The Containment Team (7 page)

Turning the box, I ripped off another piece and taped the next side. As I tore off more tape I checked Pete’s face for a sign of the red mucus. It was still clear and the color had returned as well. Perhaps I was worried about nothing.

“That’s strange, it was attached to your leg at the last. Did you feel pain anywhere else?”

Pete shook his head.

“Maybe it already had partial influence over you,” I said.

“Look,” Pete licked his lips, “I’d rather not talk about this anymore.”

“That’s becoming a theme for you tonight.” Madelyn straightened. “Maybe when I come back you’ll decide to start telling the truth so we can figure out what’s going on.” 

“Hold on,” I said, “we need to leave. Where you going?”

“I forgot my phone back in the bathroom.” She gave me her standby grin. “Don’t worry, I’ll hurry.” I hesitated to let her go by herself but we’d made certain that all of the blutom had gone before we’d left the bathroom. She’d be fine.

Besides, why did I care?

By the time I was done taping the sides of the plastic container the blutom’s excitement level had dropped and it looked as though it was searching for a way out.

“How much time do we have before it escapes?”

Pete frowned. “Not as much as we’ll need.”

The hallway was
quiet as we made our way out of our dorm room. I shifted the straps of my backpack, wondering how many other people were on our floor hiding behind locked doors. I was surprised that the cops hadn’t shown up by now. With all the shooting and screaming that had been going on I would have expected them to have been here long ago.

I pulled out my phone to check the time and saw that it was well past midnight. I couldn’t remember what time it had been when Pete had burst into my room. I knew it had been after ten because that was when I had stopped studying to take a break and eat some microwave chimichangas. Everything that had happened could have taken a couple hours or less than twenty minutes, it was hard to say.

Several rooms down, a door opened and somebody looked out. I wasn’t exactly the most sociable guy and hadn’t bothered to learn the names of my neighbors, but I thought I recognized the red-haired woman who I’d been scoping out during the course of the last term. Her eyes hesitated on me before the door shut with a bang. I didn’t blame her. I still had my shotgun out and had it ready.

She probably thought I was a terrorist or something. That wasn’t going to help my chances of getting her to go on a date with me. Hopefully, she didn’t ask about the last woman I tried to take out.

“Hurry!” Pete hissed, pushing past me and shouldering Madelyn out of the way so that he could get to the stairwell. “This stuff is getting more unstable by the minute. We don’t have long.”

I checked to see if the blutom was glowing as he passed and was glad to see that it hadn’t yet progressed to that point. My guess was that we’d end up stopping off at a gas station and lighting the sucker up. I didn’t relish the thought of having to undo all the tape, so maybe we’d just burn the whole box.

Pete was already down a floor before Madelyn and I made it to the door.

She had stopped awkwardly before it as if waiting for me to open it. With a broad smile, I sat back on my heels. When we’d first started dating I hadn’t been big on doing things that were typically expected. She had pounded it into me that I needed to be opening doors for her and paying for our meals, among other things. I must admit that a part of me had been about to do it on instinct alone, but impish smile or not, I was through letting her manipulate me.

After she opened it herself and walked through, I couldn’t help but continue to smile as I followed her into the stairwell.

“What part of hurry don’t you two understand?” Pete called up from below.

I snorted. “First, he doesn’t want us to go, now he’s saying we’re slowing him down. Wish he’d make up his mind.”

“You aren’t going to go traipsing around town with your gun in the open like that are you?”

“Why not? We’re in Texas, after all.”

“What is it with you and your guns? I swear, I always felt a little jealous when you talked about your weaponry. I didn’t see how I could compete against that.”

“You can’t.”

“That’s why I left you.”

It wasn’t and we both knew it, but I decided not to call her on it. She had created a world for herself that depended on getting men to do things through manipulation. When I had broken into that world and shattered it, she’d been left with the choice of either accepting the change or kicking me to the curb.

