Author's Note: Wow. I… wasn't expecting so much feedback last chapter. XD It's very heartening to see I'm not alone in such thoughts. Also, broke a hundred reviews! Thanks so much, guys. :D
Alex's good mood lasted about as long as it took for him to remember that Pariah and Greene were still loose in the city. At that point, his first encounter with actual, unbridled happiness was cut short and postponed indefinitely.
The island struck him as sluggish, as if it wasn't quite aware of the rekindled threat that teemed under its fragile surface. The streets were as packed as they ever were, the city's veins flowing almost uninterrupted. People understood that New York City was doing badly; that much was hard to deny even for the suicidal idiots that went about their business beneath him. Not when they were routinely advised to stay indoors as the Infection passed over sections of the city like a slow-moving, malignant cloud. What they didn't understand was that it was no longer healing over – it was getting worse.
Snippets of their conversations drifted to him as he leapt from building to building – a new pet, somebody's wedding, a get-together after work. Confusion at the quarantine being extended. Worry over how many of those black-clad soldiers were being posted lately. A deep scowl creased Alex's face at that; as much as he wanted to tear apart the Blackwatch bastards that he could see stationed below even now, he couldn't afford to prioritize them. Keeping Blackwatch and the Infected pitted against each other kept each faction from focusing solely on him, and it was in his interest to cull the strongest side until he had the power to finish both of them off entirely. And at the moment, Redlight definitely had the advantage. As satisfying as it would have been to hear their screams as he delivered karmic retribution to the mooks in the form of a giant blade, his time was better spent cracking open hives than it was trying to get out of an alert.
And as much as he hated to admit it, Redlight had a certain priority over Blackwatch anyway. No matter how he looked at it, the virus's release was in varying ways his fault. His former self had set everything into motion with his need for revenge; his own naivety had freed Greene, at least in part. And Blackwatch consisted of psychopathic murdering bastards, but if they won… they'd withdraw from the city. They'd hunt him down to the last man, and that was something he wanted to avoid, but the crisis here, in this city whose skyline was as familiar as a trusted friend, would effectively be over. Peace for himself was unobtainable, and probably for Dana too – guilt curled around his stomach like a squirming tentacle – but everyone else… everything else would heal over. Life would go back to normal, whatever that was. His memories painted it as something to be cherished. That had to count for something.
Redlight, on the other hand – if it won, he wasn't going to have a world to come back to anymore.
It didn't even matter that Pariah seemed to want to make amends – no, that was the wrong word. Making amends didn't imply enough twisted arguments and forced assimilation to paint an accurate picture. Alex Mercer still wasn't sure who he really was, but he was darkly certain that if he ever joined Redlight's hive, he wouldn't be that person anymore. As annoying and cumbersome as a conscience was, it seemed to be the only thing that separated him from Pariah, from Greene. From what they did. And he'd had enough of losing his identity.
He paused on yet another flat, featureless rooftop to look down on those seemingly endless crowds. No matter how many of them died, humanity replaced its ranks just as efficiently as the Infected did. Flocking straight back into the danger zone in search of opportunity with suicidal impatience, cloaked in a sense of invincibility as they lined up at the chopping block in droves. Why couldn't they ever learn?
He wondered how many of them were dead already, already breeding grounds for the second-deadliest virus ever known to man. Puppets, living on borrowed time while the disease pulled their strings. That was what bothered him about Redlight, moreso than how it twisted its victims into monsters, than how it spawned giant abominations of raw flesh. Physically, he was more monstrous than any of them. He simply had the ability to hide behind a human façade, an ability they lacked; underneath his skin, he was pretty sure he was the personification of horror. And meat was meat – it didn't matter how repulsive a Hunter or Hydra looked to passerby. It was all food to him.
No, what rankled him about Redlight – and the virus as a whole – was how it completely subjugated its victims' wills. Whatever a person wanted, whatever they fought for… Redlight erased all of that and left the bodies as marionettes to the Hive's queen bee. Pariah might have tried to hide it behind words like unity or perfection, and from what he'd understood of Greene's thoughts, she was convinced that she was creating one giant, tumor-covered happy family, but it didn't change the truth. It didn't even really matter that he hardly cared about the people who it infected. The virus made them into slaves, and that was far more reprehensible than making them into monsters alone. Luckily, he'd been free of that, at least before Pariah had come and shown him a taste of what it meant to cater to the Hive… and in retrospect, he realized that his personal freedom, the ability to choose his actions – whether or not to be a monster – was something that he cherished. Not because his memories told him that it was good, a cause to be championed, but because he knew.
And he'd tear Redlight down for daring to take it away from him.
Morbidly curious about the state of things, he recalibrated his eyes and peered down at the street. Ever since Pariah had been freed, he'd been wary about touching the Hive, but nothing unusual happened as he slipped into the different spectrum, shades of red on red. The sounds of the city abruptly faded as if a curtain had fallen between him and the rest of Manhattan, replaced by the moans and whispers of the Infected. He scowled and shook his head, forcing them into the back of his mind.
Sure enough, the healthy appearance of the bustling street was only skin-deep. A few white-orange silhouettes glowed among the masses, sticking out to him like open sores. Not a pandemic yet, at least on this street, but it was present. This was how it started, always. As long as the roots were there…
There was no point in letting them spread it, letting the contagion run its course. Like so many others across the city, they'd wither away into madness, then rebound as monsters ready to spread their corruption further. They were already dead – there was no reason for any confounding moral restrictions to apply to them. Either way, they wouldn't survive much longer, but he could at least make them useful to him at the end.
He straightened up from his crouch. It was time to hunt.
People tended not to recognize his normal appearance as long as he didn't do anything particularly obvious, but he changed forms anyway as he carefully lowered himself to ground level on the back side of the building. Pulling out at random one of the hundreds of different human genetic makeups he had at his disposal was second nature, complete with a mimicry of whatever material their previous owners had been clothed in when he ended them. He squeezed his temples with one hand, blotting out the old memories that came with his chosen body and focusing on the simple feel of his nails pressed against his skin. It didn't matter what name this person had or how it had felt on his wedding day. He was nothing more than a costume now.
And he didn't regret it, because as the memories relented, he noticed that this body – like so many others he possessed – was clad in Blackwatch raiment. Good riddance. But while that disguise did have its uses, this wasn't one of them, and he let the black Kevlar ripple into a plain sweater and slacks before slipping out of the secluded enclosure behind the rows of stores and into broad daylight.
