Once Peter stops wheezing due to Matt's absolutely hilarious outburst, everyone shuts up to hear what it is the documents have to say. At least, they try to shut up to hear what it has to say, but there's a bit of a dilemma when it comes to choosing who's going to read it aloud.
"Not you, Mr. I-Gargle-Glass-Shards-For-Breakfast," Wade says, snatching the folder away from Frank, who just gives an exhausted sigh and drags his hand down his face in defeat. "And you're blind, so that's another 'no'." Matt simply flips him off for that, and the gesture is lovingly returned. "I'd love to get a whole detective noir thing going on, but I'm pretty sure that Jones is seeing double after all she's had to drink. Karate Kid dropped out of school in the fifth grade, so I'm not sure his reading skills are up to par."
"Hey!" Danny says indignantly, and Colleen just shakes her head.
"You sure seem to love talking; why don't you read it?" Frank finally snaps, because even Deadpool can't crush his fiery temper for very long.
"Oh, Frank, just admit you want to hear even more of my sweet, sweet voice so that you can imagine—"
Frank snatches the folder from Wade and tosses it to Peter before crossing his arms over his chest.
"What was that for?!" Wade asks, his voice saturated with offense.
"Kid annoys me the least, figured I'd give it to him if it meant shutting you up."
Peter smiles at that, because that's basically a ringing endorsement when it comes to Mr. Castle. Most of what the man says is composed of insults or vague grunts. He opens up the folder and begins flipping through the different sections.
"Bellevue, Elmhurst, Metro General, Mount Sinai, Mount Sinai Brooklyn, Mount Sinai Queens, Mount Sinai St. Lukes, Mount Sinai West—basically every Mount Sinai variation on record—um, now we're getting into psychiatric facilities…" Peter flips a bit more, because if he reads off every name they'll be there for hours. "Jails, too. And police precincts."
"What precincts?" Matt asks, leaning forward a little.
"Um… 1st, 9th, 46th, 61st, 114th," Peter lists off as he flips through the files. There's nothing about the 15th which is what he's assuming Matt was most interested in. Daredevil taught that precinct a lesson about corruption, and anyone who managed to stay, especially after Fisk went away to prison, seems to have learned said lesson. He pauses before pulling out the file for the 114th and flipping through it, since it's the one most relevant to him. "The precinct files have names of officers, and tables. I think…" Peter pauses to scan over the tables and confirm that awful feeling in his stomach. "The charts have an officer's name, a date, a number, a location, and a price. I think the number is people. There's a quota at the bottom."
"For just the precincts, or for everything?" Colleen asks.
Peter puts the folder back before pulling out one of the hospital files. "Names of workers, dates, numbers, locations, prices, and quotas," he confirms. "Looks like they're on everything."
"Jesus…" Luke mutters.
Peter flips past the files labeled with institutions until he finds something different. It's hand-written as opposed the everything else that was clearly typed. Jessica raises an eyebrow as Peter pulls out the thick stack of papers that have been stapled together.
"What's that one?" she asks.
Peter flips through it, and after a few pages of letters that, while definitely the alphabet he knows, are formed into completely incomprehensible chains. "Uh… I think it's in code."
"What? Lemme see that," Frank says, gesturing for Peter to pass it over.
"No, I've got it," Peter replies, as a pattern between the words catches his eye. "Just…" he sets the papers down on the coffee table and kneels in front of it, flipping back and forth between the few sections of writing where he can see a pattern. "Does anyone have a pen?" he asks, not looking up at his audience.
That prompts a wave of people patting themselves down, until Frank finds one shoved in one of the many secret pockets of his scary jacket and passes it to Peter.
The adults seem content to watch in silence for a few minutes, or it takes them that long to come out of their stunned stupor from seeing a teenager good at something that has nothing to do with technology. Either way, it isn't surprising that Wade is the one who breaks the silence.
"Um, okay lil' Turing, you do a lot of Sudoku growing up or something?" he asks, having moved in a bit closer to read exactly what it is that Peter's writing down.
Peter glances up at him for just a moment to judge just how serious he's being, (completely) before going back to working on the paper which is now filling up with lines between the writing with his own notes. "What? No, it's a substitution thing, it's really easy," he says, pointing at a word with his pen. "See this?"
