BrownRekluse

REBIRTH

“Beast contained, sir!” reported the Crey Special Operations. “Twenty four patients and eight scientists dead. Beast incapacitated. Minor wounds. Test of the Beast’s strength is concluded and has shown to be exceptional. Begin cleanup of expendable resources and salvage of non-expendable resources!”
“Sir! Yes, Sir!” his team responded.
Bodies were taken to the Crey facility morgue via back corridors accessible only to high management and Special Operations crews. This was where Alex’ body was taken. Un-noticed, Alex’ body was already mending itself. The tissue damage was pretty severe. He had been blasted in the back and there were basically two halves of him from there up, not to mention some missing fingers.
Bodies piled up on the carts around him. The subjects of his test lay next to him, categorized by the room in which they were found. The creature had all but made subject one unrecognizable and subjects two and three had been torn limb from limb. Alex was already dead and as such the creature had left him alone. Soon most of the damage Alex sustained was repaired, but he was still covered in blood. “The Beast has amazing strength as shown by the subjects of Project three hundred sixty eight not even proving a match much less a challenge. There seems to be some form of energy projection that stalls regeneration as well. Project two hundred ten also no match. The Beast broke through all restraining walls and unfortunately did away with Project one hundred twenty eight also. That’ll set us back a bit, but I think we still retain the notes from the project. Alex Lastname also killed in the process of the Beast’s recapture. He has sustained…” the forensic examiner trailed off as Alex, undamaged except for his clothes now, sits up and groans loudly holding his head.
“I’ve got to get to a hospital or the cops…” Alex managed to mumble, “Huge monster attacked and there are people…” Alex eyes widened in disbelief as he sees the remains of his patients. “NNNOOOOO!!!” He screams and falls to the floor clutching his knees to his chest.
“Security! Get in here! We’ve got a situation!” says the examiner. Shortly thereafter a squad of Crey Special Operations shows up to contain whatever might have taken place in the morgue. They find Alex bent over the remains of his patients, crying. “Tazer him and take him for study, his regeneration wasn’t affected by the Beast!” commands the examiner.
Turning to face the squad, Alex with his face contorted by the rage he feels takes the tazer probes directly to the chest. The 150,000 volts flowing through his body only seem to be a slight tingling to him. “YOU KILLED THEM FOR AN EXPERIMENT!?!? How am I to know that you didn’t engineer that strain of Ebola I was trying to cure?! You bastards are going to pay for this! YOU HEAR ME?!?!” Alex screams as the air around the room begins to crackle with an unearthly energy similar to the one emitted by the Rikti device he had used. Suddenly, the room explodes out from Alex. Titanium alloys bent and melted by the extreme blast of energy that had radiated out from him. At the middle of the destruction hovered a form. Alex knew that something was definitely different about him now.
Outside of the building, a little girl and her mother had been leaving the building when the wall blew open. Instinctively the mother had cradled her little girl against her to protect her. It didn’t seem to matter much to the sharp pieces of debris though. Somehow Alex felt the woman and girl’s pain and darted to them, flying effortlessly through the air. Laying a hand on them, a green energy flooded from Alex and into the two of them. Their wounds healing instantly, they opened their eyes and caught sight of each other then hugged each other tight. So concerned with each other, they got up and ran from the site. No one saw the man slink into the shadows of the alleyway near the building. Alex could only stand in the shadows and stare at his hands. He could heal or kill with the power he now had he realized.
Alex decided that he would take the name of a species of arachnid whose toxin he had used in his research and use this new identity to make villains like Countess Crey pay for all the suffering they had brought to this world. BrownRekluse would heal those who were sick and bring justice and vengeance to those who caused suffering.

THE START OF THINGS TO COME

A diffuse and gray light filtered in through the apartment window. Air smelling of smog from the great smokestacks down the block in the King Garment Works permeates the room even though the building had an air conditioning system. Suddenly there was a blaring noise coming from the alarm clock next to the single bed. Alex leapt to wakefulness and almost fell out of bed. “No more pancakes ma…” he mumbled before realizing that he was in his own apartment. Slowly Alex got out of bed and went to the small bathroom to get himself ready for work.
Each morning he skipped breakfast because he felt he never had time for it. The real reason being that as a child living with his parents and grandmother, she always made him eat everything on his plate and always made a breakfast fit for Henry the VIII. A white complexion, almost ghostly, with long blond hair gave him the look of a geek of some sort. It was almost like he worked in a laboratory. “Right on the money,” Alex thought to himself. Truthfully, he was a biochemist employed by Crey Industries. He worked in the pharmaceutical department trying to concoct the next wonder drug that would cure almost anything. What with the Rikti advanced technology, there weren’t many things that couldn’t be cured already. Still Crey had to be the one to get that cure first so they could corner the market. No matter that monopolies were broken up by the government, they somehow found ways around that.
Alex’ current project was a cure for a particularly virulent strain of Ebola that was combined with cancer cells to give it a robust and resistant structure. No one knew exactly who came up with this bioterrorism weapon, but it got out somehow. He was working on using Rikti technology to fuse starfish cells with many marine and arachnid toxins that could have healing effects. So far the results were quite promising. “Subject one and two are almost completely rid of the engineered cells. Three is beginning to come out of the worse stages of the virus,” Alex notes into the recorder. In less than 24 hours the modified Ebola seems to have completely reversed its progress through the patient’s bodies. He had to notify the board of the treatment’s success.
Alex dialed the number provided him should the treatments work. “Reporting on project number one hundred twenty eight. Project is an unmitigated success. Virus in remission and symptoms reversing in under 24 hours.” Voicemail is how things are handled in Crey so that you can concentrate on your work and only the review committee is bothered with reports. Alex knew that he’d probably not get his name on anything connected with the project, but he had accepted that when he started. Not that the pay wasn’t good. It definitely was, but he would have preferred the recognition. “Ah, what’s recognition as long as it saves lives,” he thought to himself.
Just then, an explosion ripped through the building knocking Alex to the ground. There was a sound of metal being ripped open and Alex looked up to see the wall of the room being torn apart by a huge creature the wasn’t even vaguely recognizable. Its strength was tremendous as it tore its way into the room. “My research!” Alex screamed as he picked himself up and tried to save what he could of the formula.
Alex never even saw the blast that killed him. The monster had thrown a table into some Rikti technology that Alex had been using to splice the toxin and cell molecules together. The beam from the device struck Alex in the back just below his heart and darted upwards. Just before he died, he had a chance to wonder why his serum was glowing. The serum had absorbed the energy from the Rikti device and spilled down Alex’ chest and into the wound when the beam had ruptured the vials.

Stay tuned to catch the follow up to THE START OF THINGS TO COME next week!