InFamous Bad Blood Part 5

Chapter Four: Wanted

"Cole…"

"Trish?"

"Cole, wake up…"

"What's going on?" he asks, opening blurry eyes to sterile white light.

"Oh god, Cole, I'm so glad you're awake," Trish says.

He turns his head toward her voice. As his vision clears, he sees that she's as beautiful as he remembers. Even with those dark bags under her eyes, even with her hair matted with dirt, she's still the best looking thing he's ever seen. He feels his heart lurch when he remembers that she died, and all of a sudden he doesn't know what to think.

He looks around, finds himself lying in a hospital bed, stripped to his boxers and t-shirt. He's about to ask her what the hell's going on when she throws her arms around him, hugging him tight.

There's no time to think. No time to apply logic. He wraps her up in an embrace, pulls her onto the bed with him and holds her as close as he can. Silent tears start to run down his cheeks as she puts her hand to the back of his head, a soothing caress to calm his anguish.

He remembers how her body felt against his, her smell, how smooth her skin always was because she never wore makeup - all the reasons he loved her. The moment seems so perfect. It's like she never left him.

"I was so worried," she says, her voice a whisper. He can hear the strain in her voice as she struggles not to cry. "I thought I was losing you."

He clings to her like he's drowning and she's his lifeline. "Don't worry. I'm here."

This is a dream. He knows it is. Trish died. He held her in his arms as the life fled out of her. He still remembers the words she said. Beautiful words that filled him with strength, empowered him to go on doing the right thing.

That doesn't mean he wants to wake up.

He wonders if maybe he's dying as well, lying on the side of the road at the edge of the dark zone. Beyond safety. Beyond help.

Maybe this is an illusion. Or a reunion, on the other side.

"Yeah, you are," she breathes, almost like she can't believe it. "I'm scared, Cole. I don't know what I'd do without you. You can't go back out there again. You're taking too many risks. You should stop this before you get hurt."

"This isn't about me, Trish." He doesn't want to argue with her. He's been without her so long. He knows she's just frightened for him, that she'll see sense. "This city needs me. You should understand that better than anyone."

"I need you. I know you don't want to admit it, but you're so much like this city. You put on a brave face and you fight, but deep inside you're hurting. Broken. They don't see it, but I do. You're not a lost cause, Cole, but this city is. I don't want to see it drag you down as well. Please, let's just go somewhere and forget about all this. If you won't do it for yourself then do it for me. I love you."

Cole's body goes stiff. He feels his chest tighten as she speaks, like his heart's breaking, and he squeezes his eyes shut. He knows that this isn't a dream, or any kind of reunion. He knows that he's not sitting in a hospital bed with a living Trish begging him to run away with her.

Even if he'd love to believe that she'd never died, there's one thing that he can't accept. One major thing wrong with this picture.

He grabs her around the wrists, forcing her away, eyes flashing as he glares up at her. She stares back at him, shocked, and then her features twist into an ugly sneer. She lunges for him, breaking his grip and cupping his face, bringing her mouth towards his. Black drool runs out over her lips, a malformed tongue flicking out, grey and gnarled, attempting to snare his own.

He throws her off the bed and she hits the wall. She slumps to the floor and buries her head in her hands. Then she starts to sob.

Guilt spears him in the guts. He wonders if maybe he was wrong. If there's still some after effect of the tar making him see things. He climbs off the bed and pads across the linoleum on bare feet. He reaches out to touch her shoulder.

And then the pitch of her weeping changes, rising into a chuckle, and from there into an insane, gleeful cackle. She swats his hand away, glaring up at him with eyes narrowed. Her cheeks are wet with tears. Black tears.

He recognises the expression. He recognises the laugh. And this time he gets angry.

He grabs her by the throat, hauling her up onto her feet and slamming her against the wall.

"What the hell's going on?"

The mirth vanishes. Now she's staring at him, her eyes cold and hard.

"Why won't you love me?"

