Author's Note: A warning. If you don't want to spoil Prototype 2, or you just don't want to read an angry rant, quickly avert your eyes and scroll down until you reach non-bolded writing.
…Oh my god.
They murdered him. They utterly destroyed Alex. Shunted a complex character into a generic melodramatic villain role. They turned him into everything he hated. Everything he'd fought against. And they did not explain a fucking thing. The tie-in comics were a terrible attempt at best – a completely redundant self-journey met with unrealistic amounts of depravity that still failed to meet up to the atrocities he'd already seen. Everything I love, everything that made him such an interesting character, they trounced upon. His love for his sister! They made them turn on each other and didn't provide any sort of reason. No tears shed by either party. They adored each other! Dana was the only connection he had! Oh my god, I am so upset.
At first, I didn't want to touch Prototype again at all. Call me pathetic, but it hurts. I get attached to my characters. And it feels like one of them has died. Heh, he has! Thing is, dying in a blaze of glory is sad, an end, but it's an honorable end. They made sure to grind Alex Mercer bit by bit into the dust before they killed him, because apparently, they couldn't think of a way to make Heller more appealing than Mercer other than retconning everything about the former besides his appearance.
But I love the first game too much to give up just because the sequel was bullshit. And I'm going to work harder now, for anyone who feels the same as me. Alex Mercer's story cannot possibly end on such an unfitting note. Yeah, it's fanfiction. I'm just another unpublished writer. I write stuff. I read stuff. I pester people for more stuff. But somebody's got to step in where Radical Entertainment failed miserably. I have to do my best and give his character my all. Maybe I can create a shadow of what he deserved. I feel safe in saying that no matter what I do, it cannot possibly be worse than 'canon'. I say it quote-unquote because even I, who worships canon as set in stone, have a hard time accepting P2 as a true continuation. Nothing was right. Nothing was explained. Both Blackwatch and Gentek took up massive idiot balls. And Mercer? He didn't sound like Mercer, talk like Mercer, act like Mercer, plan like Mercer. He didn't have Mercer's ideals. He became a mixture of everything that he had hated – amoral scientist and plague lord. He abandoned his little sister, just like the original Doctor Mercer. And there were reasons he could have done that – falling prey to his own instincts, some residual effect from Greene. But going on an unrealistically depressing soul-searching trip and then deciding that he should take over the world? Seriously? Seriously? He saw so many worse things in Manhattan! And I'm damn sure he had plenty of memories of human goodness that he'd picked up when he went around eating people - even Blackwatch has loved ones, family, children. Why did he even need to find an 'anchor'? He already had Dana! So I'm going to try my best to shunt that horrible phantasm of possibility into the back of my mind and focus on a Mercer that follows Prototype's continuity. Yeah, yeah, mine's probably lighter and fluffier than Prototype 1's Mercer. He's still a metric fuckton closer to the mark than the impostor that showed up in his clothes come Prototype 2.
Seriously, did the devs hate Mercer or something? Why did Heller deserve his cute fluffy bunny and Mercer didn't? What made Heller's actions in the second game any more righteous than Mercer's in the first? Mercer is decried as a mass-murdering monster, but all intentional civilian kills are entirely on the player – the cutscenes and main storyline implied you went after WoI targets, who weren't universally bad people, but also acted as if Alex was gaining a conscience over the game's course – and Heller has the exact same cruelty potential as Alex did. Players are doing the exact same power trips in Prototype 2 that they did in the first. So what makes Heller the better guy? The fact that he's got a wife and kid? Right, let's just forget about Dana, and the fact that an apocalyptic virus wearing Alex Mercer's skin cared exponentially more about her than her real brother did. Honestly… Alex's actions in the first game are more excusable than Heller's in the second. He had no memories, no moral base, no human guidelines – because he wasn't human. He never was. Physically and mentally, he was a predator – something that didn't understand humans at all. Heller… is not like Alex was. The second game ignored a very important dynamic – the Blacklight virus does not change you, it recreates you. (But then again, it ignored pretty much everything else besides gory murder, too) It wasn't just amnesia in Alex's case – his entire personality was rewritten. But Heller is essentially a human with tentacle steroids. There's nothing to imply that his mind isn't exactly the same as it was before he was infected. He'd lived his whole life among people, inevitably seeing them as equals, friends, people with lives – and he slaughtered everyone in his way regardless. Hell, he seemed pretty creepily into his powers – a lot more blasé about the whole package than Alex ever was.
It may take a little time for me to get my muse back in order after all of this crap. But given that you're reading this, I've probably gotten over it by now. Enough to get moving, anyway.
I guess this story is officially AU now… uh. -pushes NotDead!Cross down and kicks him under my dresser- Well, it's more AU than it was before, anyway. I'd like to note that I am not changing any of my views in accordance with new information. Oh god no. Prototype 1 was the story I fell in love with, not 2. Heller isn't in this story, nor am I changing Alex's personality as it is here – I think that'd invalidate nearly everything I've written up until now. Or how Blacklight functions – Prototype 1 failed to explain much, so I hashed out something workable from what I observed. The only thing I may add from Prototype 2 is some new moves, because if Heller could pull them off, so could Alex. Honestly, though, I don't even want to think about that game. So consider this an AU that stems from two changed premises – Cross didn't die, as the Supreme Hunter was masquerading as somebody else on the Reagan, and Dana woke up immediately after Greene died (thus giving Alex no incentive to leave the city). Or whatever the hell happened there, because P2 failed to explain why Alex just up and left his sister unprotected to go on a... I'm not going to get into it again. Oh, and Alex isn't a crazy sadist fuck because Activision can do something anatomically unlikely with itself.
Seriously, guys. Thanks for ruining the most amazing character I've stumbled upon in six years. I really appreciate it because we have a new game that has a couple new moves and a bigger map with better graphics. At one point, I was upset that the PC version was delayed. Yeah, I cancelled my preorder. I don't want to acknowledge your PoS 'canon' any more than I have to. No way in hell are you getting my money after that.
Readers, I apologize for the swearing. I'm… worked up about this. Writing is srs bsns.
Anyways, ANs without any chapter attached are ridiculously disappointing, so here, have a chapter.
Sprawled out on Dana's couch – technically his, but he tended to think of the entire apartment as hers – was a relatively common place for Alex Mercer to find himself in.
Sprawled on the couch and watching TV was not.
He considered television an utter waste of time. After all of the lies and propaganda he'd seen Blackwatch put out, the patriotic bullshit the papers tried to print in a halfassed attempt to convince the masses that they weren't completely helpless, he had no faith in the veracity of the news, and it seldom told him anything he didn't already know anyway. Shows about fictional characters were even worse; pointless strings of information on people and events that didn't actually exist. It was beyond him why the many real people he'd consumed were so transfixed by contrived characters and their fabricated lives. He already had enough vicarious lives to keep track of. And whoever invented the idea of a commercial was going to die horribly if Alex ever met him.
As for special effects, he was thoroughly unimpressed. He made more satisfying explosions ten times a day on your average Tuesday. Half of them happened without even trying.
But this time, he didn't really mind. Truth be told, he wasn't paying attention to the screen at all. After a few minutes spent clinging to each other, a few minutes where none of the world's madness could even think of intruding, Dana had brightly decided it was a good idea for a little family time, and while Alex had no idea what the hell that was supposed to mean, he was in too much of a good mood to care. Dana hadn't rejected him. Dana knew everything and still wanted him around. That uncertainty, maybe even a little self-loathing, that had plagued him for so long was now smoke in the wind, and nothing else had changed.
