Slave Species IC

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Chapter I
"My Understandings"
-Lexon Megacity-
England

Dr. Alex Joel lay perfectly still. From this safe little haven in the Lexon Megacity he could see the stars. He never had the time to appreciate them since the Parasite had taken hold of everybody he had ever known - but in it’s way, it was liberating, despite the experiences he had endured that would have broken a lesser man to tears or suicide.
A light snowfall drifted slowly on the lashing mid-winter breeze. Alex had nothing to warm him save for his thick, grey trench coat, though he did not curl himself up in any attempt to conserve heat; that was the least of his worries nowadays. He did not risk a fire, lest they find him again.
Save for the sound of the eerie whistle of the wind, the abandoned block was totally silent. It had been that way for several minutes.
Across the darkened alley, lay two corpses, still warm, a single bullet hole through each of their foreheads.
One was a woman, the other, a man he once knew who had since been infected and brought into military service for the regime. The woman was Hannah Clarke - known more colloquially to Alex as ‘Babe’. The soldiers had found them… more specifically, David Wiseman had found them. He had once travelled with the pair but had managed to get himself captured in a scruff with the Lexon Border Guard, a unit patrolling the city limits for people just like them. Alex had been unable to save them, and he and Hannah had only just recovered from the trauma of their friend’s infection.
Next thing they knew, David was after them, and he knew all their tricks for staying under the radar. It took little under a week for him to find them.

Alex had had no other choice. If he let her live, she would live a life of painful slavery under the Victras Parasite, and if he let David live, he would find him again. He had no choice. With the consent of his girlfriend, Alex put them both down, tears streaming down his face.
He had chosen to be alone with her, as they had little chance to spend quality time with one another as the infection had become more widespread. Instead… this.

Dr. Alex Joel lay perfectly still. Fist clenched, rifle lain down beside him, perfectly parallel to his deathly still posture.
To his left, a small tape recorder. He and Hannah had chosen to document their time together as neither of them were fools, they knew that their time would come sooner or later. Nobody survives in a world like that.

The stars look perfect tonight, don’t they babe? I never thought that I could ever even find a glimmer of happiness living a life like this. But then again, I didn’t count on finding you, now, did I, Alex?

It’s been eight years now, did you know that? Even before this became our world, I wasn’t ever in-place. I have travelled with a lot of people, some that I cared about more than I would have done. You know… David.

Don’t think about him, Alex. It isn’t worth it.

Hannah, please. He was more than just a friend to me, he was like a brother. He sacrificed himself so that we could get into the city unharmed. Name anybody else who would have done that for us.

Yeah… I suppose you are right.

The least we can do is honour his memory in a positive light. He was a good man.

Well, here is to you, David.

And to you, Hannah. This wouldn’t be bearable without you.

Alex. I lo- Wait. What was that?

I didn’t hear anything.

Listen closer. Footsteps.

Shit. Soldiers?
That looks like…

No. NO!

ALEX! HELP!

LET HER GO!

*Muffled Screams*

Do it! *fuzzy static*

*The sound of two gunshots*

Alex shuffled his arm slightly to the left, hitting the clunky ‘Stop’ button on the old fashioned recorder, followed by holding down the ‘Rewind’ button for a few seconds, and concluding the motion by clicking ‘Play’ once more. He listened to the recording again. And again. And again.
The voices echoed down the vacant alleyway. Fresh rounds of silent tears would spring forth every time her voice broke through the tattered old speaker on the recorder, and only moments later, they would simply stop, frozen by the biting chill of winter.

Dr. Alex Joel did not lay perfectly still. He clenched his teeth, and scooped the recorder up into his now plane hand, and launching it across the small span of the alley. It did not take much to smash an old plastic case with a few screws holding it together. Alex fixed his eyes on the stars. He dared not look anywhere else. The stars were serene and beautiful, so calm and unchanging, yet so distant and powerful. They had always fascinated him, even from a young age. If he had had his way, he would have become an astronaut; that was his dream as a child. Alex never saw himself as good enough, however, and settled, instead, into a generic degree that served him no real purpose in the world. He had seen nothing of it and contributed nothing to it. He did not dare divert his gaze. He did not dare pay attention to anything but the clear sky, crisp, night sky. If he were to listen closely, he would hear the shuddering death throes of the shattered recorder, Hannah’s voice playing on a broken loop. If he were to look ahead, he would see her corpse, and the cadaver of his best friend, David.

