Chapter 61 – The Smooze

The door started closing, but it was moving too slowly. The blob was three fourths of the way down the hall, and picking up speed.

The door was still only halfway closed.

The blob ran into the part of the hall covered by the UV light, and it flinched. It stopped. It cautiously moved toward the light, pausing for a few seconds before it overran the light, which broke with a muffled crack.

The door closed with a distinct hiss, and the seals activated.

Grover said, “G-g-g-g-got it. S-s-s-sealed. I w-w-want outta here.”

They worked their way through the other airlocks, watching the massive bulk of the blob as it pressed futilely against the airlock door.

Grover asked, “Wh-wh-what’d y-y-you use?”

Riley said, “I tried everything in the janitor’s closet. Performic acid, sodium hydroxide, bleach concentrate, and a portable UV sterilizer.”

Grover shivered inside the lab coat. “S-s-s-smart.”

Riley said, “Not smart enough to stay out of a sealed biolab that had dead people outside it.”

“S-s-s-s-sorry.”

“If we get through this op alive, you’re going to be doing punishment details for me. And whatever the colonel wants. And whatever your mom and Cindy tell you to do. Because this was just stupid, and you nearly died, and you nearly got me killed, too.”

“S-s-s-sorry. R-r-really sorry. C-c-can we g-g-go s-somewhere w-warm?”

They went back up the stairs, closing and sealing doors after them. Riley stopped at the security door and reprogrammed the RFID lock to stay unlocked. He reprogrammed the keypad to a different number. Then he called the colonel and gave him a full heads-up on everything, including all the new information on the problem underground and the problem on the loose in the town, which the cops were going to try to cover up until they realized they weren’t helpers, they were Hamburger Helper.

*               *               *

Alex was doing her freefall thing. It was so much fun! She was still flying forward at some really fast speed, and she was dropping like a rock. Or maybe a silvery rock-shaped blob. She waited until she was maybe fifteen thousand feet up to really slow herself down, and then when she was going maybe a hundred fifty miles an hour diagonally toward what she hoped was the middle of Downingtown and not the completely wrong town altogether, she went normal and used her GPS app to make sure she was in the right place.

Oh, good, no embarrassing stuff like showing up in the town five miles over, or something like that.

She zoomed downward and waited until she had cell phone reception again, because cell towers were just not made to be convenient for superheroes flying miles above the ground.

And she had a bunch of phone calls and text messages. That could not be good. She started playing all of them while she flew down:

*               *               *

“Terawatt, it’s Colonel O’Neill. Florida and New York are still unknown. Downingtown is a live op, and Finn has signaled that the police are in on it. Please contact him directly and assist in any way you can.”

captainmal: something weird w D’town finances, going under up to 4 yrs ago, suddenly plenty of cash city-wide

Acid Burn: someone bought out the whole town, major construction effort west of hallen clinic, google earth show nothing there now but a tiny strip mall

jackryanrules: hah!

captainmal: work done by Smith & Smith Construction

Acid Burn: who doesn’t really exist – creepy!

jackryanrules: whoever is behind this could def’y pay walsh

captainmal: major $$$

Acid Burn: serious cashflow and expert money hiding

captainmal: who the $h!t uses swiss and cayman and brazil and russky and trinidad banks all at the same time?

jackryanrules: a giant international consortium secretly behind the thing

Acid Burn: or a super-rich finance guru who is ultra careful

captainmal: bad either way

“Tera, it’s Acid Burn. There’s extreme badness going on in that town, and we can’t even find out who paid off the whole town and built what’s probably a secret underground lab just west of the Hallen clinic under a little strip mall, and when I called Big Cheese he went ape-doody and he called DHS and this could be extreme, and he can’t get Riley or Grover on the phone right now so he’s really worrying.”

jackryanrules: got the names Steve Andrews and Jane Martin from mr iowa

captainmal: brilliant name Burn!

Acid Burn: credit Tera

jackryanrules: Jane is local beauty pageant winner, Steve is under juvey rules, can’t get at his records w/o court order

Acid Burn: never mind, i can bust that, okay… shoplifting at 11, assault 4 at age 14, assault 3 at age 16

jackryanrules: assault 3 & 4 are like being in a fistfight, not beating up old ladies

captainmal: so his whole life he got in a couple scrapes? this is the town badboy? lame

Acid Burn: maybe a few other things no one wanted to swear out a complaint

“Tera, it’s Jack. Again. The New York thing is a bust. It’s a guy running around pretending he has superpowers to hype himself for some stupid play he’s directing and starring in. The Florida op looks like it may be a job for the DEA instead of us: it’s probably not a Walsh operation at all, and Miller thinks it’s just a big meth lab. But the Philly op is still live. Please assist Finn with all speed.”

“Tera, it’s Riley. I just talked with the colonel and he said to call you directly. We’ve got Terawatt-sized trouble. Someone — their initials are probably MKW if you ask me — unleashed some kind of ooze monster on the town. Imagine your silvery form, but red and carnivorous and the size of a hippo. Grover thinks it’s a genetically engineered multi-celled lifeform like slime molds, and it oozes up to maybe thirty or forty mph. It hunts by sensing chemicals around it, and maybe vibration, too. Grover’s not positive. