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[PROTOTYPE]: Reborn	By : ShinaRyun Category: +M through R > Prototype Series Views: 3341 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: PROTOTYPE and all derivative/associated works and titles belong to Activision, Radical Entertainment, and their affiliates. I make NO PROFIT from this writing.

Chapter List
- 10
- 11
- 12
To look at the Red zone from a satellite’s point of view, there wasn’t a great deal to be worried about. Most of the buildings lay in ruins, yes, and monsters the size of apartment blocks plodded through the wreckage, yes, but mobile operatives like the Evolved could get over these obstacles. And while every spot of former greenery on the island now resembled a pitch-black, overgrown scab to the satellite’s eye, these were static dangers that could be avoided. All in all, a challenging environment, but no more dangerous than the Blackwatch-controlled firing range of the Testing Area or the highly-monitored Gentek bastille the Evolved had left behind.
The satellites couldn’t see everything, though, while the Evolved, standing on the lip of a skyscraper’s exposed twentieth floor, could see that their challenges came in far greater numbers. The ground beneath them was a warzone unlike any they had ever seen or heard of, a killing field for the concrete jungle, choked by hordes of cannibalistic infected humans lashing out at anything they could reach. The ground was literally covered with the dead, the dying, and those who didn’t seem content to die once, or even twice; a battleground of mutated zombies that had left behind any semblance of humanity long ago. These abominations, however, were only helpless cattle for the larger monsters that swept through them like wolves through a field. Fast-moving Brawlers and slow, island-like Juggernauts jockeyed for prime hunting spots amid the plain of human prey, and monsters that the Evolved didn’t recognize joined them in the fight for blood and sport. The evolutionary arms race had slowed to a crawl over the last ten years, that much was clear; the old dangers looked depressingly similar to when the Evolved had left, and most of the newer monsters clearly wore tattoos or brands labeling them Gentek property. Despite the fact that blood, limbs and bodies flew everywhere, and biologic weapons slashed, smashed, and blasted left and right, to the Evolved, the scene looked almost stagnant.
“Well,” Horst sighed as he flexed his cannon-arm and leaned against the chewed-open wall they had entered through, “Up or down?”
“Up,” Fritz said a moment before Darwin’s stentorian growl shook the room, the massive dog glaring at the upper edge of the opened wall, legs spread and rigid, ears up and twitching, lips curled back from his bloody fangs. His fur stood up in a huge ruff around his neck and shoulders, and blood leaked around his paws as he flexed and dug his thick claws into the flesh-covered floor beneath him.
“Welcome party?” Horst guessed, locking out his arm and loading a spear, scanning the wall for some sign of what Darwin sensed.
“Maybe…something’s coming, that’s for sure,” Fritz muttered as he did the same, sweeping the barrel of his cannon back and forth across the wall. Both Evolved tensed as dust and flecks of bloody biomass fell from above the wall’s opening, knocked off the wall by whatever it was that had gotten Darwin’s hackles up.
“On the wall,” Fritz whispered, focusing his aim on the opening. “Probably a Brawler.”
“Let’s find out,” Horst muttered through a grin, drawing a tighter bead higher on the wall itself and grunting as he fired his spear. The hard projectile punched through the wall without difficulty, and earned Horst a glass-shattering shriek of pain that rose far above what a Brawler’s throat was capable of.
“The fuck-!” Fritz started to say before their new adversary abandoned stealth and swept in through the open wall, making both Evolved jump back to stay out of its reach. Neither could positively identify what the brackish-red creature had been pre-infection; fleshy wings strung between elongated bone fingers wider than a Greyhound bus spread out from a lithe, muscle-bound torso, while short, beefy legs and complex, multi-jointed feet supported the creature’s bulk. The sheets of stretchy flesh that connected the creature’s long wing-fingers also extended from its bottommost fingers to its knees, and a second set of wingless arms protruded from its chest, each ending in grasping hands tipped with short, curled claws. Its head resembled a mix of crocodile and skinless wolf, long and narrow with a mouth full of curved fangs, a powerful array of jaw muscles clearly visible beneath leathery scales that thickened and grew into flexible armor which covered its neck, torso, and legs. It was clearly a creature of the senses, its cavernous ears bigger than Darwin’s, the tip of its snout sculpted into a complex, ridged nose, its eyes wide and black…one of them, anyway. The other was a ruined, burst mess, with the back half of Horst’s spear sticking out of it and the head lodged somewhere in its skull.
Despite having half a meter of steel-hard biomass poking into its brain, the thing seemed no less capable than if it were unhurt, spreading its wings imposingly wide and screaming with such fury that Darwin had to flatten his ears, or else risk deafness.
“Put his ugly ass down!” Fritz roared as he fired his spear, then switched to bullets, his spear making a meaty thud as it perforated into the winged monster’s left ankle. Horst’s spear went high as the creature stumbled and fell forward, crippled by the blow to its leg, its body shaking under first one, then two streams of spikey bullets that the Evolved fed into it. Holes were quickly punched out of its wings and through its armor, but even this assault was not enough to slow it down, the monster screaming its rage and pain before shoving itself back the way it had come, falling out through the hole in the wall. The Evolved rushed to the edge, hoping to see it falling to its death; both were shocked to see it gliding away, its bleeding wings pumping slowly to keep it aloft. Its screams echoed loud and clear between the buildings and biomass towers as it limped away, and it wasn’t until Darwin started growling again that the Evolved realized that the sounds stemmed from something other than pain.
“What is it, boy?” Fritz asked as he peered off where Darwin was glaring, his eyes narrowing, then widening as he noticed what Darwin had seen.
“Run.”
Horst glanced at his lover with an eyebrow raised to his hairline. “Come again?”
“Run!” Fritz repeated as he grabbed Horst’s shoulder and forcefully turned him to see the source of his distress. The tower beside theirs was spitting out dark, winged shapes from its upper levels, and with each new creature, the cringe-inducing screams multiplied into a cacophonous aural assault. Horst could see the fresh creatures zipping towards them with disturbing precision, some breaking away to flap unerringly towards their wounded comrade. Ten, fifteen, thirty…every passing second brought more, and more, too many to count as they dove for the Evolved.
“Oh,” Horst said quietly.
“Yeah, oh!” Fritz spat, yanking on Horst’s shoulder as he turned from the wall, starting to run. “More like, ‘No’, as in ‘No fucking way are we going up into that shit!’ C’mon!”
“Where the hell are we going?!” Horst yelled as he followed his lover, tracing the weaving path Fritz laid between the biomass pillars, Darwin following behind.
“Down,” Fritz replied over his shoulder, making a beeline for the elevator shafts that ran through the middle of the building. The elevator doors were gone, revealing that the once-empty tubes had become a hard biomass core for the supporting building, packed with so much flowing black armor that it looked like a volcano had erupted up the elevator shafts and cooled as it rose.
“Stairs, then?” Horst asked sarcastically once he stood beside Fritz, on the side of the elevator shafts opposite the opening in the wall. Fritz just snorted and whistled to get Darwin’s attention, pointing a finger sharply at the floor beneath his feet.
“Dig!” He didn’t have to say it twice, the massive dog forcing him to stumble back with a bold, determined bark before leaping for the spot Fritz had indicated. His back paws clenched to get a good grip in the fleshy floor, his stocky body bent and flexed powerfully, and his armored, bladed forepaws started to rip and tear with the destructive fury of a dozen backhoes. Watery blood and thick clots of pinkish-red tissue flew behind him like a cow in a wood chipper, the energetic dog quickly digging down to a thin layer of hard black biomass that slowed his progress.
“We’ve got to buy him some time!” Fritz shouted, pointing to one of the supporting pillars to the left of the elevator shafts while he ran for one on the right, cocking a spear into his cannon. “Hold them off until he can get through!”
“And then what, sweetheart?” Horst asked as he ran to the pillar Fritz had indicated and pressed himself flat to it, loading up a spear of his own. He didn’t have to wait long to use it, the first of their winged aggressors swooping into the tower through the open wall, immediately folding its wings and starting to crawl between the pillars towards the Evolved.
