The Containment Team (17 page)

GETTING AWAY WASN’T a problem. The dogs didn’t catch up to us and we saw nothing more of Pratt on our way down the stairs. When Madelyn and Ron made it back to the first floor, they took a left turn and disappeared.

I followed after as Pete said something about us going the wrong way. I wasn’t keen on letting Madelyn out of my sight when there were blutom monsters on the loose. I found myself in a hallway. Madelyn and Ron were already down the far side of the hall.

“Hold on!” Pete hissed as soon as he followed me in. It wasn’t loud enough for anybody other than me to hear. “There is an exit back that way, we don’t have to go back to the front to get out.”

The others didn’t hear him and continued to run.

Madelyn lurched to a stop, opening her mouth. She caught herself and motioned us forward. Ron kept running, oblivious to the fact that Madelyn was no longer behind him.

We quickly caught up and it was obvious why she had stopped. The sign over the door was marked ‘Containment.’

Pete shook his head. “Sorry, this won’t be of any help to us. None of them will be here. They’ve already been called out.”

“What about weapons?” I asked. “You can’t tell me they won’t have something we can use to fight the blutom.”

“Actually, I don’t think they do. Not onsite at least. All of our training protocols here were built around doing everything to preserve the samples. Even if a shifted creature escaped, we were trained to do everything possible to capture it alive.”

“That’s insane.”

Pete shrugged. “Sure, now it is. Yesterday, it seemed like the logical thing to do. Each one of our specimens is the result of hundreds of hours of research at the cost of thousands of dollars. We could be set back months if we were cavalier about destroying the blutom shifted creatures.”

“Crazy,” Madelyn said, “just plain crazy.”

“What are we waiting for?” Ron had stopped when he saw that Madelyn had fallen behind and had come back to see what we were doing. He was pale and covered with sweat as he panted for breath. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

“Quiet,” I snapped. “Slammer, try your card.

“It won’t work.”

“Humor me.”

“If it gets us out of here faster,” he muttered as he pulled the card out and swiped. “See, nothing happened. Can we please go?”

I pulled out my pistol and reloaded a full magazine.

Madelyn grabbed my hand. “No, we don’t have time for that. Pete, didn’t you say we could get out that way.” She motioned back the way we had come and dragged me along as I looked back at the door. I shrugged her hand off, but after hesitating followed her. She had a good point and I’d be a fool not to see it. What we needed to do now was get away with our lives. I’d been hoping that once we got to the lab, we’d be able to turn things around so that we could coordinate with the Containment Team. If Pete was to be believed, it was already doing what it could.

I had a bad feeling, strong enough that I wanted to vomit. If all of the safety precautions at the lab were focused on preserving their blutom specimens alive, what could they have planned to do in a situation like this?

Try as I might, I couldn’t shake the feeling Pete was lying to us or the person that he’d talked to was lying. If Pratt had shifted, it was reasonable to assume others had as well.

I thought about my earlier suspicions that something had been done to Pete. Given everything we’d been through tonight, I’d become convinced Pete was himself. There had been too many times when his personality had shown through. Besides, it didn’t make sense for Pete to have done most of the things he’d done if he had shifted.

There wasn’t a rational explanation as to why a shifted Pete would have brought monsters back to the dorm and then helped us destroy them.

No, Pete was Pete. He was probably being lied to as well as lying to us. That’s just how things worked in organizations this large. I doubted that the Containment Team had even been deployed. Perhaps they’d all been shifted as well.

The more I thought about it the more certain I became. Things weren’t adding up. This lab was all there was. It was a decent sized four-story office building but there wasn’t anything else. Unless the Containment Team was somehow coordinating with the Armed Forces and the Federal Government, there was no way any kind of acceptable response was going to be mounted. 

Just as we left the hallway, I glanced back at the door to Containment and wondered if we might have found flamethrowers or some other sort of weapon we could have used. I didn’t trust Pete’s claims we wouldn’t find anything. If I’d been in charge of security, I would have made sure to have weapons and staff on hand that could kill the creatures. 

I halted once we were in the stairwell and grabbed Madelyn’s arm to keep her from going on. Pete bumped up against me from behind.

It was quiet. The thumping was gone.

