Variant Strain

- - -

Peter leaped off the top of a five story building several blocks away from their neighborhood. There were helicopters in the distance, but no one really close enough for a good look. Or rather, he hoped the floor show was interesting enough to keep their attention.

Given everything that was happening he was hoping people weren't looking up.

He spread his arms slightly to either side of himself, fingers spread and he let the wind catch him. He had his weight flared down to a negligible amount. The leap had given him a bit more distance and an initial direction.

It had been a good idea when he'd started, but he realized belatedly that while he was able glide on the wind well enough to get above the Marine cordon it was also slow. He was almost literally drifting on the wind. He was guessing that he'd made much better time on foot, but he couldn't be sure. His position made distances deceptive. Gliding along over a hundred feet above ground at the whim of the wind and dropping slowly, made it difficult to gauge just how fast he actually was going.

He needed to go faster. He tilted his head down and let instinct make the necessary adjustments. In some wordless way, he shifted his weight again. This time, no longer entirely negated, but in a way he didn't understand, his weight was shifted. He was falling now, but at an angle. He remembered standing on the wall. Running on the ceiling. It hadn't just been his talons gripping the concrete. He'd shifted how his weight fell, somehow. Not straight down. He 'fell' at an angle. He wasn't sure how it worked exactly, but there was some sort of internal shift and suddenly gravity was acting on him in a way that would be giving Sir Isaac Newton fits.

Minor factoid. File it away for later when he'd have time to do some tests.

It pretty much had been since he'd first consumed the Drago... the Vulture. Consuming the Rhino had somehow improved his control tremendously.

Now here he was, doing the next best thing to flying and he couldn't even really appreciate it, because he had to hurry. He had to get to the Watson house as fast as his new talent could take him.

It still wasn't really flying. It was a very specific sort of controlled fall. He felt like he was plunging headfirst down at a crazily angled street. He knew intellectually that he was falling at a roughly thirty degree angle with respect to the ground and building up a decent amount of speed in the process.

He closed in, shooting over the cordon and the crowd of infected on the street. Even from where he was, the stench of Hydra came up thick. If he concentrated he could pinpoint individual sources now... but it was so hard with so many of them. He hadn't expected there to be so many. It hadn't been that long. Had it? How long had it been since the Hive had closed up? An hour? Two? How fast was this spreading?

There were definitely more now then what he'd seen on TV. Some of the homes had their doors and windows broken open. others had tried to make a break for it to the cordon. Peter swallowed as he noted the large numbers of broken and bleeding bodies just short of the cordon. They'd set up a short concrete barricade on the road, topped it with razor wire and two APCs had large machine gun emplacements poking out of their backs, aimed up the street. It was possible to drive past the narrow gap in the concrete barrier, but only if one of the APCs were moved aside to let them through.

Ironically, the Parker home had been completely unmolested. On the other hand, his sharp eyes caught sight of the crowd of infected surrounding what remained of the Sandoval Deli. The Hydra scent for it was live and strong and beginning to show the ropy splotches of the viral covering on the concrete that marked the building's conversion to another hive. Peter mused that there was probably a few hundred pounds worth of potential biomass in the place's walk-in freezer from a week's worth of unused deli meats.

He started shifting his mass again, heat, no longer flaring, but shifting internally, moving away from his head, down to his feet, cutting his acceleration sharply, slowing his fall, but his inexperience and the limited assistance of his instincts betrayed him.

He misjudged his landing and instead of settling down, light as a feather as he'd initially intended, he came down, still just a shade too fast into the back yard of the Watson home. He didn't have time to flip himself around to get his feet under him and was in mid-movement when his shoulders and back slammed into the ground with only a fraction of his apparent weight.

That was the good part. It didn't hurt. Unfortunately, gravity, momentum and surprise all factored into the completely undignified pratfall that occurred. He rolled on his shoulders, almost making it to his feet, but he still had too much forward momentum and ended up flipping end over end, bounced off a rock before finally slamming to a stop upside down against the back fence, his legs tangled over the top of the short fence.

The back yard was thankfully empty of anyone who might have witnessed his embarrassment. He didn't really have time to think about that now. He rolled back to his feet, his body flaring heat as it went back to it's normal weight. He sprinted for the back door. It was still intact and closed... but the large picture window overlooking the breakfast table was completely shattered. From what he could see, the table just inside was a complete wreck. As though multiple feet had stomped all over it on their way in.

That would not have been so bad... except he couldn't see any infected in the kitchen or dining room area.

Worse, the door to the living room had been burst open. The stairs to the second floor were through the living room.

He took a deep breath, blocking out the stench of Hydra from the street and concentrating his senses entirely on the house.

