Glass showered down around Alex even as he pushed himself to his feet. The cuts on his hands and knees healed as soon as he landed on the shards of window, and the pain he knew he should feel didn't even register in his mind. He stood up and sprinted forward, not daring to pause long enough to think, to check where he was going. If he hesitated, he would lose control. And if he lost control, Altaїr would die.
What are you doing! Zeus howled. Turn around! Turn around!
A queer sense of satisfaction pierced the haze in Alex's mind long enough for him to pant, "Don't like it when you don't get your way, do ya? Now you know how it fucking feels." He suppressed a snarl that was not his own and pushed himself harder, lengthening his strides pumping his arms faster as he ran. He needed to feed, needed to sate his hunger before he did something he would live to regret. And the sooner he was across town, the sooner he could be sure Altaїr would be safe from him.
So what's your plan? Zeus sneered, his voice trembling with barely-contained rage. You gonna keep him as a house pet? A little live-in maid?
Alex ignored the voice and focused on running. The hunger gnawed at his very being and made him long to double over. He fought through the disorienting hunger and dizziness and nearly plowed into a man when he burst out onto the main road.
"Hey watch it!" the man snapped.
There was a fraction of a second where their eyes met and Alex felt a sudden connection. This is a human, he thought, a person. He has a family, friends, dreams and passions and hopes just like I did. Bitterness encroached on the end of that last thought and he set his jaw. Just like I never will again. He studied the man's face in the instant it took him to recognize the Blackwatch uniform. Short brown hair, brown eyes, unimpressive features, small nose, eyes too close together. He wasn't even wearing his helmet. Must have been pretty green. This was the wrong night to send out fresh meat. It smelled too good.
Alex's arms snapped out and he slammed his fists into the soldier's chest. Tendrils of the biomass that composed him shot out from his knuckles and wrists, piercing the young man's flesh and locking him into his prey.
"Fuck!" the soldier cried, his voice thrown into a higher pitch from the pain. "What the...f-fuck!"
There was no point in chatting, and he was too hungry to really give a damn. He bared his teeth as he sank his arms farther into the young man's chest. Blood bubbled at the corners of the soldier's chest and his knees buckled as his eyes rolled back in his skull. It didn't take long to consume him, and once the last vestiges of the man were gone, he straightened and rolled his shoulders. Hunger still burned in his gut, but with less urgency.
"Holy shit!" a male voice cried.
"Oh my god! Somebody call 9-1-1!" a woman screamed.
Alex turned to face the few people who stood behind him and grimaced. A man who looked to be in his mid-thirties stared at him with enormous eyes, as if he was about to bolt. A woman stood about fifteen feet away, her arms held slightly out to her sides, her legs braced as if to run. The tension in her body seemed out of place; why would she fight him when she could run? The answer came in the form of a young face peering out from behind the woman's hip. The girl wore enormous glasses that made her eyes too big for her face, and her mouth made a small little 'o' shape when she met his gaze.
"Fuck," he sighed, looking away from the child. He shook his head and reached out to grab the man and he held him aloft with ease. The mother's eyes widened, brimming with tears as she backed away, holding her child protectively behind her. "Get out of here," Alex snapped. When still she didn't move, he formed his free arm into a spear and cut the man he held from groin to collar bone. "Before I change my mind!" he snarled as the man's mouth stretched wide in an agonized scream.
When they had fled, Alex crouched down to balance on the balls of his feet and focused on his grisly meal. He took this one slower, trying to pace himself so he would know when to stop. He'd been blind with hunger only moments ago, but now he could think and rationalize clearly enough to distinguish friend or foe. He dared not return to Altaїr, though. Not after the fiasco he'd just been a part of.
He thinks you're nuts, Zeus said.
"I am nuts," Alex retorted. He stood and turned a slow circle, searching out his next target. He was a good distance inside one of the safe zones, so it wasn't hard to find his next meal. The woman he picked up cried and pled for her life, but there were no children around to make him hesitate. He consumed her and two other men before he even thought to slow down. The third man he targeted ran, and he enjoyed the chase thoroughly. He could have pounced on the fool any time but he'd been cramped up in that apartment for so long that he'd nearly forgotten what it was like to stretch his legs. To really stretch his legs.
Alex chased the man into a dark alley that even he would have hesitated to enter. He paused long enough to watch the man slow to a halt at the dead end and he grimaced as he stalked forward.
"P-please," the man blubbered. "I'll give you anything you want!"
"I've got everything I need though," Alex purred. "Got a pretty sweet gig here." He reached out to touch his and felt a grim sense of satisfaction when the man flinched. His touch was gentle, merely a brushing of his fingertips across an unshaven jawline. Yet when Alex tried to pull away, he found he was locked in position. His fingers lingered on the whimpering man's skin, and anger burned through him in response. The unwilling hesitation lasted the briefest of moments, but it was long enough to unsettle him.