Her face distorts, bones moving beneath her cheeks and chin. Her eyes fill with tar, turning black from corner to corner. It seeps out over the lids, thicker than tears. Almost like blood. Her soft, mousy hair falls out in thick clumps. The mask is gone, and all pretence with it. He's not dealing with Trish, or a sham version of her, anymore.

It's Sasha who's standing in front of him, still wearing Trish's clothes.

That just makes him angrier.

She brings her hand up, tracing the hard line of his jaw with her fingertips. Her touch is gentle. Affectionate. Loving. It disgusts him.

"Because you're not her."

"But I was."

"No," he says, "you weren't. Someone like you would never understand. You could never be her."

She smirks, running her fingers across his cheek. Then she sinks her nails into his flesh and rakes them down his face. He grunts - half-surprised, half-hurt - and then slams her hard against the wall. Electricity crackles in his free hand. A warning. She smiles.

"I always loved the way you hurt me, Kessler. So cold, so cruel, so brutal," she purrs. Her features turn hard again. Fury blazes in her dark eyes. "But when I looked under your skin, I always saw her. Festering like an open wound. All that rage, all that frustration. I thought it was me that made you so deliciously mad. You should have burned her out long ago. I'd have happily taken her place."

"You knew, didn't you?" he snarls, his grip tightening around her throat, "you knew we were the same person."

"Same memories, same thoughts." She brushes the blood from his face and smears it across her lips. The hand on her neck doesn't seem to bother her. "Same canker in your hearts. I meant what I told you, Cole. It was too late for Kessler, but there's still hope for you. I can help you to forget about her, if you help me forget about him. We can start again. We can have fun. I can give you everything you want."

"No," he says, mind filled with Trish, "you can't."

She narrows her eyes again. If looks could kill he'd be nursing a fatal head wound right about now. Then her expression softens. "Suit yourself, love."

She grabs him around the head, pulling him in so that her lips are over his ear. Her words come out in a breathy whisper, somewhere between seduction and a snarl. "Just remember, I'll be waiting. I'll always be here for you, and when the loneliness drives you insane, and it will, you'll come crawling back to me."

Part of him had liked that voice, the first time he'd heard it. He'd only just been coming to terms with his powers. Trish still hated his guts for what had happened to her sister. He'd been out of his depth, confused and alone, isolated, from her, from everyone. She spoke to him, played on his fears and hopes, his desperation.

The rest of him just rallied against her, hard. His loyalty to Trish, his desire to do the right thing, for her, for the city, had won out. They'd let him beat her.

Now, the way she speaks to him just makes him feel soiled.

She trails her tongue along his ear, and he grunts in disgust. A second later, she bites him, savaging his neck, tearing into it. He throws her off and shoots a lightning bolt into her leering, bloody face.

That's when the illusion gets even more surreal. She splits apart, his lightning blast punching a hole right through her. What's left of her lunges at him, transforming into the tar he knows and hates, and splashes down over him.

It fills his eyes, his ears, his mouth, his nostrils. Pretty soon, he's drowning in it. He staggers, clawing at the ooze sticking to his face, but he can't get it off.

The darkness swallows him and he falls, not to the floor, but into an abyss. An abyss that doesn't seem to have an end.

-----x-----x-----x-----x-----x-----

When reality hits, he knows it.

Everything hurts, from his pounding head down to his aching feet, from his pummelled ribs to his throbbing fingertips. He's so drained that he can barely move, barely see, barely hear. But by God he can feel.

He's lost that blissful painlessness he had in Sasha's delusion. Still, he'd rather this agony than her mind games any day.

He opens his eyes. The world's a blur. Buzzing invades his ears and he groans, wondering what the hell's going on. He hears voices talking. Two men are holding a muffled conversation in unfriendly tones. He strains to hear what they're saying.

"Shit, he's waking up."

"Do something about it."

"Like what? Tranquilisers won't work on the guy."

"Just move. I'll do it the old-fashioned way."

Cole forces himself to focus. He rolls onto his back, hands snapping up to catch the butt of the rifle aimed at his head. He stares up into gasmask features. Two red pinpoints of light stare back at him. The man swears, and then takes a hard kick to the stomach, which sends him flying backwards out of sight.