"That says JZT. That doesn't mean shit," Wade answers.
"But look, it's here too, and here, and here," Peter says, flipping through the pages and pointing out each occurrence of the 'word'. "And here's JZTDT. So it starts the same, then there's a new letter, then there's a familiar letter. A three letter word that you use a lot and that can have a new letter and one of its existing letters added onto the end to make a new word?"
"So what you're saying is..?" Wade says.
"I'm saying JZT means 'the'. J is T, Z is H, T is E. So JZTDT is..?" he prompts.
"It's 'these'. So D is S."
"Exactly!" Peter replies before looking back down at the paper and continuing to work out the code. "It's a weird choice to code something with because you don't need a key to work it out. Sure, it takes some trial and error, but anyone can figure it out, given enough time. It's like they don't need the code to hold up for very long, just enough to slow someone down if they ever got their hands on it… Guess they assumed they'd notice fast if it went missing."
"Well, they sure were wrong about that," Matt says under his breath.
Wade kneels down beside Peter and actually manages to help, pointing out a few possibilities for certain letters, while the others tear into the files on hospitals and cops in their respective areas. Jessica reads off a list of names to Matt, and some of them he recognizes from both his daytime and nighttime jobs.
All in all, it takes Peter about an hour and a half to decrypt the code, with a surprising amount of assistance from Wade. It seems that once the guy sets his mind to a task, he can keep his focus on it pretty well. There aren't just sentences that they have to work on though, there are also tables similar to the ones in the typed documents.
Everyone is pretty much just laying around by the time Peter finishes the first table. Frank has left and then returned with a surprising number of guns, and made omelets for everyone once Peter's finished. He has to read back over it a couple times to make sure that he's reading it correctly, and he doesn't like what he sees.
"Hey, guys," Peter says. "I found something good—well, not good, it's actually horrifying, but it's good that we know it now—"
"Peter," Jessica says. "Just tell us what you found."
"Right, yeah, sorry," he apologizes. "Well, it's another table with the number of people, date, and location, but this time, it's saying what location they were brought from. So this also has the secondary location, which John Mulaney taught me is never a good thing," he rambles, and Wade is the only one to laugh at his reference. Peter thinks he understands how old people feel when they make a joke around the young 'uns that just doesn't fly.
"Yikes, tough crowd," Wade says after an awkward and confused silence, patting Peter's shoulder sympathetically.
"What I'm saying is that I have the locations that everyone ended up at," Peter says, pulling out his phone to put the address that keeps showing up into it. "It's an office building. Uh, Genlabs Inc., over in Williamsburg."
"Well, that sounds not at all ominous, or like something you'd find in a zombie apocalypse game," Wade says from where he's finishing up decrypting another table. "This is all the same stuff, by the way, just more people being taken to Genlabs."
"Well, I think I know where we need to go," Luke says. "Guess you three should suit up so we can head over."
Peter looks down at himself and then the rest of the present company. Matt, Wade, and himself really are the only ones with costumes, unless they count Frank's skull vest as a costume. He goes to use Matt's bathroom to change back into the Spidey suit, while Matt goes back to his bedroom to change. Wade whines outside of Matt's door until he's done, and then uses the room to change so that he doesn't have to subject the rest of the people there to seeing more horribly scarred skin than they already have. It's actually rather polite of him.
Spider-Man, Daredevil, and Deadpool all leave the building through the roof access, while the other heroes use the front door like normal people. Not wearing costumes does afford them a bit more free reign when it comes to entering and exiting normal people spaces, but the downfalls of not having their faces covered definitely outweigh the few benefits.
Unfortunately, Danny and Colleen's car can fit five people max, so it's out of the question when it comes to using it as transportation. Jessica had given Danny, Matt, and Luke a look that was met with resistance at first and shortly followed with defeated sighs.
That's how Harlem's Hero, The Iron Fist, The Punisher, Deadpool, Daredevil, Spider-Man, Jessica Jones, and Colleen Wing all find themselves sitting together on the E Line just past three in the morning on a Sunday.
They get a few strange looks, and they absolutely end up on at least three Snapchat stories, but they make it to Genlabs without any run-ins with law enforcement, just a drunk guy who screams 'I love you, Spider-Man' at them while they're walking from the 23rd Street Station to the Court Square Station to catch the G down to Williamsburg. Peter will forever deny that he shouted his undying love back.
