Harry strained against his bonds as the spider-lady mumbled to herself at the table beside him. They had brought him down here after they dragged his dad away, but the doctor was ignoring everything he said. She finally whipped around as he struggled against the straps, on the verge of breaking them until she walked towards him.
“You are quite strong for such a young specimen. Why have your parents spent so much money on making you so powerful? Are they breeding you to dominate the gladiatorial tournaments?” she asked conversationally as she tightly wrapped a second strap around all four of his forearms and both legs.
“Go to hell!” Harry spat, with more courage than he actually felt.
She smiled at him playfully, then laid the table he was strapped on all the way down. Rummaging through the drawers of her nearby desk, she produced a syringe and a rubber strap. Then she removed a handful of different-colored vials from another drawer and put them on a cart that she wheeled back towards him.
“You will answer my questions, or I will have to get answers in other … less savory ways,” she said grimly as she tied the rubber strap around his lower right arm. Thumping the inside of his elbow a few times, she pressed lightly on the vein that began to bulge there. “Perfect.” And with that, she stuck the needle into his arm. She pushed one of the vials into the syringe, and blood squirted into it, filling it quickly. After she did this six more times, Harry’s head began to spin. She hummed tunelessly as she finished, then she stood up and walked over to a contraption, into which she inserted two of the vials and pressed a button. It began to spin just as his head stopped spinning.
“How old are you? I would guess about seventeen, but your mutations might have thrown off my calculations a bit. You are so interesting; I wish you would talk to me, so we could help each other out. I am so close to a breakthrough, you see, and I think your blood may hold the key to finally unlocking the next phase.”
She pressed a button on the table, and a stout beaver-woman with the spines of a porcupine came into the room.
“Yes, doctor?”
“Take these two samples and send them to our other two facilities overseas. As for him, send in the guards to escort him to viewing room four.”
“Right away, doctor.” The beaver-lady left the room without comment.
“Well, my little test subject, it seems that since you won’t tell me what I want to know, I’m going to have to force you to show me instead.”
Two guards entered then, and they dutifully undid his restraints and dragged him from the room. They made a few turns and went down another flight of stairs before throwing him roughly into a twenty-by-twenty-foot chamber. Its concrete walls turned into glass about nine feet above the floor. Scientists were streaming into the viewing room, crowding the windows to observe him. Their lips were moving excitedly, but Harry could not hear what they said.
A door opposite the one he had entered through opened, and a boar the size of a small bicycle with the shell of a turtle and the stinger of a scorpion came into the chamber. Harry drew a sharp breath and backed swiftly into a corner as the speaker in the ceiling crackled to life.
“My fellow colleagues,” Dr. Angelino’s voice rang out, “I have called you here to observe this wonderful specimen that arrived at our facility today. He is not experiencing any form of rampancy, even though he has at least four mutations.” The eyes of the scientists up in the observation room grew wide with shock as she continued. “I do believe that his body has undergone advanced gene therapy, or at the very least, this represents the next step in the evolution of mutations. Let us see what the young man is capable of.”
A shrill screech filled the room as the boar-turtle charged at him with murder in its eyes. He dodged it easily and rolled rapidly back to his feet. After a few more near misses, there was another screech as the boar stopped charging him, approaching him slowly. Its deadly tail twitched, and Harry barely managed to dodge the lightning-fast strike that followed. The creature stalked towards him again, and he successfully evaded it three more times when the room began to fill up with water through hidden slits in the floor.
Leaping up to the viewing window, Harry slammed his fist into the glass. It barely even registered the impact, and his hand throbbed in pain. The torrent was up to his knees now, and the boar-turtle was floating with ease. It began to swim in his direction, and he knew the water would slow him down. Clearing his mind, he tried to connect with his inner cat, but it was panicking because of the water. He knew neither his snake nor his rabbit would be able to help, so he tried accessing his own turtle, but it was caged up tight. He had to think quickly. Taking a deep breath, he tuned all of his focus to his spider. Then he leapt into the air as his spider instincts took over, feeling small hairs tingling on his fingertips as he clung to the concrete wall of the room.
He did not have time to enjoy the feeling; he did not even open his eyes as he flicked his spider-enhanced tail at the boar-turtle a few times and heard it squeal in fright. Opening his eyes, he lost his concentration and slipped from the wall, splashing down into the rising water. He broke the surface sputtering and almost panicked; he could not swim. Luckily, he could still get his feet under him, and he stood up in the now chest-deep water. The boar-turtle was bobbing on its side, struggling to stay afloat as it tried to break the thick webbing ensnaring it.
