing me. This was, is, the only way I can live. Both then and now.
"Anyway. As soon as that crap got injected into me, I couldn't… well, it was weird. I could change my appearance, but I couldn't form my weapons. They just fell apart and dissolved when I tried to make them. Didn't take long before I couldn't get them to work at all. And it hurt. Started in my shoulder, but it just kept getting worse and worse. My back was the worst off, but I could feel it everywhere. Like it was taking me apart, or something."
Dana winced and rubbed her own shoulder. "Damn. What'd you do then?"
It was his turn to cringe. "Came back to make sure you were all right, if you'd picked up any more information. And then we ended up having that, uh…" He stared resolutely at the floor, frowning. "Talk. The one that… didn't go over so well."
She gnawed on her lower lip, trying and failing miserably at not thinking about that conversation. Yeah, that was an understatement.
Even now, she wasn't remotely close to being comfortable with it – knowing that your brother went around eating people was probably one of those things you could never really get used to. So when she'd first heard it, it had almost been more than she could bear. She hadn't even tried to hide her revulsion. At the time, she'd needed for him to leave, needed some time away from him so she could think and try to wrap her head around the horrible concept. That distance from Alex had been necessary for her to form any semblance of forgiveness.
But the expression on his face… the sharp agony that had shone plainly in those normally inscrutable eyes – it only registered now, close to three months later. The memory of that awful confession was burned into her skull, but it wasn't one she tried to dwell upon, not until now. She'd been too lost in her own horror to process his reaction, some combination of apology and dismay and frantic desperation that managed to show just as much fear as her own. He'd reached out to her, and she'd recoiled. It was inevitable – there was no way that she could have mustered up any other response – but she'd never considered how that must have hurt him.
And he had already been hurting; she remembered his husky voice and awkward posture, how every movement had been ginger and devoid of his characteristic suddenness. He'd gone through biological hell, and while he was still reeling from sickness ramped up to eleven, she had hurt him again. It was both of their faults, but neither at the same time, and it changed nothing… but now she understood that that day's scars went both ways.
"I remember," she said softly. "You looked awful."
He cracked an empty smile. "Like shit, in your own words."
She didn't return it. "I…" I'm sorry, she wanted to say. But the words wouldn't come. She was sorry, yes, but at the same time, should she have acted any differently? Could she have? Did she forgive him? It wasn't his fault – that much, at least, she could wrap her head around. He was what he was, whatever the fuck that was supposed to be, and it would be wrong to fault him for circumstances he hadn't apparently gotten a say in. Forgiveness, though… it implied a certain amount of understanding, if nothing else. And no matter how apologetic he was, it just wasn't something she could accept – she wasn't much more comfortable with his dietary habits than she'd been when he'd first admitted them in his typically disastrous way. It was the sort of thing that she could only cope with by resolutely ignoring.
"Did Ragland help, at least?" She could hope for that much; she'd found the doctor through his connections to Gentek, but to Alex, her timing on bringing him up must have been a total deus ex machina.
"Yeah. Ended up saving my life. I went and got some samples for him, and he eventually worked out a vaccine or something. I was pretty much dead otherwise. Anyway, I got healed, but while I'd been running around trying to save myself, the Infection had gotten a lot worse. The south half of the island was pretty much lost, Harlem was getting close to the same fate, and Hydras had started showing up. And…" His eyes tightened. "Leader hunters.
"I went back to check on you. You…" You forgave me, but he wasn't going to trick himself into thinking that things were going to be the same this time around, with all of the cards either on the table or next up for dealing. "You know what happened."
She did. Dana shuddered – her nightmares weren't going to get her forget that horrible chase any time soon.
"I couldn't catch up," he apologized wretchedly. "I'm sorry."
"You tried." In that tight, slimy grip, the world bouncing and spinning in crazy inversion, she remembered losing it – crying out, screaming for her brother. And she remembered him answering, calling back. Sometimes catching a glimpse of his desperate face, frozen in time, as he raced up and down the city's skyline to save her.
"And I failed. Wasn't good enough. It got away… I was terrified," he admitted softly. "I sort of went berserk, for a time. I couldn't think of anything else. I had to get you back. Nothing else mattered. I tracked down the Leader that had taken you, and used him to find where you were. Had a short fight with Greene, but it sort of went haywire." He scowled. "She coughed up this thing that was sort of a cross between a hunter and me. It didn't go down easy, but I beat it down and found you. You were unconscious, so I took you back to Ragland.