Dr. Alex Joel knew there were others around. Others like him. Women, Children, Un-infected Soldiers. Hell, he had even travelled with a few of them for a short time. At times like this, he would listen for others with Hannah, and the pair would both wonder if there were people just like them, wondering if there are others out there, just like they did.
It was strange, though, most nights, the background would be kept alive with the faint pitter patter of gunfire - the last of any resistance forces opposing the Lexon Complex being put to rest for good. Now, it would seem that the Parasite had won, and Alex’s childhood home had become host to the most inhuman thing he could imagine.
Not even a siren stirred the background, not the sound of cheerful bird singing, nor owl hunting. Not the sound of faint car, or lowering aircraft. All sounds from his childhood that would be welcome now. He hoped that maybe, just maybe, he would open his eyes, and he would wake up as a ten year old again, he would perform his daily routine, he would go to school, he would learn, he would live, he would feel safe. He guessed some things were too much to wish for.

Alex exhaled deeply, and placed his cold hands atop his face, letting out the last of the tears in as dignified manner as possible, before letting them fall back to his sides. He proceeded to watch the stars.

They always say the good ones are taken first. Alex would agree.

Dr. Alex Joel lay perfectly still.

In the end, it was his ailing prostate that saved the Professor.

That dream again. He was walking along the riverbed; the tide had gone out, and for about an hour just after sunrise, you could walk all the way across the sandy silt from one bank to the other. But he wasn’t walking across the river Teign, he was walking in the middle of the channel, downstream and out to sea. He passed people from his life, stranded on the riverbed in small boats, waiting for the tide to come back in. They all warned him: it was coming soon; he had to get out, or get in one of their boats. His mother’s plea was probably the most forceful, but she had the same glazed look in her eyes as all the others, as she’d had the last time he’d seen her, and he just smiled at her, as he’d smiled at all the others, that winning smile that had softened so many hearts over the years, and kept on walking towards the oncoming tide.

Even before it happened, he knew what was coming next. He was walking barefoot, the sand still wet between his toes, which weren’t as wrinkly as they should have been. A few tiny crabs scuttled away to his right, clacking their claws at each other. He looked backed too late to stop his foot coming down on the pearlescent seashell, a jolt of pain arcing up his leg. He took off his scarf and wrapped it round his foot: he didn’t want to get sand in the wound. When he next looked up, he could see the tide approaching, an impossibly high wall of black water charging at him like a ferocious tsunami. Normally at this point he would turn around and start running away from the water-wall, but that time he became aware of a nagging sensation. It took him a few moments to work out what it was, when the water was nearly upon him; just as he was about to be consumed by the torrent, he forced his eyes open: he needed the toilet.

“Bugger your bloody bladder, old man,” the Professor whispered, uncurling himself from the warm folds of his sleeping bag and putting on his boots and his jacket. No sooner had his eyes adjusted to the gloom, than he was pooled in torchlight; he shielded his face from the light, and could make out the shape of a man holding the flashlight a few metres away. It must’ve been Adam, the Professor thought, whose turn it was to be on watch. He gave his friend a thumbs up and a smile, and the torch bobbed up and down, like a nod, before it swivelled away and the old man was in darkness once more.

As was his custom, he packed up all his possessions and took them with him when he went to the toilet. The others thought he was crazy for doing so, and sometimes his bursting bladder agreed, but you could never be too careful in these times – what if something happened while he was away from the main camp? He was about to find out.

The group had decided long ago that they wouldn’t stay put in one place for more than a week. Even if they found somewhere that seemed like utopia, they would leave within 7 days: nowhere was absolutely safe now, and the longer they stayed somewhere, the greater the risk of being discovered, it was felt, and the more complacent they were likely to get. They had spent the last 3 nights camping outside, which they had not done for a while, especially not this late in the year, but they’d struggled to find anywhere else, and, until then, the greenery of Richmond Park had served them well enough.

The bark of the tree began to steam as the Professor relieved himself against it. Just as he was finishing, he heard a noise from the camp. It sounded very much like a scream. The second noise was unmistakably a scream, but he couldn’t tell whether a man, woman or child had made it, so little did it sound like a human being. Having zipped up, he rushed back to the camp (the thought to run away did occur to him briefly, but he didn’t give it any serious consideration); there was more screaming and shouting, and there were lights, and there was movement. He crouched down by one of the tents, slightly out of breath, and peered towards the centre of the camp, where sometimes they’d make a fire, if it was deemed safe enough. There were men – and women – in uniforms everywhere, at least 20 of them. They were chasing after those who were trying to run away, and pinning down others where they had been sleeping. Nearby, two of the soldiers were holding down Lizzie, who at 13 was the youngest member of the group. She was screaming at the top of her lungs, and writhing around beneath them with what seemed like impossible energy and strength, almost breaking free from their grip once or twice. Eventually she lay still, and the soldiers let her up.

At that moment something knocked the Professor onto his back. He looked up to see Adam’s terrified face staring down at him.

