Variant Strain

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Walking down the yellow brick road might have been thematically appropriate on Peter's part, but he hadn't managed to get more than a few blocks away before a car engine roared to life behind him, followed by a large white van pulled up next to him.

Cletus poked his head out and grinned. "Get in. No point walkin' when we can go in style."

"This is style?" Peter asked dubiously.

The dog had clawed its way free of Peter's grip and was settled on his shoulders eyeing the vehicle with clear suspicion.

Cletus nodded, "Sure is. Hop in."

"How did you even get this?" Peter asked as Donna swung open the side doors.

"He hotwired it." Donna said primly.

"I don't remember seeing this on the street..." He frowned as he realized the van itself wasn't quite as vintage as the other cars on the street. It was a model from the mid-seventies, which just made it stand out even more than being the only white vehicle when every other one was a riot of bright colors.

Cletus made a dismissive noise. "This is all imaginationland, right? Why wouldn't I have what I'm familiar with? It was right there when I looked."

The back of the van had no real seats. Donna was sitting on dirty cushions right behind the passenger side seat. Connors, who looked even more fragile than before, was slumped forward in the passenger seat. He, at least, was buckled in properly.

The entire rear half of the van had been taken up by Cain who had needed to fold himself almost double to fit.

There were some woodworking tools hung up on a peg-board on the interior wall opposite the doors. The tools were badly maintained and here and there were a few slightly out of place additions, like chains and a pair of silver-handled folded straight razors.

There were a few dark spots on the wood. Peter felt a slight chill run down his spine as a memory stolen from Cletus met up with what he remembered from his research.

Cain caught Peter's eye and rumbled. "Yes. This is that van."

Staring at the straight razors a snatch of song occurred to Peter as he glanced from the pegboard to his companions. To his... 'friends.'

Wrong musical, he mused, but it felt vaguely more appropriate than Hank's choice.

The terrier whistled a couple snatches of the song in between nonsensical gibberish.

Peter glanced over to Cletus who had the wheel and noted that the man was humming his own cheery little tune.

Peter felt a touch of acceleration. There was eagerness to the motion.

"Do you even know where we're going?" Donna asked with a scowl.

"Pfft. How hard could it be? We follow the Yellow Brick Road..." He hummed again and this time Peter caught him mumbling a few snatches of words as the van picked up even more speed. "Ease on down, ease on down..."

The dog started wordlessly harmonizing with Cletus.

"Where are we anyway?" Peter asked as he pointed at something outside the window, "Because despite the Oz theme, I'm pretty sure there's not supposed to be any McDonald's here."

Connors lifted his head slightly and replied in a soft monotone. "I've only seen photos... but surely it must be obvious. This is Middletown, Arizona. Right before the outbreak."

The empty streets slowly began to fill up as people, all dressed in a riot of various colors began to appear. Only a handful at first, but slowly more and more. They were dressed in some fairly conservative old-fashioned styles, but the styles were done in a garish array of bright colors. Cars drove and while the road wasn't crowded, Cletus found himself having to slow down to accommodate the other motorists.

"It's like everybody suddenly went color blind." Cletus said with amusement.

Peter frowned as he noted another odd detail about the ones on the street. "Look at them."

"What?" Cletus asked, distracted.

Donna noticed it next. "No one's got a face. They've got features and all the right contours to have faces... but then... nothing. No noses, no eyes or mouths."

Connors wheezed. "Parts of Henry, I suppose? Not people. Not like the rest of you. No individuality. Just parts of his mind populating the scenery."

The riot of color gave way after a while. The people growing in number. No faces anywhere, but now the colors grew more sedate. Less brilliant. Where a few blocks back they had simply been milling around, here they seemed to stream together in lockstep, streaming down the streets. There was a sort of clockwork efficiency surrounding them, even down to the movements of the few other cars on the street.

"... is it just me or are they watching us?" Donna asked worriedly.

Peter nodded, also having seen the subtle change. The lines of people would slow as they passed. They would cock their heads in unison and turn to watch.

It was eerie and reminded Peter of how the rats had acted in Bellevue.

"I think... I think he knows we're coming." Peter said quietly.

Cletus brightened up. "So... the stealth option's out?"

"Yes?" Peter responded slowly.

