The Containment Team (5 page)

“It works! The heat killed them. Quick, the showers. Throw them in the showers. The water is boiling hot.”

Madelyn was already running towards the stalls, turning on the water in the first before moving on to the next. I grabbed the closest monster and hurled it in, ripping down the shower curtain in the process.

It was difficult to describe what happened next. The whole body began to vibrate. The new mouth at the top of the neck screamed out but it was more than just that. It was as if all of the little balls of goo cried out at once, sounding like a swarm of bees. The goo moved quick as if energized by the water. Most of the balls disappeared, but not all.

A large ball formed at the base and even though some of it washed away as it moved out of the water, a sizable portion of it still remained by the time it got to end of the shower. It was the size of a basketball and had gone from purple to black much faster than the one in our room.

This time, I didn’t hesitate to put a blast of buckshot into it. A grin the size of a banana split my face as it was blown back in. Another ball formed but this one was small enough that I merely kicked it back in with the toe of my shoe.

The other monsters had overcome Pete and pinned him to the floor, but he was still struggling. I ripped one from him and threw it into the shower. By the time I returned, Pete had just thrown the other off of him. I scooped it up and threw it into the shower as well.

“No!” Pete yelled.

I turned to see what had upset Pete as he rushed past me. He stopped short of plunging into the shower himself and pushed Madelyn out of the way with enough force that she almost lost her footing and had to grab onto me for support.

“Watch it,” she said, letting go as soon as she was stable. We shared an awkward glance. The last time she had touched me had been a pat on the arm after she’d “let me down gently.” As our eyes connected, I remembered the hurt look on her face after I’d accused her of breaking up with me because she’d lost her ability to influence me as she once had. She had said something about me not really knowing her at all.

She darted past Pete and kicked a ball of goo back into the shower, bringing me back to the present. Her tennis shoe came away wet, but the goo was gone.

“The showers shouldn’t have worked,” I said. “It was too easy.”

“ You fool!” Pete turned, his hands balled into fists. “Do you realize what you have done? you remember how I said we needed a torch to kill them? Heat is a catalyst unless it burns hot enough to catch fire. You just supercharged a bunch of blutom and sent it down into the sewers.”

I wanted to punch him. “You’re the one that refused to tell us anything about this—blutom.” The word felt strange in my mouth, but it was nice to finally kno
w
what the lab’s name for it was. “This is on you.” 

“Rats!” Pete continued. “The blutom will take the bodies of rats first. There won’t be any waiting period once they shift because you just sent the blutom into level ten. In an hour, they will have taken one hundred rats, this time tomorrow, it will be all of them. Every. Single. Last. One.”

I took off my shirt and flung it into the bottom of the empty shower, blocking the drain. The water was still running, steam forming at the top. I handed my shotgun off to Madelyn and as I did so I remembered that I had slung a holstered pistol over my neck along with the bandolier, I gave these to her as well. I’d completely forgotten about the pistol in the heat of everything that had happened. I took a step forward, but Pete grabbed my arm.

“Didn’t you hear me?”

“I did but I want this stuff off of me.” I pointed to the bottom of the shower. It will collect there. I shrugged his hand away and stepped inside. “Clean yourself off. We can’t go running around with this crud crawling all over us.”

Madelyn carried my
shotgun and pistol back to our room as I was sopping wet. It was quiet now, but my gut said that something was going to come bounding at me from around the corner. I kept looking around and had to stop myself several times from taking back my weaponry. It would still work if it got wet but as long as there wasn’t an immediate need, I was better off letting her carry it.

We had gathered all of the blutom we could find in the bathroom and coaxed it into forming a ball before wrapping it in my sodden shirt. Pete had a cooler back in our room where we would keep it in until we got back to the lab.

“So Pete,” Madelyn asked, “what’s the scoop on these things? Blutom. Is that what you call it?”

Water dripped off Pete’s hands as it ran down from the sleeves of his shirt. He’d showered too.

Pete didn’t answer for several moments. He’d calmed down while in the shower and had even made a statement of apology about not being more forthcoming. We’d both accepted it, Madelyn more gracious about it than me, I still wanted to pound his face.  

“Yeah, that’s what we call it. Don’t ask me about the name. I think it’s stupid.” He sighed and shook his head as if he was surrendering. You can’t repeat anything I’m about to tell you.”

“Who am I going to tell?” I asked.

“No posts on the internet, Facebook, Twitter, nothing. Got it?”