He rolled his head to look over at her. She was in the kitchen, rummaging around in the fridge for something. A bag of chips was already sagging on the counter, spilling a few out onto the dusty wood – even during a zombie apocalypse, Dana was adamant about having a steady supply of snacks. Her wrath was considerably more terrifying than the zombies, so he meekly undertook a large portion of her shopping runs without complaint.
Truthfully, he was glad to do them anyways; the trips she did take on her own were often at her heavy insistence. He hated stores with a passion, and he'd be lying if he claimed that he had never just bolted and stolen all of his goods when faced with the daunting prospect of standing in the checkout line for another damn minute. Really, he was doing everyone a favor – the alternative probably involved him losing his head and dismembering everyone in his way, then threatening the cashier at clawpoint for taking so damned long. He wasn't patient, and he did not like people – it wasn't his fault if they were all going to mill around like there wasn't a pissed-off viral abomination in their midst that did not have the time to listen to their inane gabbing.
But Manhattan wasn't safe, even before he'd brainlessly cleared the way for a second Outbreak. He'd clamp down on his instincts and bear standing around in a claustrophobic, packed area full of delicious but off-limits prey for a quarter of an hour if it meant keeping his sister out of harm's way. She often complained that she wanted to go out and get some fresh air, but he hated the idea of her wandering the streets without his protection – not when he'd seen the warzones that those streets often became, not when he'd watched Blackwatch gun down screaming civilians at the merest suspiscion of infection. He was willing enough to go out for walks with her, doing his utmost to tolerate the crowds, but she didn't like him wearing any form besides his own, and on any of those instances where they did go out together, he was always paranoid that a military patrol would recognize him and start a firefight with her in the crossfire. Alex grudgingly allowed her some leeway, and he suspected she often went out anyways when he wasn't around to protest, but if there was a hive anywhere near Harlem, those shopping trips were his, damn it. He did sympathize with the feeling of being cooped up, but it was for her own good. He wasn't going to lose her over something so preventable.
After a few seconds, she seemed to find what she wanted; a round container of some dip. It had a tangy, sour scent to it that briefly curled his lip, but he let it slide, wholly aware that it was just another one of those inevitable gaps between himself and humanity. She made it very clear that she found his idea of food every bit as disgusting as he often found hers. Whenever he thought she'd finally come home with something vaguely palatable, she always went and cooked it. It baffled him.
She fixed a bowl of chips and dip, and he slid over on the couch to accommodate her. After a moment's hesitation, she leaned into him; the gentle contact was blissfully warm and required no restraint. Even his body, the virus – whatever lay beyond that murky divide in his mind that separated his conscious thoughts from his instincts – understood that she was good. Somebody he would never and could never hurt.
"Jesus, you're always so hot," she observed a second later, snuggling closer. "You're like a portable space heater or something. But squishier."
She was dozens of times squishier than him, and he would have readily argued that in comparison to himself, a space heater was the more cuddly of the two, but she was Dana. She got some exceptions where he was concerned, so he just shrugged, still marveling at the novelty of prolonged contact that didn't involve grabbing somebody by the neck and either slamming them against the pavement or eating them.
"So, anything you wanna watch?" He shook his head; it was all the same to him. She muttered something about apathy and fruitcakes, and flicked through some channels, her fingers skimming over the remote as adroitly as manipulated her keyboard. Eventually, she settled on something with a British guy and a phone booth. He wasn't really paying attention – Dana was far more important than whatever was on the screen. False characters and false lives - he had enough of those. She was real. She was everything.
"It feels weird, you know?" she said suddenly. "Like, it should feel weird, but it doesn't. And that feels weird. But I don't really care, I think. It doesn't… I mean, I thought that maybe we'd have to get to know each other all over again, like we weren't really brother and sister. Like it made you someone else. But you're just Alex."
"It's a lot better than I'd hoped for," he admitted. "I thought you were going to run away. Or chase me off. Or start trying to beat me up with your monitor."
"My computer is worth way too much for that." She rolled her eyes and swatted him, but there was no malice behind the act. "You should have told me sooner, dumbass," she chided. "It kind of ticks me off that you think so little of me sometimes."
"I don't; I swear, I don't. You're amazing, Dana. I just don't get how you're so…" He frowned, searching for the word. "Compassionate, I guess. I mean, I knew you were for putting up with me at all, but I didn't know how much you could handle. I saw Karen Parker convince herself I was a monster; I saw Ragland flinch every time I opened my mouth, like I was gonna kill him for not doing a good enough job. I just couldn't face seeing the same thing with you. I'm sorry, I just... didn't want to risk it."
He hated the words even as he spoke them, hated the admission and weakness and cowardice, but the truth was, he didn't understand – didn't comprehend how a flinch or a stuttered word could manage to hurt every bit as much as a wave of concussive heat, poison, a severed limb. It was a different kind of hurt, something he couldn't locate; pain he couldn't shrug off or sweep away and repair. And it was incapacitating. He had feared this not-quite-tangible pain more than he'd balked at nigh-certain suicide; flying the nuke away from the city had been a far easier decision than mustering up the courage to admit his identity. He knew it was detrimental and irrational – human thoughts and human feelings that had somehow gotten tangled up in his chimeric mess of reactions – but he could no more cast them aside than he could change what he was, and maybe Dana could explain why.
"Alex…" Dana had no idea what to say to that. Neither version of Alex Mercer had ever been very open with their feelings, to the point where it was easy to forget either had them at all. She had wondered sometimes if her brother even did. But she'd seen how the news, hell, the rest of the world viewed her… okay, he wasn't her brother, but he was her brother, damn it. She wasn't changing how she felt about that. She'd seen how the world saw him, but she hadn't thought it had bothered him. He'd seemed pretty indifferent to everyone who wasn't her and didn't belong to Blackwatch.
But if he wasn't… She didn't want to think about how it might feel. She wasn't a very social person, although nowhere near to the same degree as her brother, but the thought of being cut off – and reviled – by the entire human race was daunting and… scary. Especially since she knew he wasn't as heartless as the world painted him. He was just… ugh, how could she explain it? It barely made sense, even to her. She knew he had blood on his hands, and he was unrepentant about a lot of it. Now that she knew – not understood, not yet, but knew – that he wasn't really human, a lot of his quirks and complete confusion when it came to normalcies made chilling sense. He was a killer, yes, one with murky morals at best and positively terrifying abilities. He was something that had been created to kill. But he was also a quiet, awkward idiot older brother – stubborn, brash, obnoxiously overprotective. And she had never felt more wanted in her entire life.
Did he, though? Did he have any idea how much it had meant to her to suddenly have her brother back, the brother she'd known before he'd grown up and left her? It meant so much that apparently, finding out that none of it was entirely true didn't actually change things. She'd had friends in college, had friends along her line of work, but at the end of the day, she'd been alone. And moving to Manhattan to reconnect with her only family had worked out in the most twisted way possible. The most wonderfully twisted way.
Cuddling up to Alex might have been a good response, even if she wasn't sure he'd appreciate it, but she was already doing that. Which left…
"Chip?" she offered out of habit – one that, all things considered, was astonishing in that it hadn't yet been stamped out. As always, he declined, biomass churning uncomfortably at the thought of wrapping around that fried yellow thing, doused in that weird, whitish paste, flecked with plant matter and glistening with grease.
His momentary revulsion was lost on her. Instead of seeming disappointed or sad, as she always did, she had a rather thoughtful look. She stared at the TV blankly, her bright eyes not following the characters at all. After a bit of thought and another second's hesitation, her mouth opened. "Is this another one of those weird things that you were trying to hide?"
There was no point in hiding it anymore. "Sort of."
She noisily bit into the chip he'd turned down, and almost as an afterthought, glanced back at the fridge. "Why won't you eat anything, anyways?"
"I can't." He chewed on his lip – Dana had been unbelievably tolerant of everything, but he still wasn't comfortable telling her all about his weird shit. "I don't really have a working digestive system – anything I swallow just kind of sits in me until I actively break it down. And it's kind of hard to do that unless I'm consuming it along with something alive." Like clothing or metal appliances on a person, but mentioning that aloud was pushing things.
His feeder tendrils were a very instinctive reaction, and he wasn't really sure how he formed them – they just sort of happened when he was hungry or there was something edible within arm's reach, and he could choose to repress or release them from there. He didn't know how to create them unless his body wanted them to form, though; a fact he'd actively realized the first time Dana had expressed distaste at his dietary habits. Thank god he'd had the foresight to try it out when she was asleep. By the time he'd found some homeless victim to desperately consume, he hadn't even been seeing straight. And the staggering probably would have tipped her off that something was wrong.
It probably said something about his chances of ever adapting to human society, that he found a hamburger floating around in his midsection more painful than taking a rocket to the same area. But he wasn't really concerned, as long as hamburgers remained more easily evitable hazards than javelin launchers.
"Oh." She frowned. "That sucks. …Okay, honestly curious here. Why can you only eat stuff that's alive? Totally trying to ignore your idea of a snack… I just want to get this out of the way. Maybe I can help. I mean, let's face it, Alex, I don't think you've been looking for alternatives."
"I don't really… eat." He hesitated, trying to choose his words carefully. "I think the virus in me sorts of turn stuff into myself and then… sucks it in? It's like infection, but controlled. It can't make dead cells do anything, so I can't consume anything that's been dead for over a few minutes. Believe me, I wish I could. But the stuff you call food is useless to me. I can't really do anything with it. Even if I do dissolve it, it's not biomass; it doesn't make me any less hungry."
"Sounds nasty." She grimaced and picked up another chip, biting off the end with a loud crunch. His biomass tingled as some of the crumbs landed on his pants; with the arm that wasn't slung around his sister's shoulders, he brushed them off. "Makes me kind of glad I can do this, though, you know? Well, I guess you don't. But I don't know what I'd do if I couldn't eat chocolate. That stuff fucking makes the world go round."
It was a pretty transparent attempt to get off the subject, but Alex had been trying to do that anyways. "I'm pretty sure that's gravitational forces, actually." All of the scientists in him seemed to think it was pretty elementary, and there were no mentions of chocolate anywhere in the formulas. "The planet's orbit-"
She sighed and waved a hand, cutting him off. "You wouldn't know a figure of speech if it exploded in your face."
He frowned. "Should I be worried?"
"Case in point." Another sigh. "It's kind of funny how you do that, though. Like you just don't get things. It… I don't know, it's weird. I'll do stuff that's so ordinary I don't even think about it, and you just look at me like I have two heads or something."
"Tell me about it." Alex leaned back. "I'm trying, but… well." He tapped his temple, frowning. "I have all these memories, but I don't get why people do stuff. What compels you to do what you do. It just doesn't make any sense."
That elicited a small smile from her. "Says the sentient virus-thing." He shifted and looked quickly at her, worried at the use of terminology, but she looked more teasing than anything else, still comfortably leaning against him.
She caught his discomfiture. "It's kind of hard to think of you like that," she assured him. "I mean, the Black Plague doesn't walk around in a hoodie and leather jacket. And it definitely doesn't bring me home chocolate." Her voice turned softer. "But hey, if it's too soon, it's okay. I won't."
And she received a small smile in turn; faint and tentative, but it did wonders for his normally stony face. "Thanks."
They lapsed into silence for a few minutes.
"God, it must have been annoying," she remarked suddenly. "Like that week I was trying to get you to eat dinner. I thought you just hated my cooking. Oh!" She giggled. "Remember that time I wanted you to take a shower?"
"You tried to lock me in the bathroom and started throwing a tantrum when I asked you to let me out," he recalled, with just the slightest hint of a long-suffering undertone. Clearly he'd gotten over the incident.
"And you just unscrewed the doorknob, broke out, and escaped out the window." She laughed again. "And then you showed up the next day, clinging to the wall outside with your head through the window, and you wouldn't come back inside until you'd gotten me to promise I wasn't going to threaten you with the showerhead again. Haha… I guess you wouldn't like shampoo, would you?"
"Water too." Alex was pretty sure it would take harder stuff than commercial antiseptic to kill him, but he doubted he'd have any fondness for it, and he didn't feel any desire to slather the stuff over his head to find out. Hand sanitizer, he'd already learned about the hard way. Very inconvenient time to blow his cover, too.
"Huh. Hygiene is a deathtrap. Trying to picture Blackwatch arming themselves with Super Soakers and bars of soap now… but yeah, I've been going about this the wrong way, haven't I?" Her voice turned a bit morose. "I thought you were being stubborn about all this stuff. That you'd forgotten how to live and I needed to teach you all over again. I didn't know that you couldn't."
"Don't worry about it." He sounded like he meant it; that soft half-smile was still quirking his lips, as though he'd briefly forgotten that he was supposed to act disgruntled and bitter about the world. Dana couldn't help but smile back at this rare trespass of emotion on her brother's face. "Just… no therapists. Please."
She made a face. "I'm still not convinced on that one."
He gave a noncommittal noise at that, something between a grunt and a sigh. Damn, he thought. And here he was, thinking he was finally getting off the hook. Things could never just be that easy, could they? 'Dana's ideas' ranked fairly high on his threat list, somewhere above Leader Hunters and below close-range nuclear explosions.
"Hmph. I'm gonna get through to you one day, you big moron." She poked his forehead. "Count on it."
He didn't doubt it. Hell, sometimes he was convinced that no matter how many tanks he smashed through, Dana would always be the more determined of the pair.
Unfortunately for the two of them, even if Alex could relax into a subdued and gentle state for his only family, his body was still a compressed viral engine of power. And it had decided that it was sick of how long he'd spent sedentary. He was made for constant action and violence, and while he was getting a little better at tolerating the apartment, he still couldn't rest for much more than an hour and a half before he started getting edgy. He supposed it was like a person trying to take a nap after ingesting a large quantity of Dana's 'coffee' stuff, except in his case, he was on a permanent caffeine rush. One that made him want to kill things, to boot.
Unable to completely deny his energy, he started to fidget, toying with a loose hem on his jacket's left pocket. How did those things get loose, anyway? The leather-imitating biomass was numb, but he could still sort of distantly feel his nails digging into it as he worried at the imperfect stitching, then surreptitiously remorphed it and patched up the damage around that spot. And then started picking at it again.
A minute or so passed before Dana sighed. "You probably have to go, right? Go out, kill the bad guys. Save the world. Jesus… when did our lives turn into some sort of fucked-up action move? When the hell did we get used to it?"
He couldn't imagine a life that wasn't like one. "Probably." Twisting his head, Alex glanced out the closed window. "And I'll come back and you'll still be here." His voice had taken on an oddly wondering note. "Nothing's actually changed."
"Hey, I told you before, remember?" She smiled gently at him as they both stood up. "No matter what happens, you're still my brother."
His brow dipped in confusion, and a tangle of worry gripped his chest. Had she not understood? "But… I'm not your brother?"
She laughed and briefly clapped a hand on his shoulder. "Close enough, stupid."
Her approval coursed through him like sunlight, all warmth and energy without the burn.
She chuckled. "Now get a move on. Can't leave your twisted superhero duties unattended, can you? Show the world what you're worth. I promise, it's a better place than you've been seeing. Someday, you'll get to see that. Someday, the world will get to see you."
