Growth Beyond Reason by LORUS - Final chapter added on 9/14/22

[FallenAway]

Part 7

“Let me guess... you ruling the world would get in the way of Redfern's plans to do the same. Am I right?” Mark leaned back in his chair on the opposite side of the table and folded his bony arms across his scrawny chest. He was fed up being this thin, but from what he now knew, he had the potential - in muscle terms - to surpass anything so far possessed by the four super-huge bodybuilders he'd crossed paths with.

“Uh-huh,” Trey replied simply, as he went to the fridge to get a protein drink. He would have to eat soon. He sat down and continued with his story:

“We didn't know of his agenda straight away. Early into the program it was just me and Raul, confined to the same three rooms. The rooms catered for our every need, and it was very comfortable there. But it was like a prison to me... a different kind of prison to being almost trapped inside a morbidly obese body of your own creation. To Raul it was like paradise. Ten years in solitary and anything outside of that dark bubble is a veritable Mecca to a guy like him. He loved every minute, but often I found myself going stir-crazy.

“My food was limited at first. I was put on a low-carb but high-protein diet consisting of mostly egg-whites, tuna-fish, lots of vegetables and lean turkey fillets. I grew sick of this within a week but Redfern, my savior, urged me to be patient. Raul and I were to cohabitate to keep one another company. Well, we more than catered for that. As our bodies began to change, rapidly and for the better, we developed more than a liking for one another.

“My physical transformation was the most striking, for I had so much fat to lose. The Enerflex treatments were administered twice a day, morning, and evening. Each time we were led individually down a dimly lit corridor to the testing chamber in what we imagined to be the most secluded and secure part of the clinic. The “orderlies” that led us were huge imposing men, who wore dark gray smocks stretched tightly across their hulking frames. I remember thinking to myself: “Will I look like these brutes one day?” but I quickly dismissed the notion. Why the staff needed to wear dark Raybans indoors escaped me. But I remember thinking at the time that it might have to do with the altitude and inadequate light within the clinic. Bad light might also explain the lack of healthy skin-tones. I wasn't sure how high up in the Alps we were, but we were forbidden to go outside, not that there was anywhere outside that we could go, unless we were equipped with climbing apparatus.

“The testing chamber was your typically decked-out laboratory setup. It had tables with test-tubes, liquids bubbling through tubes out of one container and into another. There were computers, x-ray devices, white boards with all manner of nonsensical numerical data scribbled across them. Monitor screens displayed everything from computer-animated DNA... to bacilli replication, all lovingly rendered in delicious 3D. There were three cooling huts, like large walk-in refrigerators lined up against one wall, their doors polished to a mirrored sheen. Adjacent to the fridges was a set of double doors that showed through to the gym room, which would become our second home after we'd embarked on the second phase of the program.

“In the beginning there was little we had to question about a place like this. It was a laboratory and little else, or so we thought at the time. Raul wasn't morbidly obese like I was, although he stood to lose a few pounds. I was so desperate to lose my own weight that I never questioned Redfern as to why the two of us seemed to be receiving the same treatments.  

“Enerflex, not that we knew its name at the time, was an innocuous-looking solution fed to us through a syringe. It glowed ever so slightly blue in dim light, and the lights in the lab could have done with a little extra wattage. I remember asking Redfern if the serum was radioactive, hence the glow. That was the one and only time that we paused momentarily from his work to look me in the eye with something of a half-grin quaking where a permanent frown should have been. “Of course not, my dear boy,” was his reply. He then urged me to be quiet so that he could concentrate and not miss my vein. That was the thing about me at that weight: due to all the fat it was hard to find a vein. But Redfern was persistent, and he always got what he wanted.” Trey paused from his story and placed his forearm across the table. He made a fist and the massive 45-inch girth of the forearm thickened considerably. It was impossible not to find a vein on him now, for the largest of them bulged to more than an inch in diameter. He squeezed his fist harder and harder, commanding more size and vascular definition into the limb... simply for his own amusement. He was getting HUGE!!!!!

“When the treatments were over we would be led back to our three-room paradise. Why we needed escorts down the same lonely corridor was a mystery. There were other corridors branching off from the main one, so I guess Redfern didn't want us to go snooping.

“My reaction to Enerflex was incredible. In my first month at the clinic, I'd lost 216 pounds. Curiously I had no excess skin flopping about, the kind you see on those super-slimmers on those Oprah and Dr Phil shows. They end up having lost a ton of weight but need a lot of surgery to get rid of the surplus skin. But with Enerflex, this didn't happen to me. The fat was melting away and the skin that contained it was shrinking along with the rest of me. In contrast, Raul - and we'd become great friends at this point - was bulking up with muscle, not much, mind, but after the first month of treatments all his surplus fat was gone and the muscle he'd grown in the meantime was clearly visible. He was easily the equivalent of a male model at this point.  

“I easily became attracted to his tanned, chiseled, Latin features, but I didn't have the confidence to get physical with him considering I was still quite a fat young man with a lot of shrinking left to do. But he was kind, despite that he'd already told me about his time in prison. He said that Redfern had cured him of his vice, and I believed him. Why not? He was the only friend I had in the world at that time. He would share with me any leftovers on his plate, knowing that I was still hungry after the meagre portions Redfern's catering staff had provided me to eat. Technically I was breaking one rule of the program, but during test after test, if a few extra calories showed up from Redfern's probing, then the bizarre and reclusive scientist commented not.

“I mentioned that Raul was kind, and he was. After the second month of Enerflex treatments, I was phenomenally down to 350 lbs. or thereabouts. I asked Redfern why he didn't market his serum worldwide since it seemed to be a breakthrough and would benefit millions of people all over the globe. He declined to comment at that time. It put me off asking him questions beyond that moment. Raul started to find me physically attractive. I noticed that my muscles were starting to assert themselves again, the ones I'd had in high school for football. It was a great feeling. I still had a lot of fat on my body, but I was starting to look better and feel better. It was then that Redfern started us on the weight-training. This is when the real magic started to happen.

“Maybe it was magic, I don't know. I'm not suggesting Harry Potter stuff here. But I'm referring to the otherworldly aspect to Redfern that was as much sinister as it was intriguing to me. By this time Raul and I were sharing a bed, but we had yet to have sex. He'd told me about his past as a rapist of gay men... no one younger than 18, mind. Hard to think that someone with a fetish like Raul's could still abide by some vestige of a moral code. He said that Redfern had cured him, that this clinic was as much for the treatment of psychological maladies as physical conditions. But that didn't explain why we were being given the same treatments. I suggested that Enerflex could be a placebo. Raul tended to think along the same lines. I mean, you couldn't blame us for speculating, considering how little information Redfern revealed to us. If we were human guinea pigs, shouldn't he be as open to us about the procedures we were undergoing?

“We started to get scared. We would lie awake for most of the night, snuggling together in bed and speculating to the point of paranoia. We'd seen single-celled organisms thriving on monitor screens in the testing chamber and the fact that Enerflex glowed a faint blue in dim light. We arrived at the hypothesis that Redfern had irradiated some kind of micro-organism into undergoing mutation and that it was these things that we both were being injected with. The thoughts of a colony of flesh-eating critters swarming around inside me made me almost pee in the bed. Raul didn't appear to be as scared as me. He was happy with the changes happening in his body. And he was starting to get happy with my body, and what the treatments were making it become.  

“We decided towards the end of the second month not to let our imaginations get the better of us. After all, we were starting to look amazing and I'd never felt better, despite that I still had quite a lot of fat to get rid of. Ironically, as my weight continued to shrink, so my rations of food were increased. When the weight-training began, my caloric intake was increased to 5000 calories per day of mostly high-protein muscle-building concentrates. Thankfully they were filling and kept me satisfied.  

“By the end of the third month I was down to 199 lbs. My body-fat was 12%, which pleased me no end. Raul was already shredded at this stage and his body resembled that of an amateur lightweight bodybuilder. His body-fat was just 6% and he looked amazing. Being just five ten in height, his weight had dropped to 185, and he looked amazing.

“It was difficult to monitor the passage of time in a place without clocks or many windows to peer out to track day into night and back again, but on a run-of-the-mill Wednesday afternoon, Redfern called us into his private office-cum-sanctuary. The first thing I noticed was how different he looked. “Welcome gentlemen, come in and pull up chairs. We three are about to have something of a celebration,” was his greeting. Wow I remember all this word for word, can you believe it?

“Redfern was smiling now. It was hard to believe a man of such stark emotional neutrality could display a smile. There was a rather expensive looking bottle of Dom Perignon, layered with dust, as well as three champagne flutes on his huge and ornate onyx desk. His office was the height of opulence, adorned with ornaments and artefacts of sumptuous design. There were hangings on every wall: paintings, tapestries and carvings of tribal order, a kaleidoscopic museum in tribute to his worldly pursuits. It was clear he was a well-travelled individual. It was all too clear that he was as individual as they come.

“I managed to catch the date on the bottle of Dom Perignon before Redfern commenced to pour three measures into the glasses: 1955. The bottle was over half a century old. He spared little expense and obviously had a taste for the finer things life had to offer. And yet, as if he had a soul that hissed and cursed in the very face of life itself, nothing of the vitality of life was reflected in his cold, pallid... cadaverous features. “What's the occasion, Mathias?” Raul asked the question I had hoped to, for he was the more assertive of the two of us. Redfern seemed only too pleased to answer. “The first course of your treatment has been one hundred percent successful. You both have responded to the Enerflex far better than my projections initially revealed. You both look and feel better than you ever have in your... young little lives.” If glee was an emotion that only issued from the coldest of hearts, then from Redfern it dripped like acid.

“I didn't like how he referred to our lives as “young” and “little.” It suggested that his age couldn't be fathomed, that the wisdom contained within his curiously domed head belied his years by many decades. He seemed vibrant today, his sunken cheeks appearing less concave, a slight blush of red evident in both. His eyes had something of a scarlet shine, unlike the murky gray haze that was usually refracted in them. He looked like he'd gained a little weight, although his appearance still fell far short of being considered healthy. “A toast to success,” said Redfern, standing up from his desk to salute the toast. We did the same and chinked our glasses against his. The champagne was delicious, fruity, bubbly, and archaic all at once. It was a taste that I thought I'd long forgotten. It made me yearn for my old life again, the one before the obesity. I briefly thought about my parents and my sister Sally. I hadn't seen them in such a long time. My heart pined for freedom and normality. But something else in me, an innate urge or desire, wanted to see this experiment through to its conclusion.

“He indicated that we both be seated again, and that informality was the order of the day. He leaned back in his large chair causing the leather upholstery to creak noisily. He seemed too slight for the throne-like seat, and yet his image was one that conveyed authority. He had transformed our lives in seemingly impossible ways, and yet I feared the man. Raul was much easier going with Redfern. I often wondered about this but never got around to talking it over with him. “So, Trey... here we are, three months later and you are no longer the shapeless hulk you were when I found you. Where do you see yourself going from here? What are your ultimate goals... physically?”

“I didn't have to think about it. Both Raul and I had already discussed it back in the three-roomed cell that had been our home since what felt like forever. “From what I understand of the program so far, muscle growth seems to be the dominant effect of the treatment. You call it Enerflex. What exactly is it doing to us, Mathias?” I suddenly found the courage to ask. Redfern seemed to mull over the question for a moment, rocking backwards and forwards a little in his chair as he brought his hands up to his face. He made a church steeple of his long, skeletal fingers... a classic 'thoughtful' pose.

“I am afraid I cannot release that information yet. You remember signing those waivers you were given the day you arrived here? Had you read the documents fully you would have been aware of this proviso already. But I'm not displeased that you asked. You have every right to be curious. Do not fear, Trey... Enerflex is made from purely natural ingredients, I assure you. Call it my little home remedy.” Redfern leered at me, forming a wicked smile that displayed two rows of yellowed teeth, made to seem vivid in color next to the backdrop of pallid gray flesh in which they were set. He poured more champagne, intending that the bottle be enjoyed to the last drop. I must admit that since I had embraced the rigorous exercise regimen conceived for us by Redfern himself, my cardiovascular fitness had increased exponentially, and in such a short time. My Vo2 capacity had increased manifold, indeed my blood had never been so efficiently oxygenated since my football days. I was becoming super-fit. Hell, I was super-fit. As a result, the second glass of bubbly went right to my head. Raul wasn't far behind me.

“Dear oh dear, I guess I underestimated the potency of this excellent vintage,” Redfern seemed to be enjoying his play. He asked me the same question again. “Trey, what are your true ultimate physical goals?” He was patient and waited for my intoxicated brain to choose the correct words. I found them without too much trouble, and they emerged somewhat slurred, but nevertheless the alcohol had reduced my inhibitions, my self-control. "I want to get the hell outta here.... but I want to be the hugest bodybuilder ever!!!" I suppose alcohol can be an effective truth serum when it’s needed to be. Redfern asked the same of Raul. He said pretty much the same as me, although the champagne hadn't gone to his head as much as it had gone to mine. I felt heady and needed to lie down. It seemed our little impromptu gathering was at an end. Redfern walked us back to our rooms personally, something he had never done before.

“He didn't enter our rooms but bade us a good evening before seeming to melt back into the gloom of the corridor that connected our place with the laboratory in which Redfern worked his magic, the origins of which we simply couldn't fathom at that time. We had become intoxicated and horn-...” Trey halted at that point, not wishing to divulge the events of that evening to his boyfriend, especially since they involved sex with the man who'd almost killed Mark just a few weeks ago. There was more to tell, but Trey was tired speaking for the time being.

Silence ensued. Trey had his head down, attracted to the size and definition of his arms, tensing the muscles as he opened and closed his fists. He became aware of how much his pecs had enlarged, ballooning outwards so that it was difficult to see anything below them. He felt himself growing hard and flexed his shelf repeatedly, delighted at the rush of blood shooting into his chest. The sweat top was losing to the strain. Threads snapped audibly. But he needed to maintain self-control, to keep his mind sharp so he could continue to educate Mark to the past.

But Mark had questions. “Let's skip forward a bit, to the day I met you. Why did you come into the store? To get bodybuilding magazines? Trey, to a guy your size a muscle mag is like looking through a brochure on kindergarten. What can you possibly learn from them that you don't already know better than any other builder alive?”

“I needed to get away from Raul. We'd been arguing a lot. And he'd just raped a guy before he started work on the electrics. That's what triggered his growth-spurt. Don't know what he did with the body. It was just some punk hitchhiker he'd picked up enroute to town, despite our objections. We each of us drove one of the four trucks carrying a section of the gym. Redfern mass produces them this way, to make them easy to assemble so his operation can spread smoothly. By this time Raul and I were no longer “together,” so I really didn't care what he did and who he did it with.

“We had escaped from the Collective using Raul's limited teleportation skills and Joel's space-folding duck-blind ability. We'd only just learned about the time-locks created by our simultaneous flexing during growth spurts. Redfern had been completely taken aback by that. He was just coming to terms with the fact Enerflex had caused incredible side-effects to manifest in the form of our exceptional talents... but a ‘group effort’ ability? Like us, he was conscious of what was going on during a time-lock, but unlike us he couldn't break out of it until the effect had dissipated. That gave us five minutes to get out. But more on that later.

“I was pissed off with everything. Carter and Joel had amazing abilities, but I couldn't trust them despite all four of us had decided to form a Collective of our own using resources stolen from Redfern. So far so good, but we never expected everything to go according to plan. I was horny when I came into your uncle's place, I'll admit that. But I needed sugar too, and I got it. Carter and Joel had just injected themselves with some enhanced, longer-lasting Enerflex Carter had come up with, so their growth spurt was inevitable. Away from the Collective, Enerflex quickly spoils. Raul managed to teleport back there a few times to steal more. Since then, Redfern had augmented his Elite Guard and secured his fortress even further. We all knew that it was only a matter of time before he wouldn't ever return from there. Little did we know that at some point during his re-visits, Redfern must've gotten into his head, and made him a turncoat and spy.

“I remembered you from high school. Hell, I knew that you looked at me in a lustful manner, and I sensed that you were always too nervous to approach me. And why not? I was Mister Popularity, and I was open about being gay. I guess I was a jerk back then and too wrapped up in my own self-importance to even know that you were there. Sorry about that.” Trey squeezed Mark's hand affectionately, but careful not to hurt his delicate bones. He had no idea how strong he had become and was anxious to put his new size to the test.

“Maybe it was fate that brought you into the store. I am Metazenic, after all. Maybe we have this innate homing instinct or something, a kind of sixth sense ability to seek each other out. It's more than Redfern can do. He needs to place spies in hospitals and such to seek us out.” Mark felt that he was on to something.

 “You could be right,” Trey agreed. He continued with his account of the day of the gym's arrival: “The sugar in the donuts went right to my head, my fault for not having eaten properly that morning. Hell, we'd just escaped from the Italian Alps. Teleporting and space-folding just to get here, all the time trying to get the gym components sorted out for quick assembly. It wasn't easy and we were all very tired by the time we got here. We hadn't planned on hitting this town. But with only one gym and a lot of outta shape young men, it was the perfect testing zone for synthesizing our own supply of Enerflex.'

“Let me guess... you need young guys to start bodybuilding, right? Basically, your typical couch-potato teen whose body has never known a workout in its life. Like Maury Rose, Jr, am I correct?” Mark knew he was.

“Uh yeah...very perceptive of you. Maury was the key to our success, but we need some of Redfern's blood to stabilize the serum. The fiend built his own genetic code into the Enerflex to prevent exactly what Carter Yan is trying to do. Every time he thinks he's isolated a strand of Redfern's DNA from the supplies of Enerflex we stole, the molecule breaks down and cannot be extracted. Redfern built booby-traps into his own creation. But Maury Jr and three other teens who've also been making gains have been successfully screened by Carter and he found them compatible with biometric synthesis, whatever that means.”