Spice, Lilacs and Waffles. All around the second floor. Two huddled close to the front of the house, where the master bed room had been. That was good. They should be fine there, but the third...

Peter licked his lips. MJ's scent and her frantic heartbeat placed her halfway down the stairs.

Worse, she was surrounded by a miasma of cloying Hydra scent. Her own scent was still clean, but they were close to her. Too close.

A spike of panic surged heat through his body. He smashed through the back door ripping it easily off it's hinges in a burst of frantic strength. He ran for the living room, smashing aside the fallen furniture in his way with no difficulty at all, praying that he wasn't too late.

MJ screamed. Her heart beat even faster. His own rose sharply as his fear spiked. In the fraction of a second it took to cross the distance his mind flashed all manner of horrific images and scenarios that could present themselves to him.

He moved faster.

Peter burst through the open doorway as she continued her scream. At the base of the stairs and halfway up it, were infected. Men and women, all twisted in various ways by the Hydra. None quiet. All trying to get up the stairs. He couldn't get a clear count of how many were there, crowded as they were.

MJ's scream continued, but Peter realized it wasn't one of fear.

It was a battle cry.

She stood her ground at the middle of the stairs, in mid-kick. She was driving the heel of her heavy work boot into the face of one Infected that had almost made it up to her level. She caused it to overbalance and fall back among it's fellows infectees.

Her eyes gleamed, caught somewhere between panic and bloodlust as she swung around a handgun. The same heavy handgun she'd taken from the Thunderbolt operative in Manhattan. The one she'd intended to use on her father. She hadn't fired it yet, he could smell that much, even through the confused cloud of smells in the place, but she brandished it, pistol-whipping another grabby infected in the neck, sending it tumbling over the railing and onto the floor below where it landed badly, there had been a loud snap and it's neck hung at a grotesque angle. It stopped moving, beyond a few involuntary twitches. The already glazed eyes... which Peter noted had been brown once, but were now filmy with cataracts... went completely empty.

There was a shift in the crowd then. A handful... the three, perhaps four, at the lowest end of the ladder, the ones who had the least chance of reaching MJ in the first place, changed directions and swarmed to the unmoving infected on the living room floor and began to eat it.

There hadn't been anything like his feeding tendrils. They were going to town in the simplest and most brutally effective method available to them. They bit into the still warm and vaguely twitching flesh and blood ran, staining the carpet. MJ couldn't see it from her vantage. Which was just as well... she was too busy fending off more of the Infected to notice.

As the first of the feeding infected began to rip out a large chunk of bicep from their dead, two more abandoned the stairs to join the feast, lessening the press on MJ. She still had to keep giving ground, but she was making them pay for every inch they took.

A fierce pride surged in him at that, but just as quickly, a glance at the fallen infected and the crowding inhuman creatures tearing it apart and eating it sent a spasm of terror and disgust and nausea clenching his stomach. He felt too cold and too hot all at once.

And hungry.

His imagination threw more images at him. MJ down there. Being the focus of the feasting Infected. Aunt May. Anna. He remembered how the Draco's broad, too flat teeth had torn into poor Mr. Sandoval. The blank, empty eyes of the infected in the Bellevue hive, sill alive. Comatose. Stacked on top of one another like a grotesque compost heap. This was worse. This was a feeding frenzy. Another one of the infected on the stairs gave up on trying to get at MJ in favor of the easy meat that had fallen.

An arm was ripped off and the infected who'd done it, a woman in a short skirt who seemed to be halfway through the process of turning into a tracker, clambered onto the sofa to eat in relative peace away from the frenzied crowd.

That was what would happen to the people he cared for unless he did something.

He knew they were victims. He could pick out their clothes, make educated guesses about what kind of people they had been before this had happened to them. But now, victims or not, they were animals. Inhuman monsters. Mindless. Ravening. Hungry.

In an abstract way he cared that they had, through no fault of their own, become this way. He felt sorry for them. But only in a dim, distant and abstract way.

He didn't care enough to be gentle. Not anymore.

Fury surged up his spine. White hot. He snarled and grabbed the closest infected fighting to get to MJ at the foot of the stairs.

He hadn't even consciously called for the full length of his claws to form, but they had and the massive blades at his thumb and pinky closed around the infected's neck, slicing cleanly and easily through the flesh. He gave a jerk and the head popped free of the body, enclosed in a cage of his clawed fingers for a brief moment before he whipped it around and slammed his bladed fist and the head into another infected higher up on the stairs, pinning it between his claws and the wall, disemboweling it. His other claw flashed in an arc, slicing through two more infected, breaking thigh bones as his blades cleaved through them with terrible strength.

