The Containment Team (22 page)

Madelyn had her ears covered but I hadn’t been as smart. The dual blasts felt like they’d ripped open my eardrums. I yawned, trying to get my hearing back to normal, but it didn’t work. My head hurt. It felt like somebody had whacked me with a sledgehammer.

I asked Madelyn if she was okay, but I couldn’t hear her reply. Trying to ignore my panic, I repeated the question and told her I was having trouble hearing. When she nodded, I released my breath and felt a little better. Ejecting the empty shell and loading back another—it was weir
d
not to hear it as I rammed the shell home, but I checked and it was there—I got to my feet and looked inside the room. There wasn’t a speck of blutom to be seen. Pratt, Pete, Claire, and all the others had been ripped to shreds. It was weird to see so much torn flesh, but not even a hint of red blood. Wherever blutom might have been visible, it had hardened into a blackened substance that reminded me of what Ricky’s legs had looked like before he’d been torn apart by the propane tank bombs. I sure hoped none of it was alive underneath all the mass of blackened body parts.

Madelyn said something, but I couldn’t understand her. I faced her and she repeated herself.

I didn’t understand it at all.

I walked among the bodies until I found the remains that had belonged to Pete. I knelt beside them and bowed my head. I didn’t know if there was a God, my upbringing hadn’t been very religious, but if there was I would like to have thought that God had been there on the other side waiting for my old friend Slammer.

There was pressure on my shoulder and I almost spun around in reflex, until I realized it could only be Madelyn. Everybody else had been destroyed. She had tears in her eyes and I could easily read the word “Pete” on her lips. Her lower lip quivered and I had to look away and clear my own throat as my eyes too filled with tears. I blinked them back. I’m sure Pete would have laughed at me for tearing up, but I didn’t care. I turned away from her and used my shoulder to dry my eyes.

No doubt she had noticed, but there was no sense in letting the tears run down my face. When I faced her again she was still staring down at Pete.

When I spotted the ball of blutom rolling down her arm, I screamed out and yanked it off of her. It was no bigger than a marble, but it was enough to have done the job. I had my lighter out, scalding the thing as it began to vibrate, when I spotted another one.

How many of the cursed things was I going to find on her?

I pulled that ball of blutom off as well and then spun her around looking for more. My heart nearly ripped open my chest when I spotted a tiny ball slipping beneath a flap of the athletic tape covering her wound.

I FLUNG THE blutom that I already had in hand to the side, not much caring about what it did or who it shifted into. My only thought was for Madelyn. Ripping my knife out of the sheath on my belt, I took a deep breath. Perhaps if I cut away the affected skin fast enough I might be able to save her. My stomach flopped at the idea, but I held it in check for now.

I would do what needed to be done in order to save her life. There was no way I was going to lose her the way we’d just lost Pete. For him, there was nothing that I could do. That didn’t have to be the case with Madelyn. I could save her if I moved fast enough. Quelling my doubts, I wrapped my fingers around the knife. I wouldn’t hesitate. I couldn’t afford to, if I did, she’d be dead. 

Madelyn kept shaking me until I finally looked into her eyes. Her mouth was open and she was talking—or yelling—but I wasn’t able to make out a word she was saying and wasn’t going to take the time to figure it out. Her eyes grew large when I grabbed her taped hand and brought up the knife.

I wanted so badly to slit the tape down the middle and scrape out the blutom, but I stopped just short of actually doing that. I needed to be careful.  There was a chance it hadn’t yet entered into her system. Hopefully, some of the tape had formed a tight enough seal that the blutom was having trouble finding a way in. I found myself uttering a prayer as I began to cut and peel away flaps of tape. It was my second prayer in the last five minutes. If I kept that up, I’d be on the verge of becoming a regular religious person. My mother would be so proud. Dad would just grumble about it before returning to reading the news on his tablet.

Strangely, the thought of converting didn’t bother me as it once might have. If Madelyn made it through this, I’d be happy to call myself a religious guy. Heck, I might even go to church.

But there was a big if in all this.

If there was a God, I very much doubted he was listening to me now. I had never before tried to contact him, so why would he be interested in talking to me now when it was only an act of desperation that made me cry out to him?

Perhaps he’d listen for Madelyn, not for me. I almost snorted at the thought of her getting to heaven and trying her tricks on the angels. Forcing it back because of the panic stricken look on Madelyn’s face—she sometimes had a dark sense of humor, but I doubted she was in the mood to have me explain
that
particular thought to her—I focused my attention on her hand.

I peeled back the first layer of tape but found nothing. I quickly did another and found the same. And then another. And another.

