The Containment Team (2 page)

The monsters in
the closet thumped on the door as I processed Pete’s claims that the creatures we’d captured where our dates for the next night and that the stuff moving on the floor in front of me wasn't blood. Even though his voice had a joking edge to it, I knew him well enough to know that he really believed what he’d said.

I took a deep breath and the smell in the room made me gag. It also didn’t help when my stomach churned at the thought of firing buckshot into Veronica's head. After a couple of deep breaths, I was able to keep the microwave chimichangas that I’d had just an hour
ago
from coming up. I tried to remember the face that had been on the other side of that red mucus, but I couldn't do it, I’d been too caught up in the moment to pay any attention to something like that.

That was for the best, all things considered. It was going to be hard enough to live with if it did turn out to be her, I didn’t need a clear memory of her wretched face on the other side of the mucus as well.

“Jen and Veronica, huh.” My voice wavered as I spoke, despite my efforts to keep it calm as I remembered that blonde hair had been shedding from one of the creatures. Veronica did have blonde hair. I shook my head, wanting to punch Pete for bringing all this home with him.

The balls of purple blood moved towards each other. The movement was slow enough that I didn't feel like there was any immediate danger but I lowered my shotgun until it was pointing in their general direction, just in case.

“You didn't think it strange that the monster attacking you wore a miniskirt? That was Veronica. You blew off her head.” His voice held no remorse, but the slight jovial tone that he’d had before was gone.

Growling, I muttered a few choice words that weren’t intended for him to hear. I didn’t want to believe him but he was right about the dress. I’d been so focused on trying to kill the things that I hadn’t paid much attention to anything else about them, but now that I thought about it,  I did vaguely remember what the monster had been wearing.

That hideous red face could not have been the same woman that I’d been flirting with two nights ago at The Whistle.

It had taken me all night to work up the courage to approach Veronica. All the while, Pete had slowly nursed his beer and threatened to do it for me. When we finally made the approach, I had frozen, unable to speak. Pete had opened his mouth and I’d thought that he was just about to blow it for me when Jen had joined Veronica. Pete recognized Jen from the lab.

The thumping on the closet door reminded me that I needed to reload my shotgun now, while I had a chance. The pounding wasn’t nearly as strong as it had been before I'd shot them all up and while the closet door seemed to be holding, it was best to reload while I had a chance. I moved to my bed while stepping around one of the balls of blood, careful to keep the barrel of my shotgun hovering just above it. Our carpet didn’t have any padding between it and the concrete so I kept my finger off the trigger, for now, not wanting to fire at it unless I absolutely had too. Between the barely carpeted concrete floors and the cinder block walls, our dorm room was basically a concrete box. I didn’t need a bunch of ricocheting buckshot to complicate things if I tripped and accidentally fired the gun. Pete and I had been lucky so far, there was no need to increase our risk. 

“Didn’t Jen convince Veronica to join a test group at your lab?” I slid out a container of kerosene that went to my backpacking stove so I could pull out a large plastic tote from under my bed. I had a bandolier inside that was ready to go with ammo, every shell was loaded with buckshot. I slung it over my shoulder as I grabbed a box of shells—making sure it too was buckshot—and slid the ammunition into the magazine tube. “So this does have something to do with your lab.” I scowled at him. “Care to tell me what’s going on here?”

He shook his head. “Look, this is all top secret. Need-to-know and all that.”

“We're well past that. Two women have become monsters.” I still didn’t believe it but I said it for the sake of the argument. “Our dorm room is covered in blood and gore, never mind the fact that the
purple
blood appears to be alive.” It took every ounce of effort I had to keep my voice calm while I wondered if Pete had lost his mind. His lack of concern for Jen and Veronica bothered me. The casual way he talked about them becoming monsters was unnerving.

I could see in my mind Veronica's face superimposed on the head of the creature I had shot, I sure hoped he was wrong.

“I told you before, it isn't blood.”

“Yes, but you refuse to tell me what it is.”

Pete was too calm and that, combined with the professor’s tone was beginning to grate on my nerves. Did he also have the purple goo running through his veins? What happened after the incubation period Pete had mentioned? Did they turn into monsters? Or did they turn into something else?

