Variant Strain

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Peter woke and did not know where he was.

It was cold and stifling. Whatever he'd been laying on was uneven and lumpy. Someone had pulled a stiff, plasticky sheet over his head. He reached his hands up, intending to pull the offending material off his head and realized that it completely enclosed him.

He felt his fingers brush a closed zipper down the center line of his chest and realized with a start that he must've been in a body bag.

If he weren't already cold, that would have been chilling.

They had shot him. He remembered. He was sure. He'd felt the muzzle press against the base of his neck and... and what?

There had been a moment of smashing, bright hot pain. There had been the gunshot, an almost physical slap of sound so close and then... nothing.

He blinked and realized that he'd been shot. In the back of the head.

And was now in a body bag, contemplating having been shot in the back of the head.

That hadn't been a tranquilizer gun or any such thing.

They'd put a bullet into his brain and somehow... somehow he was still here.

Maybe he'd gotten lucky? He'd heard of cases of people shot in the head not only surviving, but making a full recovery. Was that the case here?

Except it wasn't like the bullet glanced of his skull. It had gone in through his neck. At the very least it should've destroyed the top of his spine and there should've been no chance that he'd have been able to move.

He flexed his fingers.

Well those definitely worked.

Ditto for his toes.

He felt a little numb in the extremities, but he hoped that was the cold. After all, how long had he been in the body bag? Might just have been poor circulation.

His neck did feel sore. Like he'd slept on it wrong. A slow, careful side-to-side turning of his head informed him that not only was his head still attached, there was nothing broken in his neck.

He grinned at that and realized that he was immune to bullets. Well... not entirely immune. He remember the night before. They'd shot him in the chest... and it had hurt for a while, but it had passed quickly.

Now that he thought about it, he'd thrown up and passed out after getting shot, but he was reasonably sure that had been due to Cletus.

He found himself very glad that whoever had shot him hadn't aimed higher. He wasn't sure how his healing ability worked, but at the same time, he wasn't sure what having hot bullet fragments tearing through his brain proper would do to his memory or personality.

A bullet to somewhere critical would definitely still incapacitate him, he realized.

He could heal it, with time, but he wasn't bullet-proof. He wasn't invulnerable.

So he was bullet-resistant then.

If they'd wanted to do something more permanent to him while he was unconscious, well... he wasn't too eager to find out if he could survive being thrown into a blast furnace or something similar. He wasn't too eager to get shot again either, come to that.

Still. Surviving being shot in the head was very cool.

He had to keep telling himself this, because otherwise the thought lurking in the back of his mind with its sly drawl whispered, Humans can't do that.

A bit more exploration revealed that the bite the vulture thing, the Drago, had also healed up. Even the tear in the jacket was gone. Likewise the cuts to his torso and thigh from its claws. Another thing humans don't do, hmm?

He froze as another thought occurred to him. The material of the body bag wasn't quite opaque enough to stop the light from getting through.

It wouldn't be heavy enough to disguise his movements.

He stopped his explorations and his toe-wiggling, which he'd kept up since it seemed to be warming him up a little and listened intently.

"... mention how much I hate this damn city?" The voice was young, but sour. Angry, tired. It was close by, but there was a slight hollow quality to the voice. Peter could tell he was hearing it through some sort of barrier.

Wherever they were, was not precisely in the same place he was.

A bored voice replied, "You've only got another month of duty rotation here then it's back out to the Mountain."'

The Mountain. Peter could hear the capitalization there. Whatever this Mountain was, it was specific enough to have earned the definitive article and a capitalization. Peter filed that away as well.

"Just my luck this crap happens. I was hoping this'd be a quiet one, y'know?"

"Don't let the Sarge hear you keep up the bitching."

"Screw you, man. This whole town is bull. We're being forced to pussyfoot around the locals when we should have been able to shut the whole thing down last night." The angry voice was raised. Heated. "Those Gentek idiots should've kept the whole thing better contained."

There was a tired sigh from the bored voice. "Gentek security did the best they could with what they had. They followed containment protocol to the letter... no one expected the target to use rats."

"I still say this would've been simpler if we'd gone in like we normally do. Flood the streets with troops. Pin the infected down before they get any further than just walkers."

"Moron," The bored voice replied. "We don't have that kind of manpower here. You think it'd be easy to shut down New York? We'd strip the Mountain to a skeleton crew and still not have enough to hold Queens."

"Whatever. You can see why I hate this damn town."

"Just give the Sarge a couple more minutes to quiet down the cops and we'll be heading back to base and handing the stiffs off to disposal."

"That's another thing. We should've just taken care of these things right here. You wanna tell me it's safe driving back through Manhattan with a load of corpses teeming with Hydra?"

