Variant Strain

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The world dropped out beneath Peter.

The Hunter kept yelling contradictory orders that were of no help at all, as he found himself shooting down a slimy tunnel. He could feel pressure all around him, but mostly around his head and shoulders. He wasn't so closed in that he couldn't breathe, but between the stench of old, live Hydra and the faint sewer undertone and a prevailing that reminded him all too much of partially digested food, he wasn't enthusiastic about the thought of breathing deeply.

Peristalsis. Wonderful, he thought, a chance to be subjected to even more of Hank's digestive system.

The red veins that had lit up the tunnels were not present and what little light he had to see by seemed to be coming from his own glowing eyes. Between the limited view of rippled, yellow-slimed flesh inches from his face and the twists as he was squeezed along by the wave of rhythmic muscular contractions, he was extremely disoriented.

The realization that he could simply extend his claws and talons and cut his way free occurred to him a few minutes later than it should have, but he was prepared to blame the confusion and occasional unexpected bouts of being turned upside down.

His fingers had just blurred into their full-length claw form when he exploded out into open air with a sputtering explosive noise. He fell three feet and managed to roll back to his feet almost immediately. He was completely soaked in bile-yellow slime that was slowly spreading in a pool around him.

The viral matting underfoot extended small feeding tendrils, slurping up the fluid greedily. Peter glanced back at where he had come from and noticed that it resembled a burst pustule.

Same as what Hives use to release Hunters, he realized.

His body blurred with red and black tendrils and the bitter-tasting yellow slime was gone.

Better than a shower, Cletus drawled.

The new chamber he'd found himself in was even more thickly coated in viral matting than any other he'd seen. It felt like he'd been swallowed by some gigantic creature rather than the material simply being a coating on the walls. The place was simply too curved and organic. Too clearly alive. There were neither corners nor sharp transitions in the red lit gloom.

He could hear a slow and thunderous heartbeat in the background. Like an immense ponderous bass that roared up the soles of his feet, rumbling up his spine and jarring his entire body. Dancing around the beat was a smaller profusion of noises. The click-clack of buttons. Dozens, perhaps even a hundred keyboards beating out their own syncopated rhythm.

His eyes adjusted and he could see here and there in the viral material were various bits of electronics. Keyboards embedded into the fleshy material, with tendrils tapping intermittently at the keys. In spots, there were clusters of computer monitors aimed at scattered, man-high mounds of fleshy material. The dim light from the displays illuminating single staring eyes that irised open and shut in an imitation of blinking. What cabling there was disappeared into the soft, yielding surface of the viral matting.

The single keyboard and eye on the sixty second floor had been nothing compared to this. There had still been the comfortable illusion of the room around him then. Walls, a floor and a ceiling. This was all simply a hollowed out chamber of flesh, scattered through with littered electronics. Objectively he could see that the room was as large as an auditorium, but between the cloyingly thick smells, the smothering body-hear warmth of the damp air and the dim red lights, the whole felt extremely claustrophobic.

Peter was ready to believe that his capacity to feel any sort of visceral disgust or horror was gone. The chamber seemed geared to prove him wrong.

The transport pustule had deposited him in front of a particularly large column of flesh. It rose all the way to the top of the twenty foot tall ceiling at the center of the chamber and unlike the other mounds that only had the monitors clustered near their base; the column sported monitors turned inwards all the way up its height.

The column was uneven. The rippling, surface of the veined, grayish-rust colored material swelled and moved with faintly disturbing shifts and jerks. As though the whole thing were breathing, but it was so large that it could only do it in sections. There was a different texture and feel to the viral matting in the chamber from the rest that Peter had encountered. If anything the gently swirling patterns reminded him of looping intestines. An image provided by Donna.

Or a brain, his voice drawled in realization.

The longer he stared at the column, dotted as it was by monitors, the more the odd patterns and shadows seemed to shift until finally the seemingly brain-like ripples revealed a form to it. Like a stereogram picture that emerged when one had stared at for long enough.

The bulges and shadows in the material resolved into a human face. A human face stretched and distorted, wrapping almost entirely around the column. The size had transformed it far too much for it to be anything but an abstract representation of a human face. Here a wriggling slash that could be a mouth. Swelling here and there picked out tremendous, thinned lips. A set of bulges and hollows formed a nose and where there should have been eyes, the material was collapsed inwards forming deeply shadowed sockets.

Peter's imagination failed as it tried to fit the bulging, pulsating structure into Henry Pym's face.

