Variant Strain

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The door opened slowly under his hand. There was a sort of mushiness to the motion and a glance down revealed to Peter a strange uneven carpet of... something that was making it difficult to open the door.

It spread in stains and cords of rust reds and browns and blacks. Peter swallowed hard, breathing through his mouth to keep the scents out, but nothing he did could keep that oppressive cloying stench of Hydra away.

The patterns of the lumpy, spongy material beneath his feet reminded him of highly magnified images of nerves. Sort of splotchy and strung together by threads and cords of... material. Peter had to keep calling it 'material' in his head, because otherwise he'd have had to acknowledge that it was probably some sort of flesh.

He tore his eyes away from the floor right in front of the door. He stepped in reluctantly, feeling the material squish unpleasantly under his feet. The room was large. The ceiling was high and the lights were out.

The rest of the complex had been brightly lit. Florescent lights at regular intervals had banished the shadows. In the 'accommodations' someone had shattered all the lights. The broken glass was still on the floor in spots. What light there was came from wall-mounted emergency lights. Except someone had decided that such lights needed to be in red. It made the whole room seem awash in blood.

From the scents that were assaulting Peter, he wasn't betting against that as a possibility. The room was mostly dominated by scattered tables bolted to the floor all with rounded corners and soft edges. There were scattered seats, those same aluminum and plastic ones from the hospital. Most of them were overturned. There was an open area at the other end of the room with a counter that looked like a cafeteria counter or some sort of bar. There were doors on the other two walls, perhaps a dozen on each side. The doors were reinforced metal and had been kicked in or ripped out. They were all open doorways, the interior of the rooms beyond shadowed and unlit by the soft red light.

It reminded Peter of visiting rooms in prisons or the day rooms at asylums that he'd seen from the movies. He imagined the place under it's normal bright and harsh light and imagined that it would be just as appropriately joyless, cheerless and dreary as any of those. He could imagine-- remember-- listless men and women shuffling through the room, their bodies twisted and changed, but not so far gone that they would not be of some use to someone.

Now, though... the lights did the room no favors. The spongy growth on the floor was also spread across the walls where it could catch purchase and spread on the tables as well. There were larger lumps of the material. Mounds the size of bodies... Peter swallowed as his eyes traced over the details. They weren't the size of bodies. They were bodies. The lines could have been fingers, toes, limbs... all distended and grotesquely bloated by strange tumorous growths like what had happened to the faces of the trackers.

He wondered idly what the bodies of trackers actually looked like beneath their hoodies and black jeans. Did they look like these... mounds? Perhaps less bloated. Still mobile. Perhaps these were what Smerdyakov Strain Hydra infected ended up as. He could traces the cords of material-- meat-- spreading out from those forms. He could see motion all around him. Rats. Chittering, squeaking and scurrying between the mounds. Hiding amongst the tangle of cords on the walls and floor.

One or two stopped to regard him and it had been the same as that rat that had bitten the man who had become the Drago. Unafraid of him. Unflinching. In some way it seemed almost contemptuous of his presence.

Peter counted the mounds at a glance and there were far less than there had been bodies in the back of the van. He still hoped those had been the dead bodies. The piled up corpses in the body bags that had been in the back of the truck had been bad, but the alternative was that something living had been twisted into those mounds. Peter took a few slow steps inside.

The rats all stopped and watched him. He froze. He could feel the weight of their gaze. Their rapid, fluttering little heartbeats added to the assault on his senses after the silence in the rest of the complex. There were several dozen of them. Unusual in size... some had minor deformities or tumors, but they all now seemed to regard him.

Peter sniffed and beneath the rot scent of the Hydra there was the thick scent of blood once more. Peter walked towards the first shadowed doorway. The rats turned their little heads as one, tiny red eyes glowing in the blood-washed light.

Every single one watching him now.

It was unnerving.

The whole place was unnerving.

Peter looked over his shoulder towards the still open double door. It had gotten caught on some of the ropes of fleshy... material... close to the door, keeping it from shutting.

Just as well. Peter wanted to make sure he had a quick way to get out if he needed it.

He stepped through the doorway, his eyes adjusting to the semi-dark with an ease that he still found surprising. His body continued to surprise him.