“Shit, Professor, sorry!” he said in a loud whisper. “We’ve got to run: there’s too many of them; I set off the fuse; it’s going to bl—” A gunshot, and a surprised look on Adam’s face as he fell sideways with a hole in his head.

The Professor looked back, he could see Lizzie pointing in their direction and one of the soldiers aiming a pistol. He tried to get to his feet, but something grabbed his leg.

Two more gunshots.

The Professor opened his eyes. He was breathing hard, and he could feel the sweat beaded on his forehead. Something was wrong: there hadn’t been gunshots then; the only round that had been let off in the whole attack on the camp had been the one to kill Adam. He was sure of it. In which case, the gunshots must have been here, now. Moreover, they’d been loud: they must have been close. He was already sitting up, his sleeping bag slumped against the wall in a medium sized utility closet that he’d decided to call home for the night. There was an extractor vent in the closet wall which backed out onto an alley (he’d done his reconnaissance before actually going to sleep). He’d stuffed some socks between the blades of the vent’s fan, to afford a little more insulation, but they obviously hadn’t done much in the way of blocking out noise: he could hear voices coming from the alley. There was something strange about them, which at first he put down to sock-muffling, but even after he’d carefully stood up and removed the items of clothing, the voices didn’t sound right; he could make out that there were two of them, one male and one female, but there was just something about them that — it was a recording! His eyes lit up for a moment at the discovery, and he even smiled to himself: no matter how old he got, or how banal the realisations, he still got a genuine buzz from those little eureka moments.

It didn’t take long for the Professor to decide to investigate. He gathered up his things, rolled up his sleeping bag, and headed outside, through the abandoned betting shop that he was squatting in. Either the owner had been killed, or had been infected and dedicated his time to other things; or, the Professor mused, his brain unable to stand still, even then, maybe the Infected just didn’t gamble? Maybe they thought it was a wasteful use of resources. Once upon a time, he’d enjoyed a flutter on the races, but that seemed like a different life now. There was a sign behind what had been the betting counter: Chances of not being infected tomorrow: 1000/1. Bet now! He hadn’t noticed it on his way in; he stared at it for a few moments, wondering who’d put it up, and when, before tearing himself away.

As stealthily as he was able, the old man snuck out the front of the shop – it was a quiet street and so he didn’t feel he was taking on too much risk by doing so – and peered round the corner of the building down the alley, just in time to see something fly across it and smash into the opposite wall. The Professor ducked his head back round the corner of the betting shop, and pressed himself flat against the wall. He listened, but it was deathly still, and after a little while his curiosity got the better of him again, and he peeked round into the alley once more.

This time he could make out the two bodies, slumped awkwardly on one side of the alley. There was a third shape lying opposite them, where the object had been hurled from. For a split second, he thought he could hear sobbing, but he couldn’t be sure. Many people would not have gone into the alley, for who knew what was waiting there: maybe it was some sort of trap, or maybe it was just the perfect place to get shot accidentally. The Professor wasn’t like most people, however: first, he wanted to know what had happened in that small space; second, and more importantly, he sensed that the third figure needed help – maybe he or she was even dying.

The Professor stepped out into the mouth of the alleyway, holding his hands up in the air to show he wasn’t carrying anything. He took a few, not deliberately quiet, steps forward; the closer he got to the recumbent figure, the more sure he became that it was a man, and that he had a rifle next to him.

“Excuse me!” he called out, his voice both cheery and concerned at the same time. “I’d be extremely grateful if you could find it in yourself not to shoot an old man.” The Professor advanced towards the figure slowly, but relentlessly, his hands still up by his head.

“But if you’re determined to stay out here and die of exposure, I’m afraid I’m going to have to join you.”

High above the tense commotion going on in the alleyway and sleeping all by his lonesome in a shell of an' abandoned school was a single young boy, shacked himself up in a closet where the preschoolers would hang their coats.
Laying on a large pile of collected coats the nappy haired boy lay dormant and curled up into a ball much like a fetus.. much like his time in the womb..
Staying in the same place causes even adults to loose sense of time and one can only imagine how exaggerated this notion becomes in a child's sense.
In fact, Valken Cyros Diedricht could barely remember how old he was by now as his mother wasn't there to stimulate and nurture new memories. It seemed that he was a boy unable to move forward in time...Instead of being a typical, lively child whose brain was starving for new information to learn, he was rather stagnant and should be considered more dead than alive.

Yet, the one thing that kept Valken's breath was the stuffed dirty rabbit clutched over his heart with a death grip.
"Boris..." the unused vocal cords in Valken's throat still worked, much to his own surprise. With the utterance of his rabbit's name Valken could imagine that Boris was actually a tall powerful rabbit that would never leave him and strangely even carried the voice of his mother. He was his only connection to the life he had before he was separated from his mother..and before he had slowly begun to die since then..