As much as he hated crowds, hated the claustrophobia and hunger and that constant, unshakable feeling of being watched, being unable to keep perfect tabs on his surroundings, they had their uses. Nobody noticed the monster in their midst; he was the perfect, genetically-engineered wolf in sheep's clothing. And for as laughably different as he was from humanity, their congregations were ideal for him to disappear into. He could become anyone, and in a sea of forgettable faces, no human eye could tail him for long.
He pushed past the crowds, and his body growled hungrily at the contact. Those people hardly registered in his altered sight; he ignored them, following the burning glow of telltale infection. The closest was up the street by a dozen paces or so, slightly to his right. He could cross that distance effortlessly in a quick, efficient leap, but it defied him with thickly packed bodies and hundreds of eyes to scrutinize him. Why didn't he dive into the chase anyhow? It mattered not whether they were ignorant of his presence or full-out panicked and screaming – it wasn't like his quarry would have a prayer of escaping either way. There was nothing to threaten him, nothing to provide more than momentary inconvenience. Why did he bother playing by some unspoken societal, human rulebook when he so clearly had the power to forge his own path?
It had been so much less complicated before 'right' and 'wrong' had any meaning to him. When he could do whatever he pleased, whatever he needed to do, without flinching inside; when he could take anyone as prey and no amount of collateral damage was too monstrous for his own goals. And now he could look back at those times and reason to himself why it had been more effective, that he had been fighting for his own survival, and feel varying shades of disgust at his actions nonetheless. It hadn't changed overnight; it was something that had been laid down so slowly, so insidiously, that he hadn't recognized that anything had changed until it was too late. He was strangled in a series of restrictions and lines he'd gradually crisscrossed over himself so thoroughly that he now couldn't even dream of releasing them. He muttered a curse under his breath, either to humanity or to himself.
He was drawing close to his first target; the man was moving slowly, but wasn't so disoriented that he drew notice from the people nearest to him. The ones that were openly hallucinating were so much harder to devour unnoticed. The man was gradually stumbling towards the edge of the sidewalk; once the person directly behind him was sufficiently distracted by his cell phone, Alex chose his moment to strike.
A touch from behind, and the dying man didn't have time to turn around, much less scream. Alex stepped into the person, a flurry of tentacles melting the man down to memories and biomass and redesigning his appearance even as he filed away the new DNA. It was a process he had worked down to an art – unless somebody was watching his victim, nobody would catch the changeling slipping into their skin. Shapeshifting in the middle of a crowded area always seemed to get noticed by somebody, but sneaking up behind somebody already there and taking their place was surprisingly effective.
The man's memories were fuzzy, frayed around the edges – the Infection had already begun to eat away at them, but he hadn't quite lost his identity yet. Gavin Hughes, a businessman who'd always dreamt of being an artist, mid-forties, and – why did it even matter? Just another shade to add to his personal choir of the damned. He'd been doing the man a favor – making it quick, sparing him the insidious decay of being torn apart over a span of days rather than a span of moments.
The monster wearing Gavin Hughes' face glowered and cast his eyes upon his next snack.
It settled into a rhythm he'd followed many times before; pick the target, pursue, wait for the best timing, and finally take his prize. It was easier to ignore the new memories as he went on, worked the whole thing into a repetitive pattern. With a twinge of annoyance, he realized that his lunch was nearly over – there were only three bright blotches on the street, and he was in the process of splitting apart the one directly before him-
"Zeus has been sighted! Open fire, open fire!"
Shit. Even muted through his partial connection to the hivemind, that was a sound he'd know anywhere. It was the sound of fucking up and having everything you were in the middle of doing interrupted by a bunch of assholes with ordnance. He jerked back, tentacles still outstretched, and dove into motion before the roughly person-shaped hunk of biomass was done being assimilated into his body. Those few seconds were always an annoyance whenever he had to move, the new flesh numb and certainly not aerodynamic.
He dismissed his infected vision as he pulled out of his dive – the world fell back into daylight colors and sound returned at once, not unlike when Dana would suddenly jack up the volume of whatever music she was listening to. Predictably, soldiers were shouting orders and everyone else was panicking. For a codename, every single fucking civvie seemed to know exactly what the word 'Zeus' meant. Either that, or they were afraid of the sudden gunfire. Or his tentacles. Whatever. When he was well-fed, like now, a few bullets only hurt slightly more than when Dana decided to start poking him.
And… hell. Marines were pouring out of a distinctive truck in the street, sending the rest of the traffic into disarray. He hadn't yet become such a bleeding heart that he wouldn't kill anyone who was trying to do the same to him, but the regular army grunts just weren't the same as Blackwatch; the rush had long since given way to a peculiar sort of guilt. Few and far between did their memories give him much reason to think he was justified in killing them beyond protecting himself, as opposed to Blackwatch's few and far between standard for not giving him reason.
But one of them was barking something into a radio, and some faceless soldier wasn't worth beating off a strike team for. He leapt into the group of Marines, snatched up the offender, and sprang away; the man's orders quickly turned to screams. Alex crushed the man's communicator with the hand that wasn't gripping the man around the chest like a ragdoll.
Something inside of him shivered. That was it, wasn't it? He'd broken the radio; he had nothing more to fear from this grunt than he did the bullets that even now prickled his biomass jacket. Probably less, if the man had broken something with his landing. Couldn't he just let him go?
But the tendrils were already reaching out, and he didn't try to stop them, instead focusing his restraint on holding back the memories of a man that was just doing his job for his country. It wasn't the first time he'd taken this kind of life. Wouldn't be the last, either.
And it definitely wasn't the first time he'd done so in vain to himself, because the air currents above were throbbing with pressure and how the fucking fuck did they get a gunship here already-
There were two more behind it, one of them already spitting rockets into the jam-packed street. That was what he hated when Blackwatch raised the alert, aside from having to drop whatever he was doing – he could weather their strike teams and soldiers, but they never seemed to stop coming. He knew from experience that once they spotted him, they didn't abandon their attempts. It seemed like as long as somebody had a camera on him, he would be treated to an endless buffet of meat shields and their firearms. Whoever had designed that particular policy wasn't winning any awards for innovation... But if he waited too much time, it allowed them to mobilize heavier fare against him. That hadn't bothered him until they started pulling in the thermobarics. He hadn't seen one in a few weeks, but after that one time... he wasn't going to hang around and chance it. He couldn't let them box him in.
Swerving around a group of panicking teenagers, he ripped a postal box out of the sidewalk and hurled it at the nearest helicopter. He winced a second later when it careened down into the still-occupied street, colliding with a gout of flame and a chorus of agonized shrieks. Oops.