Four down in under a second. The ones higher up didn't even get a chance to register the newer fresh meat before he was on them, Claws punching through the back of one, exiting it's stomach in a small fountain of gore. Another just simply lifted bodily off the stairs and slammed head first into a step. Yet another hurled out of the way by raking claws to slam into the feeding crowd on the side of the stairs.

Peter's conscious mind stopped cataloging what he did. He stopped paying attention and simply let himself tear into them. They would not touch MJ. They would not move any further up. He could hear a savage roaring and snarling as they were torn apart and he realized that it was coming from him.

It had taken him seconds. Literally. Seconds.

He wasn't even consciously aware of having deployed his feeding tendrils. Out of the corner of his eye, he noted absently, that his legs were a mass of them, consuming and absorbing the infected that had fallen at his feet.

That had stopped him as much as the realization that he'd almost effortlessly ripped a dozen infected apart bare-handed. As he stood there, breathing hard, more from the explosion of rage and terror that he'd just unleashed than from any physical exertion. He watched as the short tendrils unfolding from his legs and arms and back... cleaned up.

They'd gotten so much faster. A tendril would pierce a fallen infected and within a few seconds it would collapse into it's own mass of wiggling tendrils that would writhe and slither their way up the first tendril to be absorbed into his body... the newer mass of tendrils grabbing hold and feeding on any other bodies it encountered along the way, transforming them similarly. Nothing was capable of moving fast enough to avoid the slow, writhing mass of tendrils unfolded from his body and the bodies closest to him. And he could feel all of them. Feel his body in some strange, inexplicable way covering half the steps in a carpet of writhing tendrils, hungrily feeding and devouring the bodies of the fallen infected.

How are you that different from them? His own voice asked in awed horror in his head.

Cletus's voice replied. I clean up after myself.

He wasn't sure if the half-hysterical giggle that rose in his mind was his own or if it belonged to one of the other voices.

The stairs were completely clear of infected. A smaller crowd of about eight were still in the living room, eating... but with a disquieting sense of polite warriness. They seemed to understand that they were in the presence of a bigger, stronger predator and were loathe to catch his attention.

He snarled down at them and they startled all at once. All of them began making their way for the back of the house, dragging the half-eaten carcass with them as they made their escape.

In theory he should have killed them all. They would just try to do this to someone else, his mind insisted, but he was sick. He was terrified... not just of them or what they would do, but he'd become terrified of what he'd actually been capable of. He'd fought for his life before. He'd fought to protect other people... but this wasn't that. He'd let himself tear through them.

He had wanted to kill them. To hurt them. Because they were going after what was his. Because they were in his territory. Trying to take from him. His chest tightened at that and his fury began to bubble up once more, warring with his self-loathing.

He thought about chasing them down and dealing with them. Dealing with, hah! Eating, you mean, his voice snarled in his mind. They seemed to realize that and hurried away. In far less time than he had expected, they were gone.

He stood alone near the middle of the stairs. He also noted absently that the stairs below his position had lost large patches of carpet and wallpaper... his tendrils feeding a little too aggressively, he supposed. The entire place was a mess.

He looked up to the head of the stairs where MJ stood, gun still in hand. She had a pair of black jeans on and a plain white shirt that was plastered against her sweating body. Her hair hung as a limp and tangled mess, still halfway covering her bruised eye.

She was panting hard and staring down at him, chewing her lower lip furiously.

She looked incredible.

He licked strangely dry lips and clenched suddenly clammy hands and said, as casually as he could, "Hi."

He thought the gaze she'd turned upon him had been one of disgust and terror. In fact he'd been sure she would be ready to scream and bolt any moment now. He'd just shown her what he was really capable of. The kind of brutal, remorseless predator that he was. He wasn't sure what he would do if she ran, but he figured he would... he could just take to the streets. Keep the house secure from the approach of any other infected. That way she and Aunt May and Anna would be protected and they'd need never even see him.

So it actually caught him completely off guard when she half-ran, half-jumped down the stairs, wrapping her arms around him and began kissing him hard on the lips.

He made a muffled sound of inquiry and confusion before he fully registered her warmth pressing against him, molding herself against him as she kissed him furiously, her tongue urgent against his lips and he was too startled to keep her from what she wanted. She tasted of salt and sweet and copper.

He felt his body shifting against hers and a raw, primal part in the back of his mind respond to her hunger and began kissing back just as furiously.

It was very, very good.

A detached and very confused part of him wondered where the hell he learned how to kiss like that until the he remembered belatedly that two of the men he'd consumed had been married and probably did know how to do... such things.