I stared at Pete, looking for anything abnormal. He didn’t reply to my statement, but instead stared at the purple blood, transfixed by what he was seeing, as if this was the first time he’d been able to get this close to it.

It was hard to tell if there was something to be concerned about in regard to Pete’s actions because he could be detached when it came to dealing with normal human emotions. He hadn't been the slightest bit squeamish in our anatomy lab when one of the students had recognized the cadaver was her dead aunt.

I'd once heard him tell a mother to shut up her screaming baby or he'd do it for her. The poor woman had had two other children in tow competing for her attention and had burst into tears. There'd been no heat in his voice, he'd just been focused on his phone and was having a hard time concentrating because of the crying. He had been surprised by the woman’s response but hadn’t apologized. If anything, he’d looked confused. I’d offered an apology in his stead and whacked him upside the head.

He was probably just fine.

“If it is not blood, what is it? And why is it moving?” I held my breath, waiting to see if he was going to give me all that top-secret nonsense again. He appeared to be considering it, but then he shook his head.

“To be honest, we're not really sure what it is. It is a class all its own. What you see before you, we call the larva form.”

“If it isn’t purple blood, what happened to all their
normal
blood?”

“It consumed the real blood.” Pete gave me a long look but shrugged in the end. “It won’t be purple for long. Right at the top of the balls, you can see a dark spot forming.” Pete pointed. “In a few minutes it will be black, but I’m not going to say anymore. I’ve already said way too much. You’re going to have to cover for me if the containment team asks you any questions.”

I didn’t freaking care what color the balls were, I certainly wasn’t going to lie for him, but I bit my tongue until I could speak rationally. “Look, I get that you’re trying to abide by your confidentiality agreements and all that. Can you at least tell me how we stop them?”  

My skin crawled as the balls slid along the carpet, not leaving behind a trace of their passing. Two of the balls merged into a bigger ball. Now that it was larger, I could see that Pete was right, it was changing from purple to black.

“At this point, they’re pretty much harmless. They need to find a host to be of any real danger.”

“So I could pick it up and play with it? Nothing would happen?” I remembered the way Veronica had tucked some of her hair behind her ears and shuddered. It had been a month since my last girlfriend had dumped me and I’d finally decided to get back out there on the dating scene. It really sucked that my first prospect was now locked in my closet with her head missing because I’d shot it off.

No, Pete was wrong about the women, there had to be another explanation for what was happening here.

Pete and I had drifted apart in recent months. He’d been busy with his graduate work and I’d been preparing for finals. Perhaps Pete had gotten into drugs and slipped some to me, causing this massive hallucination.

The big ball of the darkening-in-color blood picked up the others and concentrated into one mass the size of a soccer ball. It slowly rolled towards Pete. 

“We’re only in danger if there is some sort of wound for it to shift into,” Pete said.

“Shift?”

Pete hesitated, it was clear he felt as if he’d slipped up and said too much, but then he went on. His desire to share what he knew at war with the agreements he’d signed. “Yeah, they need an entry point, that sort of thing. In fact, some of us back at the lab have theorized this…” it was obvious that he was censoring what he’d been about to say, “...creature is how the stories about vampires got started.”

I didn’t know what to make of that. “Hold on. You’re saying that these monsters are vampires? They hardly look the part.”

“A fully developed host has some of the same properties of what one might call a vampire, but no, these are not your typical pointy teeth creatures.” He snorted. “Not sure where that part of the legend came from anyway. In our experiments, we allowed an infected rat to bite another. The wounded rat never became infected, even when the wound bled.” He shrugged. “You can’t shift through saliva.” 

“Infected? So is this a virus or some kind of bacteria?”

“No. It doesn’t work like that. I misspoke. Think of that,” he pointed at the ball, “as a parasite, only it completely kills the host by devouring the blood and then turns the body to its own purposes.”

Nothing he said made any kind of sense in the framework of my understanding how the world worked, but I was finally getting some information out of him. I was about to ask him how to kill it, again, when the mass came to a stop several feet in front of us. I pointed my shotgun at the creature, wanting nothing more than to blast it into pieces, but suspected that my buckshot would do little to hurt it.

