Chapter 60 – The Secret of the Ooze

Alex wasn’t comfortable, but she wasn’t saying so. Because this was unbelievable! Somehow, Jack had managed to get a real, live SR-71 for her to ride in! It looked so cool she could hardly stand it.

Okay, so the movie she’d seen that had like ten people riding in a big, spacious cabin in an SR-71 Blackbird was totally idiotic, because there were just two cramped seats for a pilot and another person, and the idea that you could have a whole gang of people in one of these was laughable.

The pilot was this nice guy named Captain Rafael Herrera, and he had been as stunned with his passenger as she had been with his jet. He just sort of assumed she knew the whole drill and she was ready to go. She flew up into the co-pilot’s seat, went silvery, and she hoped she was good to go. She told Rafael that she didn’t need a parachute or a helmet or a special suit, or even the oxygen mask. And that part was true, as long as she was going to stay a silvery puddle in the second seat. It was a good thing she’d told Jack she could go without air for hours like this. He’d pretty much guessed the whole don’t-need-oxygen-or-temperature-control deal when she and Hanna and he hadn’t needed any air while they were escaping from that mega-hot fire in the spider cave.

The canopy had a special port about three inches across that sealed tightly and looked like it would be pretty dangerous to open when the Blackbird was flying super-fast at insane altitudes. But Rafael said they had just been told to switch out the regular canopy for this special one, and now he understood why. So they would be going at about Mach 3.5 when the Blackbird got to altitude, and then when they got to her destination he would drop down to about thirty thousand feet and Mach 0.8, and she could jump out. He was really impressed that she could do that and not get killed, but really it was just being silvery when she bailed.

So she was sitting in the small seat, being a puddle, feeling uncomfortable but not wanting to complain about it. And she was looking out the windows, because the view was mega-cool. If she wasn’t silvery, she would have needed a pressure suit and oxygen and all that stuff, since they were at maybe 90,000 feet and were flying at something like 2600 miles an hour. They were so high she could actually see the Earth curving away far beneath her. And they were going so fast the outside of the plane was at maybe 700 degrees. Rafael said the engine exhaust areas got up to more than 3000 degrees.

Rafael had told her that this was one of only two Blackbirds, both two-seaters, that hadn’t been decommissioned, because sometimes the Air Force needed to move someone around really fast. But this was the first time he’d heard of that they weren’t ferrying a general or a really important colonel around.

When Rafael started descending, she knew it was going to be time pretty soon. She started looking for landmarks. She figured she was just going to have to drop down to maybe ten thousand feet and go slow enough that she could go normal and use her Terawatt phone to get a GPS reading.

Rafael had gotten a flight plan that put him directly over Downingtown, Pennsylvania, which as far as Alex knew was really close to the little New Jersey airport where Maggie Walsh had disappeared. That all by itself made Alex feel like this was probably the right place.

She was really looking forward to the freefall part, because it was so fun. It wasn’t like she was doing something dangerous, like those skydivers who got killed once in a while. She was just flying faster than usual. And it was awesome.

*               *               *

Steve Andrews shrugged inside his leather jacket and watched as Jane excitedly told the too-slick reporter about the gross thing that ate Doc Hallen. The whole thing was crazy. He knew he was screwed, no matter which way it went. There was no way they were going to believe him. No, it was just going to be put down to one more troublesome thing that troublemaking Steve Andrews was up to. Sure, he’d done some dumb stuff when he was younger, but nobody in a small town ever let you forget that kind of thing. His dad sure didn’t. Pretty much the only person except his buddies who didn’t rub it in all the time was Jane, and everybody in the whole town reminded him every chance they got that Jane Martin was way too good for the likes of Steve Andrews.

Yeah, the cops were already calling his dad, and Jane’s parents. Jane would probably get grounded for a month. His dad would probably try and get the cops to arrest him for ‘filing a false police report’. But that thing was real! And it was just huge compared to that small thing stuck on the old man’s hand. How could it have gotten so big? And where was the old man? Where was the nurse?

Oh, God. He saw it eat the doc. It must’ve eaten the old man first. And the doc’s nurse was gone, too, so maybe it ate her! And … and … and every time it ate someone, it got bigger! If these dorks wouldn’t listen to him, he needed to do something, before that thing ate everyone in town! Even if there were lots of people around town who thought he was a waste of space, he had friends, and a lot of those friends cared about their families. He had to warn people. And he had to figure out something so people would believe him. For a change.

Riley stepped aside with Sergeant Jim Bert, while ‘friendly Lieutenant Dave’ stood with the kids. He patted Sergeant Bert on the shoulder. “Hey, Jim, have you called these kids’ parents to come get them?” He knew the cops had, because they just weren’t as sneaky as they thought they were. That was also good, because it meant he didn’t have to worry about these guys being pros, or being undercover security for the secret lab. No, they were just some guys who knew there was a secret they were supposed to keep.