He'd seen plenty of the world through vicarious memories and still wasn't sure he had a place anywhere in it. And his sister seemed to be clinging to a breed of optimism he'd abandoned before the end of his first week alive – acceptance wasn't anywhere on the table. It didn't matter. As long as the world had Dana, he didn't need any other reasons.
As if sensing his doubt, she gripped his hand and gave it a tight squeeze. "I promise," she repeated adamantly.
He made a valiant attempt at a smile. Like many of his forays into human responses, the action got tangled and muddled somewhere along his neurons; those incompatible, convoluted viral pathways confused and twisted it into an unsuccessful alien mimicry of the real thing. His voice, at least, was a little more obedient, and could have been considered passably soft. "Stick to the promises you can keep… sister."
"Brother," she confirmed. "And I meant what I said, moron!"
His smile turned a shade more real as he left the room. Yeah, that was Dana. 'Backing down' was not a term she was aware of. And for all the arguments and frustration it caused, he didn't think he'd want to see her change.
After closing the door behind him, he made his way to the apartment's roof in his typically inhuman fashion. Dana's views were too black and white, still naïve enough to believe in a clearly defined good and evil. Naïve enough to think that he tread closer to the former – guilt gnawed and his biomass squirmed when he compared his real motives to her trusting assumptions. There was no point in being dishonest with himself. He wasn't a hero – he was a monster that fought against worse monsters. 'Saving everyone' was really just an afterthought that had ended up coinciding fairly well with revenge and hatred. But her faith in him was warm and gratifying, however misplaced it might have been, and he didn't want to dismiss it.
The autumn chill swirled playfully around his skin; with his massive density and unnaturally high temperature, the cold didn't bother him in the slightest. Right now, though, it was unusually refreshing. He felt… strange, but in a good way. Like he could do anything. He cocked his head, glancing at the network of rooftops around him. Now that he thought about it, Harlem seemed like less of a choked, dying mess of concrete and brick, and more like one of those games he sometimes made up to test himself.
On a whim, he bent his knees and thrust himself up into a decent jump. The air rushed past him, curling over his outstretched arms and yanking up the edges of his jacket to trail and flap in the slipstream. The effortless, easy arc carried him neatly to another roof, which buckled slightly at the impact.
It was something he'd done a million times, but everything felt so new, so vibrant. An unfamiliar, giddy laugh bubbled up from his chest. The sheer sense of freedom – the city was his. He'd always known it, just like a predator inherently knows its place on the food chain; something he'd accepted without really acknowledging. But now it was bright and energetic, something more than just a means to an end.
Alex took another leap, this time leveling himself into a glide. Marveling at how the air momentarily held him aloft, at how small and faraway the streets and their vexing crowds seemed. Insignificant – not their lives, as was easy to feel in his frustration, but their entire presence. Outside of his awareness, his concern; trapped on the ground while he ambled freely through the sky.
He sprang from rooftop to rooftop randomly, following no pattern or purpose beyond his own momentary whims. He made his way to higher ground just to enjoy a longer fall back down, toying with his acrobatic ability in an increasingly bold display of midair flips and twists.
And all the while, he knew he had someone to go back home to, someone who didn't care about why he could do this. Someone who had looked into him and seen everything – seen things that even he wasn't comfortable with acknowledging – and accepted him anyway. For once, everything he'd been afraid of had turned out to be nothing more than smoke and shadows. And now he was free, for once allowed into at least a little sliver of the light.
It felt wonderful.
This wasn't a test of agility, a gauge on how fast he could travel on varying terrain – this was aimless. Movement for the sake of movement.
It didn't make sense; this was nothing new to him. His speed and inhuman dexterity was the first thing he'd discovered about his new body. And he could draw satisfaction from movement, but only because it accomplished something; never when it was aimless. This served no purpose – he was not hunting down prey or information. He was neither fleeing nor chasing, and he had no destination in mind. He was not honing a skill or testing out new adjustments to his structure. Stranger still was the fact that he couldn't bring himself to care about it.
A muffled series of shocked exclamations rang underfoot as he crashed down upon an apartment's roof, and he couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of it as he sprang away – some group of random humans doing whatever the hell they did with their lives, and suddenly finding the great Zeus using their ceiling as a trampoline. Their expressions were probably priceless.
He paused on top of a high-rise hotel, a tendril of wary confusion managing to worm through this inexplicable, reckless energy. This wasn't like him – he was a creature of purpose. What was he doing? What was this… feeling?
After a moment's thought, he laughed again and flipped off the side. The hell with it. If he was going crazy, fine. He didn't care.
He felt like he was on top of the world.
0o0o0
Captain Cross had once thought that Hope, Idaho had been hell. He missed those days.
Manhattan was a nightmare. A worst-case scenario. Exactly the sort of thing that they were trying to prevent. Massive population concentration, center of world commerce, travel destination, densely packed crowds… Idaho wasn't even worth thought after that. A hick town in the middle of nowhere. Isolated. An assault rifle to New York City's atomic bomb. The situation's only saving grace was that its island location and the disease's hydrophobia made quarantining it mercifully easy, but that was little comfort to the island's one and a half million residents.
And he knew it. He also knew that Blackwatch wasn't here to save those one-point-five million people; it was here to stamp out the virus wherever it managed to crop up. Or to escape to.
He'd done his duty. It wasn't something he was proud of, but he wasn't a fool. A significant portion of Manhattan's citizens had been doomed as soon as Elizabeth Greene had broken out of her containment. If Blackwatch had taught him anything, it was that it was better to salvage what could be saved rather than waste time and effort trying to help those that had already been lost. It was ironic. Penn Station had been a scare, but it had saved the world in its own right. Engineered to be as lethal as possible, Blacklight was too effective, an evolutionary dead end - it had burned itself out, killing everyone in the vicinity too quickly for it to spread. Save one unexplained anomaly, anyway... But it had given them the time to lock down the borough, and by the time that Redlight had taken root, it was effectively contained – at the very least, long enough for them to strike back at it.
It had been close; they had nearly been overwhelmed. Their various computer tests' predictions had been unanimous; Redlight had almost broken free. Unofficially enlisting Zeus's service was not something he had enjoyed, and it would see his hide on a tanning rack if it ever got out. But really, it had just been another application of what Blackwatch had taught him – use whatever means necessary. And maybe his own situation had made him stupidly sympathetic towards the Blacklight virus – it was clear that he was the only person who'd ever considered that Mercer might actually be a sapient being – but it had all worked out in the end. Focus the man-turned-monster's boundless rage away from Blackwatch just long enough for them to find a way to drive Greene out, then set Mercer loose on her. When she'd surfaced in Times Square as a gargantuan betentacled behemoth, he'd started to doubt his gambit. But he was a strategist, and the outcome became clear long before the fight wrapped itself up – Mother was packing more power, but the form she'd chosen couldn't have been less suitable for her last stand. She was a giant, immobile target, and Zeus was too goddamn fast for her to catch. He'd actually gained a bit of respect for Mercer then, when the brute demonstrated that he was capable of fighting intelligently when charging head-on didn't suffice. And alongside rows upon rows of military tanks – probably the first and last time they wouldn't be firing upon each other – he'd whittled Greene down enough to kill her with his usual savagery.
Then Firebreak. Randall had trumped him on that one. He'd been certain that stopping Greene would behead the Infection, enough for the city to be considered salvageable once more. He'd met the truth with a mixture of disbelief and disgust. The General had been refraining from glassing the city because he wanted to recover Greene, not remove her; now that she was gone, he had no compunctions about cauterizing Redlight for good. It was a blatant violation of everything Blackwatch fought for, and it was at that point when Cross realized that he'd rather be a traitor than stand by and let the city burn. And he'd planned to distance himself from the Blacklight virus as quickly as he could, but once again, the crazy bastard really looked like the only option he had left.
