Variant Strain

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Despite Gentek Tower's formidable fortress-like exterior, it was still a busy office building in the middle of downtown Manhattan. People, all with their own concerns brushed past, heedless of what was happening just the next borough over.

The elevators were disgorging the lunch crowd just before Peter got there. He felt vaguely underdressed, wearing a hoodie and jeans while finding the open area filling up with men in suits and women in a multitude of variations on the theme of professional.

His heartbeat spiked and he realized that he was in a suit as well. He couldn't remember if he'd ended up eating the suit he'd worn to the funeral or it had been left in the bathroom when the Watson house had been invaded by infected. Because if it had ended up staying in the Watson bathroom, then he had no clue where he'd gotten this one. It was a dark blue and seemed to be appropriately professional looking. The red tie even had the appearance of being properly tied.

If he looked a little too undersized to be working in Gentek, he at least seemed to be dressed for the part now.

Protective coloring, he realized. Blend in. He took a deep breath, still fighting to keep the carrion reek from getting to him and assessed the passers by. For the most part they were just normal people. None of them suspected that they were surrounded by infectees.

The security people, in their ball caps, sun-glasses and vaguely military black outfits were all infected. He made sure to note their positions and which ones had their rifles handy just in case it became necessary to fight his way out. The more he looked the more worried he became. The fortress description seemed to fit both ways. The single exit seemed to be the only clear way out of the building and that was covered by multiple security people from all over the lobby.

Containment, the Hunter murmured. Minimize chances of escapees.

Peter nodded in agreement and finally fought past the crowd to the elevator. Fortunately no one else seemed to be interested in going up. He tapped '62' and waited patiently.

The elevator opened at a couple of floors but at every one, it was just more people trying to get down. Peter noted the smell of old, musty Hydra continuing to get stronger the closer he got to the sixty second floor, but in every case, the people who waited for elevators had been clear of infection.

The elevator finally made a pleasant 'ding' noise and the the elevator doors slid silently open onto an anti-septic white hall-way that had a smell of disinfectant faintly overlaying the Hydra scent.

A lean older man in a white lab coat stood before the open elevator, rocking back and forth on his heels. The first thing Peter noticed was that the man reeked of Hydra. He had a shaggy head of gray hair, a thick gray mustache that almost, but not quite hid the painfully wide grin with all too many teeth that the man sported.

Peter stepped out of the elevator, giving the man wide berth as he did so. The man giggled worryingly and tilted his head in a curiously birdlike motion towards Peter, before clearing his throat. "Are you Mr. Parker?" The man stuttered around little tittering noises that seemed to be escaping involuntarily.

Peter stared.The man continued to smile disturbingly wide and a whole set of facial tics and twitches revealed themselves before Peter finally found his voice, "Uh... yes. Are you Dr. Pym?"

The man giggled nervously, flinching back from Peter, "Oh. Oh my goodness no. Not at all. I'm Miles. Warren. Miles Warren. Doctor." He thrust a twitching, limp-wristed hand out to Peter who shook it cautiously. "Dr. Miles Warren, Mr. Parker," He said finally. "Dr. Pym has extremely limited mobility and can't get around much." He made another giggle. "Or at all. Me and Dr. Connors help him in the lab as much as we can, of course. Brilliant man, Dr. Pym." He twitched to glance down the side corridor, then turned his glance back to Peter, "He wanted to meet with you. Dr. Pym never meets with anyone. At all. Anyone."

"Um... yes..." Peter said carefully, as he extracted his hand back from the man's persistent, almost spasmodic shaking.

"This way." Dr. Warren said, indicating with a twitch of his head the direction they were to go in. The man walked in a series of nervous twitches and tics and flailing gestures. There was an awful lot of inappropriate giggling as well. "So, you're Mary's son?"

Peter blinked in surprise, "You knew Mary Parker?"

"Yes, yes. Brilliant woman. Absolutely brilliant. Shame about... about what happened to her." He twitched a shoulder. "Terrible shame." The older man seemed to shudder for a moment and had to lean against a wall. "Shame."

