Variant Strain

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Peter could almost feel his flesh ripple and flutter at his arms and legs. He'd almost shifted to claws and talons, but he caught himself and fought his surprise down. His body was stretched tight as a wire. The scents all around him were pumping his adrenaline up. His heart was racing once more. He could almost feel the individual tendrils just beneath his skin straining to move. To fight. To run. To do something, but stand there staring stupidly.

George, still sort of half bent-over and puffing air like an over-worked bellows, gave a strained smile. "Hey, sweetie. If you're supposed to be delivering my lunch, you're a little late."

"That's just as well, dad. I ate it on the way here." The voice was a sweet, high and teasingly light. It had an airy confidence to it. It's owner was a tall, blonde girl. Her hair was cut in a short, slightly elfin cut a little past her jaw. It might have been a pageboy at one time, but it's owner had allowed it to go shaggy and artfully tousled. The only concession to taming her mane of blonde hair had been a black hairband. Her eyes were a bright, almost electric shade of blue. Her teeth were white and straight and she smiled as though she had a lot of practice. Her skin was lightly tanned and creamy smooth, the color looked honestly come by. She had a long dark green coat that came to mid-thigh, that was belted shut and gave a fairly good hint at a nicely curved figure underneath. He caught a hint of a black shirt under the coat and she was wearing jeans. She had an inch or two over Peter in height, although that could've been the thick-soled boots she was wearing.

Peter inhaled sharply as a memory of an awkward ten year old girl who liked to hit him and steal his legos rose up and imposed itself over the girl he was staring at now. Five years had apparently been enough for puberty to get quite a bit of work done. Somewhere along the way, that little girl had turned quite breath-taking. She smelled of roses and sweet cream and strangely, gun-oil. It was almost enough to blank out the Hydra scent that had been driving him mad.

She stared at George, a mild expression of surprise on her face as she asked, "Did you run here?"

George didn't bother wasting breath on a reply and simply nodded and pointed at Peter.

She then finally turned her attention on him. Her expression was polite and quizzical, but that slowly broke through to dawning recognition.

Peter, still tense, licked his lips and said, "Hi, Gwen."

She smiled and grabbed him in a sudden hug that filled his senses with her and pulled his attention finally away from the heavy reek of Hydra in the air. Her scent was almost as dizzyingly intoxicating as MJ's had been. That detail at least told him quite emphatically that she wasn't the source of the Hydra. Which was good... and bad, since now she was within proximity of the danger.

A mental image of a Drago taking a bite out of her rose up and he shuddered.

"Petey!" She said happily, unaware of the dark turn his thoughts had taken.

He winced, "I really wish you wouldn't call me that." He said sheepishly as he awkwardly returned the hug.

She laughed and held him at arm's length, her hands on his shoulders. "How have you been?" She gave his shoulders a squeeze and here eyebrows rose approvingly, "Wow... do you work out? These are really solid."

George coughed and straightened up finally, "Would you mind not groping boys in front of me?" He groused.

"I'm not even grabbing anything interesting, Dad." Gwen made a dismissive sighing noise, but said, "Yes, sir." She gave Peter's biceps another squeeze before she let go.

George gave Peter a small smile then looked at Gwen. "Everything ok, sweetie?"

"Yes," She replied cheerfully and fished a small bag of apple-chips from the pocket of her coat. "Here's what was left of your lunch."

"You really did eat my lunch?" He asked incredulously.

She made that dismissive noise again and waved a hand in front of her. "I saw Jean out here. She said you'd gone to get some lunch already, so I figured there wasn't any reason for me to hold on to your sandwich letting it just get colder and colder..."

"They were cold cuts. They were supposed to to be cold."

She shrugged and smiled. "Warmer then."

George rolled his eyes at the girl.

Peter, despite the way his nerves were singing at him about the nearby Hydra, wherever it might have been, couldn't help but smile at the Stacy's.

You don't have time for nostalgia, doofus, his voice drawled. You can get stupid and distracted later when they're out of danger.