But if Randall was full of surprises, so was Mercer. He'd assumed that the virus would cooperate as far as getting onto the Reagan – it was an appeal to survival and information, things even Blacklight could understand – but he honestly hadn't expected him to volunteer to commit suicide. When Mercer's helicopter had vanished into the distance, deadly cargo in tow, he'd felt a mixture of bitter amusement and regret. The sociopathic, mass-murdering viral monster had been more invested in protecting humanity than Randall had ever been. What did that say about Blackwatch?
But it was still necessary. No matter how twisted the last line of defense was, it was still the only thing that stood between humankind and bloody disaster. And as blinding light blossomed on the horizon, he saw exactly what he had to do.
He had to change things.
Things after that had been straightforward. He'd been floored upon hearing that Mercer was still alive, but given how everything had transpired, it came as more of an uneasy awareness than an actual threat. He wasn't sure what Mercer would do, now that there was no gripping conspiracy revolving around himself to keep him occupied, but after a week passed with no signs of the Infection resurging, he was satisfied enough that the Blacklight virus wasn't taking the reins from his predecessor. Cross had tracked him down – he looked to be in surprisingly good condition for something that had just surfed on a nuclear explosion – and while Mercer was still as blunt and impatient as ever, they'd worked things out well enough. A mutual agreement to keep out of each other's way and trade favors when necessary. So without the fear that his team was going to get eaten by a bad-tempered viral abomination, he'd done his duties cleaning up the broken city. Sometimes he called ahead for backup; sometimes a surprisingly amenable Mercer would randomly show up and lend a tentacle, although Cross suspected it was more out of boredom than it was the extremely questionable goodness of his heart.
Either way, Blackwatch had finally been close to stamping the poison out for good, just as he'd planned to stamp out the poison from Blackwatch. And his attempts at expelling one had gotten him absolutely nowhere and ended up rekindling the other.
He wasn't sure if he was a suspect or not. He hadn't been contacted for anything more than regular questioning on the incident and mission briefings. Said missions had been rather lower-ranked than he was used to, but he was inclined to think that it was because they were short-staffed rather than being on some sort of probation. He'd covered his tracks flawlessly, if nothing else. If anything was found, Mercer would be the one implicated, not him, although that had the potential to get back to him too. He doubted it, though – dealing with Pariah was eating all of Blackwatch's attention. It was ironic, that that might have actually been what saved his hide.
Not that it was much of a good thing. It was also the reason he was tromping towards a Hive. Irritatingly unspecified 'disturbances' had been occurring around there, and headquarters wanted it cleared out so samples could be taken. What constituted a disturbance beyond the usual gruesome death caused by the disease?
He wasn't too enthusiastic about finding out.
The Wisemen weren't alone for this assignment – another, lower-ranking platoon had been assigned to follow them. Looking over the assembled men, all nearly identical to each other, he couldn't help but think that they'd been distributed to him as meat shields.
He almost laughed. That was what your job was in Blackwatch. Kill as many things as you can before you get destroyed. Things were different back in the spec ops deployments, the undercover missions abroad, but Redlight was an endless enemy; your worth was in terms of how much of the job you could get done before you slipped.
He sized up the leader of the other squad. He'd gotten used to not seeing anyone's face during work, but it did make identifying anyone he wasn't duly familiar with difficult. Were it not for the name he'd been given – Lieutenant Kozlowski – he wouldn't have known that he'd met the man once before, in a conference. He'd struck him then as a relatively uninteresting man, tall and muscled but not handsome, a little too twitchy to seem suited to his station. The only thing that had made him stand out from the generic Blackwatch profile was his weapon preferences; apparently, the man liked to use two guns at once and was still a pretty accurate marksman. It was visible now, with two assault rifles slung from the lieutenant's sides rather than the usual one. Cross preferred to keep one hand free for close combat, but he did have a better chance at surviving in close quarters than anyone else could reasonably expect.
The two teams didn't mingle; shared experiences and learned mistrust kept them among their own members, checking their gear and psyching themselves up as they moved towards their target.
"Hah," Winder crowed. "Another beautiful fuckin' day in the Corps. Weather's a balmy forty-five and I am ready to blow shit up. How ya doin' down there, newbies?" He looked sideways, where the other platoon was marching in two rigid lines. "Ya think you can keep up with the big shots?"
Behind his gasmask, Lieutenant Kozlowski ground his teeth. "As your superior officer, shut the fuck up, Corporal."
Cross was frowning. "We're all on the same team here, Winder. Eyes on the prize."
"Oh, I am," Winder agreed. "Cannot fuckin' wait to send some skins up in flames."
Unlike usual, Detwiller couldn't share his teammate's violent enthusiasm. There was an uneasy feeling in his gut, and he was relatively sure it didn't come from the morning's shitty field rations. Obviously, there was some elbow room for trepidation. The Infection was picking up speed again, and Pariah and Mother were lurking out there somewhere – two boogeymen entrenched in hostile territory and liable to appear at any moment. And Zeus, he mentally added a second later, but after watching Pariah bring that monster to its knees… He could have laughed. You knew that things were bad when Alex Mercer was no longer at the top of your threat list, and you started to believe that maybe it wasn't lying about sides after all. Maybe. He wouldn't trust that monster to accurately tell him the color of the sky on a clear day, but he doubted that it liked Pariah all too much after that horrific, disgusting thing he'd witnessed.
Good instincts were the mark of a successful soldier, and Detwiller had learned to trust his implicitly. It wasn't a sixth sense like some whack-job idiots liked to boast. It was just experience and raw awareness, all focused on the simplest and most paramount of goals – keeping alive. He hadn't really learned to appreciate it – hell, to even pay any thought to it at all – before two months ago. Hardened as he was, he still had to hold back a shudder at the memory of that nightmare; getting called in as backup, Cross wounded and the target more pissed off than hurt. He'd been reloading his grenade launcher during a brief lull in the fight – the slippery bastard had leapt out of sight, and he'd taken advantage of that to shove some 40x46 grenades into the ammunition chamber as quickly as he could. His neck had started prickling, enough to hurt – the next thing he knew, he'd tossed the launcher aside and thrown himself to the ground, just as Mercer's tentacle had speared through where his neck had been an instant ago and impaled two men behind him. The top of his helmet still bore a shallow scar from the close call, but he didn't need it to remind himself.
Some moments were hard to forget.
It wasn't luck that had kept him alive – it was his skills, himself. It wasn't something to be proud of. It was just a fact. And the same infallible thing was now telling him that he had no business getting cocky.
So when Winder glanced at him for support, he remained silent instead of making one of his usual pithy remarks. After a few moments, the other senior Wiseman turned away with a grunt, clearly dissatisfied. Detwiller drummed an impatient rhythm on his launcher's barrel as they walked, skin crawling with impatience. He wished everyone would shut up and get this all over with.
He could understand Winder's derisive comments, though. All Blackwatch recruits were tough, but after spending so many years of his career among the elites, comparing the lower ranks' grit to what he was used to was like comparing the average Marines to Blackwatch. Some of the men following Kozlowski were speaking to each other rather than surveying the surrounding streets, and a few others were hyperalert, whirling around with weapons raised at the slightest sound that rang out-of-place. Compared to his team's silent, efficient unison, it was pathetic.
Cross was an impeccable leader who cared for and was revered by his men, but he wasn't soft. The consideration and concern he had for his team was an equal trade for the rigor he demanded from them. The Wisemen didn't get their reputation as the elite without reason, and being transferred to the squad didn't suddenly transform you from average to skilled. The team was constantly on their toes because it had near-literally been drilled into their brains.
