Frostbloom
Chapter 2
"Naked?" said Dr. Clay. The supe had cornered the doctor in his office for some privacy.
Homelander nodded. "She didn't seem out of it, really, just a little groggy. She said she was having aches like she had the flu." He'd never had the flu, so he couldn't judge what she meant, but the doctor probably could. "Was she on any medication that might have caused it? The hallucination, not the aches."
Clay shook his head. "No, we didn't want to give her—or any of the others—anything because we didn't know the nature of what they'd been exposed to. Any medication could have had a potentially fatal interaction with the contaminant, and we didn't want to risk it."
"Have any of the others woken up?"
"No. Ms. Barrett was the first. Did you do anything that might have caused her to wake up or do you think it was independent of your being there?"
"I touched her face and talked to her a little bit." He doubted that would have been enough to pull her out of a coma.
Clay paused. "I want to ask you a question, and you should know that this is for valid medical reasons, not any prurience on my part."
Homelander snorted. "That sounds interesting."
"Uh—have you and Ms. Barrett ever been romantically or sexually involved with each other? I'm only asking to confirm if there's enough of an emotional bond to cause her to respond to you and regain consciousness."
"That's a lot more sentimental than I'd give a physician credit for, but no, we haven't. I respect her as a person and a competent professional. Anyone speaking to her would have woken her up." But maybe she'd only woken up because she was so frightened of him. He didn't mention that to the doctor.
"All right. Did you notice anything at all odd about her, other than the hallucination?"
He wondered whether to mention the decontamination scent on her and decided against it. "No, not really. Have you been running any tests on them?"
The doctor nodded. "We've been doing blood draws to see if we can find anything anomalous, urinalysis, tissue cultures and the like, but most of that is going to take a while to come back. Do you have any information as to what experiments were going on in the lab?"
"I have someone looking into it, but nothing yet."
"Well, if you could let me know whatever—"
A nurse came up to Dr. Clay. "Could I speak to you privately, doctor?"
Homelander made a gesture at him and the two of them moved away. Shame it wasn't nearly far enough to keep him from hearing every word out of their mouths. "There's something very strange going on with Ms. Barrett." His ears perked up.
"Anything more specific?" asked Dr. Clay.
"Well, you'd need to see it. I don't think you'd believe me if I tried to describe it."
He heard the doctor and nurse moving toward Ashley's room and popped out of the office to follow them. "There," said the nurse.
The doctor's heart rate and blood pressure shot up. "Is there anything in the room that might account for it? Something wrong with the air conditioning?"
"No," said the nurse. "I had maintenance run a check. Everything's working normally."
"Have you done another vitals check? We also need to do another blood draw."
"Not yet. I was on the way in when I noticed…what's happened."
Homelander's impatience was too much, and he strode forward to join the pair in front of the observation window in Ashley's room. "What's going on with her?" But then he saw for himself.
The observation window, which should have shown her asleep in her bed, had been rendered completely opaque by the thick layer of frost covering it, veins of feathery white decorating the glass and making him think of Christmas. He stepped forward and ran a gloved finger over it, which came away with dampness, but the frost was on the inside. He touched the handle to open the door, but Dr. Clay grabbed his arm. "Don't do that! There might be some sort of contagion that could spread to the entire clinic. I'll call for a hazmat team to go in first. We still don't know what was in those broken vials."
Ordinarily Homelander would have taken serious offense to the man touching him, but the rational side of him saw the need for caution, despite his worry for Ashley. "I'm going to call Maureen and see if there are any updates. She had someone doing research on the project."
"That's a good idea. If she has any new information that might assist with the patients, please let me know at once."
Homelander barely heard him as he went back to Clay's office and called Maureen. "Do we have any more information about Project Mirror? The window to Ashley's room has frosted up and the doctor's calling for a hazmat team."
"Frost?" Maureen was silent for a minute. "Gerald turned up some hints about it. It seems to have been an attempt to aerosolize Compound V."
"Oh please," he scoffed. "It's impossible to aerosolize Compound V. Stan Edgar threw away hundreds of millions of dollars trying to create a better method of delivery than injection. I think he even experimented with suppositories at one point. It can't be aerosolized or administered in liquid form or absorbed through the skin or the mucus membranes in any way." He pushed away memory of the seizures everyone in the lab had manifested. Compound V caused seizures when it was injected. But it couldn't be, because injection was the only effective means of using it. Even Temp V had to be injected.
