Of all the things which had changed in his life since he’d fled to Seattle, Horst suspected that the change he liked best was in the sun. At dawn and dusk, what had previously been a menagerie of oranges, yellows, pinks and occasional purples was now a uniform wash of sky-consuming red, as though the sun was greeting and leaving the world each day with bloody sacrifice. It made him smile as he walked, his lips curling upwards behind his white surgical mask, now tinted the color of strawberries by the waning western light; he’d never liked the inconsistency of the sky’s colors at dusk and dawn. He understood the science behind it, but it had still never really struck him as natural that the sky should have to change from blue to black with such a chaotic intermission. Now, though, there was no anarchy in the dome above him; for almost ten years, an established routine of colors had trekked across the sky every day. The sun rose red, the sky turned blue in its wake, the sun burned red as it set, and then the sky went black until the next dawn. Simple, ordered, predictable; rare delicacies among the varied and generally unpleasant buffet that was his life. Horst tried to concentrate upon the sun and its’ thankfully-calm presence in the West as he made his way towards his home, walking down a sidewalk among a crowd of his fellow Seattleites. Varieties of clothing marked professions and tastes all around him, a school of civilians getting along the winding paths of their lives; his plain dark suit, black knapsack, slightly hunched posture and shuffling step allowed him to blend in perfectly with the herd. His surgical mask didn’t even make him stand out; around him, a sea of the mass-produced sanitary covers bobbed and moved, almost every face in sight sporting a clean square of air-purifying cloth. Those without the plain masks either wore more complex devices of rubber and plastic, or simply held handkerchiefs or scarves over their faces. Even those people driving wore masks of some kind, little white squares visible behind the rumbling mass of tinted windows which passed back and forth along the street beside Horst, buffeting his coat. Regardless of how they prevented it, no-one dared to breathe the air without something between them and the trillions of viral particulate which filled the atmosphere, turning sunlight red when it hit the correct angle and giving even filtered air a mild, unpleasant tang. Most people simply referred to it as ‘the Mercer Plague’, named after the violent bio-terrorist who had concocted the super-virus and bombed the now-ruined city of New York with it, releasing it in such concentration that upper-atmosphere winds had blown the stuff all across the continent. Thankfully, it had diffused over a large enough area that a simple facial covering was usually enough to prevent infection; Dr. Alex Mercer, the terrorist, had been put down like a dog by Blackwatch’s guns and Gentek’s science, before he could wreck wholesale destruction upon the world. At least, that’s how Gentek and Blackwatch told the story. But Horst knew differently. Had Mercer made the virus? Yes; he'd been the head researcher of the project which had refined the virus into the form known officially as DX-1118 C, or Blacklight. At the time of its creation, he and his team had believed that they were making a cure for cancer; Horst wasn’t clear on its actual purpose, but it had been something foul enough to make Mercer take a sample and run. Had Mercer released the virus? Oh, yes; of that there could be no doubt. Horst knew that the scientist had released it not once, but twice. Once when he first fled with the Blacklight sample and released it moments before his death, and again, a year afterwards. But saying that Mercer was responsible for the virus was like saying that the doctor who delivers a newborn baby is responsible for it and any harm that it does. Blackwatch, the borderline-psychotic military organization, had developed early versions of the virus decades before Mercer had even been born. Gentek, the cover organization which acted as Blackwatch's R&D department, had helped to refine and study it, doing the bookwork necessary for Blackwatch to carry out the various atrocities which had led to the virus’s development. By the time that Dr. Mercer was tasked with researching the virus, it was already a product of evil...all he did was push it through the final agonizing contractions before setting it loose. “And now here we are, eh?” Horst muttered to himself, his Canadian accent stifled slightly by his mask. His eyes lifted up towards the setting sun once again, the red light an obvious, daily reminder of all that had changed in the last decade. There were other changes, of course, some more noticeable than others; the black and yellow Blackwatch flags which flew off of almost every flagpole and the squads of black-uniformed, armored soldiers policing the street were among the more obvious. Horst kept his head down as a group of them passed by, drawing away from them with the rest of the crowd to give them, and the assault weaponry they carried, a respectable berth. No-one wanted trouble from the generally less-than-patient soldiers, ominous rebreather masks and complex goggles covering their faces beneath black foul-weather hoods. Blackwatch’s goons were always prepared to administer swift ‘justice’ to criminals with imposing arrays of beetle-black body armor and gleaming vambrace-blades. The squad that passed Horst by suddenly stiffened, each of the four enforcers turning to where their sergeant was suddenly pointing, causing the crowd to draw back even further; Horst turned his head with the rest of the people around him, pretending to care about what the goons had spotted. The soldiers’ attention was being drawn towards an apartment building, where Horst could see several people engaged in what was either a shouting match or an energetic chorus of throat-singing. The soldiers didn’t seem to care which as they jogged up to the front door and started demanding entrance. Martial law had reigned across the country for almost eight years to keep the populace under control during the long-standing viral outbreak, and Blackwatch was the most direct instrument of the regime. Gentek had made the virus; Gentek had tested it upon its’ fellow citizens. And who had been there to make sure that the test ran smoothly, that no-one ever heard about it, that no-one