All in all, they finally arrive at Genlabs offices just past four in the morning. Peter thinks he'd be pretty tired, if not for the fact that his blood has been almost entirely replaced with pure adrenalin by this point in time. This won't be the first time he's taken down a bad guy—hell, this won't even be the first time he's ended a conspiracy. But taking down the Vulture and his operation didn't go anywhere near smoothly considering he now has an arch-nemesis of sorts who knows his identity, but that's a problem for another time, so Peter shakes it off as they head for the building.
"This place looks pretty plain," Deadpool says, sounding a little bit disappointed. "What happened to villains with pizzazz? I want glass towers and garish purple and white suits—not this Brooklyn office building bullshit."
"I will be more than happy to pass off my next theatrical villain to you if you just shut up about it for the rest of the day," Jessica replies, earning nods of agreement from everyone, including Colleen, who has been relatively silent up to this point.
"That's a deal, Ms. Jones," Deadpool says, holding out his hand for Jessica to shake.
She recoils from him almost immediately. "Uh uh, hell no. I'm not falling for that shit again."
"What shit?" Peter asks, immediately regretting it when all the 'you innocent, adorable little angel baby' looks are turned on him.
"Last time he got me to shake his hand, he'd cut it off and stuck it back on with duct tape so I pulled the whole thing off. It was horrible," Jessica says darkly, glaring at Deadpool when he laughs.
"What? It was classic!"
"As truly interesting and disturbing as it is to get a look inside that thing you call a brain, I think we should head on in, see if we can find anything," Colleen says, tilting her head towards the building they're standing outside of. "I'd rather not still be out when the sun comes up."
"Amen to that," Frank says. "Can you tell if anyone's inside?" he asks, turning to Matt.
"I can't sense anyone, seems empty," Matt replies. "There's a door around the side; Luke, Danny, Frank, Colleen, go around that way. Jessica, Wade, Spider-Man come with me."
They split off into the two groups, and while the others head through the side, Matt leads their group around to the opposite side of the building where a large window on the second floor is open.
"We're going in through there," he says, before running straight at the dumpster and vaulting onto it before making another jump and snagging the edge of the windowsill to pull himself up and through.
Wade follows almost the exact same series of movements while Jessica just jumps and Peter climbs up the wall after her.
Peter's not sure what he was expecting, but the inside of the building is just as generic and boring as the outside. The walls are a pale yellowish beige, the floors are covered in dull linoleum, and there's a plastic potted plant in the hallway. A thick layer of dust covers everything, from the sad plastic plant, to the windowsill, to the desks, to the truly archaic monitors on the desks.
"This stuff looks ancient," Peter says, poking at an absolute dinosaur of a copy machine sitting up against the wall.
"It looks like someone bought a bunch of old office equipment and filled this place up with it," Jessica corrects, looking over one of the desks and running her finger through the thick layer of dust on the keyboard. She makes a face at the way her finger has been stained gray from it and wipes the remainder of the dust on her jeans.
"So it's a front," Matt says. "I can't say I'm shocked. Let's go meet up with the others."
Peter falls in line behind Matt and Jessica with Wade bringing up the back of their party as they head down the musty stairwell to the ground floor. Matt pushes the door open with an ear-rending screech from the rusted hinges, and Peter cringes sympathetically. He knows that has to have hurt Matt's ears at least as much as his own.
Colleen and Frank are at the front desk, and Colleen is trying to get the computer to turn on so she can look through their records, assuming there are any, while Frank keeps watch. Danny and Luke are apparently just finishing their lap of the first floor, and Danny puts his arms out in a gesture that conveys a lot of emotions, mainly confusion.
"There's nothing here. Did you find anything upstairs?" Danny asks.
"Just some old, unused office equipment," Peter answers. "We only went to the second floor though."
"Have you checked out the basement?" Matt asks from where he's standing by one of the interior walls, his hand just barely touching it.
"What basement?" Colleen asks. "The elevators only go up from here, and you were in the stairwell. This is the bottom floor."
Matt shakes his head. "There's a basement. A few basements, actually; I think it goes down about three floors."