"I'm not trying to say that's all it was, but that was part of it. I told Gerald to keep researching the project. Has Ms. Barrett woken up yet?"
"Briefly. She didn't say anything about the project."
"Do they know if any of the other people who were exposed—if any unusual phenomena are occurring around them?"
Homelander frowned. "Not that they've mentioned." He didn't tell her that he hadn't asked or even really given a shit. All his anxiety was for Ashley. He didn't want his plans going up in smoke because something happened to his corporate puppet and no one else would work as CEO nearly as well as she did.
"Thank you. I'm going to start digging into the backgrounds of the people in the lab. There must be some commonality among the ones who survived. I just hope it isn't anything that could fly under my radar. Do I have your permission to assign an Analytics person to this?"
"Assign nine of them." Thank God he'd had the good sense to tell Ashley to hire back the majority of the department that had been fired. "One to each person in the lab. Get started," he ordered before hanging up.
As he was walking back toward Ashley's room, an alarm went off and the emergency red lighting came on. "Fire," an automated voice announced. "Please evacuate immediately." Then it repeated the information again and again, an infinite loop.
The nurse he'd seen earlier ran toward them, supporting a half-conscious woman he recognized as the doctor from the lab. What was her name, Rennie? Another two nurses carried the unconscious lab assistant, Miller. "Fire in the ward with the lab patients!" she shouted. Clay started running toward it, but Homelander was faster than any human.
Fire enveloped the ward, the curtains between the hospital beds now sheets of flame, lethally beautiful. Pillows and mattresses transformed into thick, choking smoke that would have disoriented a non-supe. The sprinklers sprayed out water over the burning scene but so far had failed to extinguish the blaze. He looked around for the other doctor, Harriman, but couldn't find him. Had someone evacuated him through another corridor or had he left under his own power somehow? Ashley, his mind nagged at him. Get Ashley out of here. Evacuate her. Fuck contagion.
In a millisecond Homelander was in front of her door. The hazmat team still had not arrived, and with the fire now raging through the ward he doubted if they would. He pushed down the handle and stepped into the room, straight into a winter wonderland.
The entire room was covered with frost, sparkling in the fluorescent overhead lighting. The floor might as well be a skating rink, all the furnishings were white, and his breath emerged in a bloom of white from his mouth as he exhaled. The cold didn't bother him—space was infinitely colder—but the hospital bed looked like a sculpture of ice and snow, the steel of the bedrails growing frost crystals.
Ashley lay asleep in the bed, the blankets having the same white coating as the rest of the room, and frost dappled her hair and face. Only the normal sound of her heart and breathing eased his fear for her. Quickly he approached the bed and took hold of the rail to lower it. Was there a section of the bedrail that looked odd, odder than its frost coating? Was there a section that looked misshapen, like a candy bar inside a package that had melted in the summer heat and retained some of its shape when someone clutched at it? But he didn't have time to think about any of that now.
Homelander put his hand on her cheek, disturbing the pattern of frost. "Ashley, it's Homelander. Wake up. There's a fire and we have to get out of here."
She struggled out of sleep. "What? What's going on?"
Just to check, he asked her, "Am I naked?"
"You tell me," she snapped before looking at him. "Under your clothes, I guess you are. What is your problem?"
No hallucinations, which was good. "You're in the on-site clinic. There was an accident in the lab, and now there's a fire. We have to get out of here."
"Yeah, okay," she murmured and tried to free herself of her frosted bedding. He didn't wait for her to do it, lifting her out of the bed with the blanket wrapped around her. The feathery tendrils that wound through her hair and turned her eyelashes white had already begun melting away.
"Do you feel cold? Are you still achy like before?"
She shook her head. "I'm fine. Thank you for asking."
With Ashley in his arms, he stepped back into the corridor and saw a crew of people with tanks on their back and sprayers in their hands rushing toward the burning ward. Water suppression had failed, so the chemical suppression protocol had been activated. They paid no attention to him or the woman he carried, brushing past without even a look. Under normal circumstances it would have bruised his ego, but he had other things to concern himself with.
Dr. Clay came running toward him, his face a mask of horror as he saw Ashley in Homelander's arms. "Why didn't you wait for the hazmat crew?"
"I don't know if you noticed this, doc, but there's a fire in this building. I'm not going to leave Ashley to burn to death."