"That just makes this a little easier." Cletus replied and gunned the engine. Where he'd been driving carefully and obeying the speed limits earlier, now he seemed to have stopped caring. He weaved between cars, shot through red lights and at more than a few points drove with a wheel on the sidewalk to get around slower moving cars.

Cletus was laughing the whole while as the van ate up the miles.

"What are you doing?!" Donna screamed at him.

"Look, when the cops are already on your tail, you forget about keeping a low profile and make a break for it! He knows we're comin' for him!" Cletus called back cheerfully, narrowly threading past a few more slow-moving vehicles. "You wanna give him a chance to keep watchin' us come in all nice and slow and let him have all the time in the world to put crap in our way or you wanna run in and smack him around before he gets a chance to get his game together?"

"He's got a point." Cain rumbled, but Peter could see that he was using his claws to cling to the floor of the van to avoid being tossed about.

The dog was pretty much bouncing off the walls with every turn, making excited little barks that could have been in that gibberish interspersed with the occasional snatch of lyrics from, "We're off to see the Wizard." in a surprisingly good soprano.

Cletus glanced over his shoulder, talking to Donna and Peter. "See? Cain knows what I'm talkin' ab--"

"Look out!" Connors head snapped up, throwing up more flakes as he screamed.

The momentary inattention combined with his speed caused Cletus to take a corner just a little too closely. The van bounced up onto the curb and plowed into a pair of faceless figures.

Peter expected the victims to be flung away, broken by the impact. Years of action movies and Mythbusters made him expect it. What he hadn't expected was for the faceless bodies to burst on impact.

It was as though they had been made of jello in saran wrap. They splattered into a mass of frothy pink slime that thickly coated the windshield.

Cletus made a disgusted noise, now no longer able to see and jerked the wheel hard to try and keep control of the vehicle. As he did, there were several more thuds and the spattered pink goo on the windshield grew thicker. Cletus savagely twisted at the wheel and the windshield wipers began their work, leaving arcing, blotchy streaks of the material across their field of view.

"What the--" Donna began to say, but Peter felt a familiar rush of memory begin.

"-- be absurd. I'm glad you asked." Henry Pym, blonde and beefy, dressed in a conservative suit and tie sat in a booth at an ice cream shop. The man looked more like a linebacker than a biochemist.

"I'm not being absurd, Darling," The woman opposite him replied with a delightful little giggle. She was in her late twenties. She was poised and pretty, with her dark hair cut into a bob, perfect make up and dressed in an expensive skirt, blouse and jacket combo which was probably too hot for the climate. Her accent sounded faintly British to the untrained ear, but could have been the upper-crust diction. "You must realize once you and your cronies get going in the laboratory, it takes a crowbar to pry you away. I'm glad you even managed to find time to take me out."

"Well, it's the least I can do for my lovely fiance." Pym said, flashing her a winning smile, "John and Bruce can handle the lab for a little while."

"Mmm... tell me more about how lovely you think your fiance is," She leaned in closer, smiling delightedly. She wore white gloves that ended in lace at her wrists.

Pym leaned in as well and murmured, "I could show you..."

Peter found himself wondering whose perspective he was watching the memory from when he found himself back on the floor of the van.

"-- hell do you think you're doing?!" Donna completed her demand.

Cletus laughed and pressed down on the accelerator harder. "Well, if they were bits of Hank, that makes all of 'em over 75, I think I just scored 400 points." He blinked then looked over his shoulder at Peter, "I have no idea what that means."

Connors wheezed a laugh, "Sounds like while you're giving Peter 'killer' he's giving you 'geek'."

"Still no clue what that meant." Cletus said, sticking his lower lip out in an exaggerated pout.

Peter sat up gingerly as Cletus carelessly plowed into another figure that was in the process of crossing the street, splattering the slime all over the windshield once more.

Donna yelled, "Stop tha--"

"-- have a good lunch?" Bruce asked. The man wore a white lab coat. He was thin, slightly stooped, sunken-chested and narrow shouldered. He peered at Pym through thick black framed glasses. He was the absolute opposite of Hank Pym in looks, but there was a rush of affection and respect for the smaller man's tremendous intellect.

"Wonderful. Thanks for covering for me." Pym replied heartily as he put his own lab coat on.