Still no blutom.

The room went cold as sweat broke out on my forehead. I blinked as I peeled into the next wrapping of tape, wondering if I’d imagined the blutom slipping under. She’d seen it too; otherwise, she wouldn’t be reacting how she was. Each layer of tape had formed a tight seal, but I didn’t see any of the blutom. I thought of what Pete had said about the blutom’s ability to get through tight spaces and went faster.

The bandage was beginning to look like a twisted telephone cord and Madelyn was continuing to pound on my shoulder. It was actually starting to get painful, but she could bruise my shoulder all she wanted, as long as she lived. Gritting my teeth against the discomfort, I bit off my desire to tell her to stop.

I exhaled slowly while the rhythmic thumping of my shoulder increased in frequency and pressure. It wasn’t long before I was almost to the end of the tape and a dark sense of foreboding swept over me.

I was at the last bit of athletic tape. I had just peeled up a flap and there was still no sign of the blutom underneath.

I looked up into her eyes.

“You ready? We’re not going to like what we find.” It was odd to not hear my own voice very well. I was reminded of those cartoons where the adult characters made unintelligible sounds.

She set her face and nodded, her blue eyes like cold steel. I was glad to see they hadn’t changed color. How long did I have before they became dark? I couldn’t remember any of the partially shifted monsters having the dark colored eyes, so perhaps it would be a few days before those fully shifted over.

The thought of her eyes changing color seemed to make the large smoky room shudder around me.

I’m not certain what it was, but there has always been something about a woman’s eyes that drew me in. I had never quite got over the way that Madelyn would look at me, with fondness glowing in her eyes. The real truth about Madelyn I’d never expressed to her was she didn’t need the practiced smiles, or her carefully choreographed words, movements, and manipulations. I would have fallen for her regardless of any of that. What she already was, at her core, was the woman I’d been searching for. It was just so frickin’ difficult to get all the way down to the core to figure it out. What I would have given for just one last night with her, away from all of this.

When she’d broken things off, I’d given up too easily. I hadn’t fought for her in the way that I should have done. I had to get her through this. This wasn’t how things ended. Not for her.

Even if she never said another word to me after today, I was going to find a way to get her out of this. 

Now, as I unwound the last piece and revealed the wound, I was afraid she was about to disappear from me for good. How bad would that suck? Just when it seemed like we were about to get back together, she gets turned into a monster. 

It didn’t matter how much she pled, I wasn’t going to even consider pointing my shotgun at her the way I had Pete.

I removed the tape.

The burned flesh was blackened and there were several small blisters, though it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as what I’d done to myself when cauterizing my own wounds.

Even though she’d done her best, I doubted it had actually done much good. There wasn’t a drop of blood in sight. Even the blood that had been smeared around the wound was gone. Did the blutom feed on dried blood just as easily as it did fresh?

Pulling her hand up, I looked closer and could see a crack in the burned flesh. It wasn’t just my imagination.

Blutom pulsed inside the flesh, some protruding out the crack. My idea of trying to slice away the affected flesh evaporated when I saw the tip of her finger was turning gray.

How long did we have before she was covered in the blood film?

“It was just a matter of time.” Madelyn’s words sounded very far away. The incessant ringing in my ears was starting to dim. “It wanted me from the beginning. It just kept coming and coming.”

I felt tears welling in my eyes to match those that were trickling down her face. During the course of the evening, it had almost felt like it had when we’d been together. I hadn’t dared hope, but now the possibility was ripped from me like a strip of duct tape on my arm that took all the hair with it, only a million times worse.

“Morty—” She stopped. “I’m sorry for how things went down between us. You were always so good to me. You didn’t deserve what I did to you in the end.”

“Stop.” I shook my head. I knew what she was going to say next and I didn’t want to hear the words. I was trying to focus my thoughts. There had to be something more we could do. “Stop. Just stop.”

Was there a way out of this? Somewhere in the back of my mind, I heard a resounding yes, but I just couldn’t make the connection. I had a vague feeling. Hadn’t there been a solution that I’d discarded with Pete that would work here. It was almost there, just on the tip of my tongue I focused on Pete’s wounded chest—

“I left because I saw too much of my father in you,” Madelyn said.

All thoughts fled. “Huh?” I knew that her father was dead, but I didn’t know much more than that. I had asked about him early on in our relationship, but her eyes had misted over and she’d refused to talk about him. I’d tried a couple more times after that, but it had quickly become apparent I wasn’t doing myself any favors by continuing to bring it up. Eventually, I just gave it up and let it go.

At first, I thought she was implying that it was because I’d kept asking about him, but as my brain kicked in and rolled the words around the inside of my head, understanding flowed into me.

