Within minutes the duo arrived at their destination. The bridge. It had already been cleared out by the Fire Department and the first response team the night prior, only leaving a smoked-out culvert and what looked like what was at some point an entrance towards somewhere. The pair glanced around as they went to work. Jay moved to look at the caved-in entrance. Activating a device mounted on his wrist and let out a horizontal beam of light that scanned the rubble. While he was doing that Beatrice took a closer look at the area surrounding the culvert. "Hmm, definitely was a pretty hefty explosion that went off. What caused it though?" Jay dropped his wrist and moved forward towards the rubble. Resting his hands on it he continued.
"Our answers lie behind here. I'm sure of it. I'm going to call the Chief. See if he can get some bodies out here to blow this thing." Jay glanced back towards Beatrice, noticing her kneeling over something. The back of her dark blue coat towards him.
He walked over and saw it was the bloody footprints he mentioned earlier on their ride over, surprisingly the blood still looked fresh. "Really," he said, tilting his head up towards the grey sky and sighing before dropping his head and rubbing his temples with his index and thumb. "As I already said these prints lead nowhere Betty. What do you hope to find other than a dead end.”? Beatrice lifted her right hand pointing down at two footprints.
"The prints are different." Jay raised his brow, getting a closer look.
"Yeah, I see, the set before the last points towards our guy having-" Jay paused looking at the prints. The second to last being a large print with a slight, barely noticeable, bony visage while the set immediately following that was of regular human feet.
"The hell?" Jay breathed as he furrowed his brows.
"Something tells me our survivor is more than just a simple bum nut job under the bridge," she said, turning her emerald orbs towards Jay. That footprint, could it be? No, no way it's one of those, things. Why would one be out here? These thoughts swarmed Jays' mind as Beatrice scanned the print. Her eyes widened slightly as she stared at the screen.
"Bingo," she uttered. M- Cyte readings are coming from the blood. "The regenerative properties within the cells containing the virus are keeping the blood from oxidizing", she stated, staring at her screen. "Perhaps I'll finally be one step closer," she thought to herself as Jay looked down at her with a serious glare. The expression she had on her face. That of horror, of revelation, and excitement. He could only guess at what was swarming through her mind. And it worried him.
"We should probably report this in and call it a day. There's nothing else to be found here," Jay said to her as he turned to leave but he stopped as he noticed something, no, someone crouched at the top of a slope leading down into the culvert watching them. The figure seemed to notice as he began running from the scene. He narrowed his eyes.
"Beatrice." She was already ten steps ahead of him, pulling out her ABS type 20 pistol from her holster on her right hip and bolting towards the top of the slop. Jay sighed as he followed behind her. "Always on the move", he thought to himself.
"Whoever this guy is, he's fast. Faster than any person I've ever met," Beatrice thought as she gave chase. Despite her athletic capabilities she was struggling to keep up. Within minutes they were back in civilization, near one of Shikos shantytowns. The runner moved fast, cutting through a semi-crowded street food market hoping to lose Beatrice. The suspect was becoming smaller and more obscured within the tightly packed crowd of the food mart. She started becoming aggravated as she pushed through the crowd. "SCPD, move it! Out of the way," she shouted hoping for people to get the picture and clear out.
A small opening managed to appear for her as she quickly moved through. Once on the other side, she looked around trying to regain sight of the suspect. She managed to catch a figure quickly hopping from a ladder on a two-story tattered apartment and into a window two her left and bolted in that direction quickly going up the ladder and hearing slight screams from a woman as she neared the opened window. She hopped inside seeing the stranger quickly get off the floor and run out the front door as a woman wrapped tightly in a towel looked between the man who was making his escape and Beatrice with a deep red in her cheeks before bolting into what could assume to be her bathroom and slamming the door. Beatrice ignored the spectacle, completely honed in on catching her target.