In the shadowed recesses where the eyes should have been, the protrusions of viral matting holding the monitors aimed at the column twisted suddenly and two large monitors turned to face Peter, making an illusion of eyes flickering open. One monitor showed the outside of the Gentek Tower building from across the street. The street itself was filled with people. Men in Gentek security uniforms were in oversized SUV's trying to cordon people off from the park-like area surrounding the building. Given what little detail Peter could pick out from the video image, the unmasked security personnel looked normal. Smith and Jones hadn't been infected after all. The men doing that work would have needed to be uninfected to leave the building. The other monitor showed the lobby, where men in Gentek maintenance uniforms were sealing up the main doors and lowering metal shutters to seal off the building.

Evacuation, Donna whispered. The civilians are out. They've locked the building down.

HELLO, PETER.

The voice... On one level, Peter heard it faintly. The same electronically generated voice that he'd been hearing from his phone. Henry Pym's voice of Ultron. On another level he felt the words slam into him. The voice was the one from Connor's memories. The smoothly cultured baritone, but it drowned out the thundering heartbeat.

It wasn't so much sound as a physical force smashing into his body. Peter staggered to his knees as the simple greeting set every inch of his body resonating. It was what he imagined the voice of God might sound like. It was the voice that a hurricane might use to speak. He pressed his hands to his ears and could still feel the echoes of the words ringing in his brain.

TOO LOUD?

"Yes!" Peter screamed back but couldn't hear himself. He could feel and taste blood pouring out of his nose and his ears. He couldn't hear the heartbeat, but he could still feel it. Or the clicking of the keys. He suspected his eardrums had burst.

Is this better?

The voice had gotten somehow less imposing. He could still hear it ringing in his head, but it no longer felt as though it were trying to squeeze every thought out of him. There was room again for him in his own mind. He shakily rose back to his feet, his sense of balance felt badly out of sorts.

He brushed his hand under his nose and his fingers came away bright red. The blood flow was slowing. He couldn't feel the trickle of blood as thickly down his upper lip or from his ears.

I apologize for that, Peter. It has been a very long time since I have had anyone in here. I had forgotten that I didn't need to raise my voice so much this close.

Peter's ears popped and he could hear the background noises of the clacking keys and the immense heartbeat once more. The blood flow had stopped entirely and he could feel parts of his head and face blurring to tendrils to wick away at the bloody mess. "No..." He coughed at the coppery taste that filled his mouth briefly, but pushed forward. "No problem."

He took a deep breath, gathering his composure and stared up into the immense face. Other scenes flickered across the monitor eyes. More shots of the outside. The crowds shown from other angles. Police cars arriving. Inside, orderly ranks of security and maintenance uniformed personnel moving in unison through the corridors. Peter recognized some of those he'd passed in the corridors leading to where his mother's body had been stored.

"What's happening?" Peter asked.

There are contingencies in place, Peter. I need to execute them. The voice was mild. Almost blandly disinterested in tone, but Peter could almost taste an undercurrent of fear lacing the words.

"Contin-- where am I?""

I apologize that it took so long to pull you away from the situation you found yourself in, but I didn't expect you to run towards the worst possible danger in the city. There was a slight chiding, mocking edge to the words. Just enough to nudge the thought forward that it was his own fault he'd gotten tangled up with Jessica and the Thunderbolts. If he'd left as he had originally planned...

Y'know, my daddy used to tell me it was my fault when the store did poorly too. Cletus drawled, cutting off Peter's self recriminations. What the hell was he expectin' you to do when he wound your fool head up with the idea that Jessica killed your folks and then sent you down near where she was going to pop up?

Sounds exactly like Henry's style. Connor's voice chimed in. A few more wordless voices snarled agreement in the back of his mind.

Peter swallowed what else he might have asked and instead said, "Why did it take so long?"

Perhaps you are intimately familiar with every inch of your colon, Peter, but I am not. There is considerably more of me to search and my attention can only be split so many ways.

Peter considered how many monitors and keyboards were scattered around this single room. He also wondered... there really was no reason for Hank to have missed any of his calls unless he deliberately chose to ignore them.

To wind us up, his voice drawled.

The images on the monitors shifted to more interior shots of the building. A few other monitors twisted on their fleshy mounts, displaying more and more closed circuit video images of Hank's infected gathering in a large, low-ceilinged enclosed area. In the background, Peter could just make out a few vehicles.

Motor pool. Donna supplied.

"What are they doing?"

Denying Jessica potential resources. Hank replied blandly. On the screen, all the monitors were now showing the same area. The neat ranks of uniformed infected clumped together. The security personnel were shrugging out of their armored outfits and clustering close together. Without the obscuring uniforms, their deformities were much more easily visible. Strange discolorations. Odd proportions. Every conceivable change.

Peter counted four hundred individual infected personnel on the various screens. He couldn't be certain of his numbers since the images were low resolution and the ones furthest away blurred into one another.

His eyes widened as the clustered infected were liberally splashed with something from large barrels being carried by infected still in maintenance uniforms. There was too little detail at the distance, but he caught on after a moment.

