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The Underground Lab (illustrated)


Jaypat

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Another Day...

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Jon sat up and scratched his head. Would this be the day, the final day? It had been weeks since they’d seen anyone official. The end couldn’t be far off.

How had he gotten himself into this mess? When they had approached him right out of collage, he’d been looking for a way to fund his master’s degree. This had seemed ideal, a six-month contract and a high salary. The only drawback was that he was going to be working in an undisclosed location. He couldn’t tell anyone where he was going — no friends, no family, no one. Not that he had a family to tell.  Oh yeah, he’d thought it was strange when they were happy to hear he didn’t have a family. But now he understood. There’d be no one to miss him — if he never came back.

 

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He stood up, stretched and looked over at The Tube.

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It was bad enough he had to work on it all day. Did they really have to make him sleep with it too?

Peter didn’t have to sleep with it. Why did he? There didn’t seem to be too many people left on this base. Couldn’t they have found him some place else? He couldn’t count the number of times he’d complained about it. Never did any good, though. He was stuck down here day and night.

The only way out of this underground pit was an old rusty elevator or a locked emergency hatch on the other side of a catwalk. Why would anyone lock an emergency hatch? What was the point? It kind of defeated the entire purpose of having an emergency hatch, didn’t it.

John liked to pretend he didn’t know why they locked it, but deep down inside he did. They locked it to keep him in. And he realized they were smart to do it, because he would have used it and left a long time ago if they hadn’t.

 

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The only time he got out of that dank pit was every morning when they took him up in the elevator for his morning shower. He could definitely, and without question, say it was the highlight of his day.

Of course it would have been better without the armed escort. He didn’t understand why everyone went around like they expected to be invaded at any moment. He didn’t know; maybe they did.

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He used to find all the guns unnerving, but eventually he had just gotten used to them. The guns would have been a lot easier to take if the guys wielding them had been a little friendlier. As it was, they treated him more like a prisoner instead of a technician, never talking to him and occasionally shoving him with their rifle butts when they wanted him to move faster.

 

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Of course some of that might have been because of his orientation. Not that he’d ever made a pass at any of them, or anything like that. That would have been unprofessional. The only way they knew was because of Peter, the other technician.

Peter was hot. And because his bed had been placed in the old officer’s gym — which apparently he had been using— he had just been getting steadily hotter. And thanks to the morning shower, which way Jon swung wasn’t hard to guess.

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Peter, at least, had been understanding. It didn’t take Jon long to realize that his fellow technician swung the same way. Unfortunately, Peter only liked big , powerful men, and Jon, while not exactly small, was nowhere near the size that made Peter’s engine rev.

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Peter, not sharing Jon’s qualms about professionalism, had once made a pass at one of the  larger GI’s . And got a rifle butt in the face for his trouble. That was the last time he tired anything like that. It had taken weeks for that bruise to go away.

But it didn’t make much difference. Around there, weeks just melded into months. Oh, they used to be busy enough, constantly running tests on the equipment. They never told Jon what they were doing, but it hadn’t been hard to guess. They were trying to create  the super soldier. That’s what the tube was for. But it hadn’t worked. Jon had seen to that.

 

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He’d been bullied enough by these grunts with guns. The thought of making one of them into a super being was horrifying. But that was okay. He knew exactly what to do to each test so that the process never worked. And they never caught on to what he was doing. Jon often thought about that. They had some impressive minds working on this project. How was it that none of them ever figured out he’d been sabotaging the tests?

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He finally came to the conclusion that they had caught on, but had also been so horrified by the work they were doing that they never said anything. That was the only logical answer.

What ever the reason, it seemed to have worked. The tests had stopped. Most of the personnel had left and the deserted base was practically deserted once more. It took him a while to figure out why he and Peter were still there.

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But he’d overheard a couple of the grunts talking, and then he knew. This had been a black op and it had failed. They wanted no witnesses. They could come for them at any time. He and Peter were fucked.

There was only one thing to do. He’d thought about it and thought about it , but in the end this was their only hope.

Being the saboteur, he knew exactly how to make this thing work the way it was supposed to.  He made the repairs and the next time Peter left the room, he entered the tube.

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As the door closed it occurred to him that there really had never been a successful test. If this didn’t work, he could very well end up dead. Oh my God! What had he done? Was he crazy?

And then the blast hit him. Oh fuck! It was like being electrocuted! Waves a searing energy coursed through him. All he could feel was intense, thrumming energy. Was this it? Was he gong to die?

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But no, there was something else. He was starting to change. He felt himself getting thicker, all over thicker. In his arms, his legs, his chest, everywhere, all over he was getting bigger.

 

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His chest was swelling outward, pulling the front of his lab coat apart and forcing it’s way into the open.  All over, his clothes were getting tighter.

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He could feel his shoulders  growing into big rocks straining the fabric of his coat and then starting to tear themselves free.

Across his body, he could feel his muscles evolving into something new, something hard and huge and powerful.

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