Bruce shrugged negligently and turned back to using a mouth pipette to move samples from a larger test tube into smaller ones.

"Where's John? I thought he'd be here."

"Visiting Jessie." Bruce said in between transfers, using a carefully neutral tone. "He got a call from the hospital. She's taken a turn for the worse."

"Poor kid. How bad?"

"John didn't say." Bruce replied, but there was an awkwardness to him. "We should get back to work. He will join us when he can make i--."

"--t!"

Peter choked out, "You need to stop hitting them! I'm getting Hank's memories when you do that!"

Cletus frowned, "Say what?"

"Every time you hit one you lose sight of the road." Donna replied hurriedly. "Peter's getting hit with memories! I think it's a distraction to try and get you to stop!"

"I don't have much of a choice anymore! They're pretty much tossin' themselves at us!" Cletus reported back as the van began to slew back and forth.

"The first few might've been an accident," Cain rumbled, "But Hank's figured out that it is going to slow us down. Bury us in his memories and keep us from getting to his core."

"That makes no sense." Cletus grumbled.

Connors shook his head and wheezed, "No. Perfect sense. Van... vehicle. Extension of will. Your will. You're the killer intent. You're all the murder thoughts. Murder van. Bog it down in memories." He gestured with his remaining hand at the slowly dripping gunk on the windshield," Blunt the murder thoughts. Blunt... intent. Tangle up the core mind..." He bobbed his hollowed out head at Peter, "Get him so wrapped up in the past... you can't do what you want to do. Stall til there's nothing left of us."

As thought to punctuate his declaration, his nose collapsed into glittering flakes.

Cain nodded. "He's trying to nostalgia bomb you."

"Shoot." Cletus groaned, "Look, I don't think I'm gonna be able to dodge 'em all. I'm gonna try, but I'm bound to hit a couple of 'em. You can handle it, right kid?"

Peter winced, but grit his teeth, "Fine. Fine. I can handle it. Just get us to Hank. I can take it."

"That's what I like to hear, little buddy!" Cletus roared back approvingly. He reached down and pulled the axe out from where it had been stowed next to his seat.

He jabbed the head of it right into the windshield, shattering it completely in a single impossible blow. Wind roared into the van even as shards of glass imploded inwards, most of the larger jagged pieces embedding into Cletus. That shouldn't have happened if that had been real safety glass, Peter's mind insisted, but Cletus didn't even seem to notice beyond giving an excited whoop.

Connors, on the other hand, was managing to scream in his whispery little voice, covering his face to protect it with his remaining arm. Not that it did much good. A long narrow shard had stuck through the center of his forehead, extending visibly into the hollow in his head.

With the glass gone from most of the windshield, they at least had a clear view. Which was fortunate, because that just barely gave Cletus enough time to jink the van out of the way of several more of the faceless citizenry who were literally jumping in front of them.

Then there was a sudden, jarring impact on the passenger side, then the van bounced up and just as suddenly dropped, as though it had driven over something that had burst halfway through.

Peter's eyes rolled up into his head as memory rushed in.

"-- good seeing you!" The girl gushed. She was still skinny. All knees and elbows and awkward bony angles, but she'd put on a lot of weight. There was muscle growing on her frame now. Her thick, black hair was growing back in and would need a visit to a stylist soon. Her face, lit up with childish enthusiasm, was far prettier than it had ever been before. Memory flashed within the memory of a sober little girl with hopeless, resigned eyes, a bald head that had been covered with a pretty scarf and an even more emaciated frame that couldn't leave her bed.

The van slewed desperately to one side.

Connors screamed "Loo--" THUMP.

Now she danced with a sort of unaccustomed, budding grace. Releasing Hank Pym from a hug and catching Bruce in one in turn. The skinny man was a scant few inches taller than she was returned the embrace awkwardly. Bruce wasn't accustomed to physical affection. Or touching people in general, but he'd always had an unexpected rapport with her.

"--k ou--" WHAM.

To the side, Jonathan Drew stood. He was heavy set, heavily bearded and smiling indulgently as his daughter hugged his friends and coworkers. He'd asked them to come. Asked them to visit this morning before they went to work.

Bruce released her from the embrace and smiled weakly. "It is good seeing you too." He glanced over at John then back at her. Jessica. "It does seem you've taken a turn for the better."

