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While living under quarantine, it had become standard for Alex to go on supply runs every week.
After all, though he'd been careful to pick a new hideout in a part of the city both less infected and consequently less closely surveilled by Blackwatch, he couldn't just let Dana run to the store on her own. It was too dangerous. Even the safer areas had their risks. Martial law was still in effect. No stores were actually open - it was purely a matter of breaking in and seeing what you could find that hadn't been picked over by some other scavenger.
That meant, too, that the places with the most supplies left were the ones most dangerous for scavengers to reach. Alex didn't even bother checking the stores closest to the safehouse. Surely, they'd long since been emptied of any useful household supplies or food that hadn't gone bad. And if they hadn't, the last thing you wanted to do was to run into a hungry survivor with the same goal as you.
Not that he cared. He'd ran into scavengers before. He had no particular desire to kill them, but it didn't really matter - usually, one glance at Known Terrorist Alex Mercer from their local emergency broadcasts and wanted posters would be enough to send them running without a word, so he didn't even have to consider it. But if Dana were to run into that sort of situation alone... well.
He did the supply runs himself. And he did them in the Red Zone.
He had a system. Using data that Dana had helpfully downloaded for him, he cobbled together a map of the Red Zone's stores, occasionally filling in any missing or incorrect information with his own observations. He hit one or two places a week, taking notes on their remaining supplies, if there were any, so he knew when to change locations.
Getting everything done at once meant less activity for Blackwatch to pick up on.
This location was entirely new to him. A chain grocery store on the outward edge of the zone, near the harbor. An unassuming building with an unlit sign on top advertising it as a "Food-N'-Such", its parking lot empty save for a couple of long-abandoned vehicles and the long-decayed corpse of an infected walker.
Not too much viral activity in the area, he thought, as he quietly slid the shopping cart past the sliding glass doors he'd pried open. Good.
The first thing he noticed was, as usual, the smell of rotting fruit from the once-colorful produce section. Pungent, but compared to the smell of the Red Zone outside, almost like perfume.
The second thing he noticed was that the store wasn't as dark as he expected it to be. Though the fluorescent lighting had long since had its power cut, natural lighting from the combination of a partial glass roof and a crumbling hole in the ceiling meant he didn't have to bring out his flashlight. How convenient.
Standing at the front of the store, Alex scanned the signs above the aisles, each marked with a number and what you might hope to find there, cross referencing them with the crumpled paper in his hand.
Food, soap, toilet paper, feminine hygiene products, bottled water...
Usually, Dana didn't have any particular requests. And so, it was always the same run, every single week.
Despite this, Alex tried to get an assortment of things. Not that you could afford to be too choosy - you could, in addition to the fruit, write the refrigerated and frozen foods off entirely - but he didn't want her eating the same variety of soup three times a day. As he rolled his cart slowly through the canned foods aisle, he occasionally plucked a few cans from each shelf, somewhat influenced by the soft voices of the dead hissing in his mind.
...love corn...
...my mother's spinach casserole...
...not Carl's brand soup, it tastes like shit and looks like it too...
Not that he particularly enjoyed paying attention to them, of course - not in most areas of his life. And yet, he had no personal experience with any of this.
He'd never consumed anything in his short life that wasn't still alive. But they had.
As he moved through the rows, he was pleased to find that the store had barely been touched, aside from some knocked over shelves and rubble not far from the hole in the roof. It looked as though a Hunter had broken through - or perhaps been knocked through - and then quickly left after finding nothing of interest, like some sort of particularly massive and clumsy dog.
Fortunately, the toppled shelves in question had been the cleaning supplies and the alcohol aisle, neither of which particularly interested him, aside from temporarily lifting a shelf to fish out a few unbroken bottles of hand soap, dish soap, and laundry detergent.
But the most important thing about this particular store being well-stocked was that this time was slightly different. Dana did have a particular request of him.
