The night was lit up by the old Tacoma’s dashboard, blues and reds and weak greens hovering on the edge of his vision. He was dimly aware of feet planted up on the dash, dirty toes pressed against the windshield. His sister’s eyes were glazed over, her fingers playing with the edges of the plastic casing on the door, orange-red flakes drifting to the ground. If he had had more time, he would have made sure not to pick a car with rust rotting along its guts, but time was one thing he most certainly did not have.

“Don't be such a granny,” Dana had said, when he’d initially fretted. He wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean. He wasn’t sure she knew what that was supposed to mean. All he knew was that he needed to remind himself it was rust, just rust. Nothing more, nothing less.

The past forty-eight hours had been a blur. He had pulled himself out of the Atlantic, having literally eaten crow, and he’d felt wrong. Uneven. Unbalanced. Unright. His body had been reduced to atoms, and trying to retain a human shape just to remind himself he was alive and real, despite everything, had felt gargantuan. It was exhilarating. It was liberating. It was terrifying.

At first, the Reagan was nothing more than pure adrenaline in his memory. As he made his way to the hospital, things fell haphazardly into place. As far as anyone knew, he’d been annihilated. No one could have survived taking a nuke to the everything. He had an out. He just had to take it with both hands and run, faster than he’d ever run before.

Except he couldn’t leave Dana. Not again. Not like he would.

Paranoia had crept in, then, a tool in his own arsenal becoming a warm companion in its own right. Gas masks and black body armour lingered in his peripheral, and yet each time he turned, he saw no one. No Blackwatch. No Wisemen. No D-Codes. Not even Cross.

Right. Cross was dead. That didn’t feel real. He didn’t know what to think about it.

Ragland had looked surprised to see him. There was something in the man’s eyes that looked like what some of his memories identified as worry, but all he could fathom was that it was apprehension at having to deal with a monster in a dead man’s skin again.

Dana had still been in the coma, at first. Weak. Small. Pale. There were fluids free flowing into an IV site in her AC, which was as good as she was going to get for a while.

“If she’s like most coma victims,” Ragland had said, tentatively, “she’ll suffer from memory loss, ei… when she wakes up.”

It was a selfish thing, but all he could think about was that it was a chance for a do over. A better chance to explain himself. Or never explain himself.

He’d left, terrified of the possibilities that moment presented. He was ravenous; the threat of consuming Ragland if he so much as breathed too closely or even Dana if he so much as tried to hold her hand had made leaving necessary. He tried to justify it aloud, but there was no need. Ragland either understood a surprising amount or he needed no reason to be rid of his presence.

Aiden Taylor was an experienced IT specialist who worked security in Silicon Valley. He’d come to Manhattan to visit his daughter and son-in-law and, like so many others, was summarily caught in the quarantine. His memories were filled with bright skies, burning asphalt, and way too many jackets with ‘San Francisco’ embroidered on them. Maybe it was because of the crow, but his attention faltered on the hint of a kitschy knick-knack collection sitting in a sagging curio cabinet.

He managed to pull himself together, despite being caught in the middle of the sidewalk, the crowd pushing in like contracting muscle fibers. He had to resist the urge to take more. Aiden Taylor had been a decently-sized man, and his bank account wasn’t lacking either. These were the things any fugitive needed: food and cash. And with Alexander J. Mercer presumed dead for hopefully the final time, no one would blink at a California man making charges across the country while on vacation.

That left finding the stash of Dana’s things he’d hid away, so the squatters wouldn’t get them. Things he couldn’t trust to be kept safe at St. Paul’s, no matter how reliable Ragland had proven himself.

“So when’s the part where you explain why the fuck you made me crawl through a sewer access pipe at the asscrack of dawn?” Dana's tone somehow embodied both playfulness and hostility. He took that as an improvement, even as a glance revealed her eyes to still be distant, seeing nothing on the horizon.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” he asked. It didn't feel right, being on this end of the questioning.

Suspicion crossed Dana's face before softening. Her fingers pushed up, into a pocket of loose fabric along the Tacoma’s roof. “The… the laptop you sent me. I hadn’t gotten around to looking at it yet.”

“You missed a lot.”

“No shit.”

They were quiet. He couldn’t remember what had happened when he went looking for Dana’s things. Panic flared up before he tamped it back down. It was the radiation or something. Definitely worrisome, but perfectly explainable.

“You’ve been weirdly nice to me since we left that hospital. Like, weirdly nice.”

“You’re my sister.”

Dana laughed. It wasn’t a nice sort of laugh. “Okay, okay. Who are you and what have you done with Alex?”

“Ouch.” He kept his voice deadpan, even as he barely managed to keep from violently ejecting himself out of the back window. “It’s a long story.”

“I think we have time.”

He didn’t really know where to start. As he learned it, or how it happened? She didn’t really need to know about Hope, Idaho or CARNIVAL or any of the other fucked up shit Blackwatch had its fingers in for decades, but at the same time, he couldn’t just give her the Cliff Notes and expect her to be satisfied. There were other things, too, things he’d gleaned from Randall’s memories that made everything even more complicated than it had any right to be.

“I’m still working on the details,” he began after a moment. Several mile markers drifted by before he figured out how to continue. “There was a virus. Working on its various strains was Gentek’s biggest project, called Project Blacklight.”

“Right. Something you worked on, right?”

“Sort of.” He kept his fingers still on the steering wheel. He wanted to flex the digits, get them moving, but even as underfed as he was, he was terrified of breaking something if he dared to go outside the muscle memory. The truck was older than he was. Which wasn’t saying much, now that he thought about it. “Blacklight was released at Penn Station. Unsanctioned. Killed a lot of people. Including me.”

“Very funny. So what, you’re a zombie now?”

The thought of what he was had haunted him since Cross dropped that unfortunate tidbit of information over the phone like an absolute psychopath. Even if he took the late Specialist at his word, being the embodiment of a virus didn’t actually make sense. Viruses weren’t alive by definition, since they weren’t organisms. He was pretty sure he was classified as an organism. Granted, things got hazy after that, but it was a start. “I’m Infected, yeah. Technically.”

Dana turned to look at him. She hadn’t looked at him fully since she’d woken up. There had been shock on her face then, pale and gaunt, and he wondered how bad he had looked for her to stare at him like that, to trace her fingers over his cheeks like she was afraid he would break when she was the fragile one.

Do not break the steering wheel, he reminded himself.

Dana slumped further into the passenger seat, her toes squeaking against the windshield. “God. Shit. Okay. That explains why you look like you need ten CCs of chicken noodle soup, STAT.”

“Does the humour help?”

“No,” Dana said, heaving out a dramatic sigh. “No, it doesn’t.” Plastic and fabric creaked and groaned as she shifted up to fumble with the radio. Static creaked through the speakers, but none of the words that came through mattered. “Are you… y’know. Contagious?”

That landmine clicked beneath his foot. It was a loaded question, even if she didn’t know it, and he went through dozens of answers in the world’s most agonizing seconds. He played through lies and half-truths, before finally, painfully, settling on, “I can control it.”