People. Collateral damage. Right. Hundreds of idiots without the common decency to get out of his way… but it wasn't like they deserved to die for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. And that was almost invariably what happened to everyone in a hundred-foot radius of himself when he was provoked.
Not walking sacks of meat, not invisible. Just a bunch of stupid civvies. How far could conditioning take him? Would it ever come naturally, or would he always have to remind himself that they were people with lives? They were innocent of this whole mess, and as much as he longed to lash out against his enemies and feel blood splatter against his skin… he knew better now than to pick his fights here. Or he didn't, but he liked to pretend he did, liked to hold onto some proof that made him feel less monstrous. He wasn't Blackwatch. He wasn't going to kill the innocent and enjoy it, wasn't going to gun them down and laugh. Wasn't going to plunge his tentacles into their skin and sigh in relief and ravenous desire as he absorbed their biomass, pure flesh and raw material that failed to differentiate among the good or the bad…
…Yeah, it was definitely time to go.
0o0o0
Dana sighed and leaned back, closing the window of yet another false lead.
Damn, but Blackwatch had everything nailed up tight. She was no amateur at the subtle art of digging through people's secrets – she broke encryptions like her brother broke armored vehicles. She'd picked up the skill because she needed an edge in journalism's competitive market; insider information, faster access. But it hadn't been long before she realized just how much of a rush it was to screw around with everything she could get her hands on. Illegal, maybe, but not that illegal. Like breaking into somebody's house, maybe, but instead of stealing their jewelry, she was rearranging the furniture, hiding their keys, and pouring maple syrup over the carpet. Maybe that was why it was so appealing. Either way, picking apart securities was a hobby. Hell, she'd even hacked into Google's homepage once and replaced their trademark logo with a more innovative one featuring a middle finger for the 'gle'. It had been fixed before ten minutes went by, but damn had the fallout been hilarious. And more importantly, she'd never gotten caught.
She drummed her fingers against the mouse. All of that experience was getting her nowhere, and her pride was beginning to feel a bit battered as a result of it. Elizabeth Greene had been a challenge. A new level of security to breach, and she'd risen up to meet it – and then strolled away from their sites with vital files on her, along with several folders full of Blackwatch's operation plans. This? If she didn't trust Alex implicitly, she'd have sworn he was making Pariah up. How could Blackwatch hold onto such an important test subject for forty years and not have anything buried?
It might have been a humbling experience for anybody else, but Dana Mercer refused to admit defeat. If she couldn't find anything, it was because Blackwatch were a bunch of pricks, not because she wasn't good enough. And there had to be something hidden in their records, so she'd keep at it until she collapsed. Or until Alex pried her away from the computer. Which would probably only happen if she collapsed, because if he ever voiced concerns about how much time she spent researching, all she had to do was snap at him and he'd back off.
She took a swig of her coffee and grimaced – it had gotten cold. Or lukewarm, anyway, which was worse than cold. At least outright cold had an impact. She set the quarter-full mug down unhappily. Iced coffee was actually pretty good stuff; maybe she'd have to start getting that instead. Not as much of a pick-me-up as hot coffee, but least it stayed drinkable for over an hour. Not that she could get any, and the stuff she tried to make on her own sucked. She missed Starbucks. But Alex was in full Overprotective Asshole mode; he probably wouldn't even let her step outside without an escort.
…No, it wasn't just Starbucks. She missed the city; the Manhattan she'd moved to nearly a year ago, the one that was full of life and mystique and stories that didn't try to kill you once you breached their web of secrets. She missed walking around and enjoying the nightlife, letting herself be dazzled by the lights. That was Manhattan – not this place patrolled by soldiers and smothered by fear, crawling with a disease straight out of a horror movie. She was a prisoner, under unspoken house arrest, and she couldn't even blame her jailor. Objectively, she knew he was trying to protect her, and she was completely aware of the danger outside. It wasn't just the monsters; a single scrape or a person coughing on the other side of the street could seal her fate as effectively as a Hunter or Hydra. That didn't stop her from feeling like a teenager with a controlling mom.
And that only reminded her more of the only parental figure she'd known as a child – the brother who apparently was a separate being from who she currently called her brother, also the core reason why the city had been a hellhole for over three months and the new version of himself even existed. Her brother had caused all of this, and she'd tried to help him. She'd made the decision to move to the city because she hadn't given up hope that she could make everything the way it had been when they were children. How could she not have known? How had she deluded herself for so long? She'd known that there was something wrong with Alex, the human Alex, something that went beyond the scars of their shared upbringing, but she'd written it off with excuses and cloying hopes that maybe things would heal with time. But Alex – the brother who'd held her at night when she crawled into his bed to run away from a nightmare, the protector who shielded her from her mother's drunken rages – and the person that had died a little more with each passing year – had… had…
Had caused the apocalypse. Hadn't cared enough to defend her from himself, in the end. And she was torn between love and hate, because he was a monster and a sociopath and still her brother, and now he was dead and there was nothing either could say to each other. She loved him, but it had been a one-sided love for years now, and she hated him because there was no other response she could afford the purveyor of the unique kind of hell New York City had become. A shudder traveled up her back, resting to prickle the hairs on her neck. It hurt to think about, how wrong she'd been, how sickeningly cruel and depraved he'd turned out to be -
And her mind was wandering. She shook herself and muttered a curse under her breath. Get a grip, she admonished herself. Eyes on the prize.
Blackwatch's main database – Blacknet, they'd dubbed it, with all the creativity of a cheese grater – had been difficult to decrypt at first, but she was well aware of all of its tricks by now. Unfortunately, where 'Elizabeth Greene' had led to 'Mother', which had plenty of traces, Pariah was… vexing. It consistently gave her returns, but they were always unrelated and useless to her – old battle plans, funding records, the occasional Redlight project derived from Greene. It was like somebody had tagged thousands of old data at random in an attempt to dissuade any hackers that did manage to make it as far as she currently was. And that implied that there was something of use buried amongst all the junk, but she'd sifted through hundreds of them, even tried to filter them further, and nothing even hinted of a secret project or an apparent progenitor of Redlight.
One thing she found, though, was that each tagged page had a different string of numbers in the url, something that she didn't see in newer articles or even data that these dummy pages were connected to. Never one to miss a pattern, she'd tried adding the sequences together, to no avail – there was no constant. Multiplication was pointless because some strings had zeroes and others didn't. At that point, she copied down about twenty of the strings and fed them into one of her programs.
