The Containment Team (4 page)

I shook my head. “Same old Mad. Here you are practically naked, with monsters beating down the door, and your curiosity is getting the best of you.” When she got a question in her head, it was hard for her to let it go. It was as endearing as it was annoying.

“Can I help it the most interesting thing I’ve ever encountered came with you attached? Small wonder that they’re trying to kill us with the way you’ve been shooting at them.”

I bit my tongue and took a deep breath. I shouldn’t have egged her on in the first place. “Get dressed so we can get out of here.” I looked at Pete. “We’re up to three. How many were chasing you when you left the lab?”

Pete hesitated.

I knew that look. “What is it? Spit it out. These aren’t the only ones, are they? Please don’t tell me that we now have a herd of these things running amok through the town. When we captured the first two, you pretended as though it could all be contained. If there are more out there, shifting into others, how long will it take before the whole town is overrun?”

“It’s not like all those horror movies you’ve seen. The shifting process isn’t quick. Once—” He stopped and glared at me. “A friend would help me keep my oaths.”

“A true friend wouldn’t have brought this madness home with him!”

Madelyn spoke up, tearing her attention away from the goo on the walls. “Pete, it’s okay, nobody’s blaming you.”

I snorted but stopped short of disagreeing when Madelyn gave me a look that paralyzed me for the briefest of seconds. A small look of triumph—really, it was not more than a glint in her eye—crossed her face. I could almost hear her think that she still had what it took.

I ground my teeth, it had been awhile since she’d been able to get something she wanted from me with just a look. I grabbed shells from my bandolier and replaced those I’d used in the hallway.  

“You guys have to understand,” Pete said, “it wasn’t my fault. It was like that when I went in there.”

I turned my attention to Pete. “Nobody’s accusing you of anything...yet. But keep stonewalling and I’m going to begin to wonder just exactly how involved you are.” 

Pete opened his mouth but the door burst open, slamming him into the wall. The creature who I’d shot in the kneecap fell into the doorway, snarling. The other two headless ones sprung over the first, knocking it to the floor.

I intercepted the
monster that had been a man as it charged after Madelyn, aiming my shotgun for an elbow while trying to ignore the remnants of its head that were still partially attached to the neck. The wound on the neck had healed in the few minutes that had passed since I’d first shot him, and a red mucus had formed over the scarred tissue. 

Some of the buckshot hit the monster in the arm but most of it missed. The tile on the floor and wall shattered, throwing dust into the air. I covered my eyes with an elbow as some of the shrapnel blew back on me.

Growling as I stepped backward, I lowered my arm and brought up my shotgun.

The monster kept coming, barely pausing to deal with the wound. I was beginning to suspect that these creatures didn’t feel pain. The monster’s elbow still functioned, though some of the skin was now missing. The goo dripped down his arm and onto the floor where it formed into balls and rolled forward.

It had been a long time since I’d made as poor of a shot as that and I felt my face redden, glad that my father and uncle weren’t around to have witnessed it.  

Sliding backward while pumping, I brushed up against Madelyn and caught a whiff of her perfume. It was a present I’d given her for Valentine’s Day. She was wearing
that
while visiting another man?

I clamped down my teeth as I took aim at the damaged elbow. My shot removed the arm this time and sent the headless monster into the wall. I sprung forward, kicking the legs out from underneath the creature and pushing it to the floor as I pumped another shell into the chamber.

Using my foot to keep it steady, I shot the thing in the back of a knee. Bits of tile, purple blood, and flesh flew up but it hadn’t done the trick. It took two more shells and some kicking to sever the lower leg.

There had to be a better way to put these things down. It still squirmed after Madelyn, almost oblivious to the harm that I had inflicted upon it. It had barely reacted to any of the last shots.

Pete held the creature that had once been Veronica and was slamming one arm down on the sink. It looked like he’d already broken her other arm as it was hanging at an awkward angle. Or had I been the one to do that? I couldn’t remember. 

The one that had been Jen was crawling toward Pete, her one leg dragging behind her. When she got close, Pete stepped forward and kicked her back. 

The one I’d been shooting spun around and sat up, swinging up what was left of its head, almost as if it had been trying to bite me.

The neck collided with my thigh and I used the butt of my shotgun to send it back to the floor. I kicked it and stood on the creature’s chest with one leg. Had it just barely realized that I was there? Had it been oblivious when I’d shot off its lower leg?