"You wanna do your magic trick and find us the elevator to it?" Jessica asks, watching as Matt runs his hand over the wall and starts walking towards something that nobody else can sense. He looks completely focused on the task at hand, and nobody else seems to take much notice of this.
Colleen is still working at the computer with Frank beside her, and Danny and Luke have joined her behind the desk as well, while Wade and Jessica are following a few paces behind Matt- just like Peter himself.
Peter feels the hair on the back of his neck stand up, and he turns just in time to see the stairwell door open and reveal a man in all black with a gun not unsimilar to the one Frank has in his hands. He panics for just a split second, before shooting a web that sticks the man's hand to the wall and yelling to alert everyone else to the presence of the gunman.
Frank is immediately on the guy and has an arm around his throat to choke him into unconsciousness. "What the hell, Red?! You said there wasn't anyone here!"
Luke flings himself in front of Danny just as shots are fired from the other side of the floor, and Peter doesn't miss the way that Deadpool puts himself on Peter's side that has the least cover from the wall.
"Well, clearly I was wrong!" Matt yells back, tapping his fist against a supply closet door and turning to Jessica, who immediately yanks the door open and all but drags Peter in with her.
"How many?!" Colleen yells from somewhere behind the front desk between the bouts of gunfire that are getting concerningly closer to them with each moment that passes.
"Eight!" Matt yells back after Deadpool fires off a few shots.
"Head down," Danny calls out as a faint yellow glow comes from where he is, brightening the otherwise fairly dark building. "We can handle them!"
A few seconds later, Matt and Wade join Peter and Jessica in the closet, which he realizes isn't actually a closet at all, after Wade helpfully flicks the light switch on. It's another stairwell. Once the door is slammed shut, Jessica bends an exposed pipe on the wall in front of the door so that it'll be inaccessible to anyone without strength on par with hers.
Peter looks down the stairs and sighs. "Well, that looks ominous. Anyone down there?"
"I can't tell," Matt says, and that's another thing Peter's going to add onto the list of concerning things about this building. For how completely innocuous it seems, Matt's abilities are apparently inhibited by it somehow.
"In that case, I think I'll go first," Wade says, awkwardly squeezing past all three of them to get to the front of the group. "Come along now, ducklings."
Matt is the first person behind Deadpool descending the narrow concrete staircase, followed by Peter with Jessica bringing up the rear. Peter knows they're protecting him, but with the way the Spidey-sense is completely flipping its shit, he can't really say that he's unhappy with the arrangement.
"Something's really wrong," he says quietly as they continue to descend, apparently heading for the lowest sub-basement.
"No shit, Spidey," Deadpool stage-whispers back, and Matt jabs him in the side for it.
"I'm serious," Peter replies, sounding a little more nervous. "Something is really, really, really wrong."
"How do you know?" Deadpool asks.
"I— I just do?" How the hell does he explain the Spidey-sense?
"It's one of his powers," Matt says. "He can explain it later."
"You can just tell when shit is wrong? Coolest power ever!" Deadpool says, loud enough that Matt slaps his hand over his mouth. At least this time there's no licking involved.
They've passed by two doors that appear to lead down empty, darkened hallways, but when they arrive at the bottom of the stairs, there are actual lights on in the hallway this door leads down. There's a keypad lock on the door, but it isn't engaged, which just sets Peter's nerves off even more.
"There anyone down here?" Peter asks softly, and Matt nods.
"A lot of people. Thirty? Forty? I can't tell."
They all look back at the door, and Deadpool is the one to literally say 'fuck it', as he pulls the door open.
The hallway here is wider than the stairwell had been, wide enough that instead of standing single-file they can all stand side by side. The hallway looked maybe 30 feet long at first, but once they enter it must set off a motion sensor of some sort, which turns the lights on further down the hallway. Peter isn't even sure if he can see the end of the hallway; everything is the sterile, bright white that a hospital wishes it could be, and the light reflecting off of the pristine shiny floors and glass walls is enough that it takes Peter's eyes a minute to adjust from the dim stairwell.
"Shit…" he hears Jessica breathe out, and it's just then that Peter realizes the walls aren't glass; the hallway is entirely lined with cages.