And judging by the flag that just popped up, that test was done. She squinted and pulled it up.
There were no total matches, but there was a pattern. If the second number of each sequence was subtracted from the first, then that difference was multiplied by the third number, the fourth was subtracted from the quotient, and so on, all twenty of her sampled strings ended up equaling one of four answers; 5184, 288, 2688, or 3456. It could have been a coincidence, but given the seemingly random links and strings, she wasn't ready to brush off what was currently her only lead.
She plugged those into her search. 5184 and 288 were duds, the former leading to nothing and the latter only referencing some battle in which two hundred and eighty-eight casualties were sustained, but 2688 was the jackpot. If she'd been going after anything that had looked remotely promising, a mention of 'notes on project 2688 – ABANDONED' was a neon advertisement.
The date on the cache was very old; it hadn't been touched since the mid-nineties. Some might have dismissed it on that alone, but Dana was well aware that Gentek's projects with Redlight had gone back far before her time. Any information was valuable information, and some partially-deleted files from fifteen years ago had every reason to be valuable to her. Especially when she'd already beaten all of the recent stuff half to death and uncovered nothing.
Of course, it was password-protected. Very.
Keyloggers could have worked, and she had a number of different types at her disposal, but she couldn't wait for somebody on the other end to access the pages she wanted. It was a valid strategy with high-traffic sites, but with a cache this obscure, she had no guarantees that anyone would type in the passwords in the near future. Or the far future. She had to use some more specialized worms to break the encryptions, and that took time. She frowned, fingers hovering impatiently above the mouse as she waited for the program's returns.
Three minutes passed, and she began to wonder if the data was too old for her programs to break. She was about to cancel them and try a different tool when the phone rang, shattering her concentration as she racked her brains for what to use next.
She glanced over at the offending object, then back to her monitor. It could wait; she was in the middle of something important. She just needed… fuck, she couldn't think when that annoying tone was playing. Her fingers drummed out an irritated rhythm as she waited for the ringing to finish, then focused on the screen.
That lasted for the eight seconds of silence before it rang again. Dana cast a vexed glare over at the phone; was the person stubborn or just plain stupid? She hadn't picked up, so she was obviously not available – or whatever, maybe she was, but that was all details. She was in the middle of something, dammit. What, did they expect her to suddenly change her mind?
She grit her teeth and ignored it as the second call petered out, only for a third to warble out. She was disgruntledly unsurprised to hear the fourth, if not ready to start biting through the cord. She could probably blame any sort of damage on Alex, anyway.
"I'm not home, assholes," she muttered to herself. What was this dumbass's problem? God, but that tone was distracting. Normally, she could read her various programs off the back of her hand, but this clingy moron had her concentration so shot that she had to open up a folder and read through them. And even then, she couldn't comprehend much of what she was looking at.
God damn it, was this person brain-dead or something? She clenched her teeth as the phone rang out again for the fifth time. Was she going to have to unplug the damn thing?
She was contemplating doing just that when the answering machine began to record a message. One that didn't sound all too pleased. She stiffened.
"Dana Mercer, I'm watching a live feed of you right now, so yes, I know you're fucking there. Stop playing World of Warcraft, get off your ass, and answer the damn phone. I haven't got all day."
She blinked once, then huffed as she got up, pushing the chair away. It only took her a second to recognize that voice, and it left her scowling. What the hell did Captain Cross want with her now? What had Alex done this time?
The phone rang again. This time, she answered it, more than a little chagrined.
"Hello?"
A sigh crackled through the other end. "About damn time."
"Fuck you too. And I don't play WoW, you asshole."
"I don't care if you were – you know what? I'm not going to bother with it. Okay. Now that you've stopped ignoring me, I'll get straight to the point. I need to talk to your brother."
"He's not here."
"I can see that, thank you very much."
Dana laughed. "And I'm supposed to know where he is? I'm not his babysitter."
She frowned. In a sense, really, she was. He was always looking to her for guidance the same way that she had with the original Alex when she was a child, and she couldn't think of a request that had nothing to do with food, hygiene, and going out to meet people that he hadn't dutifully obeyed. She loved him, but he seemed to adore her on a level she couldn't quite understand until she likened it to her younger days. He lit up at every little bit of approval she showed, acted cowed whenever she snapped at him. She wasn't complaining, but she had to wonder how that had all happened – why she was so important to the virus that had become her brother.
"I don't think anyone could be paid enough for such a job." Cross's dry words brought her out of her brief musings. "Look, I just need a time he'll be back at. I need to know when to be back at the cams and when to try again. I'm a busy man."
"Probably not soon," Dana muttered. Lack of sleep combined with the implications of being spied upon by a cocky Blackwatch asshole that may or may not have had superpowers was not doing wonders for her already short temper. "Look, I'll make him call you back as soon as he shows up. Just leave me a number and I'll get him to talk to you. He might not want to, but he listens to me."
"I never use the same phone, so don't bother." Cross sighed. "W-"
"Paranoid much?" she cut in.
There was a pause. "Miss Mercer, do you have any idea how much I'm risking by maintaining contact with you and your brother?"
"You're not doing it because you like us, so I don't really care," she sniped back.
At that, the bastard actually chuckled. "Fair point. When do you think he'll be back? I'll try calling again at that time."
"Can't you just check the fucking cameras you have planted here?"
"I don't always have access to the feed. Time?"
Dana hmphed. "Try again at nine. Now quit bothering me, I've got work to do."
He laughed again. "Gladly."
A moment later, a click went through the line as the phone on his end was hung up.
Rolling her eyes, she clapped the phone back onto its hook. Damn interruptions. Well, that was over with now. She glanced back over to her computer, ready to pick up where she left off, and blinked. The worms finally had done their work, and the security was cracked, leaving the cache open to her perusal.
Her eyes lit up as she clicked on the page…
…and let out a strangled scream of frustration. Everything was gone. All of the pages her new search turned up were corrupted, and there was nothing she could do to fix broken data. The only link that wasn't tainted was a deleted recording, and…
…she might actually be able to restore that one. As long as something wasn't outright erased or broken, she could bring it back. It just took a bit of creative prying.
Dana slid into her chair. She had a feeling that this one wasn't another dead end.
0o0o0
In the perpetual darkness of the underground, a woman smiled.
For what reason was there not to be happy? After ages of being locked up and alone, unable but needing to share her gift, she was free. After defeat and darkness and one ageless, encompassing moment of fear, she was alive. She was surrounded by her children – so strong, so beautiful, so obedient. The cold stone and metal that had formed the walls of this place – cold cold so cold like the cage she'd been entombed in for forty years – was now warm and alive with her embrace. That need to spread and endow new offspring was a blissful thrum in her veins, sated and alive after being locked up inside for more time than she could imagine.
