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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
- 5
- 6
- 7
When the armed forces collectively melted into Blackwatch, there had been many complaints made that the new recruits were not treated nearly as well or as fairly as the original Blackwatch troops. While this was evident in many ways, it was never made quite so clear as when Blackwatch and Gentek had instituted their Sons of Orion initiative, for veteran Blackwatch soldiers only. The original Project Orion had been something of a failure, but what little information on it that had survived that failure had provided researchers with a stable foundation to build upon. Gentek’s dream of everyday super-soldiers had taken five years after NYZ to come to fruition, but the hulking men who confronted Horst and Fritz were proof enough that it had indeed come true.
Out of their armor, a Son of Orion did not appear to be much different than any other soldier, though each one stood at about seven feet tall; there were basketball players who could look down on them. Their physiques, too, were nothing particularly special, just the simple bulky builds common to well-trained soldiery, with some minor scarring from the injections of Gentek chemicals they had received. It wasn’t until they strapped into their bulky armor and were put into action that the differences became clear. Sons of Orion bested unmodified soldiers in every test they were given, proving to be exponentially faster, stronger, and more resilient than their appearances let on. On average, a modified soldier could take up to three instances of damage that would kill a normal man; that had been enough for Blackwatch.
The tall, red-eyed soldiers gradually filled Blackwatch’s ranks until every original recruit had received the crucial injections of Gentex’s formula for success: DX-1310. That none of the recruits from other branches of the military seemed able to get the injections was written off by Blackwatch’s chiefs as a lack of supply.
Fritz, for his part, was grateful that Blackwatch secretly enjoyed lording its’ dominant status over the former military. As he saw the armored giants before him, with their bladed gauntlets and heavy assault weaponry, he knew that as he was, without the truly evolved power of his creator, the odds were not in his favor.
That did not stop him from running for the first one he saw with unnatural speed, leaping over the scattered remains of the one unlucky DX-soldier who had been standing too close when the grenade had detonated. The soldier Fritz had targeted was already recovering from the blast, right arm lifting to bring the long barrel of his assault rifle to bear. Muzzle flash seared Fritz’s retinas twice before he got close enough to attack, one bullet whizzing overhead and one punching into his right shoulder with a wet thud. He felt the pain, but not nearly as acutely as he could have; the Mercer virus numbed itself to such things while in battle, allowing Fritz to plow on without difficulty.
“Come on!” the DX-soldier roared through the grille of his skull-sculpted gas mask as Fritz got close, swiping his left arm around, blade-shield cutting through the air. Fritz grabbed it as it swung and roared right back as he yanked down, trusting that his disproportionate strength would take the soldier by surprise. It worked, making the man grunt sharply as he was yanked down by his arm and set off balance, flailing wildly with his rifle. Fritz was right there to seal his fate with a clawing hand that punched sharp fingers through his Kevlar collar and tore out his throat.
“Lethal resistance, my ass,” he spat as the gaping hole in the DX-soldier’s neck spurted hot, acrid blood across Fritz’s face, the man shaking as he tried to grab at his mauled neck. Fritz left him to die, taking a step towards his next victim before a centerline shot through his chest made him cough and duck back, grabbing at the dying DX-soldier as more bullets reached out for him. He managed to get himself behind his dying meat-shield in time to stop most of the incoming fire, but suffered another shot through his belly before he could protect himself.
Horst saw Fritz hunker down out of the corner of one eye and snarled as he finished off the soldier he had chosen, the man’s head crushing beneath Horst’s stomping heel. He was taking fire himself, his bulletproofing barely coping with the heavy slugs; lacking Horst’s natural body armor, Fritz was in danger of taking damage that he wouldn’t recover from quickly unless something was done about the annoyingly effective supersoldiers.
Growling and mad, Horst launched himself for a cluster of three of the hulks, arms outstretched to grab and rend, body bruising under the repetitive fire he was sustaining. One of the DX-soldiers had the presence of mind to reach for Horst with his left arm, apparently hoping to catch the half-rotted infected aloft and hold him still to be executed. He was supremely shocked when he instead caught close to 400 pounds of incredibly powerful flesh, all of it seeming intent on tearing off his face.
Horst was considerably less surprised when the soldier dropped him and tried to back away, bringing his weapon to bear as he did so. The Evolved’s flesh was far more dense than a human’s, with the Mercer virus packing as much useable biomass into their bodies as possible, making them far heavier than their appearances would suggest. This gave the Evolved an edge in hand-to-hand combat, possessing the weight to field devastating attacks and the strength to move it with ease.