“Then out the back, down to the ground, and find some other fucking way to the station,” Fritz said as he and Horst both fired on the first of the creatures, one spear plunging into its left shoulder and the other stabbing into its neck. Wounded but far from dead, the monster howled and stumbled, allowing the Evolved to see another two of its kind sweep into the tower behind it; behind them, Horst caught a glimpse of the very first of the monsters they had fought, still aloft. He considered trying to bring it down with another spear, but was robbed of the chance when one of the monsters did it for him, diving onto its wounded comrade and starting to tear into it with fang and claw. The first was quickly joined by two more, making a writhing, haphazardly-flapping ball of teeth that made an easy meal of the screaming cripple at its center.
“They’re cannibals!” Horst exclaimed as he loaded and fired another spear at the closest wounded creature, sticking it through a wing and pinning it to the floor like a bug in a box. “Bet if we make it bleed enough, they others will concentrate on it!”
“Worth a shot!” Fritz answered as he did the same, pinning down the creature’s free wing before switching to bullets and ripping into the creature wherever he could see. Sure enough, once there was blood raining onto the floor, the two monsters behind the first stopped their advance to take advantage of their paralyzed brother, ignoring the Evolved in favor of a gruesome meal. Even as the first two paused, however, more came pouring in through the wall behind them in pairs, crowding at the entrance and spreading through the room, filling the floor with their blood-curdling shrieks and screams. The Evolved used the same tactic as before to slow them down and keep them occupied, but the creatures ate with such voracious speed that as soon as one group was busy with a meal, four more were closing in. The Evolved were getting dangerously low on breathing room, the rotten, bloody smell of the creatures’ awful stench filling the air, getting more and more oppressive as the monsters started drawing in towards melee range, surrounding the Evolved with a semicircle of blood-spattered, fanged faces that screamed for their deaths.
Horst was just switching to his long claws and bracing himself for the brawl when a triumphant yodel, followed by a surprised yip and an almighty crash told him that Darwin had made it through to the next floor, and fallen through. “Quick!” Fritz hissed as he back-flipped through the hole, grabbing onto the edge with his free hand to offer covering fire for Horst to move. The dominant Evolved tackled Fritz through to the next floor down as he tucked and rolled back, turned and pounced, his sinewy arms wrapping tightly around Fritz’s waist to carry him with as he fell through. Horst turned as he fell, putting his own back to the floor beneath them to spare Fritz injury, releasing his lover the moment they crashed down. Fritz took advantage of their position, rolling over onto his back and bringing his spear-laden cannon up to aim at the hole they had just passed through.
“C’mon,” he growled under his breath. The instant one of their pursuers poked its head over the edge, it caught Fritz’s spear right between its eyes, sending its head snapping back and making it scream loudly enough to get the attention of all its clustered, bloodthirsty kindred.
“That ought to buy us a second,” Fritz grunted, bouncing to his feet and whipping out his serrated claws before offering Horst a hand up.
“Yeah, emphasis on a second,” Horst grumbled as he let Fritz help him to his feet, shaking the cobwebs off quickly. “Lead on, sweetheart.”
“This way,” Fritz said confidently, taking off at a sprint towards the wall opposite the open one leading out towards the bridge. The floor they had escaped to was almost exactly like the one they had left, devoid of life and filled with biomass pillars that the three escapees wove around to get to the far wall. As they ran, it occurred to Fritz that his idea of jumping through the windows and dropping to the ground had a major snag: he didn’t know if Darwin could survive a nineteen-story fall. The Evolved’s bodies could withstand impacts from any height because they lacked bones to break, their bodies composed entirely of highly-mutable cells that could simply bounce back from anything they had to withstand. Darwin, clad in rigid armor plates fused to his skeleton, probably would not fare as well.
Fortunately, Fritz had owned dogs before, and quickly revised his plan by the time they got to the wall. “Baby, we don’t have time for you to question this,” Fritz said grimly as he switched back to his cannon and loaded a spear, gently pushing it out until the bladed head was exposed from the barrel, “But I need you to cut my arm off.”
“You are smoking crack,” Horst grunted as he caught up.
“Do it!” Fritz roared, holding out his normal left arm. Horst sighed in frustration and shook his head before curling three claws back and swiping one up beneath Fritz’s shoulder, snipping off his arm like a piece of tissue paper. Even with the Mercer virus’s pain-dampening abilities, Fritz still bit through his bottom lip trying not to scream at the agony while he reached his cannon-arm down and stuck the exposed tip of his spear through his fallen arm. “If you wouldn’t mind, love,” he growled, spitting blood with every syllable, “Open the front door, please?”
While Horst went to work with his claws smashing open the windows in front of them, Fritz turned towards Darwin and hefted up his bloody, flopping arm, waving it quickly back and forth. The effect was immediate, the dog instantly focusing on the arm, body tensing, ears swiveling forward, eyes locked on the dripping prize his master offered.
“You want this?” Fritz growled, backing up until he stood beside the hole Horst had made. Behind the massive dog, he could hear the renewed screams of their pursuers as they finished their meal and started jostling for space to come after the Evolved. Darwin didn’t care, too focused on the juicy treat before his eyes.
“Want it?” Fritz asked. Darwin barked and wagged his stub of a tail in reply, trembling with excitement. “Go get it!” Fritz yelled, aiming out through the hole and firing towards the building across the street. He was very nearly bowled over as Darwin took off from a stand-still, getting one good bouncing step before leaping out through the opening, making use of his highly-mutated muscle structure and natural prey-drive to follow after his promised goodie. Horst, stupefied by this entire exchange, could only watch in dumbstruck confusion as Darwin cleared more than twenty feet, crashed into the far building, and then slid safely down towards the ground with his paws trying to dig into the glass and steel surface. He barely managed to snag Fritz’s arm with a snap of his jaws before he slid down to the ground; he had it down his throat before he’d made it down three stories.
“Did you just sacrifice an arm so that your fucking mutt didn’t have to swan-dive to the pavement?” the dominant Evolved asked critically, rounding on Fritz just as one of their pursuers fell through the hole behind them.
“Spank me for it later,” Fritz growled, switching back to his standard form and clutching at his stump as he settled for falling instead of jumping, tumbling to the ground to crash in a heap. Horst sighed and followed with a more graceful leap that turned into an aggressive pounce as he saw more than a dozen infected sub-humans turn their attention on Fritz. His long claws turned one into a mess of chunks and diced organs before he whipped around Fritz’s slowly-recovering body to clear the rest away and keep them from taking advantage of his lover’s weakness. He didn’t have to protect his lover for long; Fritz gratefully allowed his feeder-tendrils to feast upon the buffet of fresh kills around him, rapidly re-making his arm and rejuvenating his carnivorous form. Less than a minute after having an arm hacked off, Fritz was back on his feet, growling angrily and lending his own ripping claws to the glorious slaughter. By the time Darwin came bouncing over to the two, they were surrounded by corpses and soaked in blood from head to toe, their claws so clotted with gore that their bodies couldn’t absorb it fast enough.
“Check him,” Horst yelled as he continued to thin the pack of infected around them. They had landed into an alleyway between the two buildings, thankfully clear of larger monsters and too tight a space for their winged pursuers to follow, leaving them with just the infected to deal with. Grotesque lambs to the slaughter. Horst could scarcely believe the level of degradation he was seeing; as a geneticist, it was as fascinating as it was horrifying to think that this was the result of the same virus he was infected with. The creatures he was killing showed little to no trace of their former humanity, wildly deformed with elongated limbs, bloated bodies, pustules and sores bigger than their own heads, stubby tentacles that wriggled and looped back to burrow into the bodies supporting them, and features that looked like they had melted and been twisted into waxy, deathly rictuses. Limbs ended in jagged talons, blades of chipped and sharpened bone, flailing whip-like lengths of tendon, and brutish clubs that swung with jackhammer-force. They gargled and growled and reached out for Horst with hands frozen into gore-crusted claws, and limped on legs as bent and broken as the rest of their bodies or crawled on all four impossibly-bent limbs. None of them wore any kind of clothing, but since Horst could not discern any kind of gender of his victims, it did not seem to matter. He felt nothing for the things that he killed, understanding that were it not for Mercer’s choice and a few prime sections of DNA in his cells, he could have very easily become one of the slobbering mutants that fell to pieces under his long claws.
