The Containment Team (8 page)

“Thanks for the benefit of a doubt, Buckshot.” Pete’s words were clipped, the way he always was when he wanted to be sarcastic. “If you would have given me time to explain, instead of playing twenty questions and jumping to conclusions that are in no way supported by any evidence that you might have or suppose, I would have told you that some of the blutom was stolen from the lab eight months ago.”

I rubbed my head as Madelyn groaned. 

“I believe that it was the thief,” Pete said, “not the people I work for that set the blutom loose in New York City.”

“You could have just come out and said that in the first place,” I said.

“Really? Look, I know that this isn’t going to mean much to the two of you, but I gave my word. And now I’ve let you two bully me into committing treason. Forgive me if I try to lessen the damage.”

“You yellow-bellied coward!” Madelyn was red in the face. “That’s a bunch of bull and you know it. When people are dying, there is such a thing as extenuating circumstances. Just imagine how things might have played out differently had you been forthcoming about the blutom, its properties, and the fact that any heat short of flame acts as a catalyst? How long until we have a mob of rats and other vermin coming up from the sewer grates looking for better hosts? Are you going to take comfort in the fact that it happened because you were trying to keep us in the dark? If you weren’t so obtuse we wouldn’t have just created a worse problem—”

A man ran out into the street in front of me and I swerved to miss him. I didn’t see the other man until it was too late.

I slammed on my breaks just as the car collided with him.

The man went
flying, screaming as he went. My gut wrenched as I grasped the steering wheel and slammed on the brakes, the car swerving to the right. He landed and went skidding out of the headlights and into the dark.

A hundred different thoughts ran through my mind as I tried to process what had just happened. I growled and clenched my teeth, afraid I’d just killed whoever it was that I had hit. How ironic would that be? After all the shooting I’d done tonight, not killing an actual living person until I ran into somebody with a car?  

I looked to the side, expecting to see that the other man had stopped, but he was gone. Prying my hands off the steering wheel, I killed the engine, my key feeling like the bite of a viper. I didn’t touch the key any longer than I needed to get the job done.

Even considering all the mayhem and carnage that I’d seen back at our dorm, it wasn’t  surprising to me to have this reaction. As much as I love my guns and shooting, the thought of actually killing another human being has always been repugnant to me.

When I’d been a teenager we’d had somebody break into our home. My parents had been out for the night and I’d been playing a video game. I’d thought that the breaking glass had been part of the game at first until I heard the intruder bump into a chair at a quiet moment. At that point I’d quietly gone into my father’s room, pulled out his shotgun, and sat on the bed, waiting to see if the burglar was going to head my way.

He’d entered the room and frozen when I’d pumped a shell into the chamber. To this day, his look of fear as his face had paled still causes me to come awake in a panic. In my dreams, I always end up pulling the trigger. After the haze of the dream passes I am always relieved when I remember that I hadn’t actually killed the man. I had no way of knowing what it was that had made him get to that point in his life. He’d been a little older than me but he’d reminded me of me. He was about my height and had blond hair as well. If our circumstances in life had been reversed, might it not have been me in his shoes? 

I hadn’t said a word, there’d been no need. The sound of my dad’s shotgun loading was all the argument I needed. We both stood there frozen. I could plainly see that he was shaking as bad as me. After several minutes passed without me doing anything more, he licked his lips and opened his mouth as if he was about to speak. His mouth moved but no sound came out. I’d been planning to call the cops but I found now that I didn’t want to.

“Go,” I said. “Just get your life together and don’t try to pull this kind of crap again.” There’d been a brief hesitation, relief poured through his face before he’d turned to run. I had been expecting my father would be upset I’d let the thief get away. He had only been relieved that I was all right. When I asked him if I’d done the right thing, his answer had surprised me. “There’s no shame in mercy.” He’d put his hand on his shoulder and repeated the sentiment. “There is never any shame in mercy.”

I’d often thought about that day, glad that I hadn’t even touched the trigger. I didn’t want something like that on my conscience. I would never have been able to live with myself.

It was one thing to kill a monster that had once been a human, it was quite another somebody that was still alive. As my eyes followed the victim I figured that there wasn’t much chance that the man had survived without serious injury. He might even be dead.