The captain, he knew, did not care much for rank. He didn't enjoy attitude, but was far more willing to excuse it than any other leader Detwiller had served under. Experience was beneficial, but a lack of it didn't disqualify a potential recruit from Cross's attention. He looked for adaptability. Instinct. Potential. Talent, either raw or honed. Stoicism. Levelheadedness. Quick thinking. And loyalty. And Detwiller, like every other member of the Wisemen, was here because he fit at least some of those criteria, and invariably the last.
Cross, meanwhile, was keeping pace with Kozlowski, if silently. There wasn't much to say. They were there to get the job done, not to make friends or talk about – what? What small talk was there to be made, anyways? His weekly killcount? How freakishly red the sky was?
"Getting close to the site," the lieutenant warned. He pulled a small device from his belt. "Going to run a scan, pick up the concentration. Probably going to be close-quarters fighting – stick to protocol, and for fuck's sake, your suit is an extension of your body. It gets compromised and you're as good as dead, so no stupid mistakes, and… the fuck?"
Kozlowski looked down at the scanner, which had started to flash. Frowning to himself, he pressed a few buttons. The blinking ceased, but restarted about ten seconds later. He growled and gave it a violent shake. "Useless piece of crap."
Cross cast a sideways glance at him. "Hm?"
"It's picking something up, all right. But it's also saying there's a strain it can't identify. Thought they updated this shit?"
The captain was intrigued. "Let me take a look."
Sure enough, there was a glaring unknown along the other listed concentrations of Redlight's better-known strains. He recalibrated the scanner again, just as the lieutenant had done, but the results came up the same. It wasn't a significant amount compared to the more familiar mutations of Redlight present, but Cross wasn't pacified. Preparation and strategy was what kept them ahead of the Infected; unknown variables were what got people killed.
"Hmph," he grunted, handing the scanner back to Kozlowski. "Keep your guard up. I don't like this."
The lieutenant laughed bitterly at that. "Since when can you ever say you fucking like what's going on here?"
As they marched closer to the Hive, Infected began to appear, then became frequent. The Walkers were neatly picked off before they could get too close, but as soon as more hard-hitting monsters began to appear, the battle would begin in earnest.
And they were getting close. They were less than two blocks away from the Hive now, the top of the overgrown nightmare of a building visible above the rows of abandoned retail stores. It stood out like a sore, some giant pustule of the city's corruption. A man could get used to the sounds, the smell of rotting meat, hell, even get accustomed to looking up and seeing the sun hanging in a crimson sky. But Cross doubted that he was ever going to be able to look at this scene and not feel disturbed at the… wrongness, the twisted, perverse face of the Infection. And for as many times as it had saved his life, his skin crawled whenever he looked at Redlight's monstrous creations, because he knew that a part of it was inside of him, flowing through his veins and entrenched in his cells. Not quite the same virus that ripped men apart and turned them into beasts under a single guiding will, but close. Too close. Different, but still a part of this horrible experiment-gone-wrong.
Mercer had a different strain too, some version of Redlight warped by half a decade's worth of genetic alterations. And that wasn't much of an assurance, because he looked human enough, until you met his gaze and realized that he was looking at you hungrily, that any pretense of civility he could muster was stretched taut over the mind of a ravenous predator. Those eyes never really changed – he'd seen Mercer irritated and dispassionate and apprehensive and furious, but that look that he could only describe as that of a starving caged animal was always there. And that was only a window into what the creature really was – Zeus could make himself look human, but Blacklight had taken the dying Doctor Mercer and recreated him as anything but. Fuck, the bastard ate people! He'd witnessed Mercer wounded before, had seen writhing tentacles and flowing ooze where muscle and bone should have been. He'd seen the jacket and jeans harden into armor plating at a moment's notice, seen his sleeves erupt into spikes and tentacles and bulging muscle. It wasn't even something that the Blacklight virus seemed to be entirely in control of. More and more often lately, he'd watched an agitated Mercer pace back and forth, his arms shivering between human and… whatever lay beneath. But it really just told the captain what he already knew about Blacklight. Any attempt at normality was nothing more than a shell over something primal and inhuman.
Mercer wasn't a part of the virus's main initiative, the hivemind, the gestalt will to erase humanity and replace it with cancerous monsters. But that was really all that could be said for him. It didn't make him sane, or good; didn't come close to making him human. There were times that Cross thought he could see a glimpse of remorse in those hungry eyes, hear concern about collateral damage when he commented on the captain's battle plans. The pure reverence in his gravelly voice whenever he spoke of his sister. A start, maybe. But it didn't change the fact that what had become of Alex Mercer was a monster in the most literal sense of the word.
He hadn't questioned his humanity for a long time, but seeing the virus fully manifestated now, assimilation and unfettered destruction, Cross couldn't help but second-guess himself. Couldn't help but wonder at what line that he himself tread.
His head snapped up, along with every other soldier in position, as a series of eerie screeches rang out. They weren't a Hunter's roars, sounding more like raptors or bird of prey than anything else. But they were far too loud and close to be the fattened crows that always circled overhead. A glance behind him proved that he hadn't merely been imagining it.
He turned to two of his men. "Keffler, Sullivan – scan for whatever made that. It's probably nothing, but I want to be sure."
The indicated Wisemen got to work, flicking through the modes on their scopes as they checked the area. A quarter of a minute passed in relative silence as the two tried to locate whatever might be behind the sound.
A scream rang out at the back of Kozlowski's line, and things crumbled from there.
Cross whirled. Three thin, reddish creatures had appeared from nowhere and were in the middle of tearing some unfortunate man to pieces. Weapons were raised almost immediately, but the damn things were too close. Somehow, they'd managed to get right in the middle of their position without being noticed. The fuck…?
Somebody took a chance and fired. The shot lodged itself in another soldier's leg, who crumpled with a yelp as the unknown Infected leapt out of the way. It was like a signal; the other two forgot about the dead soldier, dropping and snarling in unison. The captain spent a few seconds trying to blink away the optical illusion before he realized what he was seeing. Claws. Claws that had to be at least a fucking foot and a half long. At least.
And then it was like watching Mercer in action again as the fucking things swept through the ranks, butchering the rear of the lieutenant's platoon with frightening ease. Some scattered, shouting, but others weren't quick enough to react and ended up in several pieces on the pavement.
"Get back!" he heard Kozlowski howl. "Get out of range!"
The man could have sounded a little less rattled, but it was sound advice. Cross was already backpedaling, alternating looking behind him and straight ahead as he covered some distance, then reached a decision and started running.
He was a good shot, but the problem with grenade launchers was that they launched grenades. Which explode. He couldn't fire into that clusterfuck without killing any of the men who were fighting back. Of course, very few of the Infected had the decency to properly die when nailed with non-incendiary ammunition, but the captain hated having to hesitate. It never preceded anything good.
More screeching calls echoed from the rooftops. Cross recited a list of swear words in his head as he dashed away, searching for a sheltered spot where he could pause and take aim.
And of course he had to momentarily forget that those clawed anorexic fucks weren't the hive's only denizens. The reminder came in the form of the vaguely blade-shaped forearm of one of the more heavily twisted Walkers. He ducked under the swipe and kicked the Evolved in the chest, jogging backwards a few steps to fire upon it. The Infected struggled for the first two shots; upon the third, its toughened skin finally gave, and it let go of whatever life it had left in cauterized pieces.