Part of why she didn't ask him for much was knowing that certain foods were more popular than others. Humans were animals, and in times of chaos and fear, they were partial to impulse. Many were far more likely to grab comforting, popular foods, snacks in bags and cases of drinks, than things that could potentially last months or years but wouldn't taste as good.
But she'd had a craving, she'd said. Not a big deal, she'd said. But if he happened to find them while he was out there, well. She wouldn't mind having a big old bag of unopened Ray's barbecue chips to tear into.
Which is why Alex had carefully scanned his map, and planned to break into one of the stores most likely to have a variety of supplies left.
Which is why Alex was piling ten bags of Ray's into the shopping cart. Five barbecue, and five of other varieties, just in case she wanted to try something different.
Alex frowned as the bags puffed out, taking up most of the space in the cart with the excess air inside of them. Typically, he only took one cart's worth home. Less time to transport, less suspicion aroused.
But with a cart full of potato chips, this meant far less room for anything else.
Food, soap, toilet paper, feminine hygiene products, bottled water...
Well, then. He supposed that technically he'd gotten everything, even if he had less food by volume. They still had some canned foods stockpiled at home, anyway - he always got more than they needed each week.
He flipped the shopping list in his hand over and made some notes on the back as to the remaining stock. Lots of cereal. Soap aisle down. Good amount of canned food.
Plenty of potato chips left.
Once more approaching the front of the store, with his shopping duties now finished, Alex's body rippled as casually as anything, looking as if flesh and fabric alike had suddenly sliced themselves into ribbons. They melted into black biomass and contorted around him, gradually taking a different, yet still humanoid shape. The colors of that shape, like a cuttlefish changing its hue, melted into blue scrubs and white fabric. The unassuming form of a doctor.
People liked doctors. People trusted doctors. They looked like they belonged in a disaster scenario.
(Though this particular one had been on Blackwatch's payroll, and had had the misfortune of knowing a door code when Alex had not.)
Ahead of his precious cargo, he silently slipped through the double doors. A quick canvas of the surrounding area for walkers or soldiers assured him it was safe to roll the cart out of the store. Careful not to jostle the contents too roughly, the wheels slowly bumped and clicked over the threshold and onto the asphalt, until they drew to a stop a good fifteen feet into the parking lot.
He dropped to his knees, digging through the bag of supplies he'd tied to the undercarriage. Within was the solar-powered flashlight, a folded tarp, and some tie-down straps - the sort you might use on a vehicle.
The flashlight, he still didn't need. But the rest, he pulled out, unfolding the tarp and tossing it over the top of the basket. He tugged it into position, and then gradually tied it down, leaving it slightly looser than usual. For the sake of the chips.
The funny part about wearing a disguise is that sometimes, it didn't particularly matter. If he was doing things only Alex Mercer could do, he might as well not have it on.
Which is why, as he lifted the cart above his head as effortlessly as anything, leaping a good thirty feet to the nearest rooftop, he let the biomass melt back down into leather and denim.
Part of the planning process was always an escape route. Dana called him paranoid for cross-referencing the latest radio chatter and Blackwatch data with his little grocery store map. What are they going to do, stop you from stealing food?
But Alex didn't want them to know he stole food. He didn't want them to think he had a weakness, or that there was someone he was stealing food for. That meant risks like Blackwatch planting bombs in grocery stores. That meant them killing even more innocent people.
So Alex took the less-traveled streets, even if it occasionally meant having to outsprint a Hunter with a shopping cart held above him. But he was perfectly capable of that.
It made the trip much longer, but that helped ensure he wasn't being trailed, either. And it wasn't like there was anything that needed to be refrigerated.
He didn't stop checking over his shoulder until he was in the hallway outside of their safehouse: an apartment on the top floor of a tall building. The other apartments lay largely abandoned, save for a survivor or two on different floors that he kept an eye on. (Truth be told, he would've preferred they weren't there, but he wasn't in the business of evicting people during a epidemic. He wasn't that kind of monster.)
