Cerberus Research Facility.

I still remember Dave’s face.

Not the way it smiled when he thought he’d told a funny joke, or his sarcastic grin or the roll of his eyes. No, nothing like that, of course not. That’d be something of a blessing. I remember his face when he was impaled on a Dragon’s Tooth.

Not a literal dragon’s tooth, mind you, but those devices. The ones that made people…something else. Like a husk of their former self. I’ve seen it. More than once. I’ve seen them picked up by the other…zombies and placed on the spikes. I’ve seen graveyards of corpses raised on Dragon’s Teeth. Some were still twitching days later. 

They all stopped, eventually. Dave, though, Dave moved the longest out of any victim I’d observed. That sounds so cold, doesn’t it? So detatched. But it’s true. I’ve been an observer from the start. Dave moved for nearly a week. Trembles, thrashing fits, low wails and moans when he should have been dead a few minutes after being risen like some gruesome trophy.

His face never changed though. Didn’t even twitch. The mouth was stuck open in a gasp, surprised that this is how it was going to end. His eyes were wide and unblinking, and his nose was broken. I didn’t stay around until the. Well. The ‘end.’ The ‘beginning.’ The beginning of the end. Whatever you want to call it, melodramatics aside.

But I saw Dave a while later. A month, maybe. I saw him on his own two feet, except they weren’t his feet. They were something different, he was something different. Pale blue and glowing with some cold, inner fire, devoid of all markers of sex, race, personality.

I remember his broken nose, though. Sure, it could have been someone else with a broken nose. It could have been another electronic, possessed shell of a man wailing in low and deep moans as it clawed and bit and ripped through people I once knew.

But it wasn’t, it was Dave. 

Even when he was shot in the skull with an Incisor sniper rifle and his headcage was ruined, I remembered Dave’s face. Even when I packed up that sniper rifle and continued through the broken remnants of Vancouver, I remembered his broken nose.

Bye, Dave.