“Biometric synthesis?” Mark had to blink a couple of times to take in that mouthful and a half.

Trey nodded. “You remember the yellow fog that covered the town during the time-lock? That's evidence that compatible subjects are present. We discovered a patch of fog in Anchorage - that's where we had intended to go - but a short truck-stop here caused us to change our plans. Redfern didn't know I was from here anyway, so we decided the detour was worth taking the risk. You see, whenever we are close to those capable of mimicking certain processes in Redfern's own body, the fog becomes evident. We don't know why this happens, or even if Redfern knows about this, but Carter has been quite thorough in his research and his findings in lab-rats adapted to be biometrically compatible proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt. The fog is like a lodestone, pointing us towards the likes of Maury Jr and his friends.”

“How can they mimic Redfern? And for that matter... what the fuck is Mathias Redfern anyway, some sort of alien?”  Mark was completely engrossed in everything Trey was telling him. It was so incredible, like stepping into an epic science fiction tale and being swept along by the strong current of the narrative.

“I don't know. Yan doesn't even know. We don't have enough information at this point. There is still so much mystery to all of this. But be thankful that there are types out there who can be vessels for more Enerflex production. They aren't Metazenic, but I suppose they could be Metazenic-friendly. They could grow larger than a Mister Olympia contestant, but eventually there would be a cap to their muscle growth. To make this completely successful, we will have to get a sample of Redfern's DNA. There is no other way to make this process a success.” Trey stopped speaking, again to let Mark take in the mind-swirling details.

“Why do you four need more Enerflex anyway? Aren't you happy with your sizes?” Mark wasn't thinking about himself. Sure, he wanted to get huge and would require lots of Enerflex to do it... but at that moment he needed to absorb every shred of information like a sponge... to fully understand the ramifications of what lay ahead for him... for them all.

“The urge to grow huge is only part of it,” Trey solemnly explained, “Enerflex changes you, makes your muscle growth dependent on it forming bonds with glycogen. Without it, glycogen won't be released to give the energy bursts necessary for heavy weights at short reps. It would make even maintaining our great sizes extremely difficult. Without Enerflex our bodies simply wouldn't have the energy to work out sufficiently. Having told you about my obesity, there is no way that I'm going back to being that way.” He got up from the chair and moved towards Mark, picking him up in his huge arms and hugging him tenderly... lovingly. Both felt the passion rising ... along with their erections.

Trey kissed Mark for a long, uninterrupted moment. He wanted him huge. Mark wanted that too. Then Trey remembered the Enerflex he'd stolen from Raul's safe. It was in his bum-bag. “To hell with Carter's fucking agenda. I want you to take this now. If I'm correct in my assumptions, your growth should be near-instantaneous. You're a grade one. That surpasses everything that we know so far about the condition.” Trey quickly prepped the syringes.

“Wait a sec... what if something goes wrong?” Mark was beginning to think that maybe this was a bad idea. Trey and Raul and the others might not have minded being human test subjects in the past, but Mark still had time to reconsider. He gazed wistfully at his lover's gigantic arms as the muscles tensed and rippled beneath fabric that was about to give up its ghost. My God, he thought, his forearms alone are thicker than my chest. He's almost seven feet tall, wider than that at the shoulders. And he's getting bigger and more beautiful by the day.

Mark's mind was set there and then. He wanted the treatment. “Give me that syringe,” he suddenly demanded with more animation in his movements than Trey was accustomed to seeing. Trey was only too eager to oblige. Having a grade one Metazenic bodybuilder on the team would certainly help to shift the balance of power closer to them, taking some of the venom out of Redfern's sting. Trey couldn't wait to have sex with his much-improved boyfriend. Yan would be pissed, but time was running out along with their much-needed supply of Enerflex. It was now or never. Trey had wanted to be the biggest. It was true that Raul had surpassed him in size and weight, but Trey was confident that he could catch up and outgrow the Mexican.

 But what of Mark? How huge would he become, and would Trey be content with taking second place to him?

Mark jabbed himself with one full dose of Enerflex and then tossed away the syringe. As he did, he felt his lust rising. “Flex for me, Trey. Burst those clothes at the seams. The lust will help my growth.” The demanding tone from Mark was a great turn-on for Trey. He was only too pleased to oblige.

The sweat suit was on its last legs anyway, his growth this past evening had been that significant. He made a most massive crab pose, larger and more stressed than ever before. His muscles burst free almost explosively, fragments of sweatshirt confetti filling the air within the secret lab. Trey growled like an animal in heat, and his skin flared red once again as it became a stretch-mark lightshow. Stressed to the max, veins rose from his flesh like fat earthworms burrowing to the surface of some beautiful landscape after a thunderstorm. Thicker and thicker his muscles became as he flexed harder and HARDER...and HARDER....FUCK YEAH!!!!!! The striations between the massive bulges became deeper, darker, swallowing up light like miniature singularities from which nothing could escape. It was impossible to gauge his size, weight, and measurements now... but as he crabbed harder and harder, the peaks of his biceps pressed his pecs together with the force of freight-trains. His pec-shelf blasted further outward, his nipples as big as fists now. His abs bloated outward then snapped taut, small gushes of air whistling out of the gullies formed between each ab-pack. His triceps played for dominance over his biceps as they flared to even greater proportions. Networks of massive veins became gluttonous for blood and erupted out of his traps, bis and tris... the ones on his neck thickening it to beyond gorilla proportions.

His legs likewise exploded with greater mass, density, and muscular definition. Sweat from the effort shined his skin and soon more confetti was fluttering in the air as Trey's lower half was liberated. His cock, now eighteen inches in circumference and twenty-eight inches long, grew at the same rate as his massive balls, each one as large as a bowling ball, eager to spew forth their luscious elixir. “Is this BIG enough for you?” Trey growled as he continued to demand more size and power from his muscles. He added: “I feel like I'm over 1500 now. Probably more. Knowing me, it's waaaay more. Still want to grow and get fucking HUUUGE!!!!!” His body gained height, too, but disproportionate to the mass his body struggled to flesh out. His aesthetics improved as always, the ratio between his waist and shoulders bordering on surreal. He did a lat spread and his head disappeared completely when his pecs rushed upwards to block it from view. His lats cracked the air they suddenly rushed out to displace.

Mark silently but demandingly took all of this in - his lust ever increasing - as his metamorphosis into whatever form destiny had intended commenced in all its jaw-dropping glory . . .

[FallenAway]

Part 8

Mark was on fire, as if his senses and flesh were engulfed in synchronous flame. Searing pain attacked every fiber in his body... every molecule, as the Enerflex was drawn throughout his metazenic physiology. He flailed his arms wildly, arching his back and gritting his teeth against the surging maelstrom now generating within. Trey watched, wide-eyed for once, remembering back to the first time he'd been injected with the same serum. But he'd never reacted towards it with such... hostility. Neither had Raul. This was completely different, and it scared the hell out of him.

“Mark....what are you feeling?' It was the stupidest question Trey had ever found himself asking, but he put it down to sudden panic. He stood not three feet away from Mark, his gigantic muscle-bod naked and laved with sweat, his massive cock becoming recumbent once more as sexual stimulation gave way to all-out fear. There was simply no way to fathom what would happen across the next few minutes. Mark was screaming now, and the room was far from sound-proof. The din brought Carter and Joel through from the second room. Yan's beautiful brown Asian eyes waxed large in their sockets and his mouth gaped wide, as though his expression alone formed the question he tried to get out.

“Wha...the fuck?” Joel's reaction was practical and evasive, as Mark Stone augmented in every way possible, great charges of electricity flared from his body as growth seizures intensified with every passing second. It was the same as when they would break out of their own time-locks, whatever unnatural forces were unleashed from their muscles by Enerflex and the extra effects it had on them, nature itself seemed to object, defiantly hurling back at them its own forces. Joel wrapped himself and Carter inside a space-fold and so the electricity had no one to earth itself to except for Trey.

His body jerked spasmodically as the charge knocked him right through a wall and outside. He found himself on a desert highway, revealing the lab of Carter's choice as an 18-wheel semi parked about thirty yards from a truck-stop. He didn't recognize the location and easily off-loaded the electricity into the earth. Once he was static-free he picked himself up and gathered his senses. "I must've been thrown fifty feet." There was a huge gaping hole in the side of the featureless black semi. Fleetingly Trey was reminded of Goliath, that nasty big truck from the Knight Rider re-runs he used to love watching as a kid. It was amazing how the mind can often divert itself away from a crisis in the hope of drawing strength from something familiar. But Trey needed to focus... and the jolt to his system made it difficult to think as articulately as he had been when telling Mark some of his story. Would he get a chance to resume the story later? He hoped to.

“Help me.... Trey....pleeeeese!" Mark staggered towards the hole in the truck wall and fell onto the dirt. Already his t-shirt and jeans were strained to bursting point as his body swelled up at a frenetic pace. Enerflex metamorphism had been set to turbo-boost as every cell offered its allegiance to the growth process. His heart became superhuman, pumping at a rate consistent with his expansion. He was gaining at a rate of at least ten pounds per second. Trey couldn't believe what he was seeing. He wanted to go to his lover, to somehow soothe him through the process.  

Joel collapsed his space-fold and he and Carter ventured outside, both of them ripped and huge from their recent dabbling with Enerflex. They kept a cautious distance, but Carter had an SMG trained on the writhing Mark as he begged for the pain surging through him to stop. "How do we know bullets will even stop him?" Joel asked, adrenaline keeping his duck-blind ability on standby, should they need to avail of it again.

"It's just a precaution. I don't want him to come to any harm if that can be avoided. He needs to be studied in detail. He's something new, Joel. As unlike us as he is like us. This is unchartered territory," Carter explained, his hand trembling as he tried to keep the SMG steady. He'd never fired a gun in his life. He was a scientist, not a soldier.

"We were all of us in unchartered territory from the moment Mathias Redfern slithered into our lives," Joel said with a modicum of regret. Sure, he loved having gigantic muscles, but things were getting way too weird.

Trey was with Mark now, holding him firmly, wishing he could take his pain away as he quickly expanded to equal Joel, the smallest of the group. Mark still tingled with static, but Trey fought the discomfort for his boyfriend's sake. Inwardly he relished the massive growth occurring next to him, for the first time since he'd first been given Enerflex, Trey was aroused by the transformation happening beyond his body and to someone else.

“Is it st-stopping?” Oblivious to his growth at an alarming rate, Mark's perception of reality had become disjointed, surreal. Then, as if he had full command of the growth process, Mark's body ceased its metamorphosis. His trembling gradually subsided and he fell asleep in his gigantic lover's colossal arms. Trey, still the most massive bodybuilder in history (assuming he had surpassed Raul once again, which remained to be seen), lifted the lesser bodybuilder with ease and stood there on the dessert road, wondering what to do next.

“Get him inside the semi, Trey. We don't want the first vehicle that passes by to be from the Sheriff's office,” Yan instructed, finding it necessary to take charge. The vanity in him wanted him to ignore all of this and spend the rest of the day posing in front of a mirror, relishing his now 800 lbs. of muscle, testing his new strength to see how far he could push himself. But the scientist in him wouldn't allow that. If Mark was indeed a grade one, how come his muscle growth had ceased, freezing him at about five hundred pounds? He turned to Joel: “How do you feel about hiding our HQ once more? You up to it or do you need to rest first?”

“I think I can just about manage it. But I won't be able to move the thing. It's not like Raul's teleportation, Carter. He can physically move through portals between two fixed points. My power works by moving fixed points between us, bending space around us, and cancelling out the distance in between those two points, hence distance is covered. It uses up way too much energy. I can keep us hidden for a couple of hours, but we need to get that hole patched up pronto.” Joel was pleased that he could at least think clearly during this crisis time.

Yan turned to Trey. “Carry Mark inside. I'm going to sedate him and take some blood and tissue samples. Then you can patch up the wall. We need to get this rig roadworthy. We have to keep several steps ahead of Redfern at all times.”

Trey hated having to take orders from Carter Yan. Hell, Trey, as the biggest and strongest of the lot of them, should be the one dishing out the orders. He still had a score to settle with Yan for his attack on Mark back at the Steakhouse. Funny that Yan seemed concerned with the hole in the semi, and yet, just a few hours before, he had smashed a hole through the Steakhouse restroom wall, large enough to seriously undermine Maury's business. Now he was over 100 pounds heavier and way stronger. But raw muscle and brute force would have to take a back seat to intellect. Science was the only way to beat Redfern at his own game. Trey relented and did what he was told. “Do your tests, Carter. Just don't hurt him anymore.”

“I'm sorry I attacked him at the restaurant, Trey. I was desperate to get a blood sample. Think about it. I now have blood from before his growth spurt. I should be able to tell a lot by comparing the two.” Yan couldn't wait to get to work. But would he have the time to complete his analysis? There was no way to tell at this point.

 * * * * *

 The next morning....

Maury Rose Jr. peered through the locked door to Shapeshifters Gym and frowned. It was past 7am and the place should have been open by now. He rapped on the glass, hoping to attract some attention. But the place was deserted. It was a foggy morning, cool and clammy on the skin... a most unnatural mist indeed. And in summer? That didn't make sense. But Maury didn't care about the weather. He just wanted to train and grow, under the excellent tutelage of the biggest, most muscular Asian he had ever seen. “Hello? Guys? C'mon, open up. I'm fucking freezin' out here.” Freezing in the middle of summer? And where were Pete, Simon, and Donnie, the other three once-couch-potatoes who had taken to Yan's training programs like ducks to water? They should be here by now, too.  

Maury left his gym bag back at the main doors and did a full circuit of the parking lot. There was a vehicle parked at the main gates, that must have rolled up quietly without him noticing. It was a black limo, with windows tinted black... a predator of a vehicle, like something out of a Stephen King story. “Finally.” Maury droned and went to get his gym bag. The fog began to thicken. Things were getting stranger by the minute. It was eerily calm this morning, and unnaturally quiet, as though the fog acted as a muffler to the sounds of reality beyond the gates to Shapeshifters.  Maury approached the limo, hoping to get some answers. As he did, it changed position, taxiing into the parking-lot, suddenly steering to the right so that its impressive length completely blocked Maury's only escape route.

“What the...?” Maury began to panic. This was completely fucked up. Suddenly the rear-left passenger window wound down with an electric whine and a hand beckoned to Maury to come closer. “It's OK Maury, it's just me and Simon,” said Pete Carmichael, who was practically Maury's training partner at this stage. Relieved, but still holding his bladder at yellow alert, Maury felt like throwing his gym bag at Pete for scaring him so.

“You fuckin' ass, Pete. You scared the bejesus out of me. What's with the stretch anyway? You win the lottery or something?” The door opened for Maury, and he wasted no time getting in out of the unnatural cold. When the central locking mechanism engaged, Maury found himself a prisoner. He was made to sit opposite two of his three 'gym-buddies', although the fact that he knew them failed to settle his unease. They were acting quite strangely. And they looked different, apart from just bulking up by what seemed like a whopping fifty pounds of pure muscle. All three of the teenagers were starting to look pretty damn handsome, having spent all of their childhoods and most of their teen years so far failing to work their bodies into a healthy lifestyle. They had been sedentary out-of-shapers before Shapeshifters came to town. And now, in just over a month, their bodies had responded to Carter Yan's programs with tremendous zeal. Maury's body-fat was 50 percent less than what it had been, no easy task when your Dad cooks the best steaks and burgers in the county. Maury had made the swiftest gains of the three, Yan's star pupil, if you will. Had it something to do with the blood and sperm samples the Chinese genius took regularly from Maury, Pete, Simon, and Donnie? And just where was Donnie this morning anyway? He, like his buddies, never missed a workout.

“You guys look bigger... way bigger. What's going on, guys?” Maury was scared and his skin issued a cold sweat that did little to improve his situation. It was stuffy inside the limo. He turned to look through to the driver's partition, but it was completely closed off. There was a speaker and a small video screen built into the partition. Who the hell was driving?

“Do you know that Shapeshifters is a sham, Maury?” Simon, a quiet introspective type if ever there was one, suddenly had information that Maury needed to know. His voice was deep and rasping, as if his vocal cords had been rubbed raw by sandpaper. His was bigger, more muscular, and sported a lot more facial hair than Maury remembered him having. Pete was the same. But despite their augmentations, their skin was deathly pale, lacking the vigor and healthy sheen you would normally expect to see on guys who had taken to treading a path to extreme health and fitness. And in the dim light of the limo's passenger interior, their eyes glowed a sickly, eerie yellow. Clearly they had relinquished their humanity, but in exchange for what?

“Whuh-what do you mean? We've made great gains in the first few weeks. My Dad is really pleased with my progress.” At a time when reality suddenly made no sense, Maury desperately tried to justify what he was hearing.

“Your Dad is a fag and jacks off to the thoughts of you growing big,” Pete said with a devilish grin on his face.

“Shut up, Pete. I'm speaking here,” said Simon, nudging his buddy forcibly. Pete hissed - yes hissed - in annoyance. Simon trained his inhuman gaze on Maury. “There are no records of our progress available for us to review. The computer in the reception area is an empty box. Half the locker combinations spin freely in their housings. They don't lock anything away. Half the rooms in this building are off-limits. There are no women here, just men. And where are the staff this morning? It seems like we've been abandoned. Does any of this add up for you, Maury?” Simon paused to allow Maury to think about what he'd just heard.

