Variant Strain

- - -

Peter took the same route back to the Red Zone that he'd taken yesterday. While he did want to find out what was happening and certainly what had happened to Detective Stacy, he wasn't feeling quite as pressured as he'd been.

Detective Stacy was behind well-armed soldiers who'd been trained to take on exactly this sort of thing. He wasn't riding to the man's rescue, so much as checking up on him.

So he was feeling justified in indulging his curiosity and testing out the extent of some of his new abilities.

He took three running steps then leaped into the air, trying to see how far he could get on sheer muscle-power alone. He easily cleared a height of twenty feet before falling back down. Once he landed, he took a few more steps and this time flared heat, reducing his weight to almost nothing before he leaped as high as he could.

Unfortunately, there wasn't anything tall enough for him to compare his jump against. He shot past the roof of a nearby five story building and kept going until it was some considerable distance below him. Over a hundred feet? More?

He was glad he didn't have a problem with heights, otherwise this would have been much more disconcerting.

The act of flaring his weight down to nothing still consumed a miniscule amount of his biomass, but it was less now, since he'd consumed the Rhino.

He hung in mid-air for a second before gravity began to reassert itself and he allowed himself to go into a glide towards the Red Zone. He could feel the mass shifting inside him. He found after a few tests that he couldn't force himself to 'fall' upwards. If anything trying it just ended up with his weight falling normally. In fact the best he could do in terms of deflecting his fall was to send his weight roughly thirty degrees below the horizontal. So he couldn't fly quite horizontally either. If he kept his weight flared down and with a good wind, he supposed it would be possible to maintain altitude.

That was probably how the Vulture had flown. He couldn't quite get the wings to work right, so a well-controlled fall was the best he could do. It was certainly enough to send him hurtling over the Marine blockade before he finally dropped low enough to land on the roof of the Parker house.

This landing, he managed to only just smash one foot into the roof. The chimney kept it from becoming another pratfall extravaganza down the side of the house.

Definitely going to need to work on the landings.

He extracted his foot at the same time that he swept his senses over the street. Thankfully, the Marines still weren't looking up and no one had noticed him. There wasn't any more obvious infected presence on the street closest to the Parker house, or the Watson house for that matter. There were splotches and threads of the viral matting marring several houses, lawns and the street, but not much else to indicate their presence. The Hydra stink was still thick in the air, but it was stronger further up the block, towards the Sandoval Deli... or what remained of it. In that direction he could hear gunfire and the dull thumps and roars of heavier weaponry.

The cordon was quiet, but even from where he stood there was a tension to them. Not the sort of alertness one would expect early in the morning. He was no expert, but he suspected that the cordon would be some sort of fallback position for whoever was currently fighting.

He ran to the edge of the roof and took another leap, flaring heat to pick up height, but without angling his fall. He made it to the next roof, then took off once more, making his way with speed and easy grace to the sounds of fighting. To the place where the carrion stench lay thickest.

It didn't take long to find where every one of the remaining infected in the neighborhood had gone. He stood on the roof of a nearby building, watching as they surrounded the what had once upon a time been the Sandoval Deli.

The building was half collapsed. What hadn't was so thickly coated with the viral matting that the whole thing looked like it were made of flesh. Huge pustules like the one that had released the Rhino from the Police Station hive hung precariously from the second and third floor of what was left.

The street was still thickly populated by the infected. Only a few of the normal looking ones remained. What were on the street were all hideously deformed. He picked out a handful of Trackers that seemed to be in the forefront of the infected.

Across the street, a pair of tanks were still intact. They'd gone up onto the curb and were using the building on the opposite street to provide some meager protection for their flanks.

Peter picked out the torn open remains of at least four other tanks along the street or nearby lawns. One tank in particular had what he realized were three or four Hunters clustered around it. His eyes widened as he realized what must have happened. The Hunters were strong enough to rip open the tank armor when they worked together.

The large turreted guns on the remaining tanks hammered relentlessly at the hive, the sound slamming into Peter's entire body with every firing. He could pick out machine guns poking out of gun ports shooting wildly into the relentless infected crowd. It was tearing them apart, but Peter watched in sick horror as a fallen infected who'd lost half of its head was dragged away by one of it's more mobile fellows back to the hive. It shoved the unmoving infected into the fleshy material and was absorbed by the viral matting. Feeding tendrils unfolded and tore the dead infected apart. A moment later a smaller pustule grew and erupted with a fully turned Tracker ready to shamble back into the fight.