The top of it quivered and I got the impression it was sniffing the air.  

Pete flashed a smile. “See? What did I tell you? Harmless.”

I raised my eyebrow when there was a large round of thumping from the closet.

“Well,” he amended, “mostly.”

“Is it sniffing?”

“It’s looking for fresh blood. It needs a wound to shift into.” The ball slowly backed away from us, the quivering on top expanded, looking like waves across the top of a pond. “It’s determined we’re not good candidates and now it's going in search of better ones.”

“How do we stop it?”

Pete shrugged. “A mass that size won’t survive much longer than an hour or two without a host.”

“How do we kill it?”

He eyed my weapon. “Your shotgun won't do the job if that’s what you’re thinking. We could torch the sucker, but why bother? It will die soon enough without a host. We can just wait it out while the containment team arrives.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket. 

I strode to the fallen door, picked it up, and slammed it into place on the doorframe. I pulled Pete’s chair over from his desk to keep it from tipping over.

“That’s not going to do any good,” Pete said. “It has many of the same properties as a liquid, it will eventually just slide under or around the side.” 

I pointed my shotgun at the ball again, there could be no doubt about the color change now. It looked like a big round piece of charcoal.

Pete looked up from his phone and paled. “Freeze! You have some on your shirt, it's almost to your neck.”

My pulse raced
and my hands turned sweaty as I looked down at my shirt and saw that he was right. A black ball of goo was slowly crawling up my chest and just inches away from touching my skin. I went to reach for it, intending to flick it away, when Pete grabbed my arm.

“Don’t touch it!”

“You just said it was safe.”

“In theory! Nobody has actually touched it yet.”

Grabbing the closest thing at hand—a textbook from Pete’s desk—I scraped it off of me and chucked it away. The book flattened the blob against the wall before it fell to the floor, leaving a slick of the stuff on the cinderblocks.

“Ah man, couldn’t you have used something else?”

I saw belatedly that it was one of his expensive philosophy textbooks. I felt bad but refused to apologize. As far as I was concerned, this was all his fault.

The ball must have been able to sense the residue on the wall because it rolled over towards it and when it was close, they merged into one ball.

I turned around. “Did I get it all? Is there any more of the stuff on me?”

“All gone. Check me.” Pete spun in a circle and I spotted a very small ball working its way up his pant leg.

“Hold on,” I said, grabbing a pencil from his desk. “There’s a little bit on you.”

Pete cursed and I had to hide a wicked grin at his discomfort. It was about time that he showed a little human emotion. His cold detachedness was getting old. Using the pencil, I scooped off the ball and held it up for him to see.

After I checked to make sure I’d gotten it all, I figured I’d save a step and tossed the pencil towards the ball. The little blob was immediately absorbed as the pencil fell to the side. It was probably best to have it all in one place anyway.

“You’re clear,” I said.

Silence fell between us as I scoured the room, looking for something I could use to set fire to the blob. Our room had felt like a prison when I’d first moved in but now I was glad that I didn’t have to worry about the possibility of burning down the building if the fire got out of hand. Even if everything in our room turned to ash, the flames would go no further. If we found a way to safely transport the blob outside, we’d do that, but I wasn’t going to hesitate if I needed to burn it in here.

“So where is this from again?” I asked, not expecting to get a straightforward answer.

Kerosene! I had a jug of the stuff for my backpacking stove under the bed. I moved as if to get it but stopped before taking more than a step. How could I do this without burning down our room?

Pete shook his head.“I’ve already said too much. When the containment team comes to clean this up they may detain you for several days.” 

“You said that the whole city was in danger. Are you sure you know what you’re talking about with this stuff? One moment you’re claiming it's safe and I can pick it up. The next, you panic when you find out that you have the tiniest amount on you.”

“I overreacted. I’ll get a team out here and get this cleaned up.”

“The cover is blown when a top secret project breaks loose and kills people.”

Pete shook his head as he pulled out his cell phone and dialed. “It’s not too late to contain this. I’m sorry you were dragged into it. You were right, I thought of you and your guns when they started to chase me.” He paused. “They’re going to want to bring you in for questioning. I expect that you’ll have to sign a non-disclosure agreement of some sort before they’ll be willing to set you free again.”

