Transform: New Blood 37
by AKA
Caleb dove to his left, easily avoiding the projectile, rolling as he struck the ground and regaining his feet in a smooth, fluid movement. Clancy was on his feet and zeroed in on Vital’s position. His face did not show fear at all. It showed determination and resolve. “No,” is all he said, softly and distinctly, and suddenly three things happened very quickly.
The prodigious and impressive erection that Clancy had been slowly stroking and sucking seemed to disappear. It did not go limp and wag between the man’s legs, it simply was no longer there. Secondly, Clancy moved with inhuman speed directly toward Vital, his body moving almost too quickly to see, even though, thirdly, it was suddenly gaining muscle and size as it simultaneously gained momentum.
Vital knew he had no chance. He was outmaneuvered, outclassed and overpowered. His only hope was to escape and regroup. He bolted from his hiding place, leaving the rifle behind, and tried to run.
Clancy was on him in seconds. He moved through the trees and shadows with a stealth and speed that was frightening and awesome. Vital realized that what he had been told was true. These were very dangerous men, indeed.
Clancy was suddenly in front of him, standing in his path as if he had been there the entire time. He was huge, and he was fearfully calm. He wasn’t even breathing hard. Vital very nearly ran into the mountain of a man but fell to the ground and slid toward him, hoping to make it in the space between the huge man’s muscled legs, but Clancy’s enhanced senses saw the move almost before Vital made it, and he merely bent and grabbed the small man around the waist like a cantankerous child.
Carrying Vital under his arm, Clancy walked easily back toward the stream and Caleb, planting the much smaller figure on the mossy ground with his back pinned to a broad tree trunk. “Don’t hurt him,” Caleb’s deep, musical voice called.
“I’m not gonna hurt him,” Clancy answered. His dark eyes were fixed on the space where Vital’s eyes would have been, if he weren’t completely covered in protective gear. “I only want to talk to him.”
Caleb’s massive form appeared over Clancy’s furry shoulder. His face looked concerned and calm, now. He was still swollen with power, easily towering over Vital’s small frame and even larger than Clancy’s impressive collection of raw brawn. Caleb sighed through his nostrils and looked into the undergrowth for others. “Do you think there are more of them out there?”
Vital’s voice sounded oddly electronic through the helmet. “I am alone.”
Clancy asked him, “Who are you?”
“I am called Vital.”
Clancy’s mouth twisted into an unsatisfied grimace. “Vital, huh? What are you doing here? Why did you shoot at my friend? I want some answers, son.”
Vital sucked in a calming breath. “You can do nothing to me.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure.” Clancy knelt down to be eye-to-eye with the other man. “How long were you watching?” Vital said nothing. “Well, I’ll assume you saw what we’re capable of. And you ain’t even seen me at full strength, my friend. If I was you, I’d rethink the whole silent routine.”
“You can do nothing to me,” he repeated. He hoped that part of his instruction was true. The other man’s reactions had borne it out, that these men, though dangerous, were unable to perform violent acts. But with provocation, who knew what might happen?
“He seems awfully sure of himself.”
Caleb rubbed his hand under his chiseled jaw. “Maybe he knows more about us than we do.” He knelt down as well. “Is that true? Do you know what we are? What happened to us?”
Vital was dumbfounded. How could that possibly be true? He remained silent as he tried to work it out logically, but his silence was taken as refusal. Clancy grunted. He sounded like a dissatisfied bear. “He ain’t talkin’.”
“Why’s he all geared up like that?” Caleb moved his huge hand along the lines of Vital’s gear with a gentle touch, his fingers almost caressing the other man’s armored body. “It’s not like we’re gonna shoot him. We don’t even have clothes, for crying out loud.”
“We’ve got something else,” Clancy answered. “Or have you forgotten what happened back at my cabin when you were having those pleasant dreams.”
Caleb rolled his eyes. “I said I was sorry! Jeeze, are you gonna hold that against me forever?”
Clancy grinned. “I got something else I’d rather hold against you.” He reached down and grabbed onto Caleb’s cock, squeezing gently. “Anyway, I’m betting what he’s really scared of is you doing to him what happened to me. And to you.”
Caleb’s brow furrowed. “So… maybe this is bad? What we are? Maybe… maybe it’s deadly or something?”
Clancy shrugged. “Don’t feel bad.” A rush of the unusually potent sexual desire filled him up.
Vital spoke. “You are a threat.”
They both looked at him as if suddenly remembering he was there. “To who?”
“Whom,” Caleb corrected his friend.
“Humanity,” Vital answered.
Clancy laughed. “Who says so? What kind of threat are we, anyway? According to you, we can’t do anything, anyway.”
Vital nodded toward Clancy. “You were correct. You can make other men into what you are. What you have become. Your affliction is highly contagious and dangerous.”
“How’s that?”
“You are a threat. You can no longer procreate by normal means. You can only make more. Only more men like you. Only men.”