For almost half a year now he had been nomadic with a band of people who he could only describe as adults, they had came to the abandoned school to see if maybe they could find their own children but found him instead...
So as fate would have it, some how one of the members of the group had gotten infected with the parasite and they all fell like flies after that.. Unfortunately despite the members of Valken's nomadic tribe of people having either decided to kill themselves or kill each other, Valken was never able to get used to the smell of dead bodies, the heat and altered shape of a freshly fired bullet, or the terrible sound that came from the always darkly colored gun.

And now the terrible sound had came back to haunt him in his sleep, twice. Valken's eyes shot open and bulged out of their sockets as he finally used them to look around his space. Turning his body over to his side, he bravely pushed open the closet door, overwhelmed with a wave of fear that disguised itself as heat and rushing blood on his ears, cheeks and forehead.
By some divine enigma, he wanted to call out for his dear mother or 'Mutter' as he had learned to call her. He had hoped that by some chance, perhaps she was there... somewhere.
"..." As he kept staring out through the crack of the closet door he wanted to will himself to speak so that maybe his call for his mother could be recognized, but something told him no... perhaps it was Boris who told him 'no'...

On nights such as these, nights that it was too cold to sleep, too dark to trust your surroundings, she found herself stalking the stalkers. It had become a twisted amusement of hers trailing the emotionless and attempting to find patterns. The sort of randomness that made humans so genuinely beautiful was surely lost on the beasts and she was sure they were incapable of chaotic thought. She felt sure that she had started to notice small molds, though nothing of yet had she been able to file into any sort of helpful category. They did not require patrols of pairs, though often two would head out into one sort of direction together, sometimes more. She assumed that they did this, not out of fear of safety, but due to the many areas they were constantly trying to sweep.

Tonight had been similar to last night. And the night before. She stopped momentarily in the top story of one of the buildings, trying to remember when the last time was that she had really slept. A fidgeting hand tugged back at her blonde hair in what had become a sort of stress reducer. She wanted a cigarette, but after the sun went down that was always a bad idea. She hadn’t survived because she was tough, she’d survived by being invisible. She reminded herself of this as the two she’d been following broke apart. She crept slowly towards the fire escape as they both slipped out of view, decided against it, went for the stairs. She huffed down them, as silent as possible, eyes unwaveringly faithful in their darting dance upon her surroundings. Once she found herself in the front doorway she turned to the right. She would follow the man, his movements seemed rigid, seemed like he had a purpose. It was silent as death out here. She would have trembled if it still bothered her, but silence was better than screams.

She stayed far enough behind the man that she lost him twice and worried that he may double back. The third time he slipped out of view her adrenaline kicked her heart hard and she wished it could last forever. The scared rush pumping her with life, but she obeyed the fear and pressed hard against the first door to a large building she could find, a school, forcing her way in with a heavily padded narrow shoulder. She made her way towards the roof, fingers dancing over some of the memories passed. Memories that she had, barely had, of a life here. She let herself smile a little, but only until she remembered. Every smile ended that way, with remembering. Innocence used to get lost willingly in your school years, but that isn’t how it was anymore. Innocence wasn’t lost, it was stolen. She paused on a step that creaked and held her breath. Nothing. She continued.

She was about 3 quarters of the way to the rough when she heard the gunshot, and then another. She felt herself start to move faster, running up the stairs. Did someone get the both of them? Did they know there were two? One of her feet slipped on a stair and she glanced up to see a leak in the roof, it was all quick, she was moving as quietly as she could, but she needed to hurry. She needed to confirm. Her fingers gripped at the latter to roof access and she practically scrambled, pushing open a latched door and letting the snow once again stick to her eyelashes, a rough sleeve attempting to clear her view from the puff of snow she’d created.

She moved timidly, low, towards the edge where she thought she heard the gun shot. She couldn’t see anything, not for a few moments. The snow whistled at her ear this high up and then she thought she could make out voices. So muffled, like a dream floating towards her. Finally she spotted the two bodies. A woman and a man. Not both of them. Her eyes quickly searched for the other ‘zombie’. She couldn’t see him. She couldn’t see him yet. Her eyes strained against the buildings, the streets, trying to find anything that wasn’t white. And then she heard a voice. This time unmistakable. He wasn’t one of them. His voice wasn’t…right. Where they fucking retarded? You just kill one, draw all this attention and then walk into the open? Her frustration began to grow. God damnit. How do you tell someone they are coming without telling them that she was here? They obviously had guns, maybe they’d be fine?