They ran through the hallways of the apartment until they reached some stairs on the outside leading to a trash-filled back alleyway between it and some other apartments and shops. The suspect started knocking trash in Beatrice's way to slow her down, but it only served to annoy her more as she easily maneuvered around and over the trash. They soon came across a moderately sized fence at the end of the alleyway. What happened next took Beatrice by a bit of surprise. The man cleared the gate. Completely jumped over it in one mighty leap. Sure, the gate wasn't extremely large, but it was still large enough for a human not to be able to simply leap over it like they were doing hurdles in track and field.
Beatrice stopped at the gate. "Shit", she cursed under her breath as she glanced daggers at the mysterious man. He glanced back at her from which she managed to get a decent look at the man. He wore a tattered, dark grey cloak over his form with black jeans and boots. Behind the hood she could make out his fair skin and the front of his messy black hair, his lips pressed in a hard line and chapped, and most of his face being obscured by the hood over his head. The man quickly turned to run but stopped suddenly. On the other side of the alley, Jay stood lighting a cigar while leaning against their car. The runner gritted his teeth as he backed up a bit only to bump into Beatrice who had climbed over the fence. She took the man by his right shoulder and left arm and quickly pinned him to a wall.
"You're not going anywhere," she told him as Jay moved up to the two with a pair of mag lock cuffs, steel cuffs locked together via powerful magnets and moved Beatrice aside to place the cuffs on the man.
"You had to leave me behind, again," Jay uttered to Beatrice as he placed the cuffs on the suspect.
"You're just too slow, old man," she stated with a straight face as she watched him cuff the man. She looked at the man's face again and noticed him looking at her. She could see his eyes this time. There was something all most otherworldly and haunting about them. They were a beautiful shade of cerulean, as clear as the ocean or the blue sky of the world she's only seen in old movies and the picture books her father read to her as a child. They almost seemed to glow. She would be lying if she said she was mesmerized by them.
"Yeah, yeah," Jay said dismissively. "Alright you, just come with us quietly now. We have a few questions we'd like to ask ya and if you play nice, we might just let you go with but a slap on the wrist." Jay started moving towards the car to put the man in the back seat. The stranger and Beatrice's eyes remained locked for a moment before Beatrice averted her gaze in discomfort and the man was shoved forward a bit by Jay. "
Let's go, we don't have all day," Jay said with a bit of impatience bleeding through his mostly calm exterior. As the trio moved to the car Beatrice saw something on the ground where the man originally was standing against the wall. She went to pick up the object seeing it was some sort of notebook with a small keyhole on the outside. She raised an eyebrow staring at it for a moment before pocketing it and moving to get into the passenger's seat with Jay putting the man in the rear and then taking his spot at the driver's seat.
"If you try anything," Jay warned, looking at the man through the rearview and placing his pistol on the middle cup holder under the car radio.
The drive had been an uneventful one. For the entire drive, the stranger was deadly silent. He wouldn't utter a single word even when Jay tried asking him a few preemptive questions before they arrived at the station or make light conversation. He just sat there. Cerulean eyes staring out the window. Beatrice spared him a few glances through the rearview mirror.
'There is something about this guy,' she thought to herself. Perhaps a feeling of unease, of familiarity? She wasn't sure what it was. But they'd have their answers soon enough. She has a feeling that whatever happened under that bridge is connected to this man. Not only that but the fragmentation from an explosive device and those bloody footprints. She glanced at him through the mirror once more. Looking at his pale, tired, dirty face hidden partially behind the hood of the cloak he wore.
'Just who are you?' That question would ring around her head and gnaw away at her thoughts for a while. They arrived at the station within an hour. Jay parked the car near the entrance to the two-story, large, grey, and blue building. The top center of the rectangular roof was adorned with the SCPD logo, a golden shield with SCPD written in blue lettering, and a row of windows on the second and first floor with the first-floor windows ending a little way before the glass double doors leading inside the front. Jay put the car's gear in park and exited the vehicle to retrieve their suspect.
"Alright you, let's get moving," Jay spoke to the man as he got out of the passenger seat. The man stood and stared up at the building before Jay placed a hand on his shoulder and ushered him forward. Beatrice stared at them ascending the steps towards the entrance and sighed, closing her eyes before getting out of the vehicle herself and following in behind them.