I was more than a little surprised that Pratt hadn’t just opened the door and let the dogs out. The fact we’d made it back this far without hearing anything from above had me worried. Sure, we’d left Pratt with broken hips, but I’d seen how fast his hand had healed. Perhaps the blutom had a harder time mending bones the way it had done with the flesh, but I wasn’t willing to bet on it. All he had to do was get up and sic the dogs on us. Why hadn’t he done it?

“Slammer, did you guys ever time how long it takes for them to grow bones?”

“What?” Pete looked at me quizzically.

“His hand,” I prompted, “he healed.”

“Oh, that.” He shrugged. “That’s something new. We’d never seen that before.”

“Did you forget what happened back at the bathroom? The eye that was growing?”

Pete chuckled darkly. “I didn’t believe you. I thought it was your imagination getting the best of you.” 

“You never discovered that they can heal? There was no indication during all of your experiments.”

“Not one time. Pratt might be immobile for a while, though. It’s probably harder to grow bone than flesh.”

“A dangerous assumption.” My gut told me it was a mistake to assume Pratt wouldn’t be able to heal his bones in the same way he’d done with his flesh. “Assuming Pratt can heal quickly, why hasn’t he sent the dogs after us?”

Nobody had an answer to that.

“Time to get out of this blood soaked hole.” Pete pushed past me and Madelyn. We followed him through several doors and into the night. After all the stench of carnage, it felt good to have fresh air in my lungs. When we arrived back at the car there was some discussion about what to do next but there weren’t any good ideas.

I finally suggested we should get in the car and start the engine so we could readily escape if the dogs figured out where we’d gone. Ron heartily supported the motion. He was pale and looked like he might vomit. He wasn’t checking out Madelyn as much either.

The poor guy hadn’t known what to expect. The three of us, on the other hand, knew a bit more about what we were getting into. 

Once I started the car, I waited for several seconds, then I put it in gear.

“Where are you going?” Pete asked. “I thought we were going to wait?”

I shrugged. “The dogs will follow us here. We should circle the block.” I hoped that would throw them off of our scent, if a shifted dog even had the same sense of smell as a normal one. When nobody objected, I drove to the gate. The guard was gone. As Pete got out and swiped his card, I did as well.

“What are you doing?” Pete demanded.

I didn’t answer as I looked in through the window. The garbage from the man’s dinner was on the floor, but other than that everything appeared to be as it had been before. I was hoping to find something to indicate what had happened to the guard but came up with nothing.

The gate buzzed and moved as Pete looked inside as well. “Old Charlie’s gone. Hopefully, he’s safe.”

We got back into the car and I pulled out onto the road.

Madelyn was on her phone checking the news. I looked over when she swore. It was the first time I’d ever heard her utter a curse word.

“What now?” Pete asked.

“Martial law has been declared in all but a few states. Apparently, the President has addressed the nation and asked for everybody to remain calm and indoors.”

I snorted. “That’s where I was when all this started.”

“I’m sorry, Buckshot,” Pete said. “It’s my fault. I got you into this.”

I smiled grimly. “I don’t think there was any avoiding it.”

We circled around the block before parking in front of a restaurant that had gone out of business. It was just down the block from the lab.

Pete pulled out his phone and tried to make contact with anybody else. Based on all his cursing, I gathered he was not having any success.

Madelyn continued to give us updates, each more bleak than the last. The last footage from Times Square had a news crew being overrun by a hysteric crowd. It was unclear if the mob was comprised of blutom monsters or people in a panic.

There had been news choppers in the area but the networks were either censoring the footage or had gone off the air.

“That makes sense,” Madelyn said, “doesn’t it? The government’s little science project has gotten out and is killing people, they’re going to do everything they can to cover it up.” She shook her head. “We’re in it now. Deep. It’s not just the monsters, we ought to be on the lookout for men in suits. They’re going to silence anybody who knows too much.”

Pete growled under his breath, but if it was because he wanted to make defensive statements about what was going on or if he shared her sentiment, I was unable to tell. For my part, I thought Madelyn had made an astute observation. It wasn’t too much of a stretch to think that the person Pete had gotten through to had lied about the Containment Team because she’d wanted to keep us quiet until they could get to us.

All this speculation was going to drive me insane.

Madelyn’s words hung in the silence as she continued to scroll through the news. She was silent now, but it was apparent from all her sighing that things weren’t getting any better. 