There was a pause and Peter imagined the bored one was giving a shrug. "Hydra's completely inert outside of a living body within minutes. The warmest thing back there's that rogue tracker from last night and that's an hour dead. You could probably cut 'em up for steaks and you'd be just fine."

"You're sick, you know that?"

Peter decided that if they were bored enough to be bickering, they most likely weren't paying attention to the bodybag he was in.

It was a this point that two important pieces of information made themselves known to Peter.

First, was that he was ravenously hungry. He hadn't noticed it when he'd first woken up, but now that he'd had a bit of a moment to catch up with his other body parts, his stomach had decided it really wanted attention. That probably wasn't so bad. That burger and Aunt May's leftovers had been hours ago and he'd just engaged in more physical activity in over the course of a few minutes than he normally did in a year.

Or maybe, his voice drawled and pointed out, Maybe monsters need to eat when they get shot in the head.

Impossible regeneration of tissue had to use up a lot of calories.

Peter shuddered at the thought, but the second item of information reasserted itself.

There was a rustling noise next to Peter. A noise not unlike the kind his body bag made while he moved.

They hadn't expcted him to be able to survive being shot in the head.

Apparently, whatever he had... this... variant strain of Hydra (whatever that meant) that had come from Ed Whelan and acted very differently from what they were used to.

Whatever it was they were used to, they obviously had enough experience with to develop protocols and apparently had troops headquartered at the Mountain. Despite that, they were operating blind.

Pete reached up, heedless now of noise because several other facts had lined themselves up in his head very quickly.

He had managed to heal up from what should have been fatal wounds.

When he ate something he could gain traits from what he ate.

The vulture thing had ripped out a chunk of his shoulder.

It had eaten part of him.

Something in a bodybag next to him was moving.

These facts all slotted themselves into place and that fired off an immediate action for Peter.

He tore open the zipper on his bag and sat up hurriedly.

His first breath of the closed in air was heavily tainted. The carrion smell, filled his nostrils. He gagged silently, but his stomach gave a gurgle. Underlying the reek was the smell of blood and death and gunshot residue.

He reeled at the smells. He felt like he would drown in a sea of rotten meat, copper and gunpowder.

He closed his eyes, forcing himself to only take shallow breaths.

He was on top of a pile of body bags.

He wasn't sure how many there were, but there were corpses three deep at least beneath him. He guessed there were perhaps eighteen in all from how the pile was made.

The pile was in the back of one of the vans. The doors at the back of the van were shut. A couple of the beekeeper hazmat uniforms hung on pegs on the wall.

He reached out to the uniform, hoping against hope to at least grab the helmet. Perhaps he could at least keep the smells out. His fingers brushed the uniform, grabbing hold of the slick, bright-yellow material. His flesh reacted faster than his conscious mind could form the thought.

In seconds the uniform had been consumed and he was wearing it. There was a nozzle where a self-contained air-supply could be attached, he realized, but he closed the valve and breathed only the air contained within the air-tight outfit. He'd have to reopen that to refresh his air in a bit. It helped, A little. He could still smell the infected, but he realized after a moment that what he was probably smelling was himself. Which brought another odd thought to mind.

He expected to smell his own blood and sweat in the closed in suit... neither scent was present. He shook his head, forcing his attention on the stirring bodybag.

It twitched and moved feebly. There seemed to be no clear direction to it's movements, but Peter could clearly see where the talons had already poked through the material of the body bag and was slicing the end of the bag to ribbons.

It was just starting to wake up, he guessed. If it did, it would be the same thing all over again. More people were going to die.

Peter knew he had to do something, but was frozen. He could yell... attract the attention of the men in the uniforms in the cab of the van... but then they'd know he'd survived.

What did that matter? He told himself. His every instinct had been to bolt. Just open the door and take off running before anyone realized what was going on. With the right warning, the men would take down the Drago and that would have been the perfect distraction for his escape.

Hell, he was dressed as one of them right now. He might even just be able to walk away before anyone realized what was happening.

Just get far enough, switch to his own face and change his clothes and it would be fine.

Except the men had shown they weren't a match for it. They'd already lost two.

How many of these things had they faced last night?

He glanced down at the pile of corpses and gulped nervously at the thought of actually getting an answer.

Was he going to risk having more people die just so he could stay free?

Unable to stop his own morbid curiosity, Peter reached over and tugged down the zipper that had kept the vulture thing hidden away.

It's perfectly normal, human face was in a rictus of pain, revealing those pearly white teeth.

It twitched and thrashed, but obviously wasn't up yet.

He looked at it, it's body was in horrible shape, it was a ruin of bullet-holes and bruises. He saw that they'd had to break each of its wings twice more before it would fit into the body bag. It was down, but not for long. As he watched, he could see the flesh knitting and healing. Black and red tendrils would erupt lazily around bullet-wounds, creeping over it, closing over it, but leaving horrific irregularly shaped scars. The wings were also trying to heal, but they were a bent and misshapen ruin and they were healing crookedly. Even if it did completely heal, it probably wouldn't be able to get the same grace in flight that it had once possessed.