"Are you alright?" Peter asked in concern, moving closer to the man, despite multiple voices inside him warning against it.

"Sorry, yes. Yes," Another giggle. "I... I wasn't always... I was there when it happened, you see." He twitched.

"That's when you were infected." Peter blurted out softly.

"Ah. You know about Hydra, then." Warren gave a jerky nod then tittered nervously. "I suppose I... I... I shouldn't complain. Tourette's-like symptoms beats the alternatives. Nasty. Nasty alternatives. I'm sorry about what happened to your mother, though. It was a shame. So brilliant." He gave another jerky nod, then began walking down the hall once more, a bit faster now.

"Did you know her well?" Peter asked gently.

"They brought her in to be my boss." Warren replied. "I suppose I might have resented her a little at first, but she won everyone over. Everyone." He twitched once more, glancing over his shoulder at Peter, "Your mother was the real deal. Brilliant. Absolute genius. Enough to make a man feel like an academic jackal picking over the works of his betters--" He giggled nervously again and simply allowed his statement to trail off.

"What exactly happened, Dr. Warren? Hank, er... I mean Dr. Pym just mentioned it was some sort of containment breach."

Warren gave another twitchy shrug. "One of the long-term coma patients woke up and started infecting the staff. She found a way to aerosolize--"

Peter knew who 'she' was almost before Warren had finished speaking. "It was Jessica Drew, wasn't it?"

Warren seemed to startle at his interruption. So hard, both his arms flew up above his head. "How did you... No wonder, Dr. Pym wants to meet with you. He didn't say why. At all." He shook his head hard enough to send his hair flailing. "I didn't actually see what happened to Mary. I remember seeing your father defending her before I... uh... I'm ashamed to say I sort of lost myself. I got infected then and I lost track of what was happening until it was all over."

Peter froze. "You... you came back to yourself?"

"Dr. Pym has a treatment. It doesn't always work... but yes, it's possible to... ah... bring some people back from the Hydra psychosis. If they can be gotten to early enough." Warren twitched hard enough to almost send him spinning around as he turned to look at Peter. "Are you alright, young man? You've gone pale. Extremely pale."

Peter fought down the shakes that were threatening him. Not everyone who'd been infected had needed to die. He could have saved them. Could have done something... He felt his stomach clench and taste bile in the back of his throat.

He thought he'd come to some measure of peace with what he was, but that had simply become too disturbing a thought to ignore. Had he simply ignored the possibility they could have been saved to sate himself? The Walkers turned hungry and murderous once they were infected. Was he just rationalizing those same urges within him? Making excuses to indulge in cold-blooded murder and claim it as self-defense? How many of them hadn't needed to die?

Hold it together, boy, Cletus drawled. Them or you. That's all.

Stronger than tears. A voice murmured to him.

How much time counts as early enough? Donna's whispery voice asked sharply.

Peter finally choked out, "How... how quickly does the treatment--?"

"A few minutes," Warren replied. "And it has to be administered by Dr. Pym personally. Like I said, I do consider myself lucky." He giggled, "Twitches and all."

"You'd... you would think something like that ought to be getting used in Queens right now," Peter asked, still trying to force himself to remain calm.

"The equipment for it doesn't travel well, or so Dr. Pym says. It also is an ongoing process. Not a one-time... I couldn't leave the building without ending up--" Warren cut himself off and giggled nervously. "Are you feeling better now? Shall we go?"

"Yes. Sorry." Peter replied weakly. Even as he said it, he began chewing over everything he knew furiously. There was no protocol for rational infectees in the field. Yet, Pym could make them rational under specific circumstances. Neither he nor the treatment could travel well.

And the whole building reeked strongly of Hydra. Old live Hydra.

They passed through a set of security double doors that Warren had needed to swipe a security card on. Through it, was a large, well-appointed biology lab mostly done in gleaming white and chrome. Equipment lined the walls and in the center of the room were several large counters that had various racks, holding various jars and bottles. One part of the room was set up as a clean room that was visible to the rest of the lab through thick glass.