One camera lingered on a close up of the receptionist with the dead eyes and false smile. Liz, he remembered. She was still smiling that same smile as she walked behind the barrel crew. As she passed a doused clump of infected, she pulled a road flare from an oversized shoulder bag that she carried.

With a practiced motion she lit it and handed it to one of the naked security personnel in the clump. They all caught fire.

There was no audio from the video. Peter imagined there would be screams. Or at least moans of pain, but all he could hear around him was Hank's heartbeat and the susurrus of the keys. They all stood still, but there were involuntary twitches and movements here and there. A flailed limb just before collapsing. The whole cluster of infected burned and kept burning.

That was merely the first. She continued to walk, assisting to set fire to each clump of Hank's infected in turn. They burned near motionlessly until they collapsed. Thick black smoke rose from them lit from within by cheery red flames

Peter couldn't look away. He could taste bile rising in his throat. He slammed a hand over his mouth as a spasm that felt very like a dry heave violently shook his body. Under other circumstances he might have been glad to know that he was not yet beyond visceral revulsion.

"What are you doing to them?!"

They are part of me, Peter. They are not individuals. There is no 'them'. Just me.

"What about the ones who aren't?" Peter asked sharply. "Some people inside you retained their minds, right?"

Arrangements have been made for them as well.

One screen flickered to another view of a hallway. Dr. Warren passed the camera at high speed, running on all fours, his lab coat torn and streaming behind him. A handful of security personnel gave chase past the camera's field of view. One stopped briefly to fire a shotgun while still within view of the camera before he ran past as well.

"Why?!" Peter screamed. "Why are you doing this?"

Because I have badly underestimated Jessica. Because the few men the Thunderbolts were able to send will not be enough to stop her.

"She's got a couple hundred infected. You outnumber--"

I am already losing, Peter. Any of my infected that enter her area of influence will switch to her side.

"So you'll just kill them all?!"

I already explained that they aren't individuals. They're part of me. With them gone, she can't use them. Using fire keeps her from using their biomass.

"Then, what about the Thunderbolts?" Peter argued, "Now that they've seen firsthand how bad the situation is, they can bring more men in with more weapons."

They may. But by the time they get here, it will be too late.

Peter frowned trying to puzzle out why he was so certain of that. "This is your central nerve cluster right? If we can keep her out of here, you should be fine, right?"

Donna winced, Oh no. Don't tell me you want to--

"Let me back out to where she is." Peter took a deep breath then said, "I can hold her off. Try to stall her and her army until the Thunderbolts can get more people down there."

You know that he's lied to and manipulated you every step of the way, right? Connor's voice asked flatly.

Him being a manipulative bastard doesn't make it any less the right thing to do, Peter thought back sharply.

And if we don't help, Manhattan's going to look like Forest Hills. The Hunter snarled. This is a sound strategic decision.

Cletus chimed in, Big head there's got the right idea, though. We should take Jessica's resources from her. If we eat her flunkies, she can't use 'em, right?

I appreciate the offer, Peter, but that won't work. I thought she would need to be in here before she could attempt to take control of my body. I was wrong.

"What do you mea--"

Another monitor switched views to a three dimensional wire-frame schematic of Gentek Tower, including the underground areas. The entire tower and a large section of the irregularly spread root-like underground were lit up in green. One section, however, deeper inside the structure was in red. The color was spreading slowly through the green sections and even to Peter's untrained eye it seemed to be picking up speed.

The chamber you fought her in was meant to be a trap. Once she and her troops were there, I was supposed to collapse the entrances and allow the Thunderbolts to pick them off at their leisure.

"Connors led them there." Peter said as the memory of the route taken rose up.

He did not know. That was part of the reason I sent him. He is not familiar with those sections of my body. That was the only route back that he knew. But he was not aware of the trap so could not warn her.

"You were expecting Jessica to take him?" Peter blurted out, appalled.

No. But I was prepared for that possibility. Except she usurped control of that chamber from me and turned the trap back on the Thunderbolts. She still has them trapped there, running in circles. Now her influence is spreading through me. I'm not sure how to properly convey how... disturbing it is. Imagine your arms suddenly declining your control and engaging in their own agenda.

Peter did feel for a moment a subtle wrongness creep up his spine. Something like the feel of eyes on you in a darkened room when you know you should be alone. He shuddered.

I have perhaps an hour before her control extends entirely to the seat of my consciousness. Then I will be hers. His voice was heavy with resignation. I might be able to put it off by shifting my focus away from this point, but it would only postpone the inevitable.

"So even if you keep her from using the infected you have-- had inside you." His eyes flicked briefly to the monitors where the bodies were still burning. "She'll still have the rest of you? All several hundred tons of biomass of you?"