“But we've made incredible gains. Look at me, I'm down in body fat and up in lean muscle mass. It's all I've ever wanted. And by the way, my Dad is not a fag.” Maury was visibly upset now, wishing that this was a bad dream he could simply wake up from.

“We've changed, Maury. And you will, too, we like to think. It's great over where we are now. We are stronger than ever before, and we can hear our master calling to us from his mountain refuge. He needs us to go to him so that he can determine how Yan has changed us.” And to illustrate his point, Simon did something that caused Maury to scream. He produced a hypodermic syringe and stabbed it through the fabric of his gym shorts, near his crotch. Maury was transfixed with awe and disgust at the same time. He watched as Simon drew the plunger of the syringe backwards, extracting a clear solution from his gonads that appeared to glow a faint blue. It was not what Maury expected. Simon then held the solution up for Maury to get a good look at.

“Our balls don't make jism anymore, Maury. They make this shit, whatever it is,” Pete added.  

“Mine too? Oh my God. This could be cancer or something.” Maury started to weep like a baby.  

“Our new master can undo Yan's damage, Maury. He constantly calls to me in my mind, for he made me first. We have to answer his call. Just open your mind and accept him in. Be like us, Maury.” Simon's tone had become a resonant drone that found its way easily into Maury's head, causing the teenager's panic to intensify. He suddenly shot out of his seat and tried to kick open a door. He was getting stronger, but he was still a far cry off from ever committing such a feat.  

A prehensile appendage of great force and resilience suddenly punched a hole the size of a grapefruit through the driver's partition. Boneless and protoplasmic, but constricting like the coils of a great snake, the appendage quickly wound itself around Maury's neck and wrenched him backwards. He began to choke as the limb tightened its hold around him, despite his every effort to get free. The driver of the limo had now made itself known.

“Gaghk...aghk....aghhkkkk!” Maury's skin began to turn blue, his face bloating with the effort to take in oxygen. His feet kicked wildly about and one of his sneakers struck Simon in the throat.

“Enough! Donnie... release him. You may have the same master as I, but I am still in charge. Let him go,” Simon snapped. Donnie immediately obeyed. The limb slid away from Maury's throat, and he dropped to the floor, gasping in huge lungsful of air for all he was worth.

“Good job too, the Master would stick our heads up on poles if we allowed Maury to come to harm,” Pete commented.

Simon looked at him without remarking and then clapped his hands together. “Donnie... contact Raul and have him open a portal. We must return to the Collective now that we have secured our prize. Master Redfern awaits our swift return.”

Sheathed beneath the miasma of an unnatural fog, the limo roared to life as a greatly metamorphosed Donnie gave it gas, seeming to make a beeline directly for the main entrance to Shapeshifters. But before the vehicle could collide with metal and glass, the limo vanished, swallowed into nothingness. Before the portal could close completely, an object, about the size of a cereal bowl, skimmed out of the portal and attached itself to the main doors of the gym, its LED readout counting down from 30 seconds.... down to 25... 20... 15... 10... 5....

A second disturbance, making more of an impact than the one at the Steakhouse only the previous night, lit up the morning sky, waking many up from their slumber. The explosion not only ripped through the gym, reducing it to a smoldering heap, but passing cars and property for 500 meters in every direction were severely damaged. Innocent passers-by were killed in the blast and when the sound of the devastation eventually died down, it was replaced by a horrific cacophony of car alarms wailing, injured people screaming due to their injuries...oblivious to the fact they had dead loved ones nearby... and police and fire truck sirens hurtling to the scene of the carnage. Hell reigned in the aftermath.

 * * * * *

 By 9am that morning, after an evening of little sleep, for Yan was working through the night to map Mark's altered and simply incredible genome, Trey was taking a nap, stretched out on a gym mat that he'd placed on the floor of the rec-room within the semi. He had found corrugated iron paneling, which he'd used to repair the hole in the wall. He was exhausted, his body starved of Enerflex so that no more growth was possible. Yan had the last two syringes that Trey had stolen from Raul's safe and wouldn't relinquish them. He needed them for his experiments. All of this had become completely fucked up. Trey still wouldn't allow himself to trust Carter and Joel, although the three had agreed to put their differences aside, at least until they could confidently say that Redfern was no longer a threat to them.

Joel was sleeping in the driver's compartment, for there was little room elsewhere and he was just about able to fit into the bunk at the back. He was depleted and so they were visible to the world. He had maneuvered the semi around to the most secluded part of the truck-stop and paid the owner of the diner to keep an eye out for trouble. The old fucker was gay and would do anything for some green and a little muscle show free of charge. But how would the bodybuilders guard against another visit by Raul? They knew that Raul could only teleport in short-hops, therefore oceans still provided impossible barriers he could not cross. It meant that Redfern was temporarily away from his mountain fortress in the Italian Alps and operating some place nearby. Either this, or Raul's ability had improved exponentially, making oceans no longer impossible for him to transcend. This was something they would have to remain constantly mindful of.

Trey dreamed as he slept. But it was a dream like no other. It had way too much clarity to it, as though for the first time in his life, he had carried his five mundane physical senses into something that was beyond physical.... metaphysical even. The dreamscape was featureless at first, a swirling haze of inarticulate shapes and sensations. But soon things firmed up into a human-shaped figure, which emerged from an amorphous nebula of black gas right before him. It was then that Trey realized he was so much like his physical self here, massively muscular, and faultlessly beautiful. His mouth fell agape when his now greatly augmented boyfriend stood before him in a dreamscape that suddenly glinted like diamond. “Is this... real?” Trey was stuck for words. But he did not need to speak here. On this metaphysical plane, thoughts were all that was required to communicate.

Thoughts now flowed effortlessly between the two lovers and when Mark smiled at his muscle-god, so he conveyed so much warmth, sincerity, and devotion to the one he had been obsessed with since high school. “Of course it is. I am being examined by Carter back in the physical world. But whilst my body is incapacitated, my mind has realized the extra ability that Enerflex has afforded me.” Mark's words were sculpted and academic. Just a few weeks ago he had been working a dead-end job with little prospects for a lucrative and fulfilling future. Now... he had become a superhuman muscle-god, whose presence could transcend reality itself.

“You're making this possible? You drew me here? But why?” Trey's emotions were strong here. Despite his great size and strength, recent events had wearied him. He was bigger than he'd ever been, and yet... without further doses of Enerflex, all future muscle growth was uncertain. Mark had taken just one dose and had achieved in minutes what it had taken Trey two years and many, many doses to achieve. It was remarkable.

“I brought you here so that we could be together. Also... I need to know about your later months with Redfern, not so much the muscle growth, but things about Redfern's operation, anything that can be of use to us. And Raul, too. He must be stopped. If his power intensifies, and his teleportation improves, he could be unstoppable.” Mark, still less than a third of Trey's size and weight, moved towards his boyfriend, finding he still had to stand on his toes to reach his luscious lips. Both men were naked in the dreamscape, their beautiful bodies glistening with light reflecting the diamond-fire around them.

There was only joy to be felt here, now... something Trey greatly relished. Their kiss seemed interminable, fluids passing between their tongues as their union intensified. Trey ran his hands across the beautiful spread of Mark's back, his fingertips tracing the contours of his newly acquired muscularity. Smaller though he was than Trey, the feeling still aroused him more than Mark ever had back when he'd been scrawny. “You are.... so ...beautiful,” Trey exclaimed, gasping and trembling with nothing less than delight and increasing lust. Mark was only too willing to allow Trey's touch to explore every inch of his new physique, for he wanted Trey to know the new him, as much as he had the old.

“And this is only for starters, honey,” said Mark, finding it impossible to keep his lips apart from Trey's for more than a minute or so at a time. Trey didn't want this to end; he didn't want anything bad to sully this experience.  

Mark kneaded the powerful, super-hard muscles that formed Trey's immense balloon-pecs, finding now that he could dent the muscle, whereas before, he couldn't. Trey threw his head back and moaned, causing his pecs to heave upwards. They rippled to Mark's touch as his fingers fornicated with the sudden striations across Trey's pecs that formed like tectonic shifts in the earth's crust. Feeling so much muscle moving to his touch made Mark's erection pump to its fullest. A massive eighteen-inch cock morphed upwards, its pink mushroom head slamming against the brickwork of his abs like the sound of a cracking whip. But it was dwarfed next to Trey's immense member, which now approached thirty-inches in length and nineteen-inches around. His balls swelled larger than bowling balls as they stocked up on massive amounts of “manbrosia” to shower his lover in.

Mark briefly broke away to flex for Trey. He made a front double biceps pose, and his arms peaked massively, although he had yet to form the secondary peak on each bicep that Trey's colossal 65-70 inchers had sported for some time now. Each bicep peak rose to about halfway up Mark's raised forearms, whereas Trey's biceps had already ascended several inches above his fists when flexed. No matter, compared to the way Mark had been, seeing him like this now made Trey want to shower him in cum. But was it even possible to cum in a dimension formed of dreams and aether? Mark knew he was having an effect on his lover and dropped down to a crab pose extending massively striated flesh dressed in bulging veins across most of his upper body. His skin glowed with a golden luster and his muscularity seemed to deepen and improve, although there was no further growth. Mark then swung up to a full lat spread and his lats flared wide enough to fill any space between his arms. It was breathtaking, the effect making it appear as though his upper body was even more fleshed. In unison to Mark's pose, Trey also did a lat-spread and his upper body swelled to near-explosive proportions. Again, his head disappeared as his ever-expanding pec-mounds ballooned outwards and upwards, gorging on every bit of free space available to them. Mark immediately flung himself at Trey and buried his face in those gorgeous over-swells, taking time out to suckle each compelling nipple... for all of Trey's phenomenal physique cried out to be worshiped... needed...tasted!

“You have so much power now, Sweetie. Hurt me... hurt me with your growing strength.” Trey was subservient to Mark now, despite he still carried the superior size. This dreamscape was of Mark's making and therefore Trey was a guest of this surreal extra ability now manifesting itself. He dropped to his knees and secured his lips around Mark's cock. He concentrated and lowered it slightly so that Trey could begin to ease his orifice along the shaft, ensuring that his zealous tongue relished every gorging vein on its surface.  

Mark's body tensed from the sensation and every muscle stood out clearly from its neighbor, his body becoming super-rigid, flexed supreme. Locked in paroxysmal bliss, Mark began to jerk his groin back and forth against Trey's rhythmically oral pursuit of his creme. He would have it and savor it as though this were to be his last moment.

“Unnnghhh!” Mark's precum met with Trey's saliva, creating a delicious aperitif to what was to come. Both men put more power into their union as Trey took Mark's shaft impossibly into his mouth and partly down his throat without gagging. He wanted so much of Mark inside him and now that Mark was way more huge with a bubble butt so thick, shapely, defined and accommodating, he looked forward to fucking him like never before. It was then that sheer masculine need overwhelmed him, and he pushed Mark away from him. He then dove on him before he could hit the dreamscape floor as his desire to take him rose to fever pitch. Manipulating him into position, Trey growled as his great weight kept Mark in place and he separated his legs to drive his massive payload into his lover's passage. Mark didn't object one bit and screamed out his need for full penetration.

Growling with an insane lust overload, Trey rode his lover with unseen ferocity, knowing that Mark was now strong enough to take his invasion. He drove his cock further into him and Mark writhed beneath him, in the throes of utter ecstasy, demanding he invade further and with greater and greater intensity. And as he fucked Mark, Trey flexed his awesome muscles, filling out into a full lat spread that blew him up to gargantuan proportions. "So big... huge... huger still. I'm SO FUCKING HUUUUGE!!!!!" Trey released load after load of steaming, salty juice into Mark, pushing more fiercely against Mark's deliberately defiant glutes, now strong enough by themselves to pound against Trey's invading meat, stimulating it further to give up its goods.

“Unnnnnghhh!!!!” It was overwhelming and both men screamed out their bliss in unison, the ensuing orgasms further cementing their bodies into one. Together and between them, over 2000 lbs. of solid, massive muscle became one glorious and inexorable union as Mark's demand to be filled by Trey intensified with each passing second.

This was where things began to go terribly wrong. Trey's bliss gave way to a sudden awareness that discomfort had taken over from ecstasy. His orgasm subsided whilst Mark, still writhing ever harder beneath his lover, seemed to be enjoying the experience more and more. Furthermore, the sensation of Trey being raised further from the dreamscape floor was disquieting. What was going on? As he gathered his senses, panic seeming to whitewash over all pleasure he had felt previously, he noticed that his elevation was increasing in conjunction with Mark's sudden growth-spurt. Trey couldn't stop ejaculating semen. Liter after liter of jism was pumped out of his balls, through his cock and into the ever-hungry Mark, whose muscles again began to balloon outward at an alarming rate, pushing them both further upwards. In contrast Mark never ejaculated, his orgasm seizing him in an unholy paroxysm of euphoria that seemed without letup. And when Trey's balls were spent of their manbrosia, so there were other fluids within Trey Waters that would have to be tasted.

It was here, in a diamond-speckled dreamscape of Mark's Enerflex-powered design, that Trey Waters was drained of his strength, size and beauty. He cried out for Mark to stop, but Mark seemed not to hear him, such was the level of bliss surging through him that communication at this point was a futile exercise. Mark's hungry, keen flesh wanted everything and wouldn't stop until Trey had been drained to the last drop.

The dreamscape was an endless expanse of no-where and no-when, therefore it went on in all directions for indeterminate infinity. And carrying on endless currents of soul-searing aether, Trey Waters’ screams would sound onwards and forever, without end. In his place, something new and incredibly massive willed itself back to the waking world. “I know everything now,” Mark told himself as his id made peace with his flesh once again. He had no idea what fate had made of Trey Waters in the real world, but as he regained consciousness on the examination table of the lab on wheels, he fixed a steely, inhuman gaze on the flabbergasted Carter Yan. He smiled, warmly, showing serenity as he slipped his feet to the floor and caught Yan around his throat with a reach that was monstrous and inescapable.

“Well, if it isn't the woman in the red dress,' the monstrous 2000-pounder remarked snidely, as he raised the 800+ pound Yan off the floor, holding him as though he were made of feathers. The scientist was doomed, powerless to break out of the chokehold he was caught in. “Your days of tinkering around with my blood are over.” Mark looked at Yan stolidly for a moment and almost pitied him for how powerless he had suddenly become. Then, without a second thought, Mark worried him back and forth until his neck snapped. He tossed Yan into a corner and the massive bodybuilder collapsed into a spineless heap.  

McIntyre was next. Mark, all seven and a half feet of him, stampeded across the lab, smashing everything in his path, and punched right through the trailer and into the semi's cab, where Joel had slept through the commotion due to sheer exhaustion. Rampaging without the ability to examine his actions, Mark wrenched the cab apart and thrust Joel out into the cool night of a less than tranquil desert. Before Joel could make sense of what was happening, Mark held him, too, in a chokehold, only he had no intention of killing him... not yet anyway.

“It was wrong to make me,” the monster growled. Monster he may have become, but he was still very beautiful and so huge that his measurements couldn't be gauged at this time. “But you didn't make me, Joel. Redfern did. And now you are going to take me all the way to the true monster's lair.”

“Gagghk... ghk... I cuh-can't fold that much.... gahhkk...space....ghk!” Joel's protests fell on deaf ears.  

“Very well then, Scotty... how about I fold you in HALF,” Mark snarled, his desire for vengeance now insatiable. He began to apply pressure to Joel's throat, restricting his airflow so the smaller bodybuilder became weak and semi-conscious.

“Take me to Redfern, Joel, or you will die just like Carter.” Mark choked Joel still further, holding the man several feet off the ground and at arm’s length. Then, with his other hand, he grabbed hold of Joel's waist and began to apply incredible pressure. Joel gritted his teeth against the pain but couldn't scream due to the vice-grip around his neck. Reality began to melt away from Joel as a most disquieting peace rushed up to accept him.

To be continued . . .

[FallenAway]

Part 9

Maury Jr couldn't remember losing consciousness. But for the sake of mental stability, it was for the best that he was out of it. At least he was spared much of the ghastly imagery he would have otherwise been exposed to as he was taken into the Utopian Collective of Mathias Redfern... now his master.  

Raul's teleportation ability had improved manifold, along with his now 1700 lb. muscle physique. He had served his master well and Redfern always rewarded his minions for loyal service, in Raul's case: more Enerflex. His portals could indeed span oceans now, therefore there were few places across the world in which Redfern's enemies could hide. It would bode a man well to serve Redfern than to be served death by him. Ah, but death was nary a release from Redfern's clutches, for he had ways of making you suffer beyond death. Thankfully, and for the moment, Maury Rose Jr was between life and death, in a place where Redfern could not venture, at least for the time being.

He came to in a room that was not unpleasant in design, although it was little more than a prison cell. He sat up to find himself on a reasonably comfortable cot, with a single fluorescent tube buzzing and flickering overhead. To his right there was a table laden with simple foodstuffs. He was ravenous and made a bolt for the food, caring little if it was the kind of fare not covered by Carter Yan's diet plan. It consisted mainly of ham and cheese sandwiches with curling edges, some stale chocolate biscuits, and room-temperature bottled water, hardly appetizing but he was grateful for it anyway. Half-way through the meal he noticed that there were no windows in the cell.... and worse still... no door.