"What about the frost?"
Homelander shook his head. "I have no idea and right now I don't care." He didn't advise the doctor that the frost had covered everything in the room, including Ashley, but she didn't seem any the worse for wear. The frost on her and the blanket had melted away, and she'd even gone back to sleep in his arms. "Is there any reason why she should be sleeping this much?"
Clay shrugged. "It may be her body trying to heal itself. It may be some action of the contaminants she was exposed to. We need to do some testing before we can draw any conclusions."
One of the firefighters came up to Dr. Clay. "The chemical suppression seems to be working. We have the fire under control."
"Good. Do we know what started it?"
"Not yet. The security camera footage in the area should give us a better idea."
"All right, thank you." The firefighter went back toward the ward. "Do you want to see the footage?" Clay asked Homelander.
"Yes, but I have to find someplace to put Ashley. I don't want her back in that room." What he really wanted was to take her up to the ninety-ninth floor, where the Seven's apartments were, and stick her in one of the vacant ones, maybe Maeve's or Starlight's, where she would be close and he could watch her. What if he hadn't been here when the fire broke out? They would have left her in that room to burn to death because they were afraid of whatever shit she got dosed with in the lab.
"There's another room closer to Control. Would that be acceptable?"
Homelander nodded and, once he'd put Ashley in the bed and gotten her covered up, they headed for the control room. There were two people manning the security stations. Homelander instructed one of them, "Show us the security footage of the ward from the last hour."
He nodded violently. "Yes, sir." He pushed buttons and video appeared on the screen.
Hooray for the surveillance state, thought Homelander. The three patients in the open beds—Dr. Harriman, Dr. Rennie, and Miller—lay virtually motionless. "Speed it up until something happens," he instructed the technician.
Nothing happened for a bit until Dr. Harriman sat up in bed suddenly, his head shifting from side to side as he scanned the room. "Is there someone in there?" asked Dr. Clay. "Someone who shouldn't be."
"Neither of the others is reacting," the technician said.
"They don't seem to be awake," said Homelander. "Maybe he heard something. If the video had sound, we'd know." Fuck Stan Edgar for cheaping out on Tower surveillance.
Harriman threw the blanket back and got out of bed, his hospital johnny flapping around his knees. His hair was disheveled and the resolution of the picture was too low to give a good idea of his expression, but the supe thought he looked much more alert than Ashley had the first time she woke up. He also looked frightened. That was when the curtains in the ward burst into flame.
"Freeze frame," Clay told the technician. "He's looking at the curtain when it happens."
"But all the curtains went up at the same time, and he wasn't looking at them all." Homelander didn't like what he was hearing. If Maureen was right and Project Mirror had been an attempt to aerosolize Compound V, and the lab accident had somehow made the attempt work, Harriman could easily be manifesting supe powers. He hadn't seen anything from the man's eyes, no laser vision or heat rays, so how he'd set the ward on fire was a mystery. "And it's just the curtains right now. When we got there, the bedding and mattresses were on fire too."
On the video Dr. Rennie and Miller started coughing and showed signs of awakening. Harriman looked around wildly and stepped out of the curtained cubicle, turning left and heading for the far doors leading out of the ward. "He's loose," Clay said, unnecessarily as they could all see that. "Put out a security alert for Dr. Alan Harriman. Keep him under surveillance if seen but do not engage. That should give us enough time to contact you, Homelander."
"Yeah, don't risk any of the security. We don't need multiple people running around the Tower screaming with their hair on fire. Might be disruptive for the wage slaves."
"I'll forward the security footage to Ms. Lasko, with your permission." Homelander nodded. Then Clay asked the technician, "Can you show us security footage from Room 5?" The technician nodded and the ward footage disappeared, replaced by a shot of Ashley sleeping in her bed. Too late he realized the doctor had finally gotten around to checking on what had created the frost in her room.
The footage was from the past hour, and there wasn't much to see. Ashley slept, making little movements of her head and turned over at one point. "This is riveting television," Homelander remarked to the room in general. No one replied.
Then the frost began to appear, slow and gradual, becoming noticeable first on Ashley's face and hair, then the blankets of her bed, then the bedrails. It spread outward slowly, over the table beside her bed, the chair a visitor could sit in, the walls, the floor, the ceiling. The observation window was last, becoming cloudy, the tendrils of frost joining together into a sheet and obscuring the glass. "She isn't doing anything," Clay noted. "She's still asleep. Is there a possibility an intruder's in the building, some supe who can use cold and fire both?"