My mouth went dry at the thought and my hand shook as I reached for the handle of the car door. Pete grabbed my shoulder from behind.

“Don’t go out. Wait.” Perhaps all the violence of the last hour had desensitized him because his voice didn’t carry the slightest bit of concern for the victim.

“We have to see if he’s still alive,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. It was as if all those night terrors I’d had as a kid had found me all at once, combining into one single terrible storm. Only this time I wasn’t in a dream that I could just wake up from and find that everything was okay.

“Why didn’t the other guy stop?” Madelyn asked, her voice also devoid of emotion for the well-being of the man. I growled. Was nobody but me concerned for the man?

“Because the one I hit was chasing him,” I said.

Madelyn gave me this look that said I was missing something obvious. I didn’t see what she meant. Sweat poured down my forehead. This time, there was no waking up. My brain tried to figure out what it was that Madelyn was trying to get at but it had stopped working as well as it normally did. It was as though I was trying to swim through quick drying concrete, I could feel the gears in my mind grinding to a halt.

Pete’s hand tightened on my shoulder. “Think it through. You’re in shock.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Madelyn said, looking like she had to keep from smacking me. “It could be one of the blutom monsters.”

I blinked, as the thought took its time to sink in. Now that she had finally said what they’d both been thinking, I came out of the daze I’d been in and my mind started to function a little better but not yet at full capacity.

What if they were right? If this was true my worst fears hadn’t been realized.

A bunch of other possibilities came to mind as we waited, watching as the figure crawled back into my headlights. His face was covered in shadow so I was unable to see if it was covered in red mucus, but he was clearly in a bad way. My hands clenched the steering wheel as he struggled to get to his feet. Was his leg broken? I was unable to tell. His face was still down, so I had no idea if he was a monster or not, but as he stumbled and almost toppled over, I couldn’t take it any longer.

I opened the door and had one foot on the ground when Madelyn cried out.

“It’s one of them!”

By that time I was already out of the car.

As I twisted to see the broken man, another figure lunged from the dark, smashing me between the door and the car.

The once human face was ripped to shreds. I couldn’t tell if it was red mucus, purple blutom on the verge of turning black, or just blood that covered his nose. All I knew is that his teeth were chomping at me. 

The snapping incisors had the effect that Pete and Madelyn had not. It was as if all of the concrete I’d been trying to slog my way through the moment before had disappeared and I had a fire burning my rear.

I kicked the car door out, bashing the creature in the head with my elbow as I un-holstered my Sig Sauer and rammed back the slide. It had been a foolish mistake to not have a round ready to go. Luckily, even in the heat of the moment, I had remembered that I did not have a bullet chambered and had not wasted time trying to shoot when there was nothing to fire. I was glad my mind was working again. It’s a wonder what gnashing teeth inches away from your nose will do. Way better than forty-four ounces of Mountain Dew.

The creature jumped up off the ground just as I leveled the pistol on its chest and pulled the trigger. The force of the bullet sent it skidding back to the asphalt and I could see gore go out the other side and land in street. The bullet was not enough to keep it from coming.

“Morty! In front of you!” Madelyn’s voice came the same time as a thump on the hood of the car. I spun around, lining up a shot and firing at the same time. The creature I’d hit with the car leaped forward, almost as if trying to counterbalance the force of my .40 caliber bullet. It managed to maintain its balance and not skid off the roof, doing all this despite the apparent broken leg it had suffered during the accident. Blutom and flesh went all over the hood.

A couple more shots sent the monster off the edge of the car. By that time the one to the side was coming again, but I was already in my seat, slamming the door shut while pushing down the clutch and turning the key.

The engine roared to life. I thrust my car into first gear and barreled into the monster in front of us. It had been back on its feet, trying to get its broken leg up onto the car by using the car hood to stabilize itself. The action reminded me of a toddler learning to climb for the first time. As I moved forward it either leaped onto the hood of the car or was forced up there by my actions, I couldn’t tell which.

Red mucus covered its twisted face as it howled out.  Blutom dripped down onto the windshield as it beat down with its bare hands. The windshield cracked as I hit the gas and then right away hit the brakes, sending the creature flying off onto the road.

