Blood Infections

Siren

A/N
This part was getting irritating to write, so I decided to split it up. The second half will probably come after the next chapter. It's a bit short, but at least it's a update.

Also, it's in first person. I wanted this chapter to have a more personal feel to it, and this was the most effective way to do that. I'm still practicing this style, but I hope it's not too bad.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy.

-MB

Most know me as the Black Assassin, but in truth, I am not a killer. I am a saviour. Death is only a side-effect.

My story starts at the beginning of the war that brought the infection. I was barely ten years old then. The fractured remains of a government science team kidnapped me from my home and brought me to a base far beyond the edges of my known world. Before then, I was a good kid. A student in elementary school, I only periodically got into trouble, no more than the average kid. I wish I knew what singled me out amongst the countless other children, what made me special, what made me deserving of the torture I went through, but in the five years that have passed since that fateful night, no answers have come to me. Every day in that base was cold, dark and filled with pain. Every day was hell. My cell was stripped of all comforts, I slept on a metal sheet on the floor. For food, I was given some mysterious half-liquid substance that tasted like pencil shavings. Thankfully they had the decency to give me water through a tube in the wall, they wanted to keep me at prime hydration for their experiments. Oh, those experiments. I'd sit and I'd wait in terror for them all day, and when they'd come and get me, the procedure would last for hours. I didn't even get anesthesia. No. I wasn't worth the cost.

"Please stop!" I would scream. "Please just let me go!" But they never would. I watched them as they injected me with unknown serums, as my previously warm brown skin lost its color, as my eyes turned cyan blue. I watched when one day they got so fed up with my begging that they clipped my vocal cords. I remember the snap of the scissors and the moment I went silent. That's when they began to call me Siren. It was cruel; naming a girl who couldn't speak after the killers who lured in sailors with their voice. I hated the name, and from that day forward, I lost my identity. I had nothing that connected me to my past left, nothing to connect me to normality. I was disfigured, a shadow painted white by some cruel man playing god. Not one day goes by that I don't think about what they did to me, and how I have to save others from going through that. That's why I kill. To save others.

Now every month I break into the base and steal the updated copy of their list - they can't take just anybody. It's difficult, but I always manage to get through unnoticed. I know every flaw in their security system, every hole in their compound by heart. For instance, there is always a power surge at 1am on the second Saturday of the month, when the scientists reset the computers. It temporarily disables the electric fence on the outside while they reroute power to the servers they keep, careful not to let their data go offline. That's when I slip in. After getting past the fence, I travel through their ventilation system to an office on the third floor, I write down the names, then get out. However, this month I had another task. I had heard a young boy was dying, his brother had ventured out to find a cure for him and so far has been unsuccessful. Worryingly, the last time I saw him was three days ago when traveling to the western suburbs. I didn't want to think about what would happen to the kid if he died, the disease was painful and dying alone is not a good feeling. Sympathetic, I decided today I would steal a cure for him. It would be my act of kindness to balance my aching guilt. Before that, however, I needed the new list. I broke in with my usual procedure and saw that this month there were twenty names, seven more than last time. There was no way I could hit all of them. I pitied the poor souls I wouldn't be able to save.