Fritz was feeling less philosophical as he examined Darwin, relieved to see that the dog was unhurt. He offered the dog some of Horst’s kills just to be safe, and then commanded the giant dog to patrol the little clearing his lover had made so that they could discuss their next move.
“Okay,” he said with a sigh, ignoring the crunch, crunch, crunch of Darwin thinning out the herd, “So we’re not getting to the station through the air…Darwin can’t keep up with so much interference on the ground, and I don’t think that the flying freaks will let us just move along without a fight.”
“Agreed,” Horst said with a nod, not bothering to put his claws away, just letting them hang at his sides as his body soaked up the layers of blood and gore he wore. “So realistically, we’re on street level, eh? Not exactly going to be easy…like you said, lots of interference.”
“We might be able to ride Darwin, if we helped to clear the path a bit,” Fritz suggested.
Horst shook his head. “I don’t think so. The sheer density of enemies out there is too great, the chance that we could get dragged down or locked into a lengthy fight is too risky. I don’t want to get knee-deep into this shit until I know for sure that we really do have Blacklight swimming in our veins.”
“Didn’t expect you to turn chicken because of a little risk,” Fritz snorted, raising an eyebrow and crossing his arms over his buff chest, tilting his chin up at his lover. “Second thoughts?”
Horst shook his head as he reached down to pick up one of the corpses they had just made…what was left of it, at least. His claws had left just a torso with an arm dangling by a ligament, and a head that was missing a generous slice off the top. He picked it up in one hand and held it for Fritz to see, every grotesque detail of the sub-human’s mutations showing clearly from up close. Its face was particularly disgusting, its eyes burst and reformed into a pair of tendrils tipped with compound orbs, a secondary mouth growing out of its neck, its nose turned inward into a cyst-like pair of holes that drooled black blood down its pointed chin. “This is what we’re infected with,” Horst said harshly. “This god-awful, unstable caveman of a virus that’s turned this city into a club-wielding wilderness of retarded apes and rage-monsters. The level of deterioration here is beyond anything I’ve ever seen,” he practically growled as he pointed to the misshapen, weeping sores dotting the torso’s side and back in great cancerous lumps, the spikes of bone that stabbed through the skin like thick quills, the rancid blood and alien organs that still slipped out from the opened bottom of the torso, completely unrecognizable.
“So what?” Fritz asked with a shrug, only slightly put off by the grisly display.
“So, who knows what kind of changes we’re going to experience here?” Horst asked, dropping his visual aide with a meaty splat. “We’ve had this virus in us for ten years, and now every breath we take is flooding our systems with more of the same. That’s a catalyst that could do incredible damage to us if we don’t fix ourselves, soon. Fighting, or even using our mutations might be making it worse.” He paused for a moment and raised an eyebrow, then nodded down towards Fritz’s arms. “How are your marks? Tingling a little bit?”
Fritz frowned and glanced down as he lifted up his hands, blinking in surprise when he noticed that the glowing lines of bioluminescent tissue running where his major arteries and veins had once lay were burning brightly through his jacket. As soon as he noticed the brighter glow, he started to feel the tingling that Horst had mentioned, like pins and needles everywhere that his skin glowed, his back itching like lines of ants were running up and down his spine. “That’s…weird,” he said slowly, his brow furrowing as he looked to his lover and noticed the same thing was happening with Horst’s Frankenstein-like marks. “What does it mean?”
“I can’t be sure,” Horst said grudgingly, clenching his hands and frowning as the motion made his lines light up a little brighter, the tingling becoming very slightly painful. “I’d bet money that our bodies are already starting to react to the environment. Our viruses are just as stagnant as everything else here, and I don’t know how long they’ll be able to resist concentrations of corruption this high. Just guessing that anything we do to stress our bodies is going to accelerate the process.”
“And by ‘stress’, you mean…no fighting?” Fritz asked critically.
“Or using our mutations, or jumping…basically, nothing that will make our bodies work on anything that will take away from our resistances.” Horst shrugged. “I don’t like it any more than you, but it’s the price we have to pay until we find Blacklight.”
“And if we don’t find it?” Fritz asked, the faintest hint of hopelessness entering his voice.
“Then I’m afraid that Nixon might be right: we’ll be fucked, and not in the fun way. If Heller can control the virus like that…we really won’t stand a chance. And our viruses might not be able to withstand the levels of deterioration we’re going to experience the deeper we go in, and the longer we stay here. Frankly, if we don’t find Blacklight soon, we might start to mutate beyond the point of controlling ourselves.”
“Shit,” Fritz spat. “So…if we’re not fighting our way through, and we’re not riding Darwin, what would you suggest? Trying to run all the way to Penn station through that?” He pointed down the alley, where Darwin was still patrolling and crushing any mutant that came close; most had already figured out to stay back, forming a snarling, seething perimeter around the Evolved.
Horst looked around, bit his bottom lip, and then glanced down before an idea occurred to him. “Like you said, sweetheart…down,” he said, kicking aside corpses until he revealed a bloodstained, rusted manhole cover. “There might still be tunnels all the way through the island…if we can avoid concentrations of enemies, we could probably get there without too much trouble.”
Fritz was a nanosecond away from making his disagreement with this plan violently clear when two thoughts struck him. Between himself and Horst and the people they had eaten, they had a cumulative knowledge of New York’s geography as precise as any map, and could likely navigate the island’s sewer system without difficulty. He also realized that, much as he hated the thought of trudging through a sewer, the alternatives were simply too perilous.
“Fine,” he grunted, reaching down and yanking off the rusty cover with one hand, flinging it spitefully out of the alley. The cloud of nauseating gasses that erupted from the opened hole was enough to distract him from watching the flying metal disk, gagging when he would have liked to have watched the cover crush a sub-human like an ant. “Fu-uck!” he choked, slapping a hand over his face until he felt his body shift and adjust to the offensive odor. Even with the smell diminished, it was still enough to make his eyes water and his jaw clench, a decade of completely untreated sewage mixed with the viral growth that had sprung up in the warm, wet, dark spaces underneath the island. Fritz pulled his hand away from his nose and took an experimental sniff; the resulting wave of pure foulness that rushed over his senses forced him to turn away and become violently sick, leaving a puddle of blood and viral waste on the pavement beside the stinking hole.
“There’s no way to tell what we’re gonna find in there,” he grunted once he recovered and looked inside, switching to his thermal vision to just to have some hope of seeing in the dark space. He noticed that when he used his vision enhancement, the initial burning he had felt when he had acquired the power came back, like matches striking behind his eyes. The degradation of their viruses, he guessed.
“Not without going and looking,” Horst agreed, starting to step towards the open hole before he paused and looked to Darwin, lifting an eyebrow as he began to consider how they were going to bring the huge dog along into the potentially-tiny spaces underground. “Uh, sweetheart-?”
“I know, I know,” Fritz sighed, standing and moving over towards the dog, getting his attention with a few gestures. “Sit! Stay!”
The dog looked at Fritz as though he were speaking Klingon.
“Stay!” Fritz repeated, pointing sharply at the ground. “Do not follow! Hold this ground!”
Darwin’s ears slid back and his eyes darted between where Fritz was pointing and at the tiny hole in the ground, clearly understanding that Fritz was going down and that he wasn’t invited. A high-pitched whine started to build in his throat and his eyes started to widen, hoping that persuasion might help change his master’s mind.
“I don’t like it either,” Fritz growled, reaching up and scratching his claws under Darwin’s chin. “We’ll come back. Return, understand?”
Darwin whined, but obediently plopped his heavy backside down in grudging agreement. Fritz nodded and backed away until he stood beside the hole, looking to Horst as his lover switched on his own heat-vision. “Alright…let’s see if that works.”
