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Ve identified the emotions ve was currently feeling - the vestiges of an uncomfortable sense of responsibility, a mildly irritated flavour of concern. Ve was dithering whether to let it dictate ver actions - ve had already quelled the urge in the convert to shout. The dog's whimpering was unnecessary noise, but as long as he was whining in a ditch somewhere, what did it matter? Whatever madness befell it might prove a threat to ver at some point, should it bite if approached. This was a problem only for those parts not part of ver yet, of course - the others already knew.
But there was a sense of duty that ve could not shake. Neptune's leash was well out of grasp of ver capable members. Retrieving the dog was less of an effort than pushing the overwrite ahead, at least at this time a day. Were more of Townsville awake, priorities might be different. It would not be the most questionable decision ve had made so far, in awakening, in extending ver embrace. Monster. Ver heartbeat stung through her skull, a moment's discomfort. Ve dismissed the disruptive thought, forgiving verself the self-deprecation. There were secondary benefits to the explortation of Castle Hill: It was a point of overview. Perhaps someone was there, or multiple someones. The chance was slim, but it was enough to tip ver decision in favour. And at the very least, it would drive the mutt out of harm's way for a while. A lovely dog. He's scared of what you've become.
The discord in ver psyche would take a while to heal. As long as ve accepted it was part of the transition - and ve did - it need not pose a problem. Ve had been raised on principles that would take time to deconstruct without leaving behind a vegetable, made only more difficult as some of them were still imperative. The wider ver embrace became, the less these things would shake ver. The wrench in the works would lessen as more of ver was present to grant ver calm and understanding.
By tomorrow night, ve thought, ve would no longer be prone to such fits of irrationality, in any part. Certainly not in this one.
*
He jogged up along the path to Castle Hill at a leisurely pace. The volume of the sound of the gravel and dust under the soles of his feet were a frustrating side effect of the pace. He entertained, briefly, the notion of setting the whole hill on fire to smoke out the dog, but that would be a concession of defeat on many levels. His touch whispered across more distant bushes, hoping to spook the lost pet out of hiding. His attention was to two thirds hearing, hoping to catch a whine, whimper or the sound of the dragging leash. Neurons favoured the analysis of those small vibrations and completely discarded smell and non-essential touch.
Pure rationality was nothing he could afford, but it was moments like these that he had to resist the urge to succumb to it. If he did, he would cripple himself. Without intuition and empathy, he would soon encounter problems too complex to compute. He could not afford to do away with those traits. It would take time to find the right balance. For now, this had to play out, even if he was undecided, even as a whole, what would happen to the dog if he came upon it. Assuming it could be reasoned with, in the most abstract sense of the word, would it belong to the singular convert it had run away from, or the all of them? Assuming it could not, could it be restrained until the transition of its previous master had progressed enough to accept its death? Mourning was nothing Greg had experience with - and wished no experience with. The anthropomorphisation of animals, strong in the one that had lost Neptune, would make its death feel like murder as long as it persisted. He was too close right now to be as unsympathetic as the more distant parts. He hoped it could be reasoned with.
*
Near the top of his winding footpath, he paused. The dog was gone. If he'd come this far up the hill that it had bounded toward and up without as much as a sign of it, he wouldn't find it without a thorough sweep. Those were resources he was unwilling to invest.
He balanced his perception and took a moment for himself. His gaze crept back along the landscape, until he was presented with Townsville twinkling through the trees. He took in the view without judgement or deeper thought, simply enjoying the terrestrial equivalent of the night sky aesthetically.
Then he glanced upwards and continued along the path, flexing his cold fingers in instinctive worry about his blood circulation, pondering more sapient prey.
*
By the time a silhouette of someone sitting on the railing near the outlook point begins to blot out the stars selectively, he's almost there. Perhaps he wouldn't have noticed him without the brief blink of a blueish sheen touching the edge of the dark blob, dispelling the illusion that the figure could be anything else, at any particular distance. His first guess would have been the top of a tree, had he paid enough attention to the visual clues to spot the feature by itself.