Abruptly, the water began to drain from the room as swiftly as it had entered, and the boar-turtle struggled to get to its feet as the speaker above him squawked to life again.
“There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Either this young man consumed two spiders, or he gained an unheard-of four mutations from a single consumption. Either way, it is impossible for him not to be showing signs of rampancy. Send the guards in to take him to a cell. We need more blood samples and some marrow before we can dissect him to examine his brain.”
Harry paled. But he made up his mind right then that he would not go down without a fight. He backed into a corner so that he would be ready when the guards entered, but as he waited, his vision began to blur. Glancing at the boar-turtle, he saw that it was asleep. Suddenly he realized he was feeling very drowsy, and as he slumped to his side, the world went black.
. . . . .
Kane woke up in the predawn light feeling even more tired than he had before the nap. He was as stiff as a board, and as he climbed to his feet, the popping in his joints sounded like gunshots. He flexed his fingers—and much of the grogginess was blown away by the shock of seeing his human hands. Where had his mole hands gone?
Shaking himself fully awake, he started making his way down the road. He crested a hill a few minutes later and saw a truck parked on the side of the road. The driver and passenger were just getting out of the cab as Kane dropped to his stomach. They did not see him, so he climbed swiftly to his feet and dashed silently towards them.
One of the guards was peeing into a bush on one side of the truck, and the other was relieving himself into a small stream. Kane drew close enough to see that the one at the bush was shaking the last few drops off, so he withdrew his knife and threw it, sinking it into the man’s temple. As the man collapsed silently to the ground, Kane altered his course slightly to collide with the other guard by the stream, tackling him to the ground. They struggled for a few moments, but Kane finally gained the upper hand and subdued him with a rear naked choke. Searching the unconscious guard thoroughly, he disarmed him before the man groggily jerked awake. He sat bolt upright, but Kane had his confiscated pistol pointed at him, and the man stilled. Kane finally got a good look at him as the sun broke free of the horizon and the light danced across his features, revealing a boar-headed brute with the body of a tiger-man.
“I think I killed your brother yesterday,” Kane said with a cocky smile.
“What the fuck are you talking about? I don’t have a brother, and I’m not in any way related to the two men you killed yesterday,” the mutant spat even as he trembled with fear.
“Not the men. The beasts. One of the beasts in there was part boar as well,” Kane explained languidly, hooking a finger towards the electric fence.
“You’re a fucking psychopath,” the boar-man said vehemently.
Kane looked at the man quizzically for a few seconds before giving up. “Why am I the psycho? You guys are the ones that work for Dr. Frankenstein.”
“Yeah, well at least we don’t walk around covered in dirt and gore like it’s no big deal!” the man said with mounting hysteria, gagging back his breakfast.
The words clicked. Kane gazed down at himself for the first time since waking. A chunk of rancid flesh was dangling from his breast pocket, and his clothes were covered in viscera and dirt. He finally noticed the smell as well, and his stomach clenched with the threat of upheaval. “Ah, yeah … that makes sense.”
He glanced up just in time to see the guard lunge at him. The boar-man tried to tear the gun from Kane’s hand, and there was a sharp crack as the pistol went off. Red mist coated Kane’s face as the back of the man’s head exploded. Kane lay there for a while with the dead man’s blood dripping on his shoulder before he finally came back from the dark recesses of his mind and pushed the corpse off of him. He was getting tired of all this senseless killing.
Slowly he got to his feet and approached the bank of the small stream that ran beside the road. It was crystal clear, and he shuddered at his own reflection. His filthy hair was matted with chunks of dirt and entrails; you could not even make out what color it was. Deadened emerald eyes stared back at him hauntingly from a face streaked with blood and dirt, and he closed them tightly as he flopped down into the stream to let the frigid water flow over him.
Mitchell was right: fifteen years of this was too much. How many more lives would he to have to snuff out before he was able to rest? How many more loved ones and friends would he have to bury before he could get some peace? He desperately needed a vacation, and he decided that when he got back, he was taking Rebecca and Harry on a road trip to a beach somewhere, no matter what leviathans were lurking beneath the surface of the sea.
Sitting up in the stream, he saw that the water was still running brown, so he dunked himself back under and stayed there until he ran out of breath. When he sat up this time, the water was running clear, so he got out and went to the corpse he’d left in the ditch, looting it before jumping in the truck and heading back towards the lab.