"--t!" THUD.

Jessica clapped her hands enthusiastically. "Yes. I've felt so much better, Uncle Bruce. I feel bursting with energy. And I can walk again! It feels so good to be able to get out of bed. And I missed being able to hug people!" She lunged for Bruce once more and caught him up in another hug which the skinny man endured with as much dignity as he could.

John and Hank shared a laugh. John then spoke, "Jessie. Come on. Let Bruce breathe. We do need to get to work."

"Yes, Father." Jessica replied reluctantly as she stepped back. Bruce straightened his tie.

Peter groaned.

"Are you even trying to avoid them?!" Donna yelled at Cletus.

Cletus screamed back, "If you think this is easy you are welcome to come take the wheel!"

A tide of barely human figures surged across the intersection.

Peter closed his eyes as Cain roared, "Incomi--"

Hank held the squirming Bruce back. He had Bruce in a full nelson, holding him just out of range of John who was on the floor.

"Calm down! What the hell is going on?" Hank asked.

John coughed and wiped the blood from his split lip on his knuckle.

"Ask him!" Bruce snarled venomously. "Ask this idiot what he just did!"

John staggered painfully back to his feet, "I don't know what you're talking about, Bru--"

"Spare me." Bruce spat with uncharacteristic temper. "A week ago, Jessie was dying. She could barely move. Now she's on her feet? Now she's magically put on thirty pounds and a full head of hair?" He struggled against Hank harder, "Do you think we're idiots, you bastard?! DO YOU?!"

Hank's eyes widened as he realized just what Bruce was saying and released him. Bruce was visibly reigning his fury in, but it was in his eyes. The man was just itching to hit John once more.

"What did you expect me to do?" John said hopelessly, leaning against the wall behind him to catch his breath. "I couldn't let her die."

Bruce snarled something under his breath then turned away.

"What did you use on her, John?" Hank asked gently, hoping his tone didn't infuriate Bruce more.

"I figured out the cipher in the Richards papers." John replied hurriedly, "I used it to modify the Beta-78 strain. I keyed it to her body specifically. Isolated it. Extremely limited lifespan outside of her body. There's a completely different set of characteristics. It's a completely new strain, not just a Beta variant. I suppose we can call it Gamma."

Bruce kept his back to them, but spoke slowly, trying to force himself to stay in control. "You injected your daughter with the bioweapon we're developing. Do you even need me to spell out for you how stupid that was?"

"She was dying!" John snapped back. "I knew what I was doing! This is the work we should have been doing in the first place! Think of all the good we could do with Hydra! I may have just cured cancer--"

"It looks like you might have forced a temporary remission." Bruce replied flatly, glancing over his shoulder. "It looks like your daughter is physically mutating--"

"Her body is healing to what it should have looked like if she hadn't been wasting away!"

Hank held up his hands, "Hold on, hold on. Calm down, both of you. Look... this... you did a very stupid thing, John, but we can salvage this. We don't need to tell General Ross or Fort Detrick about what happened. List her as a test subject. Cover up her name, but put her on the project roster so we can pull on their resources. This is bigger than you now, John."

"But it's perfectly sa--"

Hank's voice hardened, "We have to isolate her. Make sure your Gamma strain isn't transmissible. Make sure she doesn't develop any other mutations."

"But--"

"No." Bruce spat, whirling on John once more. "No buts, you bastard. If all you've done is given her false hope... or she turns into some kind of mindless monster... you are dead. I will kill you myself. Are we clear?"

John swallowed nervously.

Peter panted as he tried to sit back up. He felt like an entire football team had used him as a tackling dummy. Donna made shushing noises and gently pushed him back down. He found that he was resting his head in her lap as she smoothed his hair back.

The dog was standing on his chest and staring down at him disconcertingly.

"Sorry 'bout that, kid. Buncha them just tried to hem us in, but I think we got ahead of 'em finally." Cletus called back cheerily.

Peter coughed, "How far have we gotten?"

"The green thing we're heading towards is looking a lot closer." Donna replied gently.

"Middletown University." Peter said quietly. "I'm pretty sure that's his Emerald City. It had a hedge maze near the Biology labs. I could see it through the window."

Donna nodded. "Picking up his memories?"

