Crime Rave (35 page)

“Sorry, guys!” Asha chirp-trills, breathless, and nursing deep scratches of her own on her left leg.

Tiburona roars as she fights her invisible assailant, her shark mouth widening so the survivors can see her several rows of teeth. Silver-eyed Connie Jones imagines she can smell blood on the shark girl’s breath. Connie’s not wrong, Icarus the vampire
can
actually smell it and it makes him hungry again.

“Lola! Enough!” Chamelia orders, and Lola returns to the group, flushed and with a few wounds of her own marking her chest.

Secrete still has her hand on the door that barely contains the blob. “Now?” Her voice hysterical.

“Not yet!” Chamelia shouts.

“Now?!” Secrete feels a rumbling from behind the door.

Chamelia shakes her head. “Not yet!”

“Something’s happening!” The doorknob turns under Secrete hand’s no matter how hard she holds it back. “I can’t hold it anymore!” Secrete pulls her entire weight back against the door and feels the wood begin to buckle.

KABOOM.

The blob—since grown into a pink, squid-like creature that occupies the entire room, the center of its belly lined with teeth in a hungry maw—breaks through the door, throwing back the group of survivors who tumble to the ground, scrambling away from the protoplasmic mass.

The extraction team hybrids, now stopped in their tracks, get the thing’s undivided attention.

The beast’s tentacles break off in pieces and the first clone to bite it is Buffalo Bill, wailing as the bulbous substance eats through his skin, dissolving anywhere it touches, growing ever bigger in bulging pustules.

“What IS this?! Get it OFF ME!” Buffalo Bill pulls at the substance, which makes it take even stronger root of his body.

The rest of the extraction team back up as another section of the blob blocks the hallway, taking up its entire length and still expanding.

“Colonel Ransom, are you reading this? What the fuck is
this
thing?” Gustave II says as the team moves back, trying not to make any sudden movements. The gamma torches don’t work but to make the thing angrier.

The blob lurches and taunts them, launching its tentacles every so often, making the hybrids shout and jump further back. The thing feints and Jekyll isn’t fast enough. It grabs her huge frame by a leg the size of a ten-year pine and thrusts it into the toothed maw. She doesn’t have time for last words before she’s dissolved.

The blob has become so enormous—as if responding to the poison energy brought by the Roswell Institute—sections of its mass begin bursting through the hospital walls.

Out in the hallway, another tentacle breaks off and attaches itself to Growl. In moments all that’s left of the werewolf is a puddle of slime.

Ransom’s reverie is broken while watching the footage and he finally finds his voice. “Retreat, motherfuckers! Retreat!”

“Copy that!” Gustave II yells back. “Retreat!” Gustave II’s voice is hoarse. “Retreat!”

But he’s just talking to himself. Jason Mars has already hightailed it up to the waiting spacecraft and the shark girl Tiburona is close behind him.

Gustave II turns and runs, the devil on his tail and catching up.

Red Feather feels the floor shake from the walls caving in as the blob continues its ascent after the Roswell Instituters and snaps out of his shock. He and Chamelia herd the survivors down the staff stairwell, not forgetting to collect Una O’Doole from her closet hiding place. Red Feather throws the unconscious girl over his shoulder and hustles down the stairs while the blob chases after the remaining members of the Roswell Institute extraction team who have made it back to their ship on the roof.

But not without one more passenger: The blob leaps and attaches itself to the spacecraft. It’s still growing and still hungry.

8:00 PM LAPD Headquarters

T
he switchboard lights up with the news of the attack on Spruce-Musa Hospital along with the dozens of LAPD and SWAT casualties. LAPD walls rumble as every cop, detective, SWAT, and bomb squad member is called to duty.

Closed circuit TV from the hospital roof reveals body-armored individuals and what appears to be a spacecraft out of an Orson Welles film carrying the militants away with what can only be described as The-Blob-come-to-life attached to the craft.

Video surveillance from the hospital fourth floor reveals a story too bizarre for any of the cops to comprehend, save for a sci-fi double feature. The fight between the survivors and humanoids, and the emerging blob, growing and spreading out into the city.

Reports come in that the blob—now stadium-sized—moves in a lazy crawl through Beverly Hills and makes its way through West Hollywood.

Human casualties are at a minimum as the protoplasmic entity moves through the city at a slug’s pace. Oddly enough, the only accounted dead are people with criminal records or suspicion of criminal activity: A pedophile recently released from prison, a wife-beater whose wife refused to press charges, a fraternity brother accused of multiple date rapes, and dozens of others. As if the blob senses criminality, seeking and plucking evildoers from their own homes and the streets.

Ammonium phosphate worked in the movie, and it’s working here, too. There just hasn’t been enough to put a dent in the thing yet.

There will be.