For a long moment, Greg stood and stared. The railing was an unfortunate obstacle and difficult to uproot. He could try to handle the character directly, but from the current distance it was like trying to hold onto a writhing fish with oiled hands. Perhaps this was the time to try approaching the lone human conversationally. There were enough things to light on fire if it went awry, after all. He was fairly confident in his ability to contain his find, just uncertain of the cost of such intervention.
He slid his arms behind his back, clasping one hand across the back of the other. Slowly, he walked toward the stairs. There was no clever way for him to approach this stranger, really. If the stranger was aware of the extending embrace and his attitude about it similary grim, approaching him without a weapon in hand would almost surely identify him as a convert. Sneaking across to him could be as detrimental as calling a greeting. There was no precedent for this and he was ill prepared for this particular approach.
First time for everything - most of his life experience was out of range, after all.
Most of the way up the stairs, he calls across the breeze, his voice bewilderingly human: “Are you all right up there?”
'Know your local terrain in all conditions before any disaster breaks out. It is no use having a high vantage point if you can't tell what is on fire,' Ethan mentally composed. Perhaps a note about setting up a long range radio antenna? He could see and video many distant blazes but that wasn't translating into escape routes for those caught amongst them.
'Know the call signatures for all local towers, and all prominant local ham radio operators' was already on his blog but his phone wasn't picking up the signals very well. He should have brought a seperate radio and spare batteries. It was something to grab the next time he passed home.
The voice startled him. Startled was generous. Actually, the voice made him jump so badly he fell off the railing he was perched on and nearly slipped and fell on his arse. Two new blog posts immediately begin unfurling in his mind: 'How not to get startled by sneaky zombies', because the idea of being bitten because he'd brained himself on a rock was just embarassing. And 'How to tell if someone is infected', because this human looked perfectly normal.
If it was really a human they should probably look panicked, unless they'd somehow missed the (alarmingly subdued) chaos of Townsville below.
Ethan scrambled for a firmer footing and swung so his path was to the other path. “I'm fine, what are you doing here?” If he was really lucky it'd be someone who'd fallen asleep in their car and was a fellow survivor trying to work out what was happening.
Greg paused, glancing across to the startled figure, illuminated almost purely by starlight. He was close enough to engage him as he had others. He could subdue him with some effort - but the human might hurt himself. His lips disappeared for a moment, pressed to a thin line, the subtlety of expression practically invisible at this distance. Then he thawed out of his thought processes - not much more than an arduous second later - and called across: “I was going to ask you the same thing.” He let a moment pass for Ethan to parse those words, then hurried forward in an almost bounding motion, for a moment invisible from Ethan's vantage point, hidden by the angle of approach. Then he's resurfaced, an anonymous shadow with starlit outlines describing a generic face, striding slowly along the platform, sauntering toward Ethan. “My dog's gotten spooked,” he explains, raising his left arm to thumb blindly at the view of Townsville as the source of the canine's upset. “He ran up here. Don't think I've got much of a chance of finding him any more, unfortunately.”
That is a surprisingly plausible excuse. He hadn't seen a dog running past but he hadn't seen a person approaching either, despite people being much less stealthy than animals. If the dog was fleeing it had more sense than the rest of them.
Okay, so probable-human. Ethan's thumb still hovered over his phone just in case. He wasn't sure what he could do with it should the human try to mug him for supplies or something nefarious, but something was probably in his subconscious and would occur to him.
“Locating fires,” he offers as his only explaination to the returned question. Several tense seconds pass in silence before Ethan finally asks: “What sort of dog?” They seemed strangely unconcerned. Maybe it was something like a kelpie and they fully expected it to be able to find its way home once it calmed down?
It took some conscious effort and gauging of memories on Greg's part to determine what the right distance was that he could get away with being and stay there. The urge to bridge the final approximate metre throbbed in his skull, its intensity lodged somewhere between the urge to breathe and the urge to eat when moderately hungry. He could suppress it for a while, easily even, but the longer he kept it contained, the more it would nag at him. Here was a mind that was mostly silent when queried, offering only hazy approximations, and a part of him begged for it to be peeled open, to be made accessible. The human is scared. Greg's gaze touched the phone briefly, amusing himself that body language was entirely sufficient to convey that much. A useless fragment of trivia at best.