escaped? Blackwatch, of course. The underground military organization had been created by the government as an answer to rising threats of bio-warfare; a military arm designed and trained to operate in a biologic warzone and to create and use bio-weaponry. Gentek had been established almost a decade after Blackwatch's creation as a front, and as a more highly-developed center for Blackwatch to brew its' various poisons. Blackwatch soldiers had worked as operators during experimental releases of the Blacklight virus. They had tried to contain the virus in New York during Mercer’s first release, and worked with Gentek scientists to reap the benefits of Mercer’s second release. At that point, Blackwatch had come into the open, revealing itself as a hard, but effective force against the plague. After that, things had really gone downhill; a nation terrified of what evil science could accomplish willingly accepted when a Blackwatch-supporting official was pushed into the office of President. Horst had known from the start that the man was a puppet, and that all the strings led to Blackwatch hands. There had been nothing he could do about it then, nor anything he could do to prevent Blackwatch, and by default, Gentek, from gaining greater and greater power on every front. Which was why no-one seemed ready to call foul as the soldiers beat at the apartment door, shouting commands and warnings. Horst shook his head and didn’t stand about to see the end of the encounter, taking the opportunity to quietly break from the rest of the crowd just as the sergeant kicked in the front door, shouts echoing down the street as Horst ducked into an alley. He followed the alley until he came to a corner, rounding it quickly, the dirty brickwork around him muffling the gunshots and screams he heard from behind him. Checking over his shoulder to make sure that no-one was watching him, he took a steadying breath, cleared his mind of reminiscence, and then focused his thoughts on a name and a face. Brian Gustofson. He broke into a jog as his body unmade itself; flesh rippled and squirmed, turning bright red in places as his form changed from that of an unassuming businessman to that of a hobo. His dark suit changed color and texture, turning into a ratty overcoat and moth-bitten sweater over filthy jeans and boots, his mask becoming a stained scarf pulled tightly over his nose and mouth, covering the haggard face which he’d been thinking about a moment earlier. The knapsack stayed in place on his back, straps shifting as ropey flesh slithered over and through his chest; the change took place in less than a second, one urban camouflage replaced by another to suit his needs. A guy in a suit and tie would look out of place among the rusting dumpsters and steaming manhole covers in the network of alleys he walked through; dressed in rags, unshaven and unkempt, Brian Gustofson looked right at home. He had gained the ragged form through gruesome means: by physically consuming the man, Brian Gustofson, in his entirety, absorbing the hobo’s body into his own. The ability to consume granted the Evolved the ability to access the memories and skills of every living thing they ate, taking their strengths, their memories, and their shapes. It wasn’t exactly pleasant, and occasionally created problems; Horst had once been forced to consume the closet person on hand in order to elude pursuing Blacwatch soldiers, and had the misfortune of pulling a nearby streetwalker into him. The prostitute’s memories hadn’t been fun to relive; neither was the reaction he had gotten from the Blackwatch troops as they rounded the corner and spotted him…well, ‘her’, really. Not a day went by when he wasn’t thankful for the virus’s easily-accessible ability to suppress and clear away irrelevant memories. In the case of Brian Gustofson, it had been a simple matter to eliminate the memories of hunger pains, desperation, numbing cold, addiction and sickness, retaining detailed memories of innumerable shady shortcuts and hiding places throughout the city. He skidded to a halt at the end of one such shortcut, glancing left and right, making sure that there were no eyes upon him. He spotted one body to his right, another hobo like the one he was impersonating, curled in the fetal position under a pile of rat-torn sleeping bags. If the man was awake, or even alive, he wasn’t showing it. Horst let him be, turning and jogging left, to the south, towards home. Even if the indigent had seen him, seen his unnatural change, Horst doubted that he’d even know who to turn to about it. He doubted that anyone he could tell would even believe him, some crazy hobo spinning stories about one man suddenly looking like another. No-one would know that the hobo had seen the greatest result of Mercer’s war with Blackwatch. That he’d made a sighting of one of the last of the Evolved. The public’s fear of the Mercer Plague was well-founded; in most cases, infection led to the rapid, uncontrolled mutation of the body into a misshapen, twisted ruin with little to no brain function. The virus bonded with its host and triggered body-wide changes by forcing the activation and change of latent DNA, controlling the host’s body and compelling it to feed upon the flesh of the living, the dead, and other infected. In ten years, Gentek had yet to find a reliable cure; Blackwatch had always known, though. They had several cures, actually…bullets, grenades, rockets, and even well-placed blades had ‘cured’ just about every infected individual that their soldiers had encountered. But not all who were infected turned into the mindless zombies. Some, those with specific, special arrangements of DNA, could resist the virus’s control and turn it to their advantage, gaining powers which had overcome everything that Blackwatch or Gentek had been able to come up with. Mercer had called these symbiotic individuals his Evolved, believing them to be the next step in human’s progress towards higher life-forms, the next step away from Darwin’s origin of the species. As Horst jogged through the trail of alleys which led more quickly towards his apartment than taking the street route, a flash of memory assailed him; he remembered when he’d first been infected. He’d been one of the first to have it happen to, after Mercer’s second release upon NYZ…he’d been a lab assistant at Gentek, working with a team of xenomorphologists at the time. They were studying a batch of