He jammed the barrel of his launcher into a Walker that was shambling towards him from the side; the metal connected with a wet crack, and the Infected fell away from him, gurgling. Not that it mattered. There were more behind it, beside it; a legion of slowly advancing corpses that didn't realize that they had already died. A week ago, this same crowd would have been strolling the same streets, talking on cell phones, carrying bags of groceries, waving down taxis. Now Redlight had made an army of them, and the only ticket out was to die. Where along the line did they stop being human? Was there a specific point when their independence burned out and they crossed the line from person to monster?
If it was anything like his own experiences, there wasn't.
But he… he was a survivor. He'd chosen his path. He hadn't known what he was getting into – who ever did? – but he'd picked his own future, however different it was from what he'd expected. These were just… people, civilians, the very thing he'd enlisted to protect. Now they were beyond saving. Damn Greene. Damn Pariah. Damn Gentek. Damn…
He was starting to realize just why Alex Mercer loathed his former self so much.
Those thoughts occurred in the span of a few seconds and in the back of his mind – introspection and warfare mixed only slightly better than kindergarteners and sticks of dynamite. He backpedaled furiously, firing off a volley of shots as he went. It was a good thing the mounted weapon was so easy to reload… Abruptly, he backed into something that immediately flinched at the contact, and spun around, expecting to see a soldier.
He didn't.
With a furious hiss, it leapt away, landing splayed and close to the ground in a ferally defensive position. Up close, he could see just how much of an ugly fucker this new Infected thing was. It looked horribly disfigured on all fours, its stubby legs at most half the size of its overgrown, bony arms. The claws were straight but grotesquely long, and they stuck out of its shapeless hands at uneven angles.
It didn't matter if the thing was going to win a fucking beauty pageant or not, though. Cross did not give a shit what it looked like; he wanted to know how to make it die.
Long claws, he noted. Midrange. Close combat was a bad idea with this thing, but unless he could get enough distance, using his grenade launcher was going to do just as much damage to him. Spindly arms, doesn't look too durable. Disfigured legs, but it's faster than it looks.
He was fast, but the circle of chaos around a Hive was a shit place to run blindly; he couldn't keep his eyes behind him and on every other Infected in the area. But swinging with his gun, baton, or his knife wasn't feasible as long as that thing had those damnable claws. Speaking of which, he'd been wasting enough time as it was. The bastard looked ready to pounce.
The claws…
He dove to the ground as the thing sprang, arms held wide. Its talons cut through the empty space a foot above his head, whistling shrilly with speed. Cross leapt to his feet, but the Infected had already whirled around, diving in for another, lower attack; he was forced to drop the opportunity in favor of testing just how much he could regenerate.
It snarled when its second charge proved just as inaccurate as the first, sounding just as pissed off as the captain felt. He feinted to the left, then threw himself right as it pounced, but it caught his trick and twisted in midair.
He clenched his teeth as the tips of its claws – maybe less than an inch – tore through his weapon arm; three widely spaced, jagged tears in the muscle. Despite himself, a sharp, pained exhale escaped his throat, but he forced himself to hold his ground with the practiced ease of one who'd shouldered off this sort of wound far too many times before. There was no point in panicking. Attempting to duck out of the way was leaving himself open. His body would heal itself quickly enough, and the agents in his blood would neutralize any would-be transmission of the virus. He'd dealt with far worse than the slice of pain in his arm.
…Fuck it. His eyes narrowed. There was no point in drawing this out.
He lifted his wounded arm and fired off a single shot – at this close range, the explosion treated him to a generous dose of heat and rubble, but he didn't waste time with catching his breath. The mutant Infected hadn't had the forewarning to brace itself, and the blast had thrown it back, if nothing else. It was hard to make out more than silhouettes through the smoke.
He sprinted forward, pulling up his arm. His enemy was rising to its misshapen feet, shaking its head like a disoriented dog. No sooner had it taken its claws off the ground when the captain slammed the edge of his grenade launcher into one of its hands with all the force he could muster. It staggered back, keening, and he struck again. This time, those spindly-looking bones gave way, snapping off two of the three claws and leaving its malformed wrist dangling at a useless angle.
It howled – a horrible, strangled shriek that made his ears throb. It stumbled back a step and dropped down to all fours again – three and a half now, really. Cross wasted no time in lunging in and snapping its other hand, grinding it under his steel-toed boots. It screamed again and jumped back, splitting the fractured digits off entirely.
It hesitated, then decided against fleeing and dove at him again. Cross was not impressed; he didn't bother to drive out of the way. The thing didn't have much force behind it – it crashed into him with barely more momentum than an average human, flailing bitterly at him with useless stumps. The captain's eye twitched. Its high-pitched keening was beginning to grate on his ears. He jammed his shock baton into the creature's torso, and as it staggered, he hoisted it up by the throat.
"Shut the fuck up," he growled, fingers tightening around its neck. With his free hand, he stowed his shock baton and freed his knife, which he plunged into the creature's skull repeatedly until the damned shrieking finally gurgled out.
"…Fucker," he muttered, kicking the body aside. The burn in his right forearm was already fading. Soon enough, it'd just be another scar to add to his collection. But he didn't have the time to spend on some uppity newcomer to the Infected food chain. He had his team to guard.
"Good one, Captain," panted Black. Cross turned sharply to face his subordinate. The man was placing his weight on one side, leaning oddly, but his suit didn't appear breached. Must have been some sort of blunt trauma, which was far less worrying than contact. Another teammate was standing next to him, but without hearing the second man speak, Cross could only hazard a few guesses as to who he was.
"Anything to report?" he bit out, sweeping the area for more immediate threats.
"We've split into pairs, as you instructed." All right, so Black's partner was Sullivan. "No casualties among ours, but we can't keep track of the other squad, sir."
"Good. Keep it up. Retreat if you have to – this is getting messy." Cross raised a hand in dismissal and started off again – there was no time to waste on chatter, and he had to keep tabs on the rest of his team.
The Infected had poured forth like a wave – the air was thick with decay, rent with gunshots and warped screams. He carved his way through the swarm with nothing but his stun baton and the corner of his launcher. It was what set him apart from the rest of his squad, of all of Blackwatch aside from the decimated ranks of the supersoldiers; the reflexes, the senses. He wasn't Mercer, wasn't blazing with inhuman power. But the added speed and fortitude was enough of an edge to have kept him alive for decades, morphed him from a regular soldier to a legend among their ranks.
Pockets of troopers were scattered among the horde. Some were holding their own. Others had not. Thankfully, none of the bodies he saw had the badges that identified the Wisemen.
Gunfire, not too far in the distance. Cross could identify the lone fighter ahead as the lieutenant by his stylized gear – Kozlowski was backpedaling, firing expertly at one of the new clawed bastards. The dual-wielded rifles were doing a fair enough job of keeping the monster at bay.
And suddenly there was a second, and the top-left half of the lieutenant was falling away in a flash of claws and blood. There was no warning, no time to react; he had been fighting and now he was dead, the transition almost lost in the chaos.
Cross sucked in a breath. Death was something he was well acquainted with, but men without a leader tended to panic. Given the current adversity they were facing, Kozlowski's fall was not going to have good repercussions on his squad, once they found out. He was going to need to round up as many of them as he could if he wanted to maintain any semblance of order.
"Cross!" That was Detwiller – he warranted a guess that the other Wiseman trailing behind was Winder. "You fucking see that?"
"Kozlowski? Yeah." The captain ground his teeth. Things were falling apart. "Poor bastard didn't even see it coming."
"And now they're all going to split. Give them a minute." He could hear the sneer in Winder's voice. "Shouldn't be bringing along children for this kind of work."
