Chapter 1.1.21 — Lock 2

Lachlan jogged the West End streets of Belport, concentrating on the steady rhythm of his shoes on the pavement.

He went right past Gnosis’s sprawling concrete headquarters, not stopping until he reached a set of unmarked buildings on the far end. To the uninformed, the warehouses probably looked like storage.

Lock jogged between warehouses until he came to a secret doorway on the outer wall. Hidden sensors scanned his tracking chip, and the door slid open for him.

Three guards greeted him, each wearing black unmarked uniforms. Lock felt the almost imperceptible touch of a psychic as they read his surface level thoughts but it was impossible to guess which of the guards was responsible.

It didn’t really matter.

It had been six or seven months since they’d brought Lock in through the main gate. Since then, it had been back alleys and secret entrances.

And other things.

They escorted Lock down a darkened set of stairs to the laboratory beneath Gnosis. All the while, Lock tried not to think about how much the entire Gnosis underground reminded him of a horror film:

Pitted concrete walls, dim and flickering lights, smells of must, dried blood, and bleach. No matter how much Gnosis tried to scrub away the evidence, Lock’s senses didn’t miss a thing.

The smells… didn’t bother Lock as much as they used to. Even the bleach.

He reached out and ran his fingers over one of the larger red stains in the concrete—there was no doubt it was blood. Lock could taste the residual copper through his skin.

Lock felt the gentle psychic touch two more times as he's escorted through the halls. It’s not personal, Lock reminded himself. They’re just worried about getting more blood on the concrete.

After all, Lock’s mutations were some of the best controlled of all the test subjects.

~

The guards took Lock all the way to a small medical room. Clean plastic sheets covered the walls like a murder scene waiting to happen, and stainless steel boxes lined the edges of the room.

Lock sat down on the edge of the hospital bed, paying no mind to the leather restraints.

He didn’t have to wait long.

Two nurses came in wearing full surgery gear—heavy frocks, face shields, masks, and gloves. Some of the blood on their frocks looked fresh.

That was all but confirmed when the nurse’s voice shook.

“Verify your identity, please.”

“Lachlan Harris. Code 50927.”

She must’ve had a bad time with the last patient.

“Roll up your sleeve, please.”

The nurses were careful not to look him in the eye and not to stare at him.

Without further ceremony, the nurses went to work. They pulled several tools and vials from the steel boxes and began taking samples from him.

Not all of which were created equal. The needle they used to draw blood barely felt like a pinch compared to the needles they used for bone marrow and spinal fluid. The deep muscle tissue extraction wasn’t fun either; it involved an incision in the skin, followed by thin forceps to cut a strand of bicep from the middle of the muscle belly.

Lock turned off his pain receptors for all of it. He had tried toughing it out the first time—he wasn’t going to make that mistake again.

The nurses were done with him in ten minutes.

Then Lock was ushered through more concrete halls and down more stairs. Deeper below Gnosis. Deeper into the Mutagen Program.

He tried to map it out in his head. Lock wasn’t sure if they were still below the headquarters or if they were somewhere else beneath Belport.

Deep enough that their fights won’t affect the substructures of the city.

~

Lock waited in another concrete room—this one was still lined in plastic and fluttering with nurses. This time the nurses jabbed him with shots, adding things instead of taking samples away, each containing microscopic testing diodes that will deliver real-time data to watching scientists.

Meanwhile, Lock watched the single television monitor on the wall.

Over the last few months, Lock had seen over ten other mutants fight, each one stranger than the last: Basic telekinetics, psychic criers, acid-spewers, extendable bone blades, and one that could only be described as an eldritch horror—if their dozens of tentacles ended with spear-tips instead of suckers. There were even a few that looked like vampires, complete with pale skin and fangs, and another that might’ve been given a variant of Mutagen-X.

Gnosis was trying to make their own supers but they all just turned out… wrong.

Lock wasn’t sure exactly which mutagens equated to which powers—some letter designations and mutagen precursors were supposedly benign in appearance, like super strength, healing, enhanced senses, and wrinkle reversal. Some of these singular precursors were rumored to be available in mass for world leaders, military special forces, and even celebrities.

Lock, himself, had been given a dozen different injections and the only ones that had been named were Mutagen-A, the baseline mutagen by which all others were compared, and Mutagen X.

The latter was supposedly Gnosis’s newest and most promising blend. The rest of the letters were a glorified freakshow.

Even the precursors were just a front. Gnosis wasn’t in the business of health or security. They were in the business of making weapons.

And business was only getting better.

Steel doors at the end of the room opened and three more guards appeared, this time wearing light power armor—Gnosis’s proprietary model: Hardened impact plates, actuator enhanced joints, and personal rebreathers. They ushered him down the hall. Lock obliged.

He rolled his neck and shrugged his shoulders, loosening himself up for his coming fight. It was more mental preparation than physical.

Lock followed the long hall to a twin set of steel doors, made to keep the sometimes noxious biological weaponry from escaping. The final door opened, and Lock caught the pungent remnants of acid lingering in the air.

The arena was some two hundred feet square and nearly as tall. The left half was divided into a three level parking garage, while the other half was completely open air. Concrete blocks and dividers littered both sections, simulating the occasional barricade or parked car to hide behind. All the surfaces were either pitted, scored, stained, or filled in with fresh white concrete.

Gnosis had tried to design a singular arena so that they didn’t give advantage to any one kind of powerset. For their simple and brutal testing, Gnosis mostly succeeded.