captured infected specimens while Horst just took notes, held surgical tools, and tried his best to understand what the more experienced scientists were saying as they poked and sliced at the snarling, groaning sub-humans. He certainly hadn’t expected the cage locks to break, or for the specimens to escape and slaughter the scientists. He really hadn’t expected to suddenly find himself flat on his back, staring up at a screaming, skinless face full of fangs and death, feeling half a dozen other sets of teeth and claws digging into his flesh. Lying in a pool of his own blood, the smell of cordite in the air from the gunshots which had cleared the ravenous undead off of his body and the sound of Blackwatch soldiers giving him up for dead from the mauling he’d received, he HAD expected to die. From the moment he had passed out to the moment he woke up in a body bag, he had kept expecting death to come to him. In fact, for about two minutes after waking, he’d thought that the reason he wasn’t in pain anymore was because he already was dead. Then the bag had been opened and he had gotten the surprise of his life, finding himself to be alive, intact, and blinking up at a grinning Alex Mercer. “You don’t look much like god,” Horst had said, the only think he could think to say. Alex had just grinned wider before replying. “You need to get out more.” It made Horst grin to himself as he vaulted over a chain link fence without effort, remembering his first encounter with the man who had made him what he was. Mercer had picked him out and chosen to infect him with the virus, impersonating an infected and allowing himself to get captured for testing at the facility Horst was working at. After that, breaking out of the cage and infecting the unsuspecting man had been easy; getting control of Horst’s ‘corpse’ had been even easier. Mercer had given Horst answers to dangerous questions, power he couldn’t believe, and most importantly of all, he’d given the newly-turned Evolved purpose. A beautiful, simple purpose which had put Horst in awe of his new leader; purpose which he still clung to, ten years after his leader’s death. “Evolve everyone,” he muttered to himself as he neared his home, a plain brick high-rise which had seen better days, plastered with graffiti and hung with the same Blackwatch flags which festooned almost every building for miles around. “Evolve everyone who can be turned, and clear the rest of the filth away.” ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Within Daniel Towers, in apartment number 509, another of the Evolved sat in a high-legged settee with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, carelessly letting the ash fall onto the worn leather covering of the short couch. His attention was focused on the emblem held between his fingers: a black and gold star mounted on a pair of gold wings lined in black. The Blackwatch star. For just over a decade, the icon had been present in his life; he’d first seen it when he was just Sergeant Fritz Mencken, an army NCO with no relation to the writer and journalist whose last name he shared. Soon after, when he’d been approached by a Blackwatch recruiter, he’d seen the star as an ideal to live up to, and a guide to live his life by. The star kept that image until he was addressed as Blackwatch Staff Sergeant Mencken (Or as his lieutenant routinely called him, fuck-you Fritz), which was when it seemed like everything changed. The world suddenly shrank down to a couple god-forsaken, virus-infected islands which used to be parts of New York, and his missions no longer consisted of kissing superior’s asses and training for viral outbreaks. Instead, he had spent his days either killing things that used to be human, killing humans before they could become anything else, or capturing one of the two alive so that geeks in lab coats could cut them to pieces. All that while dodging tanks, keeping an eye open for giant fucking birds that liked to carry off unsuspecting soldiers, and grudgingly maintaining his position as Alpha male among the sociopathic section-8’s who he lead into the field. And then, just when he was starting to get the hang of shooting cannibals in the name of the Blackwatch star, his biggest change of all had come. One day, while he was out idly putting bullets inside of infected skulls, his squad had come under attack by a force that none of them could fight. He vaguely remembered his lieutenant suddenly screaming and pointing at the sky, and then in the blink of an eye, the man was laying on the ground in a half-dozen bloody chunks. The thing which had cut down a ten-year veteran officer in the blink of an eye had sliced up the rest of Fritz’s squad just as fast before turning on Fritz himself, which was when he’d gotten his first really good look at Alex Mercer. They hadn’t met on particularly good terms; Mercer had tried to pounce onto the sergeant and leave him as hamburger. Fritz had thrown himself flat on the pavement, and had managed to send a full magazine of large-caliber rounds from his sidearm into Mercer’s torso as he skidded across the asphalt. That had made the powerful Evolved stop and chuckle as his body regenerated around the through-and-through wounds, squaring off against an impressed, thoroughly-spooked Fritz. “How’d you like to be able to do that?” he had asked Fritz as his inhuman flesh had flowed like water into the holes Fritz had just made. Fritz had wanted very badly to be able to do that, and so had allowed Mercer to infect him without a second thought or question. Only once he woke up and learned of Mercer’s plans to destroy Blackwatch and Gentek and to populate the world with others like them had Fritz begun to think about what his choice meant. At the time, it had meant getting acquainted with the ability to run up the sides of buildings, glide through the air, punch through walls, and take a bullet through his throat without adverse effect. Later, it had meant taking a good, hard look at the star he had once served from the perspective of an outsider; he hadn’t liked what he saw. Blackwatch was far from benign, and certainly not the honorable institution he’d signed onto. Fritz had known for years that he was doing some pretty dirty work, but he'd had no idea just how filthy the military organization was. Mercer had shown him more than the proper way to tear a man’s head off with one hand; he’d shown Fritz how misguided he had been. He had