I was putting the car in reverse when my side window broke, safety glass flying into my face. A hand reached for my neck, brushing it with broken fingernails as I pushed down the gas pedal and accelerated in reverse.

The monster howled out and I smiled in satisfaction as it was slammed against the broken window of my car before having its arm ripped out the window.

My success was short lived. We were brought to a sharp halt as I rear-ended a parked van. Sparing a glance for the damage I’d done, I thrust the transmission back into first and the car lurched forward. Both of the monsters were on their feet again, one limped towards us while the other ran. I flipped the car around and drove off in the other direction.

Once we had escaped, I let out a breath that I hadn’t been aware I was holding.

“Are they still chasing after us?” I asked.

Madelyn looked back, her face pale. It was Pete that answered.

“No, they’re gone.”

“Still, think this thing can be contained?” I asked.

Pete didn’t answer, but he shook his head, the frustration evident on his face.

“Do you agree that we are well past the point of recovering this situation?” I asked.

Madelyn turned when Pete didn’t respond. “What else aren’t you telling us?”

“You’re furious,” Pete said, his voice a forced calm. “I get that, but there isn’t much I haven’t told you.”

I gripped the steering wheel. It was a lie, we all knew it. “Tell us more about the theft.”

He shrugged. “Some of it just disappeared.”

“How do you know that it was stolen and that it didn’t escape?” Madelyn asked. “Maybe some got loose and it shifted into a lab worker.”

“Impossible. We have safety protocols in place to keep that from happening. Everybody is scanned on a regular basis. It’s just not gonna happen. We know it was a theft, and that it was an inside job because the security footage was destroyed on the night in question.”

“For just the room with the blutom or—?”

Pete cut me off. “No, it was the entire building. The whole night was gone as if it had never happened. I know what you’re thinking and you’re wrong. We would have noticed somebody being out for the amount of time it would take somebody to shift. The rats took a minimum of three days before they were no longer covered with the blood film. A person would probably take more.”

“Blood film?” Madelyn asked.

“You’ve both seen it, the monsters we fought back at the dorm were covered in it.”

“Ah,” I said, “you mean the red mucus that was on their face.”

“Yes, only it covers their whole body. The blutom pushes out residue as it replaces the blood. The blood film is usually gone after three days, a week tops.”

“Was there anybody who was sick right after—”

“Look, Buckshot, I work in a lab where the majority of people have graduate degrees and a higher IQ than you. Most want to be called doctor. All the questions you’re asking now are the issues we investigated right after the blutom went missing. We were thorough. Not only did nobody call in sick the day after, for the rest of the month there weren’t any unplanned absences. The planned absences had been scheduled months in advance and each one of those were confirmed to be as they were represented. We didn’t have any employees hiding out for a week so they could fully shift. It just didn’t happen.”

“So, if that is true,” Madelyn said, “the only logical conclusion is that somebody stole it.”

“Correct.”

“The question is whether that’s true,” she said.

Pete growled.

I shifted in my seat, not wanting to question Pete any further on the issue, but also not wanting to rule it out as a possibility either. In my experience, the smartest people had significant gaps in understanding and practical experience.

They might have investigated all of the regular employees, but a facility that size was bound to have other personnel that might have been overlooked. Janitors and contractor technicians came to mind, but as we’d only just got Pete talking again, I didn’t want to risk insulting his intelligence any more than I already had.

He was talking again, after all.

I made eye contact with Madelyn and gave her a slight shake of my head. Her frown said she disagreed with me, but she backed off him as well.

I could envision half a dozen other possibilities to explain away why they hadn’t detected somebody shifting. I focused on the most obvious one. It was likely that this wasn’t the first instance of blutom going rogue. What if somebody had shifted a long time ago and was covering up for others as they shifted? My guess was that Pete had very limited firsthand knowledge about the investigation and he was relying on information he’d learned from others.

Pete hadn’t said as much, but I also figured it didn’t really matter how much blutom got into someone’s bloodstream through an open wound. Any amount would start the shifting process. Because the blutom fed on the blood and replicated using the materials gathered from the bloodstream, all it took was a pin sized amount to get the process going.