The Containment Team (9 page)

I was tempted to continue to press Pete but decided against doing so because I wasn’t sure what difference it would have made anyway. Stolen or not, it was undeniable that the blutom had gotten loose. Deciding what to do about it was what we needed to deal with now.

I checked our rearview mirror, a part of me irrationally expecting that the monsters would have been able to keep up with our car. Pete had mentioned greater strength, but it hadn’t sounded like he meant superhuman strength.

The street behind us was clear, but I didn’t loosen my grip on the steering wheel or lessen my vigilance at keeping an eye on things outside the car.

I cleared my throat. “I suppose then that our working theory ought to be that whoever is behind the attack in New York set the blutom loose here as well. Were you able to change the blutom so it could be spread through the air? Are the blood vessels in the nose exposed enough that they could shift that way?”

“I don’t know,” Pete said. “A lot of things might be possible. Rats didn’t seem susceptible to shifting via airborne blutom. Yes, we did try aerosolizing it. And no, we weren’t trying to build a weapon, we were just experimenting with its properties.”

“How about monkeys?” Madelyn asked. “Pigs, dogs, any other animals?”

“Just rats, rabbits, and mice so far. Primates weren’t on the schedule for at least another six months.”

When I turned a corner I was surprised to see that several blocks down a fire had engulfed a home. There were fire engines out front but the firemen were nowhere to be seen. In fact, there wasn’t anybody in sight. The flames cast the street in shadow and made everything seem as if it were moving.

A chill ran down my back. Could this night get any worse?

I slowed to
a stop, hesitant to go any further down the street. Other than the missing people, there was something else about the scene that was disconcerting but I wasn’t immediately able to put my finger on it. The moon came out from behind a cloud and bathed the scene in eery light. I shivered as the wind whistled past the shattered remains of my driver’s side window, goose bumps forming on my arms.

“Why you slowing down?” Pete asked. “The street isn’t blocked. You can get past.”

“Something’s not right here,” I said, bringing the car to a complete stop.

“Obviously,” Madelyn said. “There’s a fire.”

“That’s not what he means,” Pete said, comprehension dawning on him. “Where are all the people? There should be firefighters everywhere.”

It felt like a trap.

“It’s not just that,” I said more to myself than to anybody else. I couldn’t place what it was. Perhaps it was the fact that the whole scene was so strange and my mind was working overtime, filling me with extra paranoia for something that didn’t exist. 

Flipping the car around, I returned the way we had come and took another side street to go around the fire. I didn’t realize what it was that had been bothering me about the scene until we had put the fire well behind us.

“Did anybody else think it strange that there weren’t any police cars? With a fire that big, the police should have been out in force to make sure that things were under control.”

Pete picked up immediately on what I was thinking. “The police couldn’t respond because they had something else to do.”

“What have you got us into, Slammer?” I asked, flipping on my radio and trying to find a local channel. I’d thought it was mere chance that we’d run into a couple more blutom monsters. Pete had probably been chased out of the lab by more than actually ended up following him back the full way.

I had assumed that Pete hadn’t told us that there had been more. This was why I hadn’t asked him any questions about the blutom monster I’d hit with the car and his companion that had tried to rip out my throat with his bare hand.

“How many more monsters were back at the lab?” I asked quietly. “A dozen? Two dozen?”

“How should I know?” Pete asked. “I only saw the ones that were chasing me. There might have been more than the three, I don’t really know because I was too busy running for my life.”

His words felt like a lie, again.

I was beginning to wonder if something more was going on. I had assumed that the epicenter was Pete’s place of work and that the attack in Times Square was related, but what if I was wrong?

Was the attack happening on a much grander scale?

Madelyn peered out her window. “It’s comforting that the radio stations all seem to be still be working. If there had been a major attack, some of them would have gone offline by now, right?”

I didn’t answer as I stopped on a station with talk, only to find that they were reporting on the attack in Times Square. It didn’t sound like there was anything that we didn’t already know, so I continued past after a few seconds. Once I got to the end of the FM stations, I flipped over to the AM and went all the way through those as well and came up with nothing.