The backpedaling DX-soldier missed his shots, but it would have been a fruitless gesture even if he had made contact. Horst was a blur of motion that struck at the two soldiers close to him, ducking or deflecting their attacks and launching his own with surgical precision. The blurred edge of a slashing blade-shield carved a twelve-inch gash across his chest, the injury only spurning Horst on to lay waste to his enemies. A sweeping kick shattered a DX-soldier’s knee, a punch set a hairline fracture through the other soldier’s hip, and swiping fingers cut through soft armor beneath each DX-soldier’s arm to sever an artery on either side of the Evolved, sending chemical-infused blood cascading to the floor.
With the two soldiers crippled, Horst was free to attack the one who had backed away. Horst snarled savagely as he turned to grab a wounded DX-soldier by his wide shoulder guards, then twisted, spun and threw the yelling man like a an Olympian throwing a discus. The spinning DX-soldier flew bodily through the air to crash into his comrade, sending both to the floor in a tangled pile. A grenade pulled from the groaning body beside him turned the two struggling onto their feet into roadkill. A kick buried Horst’s right foot into the groaning DX-soldier’s skull, effectively killing him.
The second explosion diverted the attention of the remaining four soldiers from the infected sheltering behind the almost-disarticulated body of their fallen brother. Fritz was up and away while their heads were turned, pouncing onto the closest one and making short work of him by punching into his back and crushing his heart like an overripe grape. He reached out with his free hand for the dying soldier’s rifle and forced him to squeeze the trigger as he fell, taking down a second DX-soldier as he did so with an entry wound in his gas mask and an exit wound bigger than a grapefruit.
The third soldier caught on that they were under attack again and whipped on Fritz, putting a bullet through his neck that should have taken his head off. Fritz just screamed furiously at the impact and released his dead prey to lunge at the still-firing soldier, dodging left, then right before ducking down and pouncing at the DX-soldier’s legs. A fist slammed into the man’s groin with all the crushing force of a car compacter; crippled, he simply could not fight back as Fritz grabbed his right arm at the shoulder, jerked at it once, then tore it off entirely and used it as a club to beat him to the floor.
From the sound of his groaning, Fritz sincerely believed that death was a blessing for the emasculated soldier.
Horst killed the last of their prey while Fritz was still liquefying the third soldier’s brains, kicking out his left knee from behind and then snapping his neck when he went down. The Evolved stood up straight and glanced around for a moment when he was done, taking in his surroundings for the first time. The hanger floor was littered with bodies and body parts and steadily-growing pools of blood, but he and Fritz were the only living things inside. Racks of tools, trolleys, fuel tanks and boxes lined the walls, and a pair of sleek black VTOL jets stood ready to launch beneath the retractable hanger roof, the panels still hanging open from the aerial deployment of the now-dead DX-soldiers.
“Not bad,” he muttered to himself, a smile toying at his lips.
The wet crunch, crunch, crunch of Fritz taking out his aggression on one of the corpses made him chuckle and walk to his lover, clapping a hand on his shoulder. “He’ll do you more good if you eat him, you know.”
“I know,” Fritz growled, finally dropping his improvised club and wiping a bloody hand over his brow, sighing as he glanced down and saw the blood hemorrhaging out of his bullet wounds. “We’ve got to find something to make us tougher, baby. These guys have too much firepower for me to take on more than a few of them alone.”
“You eat these four,” Horst said with a nod, “And I’ll take the rest. See if they have anything useful in their DNA.”
“One can only hope,” Fritz spat before he set to work. The prize of any battle that the Evolved engaged in was the claiming of their enemies DNA, and the acquisition of whatever new strengths they could find. Ten years ago, they had hunted down Gentek’s vicious monsters and virus-mutated spawn to find the power to control their own flesh, and acquired several choice abilities for their efforts. Since then, their feedings had been limited to one or two people a year, and from them the Evolved had gained next to nothing. As Fritz buried his hands in the still-warm corpse of the soldier he had been beating and felt tendrils of aggressive flesh snake out of his body to help him feed, he sincerely hoped that there would be something good to be found.
The DX-soldier’s large body was destroyed rapidly by the Evolved’s hungry feeding, armor and flesh alike getting broken down into pliant biomass that his body used to heal the injuries Fritz had sustained in battle. Bullet wounds closed, precious fluids were restored, and his inner balance was set back to its’ equilibrium as he consumed corpse after corpse.