Despite his own complete inexperience.

A sudden chill fell on his passion when he realized that one of those 'experienced' parts of himself had been Brian Watson. He shuddered and forced himself to calm down and pull away.

It was hard.

So hard.

His body trembled with the force of his own denied hunger, but he broke the kiss off, shuddering.

Y'know, my Pappy always told me it's a bad idea to stick it inta crazy. Cletus offered.

MJ stared at him, her eyes shining. It hadn't been fear, he realized. That... had been hunger. Possessiveness. Need.

Her eyes took on an amused glitter and she murmured in a low, throaty purr, "Hi, yourself, Tiger." She snuggled into his arms. "You were kind of late to the party, so I had to start without you."

"I was being fashionably late," He smiled back, painfully aware of how good she felt against him. How deliciously she smelled. How she'd tasted. Then he remembered just how much she was managing to freak him out and forced himself to get back on track. "Are... um... are you okay?"

"Much better now." She replied breathlessly, her voice starting to come back to something like normal. "I did my best... um..." She looked embarassed for a moment and held up the pistol, which he realized she'd still been holding while they'd been kissing. That was what she'd had pressing against his back.

Her voice was embarrassed. "I couldn't get it to work."

His eyes flicked to it and noted exactly why it hadn't worked. He gently took the gun away from her, pocketing it before she could protest. "You left the safety on." He said quietly.

She stared. "Oh." She paused and stared at him and simply said again, "Oh."

Then she laughed. Or it had started as a laugh, as the tension of the fight, the fear, the adrenaline all suddenly broke and somewhere halfway, the laugh had turned into ugly wracking sobs and she was crying against his chest. He realized she was muttering and rambling weakly into his chest, "I was so scared. Oh, god, Peter... I didn't know what to do. I knew you were coming, but I was so scared. I'm sorry I doubted you. I'm sorry I thought you weren't going to make it."

He winced and did his best to soothe her, stroking her hair, holding her. He made comforting noises, unsure of what else he could do.

- - -

It took her a few minutes to calm down and while she left his shirt sodden with tears, a quick blurring of tendrils across his chest wiped them away and Peter tasted salt. He suppressed a shudder at the fact that he was tasting her tears.

She gave him a smile, her eyes somewhat blotchy, but she looked much improved. "What do we do next?"

"How are Aunt May and Anna?" He asked.

"They're in the master bathroom," MJ replied, taking his hand and pulling him up the stairs. "She twisted her ankle when we were running up the stairs. May, I mean. Aunt Anna's wrapping it up in bandages. I don't think she's going to be able to put any weight on it."

Peter puffed out a breath, then frowned as he realized something. "They don't even know you were out here do they?"

She shrugged nonchalantly, "Why make them worry?"

He winced and tried his best not think about why she would have such a mindset. "I hate to say it, but the house is going to be a spectacularly bad place to make a stand in. The back door's wide open. I might have cowed those infected for now, but I don't think it's going to stick for too long. Especially not if they come in here with more. We've got to get you guys out."

MJ shook her head, "The people at the blockade in the road aren't letting anyone through." She wrapped her arms around her stomach and seemed to be suppressing shudders. "They're shooting everyone who's trying to get past. Even people running away from infected. We're in the middle of a George Romero movie and we're on the inside of the barricades, locked in with the zombies."

"MJ..." Peter began to say gently, but she gave him a smile that cut off whatever else he wanted to say.

"But you're here. You can get us past, right?" Her voice was much brighter than the situation warranted.

He sighed as he let ideas play through his head and discarded them almost as quickly. "Maybe. I don't know. I wasn't really thinking this far ahead. I just had to make sure you were all safe."

That earned him another hug and MJ.

His phone dinged and he fished it out of his pocket.

She frowned. "Who's texting you now?"

He shrugged and tried not to notice how upset she seemed at that. He tapped on his phone and found that it was a text message from Hank: "You were supposed to stay away. Call me."

He sighed. "It's a friend of my mom's. He already helped me a little. He knows about the stuff that's going on, but hasn't really told me as much as he could. I think." He paused, then frowned, "And I'm sure he can track the GPS on my phone. Give me a minute, he might be able to help us."

He tapped the speed dial for Hank and put it on speaker. The man's synthetic voice sounded flat and toneless. "I told you to stay out of the Red Zone, Peter. Why are you in there?"

"The infected were going to over run my neighbor's house. My aunt's still here--"

"You need to leave." Hank's voice cut him off abruptly.

"That's what I'm trying to do," Peter snapped back. "Do you have some way I can get past the cordon without them shooting at--?"

