Eh, scaly tail! part 4

...His whole body was covered in blood. And that's a good thing. There was always blood-alien and his own-it was part and parcel of his existence. If it bleeds, it means he's doing the right thing.

Something up ahead moved. Someone was hiding out there, covering themselves with the rickety, cracked remains of the wall. Hoping to hide from him? How foolish. To think that death would pass by. Death is inevitable, she makes no mistakes, just not today, when its punishing hand was him.

He stepped forward, inaudible, like a lizard scampering through the tall grass. Only a thin partition wall separated them now, ten centimeters of flimsy drywall separating someone's life from death. His hand lunged forward, toward the sound, to where the frightened heart fluttered, racing blood through the dead man's veins for the last time. The partition crumbled before his hand, unable to hold the movement of honed death, symbolizing the futility of all resistance, marking the superiority of the new species over the old.

"And this is the best they can send against me?" he hissed into the face of the terrified woman, with his paw on her head.

Without waiting for an answer, and she couldn't, for her whole being was consumed by the unbearable pain of the claw's grip on her skull, the lizard hurled his victim away. Without even a final scream, the woman slammed into the wall and sat on the floor, a helpless puppet. A large, beautiful, warm red stain remained on the cracked wall where the unfortunate woman's head had touched it.

Then something rattled against his back, leaving fresh wounds on the dark scales. The pain played a song in his temples. It was a sign, in a secret language only he understood: It sang of where the new enemies were. Those following in his footsteps, waiting their turn to meet the hand of death.

He fell and disappeared from sight, like a drop of dew spreading over fallen leaves. He slid like an elusive snake out of the hail of bullets. If they wanted to die, he would let them, just choose the right place.

The next few rooms weren't the right place- too much open space. It would be easy for people to use their cowardly weapons here. Suddenly, in one of the rooms filled with human machinery, something caught his attention.

Stopping, Lizard decided to take a minute to take a closer look at the irritant, he could afford such a delay, because the pursuers have to be extremely cautious in plotting a route, fearing surprise attacks, he had done so before, gathering a bloody harvest in their ranks.

One of the hastily abandoned monitors in the front row was broadcasting the image from the cameras. The lizard was beside the screen before he even realized what it was that might have caught his attention.

"Gwen..." the monster whispered softly, "Bobby."

Indeed. The monitor clearly showed two figures familiar to him from the memories of his old body fighting an unequal battle, against a group of women wearing the same armor as his pursuers. They were forced to take cover from the crossfire in a hangar filled with crates of military markings. Behind the girls looked the black yawn of the tunnel they had evidently snuck in through.

"They came for me..."

This revelation created confusion in the Lizard's mind. On the one hand, he immediately realized that the girls had come here to save him. Not afraid to plunge into the abyss of the unknown and engage in unequal combat, but on the other... they'd come for Peter Parker, not for him. The lizard remembered that Stacy, hiding behind the Spider-Woman mask, had already reversed the transformation of a creature like himself once before. So they're enemies, too!

"No!" the monster suddenly contradicted himself.

The encounter with the past had helped Peter's personality compete for supremacy in their tandem. But Lizard didn't want to cede his position and give up the primacy.

"We must face them!" convinced himself, or rather his other self, Peter, "they, like us, are fighting against Hydra's agents, let's defeat the common enemy first!"

This way of putting it helped. Disagreements with the Spiderwoman are a distant matter, but the pesky humans following on his heels are already here, any second now, could catch up with him and again shred his entire body. The thought of fleeing enraged the Lizard, but even less did he want to find himself under the barrage of fire again, wasting his strength time and time again to recover, for there is a limit to everything, and his regeneration as well.

Using cumbersome fingers to use the mouse was not possible, but the interface tracking program was surprisingly convenient - with just a couple of buttons Lizard was able to display the route from his current location to the exit from the base, through which Venom and the Spiderwoman broke through here.

"I see the target," some woman's voice came to his heightened ears, "he's in the third zone, I repeat - The lizard in a cage."

The woman's dismissive tone sent an instant burst of rage through him. The Lizard's consciousness was immediately flooded with scenes of possible reprisal against the self-confident woman, but he managed to restrain himself. This is the difference between him and a mad animal-he can calculate and plan his actions. If you rush headlong into the thick of battle every time you see an enemy, you will soon find yourself in a cage, exhausted, unable even to heal fresh wounds.

Snorting grudgingly, he turned his back on the voice and ran to where his unexpected allies should be waiting for him.