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Nature's fingers, the delicate and thorny vines had crawled up the sides of the apartment building, searching for sunbeams. It was a rare night. Cloudless. Clear and pristine over the skirts of Eden. The full moon baked the overgrown tower in a reflection. The city slept, but the two occupants of Apartment 1208 were awake to witness nature's claim to man's work. The moon had a message to bear, but neither one was listening. Their minds were focused on what had brought them to this moment. And what they had to do next.

The Continental Apartments building had long since disintegrated into a hostel for the destitute outcasts of the Eden Conglomerate. Every human born or naturalized in Eden were allocated a fair sum of "equity." A person's equity changed over a person's lifetime based on the individual's calculated value as an asset to the corporation. A college degree in engineering or marketing increased equity, just as a criminal record or smoking habit decreased it. If the Department of Human Resources concluded that an employee of the conglomerate had become a liability, the corporation cut its investments and relations - housing, monthly allowances, electricity, rations, etc. - and the person was cast out of Eden with only a fixed minimum of his or her equity.

Eden belonged to the American Collective, a sovereign association of stockholders who have invested in what's left of the American Dream ever since the United States succumbed to insurmountable financial ruin. Having been reduced to colonies again, private investors staked their claims, buying up desired states, cities, and country sides, as well as all the people and resources left behind. Eden had been built over San Francisco, and all of northern California belonged to the conglomerate.

For nearly a century, the American Collective had thrived. The High Board of Cooperation, based in Washington D.C. and consisting of representatives from each of the major stockholders, set standards and codes regarding the treatment and appraisal of human assets. However, when the Strain hit the "Spinal Tap," historical San Francisco, a chain reaction of mistakes, crimes, and nightmares led to the complete collapse of communication amongst the Collective in the course of a decade. Nailing the coffin shut was The Blackout, so-called because one October morning, the entire Eastern Seaboard lost power within a matter of seconds. There was no explanation, only satellite images and radio silence to confirm that the East Coast was stained in darkness. What happened on the ground after The Blackout remains a mystery. Eden took every precaution to restrict the media, as well as to stop all outside communications and travel except to those the Eden Executive Board declared "trustworthy."

No cover-up of any extent could hide the state of the Collective to the rest of the world, however, and with no regulation and total economic and social panic throughout the continent, there was nothing to stop Eden's unprecedented downsizing and relinquishing little to none of the promised equity owed to hundreds of outcasts.

Apartment 1208 bustled with a quiet chaos. The balding, graying man's equity had been "forfeited," as decreed by direct order of the Executive Board. He was on the run with all affairs to put in order out of reach. His swollen bare feet struggled in their sweat and blood to stay balanced on the windowsill. His hands didn't help for the same reason. This was his sixth time at the window in the past hour since he arrived at the Continental. He liked to believe that he had the rest of his life to contemplate jumping twelve flights down onto the crumbling pavement below. The police, inept as they were without Pulsar transport, would take at least a few more hours before catching up with him. And by then, he could leave the apartment through the front door or let gravity take him. There were so many places to hide in the ever increasing ruins that seemed to keep swallowing the capital. At least, that was what he kept telling himself.

The doctor shuttered at the cold and the daunting thoughts of suicide that seized him. He broke himself from the ledge when he took a gander at the drop. He muttered and cursed, pulling at what was left of his hair. He was truly humbled and rendered powerless as the tempest of tears resumed. He looked over his shoulder at the bed again with the anxiety and self-consciousness of a beggar the first time he stole a meager thing to feed him, wondering if someone might be watching. His predisposition pushed the thoughts of a second presence aside and he began to pace around the room again, preparing for the seventh round.

The second presence sat at the edge of the bed, eyes locked on a hole in the wall about a half-inch in diameter, which had been fired into the wall adjacent to the room's one window. He didn't look at the stuttering scientist licking his wounds or even acknowledge or ponder the crusading vines that had made it so high. He only felt their presence when they had pierced the doctor's skin whenever he stepped on the ledge.

The Dalmatian didn't need to watch. He was disgusted with the human race and possessed only a clinical fascination with death. The canine-human hybrid was completely still, hunched over with his paws on his knees. Like a gargoyle guarding a cathedral from its perch, Daniel could probably fool most into believing he was made of stone. He had the pacing physicist convinced that he wasn't there at all. It was only the faint breeze that ruffled the fur on his arms and head that betrayed his flesh, and the raised hairs on his spine and those chilling jade eyes that conveyed an intellectual wariness and cunning intellect that seemed so alien to humans.

It had been nearly twenty years since The Strain had broken into an epidemic, turning the infected into hybrids. Daniel was among the first generation to inherit the virus from humans who had managed to survive their transformations. These two generations were the beginnings of a scattered underground civilization of "pests," no longer considered human and therefore ineligible for employment, equity, or sympathy from the Eden Conglomerate.