Madelyn looked at me and I rolled my eyes. Pete saw it and threw me a glare. “I’m serious, Buckshot. I’m committing treason right now. Just you knowing the name is probably enough for them to hang me.”

I bit my tongue. I very much doubted that his breach of confidentiality would be classified as treason, but it sounded like I was finally going to get some answers. An ill-conceived phrase might change all of that and I had the making of at least three on the tip of my tongue.

“Ok, whatever.”

Pete looked back and forth between the two of us. He sighed again. “The creature takes over human bodies. It kills the host but keeps the body alive. How? We don’t know.”

“Tell us something w—” I bit my tongue. “Please go on.”

“How was the government researching this?” Madelyn asked. “Were they experimenting with human subjects?”

“Of course not. Most of the experiments were done with rodents. Mice, rabbits, rats. That sort of thing. One time we used a monkey, but that got ugly fast, so we went back to the vermin.”

“If heat is a catalyst,” I asked, “will the cold slow it down?”

“We wondered that as well, but no, it doesn’t. Cold doesn’t appear to have any effect on its ability to move but it will prolong its life and slow it down. At room temperature, a marble-sized amount will die in a matter of minutes. Less than half an hour for sure. In a freezer, it can live indefinitely.”

“The larger the mass, the longer it can live?” I asked.

“Correct.”

“Why did you insist that we pick up every remaining scrap we could find?” Madelyn asked. “It will all die anyway.”

“Besides the fact that they tend to form into balls, at the end of their life they go into a hyper stage, we call it level ten. The blutom can shift into a host even without a wound when it’s at level ten. We’re not exactly sure what allows it to do that.”

“Is that what happened to the people that chased you home from the lab?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I doubt it. We were working with a few level ten balls of blutom yesterday, but after we were done, we sent them to the incinerator. We never ever send a level ten ball back into the freezer, it’s too volatile. We have suspected for some time that there are other properties and abilities that develop at that stage that we aren’t yet aware of.”

“So we just supercharged the stuff and sent a bunch of it into the sewers.” I thought earlier about how I’d wanted to hack the monsters into pieces and flush them. That had seemed like it was the worst possible idea at the time. It was depressing that what I’d ended up doing instead had been worse. When I glanced at Pete, my hand formed into a fist of its own accord but I released it and took a calming breath. It was his fault, but it was also mine. I’d jumped to the conclusion that heat was just as damaging to them as fire and acted without trying to confirm it with Pete.

“That’s what happened. If you’re looking for me to apologize again—”

“We’re not,” Madelyn said, glaring at me in a way that said she thought I’d been trying to make him feel bad on purpose. I shrugged. I hadn’t been trying to remind him of his guilt, I’d just been thinking through the situation. Next time I went to the store, I was going to stock up on kerosene and anything else that was flammable.

I swallowed. Hopefully, there would still be stores after all this was said and done.

“Are there any weaknesses we can exploit?” I asked.

Pete shook his head. “There are a lot of nuances to blutom, but other than the fact that it can be killed with fire, I don’t know that there is anything else that qualifies as a clear weakness.” He looked down at the ball we’d wrapped in my shirt. “Watch out, it’s already oozing through. In another couple of minutes, it will be free.”

I brought it up to eye level. It was purple sludge no longer, at least everything that was seeping through had changed to a dark charcoal. The black stuff oozed out from all sides, it was as though my shirt was being absorbed into it. I held it further away from me and increased my speed, water splashing off of me as I did. Pete had done his best to dry off with Madelyn’s robe but I’d refused, for a reason that had seemed to make sense at the time. It probably had something to do with the fact that it belonged to Madelyn.

“Ok,” I said, “so we need to get some fuel and burn those bodies back in the shower as well.”

Pete had promptly turned off the water in the other showers as soon as I’d started to clean off. It had resulted in my shower increasing in temperature and scalding my back before I could get out. As I’d been pretty sure he’d done it to me on purpose, I’d made sure to not let even a small yelp escape my mouth as I adjusted the knob and stepped back in once I was able to tolerate it. After that, Pete had done his best to gather up the other blutom and merge it all into a single ball.

“No,” Pete shook his head. “You don’t do anything more. I’m going back to work. We have a containment team whose job it is to handle this sort of thing.”

“A containment team?” Madelyn asked. “How many times has the blutom escaped?”

“We’re going with you,” I said. “We can’t have any more of this stuff escaping.”

“I don’t know if the containment team has ever been called in, all I know is that we have one and that protocols were put in place to handle a situation like this. You can’t come back with me, security will never let you through.”