As far as he can see, there are people locked in individual three by three cells, and the moment their occupants see people in the hallway, they start pounding on the glass. It's a horrible chorus of 'let me out' and 'help me' and variants on pleas to get these people out before something happens. They're all screaming, and the woman in the cell directly in front of Peter is pounding her fist against the glass hard enough that her knuckles split and smear blood all over the barrier. Peter watches in mute horror as the rivulets of blood run down the wall to stain the otherwise pristine cell. It takes him a moment to get past the blood, but when he does his heart sinks. The woman in the cage who's screaming and crying and begging him to let her out is Aelisha Trenton.
He raises his hand to break the glass, to save Aelisha from whatever the hell either has been done to her, or will be done to her in the near future, but before he can, the back wall of the cell slides up. Another woman stumbles in through the back of the cell, and she looks significantly worse than Aelisha. Her skin is pale and bruised all over, and as she makes her way into the light, Peter can see that the blood vessels in her eyes have burst. She clearly needs help too, but as he again makes the move to break the glass, Matt grabs his wrist and pulls him back.
"Something's wrong with her," Matt says just as the hurt woman focuses in on Aelisha who is still pounding at the glass.
People in the surrounding cells who can see what's happening start screaming even louder, but Aelisha doesn't turn around until it's Peter yelling, "Behind you!"
As soon as she turns, the injured woman is on her, like a lion on a gazelle in those nature videos the biology teacher shows in class when they're too lazy to make a lesson plan.
All four of them watch in sheer horror as the injured woman drags Aelisha down to the ground and digs her nails into her skin, ripping them through the soft tissues of her arms and dragging them from shoulders to wrists. No amount of screaming, or hitting, or thrashing from Aelisha seems to make any difference, as the one goring her bites down on her cheek hard enough that blood wells up around her teeth.
"What the fuck," Deadpool says, unable to tear his eyes away.
There's another dramatic increase in the screaming, and Peter manages to wrench his eyes away from the horrifying sight in front of him in time to see the back walls of the other cages slide up and similarly afflicted people stumble out before descending upon the original occupants of the cells, like the zombies on the horse in The Walking Dead.
"Mesmerizing, isn't it?" a voice says over the speakers installed all through the ceiling.
Peter jolts at the voice. "It's not mesmerizing, you sick fuck! It's murder!" he yells, once Aelisha finally stops fighting.
"Not murder, no. Think of it as a new state of being," the man's voice continues, crackling just slightly. "People are animals, at their root, at their core. That's all we are. Violent, greedy evil beasts. We take and we take and we take until there's nothing left, but somehow we still try to take more."
"What the hell is wrong with you?!" Peter shouts before Matt puts a hand across his chest.
"Why are you doing this?" Matt asks, his voice calm despite the fact that he's shaking; either from rage or horror, Peter can't even begin to tell.
"This is my job," the man says.
"Your job?" Jessica spits out in disbelief.
"Well, it was my job. I worked for the government," he explains casually, as if this is some water-cooler office talk and they aren't surrounded by people brutally, senselessly murdering other people. "Biological weapons engineer, that's what I was. I was stuck in a lab ten hours a day figuring out how to weaponize Ebola— the entire developed world was working on that! But I had a vision! I had ingenuity! I knew I could make something greater—something nobody's seen before!"
"Holy shit. I called it," Deadpool says in shock. "I said Genlabs sounded like some zombie apocalypse shit, and here we are."
"Don't be absurd," the man snaps. "They aren't zombies; they're humans— at their full potential! You and me, our brains put limitations on what we can do. They stop us from biting hard enough to crack our own teeth, stop us from lifting so much we rip our muscles to shreds—our brains, they limit us! They stop us from being great! But I found a way to change that."
Peter has to swallow down bile as he listens to this lunatic raving while people are dying all around them. Innocent people, screaming for help, are dying.
"One little virus," he says. "Touch a dirty door handle, inhale the air someone coughed into, drink contaminated water, and it'll begin to make its way to your brain, taking over nerve cells and forcing them to reproduce the viral bodies until they explode. Once it reaches the brain, it begins to shut down key parts of the different lobes, and that, that was the hard part. Shut down the frontal lobe, and they can't control their movement. Shut down the parietal and they can't interpret what they're hearing or seeing. Shut down the temporal and they can't hear. I couldn't have the perfect human without any of those, no. I had to get the virus to target individual areas of each lobe to keep the perfect balance, and along the way there were casualties. People ended up braindead, in comas—just barely clinging to life. These aren't zombies; they're alive. They just have every bit of themselves perfected. Higher thought is limited, but instinct is there. The most important instinct left just belongs to the virus; spread. And while I don't like to be rushed, it seems like I'll have to release my creation sooner rather than later, thanks to your discovery. It's getting close to time for most people to start their day, isn't it?"