Having Gwen here changed things. She wasn't a cop like her dad. Even George Stacy would probably be in a lot of danger if he went in. The Thunderbolts, trained as they were against the Infected had taken fatalities. He didn't dare risk the older man. George Stacy was one of the few links he had to his parents... and he was a family man. He couldn't bear the thought of making Gwen into an orphan like him.

He turned his full attention to George and spoke hurriedly. "What happened at the Sandoval Deli. I think it might happen here."

"How do you know?" George Stacy's voice had gone hard and there was a suspicious glimmer in the man's eyes.

Peter froze. Even Gwen was looking at him strangely now and he racked his brain for something to say.

One of these days, boy, you are going to need to learn to get your lies sorted out ahead of time, Cletus tsked.

He was saved from the need for further reply when George Stacy’s phone suddenly went off. He gave Peter a thoughtful, though not unkindly look, but there were questions in that glance. He fished the phone out of his inside coat pocket, held a hand up and flashed an expression that clearly said, ‘this isn’t done’, then walked a few steps away. He answered. “What is it?”

Peter cocked his head ever so slightly and his enhanced hearing did the rest.

It was Detective deWolffe’s voice, tinny through the cellphone’s speakers. “George, something weird's going on up here. Are you almost done with lunch?” There were noises in the background, almost impossible to distinguish, but Peter could almost, but not quite hear some sort of faint roaring noise. It came from the second floor of the building, but then was echoed a second later on the cellphone speaker.

“I’m right outside. Just about to head up.” George replied.

“Have you been running?” The woman’s voice asked, but before George could reply, she continued. “You remember Fred Byers?”

George nodded. “Yeah. Saregeant. Day shift. Mans the security desk down in holding.”

“Well he just came up here and started tearing your desk apart.” deWolffe’s voice said matter of factly. “He just went nuts. Biting spitting, snarling. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Peter shifted and looked up the building. The sounds were a point of reference for him. He could make out more or less by hearing more faint sounds indicating Jean deWolffe’s presence on the second floor. On the corner nearest he Eastern side of the building. He was hearing her voice faintly just a fraction of a second before it came out of the phone. He flared his nostrils again slightly and took another deep breath, trying to filter out Gwen’s roses and gun-oil scent and focusing on the stronger living Hydra. Some of it was coming from the second floor… but the majority of the concentration was lower down.

George frowned then looked from the phone over to Peter, who contrived to look like he hadn’t been eavesdropping, but was doing a poor job of it. Gwen, he realized, had been watching him the whole time with obvious curiosity.

He finally gave up trying to pretend that he hadn't been listening and stepped up to George speaking urgently. "Get everyone else out of the building. I'm not absolutely sure, but you have to make sure he's secure and also secure anyone he managed to spit on or bite. I think he might be infected with the same stuff that wrecked the Sandoval Deli yesterday."

George's eyes widened, inclining his head slightly. Peter's expression was clearly worried, almost on the verge of panicked, but keeping it down and just barely forcing himself to stay calm. The detective caught enough of that and the urgency in the boy's voice and replied hurriedly into the phone, "Jean? Keep Byers on ice. Anyone he managed to bite or spit on? Better keep an eye on them too." He glanced back to Peter then added over the phone, "That Talbot guy might not have been as thorough with his clean up as he thought."

"Wait, I can't..." Jean deWolffe might have been trying to say 'can't hear you' but the snarling in the background came to a crescendo that swamped out her voice and the racket suddenly cranked increased dramatically.

Then screaming and gun shots started from the second floor.

The phone went dead. The noise had gotten so loud that Peter couldn't pick out Detetctive DeWolffe's voice or heartbeat from the cacophony coming from the second floor. Worse than that, the Hydra scents were increasing as if they were...

Infection's spreading, Cletus whispered.

In the middle of Queens. Peter froze. They'd chased him here. This was his fault.

George stared for a moment then up at the police station where the noises were coming from and without another thought, he tucked his phone away and pulled his gun out. "Gwen? Sweetie? You and Peter get out of here--"

Peter was about to protest. He'd intended to interrupt, but the glass doors of the police station bursting open had done it for him.