. . . . .
Kane pulled into the parking lot as a guard passed slowly in front of him, but he did not glance in Kane’s direction as he got out of the truck and disappeared underneath it. He had a plan, but he needed to determine the guard’s patrol route and get a more accurate head count of the armed personnel around the lab. He lay there for over an hour, trying to glean all the information he could. As the same guard passed him for the third time, Kane sidled out from under the truck and stuck his knife in the man’s armpit. Then he dragged him hastily under the truck before dashing to the front door as the guard stationed near there came around the side of the building. Kane hid just inside the alcove and swiftly assassinated that guard as well, leaving him sitting on the concrete as he padded into the building. Thankfully the guards around the old university were here just to keep the roaming animals in check and were not here to keep out people like him.
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The receptionist did not even look up as he entered, and he briskly moved past her and up towards Dr. Angelino’s office. He swore as he opened the door to find an empty room, then slipped inside. Surveying the papers on her desk, he noticed they were marked with an unusual emblem: three double helixes forming the letter N. The papers mentioned a progenitor lab in India and a lab in Hong Kong moving to Egypt, but Kane quickly lost interest; the academic content went way over his head.
Rifling through the desk drawers, he found a spare Glock and immediately added it to his growing arsenal of looted weapons. He then looked for anything referencing the lab where she worked, but he had no luck, and he was about to give up when he glanced up and saw notes on a nearby whiteboard, referencing a keystone specimen and the lab in which experiments were being performed on it. Checking an evacuation map on the wall, he quickly located the labs and headed to the nearest stairwell.
Opening the stairwell door, he peeked inside, then took the stairs two at a time until he reached the bottom floor. As he flung the lower door open, the guard stationed there had drawn his pistol, hearing Kane’s racket, and already had it aimed right at Kane. He dodged to the side, but he was too slow, and he felt the bullet punch out through the back of his shoulder. Thankfully, it was his right shoulder, and with his right arm now limp, he was still able to produce one of his borrowed pistols with his dominant hand. Rolling backwards into the stairwell, he fired back as the guard ducked behind the security desk. Shouts came from down the hall. Kane lined up his shot and ended the guard as soon as he peeked out from behind his cover.
Doors jerked open down one side of the hall, and scientists in lab coats began fleeing towards another set of stairs at the far end. He struggled to move the guard’s desk with only one arm, but he managed to drag it over to the stairs behind him and block the door. Not a moment later, someone slammed into it and began banging loudly. He headed down the hall to the other set of stairs, but he was too slow; the door slammed open, and Kane had to duck into an office as bullets began whizzing down the hallway.
A quick glance around the room between bouts of return fire told him all he needed to know about what was going on in here. Large specimen containers lined the back of the office, and mutant children floated in the chloroform. He did not have time to think of the horrors that entailed as the doorframe beside his head disintegrated under the barrage of automatic weapons. Dropping down, he flung himself across the hallway into the lab, peeking back out to kill a guard that had gotten too brave and come farther down the hall. Ducking back inside and slamming the door, he assessed the lab again as bullets riddled the doorframe.
This lab sported a large operating table, and the huge heart of an enormous beast sat there, with an even bigger heart floating in a tank beside it. It looked as if they had been dissecting the heart on the table before the firefight broke out. He was preparing to fire another shot when he noticed a scientist in a black apron huddled in the corner. Kane pointed his gun at the man, who moaned pitifully as a yellow pool formed on the floor between his legs.
“Where is my son?!” Kane screamed as the scientist trembled.
“They j-j-just moved him to th-th-the dissection room downstairs,” the scientist stammered.
“Dissection?” Kane roared as he approached the scientist and jerked him up by his collar. “Why?”
“They f-f-finished extracting all of th-th-the live samples and needed to l-l-look at his brain next.”
Kane raised his pistol and was about to bring it down on the scientist’s head when the man passed out and went limp. Kane dropped him roughly to the floor, the scientist’s face landing in the puddle of his own piss. With a quick glance out the door, Kane saw that the man with the automatic rifle was reloading again. Kane used the opportunity to dart up the hall two more doors, dodging a few pot shots from another guard still hiding in the stairwell. The office he now found himself in was much like the previous one, but with more of a feminine touch. He tried to check the hall, but the automatic rifle fire started up again as soon as he showed his face.