“We have bigger concerns than your mutt’s obedience training,” Horst sighed, rubbing his temples as he too felt the hotter burn from using a mutation. “Come on…he can handle anything smaller than himself, and outrun anything bigger. If we want to be able to do the same, we need to go.” Horst pulled out the viral detector Maynard had loaned them and warmed it up, then took what would be his last unpolluted breath for hours and pencil-dove into the manhole. Fritz hesitated for just a moment, long enough to hear the short whistle of Horst’s descent, the gut-wrenching splash of his landing, and then the string of vehement curses that wafted out of the manhole.
“Holy fucking god,” Horst’s voice coughed out of the hole, followed by a retching gurgle and a series of wet splashes as Horst’s body did everything it could to reject the tidal wave of corrupted viral particulate that saturated the tunnel’s air. His voice sounded ragged when he spoke. “This might not have been the best idea…the level of degeneration down here is insane.”
Curious, Fritz took a breath and then dropped down the hole, his stomach knotting and cramping up the instant his feet touched the slimy, warm ooze that caked the bottom third of the tunnel. To a non-Evolved, the experience was barely relatable. Every part of Fritz’s body, even his clothing, was comprised of complex, chimeric cells that fused his once-human DNA with the structures of the Mercer virus. The ooze that he splashed into was made of those same cells, bastardized, rotted forms of the Mercer virus that attacked the healthy cells of Fritz’s body in a relentless assault, trying to corrupt and mutate them. It was literally like being immersed to his waist in toxic waste, poisoning him, making him sick, every second he spent in contact with the stuff making his whole body prickle and burn, his head beginning to throb.
“This is not good,” he groaned as he leaned against a wall of the tunnel, recoiling immediately once he realized that the tunnel wall was covered in a lattice of pulsating flesh, stalactites of congealed flesh and bloody, brackish slime hanging heavily from the tunnel’s ceiling. Looking around with his thermal vision, he realized that the tunnel was almost like some massive, rotten artery, sick and choked with deposits of filth too old and tough to be break apart. He nearly threw up again when he realized that the warm sludge was moving, slowly but surely, all in the same direction: following the pulses that ran through the walls.
“Please don’t tell me…”
“Yeah,” Horst said with a shudder, starting to trudge along with the flow of filth around them. “Got to go this way, otherwise we’re going to wind up back in the Testing Area.”
“We should have just gone to Milan,” Fritz grumbled as he followed. For more than twenty minutes, the two mutants slogged through tunnels that led them deeper into the island, sometimes turning down side passages that took them against the flow of material, most of the time walking with it. They saw no signs of life other than the growing concentrations of viral material on the walls and ceiling, and heard nothing but the subtle throbbing of the tunnel’s veins around them, and the endless sloshing of the disgusting filth around them. After twenty minutes, both Evolved felt feverish and their legs burned, not from exertion, but from the unending contact with the poisonous slurry they had to tolerate in order to avoid confrontation.
“How much further?” Fritz asked, fighting to keep from gasping for breath as he did so. He felt sick, and after pressing a hand underneath the level of the rotten biomass they were wading through, he knew why. His legs felt misshapen and chewed, his flesh getting eaten away and warped by the horrifically-degenerated biomass touching him, spreading into him, infecting him like a cancer. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” he growled through grit teeth, the lightest touch of his fingers to his leg sending pain shooting through him, worse than getting shot, worse than having his arm cut off. Horst was no better off, his breathing raspy and thick from bloody mucus building in his mouth and throat, starting to shiver visibly as the biomass-induced sickness affected him further.
“Just here,” he grumbled, coughing and hocking up a lungful of black biomass waste before nodding towards a side tunnel dimly lit to the Evolved’s heat-seeking eyes. Fritz realized after a moment that the red illumination was less bright in the narrow passage because the heated tendrils which had illuminated their path before thinned out and grew sparsely there. The biomass sludge that was poisoning them also looked like it grew shallow in the narrower tunnel, and that was all the reason Fritz needed to pounce for it, groaning in relief as the level of the biomass waste dropped from his waist to just above his knees after only a dozen feet. A rusted set of stairs led up to a door untouched by the tendrils, which would have been worrying for the two Evolved if not for the relief that the door promised. After almost half an hour with their legs getting eaten away by toxins, both the Evolved would have been willing to cross crocodile-infested waters with freshly-slaughtered pheasants tied to their balls, if it would give them some respite from the rotten biomass.
The door’s hinges had long-since soldered together through a combination of rust and aggressive bacterial formation, but the portal shattered under an impatient punch, revealing a service hallway mercifully free of the toxic waste that had rotted the Evolved’s legs. Fritz’s head was on a swivel as he limped into the narrow, dry hallway, helping Horst through once he judged it to be clear, for the moment. It was pitch black, the only light source coming from thin, barely-warm, desiccated tendrils that climbed all over the dark walls and gave the Evolved faint streamers of dirty red heat to see by. The seething, bubbling monotone that had been the Evolved’s only music for most of the last half-hour was replaced with a dull, whooshing roar, muffled by the concrete walls around them.
“Air in the subways, eh?” Horst guessed, leaning against the wall for a moment to recuperate from his ordeal. He shuddered in disgust when he got a good look at his legs; even without clear light and his usual vision, he could see that everything the stagnant slime had touched had been severely damaged, flesh molten and chewed away, blood too clotted and calcified to drain from his wounds. Given the choice between a strip of freshly-napalmed jungle and the sewer he had just left, Horst would have gladly taken the jungle for a stroll. Third degree burns would have been a cakewalk compared to the feeling of being eaten and mutated beyond control, when he was so used to eating others and controlling his own body. “You regenerating, sweetheart?”
“No,” Fritz grunted, shaking his head and coughing dryly. The air in the hallway was as stale as in the sewer, but mercifully thin with viral particulate. To the Evolved, after being forced to breathe the rancid fumes in the sewer for so long, it was still enough to make their noses and mouths bleed with each breath. “You weren’t kidding about degenerating,” Fritz grumbled, wincing as he started walking, each step making him feel like termites were eating deeper and deeper into his flesh. “Babe, if we don’t find Blacklight-“
“Let’s think about that once we have Blacklight swimming in our blood,” Horst interrupted pointedly, not wanting to think about what it would mean if they didn’t find it. He glanced down both ways the hall ran, then lifted a hand to rub his left temple and nodded in that direction. “Left…and much as I’m going to hate it, we need to hurry up. Starting to hurt when I pull up old memories.”
“Better get the scanner out, then,” Fritz said with a nod as he started to jog down the hall, his steps unbalanced, obviously in pain as his legs pumped and flexed inhumanly. His Mercer virus was trying to compensate for his injuries by making use of the tissue available, but the muscle formations it was forming were tainted by the corrupt sludge and formed incorrectly, making movement difficult, jerky, and above all else, agonizing. Horst was no better, limping heavily as one leg shrunk slightly shorter than the other. He got out the scanner’s handheld display and switched on the main unit in his pack, not expecting anything to come up yet. Sure enough, the device began to emit a steady, monotonous series of beeps that he remembered from his encounters with the larger scanners Blackwatch had set up in NYZ, proclaiming that there was nothing to detect, yet. He could not see the screen clearly because of his thermal vision, but decided not to make the switch until the device began detecting Blacklight. Fritz nodded as he heard the beeps begin, and then the two mutants began their search through the tunnels.
The hallway brought the Evolved to another door without arousing the suspicion of any of the monsters hunting on the streets above them. They passed it by after a memory bubbled up in Horst’s memory, from a homeless criminal who used it as a way back to the sewers. Three other doors and hatches got passed by before Fritz found a heavy, plate-metal door that he remembered (thanks to a long-since consumed subway conductor) led into the railway tunnels they wanted. It resisted being opened, but two sharp blows to its hinges had it falling open easily, giving the Evolved their first breath of reasonably-fresh air in more than half an hour, and their first shock since they had dueled with the flying cannibals more than an hour before. Instead of landing with a thud of metal on dirt, the door slammed to the ground with a meaty crunch and a splatter that showered both Evolved’s feet in a warm liquid that both immediately identified as blood. The two mutants’ confusion mounted a moment later, when a cacophony of high-pitched squeaks and roaring growls echoed down the subway tunnel; Fritz poked his head past the busted doorframe and caught just a flicker of a moving, heated body before it scurried out of sight. This would not have been particularly worrying, if the body had been as large as a good-sized wolf, and if the ground were not littered with fast-cooling footprints, hundreds of them, each one as big as the Evolved’s own.