“Labrador; in love with the ocean. We called him Neptune,” he explains. “Though surely the mythological Neptune smelled different,” he comments, amusement encoded in his tone. For someone looking for their dog, of course, he's definitely awfully unconcerned with looking through the landscape for signs of it. The details come too easily as that they're likely to be an outright lie, but he's staring at Ethan with what even the dim light up here suggests is an unusual curiosity. “You wouldn't happen to know what's going on, would you?” he asks, thumbing to Townsville again in a lazy gesture. Just take him down. This is a waste of time. Invisibly, he gently bit on his tongue, restraining himself.
“…look, if you don't want your dog you should find him a new family that cares,” Ethan says before his brain-mouth filter quite kicks in. People who had dogs liked dogs and cared for their companions and were less callous when their dog ran away. Especially when the city was on fire and animal control was going to be the lowest priority. “If I see Neptune I'll drop him off at the ranger's for you.”
Could the dog be helpful? Why was he so sure the dog existed? Probably the easy way facts about the dog were rattled off; if the stranger was lying there'd be less detail. If the stranger cared there would be more panic. If the stranger was a zombie it wouldn't pay attention to something like a dog. Err. At least hopefully not. So it was probably someone that didn't know what was going on, wasn't overly worried, but had managed to let their housemate or partner's animal out and needed to get it back before they got in trouble, or for the fires to get bad enough that they had an excuse for not having it.
Either way he should probably be running, given he'd just threatened to sort of steal the dog by proxy instead of keeping his mouth shut. “Good luck finding him?” the blogger offered in farewell as he began backstepping along his bit of path, unwilling to turn his back quite yet.
Of course, they weren't dealing with zombies - though the distinction might be arbitrary at this point. The insult in subtext certainly bounces off the stranger without so much as a look of confusion. The fact that he's undeniably alive and sapient seems like it might be almost coincidental. At the first step away, the stranger's gaze snaps down to the ground, watching Ethan's second step with a curious air, as if it were an unexpected detail, but one that demanded his full attention. Then he took a step toward the receding figure while letting his left hand lunge forward, trying to find purchase on Ethan's right arm, eyes on his face, one brow subtly raised in ambiguous body language: Confused? Stern? Amused? All of the above?
The wariness was well placed: the creepy stranger (that stunt earns the upgrade) makes a snatch at him. It's trivial to twist out of the way and use that momentum to spin until he's facing away and this time he doesn't care that his back is exposed because he takes to his heels and bolts. The path is dark and treacherous and his instincts really don't care. Flight is all that matters. A stranger acting weird was 1) one of the beings causing trouble, in which case he had to get to safety and report this new behaviour; 2) an ally, see point 1; or 3) some human weirdo using the chaos to stalk victims which was not cool.
The fingers catch on nothing, and with a subtly too abrupt motion, the stranger halts, holding still as a statue for a moment. It was no waste - from Greg's perspective, there was plenty of time to assess Ethan's behaviour. For a subjective eternity, assessing was all that he did, watching his human prey go through motions as if caught in treacle, much the same as the heartbeat he might be distantly aware of if he hadn't focussed his thoughts away from such details. Then he let his eyes drift closed, letting the human's image disappear from view, reaching outward in silence into that universe of serenity - sensing the fading, useless flutter of those near-opaque synapses as they escaped the radius where he was even aware of them.
Then he's snapped his perception back into real time and devoted more than a cursory attention to his motor control… albeit not to take up the chase. Instead, he straightened himself back out, following Ethan's sprint with his gaze, his peripheral vision almost more interesting. There was nothing here that would burn longer than absolutely necessary, but that was all he was looking for.
A thick line of flame abraded an arc of miscellaneous twigs and leaves, erupting just behind Ethan and to his right, overtaking him and curving into the path, disappearing in sparse patches scattered along its length where it found nought to feed on, where the simple geometric curve had crossed pure stone.