There were other things, though, things she wasn't sure whether or not to be happy over. Things she couldn't settle her skittering thoughts upon long enough to do any more than feel – feel, but not understand. She felt unchanged but changed. Something different. She still had her love, but it was subtly off somehow. Hungry. And she was hungry.
But it mattered not, because she existed again; she knew where her voice stemmed from and could will her gift to adorn those things she blessed with her touch. She stood in a Warm Place, home-center-protected-safe-hers, where she created life and fed her children.
There was much to be done – reviving the withered seeds, driving back the threats that converged around her family. Things had not gone as they should have. Her children had been lost and crying out, broken without a mother's love to guide them. Her firstborn, the Heart, the Pinnacle, had been locked away in the lonely darkness, so far that even she hadn't been able to feel him.
She, too, had been in a dark place; one with neither comfort nor pain, calm nor fury. It was not the same sort of cage she'd waited in for years upon years – this one had no doors, and she vaguely sensed that she was not alone within its confines. There had been no sense of time, and she'd known that she was gone – but her purpose was fulfilled. The mantle of her love would be passed onto this prison, and in time, it would carry out her calling just as she had.
So she had slept, and never expected to awaken.
But now there was light and dark and feeling and time again, and her greatest son was close enough to touch. Above the darkness and echoing tunnels, she felt her many offspring in dutiful harmony, carrying the seeds of her love so that everything might be united within her arms.
She let her contented pride radiate out to her young, and their joy and resolve pulsed back to her, staggered waves of euphoria. Beside her, her firstborn picked apart those scattered sensations and sent them back as a coherent thought.
The dawn finally begins.
Yes, she decided, she liked that. Her son was so much better with words than her, so strong and smart and pure; he made her ever so proud. He had brought her out of the dark and given her children hope. And he seemed to have a gift – her gift – of his own.
But not everything was right yet, and she fretted like every mother should. There was her other son, created from her yet not born of her. And she mourned him, heart breaking over what had been done. The lesser creatures, those apart from her gift, the prey – just as they'd feared her and trapped her, they'd done something to him, twisted his gift and mind into something horrible. He was blind and confused and hurting, and so trapped in his rage that no help could reach him. She'd wept for him, and her Family had wept too, even as they struck back at their maddened brother in order to survive. He hovered at the edge of her perception, always struggling and seething and loathing, tied to her mind but closed off to her adoration. And she loved him none the less, this dark and wayward child that she would do anything in her power to heal.
Each moment he spent alone and lost was a betrayal on her behalf, and she worried over what she could do. He had his own surrogate child, one he seemed as attached to as she was to all of hers… but the girl-prey-thing wasn't his, bore none of their perfection. She had felt it as she called her children to bring the girl to her, had tried and somehow failed to bring her under her wing – had felt her seeds struggle and fail. Yet she was not under his, either. Was he simply too confused to understand how, or did he have no love of his own? She could bring them together. Find his nest and bestow her gift unto this girl. The thought of touching one of them felt strange now; another pang of that new hunger coursed through her as she considered it. It was… she didn't understand what she wanted, but it mattered not. She could not harm the girl if she wanted to bring her son back home. She would unite them and he would understand, and they would all be together.
Her firstborn smiled sadly and shook his head. I am afraid that he is too far gone. Addled. He would not take kindly to it. With him, we must be patient.
His nest, she sent back adamantly. Her love could save him. She knew it, felt it as deeply as she felt the presence of every child in her Hive. It needed no explanation and heeded no denial.
Her child flashed her a brilliant grin in response. "Not yet, Mother. But soon."
Her son's thoughts were distinctive among the chorus of her family, his intentions always gilded by superfluous words that she often had to struggle and focus to understand. And currently, he was interested in something else – not the son that was hurt and broken and mine mine mine but not hers and she needed to fix that, but one of those men that had trapped her for so long, and she snarled at the thought. One of the prey that wore black shells in a misled attempt to ward off her gift, but the image held in her son's mind showed a man unprotected. This one was faintly familiar to her; the one that should-have-been-but-wasn't, something her gift had touched but not converted.
"This one, on the other hand… this is the one we take next."
She didn't like it. There was a child that needed her, a presence she could already feel and sense. Nothing was more important than that, especially not one of those hated men that burned and broke her children. But her son was pure. Her son was right. He had the answers to everything that she had tried and failed to do alone.
After forty years of waiting, her Family would encompass the world.
0o0o0
"I said no windows!"
Dana glared at her brother, who sent her a pleading look in return through the glass. Were she not busy being exasperated at his total lack of social normalcies, she would have admitted he looked quite silly, sprawled out sideways across the wall like some sort of Spiderman emulator. As it was, she was busy being exasperated with his total lack of social normalcies, so she treated him to her best scowl and refused to answer his unspoken request of 'please let me the fuck inside already'.
"Street level. Go down there. There is a door. It is not locked. Take it. Go through the lobby. Use the stairs. Sixth floor. Fourth room. Door. Use. Problem solved."
Her moronic eldritch abomination of a sibling just blinked.
"Alex, I said no."
He kept staring, pretending he hadn't heard her. She raised one eyebrow and stared back. Two could play that game.
Twenty-five seconds later, she relented. It was impossible to beat Alex in a staring contest. Especially when she was struggling not to laugh at how stupid he looked. She heaved a sigh and pulled the window open. "Fine, fine. But use the fucking door next time, all right?"
"Sure, sure," he muttered absently, climbing in over the sill. "Thanks, Dana."
She rolled her eyes. "You're welcome. Is it so damn hard to remember?"
"Well, it's not like I was coming in from the ground, and the window was closer…"
"Yeah, yeah, whatever. I get it. You're crazy. Still doesn't mean you can't use the door like everyone else."
He just frowned. He didn't think it was something he could explain without dropping the fact that he also desired to eat nearly everyone he came into contact with, and honesty be damned, that wasn't a conversation he was ready to have.
He exhaled harshly through his nose. If that particular topic never came up in conversation, it would still be too soon for him. "Anything happen today?" he asked instead, letting his hands fall to his sides.
"Well, Greene and her son stopped by earlier with a few of their zombie minions. We had a lovely chat over tea and crumpets."
"What?" He bristled, arms rippling slightly in the lamplight. "I don't – why? How? If they of them so much as touched you-"
She sighed again. "That was sarcasm, Alex."