"The doctor had another trail, though. Somebody had left a map for me, marking a series of phone booths. Hey, a lead's a lead," he retorted, seeing Dana's incredulous stare. "Besides, I wasn't worried about anything they could throw at me. I just kept getting stronger, and their newest weapons weren't keeping up anymore.
"But the guy on the phone, he wasn't springing a trap. He had information. Information that…" He swallowed. This was it. "He told me that there was a meeting going on in Blackwatch headquarters, that there was some new weapon they were about to deploy. And… he also told me about Blacklight. About me. About…"
He took a deep breath. "Who I wasn't."
Dana noticed that his hands had started to fidget. "The Blacklight virus was made to dissemble and rebuild organisms from the cells up. But every subject it had been tested upon died horribly – their bodies couldn't handle it. When their immune systems tried to retaliate, it ripped them apart. As a result, nobody really knew what it could do beyond that very basic thing it had been tailored to perform. Until the first success came along. Me."
"So the virus gave you superpowers?" She looked somewhat confused, but not in the right way, the real way – she wasn't comprehending. "Transformed you into some sort zombie Superman?"
It would be so easy to say yes. So easy to let her believe that, to move on. To not push the break any farther. But he'd promised her the truth. He'd lied for so long. To continue keeping up this charade would be like…
…what Alexander J. Mercer would have done.
"It didn't transform me into anything. It made me. I…" His voice faltered and broke for a beat. "Dana, I'm not your brother."
"What?"
Her exclamation seemed unnaturally loud in the small apartment – it echoed strangely in his ears, a record of her immediate denial set to repeat a thousand times.
"No. No. You - you can't -"
"I'm not Alex Mercer," he repeated dully. "I woke up looking like him because he was technically the first person I consumed. I have bits of his memories because his brain hadn't completely died when the virus got to him. And I still look like him because this was the only identity I ever really had. But I'm not him. I never was."
"But you – you…"
"I didn't know at first. But when I did, I lied about it. I just couldn't…" All of his justifications failed him; they sounded weak and cowardly to his own ears. "Dana, I'm so sorry."
She didn't seem to register anything; she was shaking her head slowly and had taken a few steps backward. "You can't actually be the virus, that doesn't make any sense." His sister's fingers were working at the air as if she could pull a conclusive argument out of empty space and stamp out these words that – Alex had been right – she didn't want to hear.
Alex fluttered his hands as he grasped for an answer. "Well, I guess not. It's not exactly accurate, but I'm not a scientist – not like he was. I guess I'm a conglomerate of delocalized and reformable tissue that's been altered by and depends on the virus. But getting specific's a bitch. I was created by Blacklight, I'm made of Blacklight – I'm Blacklight."
Dana just frowned, still shaking her head, but inside her brain, gears were whirling. An amnesiac Alex made sense. That was comfortable, that was safe – that was understandable. But something that looked like and sounded like and talked like Alex and wasn't Alex at all?
But he didn't talk like Alex. The real Alex would have launched into overdrive on that topic – a flurry of scientific jargon and condescending explanations, all the while making it very clear that he was dumbing down his genius for mortal ears. Truncating it, glossing over anything, hell, writing it off – her brother would have taken that sort of description as a personal insult. She still didn't totally grasp what he'd said, but his blunt words had reinforced another point. He doesn't behave like him.
Maybe simple amnesia explained all of the changes. Maybe it didn't.
But the other option… it didn't sting. It didn't hurt. It loomed. It was a giant abyss that stretched before her like the maw of some great monster, pitch black and creeping forward by the second. And she didn't want to know what was inside -
She didn't realize she had been backpedaling until she nearly tripped into the sofa. "Alex, I - I need time to think. This is… I just…"
"We're not done yet," he confessed, his silver-blue eyes stricken and strangely hollow. "There's still more. There was one more secret left to find."
He was right, he was right, she didn't want to know any more, didn't want to think of what could be worse than an impostor living in her brother's cast-off skin –
"Go on," the reporter in her whispered.
And he continued his account, sounding much more subdued. There was an undercurrent of rigid desolation in his voice, the aural equivalent of a prisoner marching to the gallows.
"I did what the contact advised. And actually, yeah, it was a trap. But it wasn't really a trap, because he told me they were working on something. Technically. He didn't tell me they were deploying it on the assembled soldiers at their meeting. Or that it turned out there were two new weapons, not one. Bloodtox and supersoldiers. Can't say I liked either, but I managed all right and got away. Bloodtox is a poison that kills infected tissue upon contact, but doesn't react with anything else. Supersoldiers, I'm sure you've seen pictures."
Her response was on autopilot. "The guys on steroids, right?"