He had confirmation that this was one of the mutants! If he wasn't running for his life he'd be much happier at that knowledge. As it was he'd seen the videos and knew that getting caught was the worst thing that could possibly happen. So when the fire lashed in front of him instincts wanted to recoil but survival instincts refused to let him stop. Instead Ethan swerved to the left and the rockiest patch within the arc and leapt.
The flames licked at his boots as he passed over but no clothes caught fire and if the brief heat had been enough to burn him the adrenaline wiping out that pain. Stumbling on the landing and blinking bright after-images from his eyes Ethan shoved himself upright and kept running.
For a moment's misplaced instinct, the flames nearly flared up, an attempt at a wall where their more corporeal, less scorching telekinetic counterpart would have been better suited - Greg quelled the urge in time, instead exhaling his tension. If he let him run too far, he'd be out of range. It was likely he'd end up in the range of a different part of Greg, but up here, he couldn't know, he'd be out of the loop. He was responsible.
With a curt huff, Greg nudged himself into a run, tracing Ethan's path. For the sake of a surer step, he was slower - the distance between them would steadily increase at this rate - but that was something that he might remedy once the human had well and truly escaped the grasp of all psychic touch.
The vindictive part of him was tempted to manifest a pillar of fire in Ethan's path. At this range it wouldn't kill him instantly, but it would be an action of pure spite - and quite contrary to what he sought.
Instead, his gaze caught the branch of a tree and the base of it splintered with the abrupt force slamming into it. Four steady but rapid strikes later and the limb sagged, then fell, slashing diagonally across Ethan's path as it came down, blocking the easy route. To the left of the footpath was a slope only loosely secured with foliage, more rubble than not. To the right the landscape rose for a short while, forming part of the hill's irregular spine, better secured but difficult to navigate. The last of the arc fire illuminated the edges of the landscape faintly, mingling with the starlight.
There was a wooden crunching sound but it wasn't in front of him and so Ethan ignored it. Maybe that was a mistake. Thankfully the limb from the gum tree came down in front of him and not on top of him, but it was still in the way and momentum sent him smacking into it. In a perfect world he'd have scrambled up and over and kept going. In this world the attempt was made and rapidly aborted with a plethora of scratches now littering his forearms.
Two directions, which way to head? Up was a climb and there was no shelter on a bare peak. Also fire moved fastest uphill. Down it is. Only a few long strides down the hill Ethan began to wonder if this was a mistake but it was too late to change his mind now, and if he was having issues then someone wearing a human-skin that hadn't mastered simple acts like expressions was presumably going to have even more trouble coordinating limbs.
Feet slid and skidded on the scree and hands snatched at the rough shrubs, adding even more scratches along his arms. But even though it might be on an odd diagonal and at dire risk of skating on his bum and using three or four limbs as often as two, he was still moving and at a fair clip. That was the only thing that mattered. That and not falling off a cliff, that could interfere with things. Which side of Castle Hill was the quarry on, again?
This isolation was a problem. In any other situation, there would be more of him to call upon for help, to cut off the human's path. Ethan seemed to know what he was doing, how to overcome the obstacles. Greg could take him down rapidly and absolutely - but only at cost of the human's health.
The branch jerked from its angled rest across the path and skittered down the hill, pushing a crude selection of pebbles and dust across the landscape ahead of it. It's a moot gesture, though - it won't catch up with Ethan the way it's taking a tumble. It's not meant to catch up with him. It could do him serious harm.
Instead, Greg is soon clambering down the slope, as fast as precision allows - at this point easily matching Ethan's pace. Maybe a broader swath of fire would get the human to see sense. Something that he couldn't simply leap across. It felt like too dangerous a gamble, though. If this was chiefly instinct on Ethan's part, he might run through the flames before he understood their depth.
An invisible force rippled across the ground, tracing the outlines of the dark landscape with a faint breeze the only external evidence of its existence, until it found Ethan's back as a nudge gentled by distance. At the same moment, something touched against the outside of his right foot, pushing inward slightly.
Ethan was beginning to think he was going to repeat the Man From Snowy River's feat and survive this terrible descent, which was likely why cruel fate intervened. His boot caught against a root or branch or other piece of vegetation. Not an issue if he was being careful; it could even be a good thing to have bracing! A bad thing when moving hurriedly.
