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

yourself off. We can’t go running around with this crud crawling all over us.”
     
     
     
     

Chapter 6
    Madelyn carried my shotgun and pistol back to our room as I was sopping wet. It was quiet now, but my gut said that something was going to come bounding at me from around the corner. I kept looking around and had to stop myself several times from taking back my weaponry. It would still work if it got wet but as long as there wasn’t an immediate need, I was better off letting her carry it.
    We had gathered all of the blutom we could find in the bathroom and coaxed it into forming a ball before wrapping it in my sodden shirt. Pete had a cooler back in our room where we would keep it in until we got back to the lab.
    “So Pete,” Madelyn asked, “what’s the scoop on these things? Blutom. Is that what you call it?”
    Water dripped off Pete’s hands as it ran down from the sleeves of his shirt. He’d showered too.
    Pete didn’t answer for several moments. He’d calmed down while in the shower and had even made a statement of apology about not being more forthcoming. We’d both accepted it, Madelyn more gracious about it than me, I still wanted to pound his face.  
    “Yeah, that’s what we call it. Don’t ask me about the name. I think it’s stupid.” He sighed and shook his head as if he was surrendering. You can’t repeat anything I’m about to tell you.”
    “Who am I going to tell?” I asked.
    “No posts on the internet, Facebook, Twitter, nothing. Got it?”
    Madelyn looked at me and I rolled my eyes. Pete saw it and threw me a glare. “I’m serious, Buckshot. I’m committing treason right now. Just you knowing the name is probably enough for them to hang me.”
    I bit my tongue. I very much doubted that his breach of confidentiality would be classified as treason, but it sounded like I was finally going to get some answers. An ill-conceived phrase might change all of that and I had the making of at least three on the tip of my tongue.
    “Ok, whatever.”
    Pete looked back and forth between the two of us. He sighed again. “The creature takes over human bodies. It kills the host but keeps the body alive. How? We don’t know.”
    “Tell us something w—” I bit my tongue. “Please go on.”
    “How was the government researching this?” Madelyn asked. “Were they experimenting with human subjects?”
    “Of course not. Most of the experiments were done with rodents. Mice, rabbits, rats. That sort of thing. One time we used a monkey, but that got ugly fast, so we went back to the vermin.”
    “If heat is a catalyst,” I asked, “will the cold slow it down?”
    “We wondered that as well, but no, it doesn’t. Cold doesn’t appear to have any effect on its ability to move but it will prolong its life and slow it down. At room temperature, a marble-sized amount will die in a matter of minutes. Less than half an hour for sure. In a freezer, it can live indefinitely.”
    “The larger the mass, the longer it can live?” I asked.
    “Correct.”
    “Why did you insist that we pick up every remaining scrap we could find?” Madelyn asked. “It will all die anyway.”
    “Besides the fact that they tend to form into balls, at the end of their life they go into a hyper stage, we call it level ten. The blutom can shift into a host even without a wound when it’s at level ten. We’re not exactly sure what allows it to do that.”
    “Is that what happened to the people that chased you home from the lab?” I asked.
    “I don’t know. I doubt it. We were working with a few level ten balls of blutom yesterday, but after we were done, we sent them to the incinerator. We never ever send a level ten ball back into the freezer, it’s too volatile. We have suspected for some time that there are other properties and abilities that develop at that stage that we aren’t yet aware of.”
    “So we just supercharged the stuff and sent a bunch of it into the sewers.” I thought earlier about