“'What?” How did he get into a room without a door? That was impossible. He began to test the walls, thumping on the cold brickwork for signs of a hidden mechanism, the kind of thing you see in old horror movies. But he found nothing. He began to panic and called for his father,

“The fag can't help you now, bro. He's thousands of miles east of our position,” said Simon from behind Maury. Maury turned sharply and saw his gym-buddy sitting on one of two chairs in the room, fingering what was left of the biscuits on the plate but deciding against them. “How did you get in? There's no door, Simon. Tell me what's going on.” Maury was terrified. He wanted to pass water but there was only a kid's potty in one corner. Was he supposed to go in that? Simon smiled and got up from the chair. Maury couldn't get over how big he'd grown. At a guess he had to be at least 250 lbs. now, his body ripped and muscular, comparable to a super-heavyweight pro bodybuilder. He was very handsome, except for his gray pallor and a sickly yellow tinge to the once-whites of his eyes. There was something faintly reptilian about those eyes, with their slitted irises that seemed to marry well with what Maury was sure was the briefest flicker of a bifurcate tongue darting between Simon's blackened lips as he chuckled near-insensately. “Heh... I'm sure you'll eventually figure it all out, bro,” said Simon and flexed his muscles as he moved towards the petrified teenager. He wore a semi-transparent black wife-beater, stretched to near-ripping point across his beautifully muscled torso. It was accompanied beneath by a pair of white spandex gym shorts with a black lace-up front. These were the kinds of garments Maury hoped he would one day look great in if he happened to live long enough to see “one day.”

“Teleportation, right? Jeez, this is like a fucked-up movie. I'm in the Matrix, right?” Why Maury would even ask a stupid question like that was beyond his comprehension. He was scared for sure, and his mind sought a rational explanation to his sudden, inextricable predicament. The Matrix was as good a theory as any. Simon chuckled some more. He flexed right in front of Maury, towering over him by a good four inches. He was broad at the shoulders and his pecs were deep and striated. He pressed them against Maury, sandwiching him between himself and the wall, and as he did so, he guided Maury's hand down to his crotch, ensuring that he got to know his jewels pretty well.

“What are you duh-doing? Simon, stop this,” Maury pleaded.  

“Your Dad's a fag... and so are you. I found your gay porn under your bed once, but I said nothing. I took home one of the movies without you knowing and jerked off to it all night. Guess we all have our little secrets, Rose.”  

Despite his fear, Maury felt himself growing hard. Simon continued to flex his pecs right in front of him, forcing him to press against his muscular power. But his skin was cold, unnaturally so, and Maury hadn't the space to properly recoil. Simon was no longer a regular person. Maury's mind fleetingly settled on the memory of the tentacle that had attacked him in the limo earlier. Simon had referred to it as Donnie. Donnie was nowhere to be found. Was he even human anymore?

Maury fought against his rising lust, fear of his current situation refusing to give way to the shock revelation that Simon knew his secret. Maury's sexuality was irrelevant right now. Fear of the unknown reigned supreme... its presence stifling. “That stuff in the syringe... what did Carter Yan do to us?” Maury's breathing was labored, his anxiety and lust hastening his heart rate. His fate was now in the hands of a higher power, and this power - this master - had yet to make himself known.

“You should hear this from Master Redfern himself, but until he calls you to audience, he asked me to bestow upon you a welcoming gift.” Simon opened his mouth, seemingly to impossible proportions, and tasted Maury with his snake-tongue. Between the forked tips there was a gobbet of phlegm which he'd gathered from the back of his throat. And as he kissed Maury long and hard on lips that quaked along with the rest of him, so terrible stuff was introduced into Maury's body, stuff that soon had him screaming and writhing on the floor as if squirming in acid.

His task of deliverance completed, Simon stepped backwards into one of Raul's portals and vanished. Maury lost consciousness once again, which was for the best. He escaped much of the pain of his physical reworking and soon was silent and still in his sealed-up sarcophagus.

 * * * * *

Mathias Redfern was used to working in bad light, even darkness. His workshops existed in the lowest level of his mountain fortress, a place where only his highest lieutenants were permitted entry. He preferred it this way... an almost sacred pecking order, although Redfern held nothing sacred to him. Except maybe the blood of the innocent and the energizing conflicts obtained from souls in turmoil.

He worked calmly and methodically, relying on his astounding knowledge of modern science to extrapolate a cause of reasoning behind his once-protege Carter Yan's meddlesome research into the gross synthesis of his elixir. He examined a vial of Enerflex-B, as he called it, holding it up in front of him, recalling how it had been offered to him by his senior lieutenant, Simon, who'd extracted it from his own gonads. Redfern sneered in the blackness, black lips drawing back from teeth that were pointed and beast-like, his augmented sight as good in darkness as it was in conditions of light. “Yan almost had it perfected,” he remarked, his attention fleetingly diverted to the commotion occurring in one stinking corner of the workshop. He turned to address it and twin-hell-lamps blinked on in the darkness, their unnatural light strobing on rivers of airborne sulfur. The creature whose eyes generated this light rattled its binding chains in violation of its master's rule of silence. It was Redfern's own fault that the thing was restless, for he had forgotten to feed it.

“Silence, Donnie my boy... here... sustenance for your worth,” said Redfern and went to one of several tables in the dark lab, each one supporting a catatonic human subject of experimentation. He chose a somewhat plump comatose “patient” in his mid-to-late twenties, and without giving it a thought, plunged his taloned hand through and into the doomed man's chest cavity. Bone splintered and flesh was torn apart as Redfern pulled out the life-giving pump that was the man's steaming, still-beating heart. Some blood splashed across Redfern's face and neck, and he relished it greatly, for it formed half of what he considered complete and utter sustenance for a creature of his exceptional design. As for the heart itself, he tossed it towards Donnie who stretched his chains taut in a desperate attempt to catch the meat in mid-air. Donnie just about achieved it and swallowed his meal whole. His six limbs were each encased in manacles, but the introduction of a meal into his system sent his once human body into further metamorphosis. The creature growled with rising power as two more pseudo-limbs burst forth from a hideously mutated torso and began lashing and whipping about in search of mischief. Similarly... a second, rudimentary set of wolf-like jaws began to push out from what was once the youth's left shoulder. Before it had even established itself as a second head, the “snout's” nose began to sniff the air, reacting to the smells of blood and feces.

“Poor Donnie. You ingested the same biometric spores as the rest of the males in your stinking hovel of a town. Ninety-nine percent rejected them immediately, as I have learned to expect. But four of you accepted my taint into your bodies. Simon, Peter.... even dear Maury. They are shining examples of my genius. But you, Donnie, you made different work of the spores and became this, the subject of further experiments, I think. But all in good time.' Redfern grew silent and sent a mental command to Peter to sever the extra appendages and put them into cryo-storage for analysis later. Donnie was just about containable with six limbs, but should he grow any more, becoming stronger all the time, then a creature like that would be difficult to put down. Redfern resolved to be more mindful of where he sent his “altering mists” in the future.

But altering mist posed an irresistible lure to Yan and Company. According to information constantly fed to him by his spy Raul: Yan, McIntyre and Waters believed that the mists were formed when biometrically compatible subjects were present. Well, they weren't far from the truth (they had no idea that Redfern had created the mist in the first place). There was little of Redfern's stuff in them, but just enough of his taint in Enerflex to make them compelled to follow his mists. Redfern had sent out the spores to contaminate young men in Trey Waters' hometown. Most would not take, but three or four might. And so, Redfern would have his lieutenants, his loyal servitors. It was convenient that Yan had unwittingly recruited them to Shapeshifters to conduct experiments of his own into Enerflex synthesis. Redfern gradually tightened his net, all things coming together nicely, he felt.

“Be quiet, Donnie. Settle down and let your master work,” Redfern instructed. Should the beast become unruly in its black prison, he would have it sedated, or maybe destroyed, for it was a failure. Or by the same token... Donnie Drake's mutation could be seen as an evolution, but one most foul. Redfern went back to examining Yan's brand of Enerflex. “He would have needed a pure strand of mine own DNA to perfect the batches. This is unstable and spoils easily. Knowing Yan, he would not have attempted to test unstable solutions on himself. He might have been able to extend the shelf-life of authentic Enerflex stolen from my stores, but beyond that he was stumped. Hmmm.” Redfern's attention returned to a more docile Donnie, now settling down to sleep off his meal. “Only hours ago, you were able to drive an automobile. Now... you are a chained beast. Your degeneration is hastening. You could be dead in a matter of hours.” Redfern had yet to test Yan's crude Enerflex on something living. True, he had human subjects laid out before him, but where was the fun of making another like Donnie, when Donnie himself could be the recipient of an inferior serum?

Redfern prepped a syringe just as Pete arrived with extra chains. “Wait, Pete,” Redfern admonished sternly. Pete's eyes hadn't fully adjusted to the darkness, although they were slowly getting there. He tried not to stumble around before his strict master. “Attach an electrode to Donnie here, I wish to try something. If things get out of control, shoot him with 50,000 volts.”  

“Yes, master,” Pete replied simply. Grinning wickedly, his curiosity suddenly that of a child on Christmas Eve, Redfern pacified Donnie with a mental command. The creature that had recently been a human boy of 17 received the spoiled Enerflex without argument. Master and servitor gave the abomination plenty of distance, Pete's hand poised over the control pad for the electrode.

The transformation was near-instant. Pete couldn't see much but his master's vision was sharp in the darkness. Redfern's fell aghast at the intense swelling of Donnie's now protoid flesh... malleable, adaptive... filling out to seemingly engulf every free space in the room. With the force of a train Redfern was blasted against shelves stocked with all manner of compounds and chemicals. The force caused a devilish and corrosive rain to shower him as he landed in a heap on the floor. Pete fared worse than his master and was snatched by a nest of lashing tentacles that erupted wildly from Donnie's once-chest. He dropped the electrode control pad in the darkness and screamed maniacally as he felt his entire body become ensnared in the creature' ever-thickening pseudo-limbs. Shaken and suffering from chemical burns, Redfern's mind called out to Raul who was working several floors above carrying out his master's duties. “Raul, send a portal to rescue me. There is trouble here in the lab. It is too late for Pete, but your Lord and Master must not succumb to detriment!!”

Raul heard his master and answered his call, focusing a portal in his mind and projecting it down to the workshop. The portal was invisible, but Redfern was sensitive to such energies and was drawn to its event horizon. The fiend wasted little time hurling himself through its center. He emerged headfirst, rolling forwards and snapping to his feet in a trice. His lithe frame (although slight of flesh but deceptively robust) was surprisingly supple. He found himself in Raul's private quarters, the very same three rooms that Redfern had, four years into the past, housed Raul and Trey at the beginning of so many experiments. Raul was not alone either, having dosed a youth (from a village far below) with so much wine that it was easy to get him back to the Collective. The youth was purely for Raul's pleasure and was already half-dead, his anus ravaged beyond recognition.  

“You are supposed to be working, Raul. What is the meaning of this?” Redfern spoke tonelessly at first but ended his sentence acerbically. Raul, naked and massively pumped, towered above Redfern and seemed to grow before his very eyes. His titanic muscles gained yet more substance, his thighs pushing his balls and cock out further, whilst his lats forced his arms upward and his pec-shelf became massively disproportionate to his diamond-hard torso. Inches and pounds were added to his already too-huge frame, and he loved the sensation more and more the larger he became. But he had to know his place before his Lord, for Redfern had the power to revert him at any moment.

“Master, I was swollen with Enerflex and needed to vent the pressure,” Raul explained with a lame excuse.

“You could have used the gym to train like before,” Redfern hissed, in part due to anger and partly due to the pain of chemical burns which covered most of his head and shoulders. No matter, he had excellent healing abilities and would soon be mended.

“The weights do little for me now, Lord. I have grown so strong, I get little satisfaction from working out now,” Raul added somewhat resignedly.  

Redfern snorted gruffly, intending to pick this matter up later. Discipline was paramount if the Utopian Collective were to become a global force to be reckoned with. “Leave no trace of that when you are done with it,' Redfern commanded, extending a bony, shaking talon towards the bloody and dying mess in Raul's bed. The youth had been raped heinously by Raul and more than likely would not survive the assault of the near 2000 lb. muscle monster. Despite Raul's immense proportions, he was still a beautifully handsome man and Redfern lusted greatly for him. But now was not the time to give in to bestial hungers. Something had to be done about the grossly mutating Donnie far below in the labs. Redfern was grateful for Raul's portal but quickly left his rooms for his office nearby. He had to organize a cleansing party for Donnie. But did he regret testing the Enerflex-B on him?

Nothing ventured, Redfern mused solemnly to himself.

 * * * * *

Mark was furious with Joel and took it out on him physically. He picked up the massively muscular Scotsman as though he were weightless and tossed him with little effort. Joel did his best to protect his face with his hands as he struck the giant sequoia with enough force to leave an impression in the great trunk's girth. He fell to the ground and lay in wet ferns, trembling and depleted. Mark rampaged after him, mildly amused that he was strong enough to throw him that far. Just for fun he tested his strength and began to hug the trunk of the tree nearest to him. He gave it every ounce of strength he had and despite that the sequoia was many centuries old, the great organism was powerless to resist such a mighty uproot. Mark didn't completely detach it from the forest floor, for its root-structure was far too extensive, but he did worry it enough to undermine its foundations. With an ear-splitting groan, the massive tree crashed to its death, narrowly missing Joel by just a few meters. The impact sent the forest into a frenzy, as the diversity of life it supported took to fleeing in panic from the sudden maelstrom.

Mark laughed heartily and pounded his way after Joel. He found him without too much effort and picked him up one-handedly, his mighty mitt clamped securely around his throat. Joel weighed close to 800 lbs. (it was impossible to tell his exact weight without careful measuring) but Mark began to bicep curl, heaving him up and down in a series of reps that could easily go on for hours. His arm filled out with the strain and a vein super-highway erupted across the hugely defined muscles. Joel felt like death was near, and he would give up his ghost willingly if it meant an end to this torment.

“This doesn't look like the Italian Alps, Scotty,” Mark growled, bodybuilder smugness the only emotion he cared to feel right now. How could he have gone from a sweet and morally abiding young man into an apathetic, maniacal murderer? Joel thought he knew the answer, but he was in grave danger and his thought processes had become seriously marred. Mark didn't even give him time to get his breath back before intending to knock more wind out of him.

Battered, bruised and bleeding from his nose and mouth, as well as from a great many cuts across his rippling physique, Joel was once again snatched into the air and held at arm's length. Mark's strength was phenomenal, and he was getting bigger and stronger by the second. He growled at Joel again. “Take me to Redfern or I will snap you in half, runt!” Panting furiously, his breath bellowed like a miniature hurricane and as his chest heaved to help inflate his lungs, so his pecs swelled up to their most mammoth size yet. Striations that could take a man's hand up to the wrist cracked across the pec-shelf, like fissures formed by an earthquake.

“Nuh-need to...resssst, Mark. Cuh-can't fuh-fold any more.... rest.... puh-please.” The plea broke through a small crack in Mark's psychotic veneer and for a moment he relented, giving logic and sense time to germinate once more. He wanted to kill Joel, but without him it would be difficult to get to Redfern. Italy was a long way away from wherever they were, and Mark was simply too big to fit onto any commercial airliner. He granted Joel the rest he desperately needed. Joel passed out with gratitude.  

When he awakened once again night had fallen across the land. The forest of giant sequoias was filled with all manner of nocturnal sounds made by animals that belonged to the night. Still though, they could sense that a malicious force had invaded their domain in the form of a giant of great enmity, and so kept their distances. The temperature had fallen considerably, and Mark was naked from head to toe. He didn't feel the cold at all, but Joel was weak and hungry and trembled as he regained consciousness, partly from the cold but mostly out of fear. To his surprise Mark had gotten a fire going and was roasting some large mammal he'd killed and skinned. The smell of the meat was irresistible to someone like Joel who needed to eat a vast amount of food to energize his massively muscled body. His mouth watered and for a moment he thought that the old Mark had returned to vanquish the fiendish personality that had recently overwhelmed him so completely. But his thinking on this was quickly laid to rest. He fleetingly wondered how Mark had gotten a fire going on a damp forest floor but thought against asking.

“Eat your fill, Scotty. Then use your power to shift us from here,” he ordered coldly, tearing off a leg of meat which he then tossed towards Joel. It was a little overdone and Joel wasn't even sure what kind of creature he was eating, but he was grateful for the offering. Mark kept the rest for himself and hunkered down with his back to a tree to feast on the carcass.

“This isn't just about getting back at Redfern. It's also about Raul... what he did to you, I mean?” Joel was taking a risk asking something like this. Getting Mark even more worked up could have dire consequences. But as he ate and felt his strength returning, so he began to think that Mark would spare his life, if only to use him to get to Redfern. Mark barely acknowledged him as he chewed his meal noisily. In the reflected glow of the flickering campfire flames, Mark's body was radiant and beautiful, especially in the area where his rippling pecs cast huge shadows over his abdomen. With every chew of the fibrous sustenance, Mark's muscles bunched and heaved, flexed and relaxed. It was a ceaseless motion and Joel felt himself growing hard just watching him eat.

“I'm going to fucking kill that bastard,' Mark snorted, and pounded the humus floor with one fist, hard enough to cause the forest to quake. Creatures of the night squeaked, squawked, and caterwauled a cacophony of defiance. Joel's heart leaped inside him.

“I know why you are like this. It happened when Redfern stuck his finger into your face. He did the same to Trey, infecting him with megalomania. You've got it as well. I think I can help you regain control.” Joel was done with eating now. He felt his strength returning rapidly and he flexed his muscles to work the heat from the fire into them. He was huge but still a dwarf compared to Grade One Mark.

“How did you know about that,” Mark growled, making a huge fist as if about to strike the ground again. He hesitated.