Nevertheless, it would be up and about very, very soon.

Peter stared. It had to be stopped.

Even if he'd had a gun, there was no guarantee that it would permanently put the thing down.

He did have one option. His stomach growled once more.

Despite it's face, it hadn't been human anymore.

It had no mind.

It had been little more than an animal, reacting on instinct and hunger.

Maybe it had been a person once but now it was a ravening beast with wings and claws and a willingness to use them.

Oh? His voice slyly drawled, Didn't it look an awful lot like he was starting to wake up while you were in the middle of killing him earlier?

He flinched. That had been self-defense. He'd been trying to stop it from hurting those men--

Same men who turned around and shot you. Good job.That was then. This is this. It's helpless, vulnerable. This isn't self-defense anymore.

This wasn't cold-blooded murder, he told himself, biting his lower lip.

This was putting down a rabid animal. How he'd hated Old Yeller.

His stomach roiled once more, demanding. Urgent.

The fact that what he was going to do to help protect these people just seemed to happily coincide with what his body wanted anyway was one of those happy coincidences.

You keep telling yourself that. His voice drawled.

He grit his teeth. He did not want to do this... but what choice did he have?

He closed his eyes and put his hand on the creature's throat.

It's eyes opened and met his gaze.

They were glowing brilliant red, wide and staring.

They also had about as much self-awareness as a snake.

That made his decision for him.

It snapped it's teeth at him, with a dull clacking noise, but it could barely move, even without Peter's restraining hand at it's long neck.

Despite the appearance of gloves on his hands, Peter's sense of touch was undiminished. He could feel this thing's pulse, thin and fast under his fingers.

He closed his eyes and opened wide. He kept his head pulled well back and his face turned away, trying to stay as far away from what was happening as he could.

It was impossible to escape the sensations of the tendrils unfolding from his torso... his hand on its throat pressed down, laying the length of his forearm along it's neck. The appearance of the yellow hazmat suit erupting into a mass of short tendrils that began crushing the vulture's throat, his hand had moved up to it's chin and his hand had spread out into a massive fleshy blossom that enclosed it's head.

Peter bit down on his lip to keep from screaming as he realized that he could still feel it's breath tickling his skin for a long moment before his body absorbed... eaten... enough of it to stop.

It writhed and jerked feebly, the taloned feet thrashing and slicing open bags below them. He'd been facing in that direction to avoid looking at the rest of what was happening. He stared as the slashing talons revealed more faces in the bags below them. Some had Cletus' lumpy, tumor-marred blank unfeatures, but not all of them. One had the beginnings of massive, uneven horns growing from an otherwise unremarkable blunt face. Another was a sweet-faced little girl. There was nothing obviously wrong with her from what Peter could see and the chill realization that the Drago... the man that he was even now consuming was the same as the rest of these poor, dead people.

Victims of something outside their control. Victims who were now dead and Peter needed to know why.

Still too many questions. He'd had to let his mind drift. He thought on other things. It beat thinking about how he was now kneeling over the Drago and his stomach had unfolded as well, joining in and speeding up the consumption process.

He closed his eyes, bracing himself for the rush of memories like he'd had with Cletus, but he only had a single brief image... it was shaky and out of focus.

-- sweeping the floor, janitor's overalls too loose on a spare frame. Bald headed reflection in a pane of glass. Then a rat. Big. Unafraid. It's gaze challenging as it stared up at him. A swing of the broom to scare it off, but it had seemed contemptuous. It bit his ankle--

Pete sat back. The corpse and it's body bag were gone. The other bags were badly sliced apart, corpses almost spilling out.

There had been no conscious mind in the creature. Just... appetite. It still felt strange as what had passed for it's mind simply burst like a soap bubble within Peter's consciousness and the Cletus voice just laughed.

Once again he felt bloated. Too massive for his skin. Bursting to get out. He was still in hazmat uniform, but now he guesed himself to be about three hundred pounds or so, even with his body compressed down as densely packed as it could manage, he was now six feet tall and built like a linebacker. There had to be some strange automatic adjustments that his own body handled during these... he was about the right size as these men now.

Peter dismissed the hazmat uniform for a moment, allowing himself to view the van without it's protection, switching to Cletus' attire. The process of consuming his prey had not made enough noise to alert the men in the van's cab. His enhanced hearing told him they were arguing over football now.

The scent of carrion reek had receded. It was a dim, background smell now. A trace of the earlier cloying, sickly sweetness. His nose could apparently differentiate between the living version of the Hydra versus whatever was in the corpses.

Now he still had to escape.

He looked at the corpses and did his best not to look at their faces directly. His tongue darted out between suddenly dry lips and he tried to take a step back. To see them dispassionately. Just... facts. Statistics.