Fire departments from as far as Palm Springs send trucks out as the blob continues to grow and devour each part of LA it touches. Culver City, Hollywood, Inglewood, El Segundo, and Venice Beach are now memories, as the thing moves its way southwest across Los Angeles County, missing the LAPD headquarters by only a few blocks in its apparent push to reach the Pacific Ocean.

Katie Hernandez, Channel 5 News

Y
ou’ve been on this story since it broke early this morning. You were the first to report on survivors walking away from the wreckage, your vantage point in the station’s ’copter ideal until they shut down the airspace over Los Angeles.

You couldn’t give two shits about a no fly zone now, as now an even bigger story breaks and you’re gonna be up there to see it. You watch as a pink mass covers the city of your birth, leaving little in its wake but destruction and slime.

You watch fire truck after fire truck spraying the creature with a chemical that makes parts of it scream and retreat.

Your ’copter is joined by fire department water dispensers, dropping more of the chemical atop the blob. It’s working. Just not fast enough.

The blob makes its way west, toward the water.

You watch as portions trail into the ocean, submerging in the choppy nighttime waves. From what you can see by the huge swath of dark Los Angeles—city of lights—the creature has taken out large chunks from Beverly Hills, up to Hollywood, through Downtown LA and back south towards the beaches. A good thirty percent of Los Angeles along the path of the ten freeway has gone black.

As if the loss of all the young Angelenos in the Crane Mansion Massacre weren’t enough, now this.

You film. You report.

Even as you begin coughing up blood from breathing in the fire department chemicals you don’t stop.

The station feeds your report live across the United States.

It’ll be days before the rest of the country learns this is not an elaborate War of the Worlds-style hoax, some horrible Hollywood-driven Hallowe’en trick.

You won’t be there to see it, or get your Pulitzer Prize for journalism. The chemicals you and the crew breathe in prove fatal, and your helicopter crashes into the blob. The creature absorbs you as it makes its way as fast as it can into the ocean.

8:10 PM The Barona Estate

F
orensic investigators are just about the only law enforcement commodity not currently in use and they file in through the front door in full protective gear and cloth booties. Although, they’d all rather be watching the b-horror movie coming to life on live television as the blob’s trail of slimy terror continues, and not just because of its weird quotient: Their initial reports on the crime scene at Countess Barona’s mansion, or rather, crime
scenes
, are the worst of the worst.

As the blob lays LA’s streets bare CSIs begin to uncover the mansion’s secrets. Almost every upstairs room in Barona’s mansion contains the dead and mummified body of a child. Not Lon Chaney kind of mummies, but bodies that have been maintained in a cold, air conditioned environment, preserving the small figures in the last moments of what was clear agony.

One by one every LAPD witness rushes from the mansion, vomiting, including Synthia Günn, who hasn’t thrown up because of the job since her first week on patrol. Throwing up because she’s pregnant, that’s a different story, and that’s not why she’s heaving into the hydrangeas right now. She tries Red Feather but can’t get his cell. She could use his support but sucks it up and pops an Altoid in her mouth, the taste of sick making her want to barf again.

The Countess Barona, America’s now premier serial killer—of children no less—is no small potatoes. It’s going to take the forensics team a week to process all the murder rooms, that’s if any of them can actually bring themselves to go back into what everyone is now calling Hell House.

8:20 PM The Roswell Institute

M
iles underground from where Günn stands puking her guts up the Roswell Institute is in pure chaos as the failed extraction team returns home, sans even one target and with a large segment of the blob hitchhiking atop the spacecraft. The spaceship’s material is the first thing the creature has met it cannot dissolve. It roars with frustration, sloughing itself from the ship and working its way further into The Institute, devouring as it goes.

Jason Mars screams at the pilot to relaunch the ship out of the docking station, back up into the Los Angeles skies. The pilot is more than happy to comply when he sees the blob begin to eat through the Roswell Institute’s infrastructure. Were it not for the husk made of similar material to the spacecraft, LA would find itself caving in as the creature makes its way through underground, snapping beams and bridges, warping the intricate suspension system that keeps each floor of The Institute in place.

From his office, Colonel Ransom watches, his shock matching only that first day in My Lai when he died. He loads his revolver and thinks on what to do, as Institute special ops first attempts to constrain the blob and then settles for destroying it with the ammonium phosphate and potassium bicarbonate fire extinguisher spray that seems to be working for the LAFD battling a far bigger version of the beast aboveground.

The Institute scientists, of course, insist on keeping a small piece of the creature for later study and hustle to build it a suitable containment facility before its proportions increase once again.

8:25 PM The Streets of Beverly Hills

“W
e’re not too far from the West Hollywood station. You all feel up for a walk?” Red Feather’s phone is damaged from Teresa Chalmers’s screams. He can’t get a signal. “There’ll be a payphone on the way, I’ll call ahead.”

After their battle with the Roswell Institute cronies, the survivors are met with a sight to match the one that started their day of a vaporized Hollywood hill: They can almost see to the ocean. The blob’s path has leveled this entire portion of the city, Beverly Hills and onwards as they’d been fighting the Roswell Institute cronies above.