Horst did the same, both Evolved subconsciously collecting streams of DNA altered by DX-1310 within themselves which the Mercer virus sifted through rapidly, looking for anything of use. In the soldier’s memories there was little to be found, although both Evolved benefited from the soldiers’ intensive training with heavy weapons and their grasp of combat tactics.
“Anything?” Horst called once he finished, walking over as Fritz was consuming the last of his prey. Despite his own lack of progress, the sight of his lover elbow-deep in a body was enough to make Horst smirk.
“Not yet,” Fritz replied disappointedly, starting to sigh before freezing and grinning, his body squirming and shifting as his viral flesh pieced together DNA from his kills into a useful string that was quickly spliced into his own. Fritz grunted and shook as the last of the soldier’s body rapidly disappeared within him, standing up and growling as he accepted the change as well as he could. The transition took a few seconds, and left Fritz dazed for a moment when it ended, the ropey micro-tendrils of viral tissue rustling and settling down calmly under his skin.
“Well?” Horst asked expectantly, looking Fritz over to see if he’d grown anything.
“I think…I feel tougher,” the Evolved muttered, patting down his body slowly and shrugging. “Not bulletproof, but…definitely tougher.”
“Well, small miracles and the like,” Horst said with a chuckle. “Now c’mon, I believe that you’ve got the keys to our ride.”
“Right,” Fritz said decisively, turning towards the jets and reviewing what he had gathered from the mind of the pilot he had consumed, shifting himself into man’s close-fitting flight suit. “Get in the back…pilot’s up front, you’re going to have to navigate.”
“Yes sir, captain,” Horst said with a nod, jogging towards one of the twin-seat jets and quickly getting himself into the rear seat, strapping in as Fritz leaned over the edge of the cockpit and set up his systems with the practiced ease of a man who had been training to fly for years.
Which, in his own way, he was.
Fritz had the engines hot and the cockpits sealed within minutes, the long, dangerous jet slowly pushing up into the sky as soon as it was ready.
“Are you sure you can get this thing done?” Horst called, switching into his captain’s uniform to make use of the com link and be heard over the jet’s roar.
“Trust me,” Fritz answered as he started pointing the nose up. “The guy I ate did this a hundred times.”
“And you remember all that?”
“Most of it,” Fritz said with a smirk, looking over his shoulder at Horst. “If we have to bail, just aim for something flat and far below you.”
“I’m going to skullfuck you when this is over, Fritz.”
“Promises, promises,” the submissive Evolved said with a grin before his radio crackled and a voice interrupted their banter, one that both Evolved recognized with almost nostalgic annoyance.
“Unauthorized flight, this is Red Crown. You are not permitted to leave your fortress until the infected threat has been resolved. You are ordered to ground your aircraft until further notice.”
Fritz glanced back at Horst with a look of disbelief, shaking his head and smirking as he replied. “Red Crown, my Captain and I saw those DX-bastards you sent, I’m pretty sure they can take care of any infected that’re left.”
“Unauthorized flight, the situation demands that every available soldier stay on the ground and ready to receive orders. There is a possibility that this was not an accidental release. All fort personnel are required to remain within the fort until an investigation can determine the source of this outbreak. Any attempts to leave the fort will be interpreted as criminal activity, and summarily judged.”
Fritz paused and glanced back at Horst, mouthing the words ‘play along’. He winked before suddenly screaming into his mic. “Damnit, Captain, I knew they would find out! I never should have listened to you!”
“Shut up!” Horst roared, fighting not to laugh as he did so, going with Fritz’s improvised plan. “Just fly the fucking plane, or Red Cunt’ll be the least of your goddamn problems! Go!”
“Unauthorized flight, you are now the chief suspects in this attack. Ground your plane immediately, or you will be judged as guilty and will face summary judgment.”
“FLY!” Horst roared, then cut his mic off to keep anyone else from hearing his hysterical laughter. Fritz was forced to do the same, punching out his com link entirely to make sure that they were not heard as he rotated the VTOL’s propulsion jets from hover to flight mode and turned the jet eastward.
“We’re not going to get far, baby!” he called back to Horst.
“I figured as much, sweetheart,” Horst replied, then grunted as the jets kicked in and the g-forces pushed him back in his seat. Carrying close to 800 pounds in its cockpits, the plane was ridiculously front-heavy, forcing the engines to work hard and making Fritz fight with the controls to keep the nose up. He was suddenly very grateful that the jet was carrying only light ordinance. Anything more and they might never have cleared the ground.