"I have information," the man said. Tears slid down his cheeks and he shook his head in quick, jerky motions. "I-I know what you are, I know some of what you can do," he whispered as he raised his eyes to meet Alex's. "I can help you."
A sour expression chased away Alex's unease, and he moved his hand to grab the hair on the back of the man's head, twisting down and back hard enough to bow the fool's spine. "I don't need your help," he spat. "What would an insignificant insect like you do to help someone like me?"
The man's eyes widened and he grabbed the front of Alex's shirts with weak hands as he began to pray. His voice wavered from quiet absolution to fierce panic, but none of it seemed worth Alex's attention. With a deft motion, he covered the man's face with his free hand and paused as he whispered, "Save me, God."
Sudden stroke of conscience? Zeus muttered.
"Why don't we go back to me being the one in charge and you ignoring me?" Alex asked. "I liked things better that way." He tensed the muscles in his shoulders and crushed the man's skull like a cockroach. Blood and thicker gray matter squeezed and squelched between his fingertips even as he consumed the corpse, and he'd nearly finished when agony seared through his head and spine, sending him reeling. Light blinded him, and when closing his eyes did nothing, he covered his eyes with his hands, gripping his hair in trembling fists.
Images and light danced in his vision, formless and too bright to follow. When they congealed into something he recognized, the shapes were foreign, the faces unfamiliar. He saw an old man with a leathery face, dark skinned with graying hair at his temples and a bald pate. There were syringes and vials of vivid pink liquid, and he heard a thousand voices crescendo into a cacophony of information he couldn't hope to process.
Then all at once, everything ceased. The light faded as if it had never existed, the voices died out and left his ears ringing incessantly. Something warm and wet trickled down his upper lip, and he tasted blood on the back of his tongue.
Ragland, an unfamiliar voice whispered through his mind. Find Ragland.
There was a beat of calm between the voice and when his heart raced back into action. He sucked in a breath through clenched teeth, coughing in reaction to his burning lungs. He hadn't noticed he'd been holding his breath...what if he'd suffocated? Could he suffocate? It seemed like a long shot, but that was less worrisome than the fact that he'd just been clotheslined by a memory. He'd experienced these types of memories before, information gathered from those he consumed who had known of him or worked with him before the infection—or so he gathered. But he'd never experienced anything as volatile as that, nothing as...violent.
What the fuck was that? Zeus demanded in a breathless voice.
"Didn't like that?" Alex panted as he pushed himself to his feet. "So sorry to make you uncomfortable. What a tragedy."
That...that was... The voice trailed off, and when it spoke again, the words were gruff, almost...husky. That felt amazing.
Alex stared at one of the alley walls, stunned into stillness. He realized what Zeus was talking about, and it felt like an unwelcome and unpleasantly moist towel had just been wrapped around his face and head.
"Oh fuck," he groaned, "you did not just jerk off to that."
You've got control over a few parts that would be vital for that to happen, Zeus said dryly.
"Jesus Christ, get out of my head you freak," he snarled, covering his face with his hands. "I don't have time for this. I have to fix the mess you made so I can fix the mess fuck-face over there in my apartment dragged to my doorstep, and none of that leaves time to consider the idea that voices in my head can masturbate. So if you would do us all a favor, please shut the fuck up and crawl back into whatever hole you slithered out of."
The sound of faraway screams and the distant, inhuman squalling of the infected punctuated the silence that followed his tangent, and he fully expected a smart-assed remark about how he was telling off a figment of his imagination. Instead, all he got was a resigned little, Okay.
And suddenly his head belonged to him once more. There was a noticeable vacancy in the back of his mind, leaving him ample room to consider the fact that Altaїr was still in his apartment, likely scared and trying to make sense of what had just happened to him.
Alex turned to look at the remainders of his meal and felt a little ill. He shook his head and walked down the alley, rolling his shoulders as he leaned into a sprint.
It had never occurred to Altaїr just how loud humanity was. In Masyaf, he could sit in his study for hours and never hear anything but the occasional sneeze or cough from a scholar. In his younger years, he'd spent much of his time around and among people. He would often walk through town just to observe Masyaf's people, to see how they lived, to see if they were happy. During those long walks, he heard everything from the playful cries of half-naked children chasing each other with sticks to the tortured braying of over-dramatic sheep being shorn for the first time. He heard the sounds of life, and it was soothing to his ears.
There was nothing soothing about the sounds of this city.
Blaring horns warred with guttural and bestial screeches, while at the same time competing with the debased wails of the dying. The din was so chaotic it made Altaїr dizzy, but no matter how hard he clamped his hands over his ears, he couldn't block it out. He tossed and turned on the bed, paced the length of the too-small room when he could no longer stand to lay down. Nothing seemed to distract him from the damned noise!
