The Containment Team (12 page)

I looked at my watch. “Perhaps we should wait a few hours, dawn isn’t too far away.”

“We can’t afford to, it’s worse than we thought.” Madelyn looked up from her phone. “WSL has an update, finally. Apparently, the Hotel Karrow has been overrun with the creatures. Eyewitness accounts put the number of monsters at over several hundred.” The Karrow was the only four-star hotel in our town and was located smack dab in the middle.

“That was where those police were headed,” Ron said. “This is a clusterf—” He stopped and cleared his throat, looking at Madelyn. “This is a bloody mess. We should be heading out of town, not going to Pete’s work.”

“Makes sense, I guess.” I scratched my chin. “If I wanted to launch an invasion of blutom into the city, I would pick the center of town and the place with the most people. Is there anything more on what’s happening in Times Square. Are there reports of breakouts in other cities?”    

“Hold on.” Madelyn looked up to glare at me. “One question at a time.” We waited in silence as I made a turn. We were now a block away from the lab. “Nothing new about New York, but there are reports coming in from D.C., Atlanta, San Francisco, and Chicago. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Reports are coming from all over the country and the world. The monsters are everywhere. Law enforcement is out in force with orders to shoot. California has activated the National Guard.”

“That’s not good,” Pete said. “They don’t know how to fight the monsters. The soldiers will come back shifted. This time tomorrow the streets of the world will be swimming in blutom. Next week, there won’t be a populated place on earth without the monsters.”

I pulled up to the front of the lab. “I hope your containment team has some good protocols because we’re going to need them. Fast.”

I’D NEVER BEEN inside Pete’s lab before, but I had dropped him off at work. All of those times had been during the day and I’d been in a hurry, so I had never appreciated just how much the lab resembled a prison. At night, it was impossible to miss the connection.

It was a four-story building with a fence around the outer perimeter that had razor wire coiled around the top. The windows were all barred and the lights surrounding the building kept it well lit. The only things missing were the guards with guns and roving dogs.

The ominous nature of the place filled me with a dark foreboding. Was it just my imagination or had I seen this building in some horror movie? The music that usually accompanied such scenes danced around my mind as I thought about what waited for us inside, the uncertainty about what we would find made me want to turn around and find a place deep in the woods to hide.

The entrance had a guard station so I’d never been into the compound before. I’d always pulled off to the side and let Pete through the pedestrian checkpoint. At Pete’s direction, we pulled up to the guardhouse. There was a more than a hint of resignation in his voice, but I ignored it as I slowed my car to a halt.

The goal from the beginning had been to come here and every time we had turned around something else had gotten in the way. I almost laughed out loud when I saw the guard inside the booth. It would almost be too easy.

He was slumped in his chair, with his mouth open and drool coming down the side. Judging by how wet the top of his shirt was, he had been that way for quite some time. There were four televisions in front of him that rotated between views from various security cameras. The remains of a sandwich rested on his lap, he shifted and it briefly looked as though they would go toppling to the floor. At the last moment, he brought his leg up and the trash stayed where it was.

As I rolled down the window and leaned out I noticed that the guard appeared to have one eye half open. I waved hoping to get his attention but he didn’t respond. Because we were at the lab and I was concerned what might be looking out from the windows of the building, I didn’t immediately try to wake him up by saying something; instead, I closely examined his face, looking for the blood film. Wouldn’t it be just my luck to wake him up only to have him lunge at us? Did blutom monsters need sleep? I pushed the thought away, wanting to ask Pete, but doubting that he would answer.

The guard’s face appeared to be clear of any blood film, but he was light enough skinned that he already had a pinker than normal complexion. 

Had the guard been asleep when Pete had been chased away by the monsters? That seemed a little improbable, given the lack of finesse in the monster’s movements and the way that they tended to roar when they charged.

There were too many things about Pete’s story that weren’t adding up and it didn’t help my trust of him that he continued to stonewall our questions, giving as little up as he possibly could. I tried to envision Pete ducking under the red striped barrier with the monsters hot on his tail and this man sleeping through the whole of it.

It was difficult to see even though I had to admit that the guard did look to be pretty out of it. Perhaps, Pete and the monsters had run right past him without disturbing his slumber, but I doubted it.