To Lock, it looked like an abstract painting.

In the center of the open area, fresh red blood stood out. The loser had a bad time… Depending on the Mutagen, they’d live.

Across the room, another set of metal doors hissed open.

A young woman staggered in, her hands pressed against her face. Her hair floated above her, like clumps of bright red seaweed floating in the tide. Her scalp was bleeding and droplets flowed upward and dissolved into mist above.

The guards behind her had weapons pointed at her and shouted desperately into their comms for whoever was in control to close the door.

She didn’t pay any mind as the door hissed shut.

She sobbed, and Lock waited for her to finish.

A booming voice sounded from the speakers above. “Subject 61565 AND Subject 50927, your fight will now begin. It ends with grievous injury, incapacitation, or death.”

Only then did the young woman look up. She scanned the room, recognition flashing across her face before her eyes settled on Lachlan. Her shirt had a large red heart on it, the same color as her hair. The collar was matted with blood.

Lock kept his face expressionless and kicked his shoes off.

Heart-girl’s face twisted into a grimace equal parts anger and pain. She screamed, but the sound was muted by whatever twisted power she was about to unleash. Her hair grew, spreading out in a blood-tinged crescent until it was fifty feet wide.

The strands coalesced into a dozen thick limbs. They pierced the floor and lifted Heart-girl up until it looked like she was hanging in the mouth of a giant red spider.

Then she scurried toward him.

Lock sprinted toward the left side ‘parking garage’ of the room. He deadened his sense of pain and willed the tips of his fingers and toes to grow into a bastardized mix of sharpened nails and bone spurs. He leapt up to the nearest column, his claws hooking easily into the concrete, and climbed up as quickly as he could.

In less than a breath, Lock was on the third level. He stood ready, his muscles coiling like they had minds of their own.

He waited and listened to the tick, tick, tick, of Heart-girl as she climbed hair-first up the wall. The image made Lock take a step back from the edge; no matter how advanced his biology was, it was hard to suppress his lingering psychology.

A moment later, red spidery limbs crested the top of the parking garage. The tips of each limb jabbed into the concrete like ice picks, and left behind bloody impacts. Heart-girl followed, her body hanging lifeless like a marionette. Her face was slack-jawed and blank, except for her eyes, which stared unblinking at him.

Lock crouched, his own claws digging into the concrete.

A spear of hair shot toward him, and Lock leapt upward. He contorted in mid air, hitting the ceiling feet-first, and then sprung toward his target. Heart-girl ambled out of the way, defending herself with a flurry of red tendrils.

With superhuman reflexes, Lock seized one of the red tendrils, but it slipped through his hand—the blood that coated her hair was slick and his hand came back wet.

Lock hit the concrete and tumbled across it. Tendrils followed, slashing and stabbing at him like a dozen separate weapons.

Lock dodged all of them.

He lunged for Heart-girl and she backpedaled across the third floor of the parking garage. Lock slashed at her attacks, severing the first few tendrils, but her hair regrew as quickly as it fell.

Meanwhile, other tendrils speared through Lock’s shoulder—another through his thigh. His blood coagulated instantaneously. The tips that didn’t recoil immediately, Lock slashed through with his claws.

It was one thing to fight a super that moved like a semi-normal human, but with an atypical target, it was too easy to be surprised by a sudden, unexpected counter attack. If Lock hadn’t just fought a similar mutant, he might’ve been afraid. Heart-girl wasn’t much different from the eldritch horror from last time—they both moved like insects and protected their torso.

Lock had no doubt he was going to win. He just had to get close enough to Heart-girl to end the fight.

He waited, biding his time.

Heart-girl retreated toward the wall. Lock already knew she would try to scale the wall and fight from the ceiling. Up there, she would have better reach and mobility.

Lock didn’t plan on letting her get there.

Heart-girl was still backpedaling, desperately trying to fend him off. Lock let her think it was working.

Heart-girl dug her first few steps into the wall and started to climb.

Lock seized the next tendril, quickly wrapping the length around his palm. This time, when he squeezed, the hair didn’t come free from his grasp. At the same time, the claws on his feet dug into the floor.

He pulled. She stabbed. Lock grabbed another handful of hair, then he pulled in earnest.

Lock wrenched Heart-girl free from the wall and spun, whipping her around like a catapult and slammed her into the wall. A dull thump echoed through the parking lot—like a sack of laundry hitting the ground. The whole motion took less than a half second. The hair slackened around Lock’s hands.

But Heart-girl still stood on spidery-red limbs. She was cocooned in hair, only a sliver of her face visible behind the curtain of red.

Lock didn’t waste a breath.

Keeping hold of her hair, Lock pulled again and leapt at the same time. He rocketed toward Heart-girl and caught her in a flurry of slashes, cutting her body free and severing nearly all the hair from her head.

Catastrophic damage was the only way to reliably beat someone with accelerated healing.

By the time Lock’s assault was over, Heart-girl was nearly bald. The hair that was left on her head was short and quivered—still alive. She dropped to the ground, clutching her hands to her chest.

He could’ve brought the parking garage down on her, but he doubted Gnosis would appreciate the destruction.

“It’s over,” Lock said, glancing around the ceiling. He wasn’t sure where the cameras were—they were small and hidden, but Lock knew they were watching.

They were always watching.

Lock turned and started walking to the edge of the parking garage before leaping off and continuing to the exit.

“And next time, give me a challenge.”

~ ~ ~