Jim said, “Yeah, but don’t tell them. That Andrews boy’s nothing but trouble. He’s been on probation most of the time since he was maybe eleven.”

Riley gave Jim a big, oily grin and went for a ‘just between us guys’ tone. “Hey, not like we all haven’t done a little something, back when we were sowing those wild oats, hey? I bet you were quite the ladies’ man when you were his age.”

Jim nodded. “Sure, but that’s all behind me now.”

Riley said, “Look, I’ve seen this before. When a teenager tells a story like this, you have to figure someone has conned them. Otherwise, they’d be telling a story people could believe. Right?”

“Well …”

Riley pushed on. “So we know that little Jane Martin girl’s not in on it, but she’s proof the Andrews kid isn’t, either. She was with him the whole time. But that doesn’t mean someone, maybe that old man they thought they were rescuing, didn’t kill the doctor, and maybe his nurse, too. Or maybe the old man saw something, and someone else is trying to cover it up. Either way, the Andrews kid’s probably the best fall guy in town. Right?”

“Well, maybe …”

Riley said, “So we should send them home with their parents. Then I’m going to go talk to the Andrews boy and see if someone drops by to plant a little evidence, or get him to go do something stupid. What’s his address?”

Jim reeled off an address not that far away.

Riley patted him on the shoulder and said, “I’ve learned it always pays for the reporters to make nice with the cops, and it always pays for the cops to make nice with the reporters. A nice little symbiotic relationship with each side helping the other. You come out looking good in the press, and I get a nice byline. It’s a win-win.”

Jim looked like he wasn’t quite sure if he should go along on things. Riley just pretended Jim was his best buddy, and walked off to go find Grover. If this was some sort of man-eating amoeba or something even worse, Riley needed some biochemistry expertise, and Grover needed a heads-up.

He pulled out his phone and made another call to the dummy number. “Richard K. Frank reporting in. I think we’ve got three ugly murders here in the Hallen clinic, and maybe someone’s setting up a teenager named Steve Andrews to take the fall. His girlfriend Jane Martin looks like his accidental alibi, though. Still no sign of Walsh, but she might be behind this mess.” He’d just given them codephrases hidden in the message so they’d know there was a secret lab and corpses on the site. Also, they would be searching for background on Steve and Jane now that they had names to work with.

He didn’t need to tell them that he was worried. Something was going on here, and it might just be a slime-like lifeform devouring anything that moved. And there were suburbs of Philadelphia that were within spitting distance of this town. If this got loose and multiplied, thousands of people were at risk, maybe even millions.

He sauntered off across the parking lots until he was out of sight of the two policemen, and then he sprinted around the shops to get to the underground lab.

And there was no sign of Grover. Just some evidence that Grover had gone down into the underground sections, when Riley had told him not to.

Riley silently thought several things, all of which, if he’d said them out loud, would have gotten his mouth washed out with the laundry soap back home.

*               *               *

Grover was worried. Okay, he was pants-wetting terrified, only without the pants. Invisibility was the lamest superpower. It was great for being a pervert and playing stupid pranks. But for fighting crime? Not a huge help.

For getting himself out of really messy situations? Not helping much, either. The thing was still oozing in at several places around the door frame. He was pretty surprised it hadn’t just busted the door down yet.

He tried his phone again. No bars. Well, sure. He was sixty feet underground, surrounded by concrete and steel. He was going to die, and no one was ever going to find his remains, because they would be invisible. Or they’d be completely inside this monster, never to be recognizable again.

He decided maybe he could at least test some things and write some notes on the wall and on his phone, and maybe they’d help whoever came down here with Riley to wonder why dumb old Grover had gone off on his own when he wasn’t supposed to. Wasn’t this exactly what the really annoying morons did in those horror movies Cindy liked to watch so she could scream and hang onto him really hard? Great, he could see his tombstone now. ‘Grover Dunn, Jr. A really annoying moron. He deserved what he got.’

Okay, the thing — he was going to call it Clifford because it was big and might even be red — could squeeze through a hole smaller than a penny, but not easily. He typed that into his notepad app on his phone. He pulled a lamp off the desk and took out the lightbulb. Then he turned on the lamp and shoved the live electrical connections into the goo. There were sparks, and he could smell something burning, but it didn’t slow the thing down much. He noted that.

He pulled the lamp back, making sure he didn’t have more of the goop on the light socket. The goo didn’t like the electrical jolt and it didn’t want to cling to the live light socket, but it wasn’t too bothered by a hundred twenty volts. Meanwhile, the main body of goo just flowed in to fill the hole he had punched. He watched as more goo flowed forward to cover up the burned areas he had made. Okay, these levels of electricity and heat didn’t seem to bother it a whole lot. He noted that, too.