"Bits and pieces. Mostly about Jessica." He took a deep breath and his body began to relax once more, letting the pain go. He reached up and plucked the dog off his chest and set it down on the van's floor. "She was my age when this happened to her. She'd been bedridden for years before it happened."

Cain rumbled, "You're not feeling sympathy are you? You know she's the reason all this happened."

Peter finally managed to sit back up. "No. Maybe a little. I..." He looked helplessly at the group that surrounded him. "That's still how I could end up." He said quietly.

Donna shook her head sympathetically and gave him a lopsided smile, "But you won't. We'll make sure you don't."

Cain made a grunting noise that might have been an affirmative one.

"Well crap." Cletus said suddenly.

They all turned to look out of the now glassless windshield. All sorts of debris had been piled up in front of the road. Furniture and garbage and even the faceless bodies formed a block in the road.

"A barricade?!" Donna said incredulously.

"Should've expected this." Cain rumbled.

"We might be able to go around it, but the yellow brick road goes straight through." Cletus called back.

Connors wheezed. "We turn away from the road we may never find our way back."

Peter glared furiously at the rapidly approaching barrier. The others looked to him for a decision, but he didn't know what to do. Things had just simply kept happening one after another. No chance to breathe. No chance to catch up.

Some dim echo of the furious anger that he'd seen in Bruce Banner had called out to him as well. The frustration of having to deal with so much... stupidity. He shouldn't have to be the one making these kinds of decisions.

Cain startled. "Not to put too much pressure on the rest of you..."

"Spit it out." Donna said wearily.

"I'm still aware of our body." Cain said slowly. "I can smell MJ. She just entered the room. I think we're going to wake up soon."

"Out of time," Connors whispered desperately as they watched his remaining arm collapse into glittering flakes. "If he wakes up, Henry is going to bury the rest of you. He'll be conscious enough to keep you from reaching conscious control. By the time he sleeps again, the rest of you may be too far gone to actually do anything else."

"Yes or no, kid? I dunno how the van's gonna hold up if we try to plow through that thing, but it ain't lookin' good." Cletus flashed a grin. "Also, I'd like to point out that I've got a seat belt, so I'm probably gonna be fine. You three in the back, probably not so much."

"I..." Peter hesitated for a moment, then winced as he felt a sharp nip at his ear.

He turned and found the dog perched on his shoulder with a rather uncharacteristic doggy grin. "Never kick a dog, because he's just a pup." The dog said in clear soprano voice.

Peter flinched away from it and having made it's declaration, the dog bound forward, leaping off Peter's shoulder, onto the backrest of Cletus' seat, off of his head, then it shot forward out the windshield in a red haze.

Everyone stared as it flew full-tilt at the barricade.

Peter, his mind suddenly cleared, realized that the dog had just taken his anger and seemed to be planning on doing something with it.

He pointed. "Follow that dog!"

"You got it!" Cletus sang back happily and floored the accelerator.

"You're all insane." Connors whimpered and seemed to be trying to shield his face, but no longer had any arms to do that with.

The dog slammed into an upper section of the barricade. There was a moment when it was and wasn't a dog. The dog shape was something imposed on it by Hank's mind. It had little enough will or self-identity to assert any other form for itself. But the bundle of Peter's instincts and anger and all the little odds and ends that didn't quite make up a whole mind still had a lot of power behind it despite its appearance. For a moment, the dog shape, while still there, was simultaneously super-imposed with an image out of a butcher's nightmare. The word abomination came to Peter's mind. So did the words rugose and squamous. There were faces and arms and odds and ends and mingled bits that just seemed to not fit right for something that was ostensibly three-dimensional.

The not-dog shape struck and the red light surrounding it exploded into an immense sphere that smashed apart the barricade and flung aside the faceless forms that had begun to swarm. Peter recognized the sense of what it had done. The instinctive smash he'd performed in the street when he'd been fighting near the Sandoval Deli hive.

It was hard to remember that had only just been that morning. The van drove through the obvious gap in the barricade. Not all the debris had been blown free and the entire thing bounced through a minefield of uneven wreckage. The yellow brick road was still obvious beneath the debris and they sped through an open gate whose sign flickered between "Emerald City" and "Middletown University".