What had come out was still somewhat humanoid in that it had two arms, two legs and a head. But the proportions were completely off. It's left arm was swollen grotesquely huge so that it's bicep was practically as large as Peter's waist with knuckles that scraped the ground. It's right arm was a spindly thing that seemed to be little more than skin stretched across bone and sinew, but tipped with the small claws of the sort the trackers had. One leg looked almost normal, but the right one was also shrunken to a withered stumpy protrusion little more than half the length of the normal leg. It moved with a lurching, drunken motion using it's one good leg and the oversized arm for motion. The tiny leg flailing away providing an inadequate counterbalance. Part of it's head was also swollen to tremendous proportions, leaving the other half almost skeletally wasted. There wasn't enough skin to cover the enlarged cranium so sections showed torn skin where ragged meat poked through. It's features were a ruin and it's eyes, the only part of it's face that looked even remotely normal were blazing red.

The sudden blast of a carrion cloud of Hydra scent surrounding the nightmarish creature assaulted Peter's senses, freezing him in place for a critical second as it lurched for the closest target.

Gwen.

She screamed, drawing away from it almost as soon as it came within arm's reach of her. George Stacy was snapped immediately out of his own surprise by the sound of his daughter's cry. He drew a pistol from a shoulder rig smoothly and began shooting at the thing.

Three bullets took it in center mass. High on the chest and to the right. The skeletal arm flailed as the bullets punched through it, but other than some flinching and a bellow of rage it didn't even slow. Peter's eyes focused on the creature's chest and a sick feeling rose up from his stomach.

The creature was wearing a policeman's uniform shirt. It even had a badge still pinned. The sleeve the massive arm came out of had burst at the seams. The one the skeletal arm had been in had simply been ripped cleanly off. It even still had a gunbelt dangling from it's hips, the holstered gun in it banging against the flailing too-short leg.

Infected. Some poor policeman had become infected because something had been tracking him.

His fault. And Gwen and Detective Stacy were next unless he did something. Faster than he even thought he could manage, Peter stepped between Gwen and the Infected. His fingers and toes seemed all too eager to switch to their claw and talon forms and begin tearing the thing apart, but he didn't dare. Not while the Stacy's watched him. Instead he lashed out, delivering a very precise, very deliberate kick to the Infected's one good leg.

Human joints are delicate. Even a kick of normal human strength delivered to a knee at just the right angle can completely ruin it. Peter was delivering his kick with considerably more force. The knee suddenly bent backwards, in a manner that it was most definitely not designed to do. The sudden inversion collapsed it, sending it screaming down to the ground. It's oversized arm the only thing holding it up

George Stacy managed to get a bead on it then and sent a bullet through it's swollen head, producing an explosion of gore. Peter caught the worst of it, but Gwen and George were behind him. Before either could catch a good look at the mess, his body twitched with tendrils and cleaned the blood from his face and chest.

Geogre Stacy nodded to Peter, his gun still in hand, "Good reflexes." He stared at the still-twitching body that lay insensate on the sidewalk, "What the hell was that?"

Gwen was just staring in shock and horror and revulsion at the mess. Peter glanced over at her. She looked like she was about to throw up, but she covered her mouth and seemed to get it under control.

Peter shook his head and replied hurriedly. "Hydra Infected. Something like that made the mess at the deli yesterday." He took another deep breath and almost gagged. "It's not the only one."

George stared at the still moving body and then looked up to Peter. "This thing has Billy Martin's badge."

Peter flinched then licked his lips. "I'm sorry. That probably was him."

George frowned and seemed about to ask more questions, but more figures began to lurch out of the Police station.

"Oh, God." Gwen murmured, clinging to her father's side.