Retreating, he scanned the room one more time … and had an epiphany. Approaching the wall and testing for stud, he found a space between them and unceremoniously busted into the adjacent office. He was one more room closer now, and he darted over to the next wall to try it again. But this one felt solid, maybe plaster-wrapped cinder blocks, so he knew it was a load-bearing wall. He did not want to give his position away by checking the hall, so he peered through the smoked glass of the office window and could just make out the shape of three men with shields cautiously making their way down the hall.
As they passed his room, he flung the door open and managed to shoot two of them before the third brought his riot shield around. A bullet flew over Kane’s shoulder as they faced off, bouncing off the shield in front of him. He jumped up and dropkicked the shield, sending the guy flying backwards into the wall. Kane was able to shoot the guy as he scrambled back to his feet, then he whirled around lightning fast to shoot the guard in the stairwell before he could duck back in.
Discarding his now empty pistol, Kane grabbed the stairwell guard’s pistol, but when he ejected the mag, it only had two shots left. He dropped it as well and withdrew one of his extras. Relieved to see that this stairwell descended to another floor, he raced down and rolled out the door at the bottom, sweeping the area, but he found no hostiles waiting for him. There was only one door in this hallway, and he sprinted towards it and flung it open, revealing a recently vacated viewing room. Kane approached the glass and looked down into an operating room.
Dr. Angelino was drawing lines on Harry’s forehead with a marker. Kane furiously banged on the window, to no avail. She looked up, and a smile spread across her face as she caught sight of him and waved. The two massive monsters flanking the elevator doors behind her did not even acknowledge him as he backed away from the glass and emptied his entire magazine into it. The bullets bounced haphazardly around the room, one ricochet grazing his left bicep in passing. Wincing, he pulled his rifle into a firing position, backing towards the door. Targeting a smoke ring created by one of the other bullets’ impact, he began hammering shots into this precise spot, one after the other.
As the sixth projectile impacted the window, it finally cracked, and after three more shots into the widening web of cracks, pieces of glass began raining down into the operating room below. Approaching the window, he looked down to find Dr. Angelino glaring up at him and saw that the two guards had drawn their shotguns, flanking her. She had finished the lines on Harry’s forehead and turned to a nearby table of surgical tools. Kane watched in horror as she picked up a tiny saw with a round blade, and without turning it on, touched it to Harry’s forehead. The menacing sneer on her face as she looked up at him made his blood run cold. Shaking his head frantically, he screamed incoherently, but she could not hear him. Breaking eye contact, she thumbed the switch on the side of the machine, and red mist filled the air as she began sawing into his son’s forehead.
With a bestial roar, Kane felt his praying mantis wings explode from his back, and turtle-shell plates burst forth to encase every inch of his skin. Serrations sprung up on his forearms as scythe-like appendages snicked out of his wrists. His vision became multifaceted, and suddenly he could see things he had never been able to perceive with his human eyes.
Rearing back his fist, Kane slammed it into the cracked window, and it exploded with such force that pieces of it sliced little cuts into the doctor’s face even as she moved to cover it. He was on the massive elephant-hippo guard in the blink of an eye, lopping his head off with his serrated arms before the other guard could even react. Kane rode the man’s giant body to the ground, then spun around to catch a shotgun blast in the back, but it did not even penetrate his shell.
The walrus-badger guard promptly discarded the shotgun and flexed his deadly claws as Kane lunged at him. The man caught him with surprising agility, and before Kane even knew what was happening, he ripped Kane’s arm off and smashed him across the face with it. He landed by the operating table, stunned, and Dr. Angelino hastily backed away from him as Kane got back to his feet. Without warning, he reached down with his remaining arm and sliced a chunk of flesh from the elephant-hippo’s arm, shoving it roughly into his mouth as Dr. Angelino and the walrus-badger watched in horror. His arm began to regrow instantly, and he could feel his new mutations aching for release as his body suddenly packed on almost a hundred pounds of pure muscle and short tusks popped out of his upper gingiva.
“You’re an Offloader?!” Dr. Angelino cried. Then she bolted for the elevator, frantically pushing the button.
As he took a step towards her, the walrus-badger stepped into his path. Setting his jaw and flexing his new muscles, Kane lunged at the mutant man. The guard threw a punch, but Kane caught it easily, and with a quick flip, he clutched the arm and jumped up to place both feet on the man’s chest. With a savage pull, he returned the favor, ripping the man’s arm out of its socket. The behemoth screamed, then collapsed to the floor as blood pooled beneath it.