I snorted. “We’ll see about that.”

I walked around the ball, the pattern of waves across the top had become smaller but increased in frequency. Shaking my head, I took a step closer and went to a knee. There were different striations of color throughout the ball now. From this distance, it almost had the look of a ball of yarn with the main difference that the colors were constantly changing.

A long tendril shot out from it and tried to latch onto my arm. I jumped back. The slow rolling around the room had been deceptive. It had moved as fast as a pouncing cat.

Pete hung up his phone. “No answer.”

A chill crept up my back. “Has the whole facility been taken over?”

“Probably not.” He looked at his watch. “It’s almost midnight. There’s just the one guard outside and another inside. He’s probably in the bathroom or walking the corridors.”

“Two guards to protect some crazy thing like this?”

“We do research. We’re not building nukes.”

“Call somebody else.”

“I don’t have any other numbers.”

“You’ve been working there for a year and don’t—” I paused to collect my thoughts. “Okay, send them an email.”

“It’s not that simple, it's a secure facility. We can’t access email outside of it.”

“So the only choice we have is to go to your lab.”

“Only I can get in, but yes, that’s the only option we have at this point.”

“Screw it,” I pulled out my phone. “We’re calling the police. You can sort this out with them.”

Pete made a move for me and I stepped back.

“Buckshot, I need you to trust me.”

“You’re not giving me answers and people have died. What else should I do?”

Pete nodded. “A fair point. My job is also at risk here.”

“Your job? People are dead.” I looked at the closet where the pounding was continuing unabated. “Or at least they would be if they stopped moving. Life trumps everything, Slammer.”

A sudden thought occurred to me on how to know if Pete was telling the truth. Veronica had a rose tattoo on her ankle. During the fight, I’d been too busy to notice. I wasn’t about to open the door to check on it now, though.  

“Okay give them a call. You know that they’re going to take everything.” He motioned to my shotgun. “That’s evidence.” He frowned as if something had just occurred to him. “Are you sure you’re allowed to have those on campus? I know this is Texas, but...” He didn’t finish the sentence.

I gripped my phone thinking of everything I had in here that was prohibited. He was right, of course. I wasn’t supposed to have anything like kerosene or my weapon collection in our room. I had never worried about it because we lived in a midsized town in Texas. People tended to be a little bit more relaxed about things like this. It was part of the reason why I’d come here for school over someplace else in California like my mom had wanted. 

“Give me an hour. If they break out again before that, you call the cops.” 

There had been a pause in the pounding coming from the closet but it started up again, this time, stronger than it had been before.

“How do I put them down if they get free?” The thought of Veronica’s toothy smile came to mind and I pushed it away. Whatever was in that closet wasn’t her. I’d blown off its head and it had still kept coming. I knew that, logically I did, but Pete’s words had shaken me to my core.

“With wounds like that, they’ll die on their own, just like the ball.” A look of guilt swept across Pete’s face. That was the most sorrow he’d shown since he got here.

Did I even know my friend at all? In a normal situation, I would have given him the benefit of the doubt. I wasn’t so sure now if that was a good thing to do.

Any decent person would feel terrible about what had happened to Jen and Veronica. I hoped he did as well. Hopefully, the guilt I’d seen was a latent manifestation of that, not him feeling bad about telling me too much about his secret work project.

“How long before that happens? Ten minutes? A week?”

“You know, I’ve talked too much.” Pete chewed on his lip for a long minute. “I want you to swear an oath before I tell you anything more. Consider it a precursor to the non-disclosure that the Containment Team will have you sign.”

“You can’t be serious. We’re too far down the rabbit hole for something like that.”

“Stop being a fool. Give me this.”

“I’m tired of your stonewalling—”

“An oath! That’s all I want.”

It was getting harder to not club him with my gun, somebody needed to beat some sense into the man. A scream from out in the hall grabbed both of our attention and Pete ran for the door.

We’d both forgotten about the roar we’d heard earlier from the third creature.

Growling, I got to the door first, careful to not go anywhere near the ball. Pushing my shoulder up against the door, I blocked Pete’s way.

“We have to take care of this first,” I said.

