Transform: New Blood 40
by AKA
The secondary protocol took effect immediately. Explosive bolts in the Main Office skeleton of steel beams fired. Structural integrity was compromised.
The subterranean edifice was collapsing in on itself. Its surfaces were compacting down under their own weight, thousands of tons of material were doing their best to pancake into the smallest possible pile of rubble.
With hundreds of Transformed men trapped inside.
Strong, they were, and undoubtedly so. But without leverage, and pushed into small pockets of air that would soon run out, they became trapped. Pushing against anything only collapsed the entire structure more fully.
There was no way out.
The darkness was absolute. All light was gone. Each man found himself in an immobile position within the structure.
Maddox reached out with his mind to search for others, to call for help. No answers returned. Maybe the signals were maxed out. Maybe the mental network broke under the stress. Maybe Peck had discovered some method to mask their unspoken neural connection at the end. None of the maybes mattered, the fact was there. He could not find any of his brothers.
He tried to move. His body answered his call and started building muscle. His arms swelled. His chest heaved. His legs grew stronger and stronger. He pushed against the pressure on all sides and it gave way, but he could not free himself.
Maddox didn’t know if his eyes were opened or closed. Darkness was absolute. His body was being pressed down upon by tons upon tons of wreckage. He could survive the initial destruction, but how long would he survive otherwise? No way to gain sustenance even from his own source. No one to call to. No one to help. He was utterly alone for the first time in a very, very long time.
A Transformed man needs the touch of another more than almost anything else. Not only sexually, but spiritually. Now his connection had been severed. He could smell blood and foulness, and realized that Peck’s body had been crushed. “Perfect,” he muttered, licking his lips and tasting metal and chalk.
Loneliness set in much faster than he anticipated. It was disconcerting and frustrating, and the more he tried to ignore it the more powerful it became. He was alone, now. Completely and utterly. And likely to die this way.
Wolf was next to Robbie, somewhere several floors above where Scott Maddox struggled in silence. “I cannot move,” he said in his Slavic accent. “Are you all right?”
“I don’t feel anything,” Robbie answered. “I’m not sure.”
“You are injured?”
“No, not…” Robbie started coughing harshly.
“Robbie?”
There was no answer. Wolf reached out for the touch of his friend’s mind, to find its familiar humor and warmth, to feel them inside each other. But nothing came back.
Sherman was not Sherman. Jason was not Jason. Marshall was not Marshall. They were together, they were separate, they were released.
::go::
::what?::
::go::
::what happened::
::no time. go::
::where?::
::everywhere::
He was stretching. He was moving. He was going up. He was going down. He was going out. He was going in. He was visible. He was invisible. He moved through the tight spaces without moving. He was liquid. He had no mass. He was light. He was energy. He was released.
Marshall’s change had altered the basic chemistry of his body in some miraculous and drastic ways. He could absorb other men’s power, drinking the actual physical properties of their muscles into his own, multiplying his own strength and size commensurate with the muscle his body devoured.
Jason’s body had grown using the Transform fed to him through Robbie’s accidental video transference, a method that did not involve actual physical contact and altered the structure of Transform itself into a type of energy the body could absorb. Jason developed very slowly, over a period of days, and his body’s metabolism and basic cellular structure evolved as it grew, changing in more subtle but no less drastic ways than Marshall’s had been forced to endure.
Together, they had become something else entirely.
Marshall could absorb, yes, but a factor of that process was the ability to physically bond with someone else at a cellular level, and then to process the necessary portions of the other body and absorb what it wanted, leaving the rest behind after extracting itself again. A muscle parasite.
Marshall was designed to become someone else, for only a short period of time, and then extract the new, larger, more powerful entity from the coupling. Two becoming one, then becoming two again, but in different measure to each other.