Worse... the Hunters were done with the tank they'd been ripping to scrap and were now bounding their way to the remaining tanks. He could understand why so many tanks had been sent to deal with the Hive. His stomach clenched at the thought of what was about to happen to those poor soldiers.

Peter didn't even have a chance to consider what he was doing before his body was already in motion.

Your girlfriend's right, you do have a saving people thing, Cletus laughed.

He was just about to become murder on someone's car insurance rates.

He smashed into the ground, cracking the pavement under him without even realizing that he'd done something at the end of his fall to cushion it that didn't involve actually taking his own weight on his legs. There would, hopefully be time enough later to think on it a bit more deeply.

Heat flooded his body, centered along his spine. He bent down and scooped up a rusted 70's pick up truck from where it was parked, dead lifting it above his head. The thing was mostly being held together by paint and hope, but it was still nice and heavy.

Someone probably wouldn't miss it too much, he hoped, but then realized that the odds were good that the truck's owner was somewhere in that crowd already.

That didn't matter. He let his mind relax, filter out the distractions of the crowd of infected that were even now beginning to shamble in his direction. His mind filled with numbers as his focus narrowed on the bounding Hunters.

He still wasn't entirely sure how he was lifting a four ton pick-up truck much less hurling it across the length of a block, but he was glad that he could manage it. Even more that he was reasonably sure he'd thrown it just right.

The truck flipped a few times in mid-air before it was low enough that it plowed through a few dozen infected. It finally crunched into the pavement and slammed lengthwise right on top of two of the Hunters. One was caught squarely and was flattened by the immense weight. The other only had its legs crushed. It skidded against the asphalt, grinding what was left of the legs of the second Hunter for a short distance and almost, but not quite clipped the third Hunter before it skidded to a stop.

There was a brief moment of silence as the tanks' guns stopped. Even the infected seemed to pause to try and figure out what had just happened.

It was quiet enough that Peter actually just barely made out a vaguely familiar voice coming from one of the tanks. "Thunderhead, this is Hammerhead One, over. Thunderhead, be advised. We have made visual contact with target Spider... Yes, I'm sure, Thunderhead. It just threw a damned truck at us!"

Peter couldn't make out whatever the next response was as his attention was taken up entirely by the infected who'd begun to swarm towards him. One got close enough to land a fairly solid punch on his chest. It had hurt a bit, but it hadn't been too bad. Like a playful slap.

He skipped backwards, breaking out of the circle of infected beginning to form around him. He was now reasonably sure they couldn't hurt him too badly individually, but the sheer weight of numbers was going to cause problems eventually.

Then another problem of being crowded and hemmed in by infected, even if just by Walkers, presented itself.

A slight, out of place flicker of movement and whiff of something slightly off in the choking carrion rot of Hydra surrounding him. He managed to just barely take another skipping backwards step when a massive clawed arm suddenly lashed out from the crowd and tore a massive, bleeding gash across Peter's torso.

He suppressed a shudder as he realized that if he hadn't moved, it probably would have torn him in two. Or gutted him. On anyone else, the wound would still have been fatal. For Peter it just hurt... but it didn't really slow him down, despite how badly it hurt.

The Hunter roared up as it got back onto it's feet from it's crouch and charged him.

He leaped up and out of it's way. It had used the other infected to mask its approach. It had let the confusion of scents and sounds and the cover the infected Walkers provided to get in close enough to him for what should have been a fatal ambush.

Peter punched his way through of the crowd of infected. They had come in close enough to grab, slap and claw. Nothing really painful, except when they managed to tag the bleeding wound on his chest, but it was annoying.

It was slowing him down. He burst past where they'd clustered thickest around him and scrambled up on top of another car to give him a better idea of what was happening.

He dodged another blurringly fast rake of the Hunter's claws as it shot past him in an arcing leap. He noticed the downed Hunter who'd lost its legs to the truck he'd thrown had managed to grab hold of an infected and had taken a huge bite out of it's neck. The blood spurted and ran down the Hunter's tumor ridden face, but as it consumed the infected flesh, its legs seemed to writhe and regrow... filling out almost in an almost cartoon-like fashion.

As it ate, its head swiveled and seemed to focus right at him.

Oh. Oh, damn, Peter's mind gibbered.

Why does everything hate us? His own voice drawled.