The extra force against his back barely registered as such, but it combined with momentum served to send his weight tumbling forwards despite the caught foot and he screamed as his ankle made a popping noise and there was a burst strange pulling sensation before the wave of pain hit. The next few seconds blurred out. Once coherence was regained he was in an awkward crouch on all fours and - shit that hurt! - his toes could wiggle. Probably a sprain, not a break. Ice it until the swelling went down, strap firmly, use a crutch until the pain stopped. A treatable injury.
Provided he could make it to shelter. If only it was darker and he hadn't screamed, then maybe he could hide under a bush and play dead and hope the thing ran past him. It was still behind and knew where he was, though, so he grit his teeth and fought to scramble onwards because there was no other option.
In a different state of mind, Greg might be concerned for the wounded man - but elation won out, the emotion of an inevitable predatory success. For a moment, he was almost sure he felt Ethan's heartbeat, fueled by fear and pain but so very much alive; an illusion, of course, product of his imagination. The distance between them shrank steadily. At about ten metres distance between the two of them, a shy flame lapped at the bush ahead of Ethan - only to grow into a tall but tame dancing strand, casting a thin orange light across the landscape and making it unmistakable that his position was known. In light of the implicit threat, the pain in his ankle dulled in one sense and stung worse in another - the awareness that it was robbing him of his chance to escape clawed at it punishingly.
Then something like a broad fist found his shoulders, registering as a gentle punch, then persisting as a completely alien pressure knuckling against his spine, pushing his torso down until it was pinned to the ground, as if someone's foot was resting on his back along with nearly the full weight of the associated human. Nothing about the force feels acorporeal - for a moment, Ethan's subconscience is convinced that the stranger is half perched on him by way of some surreal teleportation magic. A glance back reveals that there's still some distance, albeit dishearteningly little of it, the stranger's features better illuminated now than at any one time before. There's nothing dead about that expression - it's full of predatory delight, figure advancing with a focussed energy, almost upon him.
So much for hiding. Growling deep in his throat Ethan tried to drag himself around the fire but it must have filled his ears with white noise, because he hadn't heard the thing approaching but suddenly it was standing on his back and he was pinned. One hand flailed around his shoulders as he swung a fist at where its ankle should be. Nothing connected. He tried again and fingers failed to find a limb.
That didn't make sense. How could it be stepping on him when it was over there and approaching and oh god there must be two of them.
The pressure against Ethan's back increases and shifts, encompassing a fragment of the curve of his shoulders, restricting his ability to wiggle out from under the alien force. Then the serpentine flame dims and the crunch of the stranger's steps becomes infinitely more apparent, having slowed to a casual stride. Stray, sharp pebbles have begun to make themselves felt against Ethan's ribcage, gnawing at his skin, protesting their entrapment beneath him. The silence but for the accidental sounds of motion is absolute as the creature stops beside him, smoothly sliding into a partial kneel, right knee set down on the ground a few inches beside his chest. The more recognisable tactile shape of a palm and fingers presses against his spine between his shoulderblades, partly displacing the alien pressure, dispelling the last instinctual notion that somebody else's foot was there.
'Telekinesis, you fool,' his brain helpfully provided. So he only had to fight off one, not two beings. A being with telekinesis, pyrokinesis, super strength, and no busted ankle. The blogger frantically wiggled with even more determination. Forward didn't work. What about backwards? Sideways? Could he dig? He had a functional leg that could kick and attempted to employ that offensively as the rest of him tried to escape in four directions at once.
The pressure against his back spread like melting butter but refused to lose any force, bleeding down his shoulders until it's reached his elbows, creeping down his spine until his hips are pressed to the ground as well. “Don't make this difficult,” the stranger remarks softly, his calm tone suspended somewhere between soothing and patronising. “You've hurt yourself enough already.” Fingers creep up along the back of Ethan's neck, easing in between the strands of his hair and gently across his scalp, in perhaps some misplaced gesture of kindness.