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Madelyn run into one of the shower stalls with a bag in tow.

“There isn’t time to dress, just leave!”

“You’d like it if I were to run out of here wearing only a robe, wouldn’t you?”

I didn’t answer as I took in the scene, trying to decide what to do next. The monster under my foot was squirming, but because it was missing a leg and an arm, it was unable to get enough leverage to get out from underneath me. 

By my count, I only had a shell left in my shotgun and I was torn about what to do. I could try to remove the other knee of the creature beneath me but that wouldn’t stop it from coming. Both the leg and the arm that I severed were making their way towards me, flopping around on the floor. The wounds on those appendages looked as though they had already healed as well. A new layer of purple skin had formed on the arm, red mucus was already covering part of it.

The arm flopped forward and for the barest of moments was able to balance on the fingers before toppling over. The movement reminded me of a time I’d once seen a chicken with its head cut off doing almost the same thing. That had been at my Uncle Billy’s farm when I was a kid. My mom had been freaked out that he’d let me help with the slaughter. When my dad had learned about it, he had defended the action, saying it was time for me to learn where meat came from.

Taking a deep breath, I let it out and tried to calm my nerves. Pete had succeeded in breaking the Veronica monster’s other arm and was now switching back and forth between kicking the two of them off balance.

A movement caught me off guard as the monster below me threw his severed arm and I stepped back involuntarily to keep it from hitting me in the head.

It was unbelievable, both the body and the severed arm had become two distinct beings with the ability to not only plan but also maybe even communicate. While I’d been trying to take my bearing of the situation, the severed arm had rolled over into position for the non-severed arm to pick up and once again toss my way.

Yep. They were communicating.

I almost opened my mouth to ask Pete if my conclusion was accurate but didn’t voice the question. It wouldn’t have done any good. He wouldn’t have heard me in the middle of his fighting and if he had, he would have probably just told me another lie or invoked his oath of secrecy.

The monster sat up again, so I kicked it over, careful to steer clear of the loose arm and leg. I almost preferred it when they hadn’t been severed.

Almost.

It tried grabbing at me with its good hand but I blasted it if off with my last shell, careful of the angle to make sure that none of the shrapnel from buckshot hitting the tile would head towards any of the living. On instinct, I pulled shells out from my bandolier and reloaded. It was frustrating that I was only able to push in five shells. Wishing that I’d made the investment in a longer magazine tube, I assessed our options. There were eight stalls, four showers, and another door on the far side of the room.

Not a lot of places to go. Perhaps we could hack them into small enough pieces that we could flush them down the toilet, but who was to say that the things could drown? They seemed to defy almost every other natural law. I shuddered involuntarily at the thought of unwittingly creating a bunch of dismembered body parts that would come up out of the toilets so that they could shift into unwitting victims. Franklin Hospital was several blocks over and that would be a great place for them to find wounded to shift into.

No, that wouldn’t do. We could run again but these things just kept coming. They needed to be contained here.

In frustration, I stepped back to let the monster sit up, just so I could knock it down again. I noticed as I did so that the skin had taken on a deeper shade of gray. It almost looked green. Also, the skin behind the red mucus over the wound on the neck was now a lighter shade of gray.  

I eyed the shower stall Madelyn had gone into, telling myself that I was checking to make sure she was okay and not for any other reason. She’d pulled the shower curtain shut but I could see her moving on the other side as she brushed up against it.

Pete was now working on breaking a leg of the Veronica creature and the Jen one was clinging to his back legs.

Grabbing the creature below me by the leg, I pulled it over towards Pete. I held out my shotgun, intending to take the shot one-handed but I stopped short of doing so.

Shaking my head ruefully, I was glad that I’d caught myself in time. It would have been a mistake to shoot one handed. I’d been watching too many bad action movies.

Instead, I slung my shotgun onto my shoulder and tossed the male creature over into the corner, before sprinting back to Pete. I ripped the monster off his legs and aimed at the creature’s arm before firing.

I was both sickened and grateful that I was able to remove it with just the one shot. I swung that creature over onto the one I’d just moved into the corner and pummeled them with buckshot until my magazine tube was empty. I reloaded and was about to do it again when I was distracted by a screech from behind and spun to find that Pete had really done a number on his monster.

Its leg was broken, its chest caved in, and both arms hung limply. Despite all that, it was still thrashing about and Pete was bashing the other leg against the sink.