Cross's responding admonishment was cut off by a crash. All three soldiers whirled to face it; a Hunter had leapt down to the street and was eyeing them up – or whatever the equivalent was for an eyeless beast. It was a large specimen; not big enough to be one of the pack leader variants, but definitely a shade more solid-looking than the usual ones.
He didn't waste time on orders; Winder and Detwiller were the two most seasoned men on his team. Aside from himself and those two, the only other survivor of that goddamned ambush mission was in the fucking mental ward. They knew him well enough to know what he was going to do; Cross was slightly quicker on the draw, but Detwiller contributed equally to the stream of explosives that met the monster head-on. The Hunter's advance was halted before it had crossed half of the distance that separated them; the hulking beast reeled back as one of Winder's frags burst at its feet.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a glint of metal and looked up. Some dozen meters away, one of the lesser soldiers was lifting a Javelin, clearly aiming at…
"Hit the dirt!" he yelled, throwing himself to the ground.
Three thuds followed his example – two human-sized, and one caused by clods of asphalt being blasted out of the street. He flipped around as he shot back to his feet, wanting to be sure that his subordinates weren't harmed. The pair was in the process of picking themselves up. Good. Less could be said for the Hunter, which was another plus.
"Fucking amateurs!" Detwiller yelled, his hoarse voice hardly audible over the chaos. "Watch where you're aiming, fuckholes!"
Cross wasted no time on blame – the situation was quickly devolving into every man for himself, and that was a fatal setup in the middle of the Red Zone. His own men weren't breaking rank, but he needed every soldier he could get, damn hierarchy.
Blackwatch soldiers had to have nerves of steel, but there was something about losing your commanding officer and getting swarmed by deformed, taloned nightmares that could shake a man. And losing balance for a second was all that the enemy needed. The seeds of panic had already been planted – he needed to stop the confusion from spreading further.
"On me, troopers!" he called out, putting as much volume behind the words as he could muster. Authority was far more trouble than it was worth, and something he bore out necessity rather than personal ambition, but being the Captain Cross, the legendary Specialist, certainly had its merits at times like these.
Only a few of the nearby rank-and-file soldiers were able to hear him, but one of them must have radioed their comrades, because within the next minute, he'd rallied at least fifteen more men. Most were breathing heavily and looked ready to fire at anything that moved.
It was easier to keep track of them this way, but the larger group was attracting more attention from the Infected. A single target to converge upon. Cross distantly wondered how that was reasoned out – did whatever sentient hand that guided the Hive analyze the soldiers as a threat, or were they simply a mass of flesh and heat to infect and devour?
He doubted he was ever going to get an answer to that, and he didn't care to. The only important thing was to put them down.
As he ordered the soldiers around, changing positions to stymie the advancing horde, he slowly realized that they were getting driven back. Driven back and picked off. They knew how to deal with the seemingly endless ranks of Walkers, knew how to split up and confuse a Hunter, but these new things just kept appearing out of nowhere, leaping and lunging out, either rending a man on the spot or carrying him away screaming for things Cross didn't want to think of.
The damn things were too fast. Hunters were harder to take down, but at least they had tells; it took them time to leap or change direction. These things were too fast, too erratic, too hard to hit – and no less effective at slaughtering than their other evolved kin. The rest of the infected, his men knew how to handle, but these dozen or so new bastards among them were causing far too much damage. They needed to regroup.
"Fall back!" he roared to his subordinates.
These bastards kept picking off the edges of his group, whoever was unlucky enough to be on the fringe. He needed a position with as few open sides as possible – the street was too wide, he didn't have enough men for that. One of those crevices between buildings might fare better, if he could just position half of his men facing one direction and half the other. That, and a few keeping eyes on the rooftop…
…There. He wasn't sure how the city managed to have so many alleys, but he wasn't going to question it. He stayed at the rear of his group as they moved to the new position, raining explosion upon explosion at everything that tried to follow.
And then the soldiers at his back stopped moving, and he turned and saw what he hadn't been able to see at an angle. Which was, in this case, a brick wall, covered in tattered posters and stained a sickly brown in some places.
A dead end. Fuck. They could either stay cornered like trapped rats, or they could make a break for it, right back into the jaws of the Infected. There'd be no time for a counterstrike – they'd either find a safer spot, or die. And death was a bitch when it came to winning bets.
Motioning the soldiers to stay put, he ran to the alley's mouth. He lifted his arm and flicked on his communicator. "Red Crown!" he shouted into the receiver, stealing a binocular-enhanced glance back around the corner before retreating back with the rest of his men – the pack of those freakish claw-things had blocked off a group of safety-seeking stragglers from the other squadron and were tearing them into ribbons. "I'm sending you a feed! What the fuck are these things?"
The short moment it took to get a response was endless and horribly agonizing, rent with dying screams.
"Hold on, referencing…" From the shaky voice on the other end, he'd reached a newbie. Just his luck. "Uh, Stalkers. New breed of Infected. No catalogued information on their habits or weaknesses, although it does say they're highly resistant to non-explosive rounds."
Cross scanned his team and the motley remains of the other squadron; about half the men he had were carrying assault rifles. Shit. He was lucky that the Wisemen tended to carry heavier weapons, because of the rest of the lower-ranking squadron, he counted a single grenade launcher and Javelin. One of them had a satchel that might carry grenades, but other than that, he had nothing to rely on outside of his own team.
His eyes narrowed. The Wisemen were all he needed.
"Everyone, back!" He was taking a gamble, putting everyone against the wall, but they were stuck in a corner anyways, and being too close to the alley's mouth might leave his soldiers vulnerable to their own explosions. "Form a line! When those fuckers come around the corner, I want you to pour on the firepower! Stop when you've blown them all to shit, don't waste your ammo. Aim for the head!"
The screaming had stopped; any dying groans were lost in the chaotic clamor of the red zone. Any footsteps to betray his lurking foes' positions were inaudible. Despite himself, his heart was racing. Time had slowed to a crawl, forcing back the frenetic pulse in his ears to a steady drumbeat.
He lifted his arm, raising the mounted grenade launcher.
Somebody beside him was whispering a prayer.
A screech. A flash of movement.
He fired.
It was like watching a minefield chain-detonate. Explosion upon explosion bloomed in the alley's mouth, a staggering wave of light and heat and sound that trembled the ground. His ears rang and his teeth rattled in his mouth, but he forced his eyes to stay open and his finger to work the trigger, time after and time after again. The soldiers beside him held vigilant as well, a unified bid for survival placed on cleansing flame and shrapnel. Alternating explosions and inhuman shrieks beat a strangely steady rhythm into the turmoil.
If not for the fact that they didn't have enough ammo to last so long, Cross would have said that the standoff lasted for hours. Nothing happened in slow motion. Time didn't stretch out and dilate. It just went on and on and on.
And then he had stopped without knowing when or why, and fifty men gradually took heed, the barrage dying off weapon by weapon until the crack of the last shot faded away.
The silence that followed wasn't silence, but fell like a muffling shroud to deafened ears.
There wasn't much left of whatever had tried to enter the alley, but several sets of broken claws rattled amongst the smoldering flames. The pack of Stalkers was down, or at the very least severely diminished.
He stared blankly ahead, still panting. They had won. Not gloriously; most of the other platoon was dead, Lieutenant Kozlowski included. Outside of the group he'd managed to pull together, he doubted a search for survivors was going to turn up much. They still had to fight their way back through the Walkers and whatever else the Hive could throw at him. But a quick count told him his men were alive. He was alive.
It was horribly easy to forget when you were off the battlefield, when you calmly reviewed strategies and second-guessed, throwing around words like honor and valor. In the Red Zone, survival was the greatest accomplishment a soldier could hope for.