The seal at the bottom of the door finally gave way under the pressure, and it started flowing in. He noted that the stuff stayed viscous and thick, no matter what.

He backed up. He was out of room. He opened the massive refrigerator door and backed into it.

And he backed into something. “Oh, shit!”

What had he stepped on? He whirled around to find a dead chick. A woman of about thirty or so, in a lab tech’s lab coat and stuff, lying dead and frozen on the metal floor of the fridge room.

Wait, she hadn’t been eaten. Had she hid in here until she starved to death? Or froze to death?

God, he was freezing his ass off. No, mainly he was freezing his feet off. Even the stuff Doc Janet had given him to rub on his soles to toughen up his feet wasn’t protecting him from this cold.

Clifford the Big Red Monster came after him. It moved about three inches into the fridge … and it stopped. Then it backed right out again.

It hated the cold. Okay, Grover did, too. He started peeling the clothes off the dead lady, because he was going to freeze to death if he didn’t. He squeezed his feet into her shoes and shrugged on her lab coat. Okay, that wasn’t nearly warm enough. But she was wearing a blouse and pants. He was going to go for that, too. Anything that might warm him up enough to survive until Clifford went hunting somewhere else. The thought of wearing a dead person’s clothes didn’t gross him out nearly as much as the thought of being painfully devoured by Clifford.

But if Clifford didn’t hurry up and go look elsewhere for snacks, there were going to be two frozen corpses in this stupid fridge.

*               *               *

Riley slipped back into the first room of the lab complex. The second room was an elevator and a stairway, both with biocontainment doors. Great.

Not that he was all that surprised. But if whatever was loose — and eating unsuspecting winos and doctors — had come through here, it would have eaten these bodies. That suggested a particularly nasty scenario, like someone here took a sample of the goo, killed anyone who got in her way, and released it into the wild just so it would start devouring townspeople. If that was Maggie Walsh, she would have made sure she was safely out of the area before it began rampaging around.

If that wasn’t Maggie Walsh, he was going to be really surprised.

All of which begged the question: why? Why do something like this? What was the point? He could think of a few reasons to do something like this. Terrorism, blackmail, eco-insanity, or just a desire to kill everyone you could. All of those could mean that there was more than one sample of goo on the loose, maybe locally, or maybe spread out on a much larger scale. He really didn’t like that thought. He needed to call the colonel and have a serious chat.

But first he needed to find Grover and make sure he was okay, before chewing him out for not following orders. The colonel was right. Super-powered teens might make a very dangerous fighting force, but without discipline and training, they were a lot more vulnerable in other ways.

The elevator was still sealed, and the panel indicated it was locked off on the ground level. But there were three lower levels the elevator would go to. He wondered if there were levels the elevator wouldn’t reach. The stairway door wasn’t sealed anymore. That could be extremely bad. If it had been Hanna who had gone down there, he would have assumed that every seal and containment system would be offline by now, and he would have been calling for all the CDC and biowarfare personnel in the state. Since it was Grover, he was just intensely worried.

He moved down to the next floor. The place looked like people had run out in a panic. He moved down to the floor below that, and found the airlocks. The panels had been used recently, and were still cycling through displays, so he was certain Grover had come this way. But had he gone in through the airlocks?

Riley had enough training on CBW to know how to read the panels. And he could see there were video monitors in the next airlock. He cycled the doors and moved into the next airlock. The monitors showed four different hallways, and he had no trouble calling up the last hour’s worth of video where there was any movement, and …

“Oh, my God.” He couldn’t help swearing. He had been wondering what this thing could look like, and there was his answer. It rolled into that intersection, thought about it for a few moments, and then oozed down the corridor he could see down. A side door opened with apparently no one touching it, and a valise floated in mid-air into the room. The thing followed. If it hadn’t eaten Grover yet, it had him trapped.

Riley instinctively wanted to charge down the hall and rush to the rescue. He didn’t. He assessed options. He considered strategy. And he realized he was stuck. It was a blob of jello the size of a car. His Glock wasn’t going to have any effect. The C-4 hidden in the trunk of his rental car would either be useless or else create a hundred smaller, equally hungry blobs. He had no idea if heat would damage it, or make it move faster. What about electricity? Cold? Poisons? He had no idea, and the only way to find out would be to go hunt through labs the thing could probably flow into, to devour you alive.

He tried his earjack. “Clear? Can you hear me?”

“R-r-r-riley? Y-y-y-you out th-th-there?”

Riley instinctively grabbed at his earjack. “Grover! Sitrep! And once I get you out of here, I am going to have you running punishment details next to Hanna every day for a month!” The guy sounded like he was freezing to death, but that beat the alternatives right at the moment.