“Want to tell me what that was all about?” Horst shouted as he looked out the cockpit bubble.
“Misdirection,” Fritz answered loudly. “In about a minute, we’re going to get blown out of the sky. When that happens, Blackwatch is going to believe that the people responsible for this little outbreak are dead.”
“Which leaves us free and clear to get to NYZ without them breathing down our necks…thank god for German efficiency!” Horst smirked and shook his head in disbelief at his crafty lover, his expression changing when a sudden, incessant beeping started to blare from his console. Horst was no aviator, but he knew a radar display when he saw one, and the glowing green plate before him with two rapidly-approaching dots on it fit his understanding of such things.
“I believe we have company, sweetheart,” he called up to Fritz. “Has it been a minute already?”
“Not quite…show some faith, baby. We’re still flying, aren’t we? So we haven’t been shot down yet!”
Horst raised an eyebrow as a small red light suddenly lit up before him, mirrored by another one on Fritz’s console. The rough vibrations that shook the plane made the writing beneath the light difficult to read, but Horst managed to make out the words ‘MISSILE LOCK’.
“Sweetheart, I think that our enemies are intent on killing my faith. And us.”
“Let ‘em try!” Fritz cackled before wrenching on the stick and forcing the jet to aim itself higher, the entire substructure groaning in protest at the rough treatment and heavy load. Looking behind them, Horst could see the glowing coronas around their pursuer’s engines, lighter, faster jets with threatening arrays of rockets and missiles under their wings. The hunters pointed themselves up to follow; Horst cocked an eyebrow as he saw two more lights appear under each jet, along with little puffs of smoke.
“I believe that we are being fired upon, eh?”
“There's an app for that,” Fritz answered as he flicked a switch. A bright crown of flares shot from behind the VTOL, clouding the heat-seeking missile’s track on their true target. Three detonated among the flares, while the fourth punched through and closed in on them. Fritz dodged around it with a string of foul German on his lips, flipping the jet over and breaking wide to the left; Horst could have counted the serial numbers along the missile’s shaft as it passed by them and detonated harmlessly.
“Think we might make more than a minute,” Fritz called, grinning over his shoulder. Another blaring chorus of signal locks made him curse and turn back to his console, shaking his head. “Persistent bastards, aren’t you?” he growled as he readied another switch. “Horst! We’ve got to make this look good…no ejecting! When I move, punch out your canopy. Unless you want to take a nose dive from five hundred feet in a plexiglass bubble.”
“You’re the pilot,” Horst grumbled, nodding and looking behind them again just in time to see four new missiles streak towards them. “Flares?” he called.
“No good…radar-guided,” Fritz said with a shake of his head. “Hang on!”
The Evolved finally did something that the jet agreed with: he flicked the readied switch and shoved the stick down as far as it would go, diving into gravity’s patiently-waiting grasp. Front-heavy, jet-propelled, and dragged down by the most natural force on earth, the VTOL dropped like a shit from heaven, leaving behind it a wide cloud of spinning, reflective chaff that disrupted their radar signature. One missile detonated inside the cloud, two more lost connection and streaked away like badly-made fireworks, but the fourth clung to its’ tenuous hold and followed the Evolved earthwards.
“Still got one!” Horst yelled as he punched the bubble of plexiglass above him, shattering it instantly.
“Good!” Fritz roared as he did the same, turning the VTOL into a convertible and nearly drowning out all noise from the rush of wind over both its’ passengers. “Snap your belts! The fall might not kill us, but I want to get thrown far away before that missile hits!”
“If that missile doesn’t kill you, Fritz, I swear to god, I will!” Horst roared as he broke the tough restraints holding him in his seat, dragging his legs up to get his feet beneath him to jump.
“Kill me, skull-fuck me…make up your mind!” Fritz screamed gleefully as the jet tore towards the earth. He could still see the lights of Seattle when the jet twisted through the air, but they were much further away than he would have thought. More lights were beneath him, and for a moment he thought that he might be bringing them down into a neighborhood. As they got closer to the ground, however, he picked out lines through the darkness, and chuckled as he realized that they were going to crash into a farm.
“Get ready!” he roared as they dropped closer. He could hear the missile behind them drawing closer, its’ fins whistling loudly, like the mocking trill of a hawk closing in on its’ prey. It was a race to see which would destroy the jet first: the missile or the ground.