Against all better judgment she pulled off her gloves and rose two fingers, still almost frozen despite the gloves, to her lips and blew as hard as she could. She knew the whistle that reverberated between the buildings would be loud enough for anyone close to hear. She knew IT would hear it, but it would bounce between the buildings and not exactly give away her location. Either way, they’d all been compromised. As soon as she had whistled towards the stranger she dropped to the roof, facing the only access onto the roof with the one gun she had leveled towards it. Hopefully the old stumbling fool would know what she had meant. Hopefully that thing wouldn’t make her use one of her valuable bullets. At least she was sure that there hadn’t been more than 2 for at least the last mile. She’d been watching. Without allowing herself to much satisfaction she realized that maybe, just maybe following this things was not an entire fool’s errand. Gun up. Eyes focused. Breathing shallow and silent. Hide, hide, hide. It had been her mantra, all of the survivors mantra, for so long.

Dr. Alex Joel had taken his time to unleash his barrage of grief in the form of a relentless torrent of tears in a most dignified of manners, though he was hardly expecting anybody to be there to see what he considered a weakness in his personality. What many would consider human, he saw as an imperfection…
Suddenly, from the deepest, darkest recesses of the dimmed approach, a voice; an elderly but world weary voice. It crackled slightly under the bitter chill of the mid-winter flow. But it did not matter. They had found him.

“Excuse me!” the voice exclaimed, “I’d be extremely grateful if you could find it in yourself not to shoot an old man.”

Alex frowned, though the shadows of the high-rising buildings either side of him obscured his face in a light shadow that hid his expression. Now the infected where to assume the identities of their victims? He always knew they were crafty and Machiavellian in their conduct, but stooping to such a low was hardly conceivable even for a survivor of the whole sordid affair.
Alex remained perfectly still for several moments, listening to see if the infected would make an approach or continue his speech.

“But if you’re determined to stay out here and die of exposure, I’m afraid I’m going to have to join you.”

Alex’s hand moved gently towards his rifle, dragging his extremity across the frigid ice before finally wrapping his fingers around the weapon in the quietest way he could. He did not want his pursuer to know that he was planning on getting out alive, whether the infected was to try to stop him or not.
Alex sprung upwards with fiery momentum; using both his arms and his legs to propel him to his feet, rifle in hand. He swung the armament round, finally gripping it in both hands as he instinctively looked down the iron sights to obtain a perfect view of the infected. What he saw was not a surprise to Alex, the man’s voice fitted his profile almost perfectly. The man stood before Alex, now with his hands slightly raised as a possible false sign of non-hostility, was perhaps in his mid seventies, possibly his late sixties. It was difficult to tell as of late as the stress of merely surviving could add years to a person with ease.

Teeth gritted once more, Alex thrust the nozzle of the rifle towards the man several times as a gesture of territorial defence, hoping, rather desperately, that the man would simply leave. But Alex knew that that was not how the infected worked.

“Why are you here?” He screamed, his voice, too, cracking; though this was due to him choking on the last of his tears as he roared at the newcomer. “Why will you not leave me be!”
The man remained perfectly still, he did not say a word. He was stunned and dazed like a rabbit in the headlights. It was his chance.

Alex pulled back the trigger of the Carbine with a quick jack of his index finger, and the gun clicked in response. The last two bullets he had owned now lay as smouldering cases, still smoking in the snow, used to put an end to the lives of the only people he cared about.
Alex’s eyes widened, and his jaw dropped as he realised that it must have been the end. With a sigh of exasperation, he simply loosened his grip on the gun and let it crash against the compacted snow which now reflected a dull red as the blood from the two corpses ahead soaked in.

“Do you have no mercy?” His head dropped. “Don’t you have any fucking mercy!” He screamed out once again, fruitlessly kicking the snow as he did, kicking up a small drift of white dust.
And then - silence. Broken by a screeching whistle from his left. More infected?

“Please… if you are infected… just…”

A single tear rolled down his Alex’s face and his eyes became glazed and icy. Falling to his knees, he simply murmured:

“Just… Kill me now”

The possibility of death had been a very real one that the Professor had considered, but he hadn’t thought it particularly likely that the man would try and kill him, especially not before he’d really even had the chance to say anything. Clearly, he’d either been very wrong in his judgement, or just very unlucky. With the hindsight that can only be gained from staring down the barrel of a gun, he thought it was probably the former: the desperate voice and the frosty streaks that ran the man's cheeks both spoke of a deep tragedy that had taken place in the alley, and that had affected him most profoundly, almost to the point of madness.

The Professor suspected that the individual was going to pull the trigger a brief moment before he did so, but he felt that, even had there been slightly more time, there was very little he could possibly do to change the situation, or avoid the shot, so he just continued to stand where he was, motionless. He really hadn’t thought he’d die like this, but there were far worse ways to go, as he well knew: one of them had nearly befallen him when the camp had been attacked, although whether the people the Infected used to be were actually dead was a matter for the metaphysicians, if there were any left.