"Oh." His blank gaze closely resembled that of a first grader suddenly finding themselves in a nightclub.
"Is it even possible to have a sense of humor around you?"
"I just don't get it," he muttered mutinously. "What's the point of saying stuff you don't mean?"
"Alex, I am a fucking English major and – you know what? Forget it. It'd all go over your thick head. I'm never going to teach the literary arts to somebody who still can't figure out how to use a door."
Alex felt vaguely insulted. "I just came to check on you, but if all you're going to do is insult me, I've got Infected to kill."
"Hey, hey, wait." She lifted a hand. "No going anywhere. Cross called earlier, wanted to reach you about something. And… judging by the clock, he should be calling again in a half hour or so, so stick around for it. I was beginning to wonder if you'd show up on time."
"I was busy. Lots of work today." As if to punctuate the statement, he flopped onto the sofa, fingers stretching, grasping at nothing. Nothing more than a ruse, she knew; some residual habit, or an act he maintained for her. Her brother didn't get tired. Fatigue was an unknown to him, the being that could leap up ten stories while carrying a bus, run the vertical length of the island in three minutes, and bend a telephone pole like a pipe cleaner. While still carrying the bus, probably. Right now, though, he looked oddly mortal, one finger drawing circles in the air.
Then he frowned and sat up. "Wait, Cross? Why didn't you tell me that earlier? That's actually important. Sort of."
Dana shrugged. "Hey, screwing with you is more fun."
Still scowling, he got up and stalked over to the kitchen, pausing under the archway as if unsure of what he was doing there. A few paces back and forth and he was at the couch again, falling onto it with much more violence than was necessary.
His sister wasn't sure whether to be worried or amused. "What's gotten into you now?"
He didn't look at her, keeping his eyes on the ceiling. "I shouldn't be here," he grumbled. His gaze flitted over to the window, and he made a sharp gesture towards the nightlights of the city beyond. "So much trouble brewing. Festering. Nobody else can stop it. Just wasting time here – it's wrong. I should be doing something about it."
"I appreciate your concern for the human race, but the world isn't going to end in a fucking hour, so try not to explode for an hour and you can get back to doing your thing. Actually, I've got something to show you while we wait. I finally got a –"
The phone rang.
"Oh, screw it." Dana glanced at Alex, who was staring blankly at the source of the ringing. "What? Answer the damn thing, it's for you."
On the third ring, he was still eyeing up the telephone as if he wasn't sure what to do with it, so Dana heaved the most exaggerated sigh she could and yanked it from its perch.
"Hello?"
"Good night, Miss Mercer. Can you please put the idiot who doesn't know how to follow simple instructions on the line?"
She laughed at that despite herself, and turned around to do just that. Apparently, Alex had heard the voice over the line, because he was already reaching out for the phone, his expression stony.
"Cross."
"Oh, good, you actually do know how to use a phone. That completely dumbassed look you had a minute ago was leading me to think otherwise. It was also hilarious."
"I know how to use a goddamn phone," he snapped. "I just don't want to pick up and find that it's one of Dana's friends or something. You're early."
"Your sister said around nine. This is around." Cross's voice was flat. "That, and I can see you're here. I want this information out of you as soon as possible; I've got work to do."
"Information?" Mercer's eyes narrowed. "What information?"
"I know you, Mercer, and that includes the fact that you spend at least eighteen hours a day killing things, breaking things, looking for things to kill, looking for things to break, or brooding. In other words, you've got a lot of field time. Which brings me to my question. Have you seen a new type of Infected around?"
"If you're talking about those sticklike bastards with the claws, then yeah, I have."
"Good. So you've seen the Stalkers already."
"Stalkers?" Alex mulled it over. "I guess that works. The ones I dismembered were pretty quiet until they pounced me."
"That, and they're nyctophilic. Moreso than the rest of the Infected, anyway."
Alex almost argued that, given that he saw all sorts of Greene's monsters out during the day, and he himself wasn't averse to light, but… now that he thought of it, it was true. He really wasn't that fond of broad daylight at all; it was too easy to be seen, and some deep-seated part of him was constantly letting him know that. The shadows were where he did all of his best work, both literally and metaphorically. Metaphorically? Shit, maybe Dana's weird English stuff was rubbing off on him.
There was no point in voicing that, so instead, he asked, "All right, so I've seen Stalkers. What about them?"
"Everything. I lost a lot of men to these fuckers – not my men, but men I was supposed to be keeping alive all the same. I have no interest in letting that happen again. You're a lot less destructible than we are; I was going to ask you to gather intel, but if you've already fought them, you should have some. I need to know how best to fight these things. A dozen of them tore apart our platoons as thoroughly as that many Hydras and twice as fast, and that's saying something."
"And?" Mercer flicked his hands upwards, the exasperated gesture going unseen. "How am I supposed to know how you people fight? I don't think any advice I can give you from experience is going to be that helpful, Captain. Unless you've suddenly figured out how to be less squishy."
"Squishy?" Cross repeated incredulously. His only answer was irritated silence, so he let out a gravelly sigh. "Okay, you have a point, jackass – we don't have claws and shit to swing around like built-in Swiss army knives. But you're too much of an idiot to think outside of your own tactics for five seconds? I thought you ate people's memories. Surely you know how we work?"
Idiot? Alex silently snarled. He wasn't stupid. He was definitely not stupid. Dana sometimes called him that, but she also called him a lot of other things that he was pretty sure that he wasn't, so he could chalk that up to her rather uncensored means of speech. He certainly didn't match up to his human alter ego's level of intelligence, but that was fine because he didn't want any traces of the real Alexander J Mercer's personality floating around in his head anyway. Okay, so all of his attempts at planning tended to blow up in his face. Sometimes literally. That didn't mean he was stupid… He just… preferred to let his claws and tentacles handle most of his work. If humans weren't so physically pathetic, they wouldn't have to deal with so much of that annoying pondering and introspection either.
He began to pace around the kitchen. "I do. I just don't give a fuck. You're a tactician – get off your ass and get to work."
"I don't have anything to work with, you lazy sonofabitch. We've just ran into these things once, and everyone was too busy trying not to fucking die to pick up anything that wasn't obvious. Do you have any info at all? Anything you noticed about them? Weak spots, things to watch out for? Something that surprised you? Throw me a damn bone here; I didn't just call to listen to the sound of your voice."
"They're chewy," he said sarcastically, still miffed at the idiot comment. "Could go with a milkshake."
"Mercer, fuck you."