We descended the stairs in silence until we got to the exit on the first floor. I hesitated, not wanting to let Madelyn feel like she’d managed to score a point, but also knowing that it would be pure foolishness for me to not hide my shotgun in my pack. This
was
the reason I’d opted for my larger backpack. 

Ignoring Madelyn’s smug look, I shoved my shotgun into the bag. She was probably glad that it was night so that there would be fewer people that would see me with such a large bag. If it had been daytime she might have tried to convince me to leave it behind. I noticed her lips tighten as she took me in.

I’d put on an old leather jacket I knew she’d hated to cover up the shoulder holster of my SigSauer pistol. That, combined with my combat boots probably was working as a reminder about some of the things I did that she hadn’t liked. It might have been petty of me, but I hadn’t completely forgiven her for dumping me yet. I enjoyed reminding her that she didn’t have as much say in these things as she used to.

Madelyn pushed ahead and out into the lobby as I cinched up the drawstrings at the top of my pack. When I left the stairwell I’d expected Pete and her to be halfway to the door.

They’d stopped just short of the stairs. A crowd of students had gathered around a television in the lobby—despite the late hour—that was tuned to the news. 

“Come on, we gotta go.” I grabbed them each by an arm and pulled them towards the door.

Pete shook off my hand. “Things are worse than I feared.” He pointed at the screen.

A dark haired woman had heard his comment and was now looking us over. She examined the box Pete held before sniffing and looking away. She would have stepped away from us if she’d have known what we were carrying.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

At least the woman hadn’t been alarmed by the blutom. It was still vibrating, but it was now much more subdued. She had probably just mistaken it for an old black sock. Or maybe a sick hamster.

“We can’t be sure it’s the same thing,” Madelyn said.

Words trailed across the bottom of the television screen faster than I could read. I must have been more tired than I thought. I caught something about New York and gathered that there had been a terrorist attack. We were looking at camera footage, but I had come in on the tail end of it and not seen what it had all been about. What I did see was blurry and I could only make out the back of a person running away.

A talking head came back on. “That was happening all over Times Square tonight.” He paused. “More footage has just come in, be advised it is graphic.”

Madelyn gasped. She covered her mouth and grabbed my hand.

It was a man covered in red mucus, his head shedding hair as he ran, just like it had with Veronica. He leaped up onto another man, sending the first sprawling to the ground.

As he roared and bent down to bite the neck, a dozen more piled on as the footage ended. It was unclear what had happened to the person recording the video.

Chills ran up my arms and through my neck. I had just assumed we were dealing with a problem that was relatively contained. If the blutom had made its way to New York, there was no telling where it might turn up next. 

“They didn’t.”

l almost missed Pete’s whisper in the cacophony that followed as the others in the room reacted. Half a dozen separate conversations started as people tried to digest what it was that they had just seen.

I grabbed his arm. “What?”

Pete looked around the room. “Not here.” 

“You’re little lab project has spread faster than we thought,” Madelyn said, whispering so that only we could here. I glanced at the dark haired woman and hoped she wasn’t still paying attention to what we were saying. Her back was turned to us and she appeared to be listening to a couple of other women.

The reporters on television had continued to talk and I hadn’t heard anything yet about blutom. If—

No, when that happened, I didn’t want to be standing here with a box of the stuff on hand. There was no telling how our fellow students would react to such a situation.  

“Not here!” Pete pushed through the crowd, earning several frowns as he jostled people out of the way. He didn’t cause more than a momentary stir as they returned to their conversations. 

“There’s more going on here than Slammer’s told us about,” I said.

“You think?” Madelyn pushed after Pete.

I didn’t respond as I followed after the both of them, careful to not jostle anybody as I did. Most people thought twice before saying something when somebody Pete’s size passed their way.

I didn’t have the luxury. At just two inches under six feet, I was average at best. 

It was cool outside, but not cold. It rarely ever went below fifty-five at night. I pegged the temperature to be somewhere a little above sixty.

Pete was twenty feet ahead of us on the sidewalk, heading to campus as if he was going to walk the whole way to the lab. It would take us twenty minutes to get that far and I didn’t think the blutom would last that long. Not to mention the possibility that there might be others about. Pete had never given me a straight answer about the number of monsters that had chased him out of the lab.