When the gun clicked, he thought he had been shot. His heart pounded like a drum in his ribcage, and then there was a moment of sheer, absurd relief, when he realised that he was still alive. He let out a breath which he’d thought had been his last and, as the man released the gun from his grip, the Professor couldn’t help but break out into a grin, which he quickly broke off, for he felt that it was not a very helpful way of responding to the man's yelling about mercy.

He listened compassionately as the man ranted and raved and raged, only looking away when he heard the whistle, which was no doubt was significant, but which was not his primary concern at the moment. His hands dropped to his sides as the man fell to his knees. He approached slowly, cautiously, as one might a shy animal, and spoke as he did so, managing to be at once warm and chastising.

“My dear chap, I’m here to help you, not hurt you! You’d see it right away if you’d only engage your grey matter, which good, old Mother Nature kindly endowed you with an overabundance of, and which, as an unfortunate corollary, your poor mother had to work so painstakingly to squeeze out of herself when she gave birth to you, not so long ago I’m sure. If I were going to kill you, why on Earth would I announce my presence to you and march down here with my hands in the air as if I were trying to instigate a new trend in dance steps?”

By this point, the Professor had reached the man. He fished out his hipflask from the inner pocket of his jacket, unscrewed the cap, and took a swig, partly to show the man it wasn’t poison, and partly because he needed a drink himself. He swirled the fluid quizzically around in his mouth for a few moments, before his eyes lit up with recognition and he swallowed it, smacking his lips with satisfaction.

“Ardbeg, if I’m not mistaken!” he exclaimed, beaming down at the man and offering him the hipflask in one outstretched hand; the other he held out so that the man could help himself up, if he chose to do so.

“Now, get some of this down your neck, for two reasons: first, it is a self-evident, demonstrably incontrovertible, practically axiomatic law of the Universe that one ought never, ever, ever turn down an offering of fine Scotch,” the Professor explained, with a heavy dose of mock seriousness. “Second, your other alternative is for me to give you a motivational lecture about how we must struggle on, no matter what, but, frankly, I think you’ve already suffered enough for one night.” His tone brimmed with compassion: any light-heartedness was underwritten by genuine sympathy.

The Professor smiled broadly and waggled the hipflask temptingly in front of the man.

6 years ago.

The both as occupied by a british officer. But he did not protect and serve He enslaved and enforced terror. He was checking everyone who passed wether or not they were part of his species. The gun at his hip had been used once today. He had shot a runner, someone who wasn't infected and tried to fight. The officer didnt mind. Every day, total dominance grew closer.

“FUCK YOU!.” A voice could be heard from somewhere in the darkness suddenly. He turned to see a flying, burning bottle.

__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ ________________________________________________

The perpetrators hair was a mess of colours; red and blue, green and black, white and pink. His nostrils were pierced. His eyes a striking green colour. The boy smelled like excrement and garbage. He had walked in sevage.. It threw off the the dogs, it masked his sense. IT was still shit thou. And he hated to hide in it. But he had to, as he had broken the law. He had brought war to the bastards that had taken his life. He idly flicked the lighter. Then two words came screaming from his vocal cords.

“FUCK YOU!”

He pushed out from the pipe ran up the river bank. Adrenaline pumped trough his body, his heart was beating. His eyes were wide open as he vaulted over the fence and lit the cocktail He winded his arm bac like a professional pitcher. Babe fucking ruth incarnate as he threw. It was a burning, angry proclamation of war that flew across the sky and landed onto the toll both. The officer never got the chance to fire his gun. He had not been able to tell where the boy had come from. Nathaniel scream as he lit the bunch of them on fire with his Molotov was one of pure anger. The men with guns were all engulfed in fire as the gasoline splashed everywhere. They could only scream in agony as the boy disappeared down the Themsen riverbank again. The boy behind this? Nathaniel Lancaster ,age 18, self proclaimed street warrior and anarchist supreme.

-Present-

The night lay heavy, like a blanket of silence. Around him people with flashlight searched for him. And just like six years ago there was the smell of fire and gasoline. The smell of burning flesh, burning worm. They screamed, trying to find the source of this vicious and seemingly random attack. The boy had hit a toll both that had been converted into a checkpoint. He had done it again. He had lit the fuckers on fire and dodged the cops once more. It was getting harder however. By know it was only a matter of time before they popped him in the head. Military was present everywhere these days. He trekked down the the river bank, disappearing in the darkness. He knew how to stay in the shadows, how to hide and move around under the radar. Never run groups. One got infected and you ere says gonna follow don the same path. Stick to alleys, the river and anywhere with sewerage pipes. Keep your cuts clean because if you get sick, you'll have to find treatment or raid a hospital. That was suicide.