His distraction allowed the closer Hunter he'd been dodging to land a solid swipe that he only just barely deflected with his forearm. The shock of pain at feeling those massive rending claws narrowly bounce off of bone was more than enough to convince him to save analysis for after he was done fighting for his life.

On the upshot the Hunters were now focused on him and not on the tanks, so that was good for them.

Go, me. Peter groused in his head as he flared heat and leaped up, flipping at the top of his arc to land on top of a nearby building.

Almost before he'd even settled on the rooftop, the Hunter was already scaling the side of the building. Claws dug into brick and propelled the massive inhuman beast upwards. The second Hunter was in the process of dragging itself on it's overlong arms to the building, it's undersized, but almost healed legs mostly dead weight, but he could see it already beginning to get use out of them.

It was a moment's breather. Not much, but long enough. He let his heartbeat spike, the wounds on his arm and chest exploded with black and red tendrils that grabbed at one another stitching the wounds shut. He felt himself burn through his biomass to heal himself, but considering how... full... he was, the amount needed had been negligible.

He flexed fingers and toes, allowing his talons to unfurl and dig into the roof as he waited for the first of his playmates to arrive. It wasn't a long wait. A floor below him, the Hunter surged suddenly, propelling itself upwards, sending it hurtling up to meet him claws outstretched.

Peter leaned forward, using his talons to hold him against the building even as he leaned over the edge of the roof. Heat shifted within his body and he met its rise with his closed fist in a downward, overhand arc backed by his full weight. It was a trick the Rhino had used against him. As agile and terrifyingly fast as the Hunters were, in mid-leap, they had no way to take advantage of it.

His blow smashed the Hunter's face in, sending it plummeting back down to the street faster than gravity could normally have claimed it. It landed on a few infected with enough force that the pavement beneath the pile of broken bodies cracked.

It was still moving. Its arms flailed, even as its caved in face lolled on what likely was a pulverized spine. It was a testament to how tough Hunters were that being hit in the face with enough force break it's skull open followed by a five story fall was just enough to stun one. He suspected that given a chance to feed on one or more of the infected that were milling closer to it, it would be back on it's feet.

Actually almost exactly like the second Hunter. It had gotten to the base of the building as its fellow Hunter had fallen and stopped to pace, looking up at him and making a hissing, snarling noise. It saw what had happened and was reacting more cautiously.

The second hunter grabbed a nearby infected and with a brutal callousness ripped a misshapen arm off and shoved it into the open maw of the downed Hunter.

Peter's eyes widened. The coordination the Hunters had shown against him in Bellevue hadn't just been because Jessica had been directing them. His only chance lay in taking them down fast and hard. Unfortunately the milling infected surrounding them hemmed them all in. Made it difficult to maneuver. It also gave them a lot of chances to heal themselves if he let up for too long.

With two working together, it would just make it easier to pin him down in that mess.

He noted that the Hunter he'd punched into the pavement was chewing on the bloody severed arm. The hollow in the top of it's skull was filling in with alarming rapidity, like a dent being popped out of the hood of a car. Worse, two of the pustules on the Hive quivered and exploded in a torrent of yellowish bile, releasing two more Hunters.

The tanks' main guns had stopped firing. He guessed they were out of ammunition. They'd done a tremendous amount of damage to the building underlying the Hive, but it was still standing. Worse, every infected corpse dragged to the Hive just seemed to be repairing the viral matting covering it.

The fresh Hunters made a bee-line for the silent tanks.

The clock was ticking again. He crouched, angling himself from the edge of the roof, pointing in a straight line down to the recovering Hunter. He jumped, shifting heat to bring his full weight to bear as he dropped down from the side of the building like a meteor.

He landed right on the upper chest of the still recovering hunter, his talons slammed into it explosively. There was a momentary surge of heat through his body just at the moment of impact and he smashed a twenty foot diameter crater into the ground.

The landing kicked up concrete dust from the shattered pavement and knocked over every single infected nearby. A few closest to him had simply... disintegrated from the impact.

The Hunter was pulped. For a circle of roughly three feet around his point of impact there was nothing but liquified infected and shattered chunks of cement. The numbers ran through his head and he knew there should have been no way his impact could have caused that kind of effect. Something new to think on.

Later.

The impact had also knocked the other Hunter onto its back, but it was rolling over, trying to get on all fours. Peter didn't wait for it to manage.

