Chapter 3: The Unexpected Visitor
Morning light cut through the shattered windows of the lab, throwing long golden beams across a floor littered with glass, torn metal, and tattered strips of fabric. The air smelled of ozone and burnt wiring, with a faint metallic tang that clung to the back of Lucky's throat as she stirred.
She woke facedown on the cold concrete, her cheek pressed against a scatter of glass shards that had somehow not sliced her open. Every muscle in her body ached, a deep, bone-weary soreness that felt like she had been stretched on a rack and then stuffed back into a body several sizes too small. She groaned, pushing herself up on trembling arms, and the first thing she registered was the absence of weight. She was naked. Completely, utterly naked, her skin goose-bumped with cold, her body smaller than it had been, softer, the familiar map of a forty-something woman's frame rather than the towering green monstrosity that had torn through this room.
"Oh, God," she whispered, her voice hoarse and cracked. She looked down at her hands. Pale, freckled, the small scar on her knuckle from a childhood bike crash. Human hands. She was human again.
The lab was a wreck. Her research station had been tipped over, the monitors smashed, the gamma machine's chair still upright but with its restraint arms bent at sick angles, like the claws of a dying beast. The floor was strewn with the remains of her clothes: shredded denim, a black t-shirt torn to ribbons, the sole of a shoe. She stared at the debris for a long moment, the memories filtering back in fragmented, heat-soaked flashes. The radiation. The pain. The green.
She swallowed hard and forced herself to stand, wobbling on unsteady legs. Her phone was buzzing somewhere in the rubble, a persistent, insistent vibration against the concrete. She stumbled toward it, nearly tripping over a twisted piece of metal, and dug it out from under a fallen filing cabinet. The screen was cracked but still lit, and the name on the message made her stomach drop.
Lewis.
Hey, Aunt Lucky. You still at the lab? I'm in the building, gonna swing by for lunch in a few. You around?
Her heart hammered against her ribs. Lewis. Her nephew. Eighteen years old, fresh out of high school, the golden boy of the family. She pictured him as he had been in the photograph she had found last night, shirt riding up, tanned stomach, arms crossed, that confident grin. And she felt it. A warm, treacherous pulse of heat deep in her belly, a thrum of want that had no business existing, a hunger that was not hers but was also unmistakably hers, the ghost of the green woman still coiling in her blood.
"No," she said out loud, shaking her head. "No, no, no."
But her spine tingled. A faint, prickling warmth ran down the length of her back, right along the ridge where the transformation had begun last night. She twisted to look over her shoulder, and there it was: a thin, green line traced down her vertebrae, glowing faintly, like a seam waiting to split open. She touched it with her fingers, and a jolt of something electric shot through her, a promise and a threat.
Lewis's message sat there, waiting. He was in the building. He was coming up. He would be here in minutes, and she was standing naked in the middle of a destroyed laboratory with a line of gamma corruption running down her spine.
She forced herself into motion, grabbing a lab coat from where it hung on a still-intact peg by the door. The fabric was clean, at least, white and crisp, and she pulled it on, tying it tight at the waist. It covered her from collar to midthigh, and for a moment that felt like safety. She shoved her feet into a pair of steel-toed boots she found under a desk, the laces dangling loose, and then she stood there, breathing hard, trying to think.
The building. He was already in the building. How long until he reached her floor? She had to get out, had to lock the door, had to tell him something, anything, to keep him away. But even as she thought it, another part of her, the part that had spent last night spread-legged on broken glass with his photo propped up in front of her, that part was not afraid. That part was glad. That part was already imagining him walking through that doorway, his voice rolling over her skin.
She pressed her palm against her forehead. "Stop it. Stop it, you sick bitch."
The green line on her spine pulsed in response, a slow, mocking thrum.
Her phone buzzed again.
You there? Everything ok?
She typed back with shaking fingers: Yeah, I'm here. Meeting ran long. Give me five.
She sent it before she could second-guess herself, then dropped the phone on the desk as if it had burned her. Five minutes. She had five minutes to get her head together, to find clothes that actually fit, to figure out how to face the boy she had masturbated to while transformed into a seven-foot-tall monster of rage and lust.
But as she stood there, her breath steadying, the heat in her belly refusing to cool, she knew exactly what she was going to do. She was going to open the door and let him in. And she was going to feel, every single second, the tingle along her spine, waiting, hoping, aching for the moment the green came back.