“Holy hell, you guys,” Chamelia breathes, boggled at the level of destruction.

“Did I do this?” Una O’Doole’s chin quivers, not able to fathom the destruction her trauma could cause.

Secrete is closest to the blob’s creator and emits a comforting sedative scent that envelops Una, not wanting the magnitude of what she’d done to cause another eruption from her nether regions.
We’ve had enough destruction for one day, thank you very much.

Asha Kinsella, the bird girl, takes to the air as her scuffle with the shark woman has left her leg limp and bloody, and she scopes out the blob’s scene westward. She sees a slow-moving whale of pink viscosity edging its way towards the ocean, the sound of blob-fighting helicopters audible from miles away.

“Don’t worry,” Asha chirpspeaks. “It’s huge, but not moving too fast. Plenty of time for people to get out of its way.” Asha marvels at the creature’s undulation across the landscape, like an opaque deep-sea jellyfish monster.

“See? No more worries, buttercup,” Secrete says, tweaking Una’s nose and making her laugh through the oleander haze. Una decides—with the help of Secrete’s scent magic—to dwell on this later.
A lot later. Or maybe never.

The rest of the group sighs in relief. Another iteration of the blob in their vicinity is the last thing they need as they walk towards the West Hollywood PD station.

Trip and silver-eyed Connie each hold up Teresa, still weak from her two sonic scream blasts, helping her walk. She gets stronger as Secrete works more of her olfactory magic and in moments can walk on her own.

“I’m starving,” Karma Devi looks towards Detective Red Feather. “You’ll get us some grub at the station—not vending machine crap—right?” She has a yellow bruise welling up under her right eye, a possible cheekbone fracture, courtesy of one of the soldier dicks who elbowed her face before she slit his throat with a scalpel. “And some clean clothes maybe?” Not that Karma minds wearing an asshole’s blood on her scrubs.
War paint
, she thinks.

“I concur,” Teresa says, feeling a little more like herself again after too much sleep. “I vote for pizza. Extra cheese, extra meat, extra pizza.”

“Seconded,” Tashi replies. That’s when Cherie notices the tears streaming from her friend’s purple eyes.

“Oh sweetheart!” Cherie pulls Tashi into a hug. Tashi pushes her away.

“I’m fine. I’m fine! I just never wanted to see that rapist pig ever again.” Tashi feels her entire body tighten with rage. “I should have fucking killed him myself.”

Cherie walks behind her and massages her shoulders. “I’m pretty sure the blob got that asshole, hon. You’re never gonna see him again. Ever.”

Tashi wipes hard at her eyes. “I better not. Next time he won’t get off so lucky.”

Red Feather clears his throat, reminding the survivors there’s still a cop in their midst.

Linda Kang’s acid reflux acts up again, and she rubs her throat as her esophagus spasms, bile rising in a painful burp. She needs some kimchi, and stat.
Don’t freak out, girl. Stay calm, just breathe.

Icarus Lazlo, the menstrual-blood drinking vampire is having the hardest of times containing himself from full-on attacking Cherie Beauxden and her three uteri. He tries to hang back as much as possible without looking suspicious, giving as much space as he can between her scent and his desire. Thankfully she doesn’t seem to have recognized him, nor does the bird girl flying above twittering away.
Keep walking, don’t think about her, the blood, the tissue, the succulent nectar of survival. Think about rotting corpses, maggots, death.
Her scent is too powerful, and Icarus adjusts his shirt to cloak his erection.

Lola Calavera keeps looking over her shoulder, making Icarus think he’s been made.

“You okay?” Secrete asks Lola.

“Just making sure nobody’s following us.” Lola has a sick feeling in her stomach that it’s not finished yet.

“Just our shadows,” Secrete says, linking arms with Lola, smiling.

“My spidey sense is going haywire, too,” Connie says, rubbing the goosebumps from her arms. She starts looking over her shoulder too, even though she knows whatever her physical intuition foretells it’ll be in front of them, not behind.

“Well, we sure showed them. Awesome teamwork, bitches.” NRG says, exhausted and depleted, but adrenaline elated.

“Hell yeah we did,” Chamelia concurs. “It feels good to not run for once. Stand our ground against The Institute. And win.”

NRG puts her arm around Chamelia and rests her head on her shoulder as they walk.

Chamelia glances from face to face. A vampire, a werewolf, a bird girl, a sonic screamer, a master scalpel wielder, pheromone woman, acid vomit girl, a foreteller, the mother of the blob: the most powerful group of survivors she’s met to date.

“I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship,” Chamelia says, shimmering into human form and smiling.

Everyone agrees.

Yet, the bad omen that began with Lola spreads through the rest of the group—a dark virus—as they walk through Beverly Hills towards West Hollywood, their walk punctuated by the distant sounds of the battle to contain the blob.