“Who do you think intercepted Raul's teleporting of you to bring you to the semi? My ability folds space around me, but it also acts like a two-way mirror. Sounds and images filter in, but nothing of me leaks out. I was monitoring the situation with you, Trey, and Redfern back in the apartment, waiting for the right moment to act. I could only pull you out once Raul activated his portal. Besides, I needed you away from Redfern... his powers are considerable, and we just don't know what he is capable of beyond what he's already demonstrated.” Good, he had Mark's interest and the bodybuilder-god had yet to pound the earth again.

Mark grew silent, seeming to shrink down into himself somewhat, but maybe that was a trick of the flickering light. Joel was out of his depth in a place like this, having grown up in cities, with little connection to nature. In a wilderness like this he was stripped bare, reduced to his basic elements, in his case... an extra-sensory talent to fold space, massive muscles adorning his ample frame... and the desire to grow, always to grow, although of the four super-bodybuilders Redfern had augmented, Joel's desire to grow was not as governing of him as it was the others.

“I... I think I... killed Trey.... absorbed him somehow.... absorbed him into me and my mind. I have this place in my head... like a dream only a real place... within a dream. I took Trey there and killed him.” The realization of what he'd done now struck Mark with a cold audacity. Joel concentrated and prepared to fold space around himself, purely a defense mechanism. He could escape now if he wanted to, but something caused him to pause from taking that course of action. Was Mark returning to his old self? He needed to keep talking, to keep his mind interested in anything but killing him or uprooting any more trees.

“Trey loved you very much. You couldn't help yourself and no one blames you for what happened. Redfern is to blame for this. He caused this imbalance in you, but Trey got over it. Heck... he wanted to rule the world at one point. Redfern messed around with Trey and Raul more than Carter and me. But one good thing came of Trey's hostility towards Redfern, it allowed us to escape from the Collective when first we realized we could stop time by flexing during a growth spurt. Trey's not here to tell you the rest of what you need to know. But I can try to fill in the blanks if you'll allow me to.” But Mark now knew all that he needed to know, thanks to his absorption of all that had been Trey Waters.

Silence ensued, during which Mark seemed to shrink down further into himself. He began to shake back and forth, erratic movements gripping him like a palsy. He pressed his hands to his temples and grimaced, hissing against a sudden upheaval taking place inside his head. 'Unnnngh....can't stop this... too much to... buh-bear!!'

Joel could do nothing but watch, helplessly, as Mark began to change, shrinking down further, his entire body transforming into something else.... nay... someone else. Muscles pulsed, flexed, and became more compact, still massive in size despite their shrinkage. Bones shifted audibly as the frame upon which Mark's massive muscles were supported became denser, smaller, but still huge enough to support his now 1000 lbs. of weight. In a matter of a minute or so, Mark Stone ceased to exist, and in his place.... a much smaller, but somehow more powerful Trey Waters sat, naked and rippling, more beautiful than ever before. The palsy ended and an eerie kind of calm befell the forest.

Sweating profusely, misty perspiration rising off him to condense in colder air, it was as if Trey had been re-forged from a womb riven by flames. Joel was speechless. The only one he had seen shape-shift before was Carter, for that had been the extra-ability he'd developed as a side effect of Redfern's Enerflex experiments.

“Trey... is that really you?” Joel's mouth fell agape, and his eyes waxed huge in their sockets. This was all too remarkable. It was as though having killed Carter, Mark had absorbed his shape-shifting ability. If Trey had been killed by him in some alternate dimension formed of thoughts alone, then perhaps something of Trey lingered there still... in Mark's mind. Somehow Mark's thinking about Trey willed this to happen. All of this was highly speculative, mind. But it was as good a theory as any.

Trey looked across the campfire and was pleased to see a familiar face. He still shuddered a little but at least the heat of the fire helped. “Please tell me what's going on, Joel? Where are we? And where's Mark?”

Joel didn't know where to begin, but just continued to stare at the regenerated Trey Waters. Around them the night concealed the travesties of a fiend... as much as it cradled a miracle.

 * * * * *

In the deepest recesses of an inaptly named “clinic,” Raul Ortega, a most intimidating man given his size and strength, nevertheless cringed outside of the workshops of his Lord and Master. He was facing an unknown threat, and no one had gazed at Donnie since when he'd been relinquished of his humanity due to Redfern's biological (bio-illogical?) tinkering.  According to Redfern, Donnie's mutation had accelerated due to the introduction of tainted Enerflex formula into his system. Raul, like the half-dozen bulked-up gray-skinned thralls sent to assist him, was armed with two modified UMP .45 caliber submachine guns, each one capable of firing a chemically charged bullet at a rate of 580 rpm. The chemical was a reversion formula to Enerflex but was housed in a secondary chamber designed to explode after the bullet's silver/titanium compound tips had punctured Donnie's immensely resilient outer skin.

The area had been flooded with ultra-violet lightning, leaving nowhere for the beast to withdraw to. These creatures of the night tended to avoid direct sunlight, but was this having any kind of adverse effect on a creature beyond doors that seemed too flimsy to contain its rampage? It was too quiet. Raul gulped audibly due to nervous tension. He cocked both of his guns and tried not to think about shitting his shorts.

Behind him, his smaller subordinates, the gray-skins, with their deathly pallor and even less animated gaze, would do whatever he ordered them to. That suited him. He puffed up his enormous chest, flexed a little blood into his muscles, and ordered three of the six thralls to enter the workshops. Little more than mindless trogs, their wills completely bent to their master and his senior lieutenants, the first three kicked through the only entrance into the workshop. They drew back from the ultra-violet lamps which immediately seared the outer layer of their pallid skin. Raul was grateful that his master had seen fit to leave his humanity relatively intact. But the thralls were too far gone, re-made in their master's image too extensively. The thralls hissed out an agonizing objection to their mission, but Raul was uncaring. “Sweep the area and clear,” he commanded with an authoritative tone he generally kept in storage until his master was out of earshot. “The light stings us, pleeeeese be merciful,” the creatures hissed in a fawning tone that was to be pitied. “Lt. Donnie is nowhere to be found,” one of them was only too eager to impart, his skin beginning to smoke as the lamps made short work of the moisture in his altered body. Raul ordered the second three to enter. They went willingly, but like the first three were soon screaming in pain. That should have been enough to provoke Donnie, had Donnie been capable of reacting at the time.

Raul killed the UV lamps and restored normal low-watt lighting, much to the relief of the thralls. When he was convinced that it was safe to enter the lab cesspit, he did so... and almost gagged at the site of what he found there.

Every surface: walls, floors, ceiling - the remains of whatever benches, shelves and workstations that still resembled such - was slick with disgorged organic matter. It was as though Donnie had exploded, but only after ingesting (absorbing?) every comatose test-subject Redfern had present in the workshop at the time, as well as Pete. The smell was pungent and nauseating. Raul felt his gorge rising but just about managed to keep it down. Still, he couldn't bear to be in this room for more than a couple of seconds. The thralls gave the room a clean sweep and reported it clear of monstrosities.

“He must have nearly filled the room before he turned into so much sludge,” Raul commented, deciding it was okay to lower his UMPs.

Just as he did so, the doors slammed shut, as if of their own accord, trapping all six thralls within. Power to the lights was cut and in the darkness of the former workplace of Mathias Redfern, flashfire from several guns cut through the blackness, the high-velocity pulses from the weapons not loud enough to drown out the screams of six altered men being relinquished of their spines. As the gunfire ceased, the sound of flesh being wrenched apart completely brought Raul's gorge up and he began to panic, unleashing a hail of machine-fire from the twin nozzles of his UMPs. He emptied two complete magazines into the doors to the workshop, and as he did so, raced backwards, his movements completely controlled by adrenaline. When the guns were spent, he dropped them and held his breath for a moment, stooped over, each shoulder almost scraping the walls on either side of him.

The doors had been reduced to wood chips so that the being thus emerging could do so with little effort. Raul couldn't believe what he was seeing. Empty footprints formed of the putrid slick remains of an organic monstrosity, appeared to animate themselves along the corridor, as though the invisible thing that made them sought an audience with Raul. Fear riveted him to the spot. In his mind came a mental inquiry from his master: “What is happening down there? The video cameras aren't transmitting. Respond to me, Raul.”

But Raul couldn't respond, for fear had transfixed him. The invisible thing closed the distance, its footprints, tap-tapping along and voiced in wet, tacky splashes. An insubstantial wraith solidified before him, firming up out of thin air itself. He was human-shaped... seemingly with his humanity completely restored... but fleshed out in a manly beauty the like of which Raul could have easily rivalled back when he was in the early stages of muscular development.  

Donnie Drake was human again. But how was this possible? “Hello Raul. Did I miss anything fun?” Raul was speechless. Redfern would have to be informed of this right away. He immediately formed a portal behind him and stepped into it, leaving the embodiment of an inexplicable process standing passively in the blood-stained corridor.

Nothing ventured... indeed.

To be continued . . .

[Ro20316]

Omg what set of chapters.

The twist amd turns of the story are awesome. Im kinda sad for Carter and Trey. I feel they all would have made a great team.

There is still so much to talk about and that endinh!!! Amaazing

[FallenAway]

Part 10  

With his energy levels replenished, Joel McIntyre, safe in the knowledge that Mark Stone was no longer “of this world” (but for how long?), folded space around them and left the exposure of the sequoia forest far behind. His power was crude at the best of times and required tremendous force of will and concentration to achieve any measure of accuracy. But he succeeded in taking them both to an island off Ireland's West Coast. There was a cottage there that belonged to his late grandmother, and she had bequeathed it to him in her last will and testament. As a Briton, Joel would use the cottage on getaway weekends, sex-romps as he'd once referred to them, back in the days when bodybuilding was just a pipe dream. When he wasn't using the cottage, he would rent it out to immigrant families. That way he had been able to pay for his college fees, and just about keep his head above water following the death of his parents in a car accident when he was seventeen. The cottage would serve the bodybuilders as a temporary sanctuary, a place to plot their next move... ultimately to try to figure out what the hell had just happened to Mark.

The cottage was small but catered to their needs. Currently it was idle and devoid of tenants. Times had improved for Joel, along with his incredible physique, and a one-year relationship with a dying “old queen” had left him once again on the plus side of a last will and testament. The benefactor, one Ronnie Lang, had been in his fifties when inoperable cancer was found in him. He had been rich and lonely, in need of companionship to make his last months on Earth as pleasurable as possible. Ah, but Joel's caresses could hardly soothe in the way morphine could. But Ronnie, looking some fifteen years older due to the ravages of the tenacious disease, had been grateful nonetheless, and left three million pounds to Joel, his final “companion.” Most of that money had been invested in Joel's rise to bodybuilding greatness. It had helped to get him started off in the early years, since when his meteoric gains in the beginning soon attracted the attention of someone in Mathias Redfern's employ. Metazeniosis was suspected and a business card bearing the logo and details of the MR Utopian Collective's Body Enhancement Emporium had been slipped into his locker at the gym in Edinburgh where he had carried out the first year of his training. It was during this first tentative year that his incredible gains had surprised not only Joel himself, but everyone at the gym.  

The rest was history. Redfern quickly admitted him into the Collective and was made the study of Carter Yan, the fiend's new intern. Yan himself was a most promising bodybuilder in that his condition easily broke through the Asian genetic predisposition to be lean. Skipping forward a bit, when four augmented men had formed a sub-Collective of their own, the fact that Joel was stinking rich would help their cause greatly. For a start, they were able to acquire the semi and transform it into a mobile laboratory, which Joel could easily hide from Redfern thanks to the extra ability he had acquired as a reaction to Enerflex. But the semi was a long way away now, its secrets laid bare, and its structure completely flayed open thanks to Mark Stone's rampage. The cottage would provide them respite and little else.

“The last time I was here I could just about fit through these doors,” Joel remarked, somewhat amused at how his shoulders were wider than the front door. He was still smaller than Trey who'd decreased by fifty percent since his re-birth. The men just about managed to squeeze themselves inside and found that the living conditions were hardly suitable to their sizes.  

“It's a tight squeeze, but at least it’s better than that forest,” said Trey, carefully lowering himself onto the couch, a two-seater that just about accommodated the girth of his tremendous thighs. He was extremely tired and felt like he could sleep for a week. The staircase to the second floor was ridiculously narrow, but Joel managed to get to the master bedroom above, where he kept a suitcase containing mostly clothing and other essentials, should he ever need to get out of Dodge at lightning speed. He dressed in a pair of sweatpants that clung to his parts like a second skin, along with a simple green polo-shirt, which was also tight in places, but he reckoned it would hold. He found a pair of stretchy shorts for Trey and a wife-beater that he hoped would fit him. Thankfully Joel's feet still fit into spare sneakers he kept at the cottage. Alas... as the heavier of the two, Trey would have to go barefoot for the time being. The House of Trione was not on their visiting agenda, and this was the only place where they could get replacement clothes that would fit them perfectly. But there would be time for that later.

They stayed awake into the small hours of the morning, unsure of what day it was, but hardly caring. As Metazens they could usually go without sleep for up to forty-eight hours, if need be, and there was a lot that they needed to discuss. Joel disappeared into the cottage's tiny scullery and produced a bottle of red wine that he knew was there. It wasn't expensive stuff by any means, and neither man drank as a habit, but habits were meant to be broken. In the glow of the cottage's small electric fire, with Trey stretched out on the couch and Joel just about able to fit in the matching armchair directly opposite, the scene was set for some necessary and interesting discussion:

“What's the last thing you remember before waking up in the forest?” It was as good a place as any to start. Joel sipped his wine and found it pungent, with a pleasing aftertaste. It was nice.

Trey thought hard about this, the wine making him heady despite he'd only downed half a glass at this point. “I had a dream... only it felt like something more... as if it really happened. It's hard to explain. I was with Mark, and he was growing huge. I wanted to fuck him so badly, Joel, because when we were together, I could never violate him like that. He was too fragile to take it when he was scrawny. But since his metamorphosis, my lust for him intensified. I... I...,” Trey fought hard to make sense of what happened next, but he couldn't, beyond describing the sensation of being drained to the quick by Mark's insatiable desire to get way beyond huge.

“If you said this happened in some dream dimension, we must assume that it's a real place and that Mark, as a Grade One Metazenic bodybuilder, has the power to access this place. And he can draw people there to do with as he sees fit. It wasn't a dream, Trey. This happened to you in the physical sense as well.” Joel was lost in thought for a time, wishing that Carter could be here to add some insight into the ever-developing series of bizarre occurrences that now seemed synonymous with their everyday lives.

“I know that I used Mark's body to come back, and that to do so I tapped into Carter's shape-shifting ability, which is now very much a part of Mark's abilities,” Trey added after the silence had become deafening. “Further to this, Joel, the fact that I seem to be half my size and weight suggests that it takes a great amount of power, will, and effort to make this transference possible, if indeed it can be called that.”

Joel nodded and added his two cents: “This all stems from Redfern. I get the impression that the fiend isn't one hundred percent sure about the effects of Enerflex, and the fact that the side-effects alone seem to have an agenda entirely their own. Mark has your former megalomaniacal tendencies, and that's why you now share his body and Carter is dead. I'm given to wondering if Redfern can resist the temptation of further experimentation. It could be an addiction of his... but to what end? What does he truly get out of this beyond the thrill of scientific discovery?”

“I can feel Mark now, Joel. He's trying to regain physical dominance. Now I know how Bruce Banner feels.” Trey shifted uncontrollably on the couch, its confines becoming uncomfortable. Joel immediately grew concerned. “I must hold him back, Joel.... but it's...it's... difficult... trying... to maintain... con...trol!” Sweat now dappled Trey's rippling skin, his back arching away from the couch as his body was seized by a violent spasm, one that literally took his breath away. Trey's body began to expand as the suppressed Mark, locked inside his altered cells, vied for dominance yet again. Should that be allowed to happen, Joel might not be able to resist him.  

“Trey, you have to fight this,” Joel cried, panicking. He stood up and swayed on his feet, for the wine had gone to his head and that didn't help matters. He watched, horrified, as a once passive Trey was seized by violent spasms that had him kicking and thrashing about, which did the living room furniture little good.

“Cuh-can't stop thisssssss!”

It was then that something unprecedented happened. Call it purely instinct, but it seemed that Joel suddenly knew what to do. He concentrated for all he was worth, and instead of folding space around his body to snatch him from potential harm, he projected his talent towards Trey.... and not only that... it went into Trey as well. But to what effect?

Suddenly Trey began to calm down, as the beast within him was mollified for now. The spasms quietened and his body returned once again to a completely passive state, although it could be said that each man's body was pumped with adrenaline. Not only that... Trey was pumped.... bigger than before, having regained quite a bit of the size that his regeneration had robbed him of. This was punctuated by the fact that the clothes Joel had lent him now fluttered to the floor in tatters. “What just happened?” Trey was breathless from exertion and panic... they both were.

Joel didn't have an answer, but he decided to stake a guess. “I think I inverted my power somehow... projecting it at you.... and into you. This is metaphysics, hardly something I'm au fait with.” Again, Joel wished that Carter could offer his analysis. But there was no time to mourn any losses. “I think that I have folded space around Mark, somehow, trapping him, or at least the essence of him that tried to reclaim the space your body occupies. Maybe he's out of phase now and can’t re-emerge. This is all speculative, Trey. But the theory seems to fit the facts.”