“I’m not following,” Caleb admitted. “You’re saying that someone wants us dead because they’re afraid that we’ll…”
“We’ll turn every man into what we are,” Clancy finished. “Then… no more babies. No more people. No more anything.”
“Why the fuck would we do that?”
Vital considered his answer. “It is your goal.”
“Says the fuck who?” Caleb asked.
“The Brotherhood.”
“Oh, man, this is some seriously fucked up sci fi shit we got here, my friend,” Clancy stated. “Who’s the brotherhood? What do they want to do that for? And, for the last time, who are you?”
Vital adjusted himself against the tree to sit up more. The two looming giants were somewhat threatening, no matter what their words were conveying. He wanted suddenly to appear larger himself. “You are The Brotherhood. You are Transformed. You’ve become something other than human. A mistake. An escaped viral plague.”
“This guy talks like a robot. Maybe he is a robot! Nothing would surprise me anymore.” Clancy’s fur-rimmed mouth twisted into a frown.
“I’m a man. This uniform protects me from you. From your disease.”
“How can it be a disease? I don’t feel bad, I feel great! Look at me, I’m nearly 80 years old! Do I look like I have a disease to you?”
“You were designed to be something else. You are soldiers, but you’re flawed.”
“Take that helmet off, you sound like a god damned android.”
“It protects me.”
“From us, I know. Look, I promise not to do anything. Caleb promises, too, right, Caleb?” The golden man nodded. His body was altering again, shrinking now, growing more ‘normal,’ or as normal as a naked horse-hung bodybuilder could look. Clancy followed suit, allowing himself to assume a less threatening guise, until the two naked men stood barely taller than Vital himself, though most certainly bulkier.
“Can you control it?”
Clancy nodded. “Nothing happened to me until my friend here was fast asleep. It wasn’t intentional. Hell, we were having a nice friendly conversation right up until the moment his twin pythons started spitting.”
“Colorful metaphor,” Caleb remarked dryly. “But he’s right. It was unintentional. Whatever this is that made us, it’s not a disease or a virus or something you can catch. It takes intent – even if that intent is subconscious. And since neither of us is asleep at the moment, let’s agree that you’re safe.”
Vital did not want to agree with them. It was obviously a trick. And he said so. “I won’t fall for your tricks.”
“Look, friend, we’re no going to…”
“No,’ Caleb said, “he’s right. He’s got no reason to trust us, given what he thinks he knows – which is more than you or I know. Let’s just let him wear that until he feels okay about us. All I want to know is… well, I guess I want to know everything.”
“Everything?”
Caleb nodded to Clancy. “Everything he knows.”
Vital considered the request. “Tell me how this happened, how you came to be Transformed, and I will tell you what I know.”
So Caleb did. He told Vital about his encounter with Robbie and Mitch. About the sex at the lake edge. About changing, and how he felt now. He told about the attack, and his escape, and encountering Clancy. Then the other man took up the tale and explained more about what had happened in his cabin, as the sleeping young man’s body began to manifest its power, and the accidental gift he had bestowed upon Clancy’s frail body that created the two men standing naked before Vital now.
“And that’s it. That’s all I know. We were going back to the lake, to where your forces attacked me and my friends,” Caleb explained, “when you showed up here and… and here we are.”
It seemed implausible, but not impossible. “I believe you,” Vital announced.
“Fine. Great. Now it’s your turn.” Clancy stood upright and gestured toward his own greatly improved body as he asked, “What is this stuff? Where did it come from? What happened to us?”
“And why does everyone seem so intent on killing us?”
Vital reached up and unfastened his helmet from his uniform, accompanied by a soft hiss as the seal was broken. He removed the shell and the clinging under seal and brushed a hand through his close-cut burr of thick, dark hair.
Caleb felt a chill of sexual excitement rush through him as he gazed on the third man’s visage. He kept himself in check, as promised, though he wanted to do much more than simply look at the man’s face. Vital had almond-shaped eyes, blue-green, and a dark complexion. His cheekbones were absurdly sharp, and his lips were absurdly thick. He had a small nose and a sharply angled jaw. He wasn’t handsome so much as pretty. His features were smooth and almost feminine in their delicacy, but there was a hard edge to his gaze and his voice, when he spoke, was deep but soft.
“You are Transformed. Both of you. There is no antidote and no immunity. Any man can be Transformed, and once he has been altered he has the ability to Transform any other man. As you’ve both witnessed and experienced, the process is immediate and overwhelming, altering your bodies at a genetic level.”
“What the fuck is it?”
Vital explained all he knew. Where it originated, what it had been designed for, its escape from the military and the development of The Brotherhood. He spoke in general terms, because he wasn’t given specifics. He told them what he had been told of their new capabilities, some of which neither man had experienced yet. He told them why they had been attacked earlier, and what his mission was now. He told them everything.
