Variant Strain

- - -
Lunch had been burgers from a local deli delivered by a dark skinned local teen who spent an awful lot of time smiling nervously at Anna and staring. Peter had the impression that technically the deli didn't really deliver, but this was an arrangement she'd sweet talked them into agreeing with.

The burgers had been huge, greasy things. Thick and dripping with condiments. The deli had thoughtfully provided a tiny selection of vegetables on the side if anyone wished to desecrate the mass of meat with greenery. Anna had chosen to have a salad with hers, which seemed to Peter to be some sort of strange contradiction.

She'd had to leave right after. Anna was still planning on putting in a few hours of work while she could. MJ hadn't come down for lunch at all, and her aunt had brought her food up to the spare room.

Peter ate slowly. He made mincing, tiny bites of his massive burger, barely opening his mouth. As he did so, he eyed his hands suspiciously. He was alert for a sign... any sign that they might try something... strange.

The last thing he needed was for his Aunt May to see his hands turning into unfolding fleshy orchids and absorbing the burger that way. But his heart seemed to have settled and he finished his sandwich without incident.

Aunt May had been quiet. She hadn't even made even her normal complaint of how unhealthy the burgers must've been. She'd sat there and eaten, looking to Peter as though she hadn't tasted any of it. Aunt May hadn't been able to finish more than a few bites and she'd passed her leftovers to Peter with a wordless glance at his nod.

She'd had a handful of papers close at hand during the meal. Peter knew she was making calls. Informing whoever needed to be informed. Dealing with his insurance. With the bank. With the funeral arrangements. With all the thousand and one little details that one never really had to think about until someone was actually gone. It hadn't even been twenty four hours yet. It had barely been twelve. The whole thing still felt surreal. He could tell she was busying herself with those details to help her deal. If she was making calls and writing down numbers and making all these appointments, then she wouldn't really have to think about what had happened.

He attacked his Aunt's leftovers with more gusto once she'd left the kitchen table to continue dealing with the paperwork in Anna's bedroom. Now alone and far less worried about getting caught, he devoured everything left on the table down to the dry pickle spear and the badly sliced tomatoes. As he cleaned up after them, a sick, twisted little thought rose in his head. Could he actually mimic a burger now that he had eaten one? Or a tomato? On reflection if he did turn into a tomato it would probably be a sliced one... or did that not work that way?

Could he, in fact, make a pickle spear out of himself?

He wasn't sure he wanted an answer to that question. The mimicry that he accomplished was extremely good, but far from perfect. He'd noticed that the zipper on his 'khakis' wasn't actually made of metal like it should have been. It was a good simulation, the color was right, but when he'd actually touched it, it felt more like... like plastic. Or in some strange way, like bone. It also didn't open the way it should. If he concentrated, he could kind of force it down, but then he got the red tendrils blurring and then it would just be an unzipped zipper without actually having passed through the intervening teeth.

Which might have been right as well. He wasn't sure how these were being duplicated, but maybe it couldn't actually shape metal. It looked like consuming something gave him a pattern to work with, but the duplication wasn't quite perfect.

He fought the sick thought down to try turning into a burger with a side of fries anyway and wandered into the den. He sat down heavily before Anna Watson's old desktop. The office chair he occupied creaked dangerously under him and he quietly cursed to himself as he remembered how much heavier he was now.

He had... information. Not much of it made sense yet, but he needed to put it together.

He also needed to look for information.

Thank goodness for the Internet.

What he knew was that Smith and Jones had come to their home looking for someone they had called a Runner by the name of Ed Whelan, who had worked as a nurse. He was fairly sure 'Runner' was a specific term rather than just a description. Smith and Jones were supposed to hunt down Runners... obviously Jones had been at it longer than Smith. He guessed Runners didn't happen very often and whatever simulations or training they underwent didn't quite match up to actually being in the field. Or it was Smith's first day on the job.

Cletus Kassidy had been their tracker. They had somehow had a rough idea of where the Runner was going, but they couldn't really pinpoint him without Cletus. It hadn't been a scent exactly that Cletus had followed. It was something else. Something somewhere in between scent and pressure and a sort of visual... the memory had been jumbled and difficult to explain, but Peter remembered what it had felt like.