"Diluted Blacklight virus steroids, but yeah, pretty much. I wasn't exactly happy with the guy after that, but I still needed information, and he seemed to know a lot about what was going on. He told me some more about Bloodtox, and where Blackwatch was about to deploy it. He wanted me to take their plans apart.
"I didn't want to destroy the blowers. They finally had a true shot against Redlight, and I was taking it away."
His eyes were distant, gazing upon some past atrocity that only he could see.
"But that stuff could kill me too, and if I let it spread, I was going to end up trapped. Prey. Was I right to do it? Probably not. But that was the lead my contact gave me, and I didn't know what else to do. I went into the ten or so blocks Blackwatch controlled and destroyed their machinery. Obliterated half of the city's hope at getting out of a disease-induced hell. Saved my own hide. I just don't know. When you were gone, when I didn't know if you were safe and there was nothing I could do to help you…" He trailed off. "Everything just felt kind of empty. I don't know how to describe it, or what it was. I'm glad it didn't last.
"Then Blackwatch started trying to use Bloodtox to drive out Greene from underground. Which was fine by me, since I wasn't going to get any shots at her while she was holed up. I escorted a pumper down to Times Square and guarded it while it got to work – Blackwatch stopped being dumbasses for once and figured out I was actually helping them, but it didn't last. Anyway, the stuff worked. Greene surfaced. And… well, she wasn't exactly a zombie college kid anymore.
"Times Square turned into hell in seconds. Greene went and morphed herself into this giant tentacle-blob thing, a couple of stories tall. It was hard to kill – I couldn't get close without getting thrashed by its tentacles, and it could blow up a line of tanks just by… roaring, or something. Very tough fight, but in the end, I ripped her out of her cocoon and consumed her."
"And what did you learn?" Dana whispered, not trusting her voice to remain steady.
"Huh? Nothing." Alex shrugged. "Not from her. Her memories don't make a lot of sense. It's more than instinct – it was like she was a puppet of Redlight, a mouthpiece, just along for the ride. Moreso than the rest of the Infected. The only thing that was really hers was her concern for Pariah. But I haven't delved into her head much. Don't like it. But no, she didn't have the truth. Not mine.
"I learned something else, though. Operation Firebreak." His brow narrowed. "Now that Elizabeth Greene couldn't be retrieved, General Randall decided there was nothing left in New York City worth saving. They were going to glass Manhattan in a few hours' time."
"I know. Everyone was talking about that explosion for a while, there's a shitload of conspiracy theories involved… I found the truth on some of Blackwatch's erased records." She paused and looked up at him. "You were the one that stopped it, weren't you?"
He couldn't muster up a smile. "Yeah."
Neither could she, but there was a certain level of warmth in her eyes. "I… I'm proud of what you did. I don't know how you did it, but it was brave. I know it."
"I couldn't let them destroy the city," was all he said. "Especially not with you still in it. So I hurried over to the next marked phone booth. My informant told me that he had a way I could get to McMullen. I was starting to get a resistance to Bloodtox; if I let myself get captured, they'd take me straight to him. So I did, and totaled their Bloodtox factory while I was at it. Pretended to falter, put up a fake struggle. Made a few missteps. They fell for it.
"So I waited until they put me on a slab, and then I had some quality time with my old boss.
"McMullen knew what I could do, and he shot himself before I could consume him. But he told me enough. A tease, maybe a justification. A final hint that strung together a series of broken flashes and recreated a memory – the truth that I'd been searching for all along.
"It turns out the person behind everything, the person who made me like this… was Alex Mercer."
Dana sucked in a deep breath – he glanced towards the sound and saw that her eyes were screwed shut. Her face had contorted into a painful grimace and her hands were balled up into fists, as if the knowledge had physically struck her.
"Years into his work at Gentek, Alex Mercer had discovered that people working on project Blacklight were starting to disappear. He feared he was going to be next. He forged a visa, created a new identity for himself, and made some long-term travel plans. He smuggled a vial of the experimental virus he'd worked on out of Gentek as 'insurance', a threat that would grant him safe passage if he got caught. On his way to Penn Station, he encountered Karen Parker, who begged him to listen to reason. He brushed her aside. In the terminal, Blackwatch cornered him. He threatened to release the virus. Blackwatch fired anyways. And as he died, he went through with his last promise. He broke the vial, which killed everyone in Penn Station in the span of a few minutes. And the majority of the virus infested his dying body. It slid through his failing immune system and preserved what little life he had left. Redesigned his tissues and streamlined his cells, recreated him from the inside out. And a few hours later, I woke up for the first time."