He took a step and stomped down on the back of its head with a taloned foot, driving it down into the pavement and pinning it face-first. It struggled and would probably have been strong enough to push him off once it managed to get it's arms underneath it, but Peter didn't give it an opportunity to do so. His hands blurred into claws and he slashed both across it's spine, stopping its struggles.

He let his talons close, crushing the head harder into the pavement, causing more cracks and he took deep satisfaction in that.

He straightened up, looking over to the tanks and found that one had rolled away from it's previous position, rolling over and crushing slow-moving infected as it did so. The other... the other had both Hunters on it. They'd somehow torn apart the treads on one side of the tank, keeping it from moving. The Infected had gotten back to their feet and were turning their attentions back to the tanks as well.

Unexpected satisfied pleasure surged up his spine and he looked down. He realized belatedly that his talons had unfolded into feeding tendrils and he was already in the process of claiming-- consuming-- the bodies of the fallen Hunters.

Peter ran.

He bent his attention to the tank as the two hunters clustered around the hatch at the top of the turret of the immobilized tank. He was close enough to hear the occupants as he closed in.

"Hammerhead One, this is Hammerhead Four. Guess this is it, Sarge. It was nice serving with you Sarge."

"Schultz! Hang on... we can--"

"No can do, Sarge." The man's voice had a resigned tone to it. "I really hate this damn town. Get the hive. Me and Petruski can keep the Hunters occupied choking us down long enough for you to get the job done."

Another man's voice, muttered. "Herman."

"I knew you were gay for me, Petruski." The resigned, cynical voice replied with a laugh.

The two Hunters tore the hatch off and threw it aside. The first leaned in and promptly recoiled away from a hail of automatic gunfire shooting out of the hatch.

The bullets tore into Hunter flesh where they struck, but it never seemed to really do much good. One Hunter hooked it's clawed paw around the edge of the open hatch and began to rip the steel open.

Guns clicked empty.

"Oh, shi--" The voice muttered just as a hunter reached into the now wide open hatch.

The distraction was enough for Peter to take advantage. He caught one Hunter across the throat with his claws. The other dodged aside at the last moment and hopped away from the tank just enough to assess the situation.

Pete glanced down into the open hatch, "You guys okay?" He asked. He was wearing Cletus' face still. His voice came out with a sibilant hiss.

Two men in the bright yellow Thunderbolt hazmat uniforms stared up at him. They brandished rifles that they had pointed at him. Even if he hadn't heard the guns click empty, he would've known it to have been a hollow bluff. The smaller man was shaking badly. The other seemed unperturbed.

"What the hell? You guys arguing over who gets to eat us?" The smaller man asked in disbelief. The cynical voice.

Peter replied gravely, "I wouldn't eat you."

"You wouldn't?"

"Not without some ketchup." Peter quipped, unable to resist.

Way to put 'em at ease, Cletus cackled.

The larger man rumbled a half-hysterical laugh, which seemed to offend the smaller man. "That ain't that funny!"

Peter grinned. At least those two were alive. The Hunter gurgled wetly as it slid off the turret. The other hunter... Peter looked around frantically, unable to locate it. There was a crash in the middle of the street and he realized that the last Hunter had disabled the treads on the other tank.

He was all set to run over to the next truck to help when the hatch opened and a Thunderbolt popped up. The Hunter looked up and roared from where it had been crouched near the treads.

Then the T-bolt moved his arm and ducked back down.

The sudden roar of a grenade took Peter by surprise.

Well, not as surprised as the Hunter who had lost both arms and was twitching feebly some distance from the tank. Peter nodded approval. These guys really were the experts. Or at least they had the right tools for the job, which in this case amounted to the same thing.

That gave them a moment. Who knew how many more Hunters were waiting in those remaining pustules.

"Why were you guys trying to take out the Hive?" Peter asked hurriedly.

"We ain't gotta tell you squat!" The smaller man, Schultz, replied.

The larger one, Petruski said slowly. "Hive's coordinating the infected. Take it out, they stop cooperating."

Schultz smacked the bigger man in the chest with the back of his hand, "That's classified."

Petruski shrugged elaborately at that.

Peter nodded and looked around. Neither tank was capable of movement now. The Hive still needed taking out.

"Do you guys have anything left to use on that thing? It looks like it's down to one undamaged load bearing wall. You take that out the whole thing comes tumbling down."

"We're dry," Petruski said.

Peter frowned, "I guess I could toss a car into it and hope for the best."

Schultz seemed to consider that for a moment then got on the radio, "Hammerhead One, This is Hammerhead Four, over."