He couldn't. He kept wondering what they'd been like... if anyone would miss them now that they were gone. He shuddered and wondered if the janitor who'd been bitten by a rat had had anyone. He didn't know. He wasn't sure if he wanted to know.

He could make a break for it if he could fly out, he considered. His heart raced and he shifted himself to the vulture's form, or rather he tried to. He could do the man's face... but he couldn't get any of the other changes to occur. No wings then, he told himself.

He wasn't sure why... maybe his own human self-image kept him from assuming the strange alterations of body that it had possessed. No wings then. And the extent of it's ability without the wings had been a sort of levitation... some sort of local anti-gravity.

There would be time to consider the sheer impossibility of that later, but for now he had to escape.

Do you? He stopped as the thought came to him.

They were going to take the bodies back to their own base. They'd be bringing him to them, Trojan horse style... all he would have to do would be to play possum... and... the bodies were slashed apart. The moment they looked into the back of the van, the whole thinig would blow up in his face.

He was smart. He'd always been smart.

He couldn't afford to do anything reckless.

Like jumping the serial killer about to walk off with Uncle Ben's body? His own voice drawled.

Exactly that. He'd learned. He would have to be more careful.

Careful like leaping in to attack a monster that you just watched eat someone? How well did that one work out for you, sport?

He winced and wondered when his own internal monologue had gotten so sarcastic. Or had it always been that way?

There was always the simple route, he supposed. He took a deep breath and allowed his pulse to race once more. His body rippled with tendrils and settled onto the anonymous bright yellow hazmat gear.

He grabbed one of the empty body bags on the floor and arranged it as best he could to cover up the opened bags.

He carefully moved to the rear of the van and listened, filtering out the ongoing football argument from the front of the van.

Raised voices just beyond. About ten or fifteen feet at a guess. If he really concentrated he could pick out heartbeats One in particular was agitated and beating thunderously.

"Are you serious?" Peter recognized George Stacy's angry voice. He had the agitated heart. "You cannot possibly be--"

He was cut off sharply by the voice of the man Peter recognized as the Sarge. "Take it up with your superiors, Detective Stacy. We have jurisdiction."

"But... terrorists?" The disbelief was heavy in the detective's voice. "In Forrest Hills? Hitting a deli. Did they maybe want the felafel?"

Another voice, female, with a slight, husky rasp to it. The voice of a woman with a pack-a-day habit. "George. Calm down. I'm sure we can get this all sorted out," She soothed.

Peter eased the door open as quietly and as subtly as he could. The other heartbeats in his immediate vicinity weren't turned towards the van. He wasn't entirely sure how he knew... something about how they seemed to be positioned to his hearing, but everyone's attention it seemed, both cops and the men in the hazmat gear, had been turned on the argument.

The woman trying to calm George Stacy down had high, sharp cheekbones and full lips. Her auburn hair was drawn back into a severe ponytail with a few wisps on her brow. Her features were careworn and showed a fine web of wrinkles around the eyes, but she was still a striking woman. She was dressed in a black pant-suit with a coat over it that came down to mid-thigh. Sensible leather shoes with low heels.

"I'd listen to Detective DeWolffe, if I were you, Detective Stacy." Talbot said in an almost bored tone. "Move your men back, we think there may still be some unexploded ordinance at the location and I can't waste any more time worrying about your people tripping over something."

Peter didn't bother to hear the rest of the argument. He opened the van's rear door and slipped out, then affected to look like he'd been standing next to the door the whole time. He hulked past, doing his level best to be unobtrusive, which was not easy when you now stood six foot even and had shoulders broad enough to make going through regular sized doors difficult.

His balance was terrible. He could just barely grasp where his limbs were at any moment and everything looked so... small. It would probably take a few moments for him to get the hang of the larger body, but he did his best to shuffle along, never quite lifting his feet off the ground.

He made it to the alley where he'd hidden earlier without tripping over his over-sized feet, ducking awkwardly under the yellow police tape that closed it off.

He was almost sure he could walk again without giving himself away. He glanced over one shoulder. No one was watching still. He kept moving, then as he was about to reach the end of the alley and turn back onto the street, he shifted himself... now wearing Cletus's old red-headed features while sporting his new bulk. Well... oddly he didn't feel as bulky now. He felt lighter on his feet and a roll of his shoulders told him his perceptions had adjusted.

He swung his arm around in a slow arc and noted that he'd lost a great deal of his clumsiness, but he still wasn't quite up to the easy grace that he'd just discovered that afternoon.

Which still left him looking for someplace to ditch his extra biomass so he could squeeze back down to his normal form. He fished his phone out of his pocket... it felt vaguely sticky and he did not want to think about where it had gone when his outfit didn't have pockets.

He still had a few minutes left to make it to dinner.

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