“I need to cry for him, but I can't. I love him so much... or loved him. I don't know. I don't know much of anything anymore. I want to shed tears, but they just won't come.” Trey stood up and puffed himself up to full height. He remembered being this size so recently, and he longed to be massive again, but it didn't really bother him that he wasn't. He was just pleased to be alive. Still, he played with his muscles, and both were glad for the show as it helped to settle their minds on something pleasant after the brief near-miss of Mark's attempted re-emergence. There was no way to fathom Trey's size currently. With their Enerflex supply cut off... maybe permanently, sure they might still get bigger from bench-pressing oil trucks and such, but it would be harder work than just availing themselves of Enerflex-glycogen bonding. Joel, too, had grown... he could tell by how snugly his clothes clung to him. And his cock and balls were bigger than ever. As Trey flexed in front of Joel, dominating that tiny living room, his head almost scraping the ceiling, Joel grew wet as precum started to soak into his sweatpants. His breathing once again became erratic, this time with lust. He quickly burst out of his clothing.

“Look at my biceps,” Trey remarked, gracefully yet arrogantly arcing his arms upward to form two granite peaks that bulged up to his wrists. He remembered how they had recently formed secondary peaks, pushing their height higher, even beyond his balled fists. Although his bizarre return had robbed him of a great deal of his size, nevertheless he retained much of his muscular aesthetics, even more so. Veins like raised tree roots cracked across his flesh, driving energy into every fiber of his muscles. He made a full lat-spread and his muscles heaved upwards and outwards, the over-swell of his upper pecs glancing off his perfectly formed chin. His nipples expanded and pushed out from his pecs, each one only short of calling out to Joel's now eager lips. As Trey flexed harder and harder, both men got off to it, their once indolent cocks now twitching with vigor and growth of their own.

“Damn, you're turning me on,” the Scot exclaimed, unable to suppress his lust at this time, nor did he want to. He needed this. They both did. Trey's cock expanded to about sixteen inches. It was huge and manly-thick but fell many inches short of what it had been until so recently. Joel flexed off a crab pose, his definition, symmetry, and separation even more pronounced than Trey's. Joel was one of the most aesthetic super-huge bodybuilders of all time and at around 800 lbs., were he to get any larger, his aesthetics would only improve. It was a thought that made him even hornier as his mind briefly dwelt on it.

“I'm getting bigger, Joel. But how? We're out of Enerflex.” It was true. The more Trey flexed the huger he became. It was phenomenal. He was regaining his former 2000+ lbs. of muscle-bulk and he was doing so in a matter of seconds.

“Uhhh, so horny, Trey. It must be Carter's ability.... muscle memory and all that. It's allowing you to.... uhhh... re-imagine your former size.” Joel was stroking his huge, thick cock as he proffered yet another five cents explanation to Trey. The cottage was becoming too small for Trey as his height continued to challenge the ceiling for dominance. Trey did another double biceps flex and this time, his bis shot up higher than his balled fists, his beloved secondary peaks now returned to where they were meant to be. Every part of him filled out, blossomed with muscular magnificence... thicker... huger... heavier!

“BODYBUILDING!! BODY-FUCKING-BUILDING!!!” Trey screamed, and every pane of glass in every window frame of the cottage rattled, some on the verge of shattering. His power was returning... increasing. Joel's lust was rising and as it augmented, it caused massive muscle growth in him, too. How was this possible without Enerflex? Were the two men in the process of developing further abilities, ones that managed to bridge the gap between Enerflex dependence and the ability to expand without it? There was no way to know without tests being performed. Joel guessed it must have something to do with Mark, now suppressed and contained, as if both men could suddenly draw power off him to fuel their muscle-growth. Joel's body was thickening, getting heavier and heavier as his body found ways to trick his muscles into “thinking” there was Enerflex bonding with glycogen.

Trey and Joel became locked in a passionate embrace, the heat of their bodies almost welding them together as one incredible mass of beautiful muscle. Trey opened his mouth to accept the eager offering of Joel's tongue whilst the Scot massaged Trey's still-expanding mega-chest, finding that he had to apply ever-increasing pressure to knead the pecs as they each grew bigger and harder... huger... HUGER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As the stronger man, extreme lust at its most masculine and primordial caused Trey to become the Alpha Male and he pushed Joel to the ground, the force of which sent him crashing through the floor. Both men fell through to the cellar below, a small earthen square in which preserves had once been stored. The cellar stank of something rotten, and organic... definitely vegetable in origin, but neither man gave it any notice. As debris from the destroyed living room rained down on them, the vast sweep of Trey's delta back afforded them ample protection as he took position over the wantonly lustful Joel.

“Got... to... give it to you, Joel... need to... stamp you... with my Mark!” Trey's entire body quivered with anticipation, his gonads firing up in preparation to release their load. Both men continued to grow beyond reason as they engaged in this carnal fusion... one formed of two of the strongest, hugest bodybuilders in existence. Joel cried out in defiance of Trey's invasion. It wasn't that he didn't want it. It was just so difficult trying to push back against the bigger man's incredible strength. As Trey pounded against Joel, their combined weight compacted the earth beneath them, sending great tremors surging through the island's rocky mantel. It was as though the entire island trembled from the effort. Joel gave it his all... willing more size and weight onto his ultra-dense skeleton to simply make it through the sex. Both men needed the release so badly. This was a time that had to be relished.

Joel clenched his fabulous bubble butt and gritted his teeth as his overbearing dominator sent his seed deep into his rectal canal. Driving.... hammering... pulverizing... Trey went with his meat, seeking no mercy, deriving no solace from the act. It was a rape of epic proportions, but one with Joel's utmost consent. Their bodies were physical works of art, living architecture upon which dark avenues burrowed deep between mountains and miniature fortresses of muscular exactitude. As the muscles heaved and flexed from the acts of sex and the extreme growth seemingly inspired by it, so the vein mazes that fed the colossal musculatures with nutrients thickened and propagated, turning each man into an incredibly sculpted leviathan.

Trey's cry was an ululation of absolute triumph as his climax caused a torrent of jism to flood Joel's innards. His hunger for Trey's crème had an agenda of its own and would not waste a single drop. Trey came and came, seemingly without letup, pumping liters of his spunk into Joel, who himself came in abundance. It was a glorious union in which they both wished they could forever remain. But this was just the lust of the moment doing their thinking for them. All good things had to come to an end. It was a natural law. Then again, to look at these two gigantic men, their combined weight now more than two tons, an innocent and ignorant by-stander would hardly see where anything natural might apply to them.

Trey withdrew from Joel, allowing the smaller man to turn onto his back. He was filthy from the dirt floor, his sweat and cum making the dirt into a paste that covered him almost from head to foot. Trey likewise was filthy, but he cared little for this as he lowered his head to kiss Joel once again. Their lips locked for what seemed like time immemorial. Joel noticed how the cellar was open to the sky and moonlight was raining down from above. Their lovemaking had completely collapsed the cottage, although debris that should have been falling from above seemed suspended... somehow.

Time had begun to slow, its passage rendering down to complete chronological arrest. Both men became aware of this when their bodies were seized by the rictus of a ‘no-time’ time-lock. Still in the embrace formed of the aftermath of sex, they were aware of the very dust motes in the air now seeming to hang in timeless suspension. The effects soon gripped them both and they found themselves unable to move. However, as with time-locks and the fact they were generated by their flexing bodies during a growth spurt, both Joel and Trey were aware of the non-passage of time. What's more, although they could not speak, they could still communicate... with their minds.

“This is incredible. We're doing this without Carter and Raul, for the first time, Trey.”

“I know, how weird is that? It must be Mark having absorbed my strength and Carter's ability. It's like we've been unified and now our powers are increasing.”

The time-lock would last just a few minutes. As the men came out of it, a huge discharge of electricity was released from their bodies. The time-lock would continue for just a little longer. It would be wrong to waste such an opportunity to strike while their man-irons were hot.

“The fortress. Now is our only chance, Joel,” said Trey, pleased that they both had stopped growing. Joel looked about the same size as Trey and they were far bigger than they'd ever been before. But there would be time for flexing and fun later if they lived to see a new dawn.

Two massive hulks of men clambered out of the cluttered pit on which firm ground had once supported a quaint and cozy cottage. Thankfully this area of the island was somewhat isolated, therefore there were no witnesses to have the wits scared out of them at the sight of Trey and Joel, both naked as they day they were born, covered in dirt ̶ cum dripping off them in sticky, elongating beads ̶ and loping away from the devastation their sexual act had caused. But had someone seen them, they would have questioned their own sanity as both men seemed to disappear in the blink of an eye. Thankfully no eyes, human or otherwise blinked in disbelief in the aftermath of their departure. Time was still on their side, but for how long?

 * * * * *

Redfern was furious, with himself mostly. He should have seen this coming and raged in his mind as he struggled to focus inwardly and call upon alien energies within him to break out of the time-lock. How was this possible, that the others could slow time without Raul contributing to the phenomenon? The answer was as plain as the forked tip of Redfern's serpent tongue: Evolution. The Metazens had arrived at a more advanced phase of their genesis and not even Redfern was sure if he was still powerful enough to revert them. He admitted to himself that he had performed in a manner most sloppy, one most unbecoming of the character he had spent decades molding himself into. Ah, but he was only one character in three, a most unholy trinity festering in a body that had long since relinquished its hold on humanity.

In one of many panic rooms, connected via bolt holes and service passageways built into the skin of the fortress/clinic's underbelly, a massive discharge of electricity knocked out the main power throughout the edifice, plunging everything into complete blackness. It was the sign that Redfern and Raul had broken out of the time-lock. The darkness could never pose a problem to a creature that could see quite well in utter blackness, for as much as the blood of others provided sustenance to Redfern, there was another thirst in him that was in dire need of satisfying. And for as much as the blood was life to a thing such as he, the darkness itself could often be the net he would cast to ensnare the purveyors of that blood.

Raul and Maury were different matters altogether. Raul Ortega hated the darkness, for he'd spent way too long in dark solitary confinement during his prison stretch. The prison shrink had believed it would pacify his rages and sexual proclivities. Well, it did to a certain extent. But it also freaked him out upon occasion, often reverting him back to a child-like state in which he would cry for his Mama during the night. Fortunately, the emergency generators kicked in and the panic room was given light once more, only one of an extremely low wattage.

“They will come, Raul. We must be ready, although their statuses and strengths are unknown.” Redfern darted towards a large console spanning an entire wall in the panic room. It was decked out with all kinds of bells and whistles, but it consisted mostly of video monitors, each one displaying nothing but white static. Stooped over the console as he flicked switches and twisted knobs, his gray eyes: each tinged with a hint of scarlet as it darted fleetingly from one monitor to the next, Redfern resembled a nightmarish creature indeed, as though nature in its occasional mismatching of designs, had saw fit (or unfit?) to splice together a great Desmodus bat and a scarecrow thing wrought from the disturbed imaginings of a dreaming child. Raul now realized his master was a monstrous thing indeed, for Raul wasn't the only one used to metamorphosis. Indeed, his Lord and Master was a master of metamorphism at its most convoluted and fiendish.

“Donnie killed all of the gray thralls, Master,” said Raul, finding it was altogether too warm in the cramped confines of the panic room. He was more than 2000 lbs., maybe a lot more, and he wished to teleport them all away to somewhere less confining. But his master could be into his mind so easily, and should Raul attempt escape via teleportation, Redfern would void him of the ability before he had a chance to step out of the portal on the other side. He would be trapped in no-where and no-when... forever. So much darkness was a horror too unbearable to contemplate.

“Yes, I know, Raul. Each of them was made from my blood, and I felt their ends one by one as Donnie wrenched the unlife from them.” Moving like a living shadow, Redfern now more elongated and hunched than before, oozed away from the console and almost hovered over Raul like the Angel of Death. Redfern's face was monstrous for his jaws had become those of a wolf, with huge incisors forming a malevolent overbite that caused his lips to gush with tacky dark fluids. His eyes seemed even more red in their orbits and his cheeks appeared to have collapsed inwards, creating hollows that fed on the scant light of the room. But in those hollows, something moved... nay... squirmed, seemingly on the threshold of life... or something that parodied life as we understand it. Tinges of their own, however faintly blue, where his eyes were red, the pits of Redfern's spectral countenance housed secrets of their own.  

“There are just the three of us now, Raul, for I also felt Simon's true death, so keep your resolve. I sense that Trey and Joel are enroute to the Alps even as I speak.” Redfern knew that he had Raul's undivided loyalty. There was something of his stuff in the Hispanic, but not enough to exact a fully vampiric transformation. In fact, Raul was still human... in the main. Maybe he would eventually turn, in a century or so, should Redfern ever permit him to live that long. Redfern bent his hunched, dark-robed body further as he drew close to the unconscious young Maury Rose Jr on the panic room floor. The boy was curled like a great fetus, naked and bloated as Redfern's taint worked its way through him at the cellular level. Redfern had changed him, made him his thrall, a fledgling vampire who would know his master for long and long, his ascension to higher status lost on the horizon of future time. Redfern needed a ‘fractal lamina’ in Raul... a halfling with no fear of daylight, to carry out Collective business when the main staffing body was sleeping in its dark niches. That is why Raul had never been made Redfern's senior lieutenant. Soon Maury Rose would awaken, changed irrevocably and he would rightly step into that role.

“I am fully charged, Master. I will teleport us at the first time of trouble,” Raul resolved, flexing in front of Redfern in the hope that it could keep his mind from worrying about what was to come.

“A loyal sentiment from one such as you, Raul,” said Redfern, forming a loathsome half-grin/sneer. Cur-like lips were drawn back from a snout of needle-sharp teeth, but quickly became a cold frown as Redfern reshaped his muzzle into something more human-like. “But we shall not flee this place... unless left with little or no alternative. Trey and Joel shall come here, aye. But as you have seen with your own eyes, Donnie has been re-born as something powerful, something I must know. He is straight in his sexual orientation. If I can leech off him, he could make me far more powerful than I could ever dream of becoming. And I have a feeling that he will be anxious to meet Trey and Joel again, when they eventually arrive.”

Much of this flew right over Raul's head. There were things about Redfern that mystified him even now. He accepted that the gyms of the Utopian Collective were used to recruit young straight men into the Collective's hive, from which Redfern's bodybuilders would seduce them, fuck them and have them hating themselves in the morning. Indeed, Raul had fucked many a youth this way, the bullish college jock type being his favorite... the ones who resent homosexuality to such an extent that to actually be a participant in a homosexual act would create one hell of a mental derailment. It was the conflict that arose from such derailments that Redfern had particular interest in. But as a source of... food? Surely not. This was as much as Raul knew about his Master. Sure, Redfern was a vampire in the truest sense. But there was something else in the fiend that even true vampires cowered from. That was the part of Mathias Redfern known only to himself.  

“Master, I saw what Donnie can do. I heard him slaughter six thralls armed with UMPs. He can be as of mist, invisible and more terrible because of it. How can you possibly apprehend him, much less rape him to conflict status?” Raul simply could not fathom such an act, although to see it happen would be impressive indeed.

Redfern drew away from the re-forming Maury, knowing that he would have a new creature up and about shortly. His face now restored to something ugly but vaguely human, Redfern managed a true grin, one that seeped sulfur and malice as his eyes flashed a deeper crimson than before.

“Oh, I have every intention of tasting the conflict in Donnie, dear Raul. As of the rape of this one... I will leave that entirely to you.”

 

To be continued in the final chapter . . .

 

[FallenAway]

Part 11

The cavern into which they emerged was dark and cold. But despite that Trey and Joel were both naked, wearing only sheaths formed of drying bodily fluids and cellar dirt, their amazing physiques easily resisted the extreme low temperatures that would prove fatal to lesser men. They'd both been in the cave network before, assisting Raul's raiding sorties into the heart of the fortress, but neither Joel nor Trey had ever ventured further. Still, Raul (although the others were unsure of his loyalties at the time but were cautiously willing to allow him to attempt the Enerflex snatches) was able to provide them with a rudimentary layout of the naturally occurring cavern network within the mountains which connected ostensibly with what could only be Redfern's tunnels of escape... his bolt holes... lest the great vampire ever need to slip away with his unlife intact.

“We don't have much time... five minutes at best,” Joel declared, wishing they'd brought flashlights and such. They chose a direction from which they felt a current of air and quickly noticed how the natural craggy passageway in which they moved was gradually becoming luminescent. The faint blue hue strengthened as they moved closer to the source of the airflow.

“It's like Enerflex,” said Trey, pausing momentarily to touch a vague, blue-lit patch on the rock wall, as if expecting it to provoke a response from his extremely huge muscles. “I wouldn't be surprised if Redfern bothers to dispose of his experiments as carefully as he should. Some of the Enerflex might have seeped out of the drainage system and into the sub-strata of the cavern system. Of course, if true, it will have spoiled long ago, and therefore is useless to us.”

Joel was the first to arrive at the steel grille bolted into a seemingly man-made square-cut passageway through which fresh air could be felt. Joel had the grille off in a trice, crushing the metal into a ball as though it were tinfoil. “I'm stronger,” he admitted, quietly marveling at the feat. When all of this was over, and providing they both survived to flex another day, Joel and Trey both resolved to put their muscles and their increased strength to the test, and most importantly enjoy every minute of getting off to the experience.

In the faint blue light Trey's smug grin was just about visible. He was slightly larger than Joel, now, maybe 100 lbs. heavier, although at their current massive sizes and weights, 100 lbs. made very little difference. Still: “What you can crush like tin-foil, I can probably squeeze so hard the atoms will collapse,” Trey declared with pride.

Joel did not care to be boasted to at this time. As if atoms could collapse, indeed. A quick examination of the bore of the square passage revealed two things: it gradually inclined upwards, probably extending into the very underbelly of the fortress itself, and just about accommodated each man's incredible dimensions.