“C’mon, gravity,” Fritz murmured to himself. “Be the heartless bitch I know you are.”
Above the falling jet, the two pilots assigned to blow up the traitors circled and watched incredulously as their prey streaked for the ground, amazed that they were having such an easy pursuit. They kept circling until the jet finally closed with the earth, their only surprise coming when the jet’s afterburners kicked in on full blast and the nose fought to come up. They both wrote it off as the pilot’s final desperate grasp for survival; when the missile following the jet crashed into the VTOL’s tail and blew the jet in half, it proved to be as useless a gesture as it was cowardly. The front half of the jet tumbled a hundred feet through a field of wheat before digging itself into the ground. The jets did a fly-by to make sure nothing was moving beneath them, and left as quickly as they had arrived when they saw none.
Unbeknownst to the two Blackwatch pilots, the VTOL’s pilot had not tried to lift the jet in desperation. Barely fifty feet off the ground, Horst and Fritz had abandoned ship, jumping as far from the plane as their legs could take them. Fritz’s foot had caught on the stick and forced it back, breaking it there and forcing the plane to lift up. The afterburners had been from his hand grabbing carelessly at his console; had they been carrying any, he would have also armed and dropped a nuclear payload onto western Washington.
“They’re gone,” Horst called as he picked himself up from where he had fallen, trusting in his black fatigues and the thick wheat to hide him from the jets. “Nice landing,” he added as he jogged to where Fritz had tumbled, helping his lover to stand.
“Thanks,” Fritz answered, chuckling as he saw the burning wreckage scattered ahead of them, shaking his head. “So now we’re off the hook…where to?”
“There looks good,” Horst said, nodding to the north where the lights of a large compound could be seen.
“Lorans Prison?” Fritz raised an eyebrow and looked to the lights before glancing back to Horst. “Why?”
“Safer transportation to NYZ, for sure,” Horst answered, starting to walk towards the lights and shifting into his regular appearance, jeans and his leather jacket forming over his body as he ran a hand through his loose auburn hair. “And who knows…Gentek might have something fun for us to steal, eh?”
Fritz sighed and then smiled as he followed Horst’s example, black fatigues and his tight field coat forming over the powerful body that he knew and loved best. “Race you there.”
“You might not win…think I might have gotten something from one of those DX-idiots,” Horst purred as he rolled his neck and shook out his legs.
“Put up or shut up,” Fritz said with a grin. He took off from a dead stop and was sprinting in seconds, cutting a swathe through the wheat fields that was quickly mirrored by another laid by Horst. He had been bluffing about getting any faster, but Fritz had known that already and slowed himself to let his lover keep up. They had crashed several miles away from the prison, but for the tireless Evolved, it might as well have been a simple stroll rather than a sprinting dash that crossed county lines.
The reason for their haste became clear when they drew close to the prison. Gentek’s symbol was painted on practically every wall, and their flag hung high above the complex’s tallest tower. Lorans Prison, like every other in the country, had been converted years ago into a Gentek facility for the ‘humane’ testing of new developments in medicine and biochemical weaponry, each one a center for scientific advancement. The fact that each one also housed small populations of convicts was a negligible detail; hundreds of court cases had been brought up because of Gentek’s human testing before Blackwatch declared martial law. Afterwards, no-one had spoken out too loudly against them.
Now, the prison-labs served as a deterrent against criminal activity, more so, some claimed, than the Blackwatch muscle which patrolled all populated areas of the country. Getting shot was one thing; getting locked in a cell and used as a lab rat among other violent lab rats was something else entirely.
Horst and Fritz did not care about Gentek’s ethics. How could they? Horst had been a part of Gentek before he became an Evolved, and Fritz had been a Blackwatch goon; in the last day alone they had shed more blood than anyone had spilled in Washington since the Green River Killer. All the two Evolved cared about was what Gentek might be working on within the tall walls before them. Fritz’s eagerness got the better of him once they drew close, increasing his speed and racing ahead.
“Any guesses?” Fritz asked once Horst caught up to him, the ex-soldier leaning casually against the wall beneath a watchtower, out of sight of the spotlights beaming slowly around the perimeter.
“Twenty bucks and a round of oral says that it’s a cure for cancer, and that they’re hiding it. Or weaponized cancer,” Horst added as he pressed flat to the wall before the spotlight swept ahead of them both.