Well... that answered the question of where the guards had been.

The room had several bunk beds. It almost looked like some sort of dorm room. His colorless low-light vision showed him a pile of bodies, all dressed in Gentek Security's all-black SWAT gear plus gas mask uniform. Some were injured. Great bleeding chunks were torn out of them which still bled freely. That made little sense. If they'd been bleeding like that for any length of time, they should have bled out by now.

Unless the rats were reopening or enlarging the wounds every time the blood flow slowed. He glanced back over his shoulder suspiciously at his strange rodent watchers.

Most weren't even injured that Peter could see. The ones who weren't wearing their gas masks stared at nothing. Their eyes were blank and empty. Not dead, but unseeing. He could just barely make out some sort of grayish film, like a cataract beginning to cover their eyes.

Where the Drago or Donna had had nothing behind their eyes but animal instinct and a hunger for violence... here there was nothing. Their bodies were alive and in some cases injured, perhaps dying, but there was no one home. Some of them were obviously dead, but the majority were alive, if the continuous flow of blood was any indication.

Of those, some were beginning to show the beginnings of the tumors and mutations Peter had seen, but there weren't many.

Peter did his best. He really tried to keep this from overwhelming him, but a part of his mind continued to scream that he needed to get out. Some terrified, primal part of him didn't care anymore. This place... Gentek could keep it's answers. It didn't want to see these things anymore.

On the bunks were worse cases. They were mostly only partly dressed in their uniforms. Their bodies were beginning to twist in strange, horrible ways that Peter could only just barely understand. Limbs swollen hugely with weirdly placed muscles tearing out of kevlar uniforms. Their faces being blotted out by tumors and the loss of chin and nose. Teeth were slowly breaking apart into the tiny needle-teeth that Cletus and Donna had sported.

The cords and twists of fleshy material grew and tangled like roots through the piled bodies and through the larger things on the beds. Ed Whelan's nasal whine whispered softly, uncertainly, Kravenov strain. Hunters.

The piled up living guards... senseless or mindless... perhaps drugged up and tripping on something or with their minds destroyed by Hydra were being used as raw materials somehow. Compost heap. His own voice drawled. Still growing. Eating them. Slow.

Peter shuddered, revulsion crawling up his spine, but at the same time his stomach betrayed him with a small hungry gurgle. He wanted to tear them free of those tendrils. The roots that had grown into them, his too sharp eyes could now pick out where the flesh of the individual guards was beginning to merge them together, the junction facilitated by tendrils of black and red, or those tumorous growths.

He stood frozen. Wanting to move forward to help. Not daring to move closer lest his body try to accidentally consume the helpless, stinking-- delicious-- heap of them. He felt his gorge start to rise or perhaps a terrified shudder ran through him, but something snapped him free and he staggered out, one hand to his mouth, fighting urges he could barely understand. He pressed his fist harder against his mouth, uncertain if he did it to keep from vomiting... or to keep the drool from escaping.

It should not have been. None of this should have excited him or stirred his hunger, but it did.

It does look awful nice, don't it? Cletus drawled softly, hungrily.

He shook his head, glancing into another room to find the scene repeated. This other room held a mix of people in smart-business casual and lab coats also piled together in a mindless heap beneath a web of tendrils.

Why separate them? he asked himself, trying to distance himself from the images. Trying to distance himself. In the van, the bodies in their individual body bags had been bad enough. The insensate piles that were being slowly broken down by the tendrils was infinitely worse.

He kept moving, the next room yielded seemingly normal people. He almost sobbed with relief that someone had survived... until he got closer. Their eyes were just as blank, but they glowed faintly.

There was that hunger.

That's all those eyes held. They seemed perfectly normal and uninfected... save for those faintly glowing red animal eyes. One, a young man in rolled up shirt-sleeves and a loosely knotted tie at his throat shambled over, barely able to maintain the necessary coordination to cross the room and snapped at him, blunt teeth closing with a clack that reminded Peter all too much of the Drago.

Peter pulled back hurriedly, but it quickly lost interest in him as he crossed the threshold of the door. They only seemed to be barely able to sense him if he came within a few feet of it. Hell, it could barely move... another Hydra victim, he reasoned.