His posture shifts, left knee setting down beside his right, right rising in turn, then sliding across to rest against Ethan's back as a corporeal counterpart to the telekinetic push. Some of the phantom pressure evaporates, remaining most prominent against his elbows, greatly restricting what he could do with his arms.
“I'm going to make this as difficult as I possibly can, you bastard!” Ethan gasped as he continued struggling. There wasn't anything else he could do and if he submitted he'd find out what happened to the other victims and he only wanted to learn that via a good hiding spot and a pair of binoculars, and preferably not even then.
It came out far more panicked than defiant. He was a survivor, he wasn't supposed to NEED famous last words. The pin was mostly on his arms and spine. Desperately Ethan tried to kick his boot heel through the other's kneeling leg or arm or head or any other body part that got in the way. If he did enough damage it might let go. If it let go he might escape. If he was really, really lucky he may possibly knock it out and then he'd have to try and break its neck or something, but he was scared enough that a little murder was seeming okay.
If Greg's exhale were audible, it might make his mild, forgiving frustration apparent. His free hand swerved back absent-mindedly, a subconscious gesture associated with another lip of telekinetic force weaving its way through the landscape, easing itself in behind him like a shield, then folding down to trap Ethan's legs against the ground gently. “I'm not here to do you any harm,” he comments, even while his fingers creep along the back of Ethan's head once more, a stray pet, before settling in a grip that's all too clearly trying its best to straddle the line between firm and painless. A light, telekinetic nudge wiggles against his forehead, feeling much like a dry tentacle, before his head is lifted and turned to the side.
The burning flame brightens a little, illuminating the two human figures with a soft light. Greg's left hand, not yet preoccupied, hovers a few inches away from Ethan's face. A scabbed, slightly nasty looking gash runs from the base of his middle finger down along the palm, curving outward slightly, then half the way around the bottom corner of the palm. It looks like someone might have given him grief with a knife and he got lucky that it didn't cut much deeper.
For a moment, it looks like the skin is subtly distending by itself, as if there might be a parasite shyly hidden beneath it, waiting to surface and confirm Delaney's bodysnatcher theory; then a twitch of the stranger's fingers and a falling flake of crusted blood reveals that it was probably just another telekinetic intervention. Briefly, the hand rises, tip of its ring finger disappearing between the mutant's lips, only for the fingers to curl, moistened digit dragging along the opened wound, smearing a thin trail of blood across the cusp of the finger. Whether due to a trick of the light or due to objective reality, the band of crimson seems to change its texture in the light, a regular pattern of little black dots forming amongst the dark colour.
Please be a trick of the light.
Bite. No, don't bite, clench teeth and keep your mouth shut. No kicking. No clawing. What was left? Ground too rocky to burrow into by wiggling. Screaming won't attract help. No James Bond cyanide pill. No Bond anything. Had to be something. Had to be.
Thoroughly restrained as he was, Ethan couldn't think of anything. Could barely think at all with all his higher processes abandoned in favour of the struggle to escape. Something bad was about to happen and he did not want to experience it. The blackened patches should be prompting thoughts on pathogens and necrosis and alien bioforms but that would require engaging parts of his brain that are in shut down mode. All he knows is that that blood is bad and sick and if it gets in him he'll be sick too, so get away get away get away.
Invisible fingers push against his lips, touching their tips against his teeth, then undulating in under his cheeks, wiggling to the back of his jaw and pressing uncomfortably against the joint. A different pressure against his chin tries to apply some additional leverage to pry his mouth open. For a long moment of a tension that steals Ethan's breath, the status quo is unchanged - then some part of his body physically relents. A split-second is all it takes for his teeth to come down against an obstacle appearing hard as rock, a thickening wedge, forcing them apart just enough to allow a finger safe passage past them. Ethan's fingers uselessly claw at the dirt, more stone than ground, nails protesting their treatment. It doesn't stop that ominously spotted fingertip from disappearing into his mouth, touching his tongue. The instinctive jerk of his tongue away from the tang of blood does nothing - it feels like there are grains of sand trapped between his tastebuds, themselves tasteless but nonetheless maddeningly tangible.
✘ IN PROGRESS