showed Fritz how Blackwatch and Gentek were really one and the same twisted organization, how his orders came from scalpel-happy scientists as often as they came from his ranked superiors. That, more than anything was what had turned him to Mercer’s side. If there was one thing Fritz hated, it was the feeling of being used, especially by some freak-of-nature scientists. “Well,” the grinning Evolved muttered to himself in a quiet soprano, flipping the star between his fingers, “Not by just any scientist, I guess.” Fritz chuckled at the private joke, standing up from the settee with a sigh and a stretch, a breeze blowing through an open window tickling across the skin of his bare chest. Before his evolution, he’d been very proud of his body; a beautiful collection of trim, buff muscles decorated by a few scars and a small collection of tattoos, but he didn’t particularly care anymore. The Mercer virus granted even stick-thin Evolved enough strength to bench-press a Buick without breaking a sweat, and some of the monsters the virus made had muscles bigger than he was. His form was just the most common to him, the body he felt most comfortable in. The fact that he felt most comfortable with a torso he could bounce quarters off of, biceps he could crush walnuts between before he became infected, and legs like spun steel was just because it was what he was used to. He had known other Evolved who purposefully kept themselves in the forms of people who they had consumed, claiming that remaining in their original bodies was like clinging to useless childhood toys, memories of past lives which had no bearing on the present. Fritz had never cared enough to argue against them, keeping his old body as his standby and ignoring anyone with an opinion about it. Almost anyone, at least. Fritz sighed through a smile as he set the Blackwatch star on an end table beside the couch, pulling his cigarette from his mouth as he walked to the open window to watch the sunset. From behind, one could see the long, pulsating lines of glowing red flesh which stood out from his back, one of the trademarks of the Evolved. The red-glowing flesh usually marked where the initial infection had been most prominent on each individual, but Fritz had seen all kinds of marks during his times around other Evolved. Fritz’s own resembled crude wings, sprouting in branching lines from between his shoulders which stretched down his back and sides, the longest reaching over his hips to line each of his thighs to the backs of his knees. Smaller lines throbbed along the paths where his major veins used to be, crossing over his biceps, neck and inner thighs, but the most prominent flowed across his back. He felt the lines throb as he watched the sun set, his crystal-blue eyes narrowed against the light before flicking down to glance at his right arm. In the red glow, he almost couldn’t see the pulsating line stretching over his upper arm, but he could feel it in his flesh as a dull, rhythmic ache. For a moment, he wondered how his life might have been different if he’d never become one of the Evolved. For a moment, he thought about what it would be like, not having the secret of the decade locked within his DNA; what it would be like to have no more pressing concerns than what his superior officers would want him to do, day by day. Fritz smirked and reached up with his left hand, plucking the cigarette from his lips and turning it ember-down between his fingers, his tongue pushing forward just enough to press against the point of his right canine. He pressed the glowing coal down to his right bicep and just chuckled to himself; un-infected, he would have felt the pain of it, the quick burn and the lingering ache that followed. Evolved, he barely registered the touch, his virus-saturated flesh toughening automatically against the heat, putting out the cigarette as if he’d stubbed it into an ashtray. This is better, he thought to himself, pulling the doused smoke from his arm and marveling as the darkened callus beneath its’ touch faded back into his skin, the line of glowing flesh flaring brighter for a moment. I will always be better now than what I was before…until the day I die, I will be better. He took a slow breath as he lifted his arm up before him, holding it outstretched from the window as he muttered reverently, “Evolved.” A knocking at the door turned his attention away from his arm, his eyes narrowing as he tossed the spent cigarette out the window, forgotten. His body fell into a crouch as he padded across the room towards the disturbance, the hairs at the back of his neck lifting up in aggressive anticipation, his bemused ruminations replaced in an instant by predatory wariness. Granted, this was usually the time when his roommate came home, but after a meth lab had blown out the top story of the building next door, Blackwatch troops tended to come by now and then to check that there weren’t any others in the area. Blackwatch troops also tended to disappear whenever they went knocking on Fritz’s door, their bodies left in convenient locations far away from Daniel Towers. “Who’s there?” he called roughly once he was ten feet from the door, flexing his hands slowly and curling his bare toes against the hard floor. He doubted that whatever was on the other side would be dangerous, but it never hurt to be prepared; from here, he could turn the metal door into flying battering ram and pulverize anyone on the other side with a single kick. A small part of him desperately wanted there to be an enemy on the other side of the door; thinking about his genetic superiority always put him in a mood to kill lesser beings. He relaxed once he heard a familiar voice from the other side, a smirk spreading across his lips at the sarcastic reply. “It’s a singing stripper-gram, you paranoid jackass, who do you think? Open the hell up, I forgot my key when I went out this morning.” Fritz chuckled as he stepped forward and unlocked the door, smiling down at the short, ragged-looking hobo who stood on the other side with an expectant look on his haggard face. The soldier crossed his muscled arms and leaned against the doorframe, raising an eyebrow slightly as he stared down at the man. “And what makes you think that I’d want to see you out of your clothes, sir?” “Because you know how easily I can get you horny once they’re off, wise-ass. Let me in, this asshole’s memories keep bubbling up when I wear him,” Horst