Fifteen minutes passed and I was wondering what to do next with Pratt finally came out of the lab with a pack of dogs in tow. I was still surprised he hadn’t chased us down. He moved as if we were of no concern to him. His hips appeared to have healed and he walked without the slightest hint of a limp. Several of the dogs circled the spot where our car had been parked, but Pratt called them over with a shout and a wave of his hand.

They wandered into the middle of the street and headed towards the center of town. The way they casually used the main thoroughfare bothered me, it was as if they were laying claim to the city.

Perhaps Pratt had watched the news and knew how successful his attempt to spread the blutom had gone. Maybe that was why he was walking around as if he owned the place.

My hands gripped the steering wheel and I punched down on the gas, even though I knew that the car wasn’t turned on. If it hadn’t been for that, and the fact that I had other people in the car with me, I would have been hard pressed to stop from kicking the engine to life and running them over.

How dare he launch an assault on our great nation? How dare he make plans to shift as many humans as possible?

I took a deep breath and the moment passed. The others must not have been paying attention to me because none of them said anything about what I’d done.

As the more logical part of my brain took over I recognized that it would have been a very bad thing indeed to try such a stupid thing. Not only would it have not done them any harm that they couldn’t quickly recover from, it would have turned their attention back to us.

“What now?” Madelyn asked once they were gone.

“We’re going hunting.” I started the car and pulled forward until we were at the guard station. “Before we do that, though, we’re going to check Containment on the offhand chance there is something we can use.”

Pete opened his mouth but didn’t say anything. Ron muttered something and Madelyn just nodded her head as she took my hand. I wasn’t certain if it had been an involuntary reflex on her part, but it was comforting to have her nearby.

THE SLAMMING OF my car door seemed loud in the early morning and I wished that I’d taken more care to ease it shut. Madelyn gave me a reproving look as she gently shut hers and pushed her hip up against it to make sure it latched. Pete and Ron followed her example.

I opened the trunk of my car and slung my pack over my shoulder. When I picked up my shotgun, I loaded a shell and was comforted. Even if it didn’t kill the monsters, it still felt good to have something with enough firepower to at least slow them down.

The bandoleer was beginning to irritate my shoulder but I wasn’t about to take it off. I replaced the shells I’d pulled from it earlier before following after the others.

We made our way back to the lab in silence. Pete’s card still worked to get us in through the door. At first, I was surprised by this, but upon reflection, I supposed it made sense.

Pratt didn’t view us as a threat, we might not have even qualified as an annoyance. We were just the fertile field he intended to cultivate for the rest of his people.

I pushed away the thought and all the ramifications it held. We could fight this. While the attack seemed bad, they could not have attacked every city in the United States. No, they had probably focused their resources on the big metropolises and planned to spread out as things went. Mankind had a chance as long as we organized and fought back.

Once Pete opened the door we all paused, afraid that Pratt had left behind dogs to guard the place. The wind picked up and a low-pitched whistle sounded as it pushed through the half-open door. We waited but nothing happened. After several minutes passed we all ventured inside.

The eerie silence that followed was more than a little disconcerting. Pete stopped in the lobby, clearly uneasy about going further. I could relate. It wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but given the lack of weapons we had that could kill the blutom, it was worth the risk of returning to see what might be available in the Containment room.

Pete had tried to convince me anything we found would be non-lethal, but I had insisted we return. There was an offhand chance somebody might have realized the potential danger and taking appropriate precautions.

If I had been the head of security for the lab, I would have made certain we had something that could kill the blutom, even if it was locked up and hidden away from the eyes of the general employees. I might have even gone so far as to tell them everything we had was focused on containment, not killing.  

When I touched Pete on the shoulder, he started and with a quick glance back at me, he made his way into the building. We followed him through several corridors and I was beginning to wonder if it would have been faster to come in through the back way—Pete had insisted his card didn’t work back there—even if we had to smash our way in, when I heard nails clicking on the hallway’s tile floor.

It came from up ahead. 

Pete froze and I pushed my way past Madelyn and Ron to join him. The movement stopped as I got to Pete. I wasn’t certain, but I could have sworn that I heard somebody—or something—sniffing the air.

Pete motioned for me to take the lead and I hesitated, wondering if this was an ill-advised plan in the first place. Perhaps Pete had been right we wouldn’t find any weapons in the Containment room.