“So, how did I get it then? Or, I guess I mean, how did Robbie get it? He said he had no idea how it happened to him, and he didn’t encounter any giant muscle dudes along the way. He just changed, all at once.”
“We do not know. He is in custody now. You were to be taken in as well. There was no order to eliminate you.”
“Yeah, sounds like there would be if you knew how to do it.” Vital remained silent. “And what’s this flaw you mentioned? Why can’t we do anything to you?”
“Your aggression has been rechanneled. You can act when threatened, but you can not feel angry or violent. It has been mitigated to such an extent that your physical prowess will not aid you in a fight, simply because your brain will not obey those commands. Your aggression is purely sexual, now. In a phrase, you’d rather fuck than fight.”
“I don’t know about that, I’m feeling pretty miffed about now.”
“You have not taken any violent act against me. I am not even restrained. Doesn’t that strike you as unusual?”
“So that’s why you’re not afraid.”
“I have nothing to fear.”
“So,” Clancy said, “what now?”
“I am your prisoner.”
“Uh, no. You’re not,” Caleb announced. “If you leave us alone, we’ll leave you alone.”
“He can’t do that,” Clancy said. “Either he’s our prisoner or we’re his.”
“Says who?”
Clancy sighed. “It’s just the way it is. He has his orders. And he and I both know how this works.” Caleb looked at Clancy and furrowed his handsome brow. “I had a long life before we ever met, son. There was a reason I ended up in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. I’m not exactly ignorant of the workings of undercover agencies.”
“Say what, now?”
Clancy shook his head. “I’ll tell you later, but right now we need to…”
“You’re The Bear.” Vital said it as a statement, not a question. Clancy’s mouth quirked into a grimace and he looked at the other man sharply before closing his eyes and slowly nodding. Vital moved to stand up and offered his gloved hand to the furry, naked muscleman. “I am extremely honored,” he said.
“The fuck?” Caleb asked.
“Like I said,” Clancy answered, “later.” He let go of Vital’s hand and looked at the device on his wrist, his eyes narrowing. Then he said, “Fuck. They’ve been monitoring.”
“Of course,” Vital answered.
“Well, shit. I really must be getting old.” Clancy looked at Caleb and said, “The reason our friend here has been so forthcoming is that he’s been stalling for time.”
“Time for what?”
“For his friends to arrive. While we’ve been flapping our lips and posturing about who’s doing what to whom, his little collection of electronics… fuck! We need to move.” He looked up into the sky. “Or not.” He looked at Vital again. “Satellite?” Vital nodded. “Thermal?” Another nod. “Well, shit.”
“What?” Caleb was well and truly confused.
“We’re kind of fucked.” He looked across the stream and into the forest beyond. “Let me think a minute.” He took a couple of steps toward the water and tramped into the stream up to his ankles. Then he quickly turned and looked at Vital again. “You said this was developed by the military. Special Ops. Main Office, I assume?”
Vital nodded. His lips quirked into a slim smile.
“Okay. Okay. Stealth. Camo. Speed.” He snapped his fingers and looked at Caleb. “We need to go cold.”
“Um, so, it probably goes without saying but you lost me about five minutes ago. What the hell are you taking about?”
“You and me, we’ve been altered at the genetic level. These alterations were intended to create a kind of super soldier, one who could basically get in and out unnoticed on his own, and take care of himself under any circumstances.”
“Okaaay…”
“We need to go cold.”
“Still not following.”
“It’s like your changing your physical appearance to look like any other man. It’s like moving through the forest at speed, but in silence. I’ve been so stupid! Okay, just… go cold.”
“Like, cold cold?”
Clancy nodded. “We need to disappear. They’re tracking us. From space.”
“No fucking way.”
“So go cold. Lower your ambient body temperature. I think we can do that.”
“How do you know?”
“If I was creating the perfect soldier, that’s what I’d do. He,” Clancy said, pointing at Vital, “is already invisible by virtue of his suit. We have an advantage. We don’t need suits.”
“So… how does one ‘go cold?’”
“Just do it.”
Caleb frowned, then shrugged, then closed his eyes and tried to summon the same kind of feeling he had when he learned how to alter his appearance. It was a form of ‘believing.’ If he believed he was someone else, he would become them. If he believed he was cold, then…
“I believe I’m cold.”
Clancy’s huge paw grabbed onto Caleb’s thickly muscled arm. His eyes widened and a wide, bright smile broke through the dark fur surrounding his lips. “Fuck if you ain’t, son! How’d you…?”
“Believe it,” he answered. “You just have to believe it.”
Clancy closed his eyes and believed it.
Vital’s wrist-mounted monitor started to glow with a soft red ring of light. He looked down at it and couldn’t help smiling himself. When he looked up, Clancy met his gaze directly and they both knew what it meant. “Put your helmet back on, Vital,” the older man ordered. “You need to disappear, too.”
“Now,” Clancy announced softly, “we move.”