“Thirty and oral says that it’s not,” Fritz said with a chuckle, looking up at the watchtower above them. “Start there…guards we can take, then scientists inside.”
“Way ahead of you,” Horst hissed from ten feet up the wall, already climbing hand over hand up the sheer concrete face. Normally the Evolved would climb walls more quickly by shifting biomass into their feet and legs, putting their center of balance lower and giving their feet the grip needed to defy gravity. With discretion in mind, Horst instead shifted writhing black biomass into his hands as well as his feet, and climbed like a gecko until he came to the edge of the wall and could peer over slowly. He saw only two guards, one in the tower room and one further down the wall; Horst got Fritz’s attention and pointed to the second guard before he climbed over the edge and snuck up on the first.
A broken neck and a rapid, silent consume put Horst in the slightly-overweight body of a prison guard; a torso crushed by Fritz’s constricting embrace gave him a similar disguise. The two met at the door leading into the prison body, where signs on the wall quickly led them towards the research center. Their progress was impeded only once, by a scientist and his intern who questioned why the guards needed to be breathing air clearly meant for men who hadn’t dropped out of high school.
Moments later, the Evolved had switched disguises, both quite happy to find that Gentek did not invest nearly as much into security cameras as Blackwatch.
“I think I’ve got something,” Fritz said in the pompous voice of the scientist, glancing over at his intern as they walked. “Does the phrase ‘direct-infection combustible virus’ mean anything to you?”
“Possibly,” Horst said slowly, pondering for a moment before his eyes went wide. “Remember that trick that Logan had? You know, before Heller ate him?”
“Yeah…you think that might be it?”
“We’ll see,” Horst said with a shrug. “Worst case scenario, I’m wrong and Gentek’s cooked up something else that explodes.”
“Fun,” Fritz purred before his attention was stolen away by the room before him; he recognized it from his days in Blackwatch, when he had ferried infected…and not-so-infected in for Gentek’s testing. Admittedly, he had never seen it from the place of those performing the tests, up in the glass-paneled observation room, but through the windows he recognized the stained concrete walls and the grimy, blood-soaked floor. He could smell the chemical cleaners that tried and failed to erase the misery of those who had died and suffered beneath him.
Fritz tasted fear, stained into the concrete deeper than could ever be erased.
“Pathetic,” he whispered to himself.
He and Horst entered the room and nodded to the other three scientists inside. Fritz had not taken the leader of the project, but since the elderly woman was there, and since no-one truly cared about the presence of an intern, Horst edged his way over to her and consumed her with barely a rustle of slithering flesh. Fritz distracted the others with a singularly racist joke to keep them from looking over until Horst drew their attention.
“If you’re quite finished, Dr. Ferdinand, I think that we would all like to begin.”
“Of course, Dr. Silverwood. At your discretion.”
Horst nodded curtly, as he felt his most recent disguise would, before clicking on the intercom and speaking to the two scientists in the room below, each one covered head to toe in a protective haz-mat suit. “Gentlemen, let’s get going. We don’t have all day up here.”
Affirmative nods from the assembled crew below them queued the start of the experiment. The two scientists walked through a circle of naked prisoners in the middle of the room, each one chained down to the floor by their wrists and ankles, their mouths gagged to keep them from pleading too loudly. One prisoner was similarly bound in the middle of the living ring, and it was he that the two scientists focused upon. One gripped him by his shoulders to hold him still while the second came around behind him, holding in one hand a syringe loaded with a greyish fluid.
“What are your expectations, doctor?” Horst asked of one of the human scientists in the viewing room.
“Expectations? Ma’am, I expect that we’ll see quite a show,” the man answered with a macabre chuckle. “After seeing footage of what Heller did with this in NYZ, I must admit that I’ve been dying to see it myself. I think that this formula might be the one we’ve been looking for.”
“Hmm,” Horst answered as he watched the needle sink into the prisoner’s back, clearly putting the man in pain. The syringe was depressed and the needle extracted hastily, and then both scientists moved away with what could only be called fearful speed. The reason for their retreat was made clear when the injected prisoner started screaming around his gag, writhing in his restraints as his flesh began to bubble and shift like snakes under his skin. The other prisoners seemed to be no less disturbed, all trying desperately to get away.