Be dressed according to the weather was also important. That's why the young man wore the heavy warm clothes that he did. That and the coat covered his tools of destruction. He moved around the back of a car, seeing the last of the cops disappear in the direction of the fire. He was out of immediate danger for now.

The seconds stretched, her whole body buzzing with an awareness that even the dampening cold couldn’t numb. The average person’s body would have begun to warm with the ache of tensed muscles, but hers were acclimated. The tightly wound muscles felt so at home in this rigid position that they seemed more “at ease” than when she actually tried to relax them. It was a feeling you couldn’t explain to someone who hadn’t lived like this, the actual energy it required to convince your body to settle, to relax. It didn’t trust you anymore on the subject of relaxation, and really, why should it? No one had the right to relax. Not when the war –can you call it that if we’d already lost-, the struggle for survival was such a minute to minute ordeal.


She could hear muffled sounds behind her, low on the street of the man speaking to someone. Had she been wrong about her calculations of the movements? Where there more of them? Had she just signaled to them? As if on cue to answer her most recent millings a fire arched on the other side of the roof; a small explosion, a wave of heat that she saw rather than felt. She remembered in the beginning how common the fires had been, when people had resisted violently instead of skittering like roaches when the kitchen light was flicked on. But the burning glow was an unmistakable cry from humanity, the real humanity.

She curled forward on the roof, resting on her belly while she attempted to keep an eye on the hatch and an eye on the simmering gust of, maybe it was hope? But she knew from experience some things that smelled of hope were really just well disguised suicide. Lately it had become harder to distinguish the two. She wanted a cigarette. She army crawled, the way her father had taught her, elbows pressing forward, followed by knees, both pushing into the snow so quickly that the dampness only barely seeped through her clothing. She crawled past the hatch, weary, assuring herself she would hear them open it. She had to see.

She pulled herself up on the lip of the roof, looking across towards where the fire burned, where they roasted, they screamed. She wanted to be happy about it, she wanted to rejoice in their suffering, but even after all this her personality would not allow her to rejoice over death, even their deaths. She wasn’t sure she could have rejoiced anyways, it was one of those things she may have forgotten how to do, the knowledge pulled out to allow room for the old guns semantics or for cigarettes. Staring at the fire wasn’t helping, she really wanted a smoke.

From the fire, closer to her, it moved. At first she couldn’t be sure, some defunct rainbow brazen against the snow darted out of her view and she thought of the stories her father had told her about acid and how beautiful things were. This wasn’t beautiful, but daylight had become a burden so any glimpse at vibrance seemed surreal. If you had seen her then her mouth definitely betrayed her surprise. Then he was running down another street and it was a he, a man. This didn’t quell her sense of shock. Suicide? Hope? His movements didn’t speak of the forfeit she had seen in others, he seemed determined. He was quick until he stopped behind that car. She scanned the area around him and came up with nothing, if they were following they had become stealthy, but that wasn't likely, even these beasts got rattled by exploding brethren. She contemplated whistling once again, but really, was that suicide? Why tonight had she decided she needed to alert all these people of her location? Why tonight had she been so reckless after years of hiding, months of solitude?

And that in itself was her answer. And so those two fingers once again went to her lips and the high pitched whistle rang out at the parrot. Suicide, hope, she toed the line.

The wave of heat exerted from the explosion done by forces outside the abandoned school may have even passed through its rickety frame as well. Yet in parallel, it also fully roused the dormant child from his nest of darkness and violated security.

The old, disgusting door creaked open clearly having scratch marks of blood and broken fingernails around it's outline. Looking at not just what was inside the closet but more rather what was outside gave a much more gruesome and terrible context. Valken aligned one of his green eyes with the opening in the door, his eye giving off a demonic glint as it was barely able to catch the moons' light. He had to look over several bodies laying dead across the destroyed classroom and he preferred to ignore their faces.
The room as a whole was monochromed and devoid of most of it's color even the splashes of red blood became old and crusty as they had been spread across the bodies, over the tiny sized tables and chairs and across some of the walls where decorations, bookshelves, papers, alphabetical letters and pictures of the lost children barely stood hanging.
The classroom became a dark irony of the savage and irrational.