He had some information to serve as a starting point then, he mused. The names of two people... and Gentek.

He ran a few searches, using various combinations of the few facts he had and turned up quite a bit of information immediately on Cletus. Cletus Kassidy had been a homicidal psychopath who had gone on a spate of spree killings all over Arkansas in the summer of 1993. At every site of his bloody and brutal murders, Kassidy would write out somewhere on the scene in his victim's blood: "Carnage Rules". This had earned him the nickname in the newspapers as the "Carnage Killer"

The crime fansite that Peter had stumbled upon had recounted with a sort of morbid glee that over the course of his bloody three month rampage, Kassidy had left seventy two dead-- and at this point the voice laughed in his head, stronger now than it had been before and drawled out, It's actually an even hundred... the cops didn't find 'em all.

An FBI team finally caught up with him in the early fall of '93 and he was convicted and sentenced to the electric chair in 1996.

Except someone had offered him a vial and a new chance at life the night before. Peter had to wonder then... who had died in Cletus Kassidy's place? Why would anyone choose to save him-- he caught himself as the memory of that moment had surfaced again. Fragmentary, but tantalizing. Cletus... had been the right kind. He'd had a chance at... something. Fifty-fifty the man in the suit had told him.

Whatever it was had been enough for whoever they were to offer him a chance to work for them. That was what had happened. They had saved him and used him, but Peter had a feeling that if it had not worked, no one would have shed a tear. But it had worked, hadn't it? Cletus had been thirty one at the time that he should have been executed. He'd been forty seven then when he'd finally died at Peter's hands, but Peter had a feeling he hadn't really aged much in that time.

He remembered Cletus's tumor-ridden face... the strangely sharp senses... the strength... oh, yes. Peter knew Cletus had been very strong as well, he hadn't quite noticed it last night, driven as he'd been by his own fury, but Cletus hadn't had any difficulty at all in lifting Uncle Ben who'd been a tall man with a heavy build. But Peter had been stronger still.

Stronger than Tears.

Peter shook his head to clear it and closed the browser window, still disturbed by what he had found. He ran his tongue nervously across suddenly dry lips and realized his heart was hammering.

He closed his eyes, trying to force himself to stay calm, but this hadn't been his body gearing up to change. He licked his lips once more.

Those crime scene photos. Even in black and white they had been horrific. Bodies artlessly arranged in strange patterns all over the ground. Some of them hacked to pieces and scattered in ways that seemed to be set to cover as much ground with gore as possible. Blood spatter on every surface.

His stomach should have been roiling in disgust.

Except he felt... excited. Disturbingly arou-- he closed his eyes and sharply turned his mind away from that line of thought.

Cletus had been turned on as all hell when he'd done it, Peter realized. The Carnage Killer. A monster in human form, but whatever it was that he'd done the night before, he hadn't just consumed the man's body. In some strange way he'd devoured his mind. His memories. Some part of him was now in Peter and he suspected there was not going to be any way to get rid of him.

Peter had invited it into himself.

That brought his bile rising once more. He could actually feel agitated tendrils rise up from his body this time and with an act of will forced himself to calm down. He knew he was not going to be like Cletus.

He couldn't.

He would not let that happen.

Whatever else he was, he was still Peter Parker. He wasn't Cletus Kassidy, no matter what voices whispered in his head. He wasn't about to forget that.

He took a deep, shuddering breath and opened another browser window. He still had more information he could look up.

A few minutes of false starts and misdirected searches had finally turned up Ed Whelan's social media profile page. The face was what Peter had remembered from the briefing Cletus had sat through. The man was unremarkable. Short, mousy brown hair, small, squinty brown eyes behind a pair of cheap glasses. He man had a lean, sad face with a vaguely rat-like cast to it. There weren't that many people listed as the man's friends... and the ones who did seemed to have mostly been using him for game fodder than actually talking to him. No family, few friends. The few photos of himself on the page were all self-portraits. Probably taken with a camera phone.

Peter shook his head. He didn't get out much, nor have much in the way of friends, but Whelan was an even sadder specimen than he was.

The last status update had at six in the evening from last night. He wondered why the man had even bothered, when no one really read them?

Peter read, "Heading in."

That was it. He updated religiously, but it was all completely innocuous, innane and... pointless.