I arched my head to the side and my neck popped. After several seconds, the clicking started up again and it sounded as if it was headed our way. Sweat trailed down my forehead and my heart rate increased as I brought up my gun and waited. It didn’t make sense to move forward if it sounded like the dog was coming towards us.

I felt movement from behind as Madelyn put her hands on my shoulder and her mouth close to my ear.

“Let’s get out of here.”

It was barely audible, but I was still afraid that the dog was going to hear it.

I gave my head a slight shake. We’d come this far, it was too late to turn back now. I’d rather face the thing than be looking over our shoulders on the way back to the car.

Her fingers were digging into my shoulders when the dog moved out into the hallway. It was thirty feet away but even from that distance, it was huge.

“Mad,” I said, “take my pistol. On my mark, everybody fires at once.” Between Ron, Madelyn, and myself, we would send a hail of lead down on the beast.

“Hold your fire!” Pete said. “Ricky, come here.”

The big dog came lumbering forward, wagging a gigantic tail as it did. When it stopped in front of us, Pete took a knee and scratched its ears.

A light shined down the hall. “Who’s there?”

“Ms. Kinsey?” Pete called. “It’s me, Pete Sanders.”

It took me a few seconds to put the two points of information in my mind together. Wasn’t that the woman Pete has spoken to about the Containment Team? My memory of the event was foggy because at the time I’d just finished cauterizing the shotgun pellet wounds on my arms.

“Who’s with you?” The woman asked.

“Several of my friends. We’re armed, but we won’t harm you.”

There was the unmistakable sound of pistol slide being pulled back and released.

“Put your guns down and stay where you stand.”

“Claire,” Pete said, “this isn’t necessary.”

“Did I ever tell you Ricky was trained as an attack dog?”

I looked down at the large eyes looking back up at us and didn’t find it hard to believe. Something wasn’t right here. I stared down at the dog, trying to see if something seemed off about the color of its eyes. I couldn’t tell, it was too dark.

“Ricky isn’t the only dog here tonight,” Pete said. “Believe me, you want us armed.”

“Have you seen Pratt?”

That settled it for me. The fact that she was asking for the very man that we knew for sure had shifted was proof enough that we were dealing with another shifted individual. I slowly raised my shotgun but stopped when Ricky cocked his head and growled softly. 

Pete hesitated, unsure what to say next. At least that’s why I thought he didn’t answer right away. “We did. He tried to kill us. There is a large pack of dogs with him. They are—”

“Once I prove you haven’t all shifted, you can pick up your guns and we can continue this conversation.” Her voice quivered as she started to speak, but became firmer as she went. “I will give you to the count of three and then I will start firing.”

I furrowed my brow in thought, trying to think through the situation. My gut said to be wary, but the fear in Claire’s voice was evident. Pratt had shown so little emotion that I wondered if there was a connection between the blutom and the lack thereof. It was not enough evidence, however, for me to want to put down my weapon.

Behind me, I heard both Ron and Madelyn placing their weapons on the ground. I cringed, uncertain what to do now. Pete raised his hands so that Claire could see he was unarmed. She turned the light to focus on me.

Claire was directly in front of me. She was trying to manage both a flashlight and a pistol. Because I was blinded by the light I couldn’t tell if she already had her pistol pointed at me or not, but I was willing to bet that I could get the drop on her, all I had to do was pull my trigger.

My heartbeat thudded in my ears and my hands grew sweaty. The trigger guard felt cold against the skin of my forefinger. If I put down my weapon, would she immediately fire at us? Once we were down she could drop blutom in our wounds so we could shift.

The seconds that ticked by seemed to take an eternity and my mind worked through the many possible scenarios. The pressure I felt from the others was overwhelming and I almost did it for that reason alone, but I still kept the barrel of my shotgun up, pointing in her direction. I had made sure as we’d approached the building that I had a shell in the chamber, ready to go. I’d flipped off the safety when I’d taken the lead.

All I had to do was pull the trigger.

A bead of sweat trickled down my forehead and into my eye, causing me to blink. It seemed to have an awakening effect on me.

What was I doing? She knew Pete and might have answers that we badly needed. I didn’t like the thought of being unarmed but if she turned out to be human there was much that could be gained.

As I leaned over to put my gun on the ground, she kept the light on me. The beam lit upon Ricky as well and I saw that his eyes were black.

It was the exact same shade Pratt’s had been.