Horst lifted an eyebrow and could not help but smirk as he saw the injected prisoner suddenly erupt, his torso breaking apart as skinny tendrils that looked like they had been made out of melted bone and intestine snapped from his body like striking cobras. Each tendril reached out for one of the other prisoners, grabbing at them with what at first appeared to be sticky secretions; one of the human scientists gasped when they all saw the prisoners’ flesh squirming with small tendrils that had punched into the unfortunate men’s bodies.
“Monstrous,” the scientist breathed.
“Wait for it,” Fritz said quietly. Sure enough, the tendrils retracted into the first prisoner’s body as rapidly as they had burst outward, dragging their prey back with enough force to snap the links of the men’s chains. One prisoner was unfortunate enough to have had his chains made stronger than the others; his scream reached through the room’s soundproofing and made all four of his observers shiver, the humans in disgust, Horst and Fritz in hunger. He left his hands and feet behind as he was dragged into the first prisoner’s mangled body with the others, resulting in an ugly knot of broken torsos, horrifically bent limbs, and heads that appeared almost stretched apart.
But for the soundproofing in the viewing chamber, Horst was certain that he would have heard a river of blood pouring down the room’s drain. As it was, the room was silent as a tomb until Fritz broke the disgusted spell, smug as could be.
“You, baby, owe me thirty bucks and a blowjob.”
“You don’t know that for sure! You!” Horst snapped, grabbing one stunned scientist and slapping him just lightly enough to get his attention. “Was this a test of weaponized cancer?”
“N-no,” the man stuttered, too surprised and nauseated by what he’d seen to say more. It didn’t matter once Horst sighed in frustration and slapped him again, this time hard enough to spin his head around to face his back, snapping his neck.
“My god!” the other human scientist exclaimed as he stared at the dead eyes and broken jaw of his colleague.
“We prefer the word ‘Evolved’,” Fritz said casually before chopping the man across his throat, crushing his neck as sharply as if he had been struck by an ax. He dropped to the floor with his colleague to claw at his throat for the last moments of his life, ignored by the two Evolved even as Horst bent down to start patting down the scientist whose neck he had snapped.
“What on earth are you doing?” Fritz asked quizzically.
“Getting you your thirty bucks,” Horst muttered once he found the man’s wallet and pulled a few bills from it, smirking. “You can collect on your blowjob later. Now c’mon, we’ve got to go slap Charles Darwin in the face.”
“With direct-infection combustible viruses,” Fritz said with a smirk, nodding and holding open the door for Horst to walk out, following behind his lover after they consumed the evidence of their presence. Horst, knowing all that the project leader knew, led them down the maze-like hallways to the lab where their prize waited for them, along with one intern who was unlucky enough to be eating his dinner at his worktable.
The Evolved had always appreciated irony.
“Alright,” Horst said once he and Fritz each had a vial of the viral compound in their hands, their bodies finally settling down after splitting the intern between them. “In theory, all we should have to do is drink this stuff.”
“And if that doesn’t work?” Fritz asked skeptically, swirling his vial slowly.
“Worst case scenario? We mutate out of control, explode and kill each other.”
“Bottoms up,” Fritz said with a sigh. “Prost,” he added as he clinked his vial with Horst’s.
“A votre santé,” Horst added before tipping back his vial and swallowing the contents. He had expected something gag-inducing, but oddly, the tube of viral mutate barely tasted like anything as his body absorbed it on contact. He blinked as he finished the vial, looking down at it quizzically for several long seconds before his body suddenly lit up with pain, feeling like there were thousands of boots that seemed intent on kicking every inch of him to death. His vial hit the floor and shattered, followed a moment later by Fritz’s, and then by both Evolved as their bodies squirmed and pulsated unnaturally.
“Roll away!” Horst managed to growl out of the uneven hole where his mouth came and went across his face, trying his best to do exactly as he said. He did not know if their experiment had worked, but as unstable as his body felt, he guessed that if he and Fritz came too close, they might try to consume each other. Success or failure would not matter if they wound up like the ball of body parts left to bleed in the concrete test chamber.
Fritz did as Horst said with slightly more grace, tumbling across the floor to put ten feet between them as they trembled and seized on the lab floor.
“Trust fucking Gentek to make their--Yeeeaarrghh!—goddamn experiments suck!”
“No shit!” Horst roared before his body bent nearly in half, his virus-infused flesh unwinding entirely before reforming back into a vaguely humanoid pile of red meat, then refining itself into his usual form with a hissing shift. His eyes flicked immediately to see how Fritz was faring, a sigh of relief working past his lips as he saw his lover reform just as he had, groaning on the floor and reaching around to clutch at his back. Horst wondered why until his bioluminescent marks throbbed, each feeling as hot as a brand.