Once the bulk of my infected are gone, there are charges wired into the building that I will trigger, causing Gentek Tower to collapse. They were a failsafe designed to destroy as much of my body as possible, but I have grown far too deeply since the self-destruct was rigged up. To be honest, I don't believe they would have sufficed to kill me even when they were new. I have a few more roaming other areas. Setting what fires they can. It's not a perfect solution, but I don't have enough of the necessary agents to scrub all of those tunnels clean.

"So what then?" He asked and suspected that he would not like the answer.

That's where you come in, Peter. The voice had softened. The fear hiding behind the words was back in full force.

Peter growled in the back of his throat. "Like Connors. You're asking me to kill you."

I have lived... if you can call it that, His tone was pleading, As a glorified barnacle for almost fifty years now. I cannot even think of myself as human. I am not a man. I am a resource to be used. And I have been used as a glorified computer, a trash disposal and a garbage handler for the majority of that time. The voice's bland tone broke beneath the weight of its own weary bitterness. Perhaps it would have been better if I had ended up like Bruce, but this is the hand I have been dealt. Jessica needs to be stopped. I cannot do it. I also cannot allow my resources to fall into her hands.

Peter snarled, "If it's that important why don't you do it to yourself?!"

Let's not be hasty here. He's kind of an eat all you can buffet, Cletus pointed out.

If I thought it would work, I would. But I already told you they tried, didn't I? As long as some scrap of me remains, I will remain conscious. I will grow back. I will be... of use. My infected could scour this chamber with fire and bleach and anti-virals, but I will not be able to help myself. The seat of my consciousness will retreat from it. Some part of me will inevitably survive. In all the decades of my work with Hydra, there are only a handful of things I am aware of that can consistently destroy the infected. You are the only one available to me before time runs out.

His knowledge would be useful, the Hunter prompted.

But I don't want him in my mind, Peter growled in his head.

Connor's soft, flat voice replied. He knows everything about Hydra.

And it hasn't helped him one bit. Peter snapped back. I don't need any more voices in my head! He paused for a fraction of a second then thought, No offense.

None taken, Cletus replied cheerily.

"Even with your mind gone, there's still all this biomass for her to use." Peter pointed out.

Which will no longer be centrally controlled. I am disassociating my nervous system from as much of my body as I can. It will be dead meat. Her infected might consume it, but she will not be handed a readymade hive. The sections she controls will be forced to grow into that flesh and rebuild it for her purposes. It will buy time for the Thunderbolts to bring their troops in.

"And you can't do this and stay alive?"

If she takes control of me, it would be child's play for me to reverse what I did. She will need to struggle. It is as simple as that. It will take her days to consolidate her gains rather than hours.

"It's not that simple to me. You're asking me to kill you!" Peter snapped in frustration.

It is that simple. It's not like it's anything you haven't done before.

"I didn't have a choice then!"

The voice hardened suddenly. We do not have any more time to waste. Let me give you a choice now, then, Peter. I am opening an elevator shaft to the top floor.

There was a distant, muffled chime and a patch of reddish rust flesh parted to reveal darkness. Peter noted a slight freshening to the air. Less musty. Less closed in.

The rooftop access door directly across from the elevator shaft will be left open for you. You should have no difficulty escaping from the roof before the charges bring the building down.

"And the catch?" Peter asked slowly, forcing himself to stay calm. His heart was beating hard. His blood thundered in his ears.

If you take this exit without first killing me, my last act before Jessica takes control will be to contact Thunderbolt command.

Peter's eyes widened, but he didn't know why he was even surprised. "You wouldn't--!"

I will tell them who you are. I will give them all the information I have on you. On your dear Aunt. On the Watsons. On Miss Stacy and her father. Everyone you have left, Peter.

Peter's fist clenched and his eyes blazed.

The Thunderbolts will not be gentle. They will go in guns blazing. Your loved ones are not as durable as you are. Or perhaps I will tell Jessica everything. I will, after all, not be able to help myself. She would no doubt be worse. You are now the only thing keeping them safe.

A wordless, incoherent snarl of rage ran up his spine.

Let it be a race then. Whether Jessica gets to them first or Colonel Jameson.

Hank's voice dropped, becoming insistent. Driving into Peter's mind, boring into his thoughts.

Listen to me, Peter Parker. I am threatening you. I am a danger to you and all you hold dear. If you do not kill me right here, right now, I will. Take. Them. From. You.

Donna screamed in his mind, Stop! Think! He's making us angry--!

I will take them all away from you.

Peter knew he was being goaded. He knew Hank was manipulating him. Pumping him full of aggression. Playing with his reactions.

Don't give in then! Donna snapped at him.

Why not? Cletus drawled.

I will take her from you.

He knew all that, but with those words, none of it mattered. Hank put special emphasis on the word 'her' and there was some sense of... red hair, green eyes and fair skin in the words.

He screamed a wordless, furious roar as his claws and talons flashed out and began to tear Hank apart.

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