He couldn't look at her, didn't want to confirm the disgust and disbelief that had to be scrawled across her features.
He kept talking. It was all he had left.
"Everything after that just sort of fell into place." His tone was hollow, detached. "Found out Cross was the informant over the phone. He knew where the nuclear bomb was, and had a plan to get onto the Reagan, that ship off the coast. Went through with it and boarded disguised as a commander. I killed Randall, but before I could disarm the nuke, one of the soldiers on the ship… well, that hunter-me hybrid that I mentioned earlier? Turns out I hadn't killed it thoroughly enough, and it was disguising itself as a rank-and-file soldier. It tried to eat me, but I managed to bring it down again. But it had wasted too much time; I couldn't disable the nuke before it went off. I had Cross secure it to a helicopter, and I flew off over the ocean… Jettisoned it, but it exploded before I could get any distance from it. I got pretty much destroyed. I was out for a while… Woke up some time later, rebuilt myself from being a splatter on the pavement. Went to find you. You were awake. And we went on together from there."
Dana was silent.
"So," he said softly, picking apart the floor with his eyes, "you know the truth. I'm an overgrown blob of viral protoplasm wearing the skin of the scientist that died to create it – the man that tried to damn the world, the one that started all of this. You and I were never related. I'm not human and I'm not infected, not like anyone else is; I was made to be something else. The ultimate biological weapon. Not a person. Nothing even close to one."
He braved a glance up, only to find that she wasn't meeting his eyes either. "Well," she said slowly. "You weren't lying when you said the truth sucked."
Alex swallowed; he had a lump the size of a hive in his throat.
Awkward silence reigned supreme for a few minutes. He didn't dare break it. It was better than hearing what he'd heard before, what he knew he was going to hear now.
"The worst thing is," she started, "is that it makes sense. I can see him doing it. Fuck, he was my brother… but I can see him doing that in Penn Station. I can see him doing that to the world. I'm a horrible person for believing it. But I…"
"You're not," he replied vehemently. "You didn't do any of this. You didn't deserve to get saddled with him –"
She whirled on him. "Don't talk about my brother like that!"
They both flinched, two pairs of blue eyes going wide.
"Fuck, I'm sorry." Her apology came out as a gabble in her haste to take things back; she took two steps forward to make up for their combined cringe away. "I did not fucking mean that. I… I mean, you're not… You're Alex. I shouldn't have said that, I'm just trying to make sense of this, I…"
"But it's true," he said softly. "I'm not your brother."
She just shook her head. "It doesn't feel like it. I didn't mean that. I thought I might have meant it, but I don't. It didn't sound right."
There was another stilted silence.
"If you have his memories… tell me. Did the… the real Alex care about me, then?" Dana asked in a low voice.
Alex hesitated, and her tone sharpened. "Don't bullshit me, Alex. Just tell me the truth."
He wavered and finally caved under her piercing stare. "I… he should have. I think he would have, too – god knows you deserve it – but he just wasn't capable of it. I… your brother," and the distinction came out as smoothly as if he were being dragged over a bed of nails, "was a really fucked-up guy. It was like he was the only person that existed, him and his work – and everyone else was sort of a dream, an afterthought. Real, maybe, but not real enough to be worth his time or consideration. I… I think you know that. But... no, Dana. No, he didn't."
"Oh," she replied, voice small.
"I'm sorry," he said, torn – it came out as a whisper.
"It wasn't your fault." But her words came leadenly and without conviction; automatic, and perhaps not really believed. His fault, really – the reality of it, the understanding that your brother was actually long dead and has been replaced by a semi-functioning duplicate could hardly be expected to come overnight. "It wasn't really his, either. I don't remember too much, but he was the only thing that stood between our… mom, and me. He was the one that had to deal with her.
"It was his choice to turn out the way he did," Alex cut in harshly, without thinking. "You lived in that household too, and you grew up fine. More than fine. He grew up and tried to slaughter the world out of spite. Everyone has a choice. And he made his."
Dana flinched. It occurred to Alex belatedly that she hadn't been trying to excuse his actions, but his lack of love for her.
"I'm sorry," he apologized yet again, feeling sick at the transgression but not knowing how to backtrack. "I… I have some issues with the real Mercer and what he did."
"…I guess you would. Even if he… created you, or something?"
"I'm glad to be alive, but the world would have been better off if I hadn't existed. You would have been better off."
"Alex…" The name suddenly tasted strange on her tongue. Or it should have, and it didn't, and that was why everything was subtly off, like a reflection in a trick mirror.