The room tilts without warning. He flies off the bed he was lying on, crashes into the floor and then hits the wall. He looks up and sees half a dozen others, all wearing the same outfit as the first. And all clinging for dear life to anything they can catch hold of.

Two men are sitting at the far end of what looks like the compartment in an aircraft. Through the front window, he can see Empire City stretching out below.

That's when he realises that the buzzing noise he can hear is the sound of helicopter rotors spinning.

He doesn't stick around to fight with the other passengers or even ask any questions. He just staggers to his feet, grabs the compartment door and throws it open. Everyone starts swearing as he stands on the treshold, a gale force wind hammering him from all directions at once. The urban sprawl of the city - his city - calls up to him.

It's a good fifty metres to the ground, twenty to the nearest rooftop. Even if he's not human, he's still covered in Sasha's tar. He's not at a hundred percent right now.

Still, when he thinks about it, it's better than staying here.

He bails out, the wind closing like a cyclone around him, jerking his arms up over his head. He braces. Then he hits the roof. Pain rockets up his legs, but the bones don't shatter. They just compact and make him wish he was dead.

He sprawls forward onto his face, cracking his jaw on the concrete. He bites through his tongue, swallows a couple of teeth and a mouthful of blood. He's trying to get his bearings when he hears something land hard behind him.

Now he knows he's in trouble. Real trouble.

Two more impacts. Enraged voices yell for him to stop. There's not a chance in hell. He takes off at a sprint, leaping to the next roof and clearing the gap by a good few feet. His pursuers give chase and they're matching stride with him, running as fast, jumping as far. Except that they don't have the tar and a whole heap of injuries to contend with.

They're going to catch him and he knows it.

He starts to get desperate. He fires off a blast as he's running across the roof of an old apartment building. It eats through the rust on the moorings of an old water tower. The heavy, iron drum pops its bolts and tumbles down behind him. It misses him by a hair's breadth as he leaps to the next building. He stops to look back at the damage and catch his breath. Right now, that oxygen he's sucking in is the finest thing he's ever tasted.

But the electric drain's still killing him and he's not close enough to a power source to recuperate.

The heap of scrap metal blows apart. And then the gasmask-wearing men are after him again. Black fatigues, body armour, assault rifles - these guys are soldiers. He doesn't know if what he just saw was a good, old-fashioned explosive, or if someone just fired off a powerful telekinetic blast. Either way, he doesn't intend to stick around and find out.

On any other day, he'd be the one picking the fight with troublemakers like this. But they seem fixated on him and not destroying Empire City like every other psycho in these parts. He figures the best thing to do is just keep their attention.

He's only just settled on that plan when they peel off and give up. He keeps running, wondering if they're trying to outmanoeuvre him. Maybe they think he'll slow down when he doesn't see anyone chasing him. Then he understands why they stop.

As he reaches the edge of the next rooftop, the air whips up around him. A second helicopter emerges from the gap between the buildings and rises to hover in front of him.

"Shit," he grunts.

It spins around, bearing its open compartment to him. His eyes widen when he sees the figure standing in the doorway. A woman. Tall, maybe taller than him. Lean, near-androgynous, but muscular. Her dark, shoulder-length hair whips around her features. She's wearing a dark blue three-piece - tie, trousers and jacket - with a white shirt. She holds out a gloved hand towards him, and the air distorts around the tips of her bare fingers. A wave of pure energy hits him like a sledgehammer and throws him backwards across the roof, where he slides into the concrete parapet.

He pushes himself up and groans. "Son of a..."

The woman jumps down onto the rooftop.

"Don't make this any harder than it needs to be, McGrath," she says, voice raised to be heard over the helicopter's engine.

"Listen, lady, I'm having a real bad day, so you'd better just back off and leave me the hell alone."

"Like it or not, you're coming with us." Her eyes glow. She's warning him. If he resists, she'll make him pay. "Don't make this any harder than it has to be."

"If you think I'm honestly gonna do this the easy way, then you don't know me too well."