“So much for avoiding fighting,” Fritz grumbled as he stepped into the wide, open tunnel. A breeze was blowing steadily from his right to his left, though what that meant for their journey, he could not say. “Claws?”
“Not unless we absolutely have to,” Horst answered as he knelt down beside the door and lifted it up. “Let’s see what we’re up against first.”
“Fair enough,” Fritz said as he nodded and helped get the door up, his face twisting in disgust at what lay underneath it. The fact that it had been crushed, its broken bones poking through in places, its belly split and its guts laying out, did not offend him, nor did the form of the dead creature. It had the general build of a rat, but its muscle structure had increased to the point that it almost resembled a short, squat bear, its skin open in places to reveal still-twitching muscles. Its tail was as long as one of the Evolved’s legs, and from what remained of its head, the Evolved deduced that it was completely blind. Without eyes, there was more room to pack brutal muscles into its extended, open jaw, its mouth like an angular bear trap lined with rows of sharp, chisel-like teeth that stretched all the way back to its short neck.
What disgusted Fritz was that he knew, on a basic level, that he and this ugly monster were related, sharing the same virus.
“That’s a rat,” Horst said after a moment, the thing’s body cooling rapidly.
“If that’s a rat, then I’m Elvis,” Fritz said with a snort. “Gotta be a dog of some kind.”
“Ever see a dog with a tail like that, sweetheart? Rat. We must have dropped in on a swarm of ‘em, eh?”
“No, we must have dropped in on a pack of wild dogs. There’s no way a rat would get this damn big.”
“Really?” Horst said with a raised eyebrow. “You really believe that there’s nothing in this god-awful petri dish of an island that could make this…thing?”
“A rodent of truly unusual size? No, I don’t think they exist. Look, I might agree it’s a rat if I see one alive,” Fritz said, shaking his head and standing up. “Unless you want to try eating it and seeing for yourself?”
“Not when we’re so vulnerable,” Horst said with a shake of his own, dropping the door back down and then nodding to their right. “Air’s gotta be coming in from somewhere, and I’m just guessing that it’s a station. Penn’s close, so…”
“Makes sense,” Fritz agreed, jogging against the wind with Horst close behind, the dominant Evolved listening closely to the rhythm of beeps sounding from the tracker on his back, hanging on each beep, listening for some difference. The beeping stayed constant for a whole four hundred meters, at which point Horst’s attention was stolen by something else entirely.
“I told you! Rats!” he hissed to Fritz as he jumped back from one of the massive, mutated rodents, the thing snarling and slavering as it snapped its trap-door jaws at him.
“Fine, fine, rub it in that I was wrong, for once in my life!” Fritz answered, sidestepping another rat and sweeping a fist around to meet its attack, happy to find that, unlike the flying monsters they had fought before, these could be killed without undue trouble. His fist crashed against the rat’s skull like a mace, crunching bone and dropping it like a rock. This, however, was a tiny victory when the rest of the swarm was still jostling for space around him and Horst, more than two dozen of the enormous rodents cramming into the tunnel. They had appeared seemingly from thin air, exploding out of grates and rusted doorways along the tunnel wall, moving with a fluid unity that spoke of more than just a mass of mindless beasts. Whatever the Mercer virus had done to their bodies, it had done an even greater number on the rats’ brains, adjusting their swarming instincts to the point that, to the Evolved’s eyes, they really could move like one huge, hard-to-kill creature.
“We can’t stay here!” Horst called as he grabbed a rat as it leaped for him and threw it into another that was trying to do so from behind him. “I don’t want to have to eat these things before we get Blacklight!”
“What do you suggest?!” Fritz answered as he swept out a kick that launched one of their attackers into two more of its ilk. The three rats were pushed back, but even as they recoiled, another three launched themselves at Fritz’s back, making him stumble forward and growl in aggravation as he turned to repulse them. He was spitting mad, furious at the tunnel he was fighting in for being so damn full of rodents, mad at the rats for being so damn ravenous, and incandescently pissed off at himself for being so weak. He knew that if he was not crippled by the viral degeneration he had suffered, he would have been able to rip and tear and flood the tunnel with blood and corpses…but as he was, he was barely able to keep up with the rats as they swarmed around him. Half a dozen bodies lay cooling on the ground around him; he could scarcely believe that he had only managed to kill so few.
“I’m kind of at a loss!” Horst roared as he impatiently grabbed a rat that was sinking its teeth into his left calf, his fingers punching into its back and closing around its spine. The rodent squealed and released its bite, then went into convulsions as Horst twisted viciously and broke its back in two. Blood and spinal fluid washed over his fingers and made him snarl in pain; the stuff felt like acid against his skin, the rat’s spinal fluid laced with concentrated levels of the degenerated Mercer virus. The rat’s blood made his skin break out in a web-like rash, but the spinal fluid actually ate into his flesh like white phosphorus. Horst yanked his hand back, but the damage had been done; his middle finger came off and was left stuck into the wound, slowly dissolving into a spot of fleshy slag that raised bubbled masses of quick-mutating muscle over the rat’s back.
“That was my favorite finger!” he screamed, rage descending over him as he lashed out at whatever was closest to him, eventually grabbing a rat’s long tail in both hands and swinging its struggling body like a flail. Fritz picked up on the trick and quickly did the same, sweeping a wide circle of breathing room for himself to take stock of his own injuries. Bites all over his legs and arms burned viciously, some with broken teeth still sticking out of them, turning flesh dark purple wherever they were lodged. Rat blood covered him and made him burn horribly, and in some places, he could feel the fluid starting to raise lumpy welts that felt like nails pushing out from his flesh.
“We can’t keep this up!” he shouted as Horst flailed wildly with his now-dead rat, the dominant Evolved spitting blood in response before releasing his impromptu weapon, flinging it at another. He lunged for the stunned animal and grabbed it beneath its jaw with his left hand, then punched his mangled right into its side, administering a dose of the bio-bomb toxin the Evolved had taken. It felt like saltwater ran through his arm as he pumped the viral compound into the rat, but it was worth the pain once he yanked his hand back and kicked the convulsing creature away. It detonated with furious energy, dragging three of its own into the explosion, killing all four, and drawing the swarm’s attention away from their would-be prey.
“Run!” Horst yelled as he took off at a hobbled sprint, making no attempt to limit himself as he raced down the tunnel. Fritz was quick to follow, but barely made it twenty feet before he was tackled from behind, by something that felt a hell of a lot bigger than the rats they had been fighting. The Evolved snarled as he hit the ground, his hands slamming to the dirt to shove himself and his new attacker up. It worked, barely, but when he tried to turn and launch a punch at his enemy, another hand, this one bigger, longer, and tipped with jagged black talons, grabbed him around his bicep and stopped him cold. Confused, Fritz turned as far as he could to see what had blocked his attack.
It was a rat. Specifically, the rat Horst had lost a finger to, the one that Fritz had thought to be very dead with its spine severed. The rat disagreed with that assumption, in a way that Fritz simultaneously understood and was shocked by. It stood upright on two legs and balanced itself with its long tail, its grotesquely hunchbacked torso stretching up close to six feet and its head rising another two over that, towering over Fritz. Its arms had grown huge with uneven, chaotic muscle growth, and its paws had become more akin to the hands of a gorilla, each finger tipped in a curled, malformed, dagger-like claw. Before, its head had been little more than two beefy hinges with teeth in the middle; now, its skull stretched even further forward and the joint of its jaws was stretched even further back, giving it a biting surface greater than a mature crocodile. Its fur was thick and coarse, and most disturbingly to Fritz, there were lines of white-hot viral growth stretching over its body, pulsating rapidly with its quickly-thumping heart.