That could have been him. The shakes just wouldn't leave once that thought came crashing into the forefront of his mind. He had gotten lucky. He'd kept his own mind... whatever else Hydra was it seemed to attack the brain first. The extreme mutations were secondary to whatever it was it did to the minds of its victims.

His entire body continued to tremble. A worse thought followed closely on the heels of the first. A detail that was difficult to overlook, despite the horror of the situation. Everyone he'd seen so far had been some sort of Gentek employee. There were the people who worked here. People who shouldn't have been infected. People who knew how to deal with this. This facility was designed to prevent this exact thing from happening... so what had happened?

The rats continued to stare.

He wanted to leave. Needed to leave. All of this seemed horrifically wrong. Where were the Thunderbolts? They'd only hesitated in shooting the Drago because they wanted to make sure they'd had all the exits covered. Those people wouldn't have allowed something like this to happen, would they? You would think they would have known.

That's what he was down here for, wasn't it? To let them know things had gone horribly wrong? So where were they? His earlier guess about prisoners hadn't borne out either. If there had been prisoners, they were probably like everyone else here.

Infected. Mindless.

Except... even if they were, he still checked each door. He didn't know for sure that they had all turned. He didn't dare risk leaving anyone to this place. No matter that he'd never have known... actually, that was part of the problem. He wouldn't have known . He knew he wouldn't have been able to live with that hanging over him. He had to make sure, so he peered into every door and found nothing but shambling, twisted mockeries of people standing or slowly moving in every room.

No one was dressed in the beekeeper outfits. Just more doctors, scientists and administrators. It was almost like something had herded them down here. No wonder the rest of the place had been so empty.

The last two rooms were different. He hadn't really been able to see them because the light had been dim and the angles bad from where he'd been looking, but the first, to his surprise had an intact door. There was a small plexiglass plate on the door where a card with neatly typed words that said: Subject 0797: Parker, M

Below it, handwritten in blue ball-point pen it spelled out with a jagged spikey hand were the words: "Sleeping Beauty"

Peter eased the door open to reveal a room that still had it's lights. The harsh white light drowned out the dimmer red emergency lights behind him, giving the room a stark contrast. The room had a single bed. Familiar looking medical equipment and not much else. A long counter extended across the far wall, but other than that, there wasn't anything else in the room.

The bed was freshly made and hadn't been lain in. There was no blood smell here, but the scent of Hydra's sickly sweetness was heavy and unmistakeable. Beneath that though... familiar. Something smelled very familiar and stirred a thought of reading in the floor of the living room while his mother and father watched TV on the couch.

Parker, M.

Parker, Mary.

Mary Parker.

His mother.

That's who'd been here. Ed Whelan's memories refused to give him any clues. The image of his mother laying on the bed, naked but for the sheet and the straps rose back up, but it told him nothing. The familiar-- family-- scent seemed ground into the room. Part of it. Had she been here since they told him she'd died?

Five years strapped to that bed? Peter turned away from that neat and empty little room. The only empty room he'd seen thus far. All the others had at least four or more mindlessly shambling infected. No one else seemed to be like he was. At least no one who was interested in letting the other monsters see that they'd kept their minds.

Peter moved to the last door. This one had a closed door as well. It had it's own cardboard card. Older. The cardstock was yellowed and seemed crumbling. The ink had faded from it, but it was still readable. The letters hadn't been a printout. They looked like they'd been done in a typewriter: Subject 0002: Drew, J.

He stared. Could that have been Johnathan Drew? He had to wonder. Had it been one of the men from the photo that had survived Middletown, Arizona?

The anonymous wit with the spikey handwriting had also written something in blue ink below that typewritten name: Madame Hydra.

Peter had to stare at that even longer. Well, he knew that with the Hydra he actually could turn himself into a woman. It wasn't that far of a stretch to imagine someone else might've gotten turned that way. Or the name... Madame Hydra... was meaningless. Or this was someone else with the last name of Drew.

Someone else who also seemed to be subject 2. Someone they'd had practically since the beginning.

Someone from Middletown, Arizona, perhaps? His voice drawled.

The door had a lock. On the outside. It wasn't actually locked, but it caught his eye nonetheless. He opened the door to the last room slowly.