I slammed Pete up against the wall with one hand, careful to keep the ball of blutom from touching either one of us as I did so. “It’s non-negotiable. You brought this down on our heads. We’re in this as much as you are. We’re not sending you back with a cooler of the stuff by yourself. End of discussion.”

Pete wrapped his arms around mine but made no move to push me off. He stared down at me and then gave a quick nod of his head. I released him. 

“Was it only the three?” Madelyn asked as we moved again. “Are you sure?”

“Tell us exactly what happened,” I said. “You entered work. What happened then?”

I stopped when movement up ahead caught my attention. Several balls of blutom rolled towards us, they were far smaller than the remnant of the ball that I’d left burning.

A few months ago, I’d seen an advertisement for a flamethrower and I remembered thinking that it looked fun but I’d never have any practical use for such a thing. Now I wished that I’d given into impulse and had made the purchase. My shotgun was a nice weapon, but I’d learned today that there were things out there that buckshot couldn’t stop. 

“I’ll go back for my robe. We’ll wrap them in that.” Madelyn disappeared. 

“Just drop them in on the other ball in your shirt,” Pete said. 

I looked at my shirt and then at Pete. A full centimeter was now on the outside. “How do you discern the level? Does the color have something to do with it?”

“It’s more the amount of activity but at some levels, color is an indicator. You’ll know when it’s level ten. It’ll be as bright as the sun.”

“I’m not convinced that it’s only at level ten that they no longer need an open wound. The last one I flung off of me had been heading up my neck. I also can’t forget how you screamed like a little girl when we found that one on my shirt.”

“I’m telling you,” Pete said through clenched teeth, “it's fine. I just overreacted a little. That’s all.”

If you’re so certain,” I said, “you ought to be the one to do it.

“Fine. I’ll pick it up.” He reached for my shirt, which I was glad to hand off to him.

“Hang on,” I said. “Mad, I want my shotgun back!”

I followed her back into the bathroom while doing my best to shake my hands dry. Water flung off me and left streaks on the floor.

It was strange, the women’s bathroom was a little bit cleaner than it had been right after we’d thrown the monsters into the shower. I suppose it was because all the blood had actually been blutom and had tried to come at us.

When I walked in, Madelyn was heading towards me. Her towel in one hand, my shotgun in the other.  

“My shotgun?” I held out my hands but she didn’t hand it over.

“It’s good to see you, Morty.”

I was taken aback. “It has been awhile.” The words escaped before I had a chance to think of something better. I cringed but she just nodded her head as if that was the response she was expecting. I didn’t know what else to say.

“It has.”

She all of the sudden looked flustered. “Here. Take it.”

I gingerly took the weapon, unhappy that I had to pick it up with damp hands. Once this was all over, I would do a thorough job of cleaning it anyway. Too many of my shots had been fired at point blank range and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there was blutom or worse on the inside of my muzzle.

“Out of the way.” She pushed past me and back into the hallway. I didn’t immediately follow her. It had been difficult to get over her. I didn’t want her to think that I was trying to get back together with her. I didn’t doubt that she could tell I was still interested. It was fine if she thought that, I just didn’t want her to think I was desperate.

I went to the stall where we’d left the remnants of the monsters. The flesh was still gray, but it wasn’t as mottled as it had been before. Pete had been surprised that the hot water had the effect of putting down the monsters until he’d examined the bodies more closely and realized just how many wounds they had from all the buckshot I’d shot into them. He’d guessed that the wounds had weakened them to the point that the blutom hadn’t been able to retain control of the host bodies while the hot water poured over them. He’d also said that the bodies would turn back to the original color. I was hoping they didn’t, I wanted there to be evidence that something unusual had happened.

Bending down, I examined the body of the one that had developed a mouth and an eye over the opening of the neck and was glad to see that hadn’t changed. If the police were to show up, I didn’t want them to think that we’d murdered three people and had hacked them to pieces. I had to admit, that is very much what the situation would have looked like from the outside if all signs of the blutom were to suddenly disappear.

A scream came from outside the bathroom, and I was struck by the fact that it was lower in tone than Madelyn’s had been.

Madelyn pulled open the bathroom door. “Morty, come quick! It’s Pete.”

I ran out into the hallway to find Pete walking towards us, holding the ball of blutom out in front of him as if were about to explode. My shirt dangled at the bottom as if the ball had crawled up and seized his hand. The blutom constantly shifted in form and was vibrating.

It was also blindingly white.