“I can drive,” I called out, waving for Pete to come back.

Out of habit, I moved to open the door for Madelyn until I realized what I was doing and walked around towards the trunk of my car. Once my backpack was inside, I slammed it shut and saw that Madelyn was watching me closely. 

I could tell by the way she flashed that cursed impish grin of hers that I hadn’t fooled her in the slightest. Her smile was infuriating. I didn’t say anything as I got in the car and started the engine. When we were all inside, I took off, careful to keep from going too fast. I was anxious to get that blutom out of my car and back to the lab but we didn’t need to be pulled over for speeding. The last thing we needed was a cop interrogating us about the weird looking stuff in the box.

“How close is it to escaping?” I asked. “Or moving to a higher level?”

“We might make it,” Pete said.

I cleared my throat, knowing that Pete was likely going to stonewall me but also knowing that I was liable to beat him if he didn’t finally start to give us answers.

“You didn’t seem as surprised as you should have been to see that blutom was loose in Times Square. Care to tell us what’s going on?”

Through my rearview mirror, I saw Pete lick his lips. When he didn’t answer I continued to push.

“Why was the government spending all this time and money researching blutom? Is there a practical application for the stuff?”

Pete still didn’t answer and was looking more uncomfortable by the minute.

Madelyn looked back at Pete. “Is there a military application?”

She asked what I’d been thinking. I hadn’t wanted to come out and accuse Pete of it but even in the dark car and could see the look of guilt on his face.

It was all I needed.

“Sheesh, man!” I said. “What are you hoping to accomplish by militarizing the stuff? Has a terrorist gotten hold of the blutom or is this attack in Times Square the government using New York City as a Petri dish?”

“It’s not what you think. After rats are taken over by the blutom, they develop useful attributes. Increased strength, intelligence, ability to move faster, that sort of thing. We were trying to find a way to isolate what caused the increase so that we could use it to enhance human abilities.”

“What were you going to do?” I asked. “Reanimate the dead or ask for volunteers to commit suicide?

“Do you realized how insane this all sounds?” Madelyn spoke at the same time as me. “You were going to kill people to see if you could somehow harness the powers these monsters have when they come back from the dead.”

Pete gritted his teeth. “We were hoping to find a way to isolate what the blutom was doing without killing the host. The trials were in their infancy. This wasn’t something we were hoping to accomplish in a year or even in five years.” 

“This is all interesting,” I said, a pit forming in my stomach as I thought about New York. The monsters that I’d seen so far hadn’t demonstrated any increased intelligence, it had been just the opposite. “We’ll have to save all this for later. We need to know what we’re facing tonight. How does their intelligence increase, Slammer? What happens to the rats that have time to let the blutom settle in?”

“They have the ability to think at a human level.”

“They become self-aware?” I gripped the steering wheel. “Things aren’t adding up, what aren’t you telling us? Other than a relentless ability to stop coming, those monsters are as dumb as a doorknob.”

“That’s a temporary condition, eventually, they come out of their cocoon.”

“I can’t believe I’m asking this,” Madelyn said. “But were you able to establish communication with these rats? It is possible this is an alien life form and the blutom is their method of reproducing?”

“None of the rats survived long enough to even begin to form a dialogue.”

“Killed them before you got that far, eh?”

“No. Please keep in mind, that it wasn’t the rats that became self-aware, it was the blutom itself. At a certain point, all of the rats we shifted were abandoned, the blutom left the host body, leaving behind a shriveled shell.”

“The blutom knew it would be limited with the body of a rat and went off looking for a better host.” Madelyn’s voice was low. “They risked death to avoid sticking with an inferior body.”

“We don’t know for sure, but that was a working theory.”

“I may be going out on a limb here, but I’m assuming—or at least want to believe—that you had nothing to do with that attack we just saw on the television.”

I stopped as I looked in my rearview mirror, but I was unable to make out Pete’s expression.