Alex paused – not because he was considering the suggestion, which by this point, he was relatively sure Cross hadn't actually meant, but because it occurred to him that while 'chewy' was not an adjective that applied to his method of eating, he had noticed an anomaly as far as these new monsters – Stalkers, apparently – were concerned. He hesitated for a second, then silently shook his head. He doubted that how easily he could digest something would be the sort of information Cross wanted, and if Dana was any example to go by, humans didn't really like hearing about his idea of a square meal anyway. That was his own little mystery to ponder.
"Look, I don't have anything to tell you. They're sneaky. They still die like everything else does." An annoyed sandpaper sigh rasped over their connection. "If you're so fucking afraid of them, just tell me where your next assignment is and I'll shadow you."
Cross was surprised at the offer, to say the least. It wouldn't be the first time Mercer had lent a hand, but he'd been under the impression that the entire Wiseman team dying, save himself, would have been a bonus in Mercer's eyes. Apparently, Mercer was either smarter or less vindictive than he'd given him credit for. Both seemed equally unlikely. But despite the obvious safety net that Zeus provided against his enemies, plus the time he'd get to observe Stalkers getting their asses handed to them, he was hesitant. His record was sketchy enough, and he was well aware that the time he was spending off the radar was killing every residual chance he still had at taking the reins of Blackwatch. Bringing Mercer along again so soon seemed like a dangerous idea, but going through another clusterfuck like today was even less tasteful. "I'd rather not. I'm skating on thin enough ice as it is with Red Crown. But… hell," he grated. "I may just take you up on that one."
"I'm shocked." Alex's voice was dry. "It's not like I'm actually useful or something. But hey. Cross, if you want information out of me, give me some of yours. What's the situation in Brooklyn? It's under quarantine, but the bridges there are still littered with detectors from when it wasn't, and I haven't had a chance to fly a chopper over there yet."
"That, and you don't want to get too far away from your sister, am I right?" The silence on the other end of the line was enough of an answer. "Fair enough. It's like Manhattan was, a day or two after Greene got free the first time. There are definitely Infected showing up, but nothing advanced yet. You might be interested to know that there's no epicenter, there's a line. All of the infection there is branching outward from a path that leads directly from our headquarters to the Williamsburg bridge."
"Pariah, right."
"Undoubtedly. Even worse, that day's border patrol on the bridge apparently went psychotic as soon as they got back to base, attacked everything in sight. Had to burn a lot of our own that day." He paused. "You know, Manhattan is a major business center. But Brooklyn is mainly residential."
"And?"
Cross snorted. "I don't know, thought that might actually mean something to you. Guess not."
"What do you want me to do about it? Break down in tears? I can't save all of them. You can't save all of them, and that's your job. Me, I was built to destroy them. And it's something I'm damn good at doing even when I'm trying not to."
A sharp note entered the captain's voice. "If you start going through with that, we're going to have problems, Mercer."
"Don't have an aneurysm, Cross. I'm not my creator. And if you start trying to kill me over something I said, I'm going to have to off you."
"You sound like you're not that enamored to the idea," Cross noted. "I always thought you were jumping at the bit to bite into my head as soon as I stop being useful."
"I don't get attached," Mercer growled. "It would just be a pain in the ass if you went and died on me."
"Yeah, yeah. Keep telling yourself that. Next thing you know, you're going to be asking me if you can sign up for the team." Upon hearing the snarl that reverberated over the line, he backpedaled. That's what you get for trying to be friendly… Familiarity was a great way to get new recruits to ease up around him, but Alex Mercer didn't follow the same set of reactions as most everyone else. The viral monster occasionally showed hints of a rather sardonic sense of humor, but never seemed to be able to tell when anyone wasn't being completely literal to him. "Relax, Mercer. Joking. I'm not delusional. The day you'd voluntarily join Blackwatch is the day they'd start selling Girl Scout cookies for charity."
"What the hell is a Girl Scout cookie?" The Blacklight virus was clearly annoyed.
"Never mind, never mind. Learn to take a fucking joke… We've got a strict 'no people-eating crazy fucks allowed' policy anyway. Heh." His voice turned sober. "Can't say I've been following that rule very well lately."
"Hmph, well. Whatever gets the job done."
"Yeah," Cross sighed, looking out at the cloudy dusk sky. "Indeed."
0o0o0
"You done?" Dana asked rhetorically as Alex came back into the living room. "What did he want, anyway?"
"Info," the monster sighed. "And to yell at me. Whatever." He frowned, racking his memories for something normal to say. "…How was your day?"
"Boring as hell." Her mouth twisted. "Coffee and computers. And phone calls from stalking assholes. Feel kinda locked up. You know?"
That was a loaded question, and he knew it – from the way she was looking at him, she knew it perfectly well too. But he wasn't being hypocritical. It wasn't the same. Her body was weak and delicate. It didn't roil and seethe with the need to sprint and jump and shift and tear and consume. He could look after himself; he was built to look after himself. She wasn't. "Trust me, Dana, you do not want to be going outside right now."
"Yeah, yeah, sure," she sighed, rolling her eyes and shaking her head for good measure. "I get it. I'm fragile, you don't want to risk me getting killed by a little old lady and her pack of rabid Chihuahuas."
Alex's brow furrowed in confusion. He hadn't been aware of the fact that old ladies were dangerous. Had he been taking risks, paying them minimal attention when he did go out for walks with his sister? At the same time, a large portion of his memories seemed convinced that pouncing on and slaughtering the elderly was a Bad Thing. Neither did they seem to have much reference for said danger presented by aged persons, but he trusted Dana's word. He was going to have to observe some of them more closely in the future.
She gave up on waiting for a reply. "Well, get me some chips the next time you're out. I'm running low. Not now, you asshole!" she called as Alex turned for the door. "You just got home. Don't even think about trying to sneak out."
How am I supposed to do that? he wondered glumly. Every subconscious thought was focused on all the things he could be doing, killing, and eating at the moment. It was almost as bad as the voices.
His interest perked at Dana's next words, though. "There's something I've got to show you anyways. Found something today. It's not much, but, well, it's… interesting." The sideways look she gave him as she led him over to her personal computer implied that it was the same sort of 'interesting' as his feeder tendrils and shapeshifting.
"Pariah?" he asked, and she nodded.
Dana knew Alex just well enough to see the curiosity beneath his eternally austere expression. She was glad, and more than a little proud, that she finally had something to contribute.