It was their only way in, and time was of the essence. Because Joel had never been this far, he had no space-folding coordinates to avail of. He began to regret their coming here, because they had no plan and were making it up as they went along. But didn't James Bond also operate in a similar fashion?

They advanced for what seemed like an interminable time, the passage seeming without end. The time-lock effects wouldn't hold much longer, and Trey was given to thinking about what kind of hostilities awaited them above. They eventually emerged into a dark sub-basement, badly lit, with just emergency lights glinting wanly at two-meter intervals along the ceiling above. They loped along the corridor as stealthily as their sizes would allow. Joel noticed a closed-circuit camera overhead. Frozen in time it would be unable to capture signs of intruders. But that would soon change.

“Curious... Raul talked of patrols this far down. He had to teleport every thirty seconds just to avoid them. But now, nothing,” Joel remarked, liking little that they were met with absolutely no resistance. It didn't sit well with him. Eventually they arrived at a flight of steel steps and cautiously took them up to the next level. The passages this far down lacked any kind of hospitable touches, for they were simply escape routes for a fiend. Lighting was necessary because the bolt holes cross connected with service ducts and passageways in need of frequent maintenance. Raul once mentioned having to teleport into some of the service tunnels, encountering some resistance on the way. Did Raul expect to make it in and out freely with every sortie? At its height Redfern's Collective was constantly upgrading its security to make it as impregnable and resistant to teleporters and space-folders as was scientifically possible.

“We should be below Redfern's workshops now... the cesspit of his meddling with nature. And still no resistance. I don't like this at all, Trey... something isn't right.” Joel and Trey had expected to find the time-locked minions of Redfern, his elite, gray-skinned muscle-thralls, each one armed with an array of weaponry. It would have suited them to relinquish some of them of such weapons to protect themselves. But this level was as vacant as the one below.

“Emergency lighting,” said Trey, stopping to review a small information panel on the wall to his left, showing the status of the edifice's electrical systems.

“Redfern and Raul must have already busted out of the time-lock, for only an electrical discharge of that magnitude could have done this,” Joel offered, feeling his strength returning so he could at least keep a space-fold on stand-by, should they need to make a very quick exit. They came to a dead end, one formed of a ceiling cave-in. Who or what could have caused that?

“Damn, we can't go any further this way,” said Trey, picking up a piece of fallen masonry and crushing it to dust with hardly any effort. The action of doing this caused his manhood to twitch with delight.

“I think I can get us above this level with my ability. Redfern spends a lot of time in his workshops, and I have a pretty good memory of the fortress's schematics that Raul stole for us,” said Joel, glancing above him and trying to imagine what the room above might look like.

“Assuming Raul was honest and didn't alter the schematics,” said Trey, feeling that such an assumption was worth a cent or two. Hearing this did little to bolster Joel's confidence. He concentrated on his talent and immediately the men were wrapped up in a spatial rift that temporarily bent reality around them. Real time and space quickly snapped back into place with minimum recoil upon their departure, displacing little more than dust motes hanging statically in the murky air.  

The effect was instantaneous. They arrived in the foul chambers above and immediately the smell contained within caused them to retch violently. “Jesus, what the fuck is all this?” Trey covered his mouth and nose with a hand and Joel followed suit. The emergency lighting in this room was blinking intermittently in time to the sound of something electrical sizzling within its plastic housing. During the rapid exchanges of dim light and soul-searing dark, the companions caught glimpses of the aftermath of a bloody rampage. Every surface was stained with something slick and sickeningly organic and lying in a heap on the offal-smeared floor were six of Redfern's gray thralls, their bodies riven apart... maddeningly defiled. Careful not to skid on the remains of these once-men, Trey picked up a couple of UMPs and ammo belts containing replacement rounds. Now, looking absurdly like two naked commandos engaged in some hilarious naked initiation ritual set by their peers, Joel and Trey made for the open corridor beyond, hardly pausing to acknowledge that the doors to the workshops had been reduced to so many woodchips.

“Why would Redfern have his own men murdered? This doesn't make any sense, laying his defenses so bare like this.” Joel was wrong to assume this, as Trey was only too keen to point out.

“Are we talking about the same Redfern here? Joel, think about this for a second. Would a man who wants to take over the world reduce his defenses to beyond the bare minimum? He's gotten sloppy, maybe. But something tells me a force has been unleashed here, one that even he fears. Its handiwork is all around us.” He paused to look at the machine gun in his grasp. Next to his size the UMP looked ridiculously like a kid's toy. “Judging by the state of our friends back there, even being armed to the teeth, they still ended up as dog food. Maybe we should turn back.”

“And do what?” Joel snapped. “Keep watching over our shoulders for the rest of our days, wondering how, when and where Redfern might next see fit to strike out at us without warning? And what about the future of the world, should the bastard live to realize his Utopian Ideal? That's a euphemistic concept of a horrific reality I would rather avoid.” He slung his UMP over his immensely broad back, surprised that the gun's strap could be adjusted that much, and placed his hands concernedly on Trey's car-width-sized shoulders. He sighed... almost dismissively, but just about held on to his intentions. “We're here now. We must try to stop this. There's no turning back. Besides, the vertical plane space-fold consumed more energy than I thought. I won't be able to fold again for at least thirty minutes. So, we might as well try to do what we can in the time allowed.”

“You're quite handsome when you're being reassuring,” Trey admitted and formed a shaky smile.

Joel smiled back and flexed his pecs a few times to work some blood into them. They swelled a little and made the gun strap groan in defiance. “Come on, we need to keep moving,” said Joel, the first to make it through the doors along the undamaged end of the corridor leading to the ruined workshops.

As they left the ruination in their wake, a creature rose from aether that licked along the corridor in sluggish twists and whorls. The bodybuilders had failed to notice it, but Donnie had heard their every word. His body firmed up into its ‘human’ guise and his body flexed huge in the semi-darkness of the carnage he had caused. He began to walk in the direction of the doors used by Joel and Trey to further their investigation of the incident that seemed to have brought Mathias Redfern's Utopian Vampire Collective to its leprous knees. His appetite having failed to be satiated by the blood of undead servitors; Donnie Drake licked his ice-cold lips in anticipation of a meal truly deserving of his untried hungers.

 * * * * *

Raul, upon instruction from his master, teleported to his quarters to retrieve the remains of the village youth he'd ravaged earlier, the one he had yet to dispose of in a proper manner. It had given Redfern an idea. The cadaver was only recently dead, yet to cool and stiffen. It would provide an insatiable lure to Donnie. Raul wasted no time picking up the remains, which he slung over his back and stepped into a portal back to the panic room. There he found Redfern stooped over Maury Rose Jr, for the young fledgling vampire’s sleep was at an end and he was already stirring with unlife.

“Put that thing down, Raul. Maury will need his first meal upon his full awakening. As for me.... I have other appetites in need of sating. And this one may still be able to provide me what I need.” Redfern was positively cackling with delight now.

“Master, there is no telling what we're up against. Shouldn't you think about escape?” Raul had seen Donnie in the flesh... if it could be assumed that the altered youth still had flesh. He was a construct of Redfern's insatiable curiosity and tinkering. There was no telling what he was capable of.  

“Keep a portal open for me, Raul. Before I flee, I must sample what Donnie can offer me. That way my meddling with nature will not have been entirely in vain.” Redfern paused to consider his words before elongating an already nightmarishly exaggerated fingernail so that he could make a portal of his own, directly into the dead youth's gray matter. “Alive and the energy of defilement and conflict simply flows into me. But dead... I need to tap the well at its source... aaaaaah.” Fused with the corpse in this way, something other than blood flowed into Redfern, causing his cheeks to flush blue with inexplicable tinges. He reared back his wolf-like head and pealed an annunciation of bliss.... “soooooo gooooood!” The youth had died being ravaged sordidly and the pain in his body was stored as memories in his mind, ones that Redfern, for all that he was the freakiest of freaks, had the ability to tap into. If blood was the lifeblood of an unliving vampire, then surely this ‘defilement manna’ was his ultimate narcotic.

Maury awakened fully, lusting for the hungers that only a vampire was capable of. His flesh was ashen gray, muscles huge and ravenous for a glut of blood. He knew his meal was nigh on fresh, for the dead youth's tripes steamed rancid vapors in the small confines of the panic room. No matter, upon instruction from his all-powerful master, Maury was allowed to settle down over the corpse to feed. He was allowed his fill, but only marginally, for the corpse must still prove tempting to Donnie.

“Maury, you are loyal only to me. My stuff is in you and that shall forever make you my creature. Do not harbor ill-will towards me, and you shall do well in my organization.” Redfern allowed the naked vampire to stroke the protoflesh cock of his master. As he did, the member, as if a separate entity, formed a rudimentary set of gnashing teeth on its tip and snapped at Maury's cold flesh. The young vampire immediately drew back with a start and yet could not stare resentfully at the one that made him. “Go out with Raul into the airlock and to the corridor beyond. Lay down this bait and wait in ambush for Donnie to approach. When he arrives set off this charge.” Redfern handed Maury a small, circular grenade containing a chemical stunning agent that would hopefully have a paralyzing effect on Donnie.

He turned to Raul: “Once he is stunned, you will open a portal in the floor directly beneath Donnie, one that connects with the stasis chamber in Panic Room Beta, one floor above us. Once contained, I can do with Donnie as I please.”

The servants of Redfern had their instructions and so entered the airlock, laden down with the bloody remains of a once strong and vigorous Italian youth. Outside emergency lighting blinked erratically, casting intermittent shadows occasionally interrupted by flashes of electric blue. It was as if the entire mountain fortress had been charged with energy, physical and psychical as one. It was unnerving and hardly bolstered confidence out of Raul. Still, he had a job to do. He placed the corpse on the floor and nodded to Maury to prep the charge. The boy seemed so mindless right now, the traits of self-awareness and self-preservation still in the process of being re-written by the powerful psychic hold his master had over him. Still, it meant that Maury knew no fear and would gladly die the true death for the survival of the Lord Mathias Redfern. Raul envied him for his falsely imposed sense of bravery.

“Right. Step into a portal with me and wait for signs of approach. Get ready to throw that charge.” Maury, although in the running for Senior Lieutenant, nevertheless did Raul's bidding. Both men were psychically linked to Redfern, so there was no opportunity for Raul to take advantage of the situation. It would be difficult keeping one portal open and forming another beneath the bait at the precise moment, but Raul would need to keep fear from marring his concentration. The portals were invisible but difficult to maintain. In this fashion Raul was trying to make them more like Joel McIntyre's space-folding/duck-blind ability. But the two abilities were as dissimilar in their effectiveness as they were similar in their execution. The trap was set. All they needed now was to have Donnie make an appearance.

 * * * * *

A couple of floors below, Donnie Drake found suitable prey. From a pool of mist looking like a miniature hurricane as seen from space as it turned in whorls on a checkerboard tiled floor of the anteroom in which they had arrived, a large and leprous tentacle shot out and wrapped itself around Joel McIntyre's ankle. His finger poised on the trigger of the UMP, the shock of his ensnarement caused him to unleash a volley of rounds, narrowly missing Trey's right shoulder.  

'FUCK!!!!' Joel screamed.

As the creature hiding in the pool of mist tugged harder on Joel, further affecting his balance, he aimed the gunfire upwards, cutting a swathe of devastation into the ceiling above. Debris rained down into the anteroom, a small administration office and little else. Joel struck the floor as Donnie continued to reel him into the vortex formed of his own incredible powers of metamorphism. Joel clawed frantically at the floor with his free hand whilst his mammoth strength crushed the UMP simply out of the shock reaction to the attack. His fingers easily dug through the tiles and for a moment neither hunter nor prey had an advantage.  

“Shoot the fucking tentacle, Trey!!!”

Shock riveting him to the spot, nevertheless Trey had to act and broke out of his momentary trance to take aim at the monstrous appendage. Several rounds of ballistic fury found their mark and completely severed the proto-flesh arm. About three feet of it remained clamped around Joel, but in the main the creature withdrew, although the swirling pool of eddying mist remained. Trey wasted no time in hauling Joel to safety before streaming a volley of white-hot fire into the center of the pool, emptying a UMP magazine completely.

Inside the pool the thing that was Donnie howled in defiance of the assault and immediately put out a dozen more tentacles, this time ones with cartilaginous barbs to hook and maim. Fortunately, Trey and Joel withdrew from the anteroom just in time, the tentacles succeeding only in hooking into the wood of the door slammed in defiance of its assault.

The two bodybuilders, although winded, had suffered no damage. They paused briefly in the dark corridor outside to reclaim their breaths. In a fit of rage Trey puffed up massively and launched himself back in the direction of the anteroom.

“What are you doing?” Joel's attention was completely on Trey now, so he forgot all about the three feet long proto-flesh worm that was still hugging his ankle and writhing with a filthy newfound independence.

Screaming maniacally, Trey smashed through the door, reducing it to woodchips and immediately brought the ceiling down on the mist pool still releasing more and more of Donnie's alien/vampiric limbs. The ceiling, along with the floor and most of the furniture in the room above rained down on the mist pool, burying the beast beneath several tons of wood and crumbled masonry. Trey, in the main, was unscathed, and still with inhuman adrenaline fueling his strength, pounded repeatedly on the debris pile, further pulverizing it, hopefully killing the beast beneath. Only when a pile of sand and splinters remained did Trey stand down from red alert. Alas, yellow alert itself would last but a second or two. Returning to the corridor outside, he found Joel wrestling to resist the invasion of the proto-worm thing that had once been part of Donnie. It put out gnashing barbs and pseudo-teeth, a miniature array of hardware that easily sawed through a hide as resistant as Joel's.

“Arrrrghhh!!!!” The pain was like nothing felt by the Scot before as the parasitic thing burrowed into and along his leg, cleaving its way through muscle and sinew, devouring as it went along, adding to its mass. Trey stood there, feeling helpless, not knowing what he could do to help his friend... a friend who meant more to him now in the wake of recent events than Mark had at the beginning of their true relationship. Mark Stone suddenly came to mind... literally.

“There's nothing we can do for him, Trey.”

The voice resounded in Trey's troubled mind, sounding like it was happening all around him. Could this be Mark, contacting him from that weird dream dimension he'd taken him to before? “Mark? Can this be you?”

“Yes, there is no time to explain. But you are free of me now. I passed from you to Joel during the intercourse you shared. I'm not annoyed with you. This marks my return to independence, and I'm changed. I have... new powers now. My evolution is complete. I can return to life now, but to achieve this I must use the parts of Joel that are still uncontaminated.”

It was amazing hearing Mark talking to him like this. But Joel was in so much pain as the protoworm worked its way into the fleshy food reserve that was his massive quadricep muscle. The Scot squirmed in agony on the floor, tearing at his own thigh in a desperate attempt to dislodge the invader. But his efforts were in vain. The thing was taking him over, inch by agonizing inch.

Trey watched in abject horror as the worm did its work and then marveled at the still-human parts of the dying Joel McIntyre as they began to emit a bright glow. The physical touched briefly with the metaphysical, creating a gateway of sorts, a means for a being without physical form to re-mold the untainted parts of Joel into a permanent new body. Whatever alien powers existed in the universe to govern such acts, Mark Stone could only be thankful. It was too late for Joel now... but his death need not be in vain. Flesh made into a soupy, flowing plasma broke away from the diseased leprous lower portion of Joel, even as the corruption had begun to invade the other leg.

“Quickly Trey... accept this gift and do the right thing with it.”

As if those words had been an invocation, a beam of light shot from the flowing white plasma taken over by Mark's shifting life-force and struck Trey dead-center of his chest, forcing him backwards where he struck a wall with enough force to destabilize it. Mark, now sole custodian of what was left of Joel, had taken his power to fold space and summarily transferred it into his boyfriend. But not only that. The ability to use the power on an instinctive level was also transferred. As soon as Trey received it, he was able to immediately make use of it. He conjured a space-fold event and wrapped up the diseased vampiric leg-things in a bubble of no-space/time, effectively canceling them out from our universe entirely. When the danger had passed, he settled back to gaze in utter disbelief at the plasma flow, as it began to solidify and take on layer upon layer of living texture.

Within a couple of minutes Mark Stone breathed the first breath of a new life... a life made of another life forfeited: Joel McIntyre's. But perhaps something of him would live on in Mark Stone, as Trey had lived on in Mark for a time. But this was very much a Mark of old, untouched by the taint of Enerflex. He was his scrawny self once again, as he had been on the day when Trey had strutted into his uncle's store, effectively changing his life forever. It seemed so long ago now... and Trey was huger than ever.

Naked as the day he was born, Mark reached out to Trey and the giant shed tears of joy to find them reunited. Okay, so Mark had a lot of growing to do now, but he was so very glad to see him. He scooped him up in his brawny arms and kissed him repeatedly for what seemed like an interminable moment. It was certainly a moment neither of them wanted to end, but they must be wary of the grave situation they were embroiled in.

“I can't believe this has happened, Mark. I thought you were lost to me forever. I'm so relieved to have you back.” Trey kissed him with all the enthusiasm of a puppy licking the face of its master. It was an absurdly fitting comparison.

“It's good to be back. And what a roller coaster ride it’s been. It's great that we are together again. And don't worry, I'm not about to turn into a 2000 lb. psychopath again. You'll be pleased to hear I've voided all traces of that persona.” But for all that Mark had been restored physically to his original form, there was something about his eyes that didn't seem altogether normal. In the scant light of the corridor, they glowed with a brightness that seemed unnatural, as though Mark had been to a place and seen things that no ordinary man must ever gaze upon. But he seemed all the better for it.