"Doubt it," said Homelander. "I don't know of any supes who can use diametrically opposed powers."
"It does seem to be a limiting factor of Compound V. Maybe two rogue supes working together?"
Maybe Billy fucking Butcher. Maybe he's managed to suborn more supes into his little group of slayers, dumb fucks who don't realize he'll kill them too as soon as they aren't useful anymore. "That's a possibility. I'll look into it."
One of the security people came in. "No word on Dr. Harriman. We think he's escaped from the building."
"He won't get far in a hospital johnny with his ass hanging out for all the world to see," Homelander said. "Analytics should turn something up as soon as someone calls the police over the guy walking down the street half-naked."
The nurse appeared at the door and gestured Clay over. "I did the blood draws for Dr. Rennie and the lab assistant with no problem. When I tried with Ms. Barrett, the needle broke."
"In her arm?" the doctor asked.
"No. On her skin. I couldn't penetrate her skin with the needle. When we did the original blood draw, it was fine."
Clay stood there, silent, rubbing his chin with one hand. "Try the supe needles and let me know if they don't work." Since most supes had inhumanly tough skin, Stan Edgar had come up with an alloy that could penetrate their skin. There wasn't much of this alloy and it was expensive in the extreme to create, so the needles were the extent of its use.
Homelander felt the breath go out of his lungs. Harriman had burned the ward down; if in fact Ashley did have supe powers due to the accident, what would she be able to do? He thought of the frost and an image of Vought Tower encased in ice crossed his mind, with little ice people sitting behind desks and waiting for elevators and taking ice craps in the toilet. But where would her frost powers come from? Where had Harriman's fire powers come from? The only answers were in Ashley's head now, assuming she had a grasp of what Harriman was doing with his project. "Is she awake?"
"No, sir," the nurse said. "The blood draw should wake her up."
"I'll go with you," said Dr. Clay.
"So will I," said Homelander. Both of them looked at him oddly and he gave them his predator's smile. "Let's get to it, shall we?"
Neither of them liked it, but they weren't going to tell the leader of the Seven no. When they got to her room this time, the observation window was clear and there was no snowy frosted coating on the room. Ashley hadn't moved since he'd set her down in the bed. "Did you check her vitals before the blood draw?" asked Clay. The nurse nodded. "Did she have any reaction when the needle broke?"
"No, sir. She didn't even wake up."
He nodded. "Go ahead."
The nurse wrapped a length of tubing around Ashley's arm above the elbow, tapped the inside of her elbow with two fingers, found a vein, and stuck the needle into her arm.
"Ow!" She came to in an instant, launching a punch at the nurse. Homelander had been expecting this and caught her fist in his hand, but he didn't expect the power behind that punch. He actually had to exert quite a bit of strength to keep her strike from hitting the hapless nurse. And when her fist impacted his hand, it felt…uncomfortable, sort of. Maybe approaching…pain? Just a little?
To distract himself from the unsettling strength Ashley had just displayed, he spoke to her. "It's okay. They're just doing a blood draw. Do you remember the lab accident?"
"What?" She pulled her hand away from Homelander.
Dr. Clay took over the narrative. "You'd gone to visit Lab B5 in Subbasement B, presumably to check on the status of the experiment. Dr. Alan Harriman was the project lead. Project Mirror?"
Her heart rate went up a few beats. "I remember visiting the lab. What specifically happened?"
Clay told her, "One of the lab assistants caused some vials to break. We don't know what was in those vials, but five people in the lab died immediately." Ashley closed her eyes and Homelander hoped she wasn't going back to sleep. He needed to discuss this with her, the frost and the fire and the unexpected strength.
"What explanation have we given their families?"
"None, as of now. The accident was only a few hours ago."
"What was Project Mirror, Ashley?" Homelander asked. "Because Maureen thinks it was an attempt to aerosolize Compound V."
"It wasn't." She put a hand to her forehead and rubbed her temple.
"Are you sure about that? Because Dr. Harriman burned down the ward he was in and you almost iced over your room. Plus normal needles don't penetrate your skin anymore, and you've got significantly more upper body strength than you had this morning."
"Meaning what?"
Homelander saw the dawning horror in her eyes and smiled. "I think you're a supe now."