If there was something of significance going on in town, none of the local stations had picked up on it yet.

“It’s late, Buckshot,” Pete said when I expressed my thoughts aloud. “Most of the stations probably have the recording done ahead of time and have left a computer in control of the broadcast.”

It was probably a safe assumption, but I wondered if that was how radio stations really worked. I didn’t know enough about it to challenge Pete’s assertion.

“Madelyn,” I asked, “could you check WSL?” It was one of our local news stations. Everybody in town relied on their website to keep up to date with what was going on in town.

“What do you think I’m doing?”

I looked over and realized that she had her phone out. She held it close to her face as she navigated. I’d forgotten about her habit of doing that. When we were dating I’d always teased her about it, saying that she needed glasses. She always insisted she did not. 

“Nothing,” she said. “The major attack in Times Square hasn’t even been mentioned.” She bit her lower lip and chewed on it. “I’d have thought that they’d have at least a person, if not a team, monitoring the nightly news, but Wilks is a small town.

I cornered and sped up, only to find that there was a group of people in the middle of the street headed in the same direction that we were going. Tingles ran down my spine as it reminded me of something out of a horror movie.

The people were not moving normally. It wasn’t the slow plodding shuffle of zombies, they were actually moving along at a healthy speed, but I was reminded again of toddlers. This time, the toddlers were learning to use their legs for the first time. All the other blutom monsters I’d encountered had been so focused on attacking us I hadn’t the time to notice any nuances in the way that they moved.

Madelyn muttered a swear word. At any other time, it might have made me smile because she’d always gotten on my case about my language, but the group held our attention. 

“Think, Slammer!” I said. “Are you sure you didn’t see any other monsters back at the lab?”

Perhaps seeing the marching monsters would give him the comfort he needed to start spilling his guts.

“Far fewer than we can account for here,” he said at length, his voice disturbed by the number that he was seeing. 

One of them looked our way. The blood film was evident on its face, even from where we were a block or so back. If there had been any doubt remaining in any of our minds, that removed it. Baring its teeth, it howled out, the sound quite audible through the broken window of the driver side door. 

I looked over my shoulder, intending to back up, but saw a group of people stepping onto the street behind us. I didn’t need to see their faces to know that they would be covered with the blood film as well. They all had the same gait as the others.

Where had they all come from? Light from the moon flashed off something on one of their chests. Had that been a policeman’s badge? Despite the tension of the situation, the conspicuous absence of the cops made me do a double take. The more I looked the more certain I became. This monster had formerly been a cop. 

Had the police responded to an inciting incident and then been shifted as soon as they’d shown up?

“Are you going to do something?” Madelyn asked. Her voice was quiet but laden with enough angst that I looked over at her. A street light lit her face, showing a mix of resignation and fear.

The monsters behind us sprinted forward.

There are times when it’s important to take a second to plan out what you’re going to do next. I’d always been a believer in having a plan to handle difficult situations. Sometimes, though, you just have to move on instinct.

I hit that gas, the wheels of my old Honda squealing in protest as we lurched forward. “Everybody hold on.”  

“What are you doing, Buckshot? Just turn around.”

The question barely registered with me because the others in the group in front of us had turned to look our way now, the cursed blood film covering all of their faces. I could see several shorter figures in the crowd and assumed that they were children who had shifted. My anxiety to get out of the situation unscathed overcame my horror of seeing young ones taken by the horrible blutom.

They all looked on as I approached I wondered if they wouldn’t even react as we sped by. At the last second, they ran towards us too.

One of the faster ones ran directly in front of our car and I had to swerve onto the sidewalk to avoid it. My headlights shined briefly onto the face of the monster. It might have been a teenage child or short person before shifting. All of its hair was missing and it roared at us, distorting its face and making it impossible to tell what it had been previously.

I continued to dodge the monster on instinct, fearing it had once been an adolescent, but managing to slam into several others. One rolled up onto the roof and down the back of the car. The other grasped onto the hood.

It had previously been a middle aged man that had probably been bald before shifting because the top of his head was covered with sunspots. He looked up and roared, saliva dripping onto my windshield.

