A Laboratory

It was odd, as they went down the silent highway. By mutual unspoken consent, they said nothing, moved as quietly as possible. There was an odd expectancy in the air, a sudden sharpness to her senses. Lois Lane had the odd feeling of being watched, and her every nerve seemed super sensitive, ready to jump at the slightest sound, to shiver at the least puff of air...and the corridor went on, turned left...and ended at a heavy metal door. At a nod from Cheetah, Lois grabbed the handle and pulled it open, receiving the full blast of cool, refrigerated air.

They walked into what might, at some point, have been some kind of workshop or production floor. There were tall ceilings with exposed ductwork, pale off-white walls, bare cement floor.

Except someone had made a game attempt at turning it into a mad scientist's laboratory, and it was cold enough that their breath fogged the air.

The far wall was a single long table with enough glasswork, bunsen burners, centrifuge machines, gas hoods, spectrographs, and other miscellaneous beige equipment that Lois couldn't even name to give full employment to a cartel of methamphetamine cooks. To their right as they entered the door was the monitor and keyboard of a computer station, looking oddly prosaic, and in between there were eight full-sized tables like those in a morgue...most of them unoccupied, aside from suggestive stains, but three of them bore naked, partially-dissected corpses.

Lois Lane swallowed as she approached them. She recognized the features of the women from their social media profiles. Their names and vital statistics came to mind...Jenny Dunlap, Mara de la Cruz, and Diana Reynolds. All students at Metropolis University, all of them having gone missing in the last two weeks. Now they were dead, their chests opened with surgical precision, organs removed. The bare breasts looked odd, hanging away from the great incisions and the gaping, bloodless body cavities.

Cheetah, meanwhile, had padded immediately to the right...and Lois saw where the organs had gone. The right-hand wall was entirely low, metal shelving, in which disembodied organs floated like exotic tropical fish in tanks.

In the cold, the cat-woman's fur bristled. She moved with swift, jerky movements, her tail thrashing in agitation as she examined each of the tanks on the wall in turn.

"What were they doing here?" Lois asked, finally breaking the silence. "And who was doing it?"

"Vampires," Cheetah growled. "Aren't purely supernatural. There's a viral component. The changes are genetic...and those genes can be altered. That's why they stole my research, they wanted to improve their vampiric form...incorporate more animal components..."

Lois Lane nodded...and then hunched over as a sudden cramp nearly folded her in half. The throbbing pain in her labia had turned into shooting pains, as if poor dead Tonya Wong was still latched on.