Peter could identify most of the equipment. He'd never been in this particular lab before, but there had been times when his mother had taken him to work and done her best to answer his every question. Including what every single piece of equipment was and what it did.

Peter had been a very curious five year old.

He was almost too distracted by his thoughts to notice the man at a corner desk working on a PC. The other man was also wearing a white lab coat and had his back to them as they entered. At the sound of their entry, the man turned and rose.

Peter blinked in surprise as... something twitched under the man's coat at around the level of his knees. He also smelled strongly of Hydra.

The man had thinning, light brown hair that was peppered with gray. The skin on his face was unusually dry and seemed to be cracking and peeling in places. His face was lined and haggard, and between the wrinkles and the cracks, it was difficult to make any guess as to his age.

Peter couldn't help but notice that the man's right arm seemed to move oddly. Too slowly and with far too much liquid grace to it. Closer still, his right hand was an obvious prosthesis, but an obviously expensive and advanced one.

"This," Warren began, giggled, caught himself, then continued, "Is Dr. Curt Conners."

Connors offered Peter his prosthetic hand to shake. It had a solid grip and Peter could feel the material it just under the synthetic skin covering it, not individual bones like in a human hand, but solid mass beneath the palm. The man met Peter's gaze with a flat stare.

His gaze wasn't dead like the receptionist's, it was simply... uninterested. It wasn't hostile in any way, but neither did it hold any trace of warmth or acknowledgement in it. Peter found a reptilian coldness to it that reminded him of a snake.

Warren giggled nervously once more and gestured twitchily, "Dr. Conners, Peter, here, is Mary Parker's son."

That got a single acknowledging nod. There was no change in the man's expression, none in that graceless stare. The coat twitched again, just a little below knee height now. No one commented on it.

Peter was more than happy to turn away when Warren beckoned him onwards. "Dr. Pym will be speaking to you shortly, but he asked me to get some blood samples?" There was a slight curious note to the man's tittering this time that was impossible to miss.

Peter simply nodded. "I just... I was expecting Dr. Pym to be the one to--"

"Dr. Pym isn't... I mean... he can't... he's..." Warren shook his head and cut off a fresh set of giggling. "He can't exactly... um... hold anything. At all."

"Oh." Another detail, Peter supposed. One that fit everything else. Such as how Hank Pym could administer a treatment when he couldn't hold anything.

"Why don't you take your coat off and roll your sleeve up?" Warren asked as he led Peter to another desk. He turned and began rooting through various cabinets.

Peter did try to take his coat off, but realized, as with everything else he'd worn in the past few days, the coat was part of him and the sleeves refused to slip free. He glanced over his shoulder at Connors who was no longer paying attention, so Pete did the next best thing he could manage.

Tendrils blurred his torso and the coat was reabsorbed, leaving him in now rolled up shirt-sleeves. The tie was still there, but Peter noted with some amusement that it had loosened around his neck.

Warren turned back, still twitching slightly as he did, this time holding a still sealed syringe, a large wad of cotton and a bottle that sloshed with Warren's every unexpected movement. It smelled strongly of alcohol.

Peter frowned as he realized that Dr. Warren, a man who did not appear able to even cross a room without setting off a dozen nervous tics and twitching movements, appeared to be intending to draw his blood.

With a massive needle.

Now, normally Peter had little fear of needles, but on the other hand, nurses who did this sort of work tended to also have steadier hands.

Warren still had that tremendous grin, even as he tittered nervously. Peter suspected that horrible rictus was permanently stuck on the poor man's face. Those teeth did little to reassure him, caught somewhere between normal and the needle-teeth of a Tracker. The older man put everything down on the desk with a slight clatter and almost managed to knock the small bottle to the ground, but Peter caught it at the last moment.

"I'll admit it's been a while for me." Warren giggled, "But it's just like falling off a bike!" He declared with almost genuine good cheer.

Peter eyed the man as he tried to slowly and with as much caution as his twitching fingers would allow extract the syringe from it's packaging. Peter noted at least twice that the man seemed about ready to bring the package up to his mouth to tear it open with his teeth.