Nothing, that is, except for his last interaction with Alex. He knew that he needed to talk to Alex about what had happened, but the very thought of facing the madness in the other man's eyes made Altaїr shudder. There would be a time and a place to handle that; that time may be now, but it could damn well wait until he could stomach the idea.
"I could think if I could get some peace and quiet!" Altaїr snarled. He paced the room a few more times until his temper boiled over and he finally snapped. He grabbed the vase on the bedside table—managing to smack himself in the face with the stiff, cloth shade over the top of it—and hurled it out the window. The glass was already broken from Alex's dive, so he had to wait and listen for the crash.
There was a muted crash, followed by a high-pitched cry of pain, and Altaїr's heart sank.
"Oh god," he breathed, "I've hit someone." He hurried to the window and leaned out far enough to see the street below. He breathed a small sigh of relief when he saw only the grotesque form of one of the infected, then grimaced at the disgust that followed. He'd reacted to his emotions with violence...hadn't he learned all those years ago? How many times must he be taught the same lesson before it finally stuck?
The creature snarled, interrupting his thoughts, and despite being several floors up, he heard the beast clearly. It stared up at him with eyes that were disturbingly human. And then it looked at the building. Its gaze shifted from the ground, to the building and then back to him, and it took Altaїr a moment to come to a sickening conclusion. It was measuring distances.
"God help me," he whispered as he crossed the room. He heard a snarl of effort and the sound of glass shattering, but didn't look back. Instead, he staggered through the dark apartment, stumbling over unfamiliar furniture like a bumbling fool. He kicked a table and fell to the floor, sucking in a pained breath between clenched teeth.
The piercing sound of scrabbling claws reached him from the bedroom, and he swore under his breath. He stood and lurched toward the door, reaching for the handle. When his fingers closed on it, he yanked the door open and staggered out into the hall. The hallway was just as dark as the apartment, but he was more confident as he navigated through it. Unless he was incredibly unfortunate, he could walk down the middle of the hallway and avoid any furniture fixtures.
With his arms stretched out before him, Altaїr made his way quickly down the hall. He stepped on a few uneven sections of carpeting that tripped him up, but he found the end of the hallway without issue. He ran his hands along the wall, searching for a door handle.
The beast howled, and its ungodly voice sent cold tremors down the assassin's spine. His breath quickened and his palms slicked with sweat as his body keyed itself up for a fight. Energy sang through his muscles, made him want to scream and run and hit something all at the same time.
"Come on, come on," Altaїr panted when he reached the end of the hall. He ran his hands along the wall, searching for a door, a window, anything that would get him the hell out of there. He could scale the building down if he needed, for God's sake. But he found nothing. He stared at the darkness before him, prayed as he searched for an opening. Tears of frustration stung his eyes when still he found nothing, and he slammed his fists against the wall. "Come on!"
The infected snorted from farther down the hall, and Altaїr heard it take several quick steps toward him. He rested his forehead against the wall, unwilling to resign himself to this fate. His hand slid down the wall, and he froze when his fingers touched something. An irregularity in the wall. A secret door? Why the hell would it be hidden? Who hid a door in a wall this far up a building?
Altaїr inspected the irregularity, feeling how far it went, how tall it was, and found that it was a seam in the wall that ran from the floor up to a section of the wall that jutted out. It was a doorway! He'd been in a doorway this entire time!
"Where's the handle?" he panted. "The handle, where's the goddamned handle?" He pried at the split in the wall and felt it separate, felt the fissure widen enough for him to fit his hands in. He strained, using all of his strength to pull and push the halves of the door apart, and when the gap was finally wide enough, he squeezed through it.
The creature's steps were heavy as it raced toward the door, and Altaїr's heart raced with panic and adrenaline as he pushed the doors shut again. He could hear the infected's breath, could hear its snarling language, and just before he pushed the doors shut, he felt the thing's foul, wet breath on his face.
He turned to retch in reaction to the stench as the beast howled and slammed its fists against the doors. There was no way for it to get through unless it found the same seam, and Altaїr doubted it was smart enough to figure it out. Still, knowing it was out there was enough to drive him forward. He crawled away from the door and smacked right into another wall. He felt his nose for a break as his eyes watered, but hadn't managed to hit the wall hard enough. He reached out with unsteady hands and felt along the wall for a corner. There was one to his right...and one to his left. He pictured the room in his mind based on what his hands found and felt his heart sink. This wasn't another hallway...it was a space no larger than a washroom. And the only way out was the way he'd entered.
"No," Altaїr whispered. He turned back toward the door where he heard the creature pacing, and he sat back against the wall. He shook his head and started laughing, though there was no humor in it. Through all of that, through the fear and the panic...it seemed ridiculous to him to sit there in the darkness faced with death and realize that he was hungry.