The Containment Team by Dan Decker Read Free Book Online Page A

underneath it. It was scalding and difficult to keep my arm underneath for fear of getting burned, but the little balls of goo were washed away.
    “It works! The heat killed them. Quick, the showers. Throw them in the showers. The water is boiling hot.”
    Madelyn was already running towards the stalls, turning on the water in the first before moving on to the next. I grabbed the closest monster and hurled it in, ripping down the shower curtain in the process.
    It was difficult to describe what happened next. The whole body began to vibrate. The new mouth at the top of the neck screamed out but it was more than just that. It was as if all of the little balls of goo cried out at once, sounding like a swarm of bees. The goo moved quick as if energized by the water. Most of the balls disappeared, but not all.
    A large ball formed at the base and even though some of it washed away as it moved out of the water, a sizable portion of it still remained by the time it got to end of the shower. It was the size of a basketball and had gone from purple to black much faster than the one in our room.
    This time, I didn’t hesitate to put a blast of buckshot into it. A grin the size of a banana split my face as it was blown back in. Another ball formed but this one was small enough that I merely kicked it back in with the toe of my shoe.
    The other monsters had overcome Pete and pinned him to the floor, but he was still struggling. I ripped one from him and threw it into the shower. By the time I returned, Pete had just thrown the other off of him. I scooped it up and threw it into the shower as well.
    “No!” Pete yelled.
    I turned to see what had upset Pete as he rushed past me. He stopped short of plunging into the shower himself and pushed Madelyn out of the way with enough force that she almost lost her footing and had to grab onto me for support.
    “Watch it,” she said, letting go as soon as she was stable. We shared an awkward glance. The last time she had touched me had been a pat on the arm after she’d “let me down gently.” As our eyes connected, I remembered the hurt look on her face after I’d accused her of breaking up with me because she’d lost her ability to influence me as she once had. She had said something about me not really knowing her at all.
    She darted past Pete and kicked a ball of goo back into the shower, bringing me back to the present. Her tennis shoe came away wet, but the goo was gone.
    “The showers shouldn’t have worked,” I said. “It was too easy.”
    “ You fool!” Pete turned, his hands balled into fists. “Do you realize what you have done? you remember how I said we needed a torch to kill them? Heat is a catalyst unless it burns hot enough to catch fire. You just supercharged a bunch of blutom and sent it down into the sewers.”
    I wanted to punch him. “You’re the one that refused to tell us anything about this—blutom.” The word felt strange in my mouth, but it was nice to finally kno w what the lab’s name for it was. “This is on you.” 
    “Rats!” Pete continued. “The blutom will take the bodies of rats first. There won’t be any waiting period once they shift because you just sent the blutom into level ten. In an hour, they will have taken one hundred rats, this time tomorrow, it will be all of them. Every. Single. Last. One.”
    I took off my shirt and flung it into the bottom of the empty shower, blocking the drain. The water was still running, steam forming at the top. I handed my shotgun off to Madelyn and as I did so I remembered that I had slung a holstered pistol over my neck along with the bandolier, I gave these to her as well. I’d completely forgotten about the pistol in the heat of everything that had happened. I took a step forward, but Pete grabbed my arm.
    “Didn’t you hear me?”
    “I did but I want this stuff off of me.” I pointed to the bottom of the shower. It will collect there. I shrugged his hand away and stepped inside. “Clean