"I... hah... I remember this used to be easier." Warren explained, mildly embarrassed, his giggling taking on a higher register. "Dr. Connors? Could you assist me, please? Dr. Pym wanted about fifty milliliters of blood from Mr. Parker."

Connors got back to his feet, his expression still flat as he approached and took the syringe from Warren briskly. With detached air the man tied the rubber tubing around Peter's bicep and with a minimum of words and fuss, swabbed an area on his inner elbow with the alcohol and extracted the required amount of blood with a professional expertise that was impossible to miss.

His prosthetic hand had surprising dexterity as he used it, but the soft whirring of the implement kept pulling at Peter's attention. He'd tried his best not to stare. Not at the man's cracked and peeling face, nor at his replacement arm, nor at that strange twitching beneath his lab coat.

These men had survived exposure to Hydra. It was impossible for him to ignore that as ravaged as both men so obviously were, they were still luckier than most of the Hydra victims Peter had run into so far. They got to keep their minds for the most part. Their bodies, were still mostly their own. At least to some extent. If he'd been just a tiny bit less fortunate, he could just as easily have been as badly off as these men were.

Or worse, his own voice drawled.

There but for the Grace of God, Cletus chimed in.

"Thank you, Dr. Connors." Warren called out, but the man had already moved back to his desk with a dismissive shrug and a grunt. Warren turned his attention back to Peter and said in a lower voice, "Please don't think too badly of him. He was a lot more social... you know... before. He's a little self-conscious about..." He made vague gestures towards his own twitching right arm.

Peter simply nodded, staying on his seat, his arm folded to hold the cotton swab over a wound he already knew had closed. In fact, he was fairly certain he'd felt the tendrils that had closed the wound also consume the cotton.

Warren's manic rictus of a grin twitched slightly, as though he were trying for another expression, but failing miserably. "It's actually quite amazing, isn't it? One little thing could make such... such a wide range of changes in the human body."

Peter frowned slightly and replied, "It almost doesn't seem possible."

"Not for an ordinary virus, no," Warren gave a jerky shake of his head. "Hydra is, of course, no ordinary virus. What we're dealing with here is massive. Your average virus is just a bit of DNA wrapped up in a protein coat. Hydra's follows that same general idea, but it's huge. Seriously huge. Over a dozen of times larger than a normal virus. It's almost the same size of the cells it would infect."

Peter blinked in surprise, "Wait... most of structure of a regular cell is taken up by the structures that keep the cell alive."

Warren gave a pleased giggle, "Indeed! Well spotted, Mr. Parker. So what does that tell us?"

"That Hydra has a whole lot more genetic material in it than our own cells do?" Peter asked tentatively.

"And all of it just waiting to be inserted into our cellular structures given the proper triggers. Even the protein coat it has is incredibly complex. A massive single molecule that denatures rapidly in an aerobic environment. Comparatively fragile in the open air from it's size, but ironically this makes it so rampantly infectious inside a living organism." Warren's twitches seemed to lessen as he warmed up to the topic even more.

"But all a normal virus does inside of a cell is hijack its materials to reproduce itself. I can't see how that would end up with... the results we're seeing." Peter countered. "In fact if it's as big as you say it is, wouldn't it practically have to completely tear apart multiple cells just to get enough materials to reproduce itself once?"

Warren clapped his hands, "Indeed, indeed! You truly are Mary's son, my boy. Good, good!"

Peter felt a small flush of pride at that, but he kept his attention on the older man as he continued to speak.

"The Hydra virion infects neural tissue first. It zeroes in on the nervous system and the brain, causing some initial changes."

Peter nodded as he realized what that meant. "That's why so many of the victims end up either comatose or psychotic."

"Mostly the damage is done to the higher brain functions. Abstract thinking. That sort of thing. The back brain, the R-complex is mostly left untouched. So you see a lot of that in the Walkers. Territorial behavior, aggressiveness, hunger... that sort of thing." Warren nodded, his head bobbing jerkily. "Well... at least in the ones it doesn't outright kill."