How was I too much like her father?

“He was a good man,” she continued, “and my mother loved him, but he was headstrong and never as cautious as she would have liked for him to be. It’s what killed him in the end.” She shook her head. “He never did have much sense. I could see you were the same way. Always jumping into things without thinking through the consequences. You know what the crazy part is? That’s what you’ve been doing all night. It’s because of that—or perhaps in spite of that—that we’re still alive.”

I felt the blood rush to my face as I reviewed the events of the evening. “Hold on. Are you blaming—”

“You fool. You utter and without-a-clue-fool. It’s your insanity that got us this far. And that’s a good thing. I suppose there’s a time and place for just about anything. Tonight was that time and place for you. Who knew? All it took was a night with the living damned dead to figure it all out.”  

She was babbling. Some it made sense to me, but I didn’t have to think it through or respond. Time. We had so little time.

Hadn’t Pete said something about how the blutom didn’t go into the bloodstream the way that a virus might? No, the blutom ate the blood. That was how it expanded and took over.

“I loved you. It broke my heart, but I had to leave you. I didn’t want to end up like my mother. That was a mistake. I never stopped—”

The words were lost on me as I pricked the tip of her graying finger with my knife and yelled out when she bled. “You still have time.”

I grabbed her hand and dragged her out of the room.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“We can talk later. I can save you.” We ran through the hallway, my shotgun bouncing against my back as we did. I had to get her out of here. There had been so much blutom in that room it was practically in the air. I didn’t dare do what I was planning until we were someplace that was less infested with the stuff. We made it to the lobby without running into anybody else. I was relieved when we burst out the doors and into the open air. Sunrise was half an hour or so away. Not much longer. That was significant, I remembered that, but at the moment my mind couldn’t grasp why. 

The fresh air was exhilarating and made me run faster, practically dragging Madelyn behind me. At one point she tripped and almost went down. I swept her up and pushed her forward.

“Go! Go! Go!” 

When I stopped in front of my car I noticed that my trunk was open and that the shifting Ron was gone. I didn’t stop to dwell on it as I fumbled with my keys and opened the back door. Rummaging around on the floor I pulled out a plastic box, the first aid kit I kept in my car. This wasn’t your average prepackaged store bought item, no this was one I’d stocked myself. I pulled out the rubbing alcohol and held it up as if it was a trophy.

Madelyn raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to try to burn it away with that?”

“No.” I pulled off my pack and took out my hatchet. “We’re going to cauterize the wound I’m about to make.”

“What?” It was almost as if she hadn’t been pale or scared before as a whole new level of fear swept over her.

I pointed to the blood on her wounded finger. “Blutom eats through your blood from the outside in, if we—”

“You want to cut off my hand?” She paused. “I think I’d almost rather die.”

I was incredulous. “Is it really that hard of a decision? Besides, I think we can just get away with taking a finger.”

Madelyn bit her lip. “I was wrong. So very wrong. You’re crazier than my old man ever was, you know that? To think that I was about to say—”

I cut her off. “I don’t know how long we have. Pete shifted quickly, faster than he should have by all accounts, but he was covered in the stuff and it had come from Pratt. The blutom inside his body didn’t seem to follow the same rules as the rest. You only had a pinprick get inside you. It might have been from him, but I doubt it. There were a lot of empty bodies in there.”

A moment passed and then another. I was to the point that I was almost jumping up and down in frustration.

“We can save you. A finger or your life?

“But what if it’s not enough?”

“Then we take your hand. Half your arm if we have too. I’ll be with you every step of the way. We’ll make it work.”

The seconds ticked by as she shook her head, her fear at war with the logic.

“Mad, come on. I’ve lost Pete.” And Ron, but I hardly knew the guy. “I can’t lose you too.”

She thrust out her hand and clenched her teeth. “Do it.”

I didn’t wait for a second or question her to make sure she was certain. I doused it in rubbing alcohol—because better safe than sorry—and then pushed down her other fingers into a fist and put the shifting finger down on the hood of my car after I covered a space the size of a plate in alcohol.

Looking up, I noticed that her eyes were closed and she was looking away. I hated what I was about to do, but I didn’t see another way out. I lifted up the hatchet. “On the count of three.”

“No.” She closed her eyes. “Just do it.”

I exhaled. There was so much I wanted to say. I had heard her on the verge of almost saying she was still in love with me. I’d cut her off in my anxiety to save her life. I didn’t regret the decision, but there was a part of me that wondered if she would ever be able to be with me again after what we’d been through and what I was about to do to her.