What lurched out were about seven or eight more figures. It was difficult to tell exactly because one of the figures looked like two uniformed police officers who were pressed shoulder to shoulder against each other and were beginning to melt into each other. At least three of the figures who lurched out looked almost perfectly normal, save for the blank, slack-jawed expressions on their faces. They shambled forward, poorly coordinated, but not seeming especially hindered by whatever had happened to them. The others were showing their own deformities, but none of them as extreme as the first. Peter's mind simply glossed over the details of how they'd been changed, just that their proportions were off. Oddly distorted silhouettes and strange bulges under their clothes.

They moved towards their small group, but Peter realized they were orienting on him. He wondered if Jessica's allure would let her control these new infectees even at this distance and she was still after him. Did she get away from the Thunderbolts? He had no clue. Maybe the infected were acting on instinct. Or there was some sort of embedded command...

Or you just smell purty to 'em. Stop starin', doofus and do somethin', Cletus' voice urged.

George raised his weapon and thundered at the approaching infected. "Everyone stop right there!"

No one paid attention, although one or two might have begun looking in his direction.

"Stop or I'll shoot!" George roared, but again, no one took notice.

Peter stood and stared. Torn. He didn't want to show them what he could do. He didn't want them to see a monster. He couldn't let them get hurt. He was fairly sure he could take them, even with their superior numbers, but not as sure if he was forced to hold back. They hadn't been infected long... they couldn't have. George and Peter had barely been in the restaurant forty minutes. The changes hadn't overtaken most of them. Or perhaps not everyone got physically changed by infection. Either way, he didn't think they'd developed the same inhuman strength that the Trackers had, much less the Hunters.

George snapped a shot off at the feet of the approaching group. No one even flinched. Gwen pressed harder against her father's back.

He was running out of time.

The closest, a man in a rumpled brown suit lunged toward them. His slack mouth suddenly open and slavering, spittle spraying everywhere as the completely blank non-expression blossomed into a feral hunger. It sprinted towards George and Gwen. Detective Stacy's gun roared again, striking the charging figure in the center mass once more, blood stains blossoming on the man's white shirt, but it did little more than stagger him slightly.

Time was up. Peter couldn't afford to wait any more.

Peter put himself in front of the charging infected with a single step and flared heat and red haze around his body to redistribute his mass for a fraction of a second. He drove a single roundhouse punch into the infected man's chest, adjusting the angle just right and smashing into him with the entire weight of two full-grown Hunters behind his fist.

The blow blasted the infected entirely off it's feet and slammed it backwards, slamming into and knocking down the three nearest infectees. It bought them a few seconds. Peter wasn't nervous about facing infected again... it was beginning to become almost routine for him. He could handle that. He really didn't want to deal with the questions. Or with the looks if they realized just how... different he was now, but there would be time to worry about that later. People were in danger.

He snapped harshly at Detective Stacy, hoping to cover up his fear. A bit of the nameless security officer's tone slipped into his voice, demanding instand obedience, "You need to get Gwen out of here, sir. Get help. They transmit the infection by bite."

He didn't give the older man or his daughter a chance to reply before he closed in on the infected before him. The one he'd punched had it's entire chest caved in and was pretty much a dead weight pinning the ones it had landed on. Fortunately, it looked like the infection hadn't gotten far enough to really begin reinforcing their bodies. Two of the pinned infected had been outright knocked out by the impact. Peter took care of the third with a swift boot to the jaw, which drove it's head into the sidewalk and knocked it out as well.

As long as he thought of them as 'it' rather than 'he', he could keep his nausea down. These poor people didn't ask to become infected. They still looked so very human. Maybe they could still be helped. Maybe not. He didn't want to make that judgement call in the middle of a fight. He hoped they could be helped. He didn't want their blood on his hands.

But it's already there. The only reason they got infected was because Jessica's after you, His voice drawled.

We don't know that. This could've happened anyway, Cletus's voice shot back.