It looked hungry. Fritz was, therefor, only mildly surprised when it dragged him off the ground, yanked his captured arm into its mouth, and bit off the appendage at the elbow. What it did once it had his arm and dropped the rest of him to the ground shocked and horrified him.
“Favorite…finger,” it growled as it chewed and swallowed his arm, shivering and snarling once it did so, its body squirming as viral flesh slithered and snaked under its fur and skin.
“Oh, fuck no you don’t,” Fritz snarled, shock blocking out the agony of losing an arm, kicking himself back from the massive mutant and shoving himself to his feet with his remaining arm. “Horst! Trouble!” he yelled between grit teeth as he brought out his claws. The sensation of forcing his damaged, slowly-dying body to change to such an extreme went a few steps beyond pain; he felt himself grow weak as biomass was forced to replicate and shape itself as he desired, pulled from within him and leaving him feeling hollow inside, almost fragile. It was a feeling he had not experienced in more than a decade, since he was merely human, and feeling it again brought bitter reflux into his throat as his claws came out. Not surprisingly, the claws replacing his mauled arm were smaller and thinner, but the set that replaced his intact left arm were far from perfect as well. Neither set appeared equal, the middle claw of each set larger and more acutely curled than the others, the serrated teeth lining each edge uneven, chipped, bent, or missing entirely.
Nonetheless, they were better than fighting with one hand, and Fritz had no time to complain.
“What the-!” Horst exclaimed as he came up behind Fritz, rapidly whipping out his own claws and groaning in agony as he, too, had to face the crippling weakness Fritz had dealt with. “How the hell did that happen?!?”
“It said something about a finger,” Fritz snarled as he brought his claws up. His arms felt like lead, the usual whip-crack speed he felt with his claws completely gone.
“The fuck do you mean, it said? It talked?!?” Horst asked as his long claws flexed and twitched. His were malformed as well, curled and dull in places and noticeably shorter than usual. The rat was still convulsing in front of them, but after a moment it seemed to get its composure back and turned its head back to the Evolved, hissing at them and brandishing its own claws before it. Bloody drool leaked out of its gaping mouth, and its fur rustled and was pushed aside as curved spines slowly began to grow from its hide.
“It talked,” Fritz snarled, “And it said something about a finger. You missing anything, Horst?”
“Oh, fuck my life,” Horst breathed, mouth dropping in shock before he clenched his teeth furiously. “You mean to tell me this thing got this way from my fucking finger?!?”
“Stands to reason!” Fritz yelled before tucking and rolling forward, ducking underneath the massive rat’s swinging left arm and lashing out with his own as he passed it by, his claws digging into the beast’s meaty hip and ripping three satisfyingly-deep gashes that sprayed the opposite wall with blood.
“Then let’s not let it eat anything else, eh?!” Horst roared as he pounced and swung his claws in an attempt to lop off the rat’s right arm. He felt slow and heavy, like he did not belong in his own skin, and it showed in his attack when the rat ducked aside and rounded on Fritz, hissing furiously as it pounced for him. Fritz’s natural speed got him back, just, as the monster led with teeth and claws, the massive thing digging furrows in the tunnel floor as it skidded to a stop. Both Evolved took advantage of it while its back was turned, Horst leaping again and landing square on the thing’s massively bulged-up back while Fritz reached out with his bad arm and grabbed a tight grip on the rat’s tail as it passed. The slavering rodent squealed like a train slamming on its brakes and began to buck wildly as Horst slashed indiscriminately at its back and neck, digging his left-hand claws into the rat’s furry back and using his right-hand claws like a set of cleavers, bashing them again and again into whatever parts of the creature he could reach. Fritz did what he could to distract it, clinging for dear life to its tail and crawling up it whenever he could manage a fresh hand-hold, careful not to sever the tail and lose his advantage.
In pain and unable to properly defend itself, the rat squealed again before dropping onto all fours and taking off at a bumping, jostling sprint, throwing itself against the tunnel’s walls without care for its own body. Horst snarled and clung on even as the rat’s inertia slammed him bodily against the walls, the hard concrete scraping painfully across his head, shoulders and sides with each crash. He kept his grip and continued his hacking frenzy, his anger rekindled by the thought that the rat had become so powerful from eating a piece of him. Fritz did his best to crawl up the rat’s tail, but it was a fight just to hang on when his right arm felt like it might tear apart under too much strain, and the rat’s bounding gait made its tail and hips rise and fall more than five feet with each running step. The walls and floor bruised and battered him, and as much of the rat’s blood began to fall from Horst’s attacks, Fritz’s began to join it in ever-growing patches.
“Can we move along?!?” he roared up at Horst as he got himself another arm-length closer to the rat, growling and lunging boldly to try to sink his claws into its pumping hindquarters. Mercifully, he felt his claws bite into fur and flesh, the malformed serrations of his blades hooking into the meat of the rat’s backside easily and giving him a firmer grip, with the added benefit of wounding the creature. At the stabbing pain in its ass, the rat screamed and tried to turn its head to bite at Fritz, giving Horst an opening to flex his claws and stab them into the side of the monster’s neck. He twisted his grip viciously and opened deep, broad gashes in its flesh that sprayed the rushing walls in a constant stream of hissing, bubbling blood, the gushing spray accompanied by Horst’s mad laughter.
“Who’s bleeding out who now, ya rat bastard!?! HAHAHAHAHAAA!” The howling hooting echoed down the tunnel and reverberated off of the blurring walls, and lent energy to Fritz’s own attacks. Growling and shaking from getting dragged and smashed through the tunnel, Fritz’s weakened right claws slashed and gouged at the base of the rat’s tail while his left hung onto its backside, serrated edges biting deep slices out of its thick trunk. He snarled and grit his teeth furiously as he hacked away, not stopping until, at last, he cleaved through the rat’s tail and left the six-foot appendage to flop on the ground behind them. Without the counter balance, and distracted by its attackers, the rat tripped and fell face-first into the dirt at sprinting speed, almost falling over itself as it tried to find some balance without its tail. Rather than breaking away to let it tumble, the Evolved both dug their claws in and pressed their attacks as the rat hit the ground and rolled like a car off a cliff, suffering its crushing weight, using that weight as more pressure to sink their claws in deeper. Four full revolutions after losing its tail, the rat finally managed to stop itself on unsteady claws, bleeding from dozens of deep puncture wounds where the merciless Evolved’s claws had ripped it open, both men still clinging viciously to its back and hips.
“Hamstring it!” Horst yelled raggedly, his voice hoarse from growling and cackling and breathing what amounted to poisonous fumes for over half an hour. His relentless attack did not pause as he yelled, gore-clotted talons slicing and slashing in wild, reckless swings that deepened the injuries he had already given the rat.
Fritz was only too happy to do as ordered, stabbing his claws into the rat’s right leg just above its large knee joint. Even shortened, dulled, and weakened, his claws were still effective, snipping tendons and veins with brutal sawing cuts that left the rat’s right hind leg a trailing, useless burden.
“Let’s see you drag me along now, motherfucker,” he growled as he released his good claws’ grip and used them to repeat the crippling move, a single slash ripping the rat’s other tendon out and making its hips drop heavily to the ground, unable to support its own bulk. Fritz did not have to be told what to do next, joining Horst’s mindless frenzy of slashing claws that sought to carve up their crippled attacker. Even so wounded, the rat was a handful, flopping onto its back so that it could curl up and make better use of its claws and huge mouth against the Evolved.
“Just fucking die!” Horst roared as he ducked back from snapping teeth, then lashed out and hacked off the first three inches of the rat’s distended muzzle, lower and upper jaws truncated, its sensitive nose removed. That sent it into pained convulsions that battered Horst back and left him with gashes across his chest three inches deep from the rat’s flailing claws, the dominant Evolved hissing in pain at the cuts. Fritz saw a hole in the creature’s frenzied defense and leapt in, plunged his claws into the rat’s belly, then leapt back with his claws clenched as tightly as he could manage. Entrails ripped out of the monster’s exposed belly like a Manson-family piñata, dragged out in pieces by Fritz’s claws and left in a steaming pile over the rat’s convulsing body.