But could a 6 year old child really do something so heinous? Certainly not, that's incredibly impossible-No! That's hollywood. The truth is-is that the transients locked Valken away in the closet as a means to try and keep the parasite from infecting him before their whole blood spree began! This monstrosity could only come from the mind of the complex adult! -HA!
Valken's urges were much more simpler than that and in fact, he could feel his stomach quiver and bubble with hunger. " ...hu.." He barely spoke words of any language anymore as his hunger pushed him to extend open the door. He clutched Boris, his only means by sanity to his chest and decided that he felt cold enough to slip on a coat. He slung his old, over sized backpack over his shoulders of which inside (unaware of the possible implications) contained his only resource of identity, his name was written in his mother's seemingly pragmatical hand writing... 'VALKEN C. DIEDRICHT'

Valken swallowed as he stared at the contents of his former classroom, hoping by some chance his saliva would quell his hunger if for only a short while. But still, he had to trek across the mounds of bodies or he would be forced to be in their presence forever..
Just as he learn as a toddler, Valken had to put one pint sized shoe in front of the other and breathe at the same time so that oxygen could get to his working muscles. He thought that perhaps staring at the ground would be his best option when he spotted a desecrated and stripped arm. Stripped, as in stripped of it's flesh...

Well..as Valken laid dormant, at first he resorted to stealing air packaged food from the other backpacks in the closets and for a little while it was alright. But soon.. he had even begun to eat even spoiled food and as his hunger still bubbled -erm... Valken had battled cannibalism.. he lost miserably and that my friends, is by no means hollywood..

As Valken bent down and stared at the man he began devouring and besides harboring his dark little secret, He thought about saying something like 'sorry' as he figured maybe that's something Boris would want him to say...
es war ein Mann.. he figured again. For some reason 'Mann' or 'man' in english, seemed to linger on the top of his tongue.
What a funny sounding word, Mann.. Yet some how he knew he had some relationship to the word, he knew he belonged to this word in a way but that untrained area of his brain just quite couldn't make the connection...

Valken's little hair clip that androgynously and daintily held his barrage of wispy, wild hair from his two front eyes was threatening to fail. In fact to strangers his big round eyes, soft rounder forehead and thin, rather untrimmed wavy hair made him look more like a girl in overalls as he was still pretty far from the likes of puberty and his future masculinity.
If he ever reaches his masculinity that is...
He briefly wondered what his fascination was with the 'Frauen' though.. 'Frauen' being 'Women', Why did he gravitate to them?
"hm.." he grunted, shaking his head to remedy his confusion and finally looking the large window as he found that he was standing in the middle of the piled bodies and he found that couldn't make it to the door, it was impossible. He started to breathe heavily and the room felt tighter and more congested with his cO2.

So he took to the wall and pressed himself against the glass of the window as if trying to draw oxygen through it by osmosis. The coolness on his cheek was almost like getting a drink of water...
"Meine..mutter" he finally said to himself, looking down to certain death through the glass outside. Valken knocked on the glass, clearly thinking of smashing it- what if he could make it.. if he were to jump down there.. and land it. What if he could make it?
--

And then suddenly he heard a whistling sound which startled him off the glass and forced him to take a big gasp of air.
"uh.." He said dumbly, he didn't know anyone who could whistle like that! " .. Aauugh!" He decided to yell, having no idea how to whistle, having no idea what to say. " AAAUUGH!" He tried yelling louder in response, his eyes widened with starvation. Should he scream? no.. his mother didn't like screaming.. and really, neither did he...

He heard the whistle. That as human. No way they would shsitle like that. They didnt think that way. They were drones. They never did anything so clever. No all they had wwas relentlessness if a bit dull conviction to find unaffected. He moved trough the streets with quick feet. Only stopping to make sure he didn't draw infected with him to this rare occasion of human, real human interaction. But even so, the gun was cocked within his jacket. He dodged the alley. He didn't want be seen by to many at once. Survey first, make sure it isn't a trap. Then inside the school he went, gun out, sweep each hall for people. Keep running, quick steps then you stop and sweep. Rince and repeat until you are certain there is no surprises. All his search yielded was two empty bottles at first. Not that he expected much else. He tucked them under his jacket as they were future firebombs in his eyes. He kept up his search, hoping the look out on the roof could warn him if anything came. A bit selfish of him, to not rush there and help whoever it was. But survival first, humanity second.

Speaking of survival. He could see someone. A small shape. A child perhaps? He wasn't sure himself. Approaching slowly with his gun drawn, he entered the classroom. The sight he sees is both repulsive yet strangely telling. He sighs. A kid. And.. And he was eating someone. His head tilted to the side firs. Not in disbelief, but in jaded admiration. This kid was every bit the survivor he was. Quickly rummaging trough his jacket, he found something for the kid to eat. He tossed the boy a old sandich. It was fully edible, free from mold and such.

“Might not have the same amount proteins. Tastes better thou.” He looked at the kid. What was he even thinking, even staying here? Nathaniel should have avoided the building, kept to his routine instead. He was loner and groups of people was suicide. But even he wasn't jaded enough to leave a kid like this around. Hell, the kid kind of reminded him of himself in way.

“I can tell you ainat infected kid. Don't worry, I ain't either.. Infected would have obediently left here and joined the masses. Your alone huh? I am Nathaniel. You?”