Peter shook his head and decided to table those thoughts for later. He wove around his attackers, smashing limbs aside, delivering quick punshing blows to their heads intending to knock them out as quickly as possible. He took two out easily, but the last one, the conjoined officers managed to get behind him and wrapped two arms around his body and a ropy tentacular limb around his neck, tightening it and choking off his air. Spots began to dance in his vision and his fingers began to reweave themselves into claws to let him cut himself free, but before he could do so, one of the heads exploded. The other gave a keening wail just as one of its arms suddenly went slack. That was all the chance he needed. Peter drove his head backwards, smashing it hard into the nose of the other head and forcing it entirely off of him. He whirled and drove his fist into the already broken nose, knocking the remaining head out entirely.

Peter glanced over his shoulder at George who'd snapped off the shot that had taken out the conjoined infected's head. "Thanks." He said.

George asked. "Are you alright?"

Gwen stared wide-eyed at Peter, "All that and your clothes aren't even dirty."

He rubbed at the back of his neck, "It's... uh... it's kind of a long story." The carrion reek of live Hydra hadn't changed, if anything, the whole structure was saturated with it now. In the brief seconds of Peter's fight with the infected, the screams had stopped coming from the building, but gunshots continued to ring out.

"There may still be uninfected people in there," He said.

George nodded agreement. "I'm not going to get you to keep out of this, am I?"

"No, sir." Peter replied.

"Gwen? Go. Head home." George said.

"Yes, sir." Gwen replied automatically. "But what about--?"

Peter's eyes narrowed as he stared into the open door. Just inside he could see unmoving bodies scattered around. Whether dead or paralyzed like the victims from the Bellevue hive he couldn't say for certain, but he saw running figures heading for the door.

"Incoming." He said and clenched his fists.

George brought his gun back up. "Sweetie?" He said distantly, pitching his voice to Gwen, but never taking his eyes off the open door, "We can talk later."

"Yes, sir." She said quietly. Gwen gave Peter and her father one last frightened glance, then began to run up the street.

From the open door burst Jean DeWolffe, followed by five more men and women. She was pale and clutching at one shoulder, her sleeve was ripped open and the injured arm hung limp as blood flowed freely down. The others were just as badly torn up. The men at the rear were sending wild, unaimed shots behind them. The last man, a youthful officer in his full uniform almost made it out of the door, but something reached down from just above the door and grabbed him at the last moment, eliciting a final scream.

The escape seemed to change something in the air. Peter felt a momentary tension as though the entire building were shifting and suddenly, something slammed into the open doorway. It looked like a massive plug of rippling raw meat sealing the door shut. It even seemed to be shot through with blue-gray veins. Ropy tendrils of the same material began spreading outward, like fleshy roots-- or blood vessels. Branching radial growth patterns. Similar tendrils began breaking out of windows, the fleshy material sealing them closed. Nodules began forming on the tendrils and more of the material seemed to be spreading over the walls.

It was forming a hive, he realized. He knew intellectually that Hydra induced it's strange mutations very quickly. It had transformed him in an hour. From start to finish the new hive had taken less time than that. He glanced at those who'd escaped. Five. Five people total. Six if he counted George. The unconscious and incapacitated Infected at their feet accounted for another nine or so. He licked his lips.

At this time of day, he remembered that there would be roughly sixty or seventy people in the building. Not counting anyone who was in holding. Everyone still in the building was going to become infected.

That included Brian Watson, a vicious part of himself reminded him gleefully.

Peter wasn't sure if the proportions of changes among the infected would hold the same as in the Bellevue hive or if Jessica had somehow been controlling the progress of the disease... but the odds were good that everyone in there was about to lose their mind and come out as some sort of ravening monster.

How fast, he wondered, would they be able to spread out from here? He was just one person. How was he supposed to stop this? Manhattan was infiltrated. It was swimming in Hydra already. Why start up a hive so blatantly in Queens?

Unless that was the point. Have the infection seem to erupt openly here and keep everyone from realizing how saturated Manhattan was. Not that it mattered right now. His real worry was how to deal with a new hive in his territory... especially when they were down to six cops out of the entire precinct. Most of whom were already injured.

His phone chimed as a new text message arrived. It was just so incongruous it snapped him out of his contemplation and he fished the phone out to look at the new message. The origination was anonymous again: "Thunderbolts incoming. Get out."

He stared. What was going on?

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