“Think we’ve killed it?” Fritz asked, panting, limbs shaking with exertion as he backed away to stand beside Horst.
“Well, if this hasn’t killed it, then I’m kind of at a loss for how else we can do it. Savage and excessive mutilation is all we’re good at, eh?” Horst was leaning against the tunnel wall as he spoke, watching the rat carefully for any sign that it might recover. When thirty seconds passed with no break in its movements, he narrowed his eyes and lunged back to try to finish the creature off. The rat saw him coming and tried to snatch him up, but Horst ducked too far down its body to be grabbed as he pressed his attack. His claws speared into the gaping hole Fritz had carved into the rat’s belly and pushed further up, flexing and slicing to carve up anything they found inside of the rat, hunting for more important organs to destroy. He felt something resist a cut, then give way, but did not have time to check what he had sliced before the rat’s shaking became particularly forceful and shoved him away, stumbling back to where he had left Fritz as the rat went into its death throes.
“Now I think we’ve killed it,” Fritz said confidently, helping Horst to stand, and then lean against the wall.
“At what cost, eh?” Horst asked, leaning heavily before letting his body slide down and sit, propped against the wall with his bloody claws in his lap. “I’m fucking wasted, sweetheart…you?”
“Same,” Fritz grunted as he joined Horst on the floor. He glanced over at his lover, blinked, then made a face and let out a snort as he shook his head.
“What?”
“The pack’s smashed,” Fritz explained.
“Oh, shit,” Horst grunted, shifting positions slightly and sighing as he felt distinct pieces shift in his pack. “Must have broken while we were getting thrown around,” he spat as he shouldered the pack off his back and tossed it away.
“Yep,” Fritz said with a nod, too weary to despair. “So we’re fucked. No scanner, no Blacklight.”
Horst sighed and let his head hang, only glancing up once he heard the rat start to slow its thrashings, calming and eventually falling still and silent in a pool of blood. Its huge form was slow to cool, heat wafting gradually off of its body like smoke from a fire to the Evolved’s eyes. They sat there for a long minute in silence, hurt, exhausted, and more than a little depressed about their prospects. With his head down, Horst did his best to try to think of a plan, beating back hopelessness as he raked his brain.
Scanner’s broken, means we need another way to find Blacklight. Shit, we need more than that…I don’t find something to eat soon, I might actually bleed out…Fritz’s no better off. Can’t stay here or the rats will find us…even if they don’t, we stay here, we’ll end up worse than dead. Got to go…where? How? Shit. His head lifted to lean back against the wall, and in doing so, his eyes floated across to the massive corpse he and Fritz had made of the mutated rat. His eyes narrowed in disgust and his claws flexed a little in his lap.
Stupid thing…stupid me. Should have grabbed my finger back before it could mutate…
Horst’s left eyebrow raised as a queer idea popped into his head, his training as a geneticist (and the memories of dozens of doctors and scientists he had consumed) starting to turn cogs in his brain, processing the idea slowly. It was stupid and desperate, but it was better than nothing, and the more he thought about it, the more he realized that it was probably the only option he and Fritz had.
“Sweetheart?”
“Hmm?” Fritz answered, not opening his eyes as he leaned against the wall.
“We need to eat something or we’ll probably die.”
“Probably. Do you see a buffet anywhere? Waffles and ribs, please.”
“Waffles I can’t do,” Horst grunted as he slowly stood, his legs feeling shaky and weak as they supported him. “But I’m just guessing that there’re ribs aplenty.”
“Where, precisely?” Fritz asked, cracking his eyes open suspiciously.
“Right in front of us,” Horst said with a gesture towards the dead rat before them.
Fritz was less than enthused. “Did you find someone’s crack pipe down here? And if so, why didn’t you give me a hit?”
“Don’t I wish,” Horst grumbled. “Sweetheart, I know it’s going to be nasty and I know it’s not going to do us a lot of good…but it’s already mixed with my DNA, and yours, so maybe it won’t do too much harm, either. It’ll help us a damn sight more than just snatching up a rat will.”
“It might also mutate us into Franken-Rat,” Fritz growled as he pushed himself up, shaking his head. “Ah, fuck it. I’m too tired to care. At this point, I’d probably eat it even if it had arsenic for gravy.”
“That’s the spirit,” Horst said with a resigned sigh, limping over to the huge, still-warm corpse and taking a slice out of its side. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, brought the chunk of meat to his mouth and bit in deeply. His starving body absorbed the biomass the moment it touched his teeth, and then, his appetite roused, his feeder-tendrils snaked out and started to dismantle the huge corpse with ravenous hunger. Fritz quickly did the same, both Evolved giving in to their need and feasting on the corrupt corpse before them. The savage meal took less than a minute to finish, and left only a bloody imprint in the ground when it finished.
When the rat was gone, both Evolved collapsed and endured the most painful set of mutations they had ever experienced. Their screams were so loud and strangled, so shot through with agony, that not even the rats who heard them dared to come too close, understanding on some basic, instinctive level that it would do them no good to disturb the howling mutants. The screams were broken by periods of silence when the Evolved’s aggressively-mutating bodies broke down and left them with no means of expressing the constant anguish they felt, their bodies melting, stretching, breaking and rebuilding. Their constituent cells fought to retain their humanity against the onslaught of foreign DNA, their bodies becoming warzones where microscopic battles were fought, won, and lost.
When it was over, the Evolved were left panting on the ground, shivering and shaking as each felt new structures both inside and out of their bodies. Fritz picked himself up first, and shuddered as he felt his feet shift in the dirt; they had elongated and grown tighter, so that as he stood, he felt more comfortable balancing on his toes than on his heels. Most of his wounds were either completely healed or significantly diminished, and his arms had regained the comforting uniformity that came from not missing half of one limb. His claws were still engaged, and looking at them nearly made Fritz vomit. He had sprouted a layer of hair over his arms that was thinner than any rat’s pelt but certainly thicker than any human body hair, and his claws had curled and thickened considerably, the serrations lining their edges deepened viciously.
More than anything that had happened to his body, he was disgusted by what he could sense. It was like the stench of the tunnel had been magnified and concentrated in his nose, the ringing of their echoed screams reverberating in his ears, the taste of the filthy air coating his tongue as he panted for breath. He thought that he might vomit at the sensory assault, but just the taste of reflux in his throat made him steel his will and force it down. He did not want to have to taste that with his newly-enhanced tongue.
“Ugh…atzend,” he swore as he rose and stretched, trying to get a feel for what the rat’s DNA had done to him. He felt heavy, muscles thicker and bulkier, almost restricting his movement as they pulled and bulged across his back and torso.
“What you said,” Horst coughed as he started to pull himself together, claws raking slowly across the ground as he pushed himself up, hacking up a wad of blood and viral refuse as he stood. Fritz’s lip curled in disgust as he saw what had happened to Horst, his body taller and even lankier than before, wiry to the point of almost looking malnourished, his claws so narrow and slender that he almost appeared to have rapiers sprouting from his hand. Fur had grown thick over his shoulders and over his back, and most distressingly, his face appeared subtly elongated, nose more prominently pushed forward, ears stretched back and opened slightly wider than before.
“Jesus, you look awful,” Fritz muttered in disgust.
“Yeah, well, you aren’t exactly a looker, either,” Horst grumbled. Fritz’s brow furrowed before he gently brought his claws to his face, shuddering as he felt the same deformities on his own features.
“This was a mistake,” he muttered, shaken.
“Not our first,” Horst said agreeably. “But a necessary one. Hopefully Blacklight will bring us back to what we were.”
“How exactly do you plan on finding it? The scanner’s broken, remember?”