Inside, it was just as brightly lit as his mother's room had been. Everything had been pretty much the same. The monitoring equipment, the counter in the back of the room and the bed with the thick leather straps.

The only real difference between the previous room and this one, was that this one was occupied.

A woman... no, a girl was on the bed. She could have been around seventeen or eighteen. She was absolutely gorgeous. Pale, creamy skin. Her face had strong cheekbones, but was rounded enough to avoid being severe. Her lips were full, sensuous and blood red. Her nose was upturned just a tiny bit at the end. On anyone else it would've looked cute. Taken with the rest of her features, the results were stunning.

Her fall of midnight black hair spread down to the small of her back. A few loose strands drifted before her face, but concealed nothing. All she had on was a loosely draped hospital sheet like a barely adequate toga that did little to conceal the fact that her figure was lush, full. Sweetly curved and very feminine.

Her eyes had been closed and her lips curved into a singularly sweet smile.

The scent in the room washed over Peter and completely drowned out the slaughterhouse scents at his back. The room smelled clean and crisp and soothing.

It made him think of long lazy mornings curled up in bed. Of spice and olive oil and lilacs. Of home.

She made him think of waffles.

He stepped into the room, shutting the door behind him, not wanting to risk the stench following him in. The terrified, rational part of Peter was screaming for attention.

Something was clearly not right, but the majority of Peter was certain it would work out. He just... he was so tired all of a sudden, he realized.

There was a bed.

Her smile turned welcoming and she extended a hand to him, beckoning him closer.

He moved closer, dreamily. She could let him rest. No more worries, or cares. Safe and warm in her embrace... his body pressed up against hers. How those lips would feel against his...

He licked at suddenly dry lips at that thought and it seemed to open a floodgate inside him. He wouldn't just rest... he could be doing things with her. Delicious things. Wicked things. Images from Cletus memory rose up and where he would have been disgusted and repulsed, now he was panting. His breathing rose sharply, the scents swimming in the air rushing into him.

Her smile continued to be welcoming, both arms out to him now, eager for his embrace. Her sheet was slipping slightly and she was bare inches away from indecency.

He stopped. His desire warring with a certain innate awkwardness that not all the changes in the world could quite take away from him. What did he know about women? Come to that, what woman ever wanted him to do... It's a trap, doofus! A voice in his head that sounded vaguely like MJ's screamed at him distantly.

He took a step back as he took another deep breath. This time the pleasant, homey scent about him had changed. There were undertones of Hydra shot through it. The sweetness was turning cloying.

A tiny crease marred the perfection of her brow as she realized that he'd moved away. "Come to me," She whispered. Her voice was husky, as though with disuse. There were odd echoes to it, as though she were speaking to him from the bottom of a spectacularly deep well.

"I'll... uh... I think I'm fine here." Peter stammered out, fighting against the compulsion to do exactly what she wanted. Fighting down the images of the rewards she would give him for his obedience. She would give him so much...

She considered his reply as though startled by it. She scooted forward, slipping off the bed with a liquid sensual grace that captivated Peter. She walked slowly towards him, every move an invitation. She kept her eyes closed, but she seemed to have no difficulty moving towards him.

Peter backed away, a frozen rictus of a smile on his face. She smelled so good. Even from almost halfway across the room, he furiously fought down the urge to just melt into her. To reach out and open himself and welcome her into his body.

He shook his head and took another step back.

She stopped her head tilting as she regarded him. "How are you doing that?" She whispered.

"Doing what?" He asked awkwardly, backing up some more until he felt the door behind him.

"Resisting." She replied.

"Uh... clean living?"

There was a brief flash of a smile, showing her teeth. It had nothing to do with humor. They were bright and flat and too white. Almost like the Drago's. Did the Hydra perhaps include teeth straightening as a side-effect on top of the other mutations it brought? Another potential money maker!

Her delicate pink tongue darting out between those teeth broke up whatever other thoughts his mind might have thrown up. His mind yammered, desperately trying to keep thinking. Trying to keep his mind from just locking up and just giving way to his need for her. His hunger...

"Oh." She said, her expression falling into pleasant surprise. "You're the one that got away." She clasped her hands in front of herself and murmured happily, "And you came back to me."