A hand clawed into my shoulder. “What are you doing?” Pete whispered as he twisted the handle silently and stepped out of the car. “Are you trying to wake him up? Don’t say anything.” He took a card out of his wallet and swiped it against the reader at the side of the guardhouse. The barrier in front of us buzzed as it opened and Pete waved me through with one hand while putting a finger of the other up to his lips.

Pete should have mentioned that he had a card as we pulled up, his actions continued to highlight his desire to try and keep things from us. A time or two more and that would be the last straw.

I ground my teeth as I pulled forward through the gate, glancing at the guard one last time. I was a little surprised to see that he still hadn’t moved. Perhaps he’d had a few beers with his sandwich. Maybe he was dead. Whatever the reason, we passed without causing him to stir.

Once we were in I was planning to drive right up to the building and park in a loading lane, but Pete pointed me to the parking lot off of the right.

“No sense calling any more attention to ourselves than necessary, right?”

“I think they have a bit more to deal with than cars parked in the wrong place.”

“Just find a spot, Buckshot.” Pete’s irritated voice grated on my nerves but I let it pass.

Nobody else said anything as I selected a spot numbered twenty-seven and pulled in.

Pete met us as we got out of the car. “This is the last chance for any of you to turn around. The crime I’m committing is treason, I can’t imagine they’ll charge you with anything less than trespassing and it could be a great deal more.

“Trespassing? Treason?” Ron swallowed and I resisted the urge to give him a wicked grin. Not so brave now that you know the consequences of what you’re risking, eh? How many men had met their doom because they’d been chasing after a pretty face? The laughter died on my lips when Madelyn frowned at me as if she could read my mind.

“Come on.” She pushed past Pete. “We’re wasting time. The way things are looking there won’t be much of a government around after all this. Whatever there is won’t be able to charge us with running a red light, much less treason.”

Ron was pale as I clapped him on the shoulder. “Can’t back out now.” I went around to the trunk and pulled out my pack. I swapped out the nearly spent magazine in my Sig Sauer pistol and holstered it. Ron gave me a strange look when I opened the top of the bag and checked to make sure that my shotgun was fully loaded before closing it up again. We didn’t know who or what was inside and I thought it best to continue to keep a low profile, at least for now. 

“You didn’t think you were the only one with a shotgun, did you?” I couldn’t resist. “I have enough firepower in here that we could have taken your little convenience store.” I smiled. “Lucky for you that wasn’t our plan.”

“I should have stayed at the station and locked myself in the office.”

“You’d be one of them by now.” I tossed him a lighter from a package that we had purchased with the gasoline and soda pop. I stuffed a bunch into my pocket as well, just in case. “Hang on to that, you’re going to need it.” Afterward, I hauled out several containers of gas and set them on the ground. Then I pulled out the soda and emptied the contents. It made me a little sad to just dump out all the coke, but we didn’t have time to drink it and we needed to put gasoline in the glass bottles. I did take a few swigs from each as I went about the process, no sense in it all going to waste. Also, I wasn’t going to get any sleep tonight so the caffeine would be welcome in my system.

Pete snagged one of the bottles and downed the whole thing as if it had been water. I couldn’t have done a quarter of that without choking. I just didn’t drink the stuff enough, all the carbonation would make me gag. When I got to the Dew Shine, I tried a bit and decided that I liked Mountain Dew better.

Madelyn had begun filling the empty bottles while Ron watched, not trying to hide the look of desire on his face. She didn’t notice, but if she had, she probably would have batted her eyes a bit at him or given him a smile. Always keeping her options open. It was amazing how much she could manipulate a man into doing before he figured out she had no interest in him.

I was better off without her.

Even in my mind, the words had a hollow ring to them. I hated how much she got under my skin.

“Ron,” Pete said, “stop standing around and help her fill them.”

His face red, Ron yanked up one of the gas canisters. The spout hadn’t been secured and it slipped off, gas sloshing out onto his hand. Pete snickered. Even the tips of the kid’s ears were red now.

Shaking my head, I opened a couple more bottles. I tried the Dew Shine again. Nope, Mountain Dew was better. No question.

“What were you planning to use for a fuse?” Madelyn asked. She already had half a dozen bottles full.

“Old shirts.” I pulled out a box of some clothes that I’d been planning to drop off at the Salvation Army.

“Figures,” she said when she opened the box. “Did you plan to keep any of the shirts I bought for you? Some of them were expensive.”