The buildings surrounding them seemed to be fairly nondescript brick-fronted and old-fashioned. They were familiar from the memories that had been rammed into his head, but different as well. Where in the memories they'd been white-washed and well maintained... the 'Emerald City' version of Middletown University had every wall thickly coated in overgrown ivy.

Only the yellow brick road remained pristine. It was leading them straight to a building that Peter also recognized.

The virology lab. The place where Banner, Pym and Drew had worked.

The dog, because it was once more a dog, sang out tauntingly as it looped in mid-air, "We'll fight like twenty armies and we won't give up!"

More faceless things burst from the rough landings where the dog had sent them and Peter felt more memories rush in.

"--me through! My fiance is still in there!" Hank screamed as the blonde army captain restrained him.

"Dr. Pym! No one is going in there. The building is a loss. Everyone in there is infected." The man, his name patch identified him as Rogers, S. spoke in a calm authoritative voice.

Hank panted, his heart hammered and his eyes flickered desperately from Captain Rogers then to the building then to the small crowd of people who had managed to escape before the doors and windows sealed shut, trapping everyone else inside.

"What abou--"

"Everyone, Dr. Pym." Captain Rogers continued, "You are the only local expert we have on hand. Dr. Banner is still unconscious and concussed. The medics aren't sure if he's even going to wake up. Dr. Drew died making sure you got out. You are literally the only one who can help those people right now and I need you to focus."

Hank grit his teeth and breathed harshly through his nose. "But... but... it shouldn't... Drew was so sure..." He stared down at his hand. He covered it up hurriedly before anyone else noticed the toothmarks Jessica had left.

With clinical efficiency, Captain Rogers backhanded him hard enough to rattle his teeth. "Get it together. You. Are. The. Expert. If you can't give me some sort of solution for this we may lose this entire block or more." Hank stared at the man who simply continued speaking. "I was at Littleville, Dr. Pym. I know you have access to the Professor Richards' papers. I need you to fix this." He pointed sharply at the building. Some sort of fleshy, tumorous growth was beginning to spread from several open windows tracing irregular paths along the brick facade of the building.

Hank nodded numbly. Rogers seemed to approve of this then inclined his head to another man. A huge, dark skinned man glowered down at Pym and perhaps it was only a trick of the light, but the man's dark eyes seemed to glow red.

"Sgt. Bradley? Pull a detail together. We need to get Dr. Pym to his--"

"-- laboratory's this way!" Cletus called over his shoulder.

"How do you even know?" Donna called back. Peter's head was once more on her lap.

"Sign said so." Cletus said smugly. The van wheezed and the engine seemed to be choking. The back was also bouncing a lot harder than it really should have and there were more strange noises that Peter had no idea about.

"Van's had it." Cain rumbled.

"Yeah..." Cletus murmured, patting the dashboard fondly as the van continued to lose speed. "Almost there. Hold it together old girl."

Cain grunted and kicked open the back door of the van. "Time's almost up. MJ's scent is close. Real close."

That revealed an almost solid wall of humanoid figures chasing after them.

Not just chasing.

Catching up.

The faceless, surging tide that reminded Peter all too much of the masses of Hive-controlled infected that he'd already fought through before.

The dog who was sitting next to Peter drawled in his voice. "And if pretty little Jessie gets her way, that's what we've got to look forward to."

Peter stared at the crowd then at the dog who shrugged.

"I'll hold 'em off." Cain snarled. "You." He jammed an immense finger in Peter's direction, "Find Pym. Fix this."

"You can't take them all on your own!" Donna cried out.

Cain shrugged and gracefully dropped out the back of the van.

He was engulfed almost immediately by the faceless riot. Blood and bodies began to fly almost immediately.

"You idiot!" Donna screamed in frustration then scrambled to the back of the van and called out over her shoulder. "You can handle this, Peter. I trust you."

She smiled then. It was a familiar one, but he couldn't place it. Before he could think on it any further, she had leaped out as well and run into the press of bodies.

"Then there were three," The dog intoned in a bass rumble.

"There's four of us still in here." Peter replied, more harshly than he intended.

"Nope," Cletus called back. "Connors is gone."

Peter clenched his teeth and bit back a snarl. "Shut up and drive, Cletus. Let's finish this."

Cletus grinned.

The virology lab was less than a dozen yards ahead.

- - -