Crossed (comics) - Plot Synopsis

Plot Synopsis

The story follows survivors dealing with a plague that causes its victims to carry out their most evil thoughts. Carriers of the virus are known as the Crossed due to a cross-like rash that appears on their faces. This contagion is primarily spread through bodily fluids, which the Crossed have used to great effect by treating their weapons with their fluids, as well as through other forms of direct fluidic contact such as rape and bites, assuming the victim lives long enough to turn. A major difference between the Crossed and other fictional zombie or insanity-virus epidemics (i.e. in the film 28 Days Later), is that while the Crossed are turned into homicidaly violent psychopaths, they still retain a basic human-level of intelligence: thus they are still capable of using firearms, tools like bows and arrows, and of setting complex traps.

The contagion spread across the entire world, with the Crossed killing, raping, engaging in cannibalism and maiming for fun, with governments and military overwhelmed; friends and family butcher each other with anything they lay their hands on, and cities are turned into vast charnel houses. Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan are wiped out when Israeli Crossed detonate every nuclear warhead. The last organised act by the US government is to shut down as many nuclear power plants as possible and then kill the nuclear scientists & technicians to prevent them from reactivating the plants. Soon human civilization is all but gone, and mankind is an increasingly endangered species.

The speed of the outbreak differs from story to story. In the original story, Badlands #14-18, and Wish You Were Here, the infection erupts suddenly across the United States (sunset/night) and Britain (afternoon), giving nobody any time to respond. Badlands #10-13 has the Crossed tearing through small towns without being noticed, getting more and more numerous over the course of a week. Badlands #26 has a British soldier say he's been aware of the Crossed for "the past three days" by the time the outbreak is public.

The Crossed themselves show considerable variation, as they are still self-aware individuals, albeit turned into homicidal maniacs. The actual level of insanity different Crossed demonstrate ranges across a wide spectrum as well. Many are practically feral savages with absolutely no regard for their own self-preservation, to the point that they will gleefully mutilate themselves for the sheer thrill of it, including amputating their own limbs (understandably, these Crossed don't tend to survive very long). Most are capable of basic albeit deranged speech, and wield whatever clubs, knives, or sharp objects are at hand to attack anything around them. The more insane Crossed will even attack each other, though they apparently prefer the non-Crossed. The Crossed enjoy artfully mutilating the bodies of their victims, amputating limbs or worse. The Crossed can survive on any food but frequently rely on basic cannibalism - not because they have a zombie-like need for human flesh, they're just so brutal and cruel that they get warped enjoyment out of it. The Crossed can survive on any food, but but as years pass after the outbreak and the normal food sources of civilization disappear, they increasingly cannibalize the non-infected or each other to survive.

The Crossed are consumed by a pervasive bloodlust and constantly try to rape anyone or anything they can chase down. The infection spreads through bodily fluids, thus anyone raped by a Crossed with become a Crossed themselves, provided that their attackers don't kill them before they turn (which they frequently do). A major way the infection spread in the first hours and days of the outbreak was when in a veritable blood orgy, the Crossed would rape and sodomize entire families and neighborhoods, rapidly expanding the growing hordes of Crossed. Many of these rapes aren't consciously intended to infect other people, it simply occurs as a byproduct of their insatiable need for violence. Female crossed will also try to violently rape and sodomize people with whatever tools or weapons are at hand.

The mental effects of the Crossed infection are apparently not just a zombie-like drive for basic desires like violence and sexual gratification. It seems to give the Crossed a driving need to perform actions which they perceive as bad, somehow triggering the parts of their brains which control their darkest, subconsciously pent-up inhibitions. The Crossed do not simply rape and kill their victims, they torture and mutilate them to cause the maximum amount of pain and suffering. Another symptom of this is that they tend to attack and deface things and places which are considered particularly sacrosanct, i.e. defacing government buildings with corpses, or desecrating religious buildings. Crossed who manage to capture a non-infected human on a scouting expedition from a survivor enclave will frequently proceed to torture and mutilate their captive within sight of the survivors' fortress, to inflict psychological torment on the unreachable people inside.

At the other extreme, however, some Crossed have been shown to be quite capable of complex pre-meditated actions. Not consumed by unthinking bloodlust to the extent that many of the other infected are, they have enough mental where-withal to plan ambushes and traps, and organize gangs of Crossed to assault survivor enclaves. The more mindless rage-consumed Crossed will still know how to use firearms if they find them but usually won't think rationally enough to plan out where to acquire more firearms. The more rational and calculating Crossed, in contrast, will actively seek out armories to acquire new firearms from. Some of these more rational Crossed will self-consciously coat their weapons in their own bodily fluids, actively trying to turn non-infected survivors into more Crossed.

The later comics take place later and later in time after the outbreak first occurred, up to five years later by The Fatal Englishman. As Shakey explained in the webcomics, it is not so much that the Crossed "evolved" during these years (like in a cheesy zombie-horror B-movie), but that logically many of the Crossed who were so insane that they didn't care about their own self-preservation have died off, while the far more dangerous rational and calculating ones took steps to survive over a long period of time. The more deranged Crossed from the initial days of the outbreak were mostly feral, running around completely naked to attack other people with their fists and teeth, not even bothering to use crude clubs. Those Crossed with little sense of preservation, not even the sense to put on warm clothing in colder weather, tended to die off in the winters. Others who were so rage-crazed that they would charge headlong against survivors who had automatic firearms - even though they only possessed axes and knives - also didn't tend to survive over an extended period of time. The early weeks of the first year of the outbreak were pure bedlam, with the streets of every city turned into slaughter houses, as unarmed and unprepared non-infected were surprised by savage but almost mindless Crossed. Several years after the initial outbreak, a sort of natural selection process set in. The Crossed who survived that long tend to be the more rational and lucid ones who have the wherewithal to preserve themselves, use combat tactics like avoiding gunfire, use guns themselves, and can set complex ambushes. Meanwhile, the few surviving non-infected are hardened survivors who have been combating the Crossed for years.

A curious point noted by several characters is that even since the earliest days of the outbreak, some survivors have attempted to slip past the Crossed by painting red cross-marks on their faces to simulate the rashes from the infection - the Crossed will attack other Crossed if they're bored or frustrated, but at least some of the time will leave other Crossed alone. However, not matter how accurate the reproduction of the rash-marks are, even with high-grade makeup that makes them visually identical to the real rashes, the Crossed are somehow always able to tell that it's a fake. As characters note in The Fatal Englishman, having survived five years since the initial outbreak, they have never seen this trick succeed; somehow the Crossed are still able to detect the non-infected.