She took her place in her computer chair, and her brother hovered behind her. "It's not extensive reports or anything," she admitted as she flicked through some of her files. "It might even be something you've seen already. But it did prove to me that Blackwatch was trying to experiment on Pariah in the mid-seventies, and it, well… look for yourself."
He did; she had opened up a frozen screen of a video. It was old; black and white, grainy, and out of focus, but he could still pick out an enclosure he'd seen a glimpse of once, in a fleeting memory. Alex's frown deepened. "Where did you find this?"
"Blacknet. Buried under a ridiculous amount of shit, too. Now watch."
He leaned forward as the video played out. From the angle, it seemed to be a security camera. He couldn't see outside the little room, and the doors – or airlock – were not in this particular camera's range. The room itself was relatively bare, with a few blocks and children's toys scattered around, looking morbidly out of place against the thin tendrils that covered one corner of the room's flooring. At the very corner, where the biomass coating was thickest, a child sat, hugging his knees.
Pariah looked up, eyeing something off the screen, and fluidly stood, taking a few steps closer to the room's center. Mercer's attention was diverted when somebody walked in from that direction, completely enshrouded in white protective gear. He crossed over to Pariah; the child's mouth moved, but the recording had no sound. The two appeared to exchange words for a minute before the scientist removed a few syringes; either injecting Pariah with something or taking samples, it wasn't clear. The subject took this in stride, being patient throughout the whole process. The only sign of any discomfort was when he once reached to clasp the researcher's arm during one of the shots.
Work done, the man motioned to Pariah, who slid back into his corner. He turned around to leave and abruptly doubled over, arms jerking spastically. Alex's eyes narrowed as the scientist fell to his knees, his suit splitting to reveal discolored blotches and tumors in the process of erupting out. Lights from some alarm began to flash in the room as the man violently succumbed to the disease, clawing away the rest of his suit with fingers that wriggled like tendrils.
Then a series of shots flashed from the doorway, and the spasming, newly turned Infected thrashed a few more times before falling still. The last thing Alex noticed was Pariah's chilling smile before the recording ended.
"Well," he coughed, breaking the silence. "That was…"
"Weird? Disturbing? Horrifying? Sanity-dissolving? Tentacley?"
"I was going to say new, but I guess those work too."
Dana sighed. "You and your tentacles. I swear, nothing bothers you."
That wasn't quite true – things like mouthwash and shopping and soap and children all bothered him, but it was always better not to mention those things in lieu of risking Dana getting one of her ideas.
"Anyway, Pariah was actually five or six at this point, but he was still a clever bastard. Look."
His sister rewound to the scientist's first appearance and zoomed in. At first, Alex didn't know what he was supposed to be looking at, but after several frames, it became apparent that what he thought was the effect of static and shifting grains was a consistent, thin line on the suit's arm. A minute scratch, a loose seam – nothing more. And Pariah's fingers gripped it, like the reassurance-needing child that he clearly was not.
"The guy wasn't protected," Dana said. "Not enough. Just a little break in the fabric, and then… this."
Indeed. That was something he knew all too well. His memories spoke of untold horror at having squadmates disappear off duty, or worse, start showing the signs in front of them. Torn three ways between loyalty, fear, and duty.
"Look at how fast it happened. I'm not an expert on this weird Redlight shit, but isn't it supposed to take days to turn somebody into a zombie? Not a few fucking seconds! It's like watching The Thing in fast forward."
"Pariah is the perfect incarnation of the Redlight virus," Alex muttered, so quietly that Dana had to turn and ask him to repeat it.
What he didn't say aloud was that he had a better comparison than some movie that a few of his memories linked to their beliefs about Zeus, and a far less comfortable one. What he considered feeding was actually a form of reproduction – he infected his prey with a fast-acting strain of Blacklight, then pulled their newly converted mass within him, similar in some ways to a spider liquefying its prey before dining. But faster. So much faster. He could melt a person into raw biomass in a matter of seconds, their body utterly flooded with the virus…
After failing to get a response, coupled with that familiar distant expression under her brother's hood, she acknowledged that Alex was lost in thought and probably wanted some time to noodle stuff out. She yawned. "I think I'm going to go to bed in an hour. Fell asleep at five last night and got up at seven. Damn, today's been one hell of a day, hasn't it? I'm going to change. Are you going to hang around or take off again? You seemed to want to bail out of here as soon as you could."
He did, but acknowledging the twinge of guilt that came along with that – Alex was relatively sure the sleepless night had been on his behalf – he decided that he owed her that much time together. "Give me a second. I want to take another look at this, then I'll be there."
Dana shrugged and stood up. "All right." She gave him a quick pat on the shoulder, feeling him begin to jerk away on impulse before slowly, tentatively leaning into her hand. "See you in a few."
"Thanks, Dana." He paused. "I know this stuff can't have been easy to find. I really appreciate it, but look after yourself, all right?"
"Hey, what can I say? I'm just that good."
Alex slid into the newly vacated chair – warm, but still a few degrees cooler than what he considered natural. He gazed at the screen, watching the hapless scientist contort into monstrous biomass over and over again without really seeing it. Once had been enough to make him start thinking. He'd only been able to eat a few of the tops of Gentek's hierarchy – not many of them were deployed into the field in crisis situations. But the few he did have were privy to many tests, and the same conclusions that they'd drawn from them. Pariah was supposed to be the perfect incarnation of the virus. He knew from his own experience that the virus was… not sentient, but aware on some level, a puppeteer with enough forethought to bide its time for four decades. For as weak as he physically seemed, Pariah was supposedly everything it wanted to achieve. Blacklight, on the other hand… he was supposed to be genetically engineered perfection, the piece de resistance of a mad scientist. A bittersweet gift at best, but something that had secured his place at the top of the food chain and let him cripple an Infected army by himself. Pariah was the natural release of powers he'd had unlocked by artificially activating previously unused stretches of DNA.
Yet it couldn't be exactly the same, because Pariah displayed none of his physical power. He was very fast, true, but Alex had seen nothing of his strength or regeneration. The way he avoided damage seemed to suggest that he couldn't shrug it off like Alex could; if he had wanted to prove his strength to the younger viral monster, effortlessly taking hits would have been far more effective than calling up Hydras to block them. Pariah was the master of the hivemind, but Greene had been that too. That couldn't have been everything special, couldn't have been the entirety of what those mysterious hidden genes that only they shared constituted.
And he was having enough trouble with just the hivemind bullshit.
He remembered the words of yet another Gentek scientist, now nearly three months dead. "I have a feeling it might be extraordinarily bad if they ever met, face to face."
Looking back, he couldn't help but agree.
