The Containment Team (23 page)

Here we were again, about to enact some crazy, half-cocked plan to save her life that might just cause her more pain on her way to shifting.

There was no way to know if this was going to work.

“What are you waiting for?” she asked, opening her eyes.

She’d never looked more beautiful, my feelings for her had never been more intense. Tears flowed freely. I wiped them away with the back of my hand and blinked until my eyes were clear. There was only one way to know if this was going to save her.

I brought up the hatchet and swung down.

I PULLED OUT my phone and checked the news for the tenth time in the last half hour as I paced back and forth in the hospital waiting room. It wasn’t quite noon yet. It had been less than twelve hours since Pete had burst into our dorm room with the blutom monsters hot on his tail. All that had happened afterward was a blur.

It would take a lot of time to process everything. Madelyn’s words had sunk in and I realized that she was right. I’d pretty much been running on instinct the whole night long. In several rare instances, I’d taken the time to analyze the situation before I’d plunged forward with my solutions, but most of the time, I’d just reacted in the moment and hoped to be lucky.

While it had been working for me, I recognized that approach had some very significant setbacks. If I continued to act like that it wouldn’t be long before I found myself in a similar situation to her dad, dead for lack of clear forethought.

I just had one question I needed to mull over. When there’s a monster on your tail, how are you supposed to take the time necessary to plan an adequate response?

I didn’t know. Logic told me that training could play a big part in channeling better outcomes, but how was I supposed to prepare for something like this? I’m a gun nut, not an apocalypse prepper. I doubted that most of them would have been able to handle all the things we’d been through.

Well, it looked as though I was going to have to learn. As I looked around the hospital room, examining those that were waiting for treatment, I realized that it would be more than that. I would also have to help train anybody else who was willing to learn.

I thought of Pete, Ron, Jen, and Veronica. Across the city and the nation, there would be countless others like me who had also suffered much loss. We could band together, form armies, put in place protocols, and take back our great land.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew I should be mourning those that I had lost, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything other than worry for Madelyn and our future.

The good news was that it looked like my last hair brained plan had worked. The wound had bled and bled, without any hint of blutom.

The bad news was that we had to deal with terrible consequences.

The rubbing alcohol hadn’t burned hot enough to stop the flow of blood. I had also tried to do it with just the lighter. When it had become obvious that neither of those were working, I’d been surprised to find a single remaining Molotov cocktail that had miraculously still been upright in the trunk of my car. 

After I’d used some of the gasoline on her wound and lit it, she’d passed out from the pain. I’m no doctor, but I doubted I had handled any of that in the right way. I didn’t even know if we had cauterized any of our wounds correctly. What we’d done had appeared to work, so we’d continued with it until it hadn’t.

Once it was obvious she wasn’t doing well, I figured trying the hospital was worth a shot. I hadn’t much hope to find it operational, but there must have been a backup generator somewhere because the power was still on and to my great relief it was staffed, working, and—miracle of miracles—blutom monster free.

It had been a busy enough night that Madelyn hadn’t received treatment right away. Nobody had blinked when I’d walked her into the hospital with my shotgun strapped to my back. I hadn’t been about to leave it or my pack behind. I wasn’t the only armed person to enter the waiting room.

When I’d seen all the people in the emergency room, we’d almost left. It was only because of Madelyn that we’d stayed. She had been awake–but out of it–and had insisted that we stay. She was really looking forward to morphine and I couldn’t blame her.

When they’d finally come for her I’d tried to go with them, but they’d refused to allow me back. I had pulled the nurse aside and told her everything I knew about the blutom. She had promised to pass it all on to the doctors, but her tone had been placating and she’d grumbled as she walked away. I had no doubt she didn’t believe me.

And why would she?

I was the guy covered in soot and grime that smelled of death. At least I’d been smart enough to lie about how Madelyn’s wound had occurred. I wasn’t certain if the police were still in play, but I didn’t like the idea of having them come to arrest me.

Hence, the pacing.

The television in the waiting room was dark. Somebody had turned it off hours ago when the signal for every channel had been lost. The hospital wifi was down as well. I was only getting internet service through my phone, but I didn’t expect that to last for much longer either. What little news I could get off the web reported that electricity had gone out for much of the nation. The last bits of news coming out of those places that had first been reported as hit were grim. Times Square had been bombed, by all accounts it apparently had been done by our own government. Judging by the sparse reports that I could find, Times Square wasn’t the only place that had been leveled by the U.S. Government.

I didn’t know why I still had cell coverage, but I was going to get every last bit of news I could before it finally disappeared for good. A plan needed to be made. People needed to be organized. For all that to happen, we needed to know whatever information we could.

I wasn’t certain I was the person to lead them—in fact, I was positive that I was the wrong guy for the job. When the right person came along to get everything organized, I would make sure to report to them everything I knew so that we could best prepare ourselves for the storms ahead.

Maybe the best thing for Madelyn and I to do would be to find a way home. My parents lived in the country and would survive all this. My dad sleeps with loaded guns a couple of steps away from his bed. If any blutom monsters had pounded on their door during the night, he wouldn’t have hesitated to open fire.

And once the monsters kept moving after he’d riddled them with holes? I was certain my dad would have found other methods of dealing with them. I’d never been able to confirm it, but I’d long believed he had a few things stuffed away he’d never let me know about. Things from his time in the army.

Enough about all that. Before I could handle tomorrow, I still needed to take care of today.

I scanned the hospital waiting room, looking for signs that people were shifting into blutom monsters. There were fewer people now than there had been when we’d first come in. I found it strange that so few had come in after us and was uncertain about what that meant. Hopefully, it meant that the monster infestation hadn’t been as bad as I’d feared.