Trey hugged him some more, this time less zealously. He caressed him all over and then froze, as his hand touched something beneath the skin of Mark's abdomen that had no business being there. “Fuck,” Trey recoiled in fright and both acknowledged the proto-flesh globule squirming upwards beneath Mark's skin.

“Damn, looks like some of the tentacle came along for the ride,” said Mark, showing little discomfort.

“We must get it out of you. You will become like the host thing if we don't,” said Trey, panicking.

Mark was thoughtful for a moment. “It's okay. I think this was meant to happen. I can control it somehow. Don't ask me how. Just watch.”

Trey watched as Mark coaxed the proto-worm remnant further upwards. It bored and squirmed beneath the skin but could not acquire sustenance from the host body it had invaded. Trey was horrified and fascinated all at once. Mark continued to guide the creature upwards, across his chest and into his right arm. The thing obeyed mindlessly, for it was without mind, a thing of rancid vampire filth that acted purely on instinct, but instinct that Mark seemed to be in complete control of. Only when the thing made it to the palm of Mark's hand, did its journey cease. Trey only had one thing to say at this point:

“Well don't just stand there... eject it out of you.”

Mark smiled calmly, warmly. “No... it remains here. I feel it'll be of use to me. Don't worry, it can't grow, unless I command it.” Then he stood on his toes and kissed his gigantic lover who lowered his head enough so that their lips could meet yet again. “Let's get to Redfern, Trey... and end this nightmare... finally.”

 * * * * *

Despite Trey's efforts to stamp the ‘life’ out of a multi-tentacled nightmare, a creature that could be physical flesh one moment and clammy licks of mist the next, was not easy to exorcise. Donnie trickled ever upwards out of the pulverized mound of debris containing him, weakened but nonetheless hungry for sustenance. He leaked and trickled his way through pipes and conduits, drawn ever upward to the promise of a meal above. He soon found the remains of a ravaged youth and oozed his way spectrally towards it. He had to become physical to feed and became something of his human self again, although grossly bloated in places. He settled down and crossed two pairs of legs in front of him, then placed hands that formed suckers on the corrupted remains of the corpse-bait and threw his head back to relish the absorption of that which would make him strong again.

“Aaaah....yesssss,” he hissed with serpentine delight. Not needing his mouth to feed, he began to drain the flesh and blood through contact with his sucker-hands. His powers of metamorphosis were still for the most part untried, but his desire was to feed and to kill the monster that had made a lesser monster of him. Lesser? Nay... Donnie was now in an entirely different league to anything Mathias Redfern could have initially conceived. Thinking this made him grin malevolently.

His attention momentarily diverted to his inner lusts and hungers, it was time for Maury and Raul to make themselves known. Raul collapsed his portal, the effort to do so draining as he immediately focused on a second portal directly beneath Donnie. “Maury, throw the stunner.... now!!!” Maury, heavily in thrall to his superior, lobbed the primed chemical grenade and it appeared as if out of nowhere a half-second before the two bodybuilders became visible.

The grenade stuck to Donnie's rapidly expanding body as he realized he was under attack and so galvanized himself against it. But it was too late to retaliate. Caught off guard Donnie was enveloped in a sticky, debilitating fluid upon the device's detonation, a fluid that rapidly solidified into a paralyzing gauze on contact with the air. He tried to put out fresh tentacles to lash out at his malefactors, but the chemical was all-containing and he couldn't metamorphose further. Raul immediately opened the second portal and Donnie, along with the remains of the corpse he fed upon, disappeared into the portal with a jarringly audible “slurp.” In an instant he found himself in Panic Room Beta, secure in a cylindrical reinforced container hooked up to an incinerator. He was contained. The Master Vampire was once again triumphant.

“Raul, take us all to Panic Room Beta. It has enough batteries to run independently of this place for up to a year. A perfect place to examine our little pet project,” Redfern instructed as he gathered himself and prepared to be received by a portal. The transfer was instantaneous, and he arrived just in time to observe Donnie, trapped in the glass cylinder, breaking out of the paralysis gauze. He thrashed about wildly, explosively enraged, but for all the good that would do him. The cylinder would easily withstand his attempts to break free.

“Let me the fuck out of here!” He morphed back into a passable rendition of a human being; however, his muscles were large and bloated but hardly aesthetically so. He would be considered handsome, were his eyes not blazing red and his mouth not ridiculously wide and home to teeth like scythes. He pounded on the glass using fists the size of small boulders. But the cylinder held. Then he tried to escape by transforming to mist once again, but powerful fans overhead kept him where he was.

“My but I got sloppy with you, didn't I?” Redfern drew up close to the cylinder and fixed Donnie with a sulfurous gaze. As an afterthought to his remark, he added: “But some of science's best discoveries were made accidentally and by throwing caution to the wind.” He turned to Raul: “Speaking of which... step through a portal and into the cylinder. It's time Donnie got what's coming to him.”

Horrified, Raul remained tethered to the spot. “Master, I try to obey... but... Donnie... he's more monstrous than ever. I duh-don't want to be like him.” Suddenly Raul was twelve years old again. He found it mentally draining to try to resist his master.

“Fear not, Raul. I have subdued Donnie with a mental command. He will not put up... too much of a fight.” It was true, Redfern had stricken Donnie with a psychic bolt, causing him to return to as near a perfect human form as he could muster. His thrashing about ceased. He withdrew to the floor of the cylinder and curled himself up like a terrified child. But Redfern could feel him resisting and it really taxed his telepathy. Raul would have to act quickly. For this to work... for Donnie to produce ‘defilement manna,’ he would have to think and act most humanly. Keeping him in this state would not be easy. In fact, Redfern was already beginning to buckle under the strain.

“Raul.... teleport in there NOW!!!!!!” Redfern briefly turned to his halfling servant and shot him with an acidic look, warping his features into a great bat/wolf-like visage that was horrific and chilling to observe. Raul had to obey.

Thirty meters south of the fiend's location, Trey and Mark space-folded their way to the same floor as Panic Room Beta. “Raul is about to teleport. I can sense the build-up of his metaphysical charge. Once he activates a portal, I'll be close enough to ride in its distortion wave.” Mark spoke as though he'd been doing this all his life. It seemed that being dead and confined temporarily to an entirely different plane of existence had enhanced him... made him way smarter than even Carter Yan had been.

Trey wanted to say, “when and where did you learn to do that?” but for the most part he was impressed by Mark's new abilities. He just wished he was huge again so that they could enjoy each other's physiques on equal terms.... assuming they made it out of here alive. The next few minutes would determine their futures, deciding whether they had ones at all.

With a tear in his eye, Raul Ortega stepped into a portal, powerless to resist his master's command. He vanished in the blink of an eye but instantly found himself inside the cylinder. With a diameter of just fifteen feet, there was little room for a behemoth of his size to move, but he would just have to fumble his way along. Donnie received him with a warning snarl. But before Raul could get to him, the entire cylinder exploded outwards, bathing everyone in shards of super-thick glass. Maury bore the brunt of the shattering and was cut to ribbons as he flew backwards only to strike the room's control console, which summarily exploded in a shower of sparks. Gravely wounded, Redfern's stuff in him would begin to heal him straight away. Redfern was also stripped of a great deal of his flesh as he took in so much glass. He lost his footing, thrown backwards as the forces of mutated physics combined space-folding with teleportation, allowing Trey and Mark to emerge into the panic room. Raul was slammed backwards, completely crushing Donnie with over one ton of muscle.

“Deal with Redfern while he's flayed open,” Mark instructed Trey. Since when had the scrawniest of them all suddenly become the boss? But it made sense. He had a wisdom in him now that probably rivaled Redfern's own. Massively metamorphic, Trey knew that a vampire of Redfern's pedigree wouldn't stay down for long. Even now his wounds were quickly closing, and he was augmenting himself up to his most monstrous. Trey tried to extend a space-fold event around Redfern, but the vampire’s psychic abilities easily fended it off.

Meanwhile, Mark's attention was trained solely on Raul. Cut in dozens of places, bleeding all over, Mark bore his pain well and held up his infected palm, ensuring that Raul would notice the squirming infection occurring there. Beneath him a dazed but recovering Donnie Drake began to melt into mist in the hope of escaping and recovering elsewhere.

“Remember a while back, when you stuck that mighty cock of yours up my untried ass, Raul?” Mark moved closer to the felled bodybuilder, treading on so much glass as he went. Raul was momentarily winded, his body having taken less injury from the glass than Maury and his master. The effects of the teleportal/space-fold crossover had depleted him. He was unable to rise to his feet, much less defend himself.

“Do your worst, you fucking runt,” he panted. He was defeated and knew it.

Mark smiled almost sweetly and willed an orifice to open in his palm. “Oh, I'll do my worst all right. Say hello to my new pet!” The tentacle of vampire protoflesh shot out of Mark's palm and across the short distance to Raul. He tried to close himself up against it, but it turned to aether and put out branches of itself which easily hunted out Raul to the last of his orifices. Then the vapor became flesh once again and thickened... thickened impossibly.

Raul screamed as so much mutant flesh wormed its way into him, putting out hooks to latch onto his organs, nerves... into his very brain. More and more of the vile form issued from Mark as he stood there, almost gleefully bearing witness to an act of undeniable abhorrence. The tentacled mass was in Raul now... and it raped every part of his massive body simultaneously. And as it defiled him, so the flesh devoured him. Raul was rendered down into a bloody amorphous mass, shrieking from the worst kind of pain a man was never meant to feel. But the proto thing didn't stop there. Acting purely on instinct, and having made a fast meal of Raul Ortega, it went for the thing beneath, the semi-solid mist-thing it had originally budded from. It was now too big to yield to Donnie's domination and so it began to devour him, sucking up his mist through a hundred thousand rudimentary mouths formed over its ever-shifting mass.

“I have Raul's teleporting ability now,” Mark declared, almost jubilantly. Trey was glad to hear that, for Redfern was already reverting him to his original obese self. There was nothing Trey could do. He collapsed into a jellied heap in one corner of the panic room as Redfern, regaining his strength, his wounds healing rapidly, snapped to a standing position, his incredible mind re-shaping Trey Waters, making it seem as though he were dissolving him from the inside out... starting with his bones.

“When I've finished with you two, I will heal Maury, and together we will re-start the Collective. You boys have lost. I consider you failed experiments in need of aborting.” Cackling near-insensately, Redfern managed a massive metamorphosis, as if spreading out to resemble a great bat/human/wolf hybrid. Perhaps he would escape by taking to the air, for as a master vampire with an alien symbiont along for the ride, he would prove formidable in the future once he'd gotten his full strength back. But for now... he would escape with his unlife, for the vampire always was and always will be tenacious.

Mark fixed a portal in his mind... only one with a horizontal access rather than a vertical one. He concentrated this new ability into as small a space as possible. It was a portal not designed to allow anyone or anything to escape from this room. It was one designed with one purpose and one alone: decapitation.

The portal opened inside Redfern's neck and was little more than a foot across. But it was enough. Suddenly Redfern's head was separated from his body across a gulf of no-where and no-when. The portal existed for less than a second, but when Mark collapsed it, the great vampire's head fell forwards, as if to nod. But then it continued to fall and roll across the floor where it came to a stop just inches from Trey, the disembodied face frozen into a rictus of despair and agony... the dying brain's last thought that of sudden and unforeseen failure. Redfern's torso continued to live for a time. It twitched and lashed about and from the gaping neck wound, hideous fluids, bile, and viscera geysered upwards from his lower parts. It's still-mutating hands had become massive claws and tried to swipe at something, anything that still had blood in it. Again, purely instinctive, the vampire was nothing without a mind to power it.

Mark stepped to one side just as the torso and legs came for him. He landed it a boot in the back, sending it sprawling. It came to a stop inside the remains of the smashed containment cylinder now home to a writhing mass of insensate putrefaction. It immediately snatched up the body and made a fast meal of it, at which point Mark began to sway on his feet. He had lost a lot of blood and didn't have the healing properties of a vampire.

In a corner, Trey's metazenic nature managed to retain something of his former musculature, but by the time Redfern's horrid reversion process had voided itself, Trey was grossly obese, naked, and shaking like a bowl of blancmange. But there was still something he could do to save himself and Mark from the rampage of the proto-mass monster that was fast swelling up to take up the entire room. Trey managed to fold space and time around it, containing the thing. It disappeared into the phenomenon, mewling and hissing in defiance. Then, knowing that both abilities could now work hand in hand, and on an instinctive level, Mark shot the collapsing space-fold event with a portal sufficient to short everything out. The monster was contained permanently, lost in the blackness of an alternate dimension. And there it would remain ad infinitum.

“We need to get you to a hospital. Try to hang in there,” said Trey, although at more than five hundred pounds, little of it muscle, he found it a chore clambering to his feet. He was just about mobile, but his bodybuilding days were now behind him... behind both of them.

“I think I can both teleport us to one. Hold on, Trey.”

A largely fat young man and his moderately scrawny boyfriend disappeared into a portal, but not before Mark managed one final feat. He made another portal blade, this time one that severed a gas main feeding the incinerator at the back of the containment cylinder. As the room filled with deadly gas, a still healing Maury Rose Jr, barely conscious, wondered why the smell reminded him of his father's cooking. He lingered on the threshold of dreams, his body slowly healing, and decided he could use a steak right about now.

Seconds later, Panic Room Beta exploded and a fire as tenacious as the passions of a vampire quickly spread out to touch every room in the Utopian Collective. The building fell in upon itself and half of it tumbled down a mountain as so much ruined masonry. Anything that survived in that nightmarish place would succumb to the pull of gravity, dashed to pulp on the rocks below. That was that, as they say.

EPILOGUE - three months later

They had the secluded island in the South Pacific all to themselves. Impossible to reach unless by plane or boat, Mark and Trey had an easier way of getting there. They would enjoy breakfast on this glorious golden beach, possibly have sex afterwards, and then maybe a swim. But they had to be in Paris by 1pm local time for wine and oysters at their favorite cafe before a leisurely stroll along the Champs Elysées. After that... maybe shopping in New York or a trip to Cirque du Soleil. The world was their playground and they'd never been happier. Besides, they felt like celebrating. Trey had lost over 100 pounds since the end of the ordeal in the Italian Alps. That was a milestone.

“Mmm, I could stay here all day. Can't we skip Paris today and just have coconuts?” Mark could be whiningly insistent at times. It was one of several faults Trey found with his beloved boyfriend. But he had plenty of faults himself, and Mark was always quick to point them out. Such was young love.

“And how would we open them? I'm not the super strong hunk I used to be. Man, I barely got 80 kilos on the bar over my head yesterday,” said Trey, scratching under his ever-shrinking man-boobs to dispel a sweaty itch that had collected there due to the slight humidity. Despite that, the scene was picturesque and inviting. With the waves indolently breaking on the shore and a delicious warm salty breeze coming in from the Pacific, it would be easy to call this place Heaven.

“Well, coconuts are probably better for your diet, honey, and I can always open them like I did Redfern's neck... with a razor-sharp portal of delectable design.” Mark shifted to behind Trey so that he could rub sun-tan lotion across his back. Trey's body was quickly improving, as was Mark's. He was up to 154 lbs., some of it muscle, some of it fat. Mark liked to maintain this ratio so as not to seem like he was leagues ahead of his corpulent lover, the man he so completely adored no matter what his shape: the man he would share his entire life with... and the entire world. They were both still metazenic, for they had been born that way. There was no more Enerflex... there never could be ever again. But they could still achieve bodybuilding greatness faster than a non-metazen. It would take time, though, something they had a great deal of these days.

“Dammit Mark. You had to bring him up. It's difficult trying to put that nightmare out of my head,” said Trey, frowning.

“I know it's hard. But everything from that nightmare zone is now perished. Nothing could have survived. We got out of it with our lives and thankfully we're both free of vampiric stuff, otherwise that glorious sun above would make toast of us.” Mark kissed his lover's back. It was still quite fatty, but a V-taper was beginning to form. In another three months he could be down to 300 lbs. and muscles would begin to show better. They had quite a lot to look forward to.  

“I suppose we can thank him for one thing... it's because of him that events were shaped in which we met. Now all we need to do is continue to search for more metazens like us and teach them about their potential. Think about it. There could be hundreds out there like us, thousands even. They could live their entire lives and never know they possess this remarkable gift unless they start to lift weights.” Trey mused off there for a second, zoning out for a time as his mind sought to make sense of all things metazenic.

“We exist for a reason, be it a natural mutation or something, dare I say it, artificial. Redfern didn't invent metazenics, he just stumbled upon it. He used us to ill-effect, for his own amusement. We may never know what his true motivations to experiment on us were. Or maybe the answer is still out there somewhere. Carter knew a lot more than he let on. And his knowledge is now in me, somehow, although I can't yet access it. Also, I burned up his shape-shifting ability rebuilding myself out of Joel.” Both men were silent now, to remember fallen comrades. But their deaths certainly had not been in vain. They had contributed to Redfern's downfall and would be forever remembered for it.

“I'm glad that tentacle is completely out of you. Maybe we'll have a shot at something of a normal life. I just can’t wait to get muscular again. If I could get back to 500 lbs., that'd be something. I'd be happy with that.” Trey reached into their picnic cooler and popped a bottle of cool white wine. He poured two glasses, and the lovers toasted their new life.

“Here's to 500 lbs. for both of us,” said Mark. They clinked their glasses together and enjoyed the rest of their morning in a tropical paradise.

The End