Having finished carrying it up the stairs, the wheels of the cart resumed their click-click-click as they rolled down dusty wooden floors, eventually coming to a stop at the end of the hall.
Then, after a quick check to make sure none of the straps had come loose, Alex finally let his shoulders sag with relief.
Another successful supply run.
"I'm home," Alex announced, awkwardly angling the cart through the door.
"Alex," Dana replied, hurriedly getting up from where she'd been sitting at the front of her computer monitors, even though she seemed to be in the middle of something. She always made sure to help him put away the groceries - perhaps she felt it was the only way she could repay him. He felt strangely guilty about that.
But he also let her do it, even if he could've done it himself in half the time. It felt... nice.
"So how did it go?" She asked, watching him work to unbuckle and loosen the straps, wrapping them back up for the next time he needed them. He noticed a flicker of movement - she was standing on the tips of her toes, subtly leaning towards him, for some reason. He slowly lifted his head to look at her more closely.
Alex wasn't good at reading people. Especially the people he cared about, few though they were in number. But in her expression, he noticed something... expectant, perhaps excited. Anticipation.
The chips.
He wasn't used to being able to do something nice for someone. Wasn't used to excitement, to gratitude. To the concept of gifts, or kindness. He simply did things because he felt they should be done. Dana should be well fed, should be comfortable, should be happy.
Was this what that was? He'd gone out of his way, certainly; there had been far closer stores, less dangerous ones.
But they wouldn't have had chips. And he'd done that for her, without even telling her.
He'd done it simply because she'd asked, or so he'd thought. Something in her expression made him feel like there was more to it than that. He'd... wanted her to have something nice, that she wanted, even if she didn't need it.
It was a peculiar sensation. Wanting to please someone. Caring about them.
The voices whispering at the back of his brain told him that this was normal for one you called family. Even though she wasn't his real sister. Even though he wasn't her real brother.
Alex didn't know how to feel about that. And he decided not to think about it, at least not right now, while Dana was looking at him with those hopeful eyes.
So, with a little excitement of his own fluttering unfamiliarly in his chest, he yanked off the tarp, dramatically revealing the bounty of chips in the cart.
"Holy shit!" Dana exclaimed. "You're fucking awesome!"
Before he could formulate a response to that, he suddenly found her body flung against his own, a pair of arms wrapped around his trunk, his shoulders stiffening up in surprise.
If she minded that he didn't hug her back, she didn't show it, because she was already pulling away to grab one of the bags, eagerly ripping it open. The smell of artificial barbecue seasoning wafted through the air, at once both wholly familiar and not.
She crunched on a handful of them as Alex stood there, shoulders awkwardly hunched, expression still contorted in mild shock.
When he finally snapped out of it, he remembered to close and lock the door behind them, for safety's sake. He turned around only to find a large, bright orange chip being thrust towards his face. "These are the fucking best. Here, try one."
His reflex was to refuse. He'd never eaten normal food, had never tried, and suddenly wasn't sure if he even could. But something - perhaps curiosity, perhaps a fear of disappointing her in her moment of joy - stayed his hand.
Tentatively, he leaned forward and slightly opened his mouth, allowing her to place half of it between his teeth.
Crunch.
Alex's eyes widened.
An explosion of flavor in his mouth. Once again, both wholly familiar and not. From the cacophony of voices orbiting his brainstem, this was a food most of them had tried - had liked. It was hard to tell if he liked it, but he didn't dislike it. It was simply new, to the point of being overwhelming.
He chewed, on reflex. Wafer-thin bits of dried potato, seasoned so thoroughly as to become unrecognizable as one, crunched rhythmically against his teeth. It was... oddly pleasing, he had to admit.
But he still couldn't say if he enjoyed the experience. Not without more information, after all.
"...Could I have another?" Alex asked, and Dana's grin was wider than he'd ever seen it.
From then on, during his supply runs, Alex always looked for Ray's barbecue chips.