Chapter 3

Escaping the Department of Labor

I barely got down two flights of stairs before the top floor's stairwell door was slammed open and I heard that odd crooning call She-Hulk kept making that made my heart pound in disturbing ways. I had the sinking sensation that it was her mating call and she was crooning for me. Thinking back, it was only after she did that on the roof that Conan bashed my head in. And it was after she sniffed mid-coitus, presumably catching my scent despite the direction of the air currents, that she turned her lover's face into marinara. Fear now mixing with the disturbing hormonal surge, I flew down the stairs even as I could hear She-Hulk in hot pursuit.

I hit the ground floor in a blur and crashed through the stairwell door, sprinting for the front doors lying shattered before me. Painfully bright sunlight was streaming through along with the scent of death and destruction and the hunters that now prowled the shadows of the city. I was halfway across the lobby when she emerged from the stairwell and bounded after me. She was slightly taller, with a longer stride and more heavily muscled legs but she also outweighed me by fifty or sixty pounds and I was in pretty good shape even before the change. I glanced back even as I put everything I had into running and the look on her face made me find a little more. Never in my life have I had a woman gaze at me like she was looking at me. I was a filet mignon, Adonis, and Jesus Christ all wrapped up in one being in those eyes that flared hungrily, worshipfully in her quest to possess me. There was nothing of violence or physical hunger in that look. It was all emotional and mating instinct as she leapt after me.

Before I covered more than three-quarters of the distance across the lobby to the light of freedom streaming through the doors, I was falling forward with a great weight on my back and sharp claws digging painfully into my shoulders. Another croon sent shivers down my spine and blood rushing to inappropriate nether regions. A warm, wet, long tongue traced itself across my neck before those shark teeth nipped playfully at my ear lobes without drawing blood. I felt her weight shift as she straddled my hips with her knees and used those powerful arms to turn me over onto my back. Her weight dropped back down and she crooned with satisfaction when she felt my engorgement rub against her naked front.

Looking up at her, I was kind of shocked to realize she must have been gorgeous before the shark-like dental make-over and the Mr. Universe body upgrade. Even now, she was not bad looking, if you liked the muscle-bound look in women.

Which I normally don't, but she kept crooning and every time she did so, my blood raced faster and faster and it was all heading south for parts of my body that just seemed to get bigger and harder the more she crooned until it was almost painful. Her breathing was picking up the pace and the breasts still contained within the lacy lavender bra threatened to snap the flimsy piece of lingerie and spring forth in all their evident glory. Either she was a well-endowed woman before the change or she also got the Victoria's Secret upgrade. Either way, I was having more and more trouble finding her any more monstrous than my remade body, though I lacked the dentition she did.

The one thing that kept me from giving into my baser instincts and growing needs was the fact that she had still uttered no sound that I would equate with language. Those clawed hands would stroke my face and exposed torso and she would croon encouragingly as she ground her bare nethers on my still clothed equipment, but no words were forthcoming. My mind had reclaimed some of the blood flow from its southerly excursion and contemplated that fact. I began to wonder if whatever was happening to the infected was taking such radically differing paths in each person. The variety of change I had already seen with my own eyes was more evidence that perhaps whatever was loosed upon the world was more unstable and less uniform in result than the hypothesis agreed upon by the talking heads before the end came. If so, perhaps there would be a range of cognitive functionality in the victims. A range that went from complete reversion to base animal instincts and behaviors (such as She-Hulk was displaying) to hardly any change in mental and intellectual function (such as seemed to be the case in myself).

All of this, ridiculous as it seems, went through my mind as She-Hulk began to slide herself down my legs and her hands began working on the string of the sweat pants I had procured. That was the point at which I decided to put up a fight. I struggled to keep my pants secure and in place and after a couple of minutes fighting to get the string untied, my head went reeling as she casually cuffed me. I may have been knocked unconscious for a minute or two because the next thing I knew, my pants were around my knees and she was securely coupled with me, crooning ecstatically. She leaned down and caressed my face and licked my lips, ears, and neck with a tongue that was probably serving a similar purpose that lizards and snakes use theirs for. The feelings that were coursing through my body had me conflicted. This was, by no means, voluntary. It was rape. But my hormones seemed to have short circuited the part of my mind that should have objected and the sensations coming from our coupled bodies were beyond anything my rather meager, pre-Incident sex life had supplied me.

I am not sure I stayed conscious after roaring my ecstasy and sorrow when it was over, but when I recovered enough to move, I gently rolled her off of me and pulled my pants up, tying them much tighter than necessary. My chest was crisscrossed with light scratches that were healing even as I pulled my scrounged coat back over my torso. I looked down upon my rapist and was of two minds about what to do with her. In the end, I gently and quite easily picked her up and carried her to the nearest couch furnishing the lobby. I set her down so as to not wake her and quickly left. The part of me that lost the internal argument felt a twinge of fear and anger that I did not just snap her neck or crush her windpipe whilst I had the chance. I would learn, as time went on, that soft-heartedness was a liability. That particular expression of kindliness never bit me in the ass, but that is not to say it did not cause someone else grief. I never found out who she was before the change, but She-Hulk left an imprint on my heart and soul that causes me occasional bouts of melancholy and recriminations over the feel of her and my forgiveness of her after she assaulted me.

Anyway, I finally escaped from the Frances Perkins Building into the mid-day sun.

The White House was in flames. As was the Capitol Building and a dozen other important government buildings along Pennsylvania and Constitution Avenues. The sun was high in the sky still, which gave me hours yet in which I needed to both get the hell out of here and find supplies to aid in my survival. I already had a mental check list that included weapons of various sorts, food, clothing, fuel, and (if I could arranged it) a vehicle. I knew automobiles had probably been added to the extinction list by Armageddon, but while fuel was obtainable and they ran, cars and trucks would be invaluable. I was hoping to run across a hybrid SUV on my way out of town, but I was not going to be picky.