replied tersely as he pushed past his fellow Evolved and stepped into his home, dropping his knapsack by the front door. Fritz just shook his head as he closed the door behind his friend, setting the deadbolts in place as he heard the tell-tale slithering of Horst’s flesh reshaping itself. By the time Fritz turned around, his friend was back in his natural shape, his dark brown eyes closed behind his little round spectacles, sighing to himself as he ran a hand through his shoulder-length auburn hair. The silver-rimmed glasses accentuated Horst’s slightly gaunt features; when he made the lenses of the glasses turn black, Fritz thought that he looked just a bit skeletal, especially when he was grinning. In his natural form, Horst wore a plain pair of midnight-blue jeans tucked inside of mid-calf length buckled boots, topped by a black short-sleeve button-down which clung a little too tightly to his compact frame. Fritz could see the haphazard lines of glowing tissue which marred the other Evolved’s body pulsate angrily, each one marking a spot where he’d been attacked during his initial infection. Claw marks and bite marks throbbed lividly, making Horst resemble a skinnier, glowing Frankenstein as he scratched the back of his head, muttering lowly. “Fucking crack-head…like I need that shit floating around my brain.” “Aren’t we cheery tonight,” Fritz commented lightly as he turned and walked past his fellow Evolved, shrugging his shoulders slightly to grow a plain white t-shirt over his torso as he headed towards the open apartment’s kitchen. Horst noticed, chuckling for a moment at his friend’s attempt at modesty as he followed Fritz away from the door, letting his hand fall from his hair to slide into the pocket of his jeans. His free hand lifted up as he came closer to Fritz, reaching to rest on the other Evolved’s shoulder; Fritz was noticeably broader than his slender friend, but Horst had two inches on the former soldier, just enough for him to loom a little as he spoke softly into Fritz’s ear. “I’m always cheery to come home, sweetheart…nothing helps me get over a crappy day more easily than walking in the door and finding you shirtless.” Horst chuckled and squeezed Fritz’s left shoulder slowly, his arm pressing against the other Evolved’s back as he lifted his head to brush his nose through Fritz’s close-cropped blonde hair. Fritz closed his eyes and let a lopsided smile curl his lips, enjoying the affectionate touches, lifting one hand up to close over the fingers on his shoulder, resting his other on the kitchen’s island counter before him. He chuckled after a moment, cracking an eye open and smirking before murmuring teasingly. “And to think, just a little less than a decade ago you were claiming that you didn’t play for my team.” “What can I say? I’ve always been a sucker for a blonde with a fantastic ass…” Horst chuckled and shifted his feet to stand a little closer to his lover, grinning a bit in anticipation before matching Fritz’s teasing tone. “Especially when they wear lesbian haircuts.” Fritz snorted and shoved backwards from the counter lightly, just enough to push a now-cackling Horst off of him before turning around to scowl at the grinning Evolved. “And that, dear, is where I tell you goodnight and fuck off.” Horst gave his very best evil-villain grin. “You know that I’m just teasing, sweetheart…if you like your hair, and I like your hair, then who cares if you look just a bit like G.I. Jane on an angry pussy hunt?” Fritz rolled his eyes and turned back to the counter, resisting the urge to run a hand through the naturally-spikey mess of short, golden locks covering his head and trying not to smile at his lover’s comment. All in all, it was one of the better names he’d been called for his hair; Peroxide-vampire had been one of his former Lieutenant’s favorites, poking fun at his sharp widow’s peak. He distracted himself from the past and from Horst by sidestepping along the counter to the fridge, pulling the door open and peering inside. Had anyone other than the Evolved seen the interior of the cold-storage space, they might have been either appalled or disappointed at their lack of variety: every shelf and drawer was packed with raw, plastic-wrapped meat. To most people, the fridge’s bounty looked boring and generally unhealthy. To the Evolved, it still looked boring, but it was everything they needed to survive and thrive. “What’s on the menu tonight, sweetheart?” Horst asked as he slid onto a barstool in front of the island, resting his elbows on the imitation granite. He knew that Fritz was sensitive about his hair, but after ten years together, he knew just how to soothe his lover’s ruffled feathers. Fritz’s voice still sounded less than pleased as he spoke over his shoulder. “Well, let’s see…we have Gentek’s over-processed, genetically-altered whale meat,” Fritz replied dryly, reaching into the fridge and tossing a plastic-wrapped hunk of slightly-greyish meat over his shoulder to slap on the counter. “Or we could have Gentek’s over-processed, genetically-altered beef…” Another wet slap announced the arrival of another lump of flesh on the counter beside the first. “Or, if we’re feeling really gutsy, we could try to stomach Gentek’s attempt at making pork chops,” Fritz said distastefully as he returned to the island with a lump of grey meat in his hand, holding it at arm’s length as though it might oink at him. Horst set his chin into his palms and huffed out a long sigh, eyeing the three offerings with equal disinterest. “Goody, goody,” he muttered, eventually just letting his forehead fall onto the countertop with a dull thunk. His voice was muffled and just a touch despondent when he spoke. “Where did they go, Fritz? The days when we could just grab a couple of warm bodies off the street and chow down? The days when our meals screamed and ran and bled into our mouths like ripe fruit?” Fritz sighed and let the pseudo-pig drop onto the counter before shrugging. “Those days left us behind when Alex died, my friend.” “When Alex was killed, you mean,” Horst said reproachfully, lifting his head up and eventually nodding towards one of the meat-products, pushing his glasses up his nose. “I’ll take the whale, eh?” “Whale for my lover,” Fritz replied as he slid the meat over to the less-than-enthusiastic Evolved, picking up the pork for himself and the beef to return to the fridge. “We going to get business done before we eat, babe, or