Chapter 2: Unintended Consequences
The basement air was cold, smelling of damp concrete and the ghost of cheap beer from the kegs stacked in the corner. The iridescent blue serum swirled slightly in the vial as Melvin’s hand trembled. His own reflection in the glass showed his wide eyes behind his glasses, his pale face pinched with anxiety.
“Targeted myocyte hypertrophy,” he whispered again, the words a clinical prayer. “Somatotropin stimulation. Bone density augmentation.”
He’d run the simulations a thousand times. The protein chains were designed to bind, to instruct, to rebuild. It was elegant. It was supposed to make him taller. Stronger. Something his mother couldn’t flick away like a bug.
He drew the liquid into a sterile syringe, the plunger pulling back with a soft, decisive click. He held it up to the bare bulb, watching the blue glow like captured moonlight. No more simulations. No more peer-reviewed journals. This was the live trial. Subject: Melvin.
He exhaled, a shaky, ragged thing. He rolled up the sleeve of his oversized t-shirt, exposing his pitifully thin bicep. He swabbed it with alcohol, the scent sharp and clean. He positioned the needle.
His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. For a second, he saw her face—Barb’s dismissive smirk, her eyes rolling at his “bird bones.” He saw the fridge door slamming, the couch groaning under her weight, the world built to her scale.
He pushed the needle in.
A sharp pinch, then a cold rush as he depressed the plunger. The blue vanished into him. He pulled the needle out, pressing the cotton ball to the tiny bead of blood.
For three seconds, nothing. Just the hum of the water heater and the thud of his own pulse in his ears.
Then, it came.
It started as a deep, internal heat, like swallowing a coal. It bloomed in his core, radiating outwards along his limbs, not painful but intensely, unnervingly warm. His muscles twitched. A faint, electrical crackle seemed to pop along his nerve endings. He looked down at his arms, expecting to see them swelling, thickening.
Instead, he heard a sound.
A low, steady rrrrrip.
He looked down. The worn fabric of his jeans, already baggy on his skinny legs, was straining at the seams. Not at the thighs. At the crotch. The stitching began to part, thread by thread, with a sound like tearing paper.
“What the…” he breathed.
The heat in his torso intensified, concentrating, funneling downwards with a will of its own. A sudden, immense pressure built in his groin, a tight, aching fullness that made him gasp. He fumbled at his belt, his fingers clumsy with shock.
He didn’t unfasten it in time.
With a final, vulgar shred, the entire front seam of his jeans split open from belt buckle to fly. What sprung free was not the modest, familiar part of himself he’d known for twenty years.
It was obscene.
It was a thick, heavy length of flesh, already unreal in its proportion, pulsing with a deep, reddish hue. It wasn’t just big; it was a caricature, a monstrous appendage that seemed to dwarf his own slender frame. It twitched, alive with the same unnatural heat coursing through him, and as he watched, frozen in horrified disbelief, it grew another impossible inch, the skin stretching taut.
A jolt of sheer, animal panic shot through him. This wasn’t hypertrophy. This wasn’t somatotropin. Something had gone wildly, disastrously wrong. The serum hadn’t listened to his elegant formulae. It had found a different template, a different kind of strength, and it was building it with brutal, chaotic efficiency.
He stumbled back, his hands flapping uselessly, trying to somehow cover the thing. It was too big. It slapped against his thigh, heavy and hot. A frantic, shameful thought screeched in his mind: She cannot see this. She can NEVER see this.
He grabbed the nearest thing—an old, grease-stained towel from next to the water heater—and wrapped it clumsily around his waist, tucking it in to hold it up. It barely contained the bulge. He looked like he had a beach towel stuffed down his pants.
He fled up the basement stairs, taking them two at a time, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs. He burst into the main floor, the light blinding him for a second. He listened. Above, the seismic snores continued. He didn’t breathe again until he was inside his bedroom, the door locked softly behind him.
He stood in the dark, back against the door, listening to the silence. The heat was subsiding, leaving behind the overwhelming, tangible evidence of his failure. Of his… transformation. He shucked the towel and looked down in the dim light from the streetlamp outside his window.
It was still there. Huge. Quiet. He felt nauseous.
He crawled into bed, pulling the sheets and comforter up to his chin, making himself small. He lay there for hours, rigid, staring at the ceiling, as if by sheer will he could reverse the process, could siphon the serum back into the vial. Dawn bled through the blinds. He didn’t sleep.
The front door slammed in the late afternoon. Barb’s voice, rough from a shift and maybe a post-work beer, boomed through the house.
“Melvin! You better not be jerking off in there! I need you to haul the recycling bins to the curb!”
Silence.
“Melvin! I’m not playing!”
She stomped through the living room, past the neon pillows and the groaning couch. Her uniform shirt was untucked, her holster unbuckled and hanging on a hook by the door. She peered into the empty kitchen, then down the hall toward his room. His door was shut.
“Goddamn kid,” she muttered, crossing the space in a few long strides. She didn’t knock. She turned the handle. The lock, a flimsy push-button thing, gave way with a cheap click under her insistent twist.
The room was dark, the blinds drawn. The only light came from the faint glow of a dormant computer monitor. The air smelled of stale boy and nervous sweat.
Melvin was a lump under the blue comforter, perfectly still.
“Are you sick?” she asked, her voice not softening so much as shifting from annoyance to impatience. “You look like hell warmed over most days, but today you’re really committing to the bit.”
The lump didn’t move.
“Melvin, I’m not asking. Get your ass up. The bins are full, and I’m not doing it. My back’s killing me from sitting in that fucking cruiser.”
She walked to the edge of the bed. He was curled tight, fetal, the comforter pulled over his head.
“This is pathetic,” she sighed, the crudeness returning. “Fine. Be a lump. But you’re not doing it in my house on my time.”
She leaned over, grabbed a fistful of the comforter and top sheet, and yanked them off the bed in one sharp, powerful motion.
For a second, she just stared.
Melvin lay there, frozen, wearing only a pair of glasses and an expression of pure, unadulterated terror. His usual skinny frame was unchanged. His ribs showed. His arms were sticks.
And between his legs, resting against his thigh like some alien parasite, was a shock of flesh so disproportionately massive it short-circuited her brain. It was thick, veined, and so long the tip of it nearly brushed his kneecap. It looked like it belonged on a draft horse, not on her scrawny, pathetic son.
Barb’s mouth, usually so quick with a biting remark, hung open. Her eyes, normally narrowed in judgment, went wide. The recycling bins, her aching back, the beer waiting in the fridge—all of it vaporized from her mind.
Her police training kicked in, but only on the most basic level: assess the scene. Assess the subject. Her gaze traveled from Melvin’ mortified face, down his scrawny torso, to the monstrous, incongruous appendage.
A slow, incredulous breath hissed out between her teeth.
“What,” she said, her voice a flat, dead thing, utterly devoid of its usual brash music, “the fuck is that?”