Horst nodded and took a nervous breath, stretching himself slowly before starting to sniff at the air. “Well, that’s the thing…I figured that taking the rat’s DNA would boost our senses and let us sniff it out ourselves.”
Fritz raised an eyebrow and just watched as Horst sniffed and snorted. “Now I know you’re smoking crack, baby.”
“Just try it…not like we have much else to lose,” Horst said as he kept sniffing, turning his head up and letting his newly-absorbed instincts guide him, hunting for a scent in the toxin-laced air.
“Fine,” Fritz spat, starting to do the same. He sniffed, and felt a part of his subconscious react to the influx of smells. At first, he recoiled from the new sensation, but realized quickly that it was the second half of his sensory improvements, processing the air and sorting out garbage from valuable scent trails. He smelled something that his rat-brain identified as food, but that he quickly realized was just Horst. He smelled something his rat-brain identified as danger, but that he remembered as the toxic sludge in the sewers; he realized that there was a tunnel full of the stuff only two walls away and knew to avoid that direction.
“Alright, I’ll give you props for this one,” he said with a little bit of a smile, turning towards Horst. “This is kind of cool…Horst?”
“Shh!” Horst shushed intently, sniffing quickly at the air and flicking his nose left and right minutely. Fritz raised an eyebrow as he saw the hairs on Horst’s back start to stand up, and then before he could ask, the dominant Evolved was suddenly running down the tunnel. “This way!” he called over his shoulder as he took off.
“Found it?!?” Fritz asked excitedly as he ran, doing his best to keep up when it felt like the muscles in his legs had been pulled apart and rearranged in a chaotic, inhuman jigsaw puzzle.
“Found something,” Horst answered hurriedly, following the tunnel at a sprint. “Not sure what…just smells really fucking good…like…I don’t know, it just smells right!”
Fritz tagged along behind Horst as he ran, trying to sniff for himself and find what his lover was locked on to. He caught a hint of it after a minute of running, and he knew immediately what Horst had meant. It was a scent, but the effect it triggered in his body went beyond stimulating his nose. His animal hind-brain latched onto the scent with primal need, compelling him to follow it and find the source, for whatever was making that smell was clearly and undeniably superior to him. He realized in a moment why Horst could not describe the scent or the sensation it created: he as unfamiliar with feeling so completely beneath something else, whereas Fritz, used to desiring submission, was familiar with it already.
Technically, both Evolved had felt the same way before: in the presence of Alex Mercer.
“Has to be it,” Fritz breathed, adding a lick of speed to his feet and catching up with Horst. “Can you still smell it?”
“Yeah,” Horst panted, his breathing accelerated from excitement instead of exertion. He led Fritz past abandoned subway terminals and battered his way through swarms of rats, neither mutant bothering to stop and fight even as a few of the vermin got in lucky bites on their legs. They kept running until Horst blitzed into a much larger terminal and skidded to a halt, twitching, sniffing frenziedly at the air as Fritz took in their surroundings.
“Penn station,” he said with a grin. He felt teeth click together as he did so, and realized that he had developed a set of short, jagged fangs during his mutation. “We found it…so where-?”
“There,” Horst snapped, pointing sharply towards a service door. Fritz beat him to it, sprinting ahead and leaping to kick the door open, revealing a set of stairs leading down. Neither Evolved hesitated to descend, leaping down sections of stairwell until they came to another door.
“In here,” Horst muttered, pressing himself to the door and sniffing excitedly along its edges. “Strongest in here…it’s got to be. Gently,” he said quickly as Fritz pulled back a fist. “Let’s…do this with some care, okay? No telling what Blacklight might have done.”
“Good idea,” Fritz murmured, using his claws to hack off the hinges while Horst stabbed into the lock and gently broke it apart. They both grabbed the door and slowly pulled it out towards themselves, then set it aside and eagerly peered inside.
The space within had once been a room for spare parts and maintenance, still littered with work benches, tool boxes, and sections of subway cars and parts thereof. Unlike the tunnels and stations that the Evolved had passed through, the walls were not covered in vine-like tendrils and drooling polyps, but rather in a uniform blanket of throbbing biomass that gave the room an ambient heat level with which the Evolved could see clearly. Rail tracks along the floor led through a large opening in the left wall, presumably for sections of subway to move in and out for service. The biomass covering the walls formed a thick lip around the opening, and webs of fascia swathed the opening in thick pink curtains. Almost everything in the room had a blanket of the thinner fascia covering it, and the Evolved noticed as they stepped inside that it covered the floor as well, sticking to their feet and sending ripples of heat through the flesh-carpet. The ripples all terminated in one spot: the center of the room, where a clearing had been made for a shallow round bowl of black biomass to grow on the floor, standing on an armored post three feet tall, the bowl three feet wide. It was the hottest thing in the room, almost white-hot to the Evolved’s eyes, making them keep their distance as they approached it.
“So…” Fritz muttered as he started to circle it. He didn’t need to sniff to know that this was what they had come for; he could taste the thing’s scent on his tongue when he spoke. The whole room was saturated with that scent, and he realized after a moment that he was smelling pure Blacklight particulate.
“So,” Horst muttered as he approached and tapped an experimental claw against the bowl’s side. “This is it…so how do we get inside?” His claw pulled back from the bowl without so much as a crease in the black biomass to show for it. He tried swiping across it, but all he managed to do was draw a spark off of his own blades and make the bowl glow a little hotter.
“Just guessing we can’t consume it like this,” Fritz muttered, looking around for something else to try to break the bowl off the stand. He tried to open a tool box, hoping to find a chisel, but as he shifted it something shot out from beneath it, something small and so bright that it seared Fritz’s eyes like a tiny sun when he tried to look at it. “The fuck-?!”
“A rat!” Horst exclaimed, shielding his own eyes from it as it ran across the floor. It was indeed a rat, an actual, normal, seven-inch long, garden or common rat that happened to glow with a light so bright that Horst marveled that it wasn’t on fire. He tried to snatch it up, but it wove between his claws like water around rocks and sprinted straight for the bowl. Before the Evolved could even think to stop it, it climbed up the stand and plopped itself into the bowl, then vanished from sight as the bowl folded in on itself and became an armored sphere. Everything went still and quiet as the Evolved waited for something to happen, glancing between the armored rat-ball and each other with confused expressions.
“That rat has Blacklight,” Fritz said without doubt.
“Yes,” Horst answered, slowly backing away from the sphere to stand beside Fritz.
“We have to get it,” Fritz muttered as he flexed his claws, staring at the armored ball.
“Yes we do,” Horst agreed.
“How exactly?”
“No idea.”
“Alright then,” Fritz muttered, falling silent to wait and watch.
Neither Evolved had to wait long. After a minute in the dome, both Evolved heard a sticky, sliding sound behind them, and then were bowled over by a 500-pound section of subway car undercarriage that launched at them without warning. They hit the ground and tried to stand, but were each crushed to the floor by tool cases that smashed into them like massive hammers.
“The fuck?!?” Fritz growled as he shoved himself up, barely, and rolled aside to dodge another blow.
“The walls!” Horst exclaimed as he did the same, then dove forward to avoid a section of metal subway track that speared into the floor where he had lain. Fritz looked at the walls and did not understand what he saw. The biomass that had covered everything was coming alive, and everything it touched was lifting or sliding or moving towards the Evolved, weaponized and controlled by sheets of muscle that more than matched the Evolved’s strength. Ropey arms coiled around rail sections, trash cans, cinderblocks, wheels, anything that could be reached, and flung them at the Evolved or swung them like clubs.
“How-?!”
“The rat!” Horst yelled as he started to run and dodge, grunting as he did his best to deflect smaller objects that swung at him and kept away from larger one. “It’s controlling everything in the room! It’s a fucking trap!”
“Shit!” Fritz snarled. “Let’s get out of here!”
“Too late!” Horst yelled. The doorway they had entered through was already blocked by an armored grate, leaving the Evolved stuck in a room with more than ten tons of expendable biomass, more than thirty tons of easily-wielded metal, and one very clever rat that would either kill them, or save them.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
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[PROTOTYPE]: Reborn