"You're not my brother." She tried out the words, almost as a question. "My brother was emotionally dead. I didn't matter to him. Not much did, but... now he really is dead. But you… care. Unless that was just another act?"
"I'll swear on anything you want me to, Dana; if there's one thing I've ever been honest about, it's that I truly love you. As a sister. Even after I learned that was just another lie."
"A lie…" she repeated, trailing off. Her eyes were fixed at a point on the ceiling, miles beyond him. He didn't like that look. It was empty. Inscrutable. And it belonged to his sister, whose emotions were usually so clear and shining that even he was often able to make them out.
The silence dragged on, past those awkward stretches that often punctuated their time together and into something entirely new. Something that seemed more threatening than any amount of military might or Infected creatures. He watched as she pressed her slim fingers to her temples, apparently lost in thought.
The tension was crushing; his skin prickled. It burned like Bloodtox, killing him bit by bit in a different way. He ached to say something. To beg, to plead. Hell, maybe he could throw himself to the ground in supplication. He was desperate enough.
But what could he say? He knew that his understanding of comfort or encouragement – no, human interaction in general – was abysmal; more often than not, his words ended up making things worse. Hell, his presence made things worse. Maybe letting Dana go was the best thing to do.
His arms were starting to waver, losing cohesion with stress; wanting to form into something he could protect himself with. Those parts of his mind were simpler – they saw the world in black and white, with no objective beyond survival. They couldn't understand a sort of pain that couldn't be driven off with physical force. Maybe that was the way he was meant to live, that letting himself get entangled in caring was just another failure in the works, an evolutionary road to ruin. Everything would be so much easier if he could just forget… He gritted his teeth and clamped down on the changes, forcing the small, wiry tendrils back into a facsimile of smooth leather. The last thing Dana needed was to see any more of what he really was.
She hadn't caught his slip-up – the maelstrom of her thoughts had superimposed itself firmly over her eyes.
A lie. A series of lies, all woven up into a massive web of half-truths that splintered like dry timber in the test of fire. She'd crossed the line between comfort and reality, and now she stood teetering at the edge of the chasm beyond.
Her brother – the brooding teenager who'd protected her from her mother during those awful times when she got violent, and then abandoned her later on; the person who'd eagerly taught her to read and write, and then didn't care when she found her calling within those words years later – was dead. He'd died despicably, a criminal. A sociopath. He was dead, and the person she'd been living with for two months was just one of his pet science experiments, his Frankenstein. Her brother hadn't come back to her, hadn't started to care again – it was all just another lie. He wasn't Alex Mercer. He was Zeus. And that was it.
But that final closure to those thoughts wouldn't come. The name didn't fit. It was like trying to shove the wrong key into a lock; a puzzle piece that looked congruent with another but didn't quite match up when put against each other. In her mind's eye, she looked at him and said Zeus, and still thought Alex Mercer. Even though she knew he wasn't, even though he'd admitted it himself.
She tried to see the creature of spiky, matte-black chitin amidst the fiery destruction of the red zone streets, and she saw Alex standing in their apartment, hands stuffed into his pockets, that perpetually lost expression scrawled plainly over his face.
The more she thought about it, the less sense it seemed to make. The person… hell, apparently, he technically wasn't even that – that stood before her wasn't her brother? It was strange and messed-up and there had to be something seriously wrong with her mind, she knew, but it felt like the Alex she'd known since the Outbreak began was the real version, and the older version the alter ego. Like this was her brother now, and the pale shell, the twisted shadow – that was Doctor Alexander J. Mercer. Not Alex. Not… not her brother.
She opened her eyes. Exhaled a long, slow breath; let go of those false beliefs and hopeful delusions and watched them vanish into the air. She inhaled, accepted the new truth, and found that those waters weren't as deep and dark as she'd expected. Maybe… maybe it wasn't so hard to live with after all.
"It's going to take some time to get used to, I guess… but it doesn't really change anything, does it?" Dana chuckled weakly. "I mean… hell, I think I already knew it. Have known, for some time."
Her not-quite-brother blinked, hard. "What do you mean?"
"Oh, I didn't know it… but I could feel it." She looked up to him, finally meeting his eyes, and he found that hers were shining, glossy with a sheen of tears. "I… I knew things were different. That you weren't the same. Because… my old brother would have never loved me so much."
He simply stared, face disbelievingly blank. Not comprehending. Not daring to believe that what he was hearing might actually be…
When she abruptly reached up to hug him, Alex could have been hit with several canisters of Bloodtox, every infected monster known to mankind, and a nuclear warhead, and it still wouldn't have changed it from being one of the happiest moments of his life.