“G-g-g-good. Oh, G-g-g-god I’m f-f-freezing in here. It hates c-c-c-old. M-m-m-me, too.”

Riley asked, “How do I get it out of there?”

“V-v-vibration and s-s-s-smell. N-n-no eyes or ears. Org-g-ganics.”

Riley thought over his options for a second. “Do you have a map of this level?”

“N-n-no. S-s-s-s-sorry.”

Riley could see down a long hallway that had a ‘T’ intersection at its end. And there was a four-way intersection at this end, nearer the airlock. If the side corridors went around and met back at that ‘T’ down there, he had an option. If not, he had a deathtrap.

He said, “I’m going to have to go back up a level and look for a floor plan. I’ll be back in a few minutes. Just hang on.”

“N-n-not g-g-going anyw-w-where.”

Riley cycled the airlock and moved back to the first airlock. He cycled that one and went up to the ground floor so he could call in and leave a fast situation report. He was worried about Grover, but he needed to alert the SRI before he went down and risked his fool neck trying to get Grover out of there. Then he went back down the stairs to the first underground level. And he went looking for the janitor’s closet.

Sure enough, the closet had chemicals, mops … and a hand-drawn floor plan with room numbers and names written on it, so someone could find the chores he got sent to do. Riley took the plan off the wall, folded it, and tucked it in an inner pocket. The halls on the floor below branched off, ran parallel to the main corridor on both sides, and then joined up at that ‘T’ at the end of the hall. So if he led the blob in a chase, he wouldn’t be trapping himself in a dead-end hallway.

No, what he had to do was give himself enough time for Grover to get out of a freezer or wherever he was hiding, and get the airlock cycled for when Riley came sprinting around just ahead of the thing.

Assuming he could outrun it. He had to assume that if it could catch all the scientists that had been down here, it could move really fast when it wanted to.

He picked up three one-gallon jugs off the shelves, and grabbed a portable UV light system, too. It was a good thing all the jugs had handles, or it would have been even more awkward.

He worked his way through all the airlocks. As he cycled the last one, he told Grover over the earjacks, “I’m coming now. I’m going to try and get it to chase me. As soon as it clears out, you have to get out of there, get to the airlock, get it open, and hold it for me. Otherwise, we’re both going to be snack food.”

“R-r-r-roger th-th-that.”

Riley moved into the right-hand corridor. He stood the portable UV light on its side so it would shine down the side hall, and he plugged it into an outlet on the wall. Then he quietly moved down that corridor and turned to his left. He put one jug down at the corner. He moved as silently as he could to the end of the hall and set the second jug there. Then he moved to the ‘T’ junction and set the third jug there.

Then he crossed his fingers. He moved to the door into the genome storage area. The blob was still piled against the inner door. And he used a skill developed over long years as an Iowa boy.

He spat all the way across the room and nailed the blob about a foot above the floor.

It reacted at once, even if it had to pull itself out of the inner room, too. It was fast, but that little detail gave Riley enough time to run down to the ‘T’ junction and pour the first jug all over the floor. He had no idea if a gallon of performic acid would stop the thing, but it said on the label it was a powerful disinfectant for dealing with biohazards. Then he ran for the next corner.

The blob raced down the hall and rolled over the liquid. It paused and quivered a little. Okay, it didn’t like the performic acid, but it didn’t seem to have a sudden urge to keel over and die on the spot.

But Riley was already at the second corner, pouring the next jug all over the floor. Sodium hydroxide, another powerful disinfecting agent. And if the blob was taking up everything it rolled over, maybe the strong acid it just ate and the strong base it was about to hit would give it some nasty indigestion. He ran at his top speed for the last corner. And he was fast when he had to be.

Unfortunately, the blob was discouragingly fast as well. It was taking a licking and keeping on ticking, as his mom’s dad Gramps Riley used to say. Riley poured the third jug out, ran past the UV light, and turned into the main corridor.

Grover was standing there in a borrowed lab coat and shoes and oddly-sagging pants, still working on getting the airlock open. That wasn’t good.

The blob hit the third corner and stopped. It didn’t like the concentrated bleach at all.

Riley said, “Grover, we may have less than ten seconds.”

“R-r-r-right.”

The blob took several seconds to decide what to do. It rushed back down the hallway.

Riley tried to sound calm as he said, “Grover, it’s going to be heading our way any second now.” He quickly moved the UV light so it pointed down the main hall instead of the side hall.

Grover said, “G-g-g-got it.” The door started cycling open, even if it seemed like it was moving ridiculously slowly.

Grover ducked in, and Riley ran over to the door. “Close it ASAP.”

“O-o-o-on it.”

Riley gulped as the blob came rolling down the hall straight at them. The door was still fully open. The airlock was still cycling. The blob was already halfway down the hall, and moving at maybe twenty miles an hour right at them.

 
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