“Shiiit!” he hissed as he clutched at the vibrantly-glowing bite-marks on his forearms, hoping that they would calm down quickly.
“Yours too?” Fritz asked, his voice tingling with pain and ringing with annoyance.
“Ya-huh,” Horst grunted. “In the future,” he grumbled as he struggled to his feet, “Let’s make a note not to eat Gentek’s half-assed attempts to recreate our power, without something to wash it down, eh?”
“Alcohol?” Fritz asked as he did the same, grabbing at the wall and gouging out a handhold to help himself up.
“Blood,” Horst corrected, sighing as he stretched and rolled his shoulders. “I think I’m settling down…you?”
“Yeah,” Fritz said with a nod as he bent his back forwards and backwards, groaning through clenched teeth as he stretched the long lines striping his flesh. “Getting better…probably go faster if we eat someone.”
“Well, there’s got to be more than one experiment going on here,” Horst said with a sigh, slowly triggering a mutation to get him back in the disguise of a Gentek scientist. The transition made his marks burn a touch more before they settled down to a mild ache which dissipated slowly, the Evolved nodding in approval and turning to face Fritz, nodding towards the door. “Shall we find something?”
“Only if this next one doesn’t kill us,” Fritz grumbled as he shifted into the scientist he had consumed before they had witnessed the explosive demonstration. “One more, if that, and then we really do need to get back to NYZ.”
“Agreed. Come, then. Let’s see what kind of buns Gentek has in the oven, sweetheart.”
Fritz nodded as he led Horst out the door, pausing as he rounded a corner and caught sight of a clipboard on the wall, a pen hanging by a length of string tied to its’ top, bearing rows of names and times scrawled across its’ sheets.
“What’s up?” Horst asked as Fritz stepped closer to examine it.
“I think it’s a duty roster,” Fritz said slowly as he read each entry, his brow furrowing in disbelief. “Why would Gentek use paper and pen for something like this?”
Horst shrugged. “Maybe it’s not for someone important…janitor, lunch-runner, printer-boy…you know?”
“Yeah,” Fritz said a little aimlessly as one entry on the board caught his interest, a grin spreading across his face as he read it over twice. “Definitely janitor,” he said a little gleefully, turning to look at Horst with a devious expression. “Assigned to the kennels for hazardous waste disposal.”
“Kennels?” Horst asked with sudden, intense interest. “Are you sure?”
“Oh yes,” Fritz husked.
“Where?”
“Sub-level 2,” Fritz answered, already turning and running towards where the memories he had acquired told him he would find an elevator leading down, Horst in tow. “Close to the cells…guess Gentek didn’t mind reminding their inmates who they belonged to in here.”
“More like they didn’t want to have to drag their lab rats too far to throw to the dogs,” Horst rumbled as he skidded into the elevator behind Fritz, punching the button marked SL2 and fighting not to bounce with excitement. “Do you think that this is where they’re testing the K-9 units?”
“I’d guess that they have multiple test sites…no sense limiting research to only one group,” Fritz said with a shrug as the elevator zipped down. “You do realize that it might be something else entirely, right?”
“Doubt it,” Horst said confidently. “I’ve got a good feeling about this, sweetheart.”
The elevator doors opened with a ping, revealing a darkened hallway with a door and biometric scanner at its’ opposite end. The two Evolved quickly passed through with the biologic credentials they had stolen, finding themselves in another observation room sitting over a low, wide testing area. Late at night, there was only a skeleton crew of two technicians monitoring the computer screens lining two walls of the observation deck, both looking up as the Evolved entered.
“Come to see the midnight feeding, doctors?”
“That’s right,” Horst answered in his disguise’s rough, cracked voice, nodding and walking up to look out the windows. “Are the, ah, subjects hungry?”
“Are you kidding?” one of the technicians asked incredulously. “Look at them! They’re huge! Of course they’re hungry!”
Horst could only nod as he looked down through the reinforced glass, slightly awe-struck by what he saw. “They’re…they’re…”
“Adorable!” Fritz practically squealed as he plastered his face to the glass, eyes locked on the massive, snarling creatures romping eagerly below him, their hungry growls and deep barks ringing mutedly in the soundproof chamber.
Horst wouldn’t have called the things adorable…but then, he never was much of a dog person.
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[PROTOTYPE]: Reborn