Bay smiles faintly but with a strange sadness, and then he lifts his hand and brushes it along my cheek, and I tremble as if his body is wired into a high-voltage line.
"What happened, Alex, what did they do to you?"
But I just keep grinning widely.
"Nothing, luckily nothing. Eugene just exchanged a few words with me, some stupid stuff about how he searched for clues for twelve years, nothing more."
Bay hesitates.
"Something happened. You changed."
"I don’t understand."
Bay tilts his head slightly and concern appears on his face.
"Your complexion, your skin."
"What about it?"
"Listen, I think we should get out of here first."
He turns, stepping back from me, and goes to Eugene’s body in the cage, searching his pockets and pulling out a lighter.
"We need to clean up after ourselves, Alex."
"Wait, wait. What do you mean my complexion changed?" I insist, rubbing my cheeks with both hands, feeling nothing unusual.
Yes, they feel a bit cold, but we are underground and it is freezing here, so nothing strange about that.
Then I lower my gaze and notice my hands have a strange color and it is not dirt.
They are gray. Shit.
Bay says nothing and walks to the crates in the right corner, searching through them.
"The benefit of being in the basement of a funeral home is that they have large supplies of methanol, formaldehyde, formalin, and ethanol," he says dryly, pulling bottles out of the crates. "It just so happens they have conveniently provided us with everything needed to get rid of the traces."
Bay starts stacking the wooden crates around Eugene’s body.
But I ignore it. I walk to one of the Hanson zombies and pull a phone from its pocket. I have to know, I have to see. I switch the camera so it shows my face.
And I freeze.
Fuck.
My face is the same color as the zombies’ faces!
Gray, but with one, creepy difference: thin black veins running across it like charcoal lines, that is the only way I can describe it, and my eyes are a strange, luminescent shade of violet. Yes, I look like a damn revenant!
"What the fuck," I shout, dropping the phone to the ground because I cannot even look at it. A horror show.
I run toward Bay, my lips trembling. "What happened to me, Bay? I took their energy and then I controlled them, I wasn’t using my own energy, why did this happen, why do I look like one of them?"
Bay gazes at me and says, as he drags a crate into the cage, "We’ll get to that, but Alex, focus for now, can you bring those zombies here? They should burn with Eugene and the beta."
"Why are you ignoring it? Look at me, look what happened to me."
Bay stops, turns, walks toward me with quick steps, and lifts my head.