The one that got away. Ed. Whelan had somehow resisted this. Resisted her. Boring, ratty old Ed Whelan had somehow managed it and... and maybe everyone else hadn't been quite so far gone and they'd managed to send Smith and Jones out to bring him back... the perfect distraction while whoever this was took the rest of the place with rats.

"Who are you?" Peter asked, trying to buy time for himself. He had his hand on the door. She was beginning her slow, liquid strut towards him. Her bed sheet toga fluttering against her body with every movement.

His eyes tracked all of that perfectly.

She smiled sweetly once more, her eyelids still lowered, her lashes fluttering lightly in a fetchingly coquettish expression that still kept her eyes hidden. "You know who I am, Parker." She said with a gentle, chiding reproof. "I'm Jessica." She whispered huskily.

Peter wrenched the knob open and practically threw himself outside of the room

He locked the door, but he may as well not have bothered. One moment it was there, steel framed, steel core and solid. The next, it simply wasn't.

She had wrenched the door open with her dainty little bare hands, the metal of it twisted beneath her fingertips. With barely an effort, she had pulled it off it's hinges with a momentary scream of protesting metal. She held the door in one hand, fingers dug into the warped metal, as she stepped through the doorway.

Peter backed away hurriedly until he slammed his hip against one of the tables. He winced. It hadn't hurt much, but it had startled him. Although, not as much, he had to admit, as seeing her tear the door off. Nor as much now that she was holding it in hand.

"Come here," She whispered and Peter felt it now. A surge coming from her, the sickly-sweet carrion of the Hydra suddenly becoming simply sweet and delightful and so... so reasonable.

He took that as his cue. He whirled on his heel and made a break for the door.

He wasn't consciously aware of the moment she'd thrown the twisted door towards him. He hadn't seen it. Perhaps he'd heard the rush of air as she'd swung it to throw, perhaps he'd felt the air being displaced as the door was suddenly and sharply hurled towards his back.

He was not consciously aware any of these elements when instinct suddenly told him to throw himself flat on the floor. The door sailed overhead, smashing hard into the opposite wall. It embedded and stayed there for a long moment, before it suddenly fell out with a ringingly solid clang...

He scrambled back to his feet, mind automatically calculating just how strong she would had to have been to do hurl the door like that. He spared a moment to glance over his shoulder to Jessica who regarded him with pursed lips and distant interest. "I'm going to have to insist." She said huskily, beckoning once more.

Roars and snarls came from the door closest to the open exit out of the red-washed room in response to her movement.

Peter stared as five hulking, massively muscled seven foot tall creatures staggered out of the first room he'd looked into. Tatters of their uniforms still clung to their bodies here and there, but by and large they were naked. Their legs were oddly hinged, like a lion's, forcing them to balance their immense bulk onto relatively tiny feet. Their immense hands were tipped with claws, comparable in size to the talons the Drago had sported. The lower half of their faces had elongated slightly, becoming prominent. Their lipless mouths revealed the same sort of needle teeth that the trackers had, only larger. Sharper. Their heads were uniformly bald and bulged oddly. Their eyes were gone, leaving only the blank, tumorous and oddly swollen faces.

Despite the lack of eyes they managed to stare.

The tremendously muscled bodies had tufts of hair around the neck and shoulders, running a ways down their chests.

Manes. They have manes, Peter drawled to himself, focusing on that detail to stay analytical, desperate to keep himself from gibbering in terror. Like a pride of horrific, massive lions. The Kravenovs. The Hunters.

They snarled and closed in on him.

Peter looked from the hunters, blocking his route to freedom, to Jessica. The girl stood hipshot, one hand to her bare hip, Her eyes were finally open and they glowed like crimson lamps. Not just the pupils like a tracker or a Drago. Not even like Peter's eyes. Jessica's were brilliant blood red from end to end.

She smiled at him. Teasingly now. Wickedly.

He still wanted her. Just having her there made the smells all around him all the more terrible.

He turned his focus back to the hunters.

This was reminding him far too much of the last time the Football team had chased him down. If it turned into a repeat of that, he would almost have been willing to put up with it. After all, you can walk away from a wedgie. But he didn't think they were going to let him off that easily.

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