"No. They have their orders, Peter. The cordon across your street is primarily Marines, but there are Thunderbolts in charge of it. If anyone approaches, anyone at all, they will be stopped. They will not allow anyone through. Not fellow Thunderbolts, not anyone."

"So much for disguises," Peter muttered, quickly abandoning the idea of pretending to be a Thunderbolt Officer trying to make his way back to the cordon... not that it really would have worked if he'd had to bring Aunt May, Anna and MJ with him. Well, maybe MJ in her hoodie could've passed as a Tracker, but if that wasn't going to work...

"How did you get back there in the first place, Peter?" Hank asked, his voice synthetically softened. "Just go back the way you came and--"

"I jumped from the roof of a fifth story building." Peter replied.

"... you what?" Hank's voice had gone flat once more.

He replied, ignoring the synthesized voice's question, "I've got to get three other people out of here too, Dr. Pym. Can you help me at all?"

The phone was silent for a long moment before it began to speak, "Peter, I don't know if I..."

"Please!" MJ spoke suddenly.

There was another pause before Hank's voice replied in a flat monotone, "Am I on speakerphone?"

"Yes," MJ replied before Peter could. Her voice was high and sweet and pleading. "Please, sir. The only reason Peter came back here was to save his aunt and us. You can't ask him to just leave us here..."

She almost looked as though she were about to cry again and he put an arm around her shoulders, but once he did, her expression cleared immediately then she smiled wickedly at him and winked.

"You weren't supposed to--" Hank began, then interrupted himself. "We can't risk--"

Peter replied firmly, "They're not infected if that's what you're worried about. I can detect Hydra infections, Dr. Pym. They're clean."

There was an explosion of random syllables once more and MJ looked up at Peter curiously. He shook his head and Hank spoke again, this time his voice had returned to a gentler tone, "This isn't like Bellevue, Peter. I can't just override a lock. There's men surrounding the Red Zone. You would have to probably fight your way past... or sneak past somehow, but you can't do that with..." The synthetic voice trailed off suddenly.

"What is it?" Peter asked.

The phone made the electronic equivalent of a sigh and a pop up window opened, showing a map of the neighborhood. "There is side street." The map zoomed in. "No one was expecting the Infected to come out of the Hive so quickly. The cordon isn't as air-tight as it is supposed to be." One street was highlighted in red. "The Infected have not spread that far and there is supposed to be an APC detailed to this location, but they've been pinned down a few blocks away supporting another squad against several hunters."

MJ and Peter looked at one another, their expressions brightening.

Hank's voice had turned urgent. "I expect someone back in Thunderbolts Command will notice the gap shortly, but I will not call attention to it myself. You have maybe five minutes before someone sees it. Perhaps ten to twenty before personnel can be moved into place. If you hurry, you can make it out before that happens."

"Thank you," MJ pitched her voice warm and grateful, but Peter could see that it wasn't showing in her eyes.

There was another brief bout of nonsense syllables. "Just go. We will speak more later, Peter."

Peter shut the connection and memorized their destination. On foot for the Watsons with him carrying Aunt May, he guessed it would be at least a half hour walk. By car... perhaps seven minutes or so. Although that would involve having to deal with any stray infected that they ran into, but he wasn't too worried about that. Well, not so much for himself, but he couldn't risk his companions.

After a minute, he put his phone away and noticed that MJ was looking at him with a thoughtful expression.

"What?" Did he have something on his face? Had she been wearing lipstick? He didn't taste any... right? Would he know? Or would MJ, in fact, have MJ flavored lipstick?

"He wants something from you." She said after a moment, her voice cool and distant.

Peter shrugged. "I suppose. I don't know what though, but he's willing to help us and we kind of need all the help we can get."

She nodded then stared at him a bit more.

He blushed slightly, squirming uncomfortably under her gaze. "Er... now what?"

She smiled a little and asked gently, "Were you planning on letting Aunt Anna and May know about what you could do? Or did you maybe want to be someone else when we tell them you're going to get them out of here?"

Peter thought about that for a moment. He wondered a little at the implications of MJ having to be the one to remind him to keep his mask on. He'd seen... a little of what was behind hers. She was the expert, so it made sense to take her advice.

He just had to get them away from this place. Get them somewhere quiet... somewhere where he could have some time to think. He nodded and took a deep breath, his heartbeat spiked and his body shifted.

She eyed his new form critically, "Police officer? You ate a police uniform?"

"Something like that." He muttered darkly, flashing back to what had happened at the police station. It was hard to believe that had barely been two hours ago.

"Let me do the talking. You just back me up, okay?"

"Gotcha."

- - -