The young canine sat there, staring into a bullet's legacy, processing a possible scenario in which a past occupant would fire gun into the wall. He imagined another pacing human about his age, fuming over his ruined life, his equity lost with nothing to live for. A shot of bitterness trickled through the adolescent veins of the lean and hungry stray.

Daniel spent most of his time alone and had little need to communicate orally, for the man was unable to hear him, but he took a chance to indulge himself: "It must be so hard for you." His voice was mechanically smooth. It was passionless and cold, almost stale. One would swear that spoiling milk churned through his heart. His demeanor changed as he spoke.

Those who had never seen a hybrid would be tempted to imagine Daniel, a lanky five-foot, ten inch Dalmatian bipedal, as cute and affectionate, or at least disarmingly awkward. But in the revealing moonlight, as the dog shook and panted as he spoke, his ribs could be distinguished even under a worn black t-shirt. A tightened, ruined leather belt scavenged from trash was the only thing holding up faded and tattered jeans, the only protection his loins had from the night air. His complexion was overcast as though he constantly walked beneath storm clouds. Even his spots seemed worn and faded; the white and black trying to find common ground on a spectrum of gray, amidst the filth and grime that served as a second skin.

"I said it must hard for you," Daniel's flat, quivering voice rose, but his eyes didn't move. The doctor still couldn't hear him, but Daniel let his word's trickle into the man's vision, trying to fashion the desired influence that would persuade the human to give him what he needed. His mouth was dry and pulverized by clusters of ulcers. The pain brought a focus and anguish that flourished the atmosphere with poison. "To lose it all like that. That's... something. That's all you've lived for. Phwoosh. Gone. That's bitter, isn't it? The sudden absence of taste." He licked his lips.

The man's cursing stopped, but the deluge of eye-washed brine continued.

"What did it taste like, Doctor? What do those blueberry scones taste like, the ones you just realized you'll never have again? The Pulsar cruising down the freeway to your favorite station, playing your favorites. Your wife. The intimacies...The warm scalpels and goggles still warm from their radiation baths."

The Dalmatian paused and let the newfound images be processed. More elaborate but nothing more. The doctor stopped crying for a moment.

"What would a physicist be doing in an autopsy room? Why would he be dissecting hybrids?"

The man clasped his ears, refusing without cause to look at the bed.

"You see, the funny thing about you, the only reason I've followed you for so long, the only reason I'm holding you back from jumping out that window, is that you're the only human I've observed who was fired for knowing too much." His advanced canine hearing detected the closing of Jeep doors twelve stories below and the clumsy rhythm of boots up long flights of stairs.

The canine was peeved by the telepathic interference he was detecting from the assailants. It took a great deal of concentration to maintain influence over the doctor, and Daniel wasn't about to let weeks of planning and shadowing go to waste. He extended his mind to the edge of each of the building's occupant's minds. His eyes remained locked on the hole in the wall as he began to revise his plans.

Daniel decided to take a more straightforward approach with the physicist. "You have a secret Doctor, and they want you dead because of it. You didn't think that your retirement was sanctified in the face of Eden's genocide. You knew the risks, and you got the best possible outcome. Now, tell me, why did you do it? Did you just think you were irreplaceable? Were you bought off? Or did you believe that you could do it?"

The doctor walked toward the window and bathed himself in moonlight. He whispered, "What should I do?"

"You weren't special doctor. No one is. They will always find another because they have everyone convinced that Eden is all they have. People need to know that they're wrong, and that's why they need to hear your secret." Daniel's voice remained neutral even as the doctor began his seventh round at the windowsill. Daniel's hands and feet felt swollen and burned. The doctor felt nothing but his undoing at the edge of life.

"I don't want to die," the man whimpered as he turned awkwardly to face the bed, still wrestling with his conscience and now his fear of heights.

"You don't have to," Daniel's head turned to face his subject, his voice almost human as he revealed himself to the fugitive.

The doctor just stood there, witless and flustered, taken aback by the appearance of the dirty animal sitting at the edge of his bed. One of his hands strayed instinctually from its place of support to put his hair remnants in a more presentable manner. Suddenly, the motion picture of armed officers already at the eighth floor flushed through his mind. The shot of fear brought resignation to the man's mind. He sniffed at the dog who had watched over him ever since he began his forbidden research project. With an awkward arrangement of posture, the suicide tried to appear as charitable as possible, jamming one hand in his pocket, looking down at his foot faux-causally. He looked up at the hybrid, and there was a hint of disgusted pity in his voice when he said it: "You poor creatures."

The conscience had lost. The window was open and there was nothing left to say.