He climbs to his feet and clenches fists around the sparks crackling in his fingertips. He blasts her with his right hand, then his left. Bolts of energy hit her full in the torso and ripple out across her body. She staggers like she's been hit, but then comes straight after him again. Smoke rises from the blackened material of her suit jacket.

His eyes widen. He's never seen anyone take two clean blasts and just walk them off like that. He throws his hands forward and sends a shockwave rippling towards her. She weathers the impact, letting it wash over and around her. She just keeps on coming.

He's struck by the wild idea that she's just trying to intimidate him. That she's not as invulnerable as she's making out. Maybe he can beat her if he just pushes her a little harder. He's sure that if he was a hundred percent, he'd have fried her and her buddies by now.

But nothing's going according to plan today.

He tries to hit her with another blast, but his powers fizzle out the moment they hit his fingertips. All he can manage is a prickle of static.

With no other option, he swings a vicious right hook at her head. She ducks and grabs him by a fistful of jacket. Then she kicks him in the stomach hard enough to make him retch. He rams his elbow into her chest and then drops into a sweep, kicking her feet out from under her. She hits the floor and a second later he's on top of her, one hand wrapped around her throat, the other channelling what little power he's got left. He turns his fingers into a tazer.

"Who the hell are you?"

By now, he knows that she's a Conduit. A powerful one at that. That doesn't narrow things down. There has to be hundreds of them in Empire City alone, their powers bloated and out of control thanks to the Ray Sphere.

The real tip-off comes in how she uses her powers. She's had training. That much is obvious. Combined with the suit, the helicopter and the team of soldiers, that suggests she's got some kind of organised support. He starts to wonder if maybe there's some official agency using Conduits that John and Moya forgot to tell him about. It wouldn't have been the first time either of them had left him in the dark.

She's not in the mood to talk. She plants her boot in his groin, knocks away his hold on her neck with a forearm blow to his wrist, and then catapults him over her head. He sails through the air, the world spinning, and then crashes to the floor. He struggles to his knees and takes a kick to the jaw for his troubles. The blow spins him around and almost knocks him back down. His face goes numb. He spits out a mouthful of blood and starts coughing.

The woman's hands grip his head. Her gloves are off, her bare palms clamped to his temples. A jolt of pain rockets through his brain and then everything goes black.

He doesn't even feel himself hit the ground.

-----x-----x-----x-----x-----x-----

The first thing Cole notices when he wakes up is the pain.

The second thing is that he isn't hurting as bad as he should be.

Wherever he is now, the air's humming with electrical current. His body's feeding on it, mending itself, growing stronger by the second. He's lying on padding, soft and smooth, smelling like sterility. Above him there's light, bright and colourless.

It feels like a hospital bed, but not any hospital in Empire City. No one's screaming or crying or groaning in pain. There's no underlying stink of blood or vomit.

That's when he remembers - the helicopter, the woman, the fight. His first thought is a laboratory, that he's locked up in some government installation waiting to be sliced open.

But he's not strapped down. Maybe he's wrong.

Leads trail from pads on his bare chest to a heart monitor standing beside the bed. He tears them off without noticing the way they cling to his skin. The machine starts to protest, confusing him for dead instead of just impatient. He reaches over and sucks the electricity out of it.

The hit makes him feel better. His bruises are fading and his cuts are sealing shut, turning into scars and vanishing. Pretty soon he'll be back to normal.

His cell's an odd one. The floor and ceiling are plain white, but the walls are metal and glass. It looks like some kind of observation room. There's a bunch of computer terminals and other devices in the chambers outside. Stuff that looks like it's jumped straight out of a science fiction film. The kind he and Zeke used to watch.

Other than the bed and the metal tray tables surrounding it, the room itself is empty. There's only one door, and he gets the impression that it's locked.

There's no sign of the tar on his skin, meaning someone's swabbed him off. A delicate operation considering his aversion to water. His clothes too. The pants he's wearing are clean and they've laid his jacket and t-shirt out on the table for him.

So, they kidnapped him, patched him up and washed him off. Then decided to do the same for his clothes. He's got to admit that kind of freaks him out.

