Chapter 8: Buck Attacks
The alloy chains didn’t just snap. They screamed, high and sharp like tearing steel, then popped from their anchor points in an explosion of concrete dust and reinforcing rebar. Each metallic shriek was a symphonic release. A groan of buckling rock and rent iron surged from the slab itself. The terrible pressure on his limbs vanished.
As he ripped free, it was like pulling a cork from the universe.
His mass didn't just expand; it deluged the space. His shoulders broadened, pushing past the light fixtures, feeling the crisp pop of his surgical gown's seams. The slab beneath him, eight feet of solid composite, splintered like balsa wood under the impossible pressure. He wasn't laying back anymore; he was sitting up, his head brushing the struts of the catwalk thirty feet above a second ago. The world shrank.
Finn blinked through the blood and saw Buck become a mountain, the fur on his arms thickening into a pelt. The tufts of hair on his shoulders erupted into a dense, sweaty mane. The mild dad-bod gut he'd playfully teased now swelled into a vast, powerful barrel of a belly, hanging heavy and proud between the monumental pillars of his thighs.
"Oh," Finn whispered, the sound lost.
The soldiers opened fire. Muzzle flashes sparked around his feet like angry fireflies. Bullets zipped and whined, pocking the concrete floor, chipping paint from his toenails. One ricocheted off the thickened skin of his ankle with a sound like a pebble hitting a tire. Buck flinched, a twitch more of surprise than pain.
He looked down at his left fist. The fist that they'd fed intravenously, prodded, starved. He remembered the feeling of a small grey tray placed far out of his reach. He thought of that boot on Tommy's neck.
He didn't swing. He simply dropped his fist. It was a ponderous, deliberate motion, like a hydraulic press descending from the ceiling. It covered the nearest soldier entirely.
The sound was not a splat. It was a deep, wet chud, a finality so complete it sucked the air from the room. When Buck lifted his hand, a dark, glistening smear, mingled with torn fabric and crushed polymer, was all that remained. A single rifle barrel, bent at a ninety-degree angle, spun lazily on the stained concrete.
Silence, for one fractured second. Then screaming.
Buck moved with a speed that defied his new scale. His right hand, the size of a minivan, shot across the room. The soldier who'd been grinding Tommy’s face into the floor looked up just in time to see fingers like oak beams blot out the light. They closed around his torso. He had a moment to shriek, a sound abruptly cut off into a muffled choke.
Buck lifted him, bringing the squirming, armored figure up to his eye level. The tiny, panicked face stared out from between colossal fingers.Buck squeezed. There was a series of crisp, pulpy snaps, followed by a slick squelch. When he opened his hand, a limp, misshapen thing, leaking from its joints, dropped to the floor with a soft thud.
Tommy rolled onto his back, gasping, his face smeared with dust and blood. He stared up at the colossus that was Buck, at the face he'd kissed just days ago, and he couldn't decide if he was terrified or insanely, unbearably turned on.Buck turned. Two soldiers were scrambling backward, their rifles forgotten, their training disintegrated into primal flight. He rose to one knee, the entire chamber trembling with the motion, and then brought his right foot down.
It was not a stomp. It was a geological event. The sole of his foot covered them both completely. A dense, percussive crump shuddered up through his leg. He felt the minute vibrations, the faint, final struggles snuffed out under the unthinkable weight. He let his foot rest there, grinding slowly, a slow, wide smile spreading across his face. The noise was crisp, internal. A sound you felt in your molars.
Jesse, released when his captor ran, stumbled to his knees, vomiting.
The last two had made it to the blast door. One was fumbling with a keycard. The other, the man who had struck Finn, looked back over his shoulder, his eyes wide with animal terror.
Buck lunged forward on all fours. The floor cracked like a skating rink under his knuckles. He was a bear, a true beast now, and he moved with a predatory fluidity. He didn’t bother with the one at the door. He went straight for the nose-breaker. His left hand swatted the man’s legs out from under him. The soldier sprawled, screaming.
Then Buck pinned him with a single fingertip on his sternum. The man writhed, fists beating against the immense, hairy digit that was crushing his ribs. Buck leaned his face down until his hot, panting breath washed over the tiny figure. He applied pressure.Slowly. The screams became gurgles, became a wet, popping sound as the chest cavity implored.
When Buck lifted his finger, the soldier was still twitching. He scooped him up in his palm, looked at the ruined face, and closed his fist one final time.
Alarms were blaring now, a deafening whoop-whoop. A door high up on the far wall burst open. Reinforcements poured onto the steel catwalk, half a dozen more, their rifles raised. They saw the carnage, the titanic, hairy giant now turning his gaze up toward them.
They hesitated. Just for a second.
That was enough for Buck.
He laughed. It was a deep, rolling peal of thunder that rattled the catwalk rails. He pushed himself to his full height, now clearly well over a hundred feet tall. He had to hunch under the ceiling, his great furry back scraping the girders. He reached up. He didn't grab a soldier. He grabbed the catwalk itself.
With a wrenching, metallic shriek, a forty-foot section of steel grating, railings, and supports tore free from the wall. The soldiers clung to the rails, their screams tiny and thin over the grinding steel.
Panting, Buck lowered the bent chunk of catwalk. He brought it to his face. The smell of their fear was sharp, tangy, delicious. His empty stomach growled, a seismic rumble. He tilted the mangled walkway. It became a ramp. A sliding board. And at its lower end, his mouth was open, panting, wet, an impossible pink cavern.They slid. A tangle of screams and clattering armor. He tilted it further. They poured in. One slammed against his lower teeth, dazed. Another tumbled straight down the dark, slick chute of his throat with a faint, receding scream. The last man managed to hook his arm over the ragged edge of the catwalk fragment, dangling half-out, feet kicking over the void of Buck's mouth.
Buck’s huge, wet tongue, the size of a couch, pushed up lazily against the man’s boots. His other hand came up, a single thick finger prodding the desperately clinging form.
"Oh, no you don't," Buck's voice boomed, a giddy, hungry rasp. He was smiling, his massive teeth gleaming. "It's feeding time."
The last struggling morsel broke free with a panicked shriek and vanished into the hot, wet darkness. Buck tilted the wreckage up, letting the final man slide down. A series of muted bumps traveled down the column of his throat. Then silence. A profound, gurgling silence.
He dropped the twisted metal. It clanged deafeningly on the chamber floor, next to the crushed foot-smear.
Then he looked down. At his friends.
Finn was sitting up, holding a wad of his shirt to his ruined nose, blood crusting his mustache, his eyes wide with something beyond pain. Tommy was on his feet, shaky, staring up with a mix of horror and awe. Jesse was wiping his mouth, breathing hard, his analytical mind utterly shattered.
“Buck…?” Tommy breathed.
Buck, titanic and naked, his body a landscape of sweat-matted hair and corded, inhuman muscle, grinned down at them. His voice, when it came, was like boulders grinding in a riverbed, but his tone was horrifyingly, familiarly casual.
“Gives ‘em something to fucking think about,” he rumbled, the words vibrating in their chests. He gave his belly a slow, appreciative pat; it was now swollen, smooth and content. A faint, gurgle churned deep within it. “I’m done letting these egghead fucks get the best of me. Thought they were so clever.”
He shifted, a mountain changing its geology, lowering himself to all fours again. He sniffed at the air, his wet nostrils flaring, blowing their hair back.
“They want a beast?” he said, his giant eyes glinting with a chaotic, unburdened light. “I’ll show them a beast. I think we’ve overstayed our welcome.”