"Go ahead, Hammerhead Four, over."

"Sarge, you got any more ordinance left, over?"

"We're out. That was our last grenade. No offense, but I'm surprised you're still alive, Hammerhead Four, over."

"Eh," Schultz said dismissively, glancing over to Peter. "Target Spider's saved us and is offering to take out the Hive for us, over."

"What? Then how is...?"

"He's gonna chuck cars at it til it falls down. Over."

There was a long pause before the radio crackled back to life. "... that'll work."

Schultz shrugged at Peter, "Alright, Spider. Get chuckin'."

Peter frowned slightly, then shrugged.

There were a lot of cars parked on the street. More than enough for Peter's purposes. He shifted heat and lifted a mini-van, hurling it into the hive. It caused the building to shudder and a few of the pustules seemed to be about ready to burst.

The wall he struck seemed to tilt just a tiny amount for a second.

He waited for a second more as the Hive's own weight did the rest of the job. The blow had destabilized what little was left of the house of cards and the pustule covered wall seemed to overbalance and tear free of the rest of the building, smashing in a disgusting mess of bricks and flesh all over the street. The insides were a tangle of the fleshy mats strung all throughout the structure of what was left of the building.

The resemblance to nerves in those structures was striking, but probably shouldn't have been surprising.

With the front wall gone, the rest of the Hive's other walls all began to collapse one after the other, crushing the strange internal architecture of the hive beneath itself.

Peter grinned and noted a sudden change in the air. The live Hydra scent that had suffused the scene was beginning to slowly dissipate. The scent coming from the wandering infected was still strong, but it seemed less... oppressive now.

A few of the infected simply collapsed, as though their strings were cut. An analogy, that Peter suspected was probably more accurate than he'd intended. Individual infected began wandering away, or hunkering down to eat their fallen fellows. A few of the bravest infected had even begun tearing away at the feebly twitching viral mats from the fallen hive and eating those.

Peter nodded with satisfaction and he wished he were more surprised to find a rifle aimed at his face when he turned back to the stopped tanks.

He raised his hands slowly above his head. "You're welcome." Peter said sarcastically.

"Don't think we didn't appreciate the assist. Ed... or Cletus... or whatever you want to call yourself," The man responded. Sargent Talbot, Peter recognized the voice. "That was you in Bellevue the other night too, wasn't it?"

"Maybe," Peter hedged. He noted Schultz and Petruski were also aiming their rifles at him. The same rifles that had already run out of ammo.

Ah.

"Our orders were to take down the Hive and to report any sightings of you." Talbot continued in a slow, even tone. "Technically, I'm not supposed to even engage you. But we're prepared to defend ourselves. That clear?"

Peter nodded slowly.

He glanced over his shoulder at the two men flanking him. "Frankly, we're expecting back up any minute now, right?"

A yellow bee-keeper helmeted head popped up from the tank's hatch and an unconvincing male voice called out, "Yep. Totally gonna punk you if you stick around to make trouble."

Schultz sighed, "Myers, you suck."

"Bite me, Schultz."

Talbot sighed heavily and muttered, "Gentlemen? We're professionals? For God's sake."

"Sorry, sir." Myers called back, popping his head back down.

Talbot turned his attention entirely back to Peter. "So..."

"Y'know, I was just leaving," Peter said, taking the hint. Maybe there really were Thunderbolt troops out to apprehend him. On the other hand, they'd lost most of the tanks... and men... they'd taken with them to deal with the Hive. They were in bad shape and practically unarmed.

There was no way they were going to want to get into another fight right away. Especially when they were down to four men and a handful of unloaded machine rifles.

"I have to ask though," Peter spoke slowly, keeping his hands up. "Did you guys get the Police Station Hive?"

Talbot nodded, "Got that last night."

Peter heaved a sigh of relief. "Good. That's good. What happened to the cops who were--"

"No clue." Talbot cut him off, firming his grip on the rifle.

Peter heard it then. Helicopter inbound. Almost as one, the Thunderbolts looked up.

That was enough of a cue for him to leave. In the momentary distraction Peter ducked into what remained of the thinning crowds of infected and shifted himself to another entirely different face and body.

Detective Stacy was still in danger... even if the Hive had been dealt with. He picked his way slowly through the crowd. It would be easy enough to lose himself among the infected for a moment, just long enough to lose the helicopter, lose the Thunderbolts.

Long enough to think.

- - -