Part of Jason, the new part, the more powerful part, the part that had in its basic design the ability to alter whatever it contacted into a purer, more powerful and self-sustaining version of its host, bonded with the part of Marshall designed to meld with what it met, though for Jason that melding expanded beyond mere anatomical structures because it was made of energy. Pulses passed through a wire into a man’s body, absorbed, perfected, stimulated and expanded.
Jason/Marshall’s touch now metamorphosed Sherman into something else, something new. Sherman became part of the larger. Physical property broken down into original energy. Life itself. The spark. Still Sherman. Not Sherman.
They passed through the rubble and touched each man they encountered. Changing them. Breaking them down. Releasing them.
The basic atomic level of everything is the same thing. Like grains of sand, they can shift and sift and combine and separate. Within the new human that Jason/Marshall had become, they retained cell memory of the thing they essentially were. Muscle, bone, blood, flesh, hair, eyes, teeth, lips, tongue. The collection of things that made up the being called Jason/Marshall. Solid but insubstantial. Muscular ghosts that could pass through their surroundings and appear on the other side, unscathed and perfect.
Now they combined with their brothers and released them, passing through the rubble and destruction, broken down and separated, joined and not joined. Two became three. Hand to hand, body to body, soul to soul. Three became five. Five became twelve. More and more as they moved through what had been Main Office, touching and releasing, sparks of ecstatic blissful perfection, sifting like sand through the spaces between the atoms of the building and the planet and rising to the surface again, to find the same star-studded sky above and the safe, comforting earth below.
Disconnect. Re-establishment. Naked perfect bodies of massive masculine beauty and unstoppable muscular strength.
Maddox was merely existing. Just part of the destruction. An immobile object packed in with the walls and the floors.
Something touched him, touched his skin, touched his bone, touched his muscle. The sensation of meeting the insubstantial collective as it grew in mass and number felt like a static charge, like the approach of a storm, or the sensation of fear. Maddox felt his body seem to tense involuntarily, then the voices were there, again, comforting and familiar. His brothers had come to him, all of them, together and separate.
His powerful form slipped into the space between solid and liquid and gas. Molecules realizing their singularity and slipping now through solid matter. Lifting up with slow, inexorable progress. Sifting through the spaces between, feeling the building collapsing through him, around him, inside him.
Darkness still prevailed, but now he was moving, and he was with his brothers, and within the pure embrace of unbound love.
Wolf was crying, he could feel the hot tears on his face. Was Robbie dead? Could that happen? Could these bodies die so easily, after all? Bullets could be withstood, missiles and helicopters and entire armies could not even dent his powerful, perfect body, but being buried alive…
Below him, and around him, sound began to build. The destroyed complex was settling further, empty spaces collapsing, tons of material pressing down. Then he felt it, too, and he was melting. Voice spoke like whispers, just beyond hearing, dozens of them, coming closer, growing louder, but not from above him. They were not digging him out.
Someone was climbing up through the rubble toward them.
“Robbie,” he said softly. “They’re coming.”
Still no answer in the pitch blackness, no he felt the floor he lay against suddenly sway and sink. Then his skin was tingling. A feeling wholly alien that reminded him of other sensations but was like none of them. He felt like he was drifting, then. Or floating. Released from gravity’s pull, from the unholy pressure of Main Office resting against his chest, things went silent and he felt that he was moving. Somehow, he was moving, and all his bothers were there.
:: Robbie ::
:: Dude. What the fuck? ::
Wolf’s collection of disconnected atoms smiled.
Sifting, shifting, rising and collecting, the men trapped within Main Office moved with gathering swiftness toward the top of the complex and emerged through the solid matter as if rising from a pool of cold water.
They were solid as ever, nothing had changed. But everything had changed. Men were climbing out of the wreckage by the dozens. Well-muscled arms pushed up like sunflowers and pulled the rest of their bodies through the collapsed destruction. Heads emerged, unscratched and unmarked, with eyes wide with wonder and joy. Men reached down and pulled their friends and colleagues up to freedom. Towering, naked, perfect, massively muscled men standing in the Alaskan night air, their new bodies shining like liquid metal in the moonlight.
