Chapter Ten

Looking at her vuloptous body and her tempting crooked smile accompanied by her rough breathing that did interesting things to her breasts, I really really wanted to bend her over the trashcan and do her right there and then but I eventually managed to get a hold of myself. Who knew that even homicidal monsters had lines they didn't cross?

Even though it was one of the hardest things I had ever done, I carried the woman back to the Manhattan Psychiatric Center, unmolested. I handed her over to the orderlies at the door and fled into the night before they could ask me any questions.

* * *

I kept a low profile for the following two weeks. I knew that Trinity pharmaceutical and their dogs Overwatch were looking for me so I decided to lie low for a while.

For fourteen days it was nothing but cheap motel rooms and abandoned houses. Whenever I had the urge to kill and absorb, I would go out and hunt homeless people in back alleys. For a few days my life became simple monotony. Even though it wasn't exactly peaceful or pleasant, it was as close as I could get and it gave me a chance to come to grips with my new self.

Was I a monster? Was I a freak that was an affront to nature? Was I a genetic aberration that should have never existed? Sure, I was all of these things but underneath all that, there was still pieces of the Alex Mercer still remaining, pieces of the sweet naive drug dealer who died because he fell in love with a junkie.

As time passed, I became more at ease with who I was and I started to develop some semblance of a semi-peaceful life but then something happened that shattered the little pseudo-peace I had built up.

Zombies.

I would have thought that it was just a bad joke but they were showing multiple videos of dead looking people with milky white eyes shuffling around and trying to take bites out of people. The police were suppressing them but outbreaks started to escalate day by day. Eventually the police weren't enough to stop them anymore.

After the outbreak became too much for the police, the army and the CDC (center for disease control) were called in. They decided to quarantine the entire island of Manhattan and sent troops to clean out any zombie outbreaks.

As people started to think that everything was solved and things would go back to normal, their naivety was cruelly punished by fate; things got even worse.

New monsters started to appear, the crawlers. The crawlers were nothing like the zombies. They were super fast, so quick that they were nothing but blurs when they moved. They were strong enough to throw cars around like toys and they had sharp claws that could cut through metal like butter but what worried me the most was that they had no skin and their exposed pink muscular flesh was very familiar, it was very similar to how I looked when I absorbed someone. Could there be some connection between me and these monsters?

My doubts were confirmed when a giant graffiti made of blood appeared on the empire state building the following day. The grizzly note was painted by crawlers who had no trouble climbing up walls like they were crawling on the ground. The note read, "Alex Mercer please come home. Your family is eagerly waiting for you."