He pushes himself off the bed and checks the door. He was right. It's not opening. He tries shorting out the locking mechanism with a burst of electricity, but it doesn't budge. They knew what to expect from him, and they've shielded their electronics to stop him tampering.

If he can't get out through the door then he'll try the window instead.

He draws his hands back, charging up a shockwave. The ceiling lights start to flicker and dim. Once he's built up enough power, he throws his palms forward. The blast crashes against the pane and then ricochets right back at him. It carries him off his feet, throws him over the bed and into the wall, along with everything in the room that isn't bolted down.

The lights shatter. Glass tears his arms as he brings them up over his head. Moments later, he's pelted with trays and metal tools that bruise and slice. Even so, he's lucky. The bed's fixed to the floor, so it doesn't wind up crushing him.

"You're a difficult man to find, Mister McGrath."

He recognises that voice. Its that same woman that he spoke to on the rooftops. The same one that beat the crap out of him. She's speaking through an intercom system wired into the walls.

He picks himself up off the floor, cursing under his breath. She's standing on the other side of the window with arms folded, watching him with cold, grey eyes. She looks the same as before, except that she's changed her jacket for one that doesn't have scorch marks on it.

In her right hand she's clutching a sheaf of printouts. His entire life compiled in one document, if he had to guess. She glances at it, almost like she's comparing it to the real thing.

"No fixed abode, no regular haunts, no friends to speak of." She reads it off like an accountant quoting numbers. His jaw clenches. "We were lucky to have found you at all. And so were you, frankly. You were in a bad way."

"Yeah, real lucky," he grunts.

He snatches up his t-shirt from the debris and slips it over his head. Then he walks over to her, until there's just a couple of feet of air, and the glass, between then.

"This may be hard for you to believe, but we aren't your enemy."

"Yeah?" He slams his palm on the window. She doesn't even flinch. "Don't know many people who'd consider this friendly."

"It's a necessary precaution. Doesn't this seem like a lot of effort if we were just going to kill you, Cole?"

"Kidnapping me seems like a lot of effort just for a chat."

"I needed you in a secure location. I also needed to make sure you weren't followed, bugged or otherwise compromised before you got here. The only way I could see to do that was to take control of the meeting from the beginning."

"Paranoid. Now I know you're a Fed'."

"Not quite." Her lips curl up in a thin smile. It's the first emotion she's shown since they met. "My name is Marlena Klein. And I am the leader of the First Sons."

He snorts. "Like hell. Those clowns are so disorganised now, I wonder if they even have a leader. The right hand doesn't know what the left hand's doing, unless they're fighting each other. You honestly trying to tell me that you're the one in charge of those morons?"

"No. What I'm trying to tell you - if you'd lay off the attitude for a few seconds - is that I'm the leader of a faction that can help you bring order to this city. And considering what the Reapers did to you, I think you need all the help you can get."

He doesn't have any comeback to that. Instead, he just grunts and walks away. Her icy, colourless stare bores into the back of his head. He's grateful for the fact that they patched him up, but she's still part of what caused this. Kessler and his First Sons maimed this city, ended thousands of lives, and ruined hundreds of thousands more. They took everything away from him. His life. His friends. Trish.

But even as he turns his back on her, she keeps speaking.

"You might not believe this, but Kessler wasn't just some terrorist out to cause chaos. He had a plan. An important one. One that might just save the world one day. He trusted me enough to tell me his real reason behind coming to Empire City and my group are dedicated to continuing his work. But I can't do that without you. You were the key to all of this. You must have figured that out by now."

"He told you his real reason for coming here?" Cole asks. A sneer creeps across his features as he looks back. "What makes you so special?"

She glares. There's a deep, festering animosity in those eyes. Beneath all the pleasantries, beneath the pleas for his help, he realises that she despises him. She seems to like the idea of teaming up even less than he does. He starts to wonder what could have inspired that kind of hate.

And then she says something that answers all his questions, and wipes the smirk off his face.

"He was my father."

-----x-----x-----x-----x-----x-----