Pete had claimed a person was unlikely to shift through saliva, but I couldn’t help but remember how he’d insisted we not touch the blutom after saying it was safe enough to touch.

Some of the spit landed on a small ball of blutom that had been making its way up the windshield from the last blutom monster we’d had straddled on the hood of my car. Time seemed to slow as I focused on the hood of my car.

The stuff was everywhere. I truly hoped that Pete was right about it dying off if it didn’t get into a host in time because we’d be leaving a trail of the stuff behind us.

I tore the car back onto the street and put the gas pedal to the floor, worried more about escaping from the mob than the monster on the car. It continued to howl at us but it wasn’t able to do anything more than hang on. For the moment, I could tolerate that.

The mob dwindled behind us.

“Everybody ready?” I asked. “I’m about to slam on the brakes.”

Madelyn grabbed the handle above the door and braced her other arm on the dash. I heard a clicking sound as Pete fastened his belt buckle. He also put an arm on to the back of my seat to brace himself.

I hit the brakes and the monster continued on, hitting the asphalt with a sickening crunch that we could hear from inside the car. Wincing with sympathy, I reminded myself that he was no longer a man and punched the gas again, swerving so that I wouldn’t run over the monster as we sped on by.

Pete swore. “What possessed you to do that, why didn’t you just turn the car around?”

“You didn’t see all the ones behind us?” I asked, flipping on the windshield wipers and spraying fluid to clean off the saliva and blutom balls. It took multiple attempts, before everything was clean. A single ball stuck to the top of one of the wipers so I increased the speed of the wipers until it was flung off. 

There were several other balls of blutom on the hood of the car, but they were staying in place for now.

Both Pete and Madelyn checked our rear when I’d mentioned the other group. I didn’t. I knew what I’d seen and didn’t feel like it was necessary to look any further. When neither of them said anything more, I assumed that they’d both seen the second group or just didn’t want to push the point.

We drove in silence for several minutes. Each of us lost in our own thoughts. Was this happening all across the United States tonight? The problem was clearly bigger than any of us had previously thought an hour ago.

“Does your lab have a containment plan for an outbreak at the national level?” I asked. We had gone half a dozen blocks without seeing any other sign of a monster so I finally slowed down. I was beginning to hope that we’d left them all behind and that we would be able to make it to the lab without another incident.

“I don’t know. I doubt they ever saw the need, even after the theft. All of our experiments showed that after a rat had fully shifted it took a few weeks before it had enough blutom in its system that it would start to look outside the host for another expansion point. We never expected it to move as fast as it is.”

“Well,” Madelyn said, “there is clearly something wrong with your data if our little town could be overrun over the course of one night.”

“So it would seem.”

I spotted a gas station ahead and slowed down.

“We’re almost there,” Pete said. “Surely you have enough gas to make it the rest of the way.”

“How’s our buddy doing back there?” I asked. “Has he reached level ten yet?”

I could tell by the silence that all the commotion had caused Pete to forget about our deadly passenger.

“It’s still there,” Pete said after he’d pulled up the plastic container and waited for a passing street light to illuminate it. The relief in his voice mirrored my own. I didn’t like the thought of the stuff getting loose in my car. What were the odds that at least one of us had a wound small enough to escape our attention but large enough for some blutom to use as it shifted into us?

“Think it can wait for the lab,” I asked, “or should we pour some gas in the container and light it up now?”

“Man, Buckshot,” Pete said. “You’re certifiable, you know that? Would you settle down?” He shook his head. “You’re too eager.”

“What else do you want me to be?” I looked him in the eye and he looked away uncomfortably. “That thing could escape and kill any one of us.”

“Can we at least drive away from the gas station before we light the fire?”

“What are you so worried about? Somebody will see us? The only people we’ve seen have been shifted into monsters. With all them about, it would be better if we minimized the risk by staying under the well-lit station and just got it done.” 

“What are people going to think if we just pull up, spray some gas on a plastic box and then light it on fire?”

“The only people we’ve seen are blutom monsters,” I said, “odds are good they won’t be thinking at all.”