“If there are more on the loose—”

“There will be if this thing gets out. Just hang on.”

I pulled out the container of kerosene from underneath my bed. My moment of indecision was gone, if there were more of these things running around, we didn’t have time to waste.

“What are you doing?” Pete looked concerned. I felt a small twinge of satisfaction from doing something that got to him. It was about time the tables were turned.

He cursed when I took off the top and poured it around the ball. “You’re not thinking this through.”

I tossed him a large knife I had grabbed from under my bed, I had just sharpened it the other day. “It’s just carpet, no padding. Cut a big circle around us and pull back slices of the other carpet so it doesn’t catch.”

The ball quivered again, the movement was much more erratic than before I’d poured the kerosene. It rolled forward until it touched the liquid and recoiled when it did. As it rolled back it left behind a trail of the flammable liquid.

“You better hurry,” I said.

“This is crazy! You’re insane.” Pete pushed the knife into the carpet at an angle, tilting the blade until was almost parallel to the floor, easily slicing into the carpet. “I don’t know why I stick with you.” Despite his words, he cut a big arc around the ball. He probably figured that at this point there was no stopping me so he might as well keep our stuff from catching fire. “I should never have come here in the first place. Your guns are pretty much useless anyway.” Pete finished cutting around it and was now making cuts away from the circle. He completed several and folded back the carpet, exposing concrete underneath. It was splotched with dried red paint.

A smile split my lips as I pulled out a lighter from a drawer of my desk and ignited a flame. I don’t know what it is about fire and me. I’ve always liked it. Perhaps I would have been prone to arson if my parents wouldn’t have done a solid job of instilling in me a moral compass.

A high-pitched scream came from the mass. Surprised, both Pete and I stared. The mass was no longer a ball but instead, it was a blur of motion, waves of energy moved through the black mass. It reminded me of a tornado, only it was on the floor of my bedroom and it could turn people into monsters.

When I touched the flame to the floor, the kerosene lit up and fire engulfed the mass. “Get back, Slammer.” I swung up the kerosene container, preparing to bathe the black ball in the stuff.

“You’re mad!” He dove out of the way, landing right in front of the closet. “It’s going to come back on you.”

As a kid, I’d played with rubbing alcohol and had frequently dumped it out on a cement patio behind our home just so I could set it on fire to watch it burn. One day a large tarantula had gotten into our house and was cruising around in the kitchen. Mom had been off shopping and dad had been at work.

I’d been scared out of my mind.

I had made as if to run until I’d remembered the bottle of alcohol I had in my hand. I had affixed a nozzle at the top so that I was able to squirt it out. I sprayed a puddle onto the tile floor and lit it. I’d been in the process of spraying from the flames to the spider when my mother had walked in and shrieked. My foe scampered off as mom ripped the bottle away with one hand and swatted my rear with the other. I had been forced to attend therapy for months after that.

I sometimes still dreamed of that day.

The kerosene slid out as I held the bottle high and chucked it down beside the ball into the circle of fire. The can exploded as I covered my ears and ducked behind my desk, the fire engulfing the ball and filling our room with a black putrid smelling smoke.

I felt a brief moment of closure. The rational part of me knew that the tarantula wouldn’t have harmed me but it still felt good to incinerate the blob. By the time I figured it was safe to look up, there wasn’t much of the ball left. There was a little bit of residue that burned, but most of it had been destroyed.

I cursed when I remembered the sprinklers. We only had one sprinkler head on the ceiling in our room. As I waited for the water to burst out, I looked around for something to cover the burning mass. I wasn’t about to take any chances that some of this might survive. I wanted the flames to continue until everything that was left had burned.

Our desks! I was halfway to Pete’s desk—it was his fault, why not burn his stuff—when Pete swore.

“You’re certified, Buckshot. You know that right?” Pete was on his feet, he flung open the door, letting it crash to the floor. I could still hear the screams coming from down the hallway.

“Slammer, you need a weapon!” I choked on the smoke and my voice trailed off as I finished the statement. When I turned around Pete was already gone. Holding my breath, I pulled the desk over to the fire. As I did, I looked up at the sprinkler and was glad that it hadn’t gone off yet.