"But that still doesn't explain the physical changes." Peter pointed out.

"The difference is in how it executes its reproductive efforts." Warren gestured broadly. "In most cases only a small section of the Hydra's mass of DNA gets inserted. The result is an entirely new virus strain being reproduced within the cell, generally smaller and less complex, but much better suited for reproducing within the infected. That's why they called it Hydra, come to that. One body, many heads. In some cases the inserted DNA merely changes the nucleus of the host cell. Mutation rather than destruction. Forcing it to rebuild itself to new specifications. In some cases it will do both. Mostly this serves the function of creating a better environment for the primary Hydra virion to do its own reproduction, but the rest of the body is flooded with the Hydra child strains, inducing all those changes."

Peter thought this over for a long moment then said, "Including ones that allow something the size of a man to fly."

"Ah, that's one of those things we still haven't figured out," Warren's grin turned slightly sullen. "The Pym particles, that red material... it's completely chemically inert, has negative mass and breaks down spontaneously within a few minutes of being secreted by infected. We do expect some progress eventually."

"Pym Particles?" Peter asked with a bit of skeptical amusement.

"Dr. Pym was the first to document them, so he got to name it." Warren giggled uncomfortably, "Oh, goodness. Goodness. I don't mean to keep you. You do have your appointment with Dr. Pym. I'm sorry about that."

The man turned away, beckoning Peter to follow. He got up off the seat and allowed his coat to reappear before he replied. "It's no trouble. I learned a lot."

"I'm glad..." Warren giggled once more. "I used to teach, you know. Biology. So did Dr. Connors. But ever since our... ah... changes, we can't really leave Gentek Tower. I admit, I do miss it." Warren's rictus turned almost into a real smile for a moment, "I would have loved to have had you as a student."

Peter smiled weakly and ducked his head, "Um... thank you."

"Dr. Pym is through here." Warren said walking towards another set of double doors at the far end of the lab.

Peter noted the camera right above the doors focused on him for a moment. The doors made a loud click and then one swung open slightly.

Dr. Warren shook his hand once more, genuinely enthusiastic. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Parker. If you wouldn't mind, I'd love to chat some more later? Dr. Connors and I rarely meet anyone new here."

Peter smiled back, understanding a little of the man's obvious loneliness. Especially if his only company was Dr. Connors. "Sure. I'd like that too, Dr. Warren."

He stepped through the door and it locked itself shut behind him with a worryingly loud click.

There was a short hall beyond which led to a dimly lit room with pale green walls. It was a sort of institutional green one would expect in a hospital. The anti-septic smell was sharper here, but it could do nothing to hide the hideously strong scent of old Hydra. He grit his teeth and did his best to focus on something other than the overwhelmingly powerful carrion scent.

He looked around worriedly. On the far wall was a single large LCD monitor. The wall was painted with an inexpert mural in various shades of green vaguely depicting a city skyline.

There was a single green painted metal folding chair in the middle of the room.

Peter looked around the room and the only other oddity were the dark green curtains that closed off each corner of the room. He took in everything and looked at the monitor.

It flickered to life and showed Hank's cartoonish face. His digitally rendered voice came from the monitor. "Hello, Peter. It's good to finally meet you in person."

Peter blinked, "This is 'in person'?"

"As close to it as I can manage anymore," Hank replied dryly.

Peter took another breath and noted that the scent of Hydra was strongest in the corners of the room, where the curtains were. He glanced to the curtains, then to the monitor, then he coughed.

"Did... did you set up this room specifically so you could make a 'pay no attention to the man behind the curtain' joke?" Peter asked finally.

The cartoony avatar on the monitor grinned broadly. "Well spotted."

"So what's behind the curtain?" Peter asked slowly.

"Do you really want to know?" Hank responded.

"I've already got a guess," Peter replied.

The cartoon's eyebrows rose, "Do you now?"

"It fits all the clues."

"Which is what?" There was a small note of genuine curiosity in the digitized tone.

Peter's eyes narrowed and he unclenched his jaw. "That I think you're a Hive."

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