I shrugged. “Wasn’t really my style. I just wore them for you.”

She mumbled something that I didn’t hear, but given the frown on her face, I knew enough. I hadn’t planned on using my old clothes to bother her. In fact, I hadn’t given any thought to where we’d get rags for the tops of the bottles until she’d asked. It was just a happy coincidence that it had turned into something I could use to needle her.

Pulling out a shirt, I flipped open my pocket knife and ripped it to shreds. I felt a little bad as I did so when I’d remembered how excited she’d been to see me wear it. When I glanced her way, her face was taut as if she was trying to avoid showing any emotion. My insides churned as I finished shredding it and reached for another.

I stopped before I put my blade into the next shirt. The plaid shirt had been a birthday gift from her and I’d been wearing it the first time she’d told me that she loved me. My blade hovered an inch above it as I debated what to do. Even though my back was to her I could feel her eyes boring into me.

Pete had already taken the other shredded shirt and had divvied it out among the others. Madelyn walked up beside me, holding the torn pieces of my shirt to the side.

She stared down at the shirt I held.

“How’d this one get in there?” My voice was quiet as I put it to the side and pulled out another. It was a random t-shirt that she’d given to me on a whim. Luckily, there was no emotional baggage attached to it.

I tore into it with my knife without making eye contact with her. It was strange that she’d cared so much still about the shirt, but it didn’t mean anything. It couldn’t. I knew where I stood with her. Emotions can be fickle things at times. Just because she’d been concerned about me damaging the plaid shirt, it didn’t mean that she wanted to get back together or that her issues with me had been magically solved.

When I was finished cutting the t-shirt to shreds, I figured that we probably had enough and stopped. The others were all hunched over on the ground trying to stuff the wads into the tops of the bottles. Ron was red in the face. I couldn’t tell if it was still from his earlier embarrassment or just exertion. He didn’t strike me as the sort that liked to jog or workout. He was using his pinkie finger to cram the rag into the bottle and it wasn’t working very well. It kept coming out. Pete wasn’t doing much better. Of the three, Madelyn was having the most success. She was twisting an end into a spiral before pushing it into a bottle. Even hers looked like the rags were about to fall out.

Whenever I’d seen a molotov cocktail on television, I’d always assumed that it was easy to just stuff a rag down into the bottle. As we made our own, I realized that my assumption was wrong. I also wanted to make sure the rags were secured well enough that they didn’t come off if we had to run. At some point we’d want to throw these, it wouldn’t work very well if the burning fabric came off before it landed.

I had a sudden vision of the gasoline coming back to burn me because the top had come off.

“We’re not going to get very far with these,” she said.

Wishing that I’d thought to grab some duct tape back at my place, I rummaged around the trunk of my car hoping that I had something I could use to fasten the fabric onto the lip of the bottle.

I pulled out a wad of rope that had been in the back of my car so long that I couldn’t remember what it was doing there. It looked to be made from nylon, but I had no way of knowing. That might have made a better wick because I could have sliced off a bunch of pieces and easily dropped them into the bottles. Even if I’d done that I still had the problem of fastening them in. I also had an old tarp, a battered pair of running shoes, and a box of tools, nothing that was going to solve our present problem.

I was toying with the idea of trying to melt the nylon rope and use that as a way to secure the ripped pieces of the shirt when I spied Pete’s workout bag in the back of my car. My blood pressure started to rise. How many times had I told him to not leave it? The one thing I could not abide was my car smelling like sweaty gym clothes.

Then I remembered how he liked to wrap his hands with athletic tape. I opened the door and pulled out the bag.

“Hey, Buckshot, look I’m sorry about that.”

I unzipped the top and was greeted with the nasty smell of sour sweat and body odor. Not wanting to put my hand in the bag to fish out the tape, I dumped out the contents.

“What did you do that for? I said I was sor—”

I help up the athletic tape, silencing him. “Problem solved.”

Leaving Pete to pick up his nasty gym clothes, I ripped off lengths of tape and handed them to Ron and Madelyn. In a few minutes, we had secured all of the rags atop the bottles and were ready to go.   

I put a number of the Molotov cocktails into the side pockets of my pack, careful to make sure they were tightened down. Gas was already seeping up the rag, but I was willing to deal with a little gasoline on my bag so that I could have my hands free to carry several of the gas cans.