It was getting more and more difficult to keep down the microwave chimichangas I’d had for my late dinner. I was surprised that I hadn’t already heaved up the contents of my stomach several times over.

I started when I realized that this was the Veronica monster. It no longer had a head. Where had the screech come from?

If it could regrow skin, why not a mouth?

Approaching cautiously, I looked at the wounded neck and spotted two lips forming in the middle of the skin on the new head, there was also one orange eye that looked at me, the pupil slit narrowing as it did so.   

“We’re not going to get anywhere with this, Slammer,” I said. “The things keep healing and every piece we hack off just becomes another monster to fight. There has to be a better way.” I hoped that a full monster wouldn’t be able to regrow from just an arm.

A shard of glass scraped on the tile behind me and I turned to see that both of the monsters I’d just pummeled with buckshot were coming at me yet again. The severed appendages were all headed my way as well. I pulled a shell off my bandolier and loaded it into the magazine tube.

“You boys should see yourselves.” Madelyn appeared from the shower fully dressed. She bent down to lace her shoe, looking like she’d just shown up and that we hadn’t found her being terrorized by a monster while she’d been showering. She’d even managed to put on a little bit of makeup. My heart fluttered as I took her in, but I quickly stamped it down. I’d been down that road once before, I didn’t need to be burned twice to learn my lesson.

“You went on a date dressed like that?” I asked. She wore jeans and a t-shirt. I’d only ever seen her dressed like that once during the entire six months that we had dated. She normally wore a flirty skirt and high heels. Just more tools in her tool chest to get men to do what she wanted. “What were you really doing here?”

She gave me an impish smile that I couldn’t help but return on instinct. I stopped my lips from forming a full smile and tried to turn it into a snarl. It made her beam, even more, when she saw the conflict on my face.

“Seriously,” she said, “look at yourself in the mirror. They’re swarming all over.”

Loading another shell into my shotgun as I ran, I went to the mirror and saw that she was right. Beads of the dark purple creature were everywhere. The balls were creeping along. Some joined into a larger mass while I watched. I moved my hand as if to brush them from me but stopped before touching them. There were so many that there was no point in risking the contact with my skin. I had to find another way to remove them.

I ground my teeth. “If only we had more kerosene.” I wouldn't be above shucking my clothes and burning them. Madelyn would have to leave the room, of course.

“Kerosene?” Madelyn asked as if she was unfamiliar with what it was.

I studied the door at the back of the bathroom. In all the confusion, I’d somehow thought that it was another way out, but I now realized that was incorrect. Wasn’t that where the water heater was? I seemed to remember watching a janitor open the counterpart door in the men’s room, but I couldn’t be certain. It made sense that there would be a water heater for each bathroom. I’d never once had anything less than a scalding hot shower. Most of the time I couldn’t turn up the heat more than halfway. Even at that temperature I usually came out redder than a lobster.

I was also sure that the water heater ran on gas. I crossed the room and tried the door. It didn’t turn.

“Any of you know how to pick a lock?” I wasn’t expecting anything so I was surprised when Madelyn answered in the affirmative.

“Why do you want to get in?” she asked.

A look of comprehension crossed Pete’s face. “The gas line? You can’t be serious. You’ll kill us too, probably take out the whole building!”

“It’s the only way to stop them,” I said. “Fire is the only thing that will destroy them.”

“And us with them.”

“Actually,” I said, “it won’t go past this room. The walls are cinder block on the inside and tile on the outside.”

Madelyn folded her arms. “Forget about it, I’m not going to open it for you.”

I shrugged, doubting that she really had the ability. I pounded on the utility room door and determined that it was as thick as the wooden door to our room. I wasn’t going to be able to blast my way through that with buckshot. I’d been hoping for a hollow door.

A ball about the size of a marble had formed on my right pant leg, I sent it flying with a flick of my finger. It landed on top of the hand dryer.

Crossing quickly, I punched the button and held my arm underneath. The heat from the dryer had the same effect as the fire but to a lesser degree. The little balls begin to vibrate, similar to what they’d done when I’d lit the kerosene on the large ball in my room. 

“Heat! These things don’t like heat. Why didn’t you say something about that, Slammer?”

Pete was too busy kicking the monsters to hear me. Madelyn raised an eyebrow but failed to share my enthusiasm.

Praying that it would work, I went to the sink, turned on the hot water, and thrust my arm underneath it. It was scalding and difficult to keep my arm underneath for fear of getting burned, but the little balls of goo were washed away.