About half a year before I started working for the Company my wife, my three year old daughter and I were kidnapped by a man that I had worked with. He had always been rude to me at work, and so when he was fired for stealing from the factory he thought that I had turned him in. His life had gone downhill pretty fast after he was fired and he blamed me for it. His wife had taken their two kids and left him, he couldn't get a job, and he had become an alcoholic.
One day I got home from work and found the house trashed, with burn marks all over the place. I found a note on the kitchen table saying that my wife and daughter were being held hostage and for me to take $3,000 to this warehouse and that if I got the police involved he'd kill them. I went to the warehouse with the money, but was hit in the back of the head with something hard when I walked in and was rendered unconscious. When I came to I was tied up across from my wife and daughter who were also tied up. Stephen, the guy who I had worked with, had an ability. His pores could exude some kind of acid. He tortured and killed my wife and daughter in front of me, saying that he wanted me to know what it was like to lose my family.
After having killed them he began torturing me. He stuck his hand on my arm and the acid started oozing onto my arm, burning it. I struggled to get away, but he held his grip. That's how I got this scar on my arm. I heard a gun shot and Stephen fell to the floor with a bullet through his head. Alex ran over to me, poured some water on my arm, and untied me.
Alex told me that there were others out there like Stephen, and that a similar thing had happened to him a year earlier. He had come home from work early one day and found his wife in bed with another guy. He pulled the guy off of her and threw him into the wall, and noticed that the guy looked just like him. Then in front of his eyes the guy's appearance changed. He turned into a huge black guy, and while Alex was standing there shocked by what he had just seen the man jumped out the window and got away.
Alex called the cops and they investigated the scene and found some blood on the broken window the guy had jumped through. Forensics came through a couple days later and the police told him whose blood it was. They showed him a picture of the guy that didn't look anything like him, and definitely wasn't black. He realized the police would think he was crazy if he told them that the guy could change his appearance and might drop the case, so he told them that it was the guy.
Later, the police told him that the guy's roommate and neighbors hadn't seen him for a few days, and that he must be in hiding. So Alex went to the address in the middle of the night and hid in a tree, waiting. In the morning a Mexican guy walked out of the house and got in his car. Alex climbed down the tree and started tailing him in his car. About a block away, he stopped at a corner where another guy that looked just like him was standing. This other guy got into the car without even opening the door, he phased through the door, David. When Alex looked back at the driver he noticed that his hair was now blond, and that it must have been the guy who had raped his wife.
He followed them to a bank, parking in the parking lot of a grocery store close by. The two of them walked over to the side of the bank and phased through the wall. Alex called the cops from a pay phone, but saw them walk out the side of the building before the cops could get there. He hopped back in his car and stopped it in front of the entrance to the bank's parking lot before they could get out. They got out of their car and started yelling at him. He got out of his car and punched the guy who had raped his wife in the face, sending him to the ground. He managed to knock the other guy to the ground as well. He tried punching him in the face, but his hand went right through and hit the ground behind it. The two of them started kicking him and smashing his head into the ground.
He woke up in a hospital with a broken hand and a mild concussion. The police came in to question him and told him that they had arrived at the bank seeing to guys get into his car and take off, and found him unconscious in the parking lot. They found his car abandoned about a mile away. The guys must have gotten scared when they heard the police coming, which was lucky for Alex or he might have been dead. Alex tried calling home to tell his wife what had happened, but there was no answer.
When Alex got home he found it in blazes, with the firefighters trying to put it out. His wife died in that fire and he was sure that it had been those same two guys who had set it on fire. So he went to their house again the next morning, and waited for them to leave. He picked the lock to the front door and hid underneath a bed, with a gun in his hand. After an hour or so they came back home. One of them laid on the bed above him, while the other knelt down on the ground. He phased hand and a bag through some floorboards. Alex rolled out from under the bed and shot him first, and then shot the one laying on the bed. He pried open the floorboards and found lots of money that they had stolen and stashed.
He took the money and used it to by weapons and other things that he used to track down people like the two who had killed his wife. He had been doing this for a year when he came across me, and I joined him in the hunt. We watched the news and read newspapers, always looking for things out of the ordinary, and that's how we found them. We had been doing this for a few months when we came across someone we thought we had already killed. We killed him again, and later found him robbing yet another store. This is when we found out about the Company. They told us that this man could replicate himself, and that we hadn't found the source yet. They offered us a job, and that's when we started working with the Company.
Alex wasn't too happy about having to work with an evolved human. For awhile things went well, though. Alex and his partner bagged, tagged, and released some of the less dangerous people, while the more dangerous ones always ended up dead. Later, Alex discovered that some of the specials working for the Company were actually hiding and protecting some other evolved humans from being bagged and tagged. He ended up killing them, and the Company actually looked more highly upon him after that.
But that's when things changed. Alex believed that all evolved humans were a threat. He believed that sooner or later with the power they had they would be corrupted and turn on other humans that they viewed as weaker. Alex began setting up bagging missions in a way that the person they were bagging would kill his partner and then he would kill the person himself seeing as they were obviously a threat now. But too many of his partners ended up dead, and too many of the people he was suppose to bag and tag ended up dead. The Company began to become suspicious of him.
But at the same time Alex decided to leave the Company. He must have known they were becoming suspicious. He hacked the Company's systems and stole a lot of their data. He's used this data to track and kill individuals that we've already released and others that we've tried to capture. Luckily, you weren't in the systems at the time or you yourself might be dead, David.
"Why hasn't the Company stopped him?" David asked.
"They've tried," Mark answered. "We've been able to convince some to relocate and go into hiding. Two agents that tried stopping him have been killed. Alex knows how the Company works. He knows a lot of the people that work for the Company and how they act. As of now, the Company thinks he's a greater danger if we go after him than if we just try to hide these people from him. We give him false leads now and again, making sure that strange occurrences get into the newspaper."