Kane glimpsed the elevator doors closing, but he decided to let the doctor go for the moment; he had much bigger concerns. Cautiously, he approached the operating table, then let out a sigh of relief as he watched his son’s chest rise and fall. Kane wiped the blood from Harry’s forehead to see what damage had been done. The saw incision went well into the bone, but it had not punched all the way through his skull. Harry would live.
Kane watched the elevator indicator go up to the top floor, and he knew he needed to follow her before she had a chance to escape. He laid a hand on Harry’s face. “I’ll be right back, my son,” he whispered. “I love you.”
He undid the straps around Harry’s arms and legs, then walked over to the elevator and pressed the button, waiting impatiently. The doors slid open a few moments later, and he pressed the button for the top floor. The doors reclosed, blocking Harry from view. The elevator rose silently but expeditiously, slowing as it approached the top floor. She would be waiting for him when the doors opened, he knew, but he was prepared for whatever she could throw at him.
The doors slid back to reveal the back of a bookcase, and he could hear the doctor talking urgently from the other side. Noticing a knob on the back, he twisted it, and the bookcase swung outwards, exposing Dr. Angelino crouched over her desk, phone receiver in her hand.
“That scavenger scum is an Offloader, my love. He killed two of my best puppets, with ease! Help me!” There was a muffled response, and her eyes grew wide. “He is going to kill me! Send me some backup! … What do you mean, they won’t make it in time? … I can’t stall him; he’s already dispatched all my guards! This changes everything, don’t you see? You have to let the director know!”
The line went dead, and she slammed the phone down, drawing her pistols. “Guess I’ll just have to do this myself.”
Caught off guard, Kane took two shots to his armored chest before he could close the distance and disarm her. Without warning, she bit down on his shoulder, hard, and he felt the plates crack as she buried her razor-sharp fangs in his flesh. Gasping, he stumbled back, only to be bodily bludgeoned to the floor as she spun around, slamming her massive abdomen into his side before she reared up, exposing the menacing, red hourglass that adorned the bottom of her abdomen. His head was spinning wildly as the venom began coursing through his veins, and after a failed attempt at standing, he collapsed. He looked up just in time to see a wad of webbing slam into his chest, which silkily encased him and forcibly adhered to the wall he was slumped against.
Dumfounded, the spider-woman stared down at him as she evaluated his predicament. “I actually did it?” she asked herself, elation blooming on her face. “Why did I even doubt myself? I am one of the smartest people on the planet! I will not be killed by some lowly Offloader who barges into my lab and kills my guards! Do you know how many humans I had to feed those two to get them back to a point where they could even follow orders? You have set me back months with your wanton slaughter! No matter; I am too intelligent to be brought down by the likes of you.”
Kane’s head throbbed, and it was getting harder to breathe, but he still heard the doubt in her voice as she fought to convince herself of her own greatness. His blood was on fire as it pumped through his body, and he did not know if his inner animals could fight off this much venom. He watched her stoop to pick up her pistols, and she swiveled back towards him with a gleam in her eye.
“I should let you know that I won’t be able to salvage your brain. I must destroy it, just in case you have some regenerating entities in that bank of yours. A pity … but I should still be able to extract tons of raw data from your blood and spinal fluid. If the data we got from your spawn is not enough to help us finish the serum, then the data we get from you should give us what we need.
“I have been working on this for eighteen long years, and this is the closest we have ever been,” she went on. “I’ve been pumping out children at an astounding rate, trying to birth an Offloader, like their father again. The first one we had six years ago gave us tons of data and propelled our research forward ten years. I cannot wait to see what your DNA does for us.
“It might be another few years, but between my babies at the parking garage, my babies at the beach house in the Hamptons, and all the failed experiments I’ve dumped into the prison, I might not even need any more genetic material from my husband, no matter how much he insists that I do. I have spliced my genes at a molecular level, and between the sperm hoarding, polyspermy, and sperm competition, we will have our army soon … and we will take over this city.”
She approached Kane, and his head swam again as darkness began creeping into the edges of his vision. His head drooped to the side. It required all the remaining strength he had to lift it and look up at Dr. Angelino as she slowly raised the gun and pressed it to his forehead.
“I guess this is goodbye, Kane. Thanks for everything.”
Darkness filled his vision then, and the last thing he heard was a gunshot.