It could also mean it was a lot worse. Maybe ninety percent of the town was covered in blood film and in the process of shifting while I paced here waiting for Madelyn. Perhaps we were about to be overrun by the monsters.  

A little kid with his head down on the lap of his momma had his eyes closed. He had a splotch of blood on his cheek, but it had dried. From where I stood I was unable to tell where he was wounded, but I hoped it was covered well.

Who was I kidding?

If the blutom was able to get past the tightly wound ball of athletic tape that had been wrapped around Madelyn’s failed attempt of cauterizing a wound, was there anything that would keep it out short of burning the wound to closure?

The boy’s mother was pale and had wrapped her arms protectively around him. When she noticed me looking, she glared. I flipped around and continued my pacing, taking advantage of my back and forth movement to scan through the other occupants of the room.

I wanted to feel relief that there wasn’t anybody showing signs of shifting but knew better than that. Ron had practically been a monster before any of us had even noticed him. I’d already made eye contact with most everybody in the room, checking for the unusually dark eyes. Everybody appeared to have normal eyes.

For the moment.

The walls, floors, and ceiling were all clear from blutom as well, but I couldn’t stop from checking. Things had been too quiet for too long.

Maybe I was just becoming paranoid.

I shook my head as I walked over to the glass doors of the emergency room. Multiple plumes of smoke rose throughout the city and even though it was a Friday, nobody had returned to business as usual. A thought came to me of a large family all huddled around the dinner table, sucking on the blood of an unsuspecting dog as they shifted into the fully formed blutom monsters.

I pushed open the door and stepped outside, half expecting to see a blutom monster charging towards me.

It was quiet. Way too quiet. Cars rarely moved on the street outside.

Pete had compared the blutom beasts to vampires, hypothesizing that they were the source of the legends.

I didn’t know much about the vampire legends, but weren’t they said to hate daylight? The monsters hadn’t been affected at all by the lights in our dorm room or the gas station, so I guessed that if there was truth to this idea it likely had something to do with the ultraviolet rays of the sun.

The air was still as I walked down the street to the end of the block, but it smelled of smoke. I hadn’t realized this before, but one of the plumes was back in the direction of the Yarrow hotel. Had it caught fire? Given all the explosions and everything that had happened there, I wouldn’t have been surprised. The room might have been burning while I’d dealt with Madelyn’s finger, I didn’t know. 

Stuffing away my curiosity, I studied the office building across the way, looking for signs of movement inside. There were none.

Shaking my head, I walked back towards the hospital. Out of habit, I pulled out my phone and scrolled through a news site before I realized how foolish it was to do that here and put it back in my pocket as I scanned the area. I chided myself for believing that it was safe. Just because I hadn’t seen any monsters, it didn’t mean they weren’t there. The old myths about the vampires hadn’t held up when compared to any of the weaknesses I’d seen in fighting the blutom monsters. I needed more evidence before I trusted being out in the daylight.

I walked back into the waiting room to find the doctor waiting for me.

“You Morty Donaldson?” I nodded but ground my teeth. Would it have killed her to tell them my name was Mortimer? I hated other people calling me by her pet name, I barely tolerated it when it came from her. “Madelyn is asking for you. I’ve tried telling her to rest, but she’s implacable and keeps demanding to see you.”

“That sounds like her,” I said with a smile. I wasn’t certain how cutting off her finger was going to affect our relationship. It was foolish to think we’d get back together, especially considering what I now knew about why she’d ended things with me. But call me a fool for love, because I found that even the chance of it happening was enough to brighten my day. I couldn’t decide if it was because the hope was substantial enough to do just that or if even a weak hope in the grim new reality we faced seemed a bright beacon. 

I was prepared to give her a large smile but dropped it when I saw how pale she was. Any pretense she might have had of trying to cover her fear disappeared the moment she saw me.

“One of the nurses has dark eyes.”

“You sure it was a monster?”

She about bit my head off. “I’d know wouldn’t I?”

Was that why the hospital had been spared? Had those that had already shifted been keeping the other blutom monsters away?

The doctor gave me a strange look as I swore and shut the door behind us. Just as I did I heard a scream and ripped the door open again on instinct. It was coming from the waiting room. Without really thinking it through—again, Madelyn would say—I covered the distance and found that it was the young mother who had screamed.

One of the patients had turned into a blutom monster. It was a young man about my age and he had attacked the guy next to him. I ripped my shotgun from my shoulder and racked a shell home as I called out for the mother to run.

She yanked her boy up and ran for the doors. As the monster followed, I shot him in the chest, sending him back onto his victim. Blutom splattered everywhere, a trail of which disappeared into another man’s wounded neck. Great, now there would be two for sure.

The mother had disappeared through the doorway before I could stop her. Given the chance, I would have directed her back down the hall to where I could have barricaded her in the room with Madelyn while I looked for some way to destroy the creature.

The monster charged after her, but stopped at the door, looking up at the broad daylight before turning around.

The revelation might have been encouraging if it weren’t for the fact that the monster charged me next. Luckily, I was prepared. This time, my buckshot took him in the knee. It was followed by another shot to his hip on the other side.

“Help me!” The other shifting victim had his hand around his neck and I could see the blood underneath it turning a purple color. I was tempted to try a shot to put him out of his misery but found it was no easier with a stranger than a friend. Even one about to become a monster and cause me endless grief.

Instead, I ran back towards Madelyn’s room. If my guess was correct, all I had to do was get her outside and the monster would leave us alone. She was already on her feet. The doctor was gone.

It takes a brave man to abandon his patient. I might have considered shooting him on the way out if I wouldn’t have known his body would be infested by the blutom and become another problem for me to deal with. I might even get past my hang up of shooting real people just to get back at him.