The speakers cut out, and Peter looks around to his fellow heroes, each looking disturbed in their own measure. While his eyes sweep across them, his peripherals catch that the sick people are no longer attacking the others, though most of the people who were attacked are still laying on the ground or propped up against the wall
"She's infected now too…" Matt says, taking a step towards the glass, his head tilted at Aelisha who is still on the ground.
His movement apparently triggers something in the people's minds as the ones that are standing begin pounding on the glass, tearing open their knuckles without seeming to notice.
The glass is nowhere near cracking, but Matt takes a step back, grabbing Peter's wrist and pulling him towards the exit. "We're leaving. Now."
"But those people—"
"They're sick. We can't help them. The fronts of the cages have the same mechanism as the back, so they could open up at any fucking second," Matt says as he continues leading them back down the hallway.
They're about ten feet away from the door when there's a mechanical whirring sound; Peter doesn't even have to turn and look to know that the doors must have opened, because now Matt's sprinting the rest of the way down the hall and dragging Peter with him.
Jessica slams the door shut just as the people from the cells start pushing against it, and it's clear that even she's having a little trouble holding it. Thankfully, similar to the door that led down into the stairwell there's a pipe on the wall that Jessica can bend down and wrap around the handle to keep it shut, at least for a little while.
She's panting and looking between everyone else, but the door seems secure for now. "I've got three words," she says. "What. The. Fuck."
"Fucking zombies," Deadpool replies, sounding almost impressed.
The gunfire from upstairs has ceased, and they all take that as a good signal to head back up, though Jessica tosses a worried look at the door that the people (Peter refuses to call them zombies, no matter what it is that Deadpool is saying) are pounding on as they shriek and make a truly stunning variety of awful noises.
"It should hold," Matt assures before tilting his head. "For a little while, at least."
"Well, that's comforting," Jessica says, not sounding at all comforted. Peter has to agree with her there.
Jessica bends the pipe back from the door once they reach the top of the stairs, and they immediately come face to face with Luke, Danny, and Colleen, who were apparently getting ready to come down and help them.
"You guys handle everything up here?" Jessica asks, looking over the impressive array of bullet holes in Luke's clothes.
"Yeah, we got the guys tied up and locked in the office behind the front desk. Frank's watching them. You guys find anything good down there?" Colleen asks, and Peter's happy to see a distinct lack of blood on her katana.
"We found zombies," Wade says.
That doesn't turn any heads, because it's Wade and 90% of the words out of his mouth are poorly timed jokes.
"Seriously, what'd you find?" Luke asks.
"Zombies," Matt says, and now it raises eyebrows.
"They're people," Peter snaps. "They're infected, and they're not in their right minds, but they aren't the walking dead. They still bleed, and I'm sure a shot it the heart would kill them, because they're people." Calling them zombies makes them already seem dead, but they're not. There's a chance they could be saved, and Peter isn't about to risk people killing them because they're assumed to be lost causes.
"They're infected with a disease that unleashes their 'full potential'," Matt clarifies. "We got a monologue over the speaker system. Long story short, it sounds like he's planning on releasing the virus soon."
"How soon?"
"A few hours soon," Peter says grimly.
"So, we've got forty plus zombies—" Deadpool starts.
"Infected. People," Peter corrects viciously.
"My bad, infected people in the basement, and a door that 'should hold for a little' keeping them back, we've got the hit squad up here that you guys have managed to deal with, and we've got a mad scientist ready to release his disease somewhere in the next few hours. Anything I'm missing?"
"That sounds about right," Jessica says, tossing another worried glance over her shoulder down the stairs.
"Someone wanna grab Frank and fill him in?" Matt asks, and Danny nods in response.
"Yeah, I'll go grab him."
"Life as we know it could come to an end in an hour as far as we know," Colleen says, directing the group back to what's absolutely crucial. "So what's the plan?"