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The moon is getting fuller, he mused to himself as he walked down the quiet, deserted streets of Chelsea. He could still hear screaming in the distance, but as Manhattan currently was, this was as quiet as you could get it.
He pulled his eyes from the waxing moon as he strolled past the broken and boarded up storefronts, idly kicking a crumpled soda can out of his way and listening to it skip down the road. As the can loudly clattered to a stop, it masked another, fainter noise, and he paused. He held still for a minute, head cocked to catch the sound if it happened again. Another minute passed without any unusual noise, and he shrugged it off, turning to slink down a side alley when he heard it again, louder this time.
He paused once more, head swiveling, as - there it was again. This time, he froze, his senses stretching out as far as they could to pinpoint the noise, biomass prickling uncomfortably under the veneer of skin; it sounded a lot like an infant’s cry.
That in itself was unusual to hear out on the streets, as mothers generally did not allow their kids outside these days, especially since the infected seemed to hold a certain relish for children.
He hurried in the general direction of where the sound came from, jogging down a side street to get on the road adjacent; he could smell blood now, fresh blood. He sped up to a run.
About 7 blocks down the road was a residential area, mostly brownstones, apartments, and corner stores, and off to one side was a tiny, grassy park-like area, complete with a bench and two skinny trees. Bodies littered the street, at least a dozen or more, laying in cooling pools of blood.
He could hear the faint snuffling noises now, and approached the body of a young woman. She was hunched over, body laying partially on a street curb, bullet holes riddling her back. She was shot from behind, while on her knees. He crouched next to her in the now tacky puddle of blood, and gently turned her over. In her arms, cradled against her neck, was a small child, maybe a year old, staring at him with wide eyes and making small gurgling sounds.
Offhandedly, he remembered hearing about a Blackwatch patrol passing through this area over the radio not too long ago. Switching to infected vision didn’t bring any new insight; the child was not infected, and for that matter, neither was the mother. He did a quick scan of the rest of bodies lying around. None of these civilians had been infected, but Blackwatch was not known to care.
Judging from the placement of the bullet holes and the pained expression frozen on her face, her death was not immediate. More than likely, she spent the last minutes of her life hiding the child from view while propping part of her body on the curb so she wouldn’t crush them when she died. He pried open the mother’s arms and removed the squirming, blood-soaked bundle from her clutching grasp, her unseeing eyes watching his every move.
The blanket the child was swaddled in was almost completely covered in blood, so he gently unwrapped it to reveal a somewhat clean onesie underneath. The child, exposed to the cooler air without the blanket, began to cry as it was being unwrapped, so he quickly shrugged off his leather jacket and swaddled the child in it instead. Making sure the child was bundled up securely, he carefully laid the stained blanket in the mother’s open palm, then turned and headed north east.
Ragland was reading when he came in, and gave him the briefest glance from his paperwork before doing a rather hilarious double-take.
“Alex, what – is that a baby?” Without waiting for an answer, he strode over and started examining the tiny face peeking back at him from Alex’s arms.
“It’s not infected.” He answered helpfully. Ragland’s eyebrow raised, but he otherwise said nothing as he bustled the child into his own arms, leather jacket and all.
“I found it after a Blackwatch squad passed through downtown. They shot the mother in the back.” Ragland’s expression turned dark then, a barely suppressed rage and anguish floating just under the surface before he forced it down again. Not once did he stop gently rocking the child, Alex noticed.
“I’ll…take this little one to the nurses. I’m sure they’re very hungry, aren’t they, yes?” The rest of Ragland’s sentence devolved into unintelligible babbling as he walked briskly out the door, leaving Alex standing awkwardly in the middle of the room as the Doctor essentially walked off with a piece of himself.
It felt…weird, having a part of himself separated from himself, and moving further away. He couldn’t see where Ragland was taking his jacket, but he could almost sort of feel it, the barest brush on the peripheral of his senses. It reminded him a little of when he washed up on the shore in pieces, and he did not like that. Idly, he wondered if he could make the jacket move independently at a distance, as he wandered about and snooped in things he probably shouldn’t have been. Dana would be proud of him.
It was a few minutes later that Ragland returned, sans baby, jacket in hand. Alex was standing in the middle of the room, where Ragland had left him. He was familiar enough with Ragland now to recognize his footsteps from down the hall. Ragland’s eyes swept his office, from left to right, taking in his filing cabinet, desk, and counterspace, before finally settling on the virus standing in the middle of it, staring at him with the most neutral expression it could muster.
Wordlessly, Ragland extended Alex’s jacket out to him, and he raised a hand as if to accept it. When his hand touched the jacket, it exploded into a flurry of tentacles that traveled up his arm and over his shoulders, covering his brown hoodie and smoothing down into a sleek black leather jacket. Ragland had frozen when the jacket suddenly started moving in his hand – there were a lot of emotions flitting across his face, most of which Alex was able to identify.
First was panic, as he witnessed the tendrils that were the last thing a lot of people saw. Then there was probably most of the five stages of grief, ending with acceptance. Next was clinical interest, a scientific fascination with the way his ‘skin’ denatured, shifted biomass around, molded into the correct shape of ‘bones’, ‘tendons’, ‘epidermis’, and ‘clothes’, followed by color blooming across its surface like the chromatophores of a squid. Then there was a sort of childlike curiosity, as if he were restraining himself from touching Alex’s arm – his eyes lingered on the areas where the dark biomass was slower in disappearing under the façade of pale human skin and 3 layers of fabric.
Not willing to answer the barrage of questions that would surely follow, Alex turned on his heel and made for the doorway.
“Alex.” Ragland called, and something in his tone made him pause and turn back.
“Thank you.” And then he stepped forward, tilting his face down slightly so he could look at Alex over the rim of his glasses, “You did the right thing.” He emphasized each word, as if trying to impart human morals into a man-eating virus through tone alone. In Ragland’s eyes, he could see something new, something warm and profound, and it was directed at him.
Alex’s expression softened, and he nodded at the Doctor before turning and walking out.
“Tell Dana I said hi, and to rest, please!” Ragland called after him. He didn’t see the small, gentle smile on the other man’s face.