"Had dinner."

"Good coffee."

"Hate work."

The man may as well have been posting tweets for how much he actually said. Peter stared. Unless someone had cleaned it up?

No. That was too paranoid. Ed Whelan had almost no mention of what he was actually doing with his life... because whatever he was doing wouldn't have allowed him to post on something like this. Something like how Cletus had spent his last sixteen years. Locked away from everything.

Whelan worked for Metrocare. He'd had the same job practically since he got out of nursing school in New Jersey. Metrocare was some sort of private medical sub-contractor.

Peter frowned and went to work on the search engine once more. He burred himself in the search, glad for the distraction.

It beat thinking about Uncle Ben. Or Cletus, his own voice drawled in his head, strong and sure.

Two hours of searching, clicking and meticulous notes on the computer had turned up some more links. Metrocare was a subsidiary of Oscorp. Oscorp was best known as an insurance company. There had been a series of popular commercials that the company had put out involving a small green goblin that would destroy everything you owned unless you had Oscorp insurance.

Oscorp Insurance however was actually a holding company, that had quite a large number of other businesses under its wing... most notably: Gentek.

Cages and Gentek.

It all seemed to keep coming back to Gentek.

Peter stared at the man's profile photo and tried to figure out why he had become a Runner. Whatever that was.

What had happened that had made Smith and Jones and Kassidy give chase?

Peter's heart began to race as he remembered other things.

Running.

Then climbing the tree.

They realized that Whelan had run when one of the patients under his care had died. Long term comas. Something like that. A woma--

Peter hands clenched as another image swam up from his memory. A woman, seemingly asleep. Electrodes had been attached multiple points on her body and a light blanket covered her naked form. She was confined to a bed, bound down by straps of leather. Her hair was cut short to little more than fuzz on her head and a profusion of electronics ringed her brow like a crown, but every bit of monitoring hooked up next to the bed showed no brain activity whatsoever. Even the heartbeat monitor was slow. Almost a minute passed between beats.

She was the coma patient who'd died on Ed Whelan's watch. The one that prompted his supervisor to ask why he hadn't reported her death... the one who had then reported Ed as a Runner when the man had acted suspiciously.

Peter staggered to his feet, pushing the office chair roughly from him. The woman.

Cletus hadn't been shown a photo of the woman.

He first found out about her after she'd been dead, but that memory was one of her having been alive.

Where had that come from?

That hadn't been what had caused Peter to reel. He took slow shuffling steps back to the bathroom. His steps were unsteady and his breathing ragged.

Her face.

He remembered her face.

Her hair was shorter than he had remembered... really remembered. It had once been shoulder length. A light auburn. He had hugged her tightly the night she'd had to work late. He'd been upset about that.

Mary Parker had died five years ago... then why did he suddenly have a memory of having seen his mother in a coma from last night?

Shakily, Peter shut the bathroom door and leaned against it once more.

His lips were dry and he licked at them again.

This was too much.

Too much. Too quickly.

He stared at his reflection and it stared back. The surgical scrubs he'd been wearing were still on the floor of the bathroom.

He made a note to himself that he should pick those up, otherwise Aunt May would start in on a lecture about being a good guest.

He shut his eyes, forcing himself to calm down.

To think rationally.

Logic. He opened his eyes and pictured a face.

He imagined his Uncle Ben's face. He knew the man's face better than his own.

His heart raced and tendrils unfolded across his face, reshaping his features to something like a caricature of Ben Parker's face. The prominent chin had been exaggerated comically. The broad forehead, rendered immense. The hair was the completely wrong color, a faded, mottled gray that was smeared unevenly across the entirely wrong hairstyle. He'd gotten the eyes right at least, but that probably hadn't been too difficult since everyone said he'd had the same eyes as his father. Parker eyes. The same as Uncle Ben's.

Same as the underwear, he told himself. He could broadly imitate something he saw, but to get the best possible copy he had to eat it.

When he ate a person, he got that person's memories, he continued his chain of thought.

He allowed his heart rate to spike dangerously once more and tendrils unfolded and rewove his body.

He stared at the mirror.

The ratty face of Ed Whelan stared back, his expression one of shocked horror.

Now if Peter could only just remember: When had he eaten Ed Whelan?

- - -