“What the fuck happened?” Robbie was checking to make sure everything was in its right place again, grateful to find that it all seemed to be, and as gorgeous and gigantic as he remembered.
Wolf shook his head. His silver-blue eyes scanned the collection of men standing now above what had been Main Office. It looked, on the surface, untouched. The damage was all below ground. “Are we all here?”
“We are all here,” said a deeply powerful voice. It was Jason/Marshall, looking as impressive as ever, larger and stronger and more powerful than any other man, Transformed or otherwise, on the face of the Earth. Because he was more than a man.
He was two of them.
Sherman stepped up and said, “This is… should I keep calling you Jason or Marshall?”
“I am both”
“How about Mason, then? It’s just simpler. The other way sounds like a law firm.”
“Then call me Mason.”
The other men, at least a couple hundred of them, slowly gathered around the imposing form of Mason, standing taller and wider than any of them, a towering muscular giant of perfect masculine beauty and power. Maddox found his friends and they greeted each other again with passionate embraces and deep kisses, exhilarated and energized from everything that had happened.
Scott looked at the pairing of Robbie and Wolf and realized they were probably not going to be separate from this point forward. Wolf looked slightly dazed and had a loopy grin on his normally taciturn features, and Robbie’s hand held his so tightly that he doubted that anything could pull them apart. He felt a twinge of jealousy but it soon passed from him and was replaced with happiness.
He turned his attention to Sherman and the unavoidable presence of Mason and said, “You look like you’re the man with the answers around here.”
Sherman nodded. “Where’s our Mr. Peck?”
“Dead. Planted a bullet in is own brain rather than subject himself to this,” he answered, gesturing down to the thickly muscled perfection of his Transformed body. “Looks like we picked up a few new brothers.”
“Indeed. Plus this gentlemen, here. Scott Maddox, may I introduce you to our savior, Jason Marshall, otherwise known as Mason.”
Scott looked up at the giant. He was so large that it was hard to take all of him in. He offered his hand and said, “I’m very pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise,” Mason answered, “But we’ve met before.”
“I think I would’ve remembered that. I assume there’s a story behind you.”
“Two or three,” he answered, grinning. “I must say you’re looking exceptionally well Scott. I’m glad you’re not hiding behind that other face anymore, this one suits you so much better.”
“Marshall? As in… Marshall?”
His grin became a smile. He spread his heavily muscled arms wide, puffed out his massive chest and asked, “How you like me, now?”
“Well, there’s certainly more of you to like.”
“Part of those stories I mentioned.”
Sherman said, “This is also Jason. The boy wonder? You’ll recall that he was the reason we came here in the first place.”
“Jason? And Marshall?”
The huge man shrugged. “Just one of many accomplishments to add to my resume.”
Wolf cleared his throat and said, “I’m sure we would all love to hear about them, but there is a more pressing problem at hand. The destruction at our feet is surely going to be hard for whoever is in charge of these things to ignore.”
“Excellent observation,” Maddox said, scanning the dozens of naked, beautiful, twin-cocked men arrayed around them. “And a group of oversexed, newly Transformed men is going to find it hard to ignore each other.” He huffed out a laugh and said, “I know I feel like I could fuck the entire Soviet Army and have enough energy to take on the Navy Seals, too.
“Yes, the sexual tension around here is thick enough to cut with a knife. This is a whole hell of a lot of testosterone to rechannel, don’t you think?” Sherman smiled as he said it.
“Suggestions?”
“What we need,” Sherman summarized, “is acres of empty space somewhere relatively close so all these gentlemen can work out their newly energized libidos on each other without making too much of a racket.”
“So, where can we find a lot of empty space near Alaska that’s not entirely covered in snow or permafrost where a couple hundred 18-foot tall musclebound sex machines can play with each other?”
Robbie was already smiling. “There’s this lake I know…”