after?” “Why not during, eh?” Horst replied as he stood and tossed the five-pound slab of meat from one hand to the other, walking out of the kitchen to fetch his knapsack from in front of the door, twirling it lightly around one finger as he came back. “I’m not afraid of multitasking, sweetheart…you should know that by now, eh?” “It had occurred to me that you can manage to do more than one thing at a time,” Fritz replied with a chuckle as he tossed the lump of beef back into the fridge and kicked the door shut, starting to unwrap the pork in his hands as he pulled out the barstool beside Horst’s with his heel. He sat and tore apart the paper Gentek label holding the plastic together as Horst pulled a small netbook from the knapsack. He’d just gotten it all apart as Horst set the netbook open on the counter, powering it up as he sat beside his comrade. “You love the way I can multitask,” Horst muttered as the small computer went through its’ start-up procedures. “Wait until we finish dinner, babe, I’ll show you how much I love it,” Fritz replied with a grin before taking a huge bite out of the raw, pinkish-grey meat. It tasted awful, but only because the Evolved could taste the chemical imbalances in the meat, the hormone injections, the viral growth stimulants; nutritious, but far from good for him. Horst’s expression as he took a bite out of his own dinner showed that he was of a like mind. The day could not come soon enough when they would be able to feed in earnest. When they could hunt and kill and take bloody satisfaction in the death of their prey. A chime from the netbook took both their minds off of their gruesome dinner, a few tapped keys pulling up several files from its hard drive, all marked with Gentek’s hexagon-framed ‘G’ logo. Horst had planted himself within Gentek by consuming one of their scientists and letting the man’s memories float closer to the surface of his thoughts than most, allowing him to think and act just like the man had in life. Posing as an employee, he had access to Gentek’s databases and could bring home whatever intelligence the two Evolved needed to know about the twisted company. “Nothing really interesting today,” Horst said as he opened three files and pulled up a series of tables, spreadsheets and documents, scrolling through them idly. “Infected numbers are staying fairly constant outside of NYZ, thanks more to Blackwatch than Gentek; no more than a few thousand country-wide, and no more than a few hundred loose outside of testing facilities and farms.” The farms he spoke of were federal prisons, where Gentek pulled convicts for use as lab rats, infecting prisoners with various strains of one virus or another for testing and study. The public hadn’t exactly been thrilled when the bill allowing Gentek medical license over convicts had passed, but the horror stories coming out of the various prisons had caused a greater diminish in crime than Blackwatch’s shoot-on-sight policy. Taking a bullet to the head was one thing…getting turned into a living petri dish was another thing altogether. “So no change there,” Fritz mused after swallowing another chunk of pork; he could feel his infected body breaking down the flesh within him, his viral metabolism turning anything he consumed into energy for his use within moments. He nodded towards the netbook as a particular file came up, its’ contents sparse. “What about the canine projects?” Horst shook his head, speaking through a mouthful of whale meat. “Still nothing; I’m trying to get close to it, but it’s sewn up pretty damn tightly. I could get in if I abandoned my current position and took the place of one of the project members, but I don’t know if it’ll even lead to anything.” He swallowed his mouthful before snapping his fingers and banging across the small keyboard, long, narrow fingers navigating the small keys easily. “I did get one thing, really just a piece of gossip…apparently there was a screw-up with the order of test subjects. The head researcher didn’t get the kind of dogs he wanted and was raising seven kinds of hell over it.” He shrugged slightly, chuckling. “How someone managed to confuse Welsh Corgis for German Shepard’s is beyond me, but the little stumpy bastards were barking up a storm as they came out of the crates.” “Dogs,” Fritz muttered, suddenly feeling less hungry. “What do you suppose they might be testing on dogs?” Horst glanced meaningfully at the lumps of meat they each held. “Could be another food source…not likely, but it’s a thought.” “I don’t think they’re that desperate…” “They might be that sick, though.” Fritz snorted. “No ‘might’ on that count…” “Heard that, eh?” “Mm,” Fritz replied before taking another bite of his pork. “So infected levels are steady, this canine project is still a verdammt mystery…anything else?” “I keep hearing references to this project, but I haven’t been able to dig up anything concrete on it except its name,” Horst said as he pulled up another file and tapped the screen with a finger. “Project Succubus. All I’ve been able to find out is that Gentek’s not too keen on anyone knowing what the hell it is; I had to burn out an alternate personality just to get the project’s name.” Fritz raised an eyebrow. “Really?” “Managed to get the name using access codes from one of the researchers I body-snatched earlier, so I tried them on a terminal; next thing I know there’s Blackwatch goons banging on the door demanding that the guy come out for questioning.” Horst shrugged and sighed. “I switched bodies, kicked open the back door and then hit the deck, told the stupid fuckers that the guy they wanted had bolted once they came sniffing around.” Fritz whistled low and long, his expression turning thoughtful. “What could be so important that they’re hiding it from their own people with such prejudice?” Horst chuckled. “This is Gentek, sweetheart…for all we know, it could be that someone on their board of directors has been having an affair with a test chimp and they’re trying to cover it up.” “That’d be one hairy succubus, my friend.” “It’s not unheard of.” Fritz shook his head and sighed. “I think it’s something else…an affair would get covered up, but not so tightly. Someone would have talked…you’d have gossip all over the place about how one of your boss’s has been banned from the monkey exhibit at the zoo.” “Fair enough,” Horst muttered as he finished the last of his whale, getting up to toss the plastic wrapping into the trash and wash his hands. He paused mid-step, glancing over his shoulder with a raised eyebrow. “Maybe they’re trying to resurrect the Blacklight virus.” Fritz just shook his head. “With a name like ‘Project Succubus?’ Please…it’s something else.” Horst sighed and turned around to face his lover once he’d turned off the sink, the water on his hands absorbing directly through his skin; he still wiped his palms across his thighs, unconsciously trying to dry them off. “Well, sweetheart, I’ve got nothing else on the damn thing, and I don’t think that I’m about to unless I sneak in and replace someone who’s working more closely to it.” Fritz pondered on the possibility as he chewed through his last bite of pork, balling up the plastic wrapper as he stood as well. “No,” he said eventually, shaking his head. “You’re too important where you are right now to change up…which reminds me,” Fritz said seriously, his voice lowering just enough to convey a sense of seriousness, and eagerness. “Any changes in Project Phoenix?” “Moving along as scheduled,” Horst murmured, “Mostly due to me hacking through what little red tape there is and the skills of the researcher I replaced. Still moving too damn slow for my liking, but at this point I don’t think I could motivate my team to work any harder without implanting remote-controlled explosives into their chests.” “It’s worth waiting for,” Fritz stressed, his hands balling into eager fists as a tremble shook down his spine. “And you know it, love. Project Phoenix is the key to unlocking everything we’ve planned…if it means that we have to wait for it to succeed, then so be it.” “You and your patience,” Horst said with a chuckle, going back to the netbook as Fritz tossed his trash into the can. “Other than all that, nothing out of the ordinary. Their shipments to Blackwatch are staying pretty constant, so I’m going to assume that you’ve got intel on that?” Fritz nodded and turned the small computer more towards himself as he pulled a small flash drive from a pocket of his black fatigues, flicking off its’ cap and sliding it into an open USB port. While Horst spent his days at Gentek, doing lab work between his raids upon the company’s secure files, Fritz occupied himself in Blackwatch, smacking grunts and stealing military intelligence wherever he could. With a spy in each camp, the Evolved could anticipate the moves of Blackwatch and Gentek easily, and plant misinformation wherever they wanted to in order to successfully upset either organization. Fucking with Gentek and Blackwatch was the closest the two Evolved allowed themselves to come to the bloody carnage they used to wreck upon the hateful organizations. “As you said,” Fritz commented as he pulled open files from the flash drive marked with the Blackwatch star, “Blackwatch numbers are on the rise, especially among the ranks of their super-soldiers.” Horst narrowed his eyes in distaste. “More of them?” “Yep,” Fritz muttered, pulling up a graph and tapping the inclined line slashed across it. “The injections necessary to pump up one of their regular soldiers into a fucking tank cost a hell of a lot less than the process used to make the project Orion soldiers. From what I can tell, Blackwatch has basically made the serum a loyalty reward for its soldiers; serve long enough, become a minor superhuman.” “Well, that’s going to make things fun,” Horst said with a thin grin, “once we break cover, I mean.” “Fun?” Fritz turned to his friend with a raised eyebrow. “Fun to go toe to toe against an army of seven-foot tall Blackwatch thugs on steroids?” “Say that back to yourself, sweetheart.” Fritz opened his mouth to offer a rebuttal, but in retrospect, he knew that he was kidding himself. The thought of getting to sink his claws into the cocky, hulking bastards who lorded their physical power over weaker, unaltered soldiers made him drool like Pavlov’s terrier. He closed his mouth and nodded grudgingly, swallowing the evidence of his blood-lust before pulling up another series of graphs on the netbook. “Moving along, love…estimated numbers of non-infected are holding steady at 250 million in the US. They’re estimating a spike to come soon, but not enough to break 275 million; between Blackwatch’s ‘justice’ and the Mercer virus picking at the old and weak, the population is holding its’ place pretty well.” Horst nodded, scratching his chin slowly and lifting a brow at his lover. “Got anything else, sweetheart? Anything more interesting than ‘the number of births this week balanced out the number of deaths’?” “Sorry to disappoint,” Fritz commented as he rapidly scrolled through tables and charts, “but no. Standard troop deployments, munitions deliveries, training materials and so on…nothing out of the ordinary.” Horst was about to sigh and let his head hit the counter again when Fritz started and suddenly tapped the screen pointedly, almost knocking the small computer to the floor. “Damnit! I forgot, my mistake…I saw this a few days ago and didn’t think much about it. Stupid…” “The fuck?” Horst asked, suddenly intent upon what his lover was pointing at; a Blackwatch file simply titled ‘K9’. “Blackwatch is implementing a K9 program,” Fritz said, an excited tone starting to enter into his voice as he opened the file. “You know? Guys with dogs that like to bite the shit out of people?” Not even the little round glasses perched on Horst’s nose could mask his clueless expression. “So?” “So, dumbass…didn’t you say that Gentek was working on some kind of canine project?” Horst smiled as he put two and two together, speaking slowly as revelation dawned on him. “Gentek’s cooking up a bunch of mutant dogs for Blackwatch to use as force multipliers…oh, fucking brilliant. So now we’ll get to bang heads against a bunch of jacked-up mutts as well as jacked-up soldiers. Aren’t we a pair of lucky bastards, eh?” Fritz chuckled and lifted a hand to tap his cheek with a fingertip, resting his elbow in his palm. “Ought to be entertaining…I mean, what are the odds of some mutated dogs being harder to kill than the Brawlers back home?” “Oh, how I miss them,” Horst said wistfully, remembering all the fights they’d had with the fanged, clawed predators who had risen out of the ground and wreaked havoc against infected and non-infected alike. They had proven to be reasonably tough fights, and had always been fun to watch tear through a couple of Blackwatch squads. Horst sighed to himself and shook his head; another thing they had lost ever since the fall of their leader. Fritz nodded sympathetically and leaned over on his stool to gently kiss Horst’s right cheek, lifting an arm to drape across his comrade’s shoulders. “Cheer up, my friend…do I need to remind you of our plan?” “Hmmm,” Horst hummed lowly, a sly look slowly crossing his face as he glanced over to his lover. “You might have to, sweetheart…I’m feeling a touch depressed, a happy story might be just the thing for me.” “That so?” Fritz murmured softly as his hand curled around Horst’s shoulder, slowly pulling the other Evolved closer to him, tilting his barstool up on two legs. “A story to help you get some of your spirit back? Perk you up a bit?” “Perk something up, that’s for sure,” Horst replied through a grin, abruptly turning on his stool to face Fritz and lifting a hand between them, pressing flat against the soldier’s hard-packed chest. “Go on, eh?” “Alright,” Fritz said through a grin. He and Horst had been living together for just under a decade; he’d played this game before, and could think of no more enjoyable a way to spend an evening. “Our story begins with a corrupt military unit and a twisted little think-tank.” “I do so love how you keep things in context,” Horst murmured as he pressed his hand more firmly to Fritz’s chest; the familiar pressure was the other Evolved’s cue to disintegrate his shirt, baring his taut skin to Horst’s touch. The Evolved’s fingers started to sweep in a circle around Fritz’s pecs and abs, lingering over the small, thread-like lines of glowing flesh which branched from his left pectoral, radiating out from where his heart had been. With each sweep, Horst’s fingertips grazed the edge of Fritz’s left nipple, making the shirtless Evolved shiver. “But of course,” Fritz replied, a gentle heat rising to his face as he continued. “A long time ago, the military unit decided to make a poison in secret…a poison that could kill anyone they wanted, anywhere, anytime…a sword to cut down any enemy, foreign or domestic. The think-tank provided the brain power to make it happen.” “Bastards,” Horst muttered as he stood up, starting to pace around Fritz, dragging his long, bony fingers up the other Evolved’s chest to his left shoulder. “And did they succeed?” “Almost,” Fritz muttered through grit teeth, trying not to grin as he watched Horst move around him through the corner of his eye. “Before they could perfect the poison, it was stolen from them-nnff!” A soft grunt cut off his words, the sound rushing up as Horst’s fingers caught on one of the lines of glowing tissue which scrolled around his shoulder; something about the man’s touch made the bioluminescent flesh extremely sensitive, and Horst knew it. “And this thief,” Horst murmured into Fritz’s ear, coming all the way around the other Evolved and pressing against his back, lips close to Fritz’s right ear, “Did he have a name?” “Mercer,” Fritz whispered, his head starting to lean back against Horst’s chest. Fingertips clenching against his shoulder stopped the motion, reminding him to finish the story. “Mercer stole the poison and tried to let the world know what the unit and the think-tank were doing. He tried to uncover them…blow the whistle…haa…” His words deteriorated quickly as Horst’s free hand pressed against his back, fingers pushing between his wing-like lines and slowly pressing down, his palm squeezing tightly to the glowing flesh. “He tried…did he succeed?” Horst murmured before setting his lips against Fritz’s ear, kissing the warm flesh slowly. He fought the urge to press himself closer to Fritz’s back, the gradually-tightening pressure in his groin making him long for the friction that his lover’s body could offer. “No…big, bad Blackwatch shot him…forced his hand…released the poison…” Fritz spoke slowly between his husky breaths, trying to stay still as his lover dragged his hand torturously over the sensitive, glowing lines of viral flesh striping his back. It felt amazing, making his whole body tingle; he kept speaking as best as he could, knowing that the pleasure would stop if he did. “New York was infected…and when Gentek couldn’t cure it, Blackwatch tried to burn it…fuck, that’s good...” “Stick to the story,” Horst purred into Fritz’s ear, turning his hand ninety degrees so that his long fingers could start plucking across the other Evolved’s lower back, playing over the tightly-bundled lines like strings on a guitar. “What did Mercer do then?” “Mercer stopped them,” Fritz muttered through gritted teeth, the muscles in his back standing out like a rock bed under his skin, his hands grabbing at his own thighs tightly enough to buckle steel. “He stopped them and then he left,” Horst murmured softly, his own shirt slowly disintegrating back into his body to reveal a narrow frame filled by slinky, serpentine muscles marred by the brightly-glowing scars from the attack which infected him. He pushed himself tighter to Fritz’s back, squeezing his left hand between their bodies while his right curled around Fritz’s side and lifted up to trace a single fingernail from the corner of Fritz’s lips to his cheek. “And then, sweetheart?” “Left…he left to find answers for himself,” Fritz murmured as he let his weight settle back against his lover’s chest, taking his lover’s cue. He lifted a hand up and reached behind himself, brushing his thick fingers through Horst’s thick hair as he continued, his voice breathy with desire. “He didn’t come back until he knew what he had to do.” “And what, sweetheart, did he have to do?” Horst whispered into his lover’s ear, closing his eyes, his pulse quickening in anticipation; he’d heard this story at least twice a week for the last ten years, but it still affected him. His toes curled in his boots and his fingers tensed against Fritz’s back in anticipation, fighting to keep his right hand from trembling against his lover’s cheek once he heard Frtiz take a shaky breath and then pause to get his words in order. “He had to come back, love, to save us…to save us all from ourselves…to help us…” “To evolve us,” Horst finished in a rush before sliding his right hand around to Fritz’s left cheek, pulling his head sideways as he leaned down, his lips dropping onto Frtiz’s own in a hungry, wet kiss. Fritz answered the kiss with his own, his lips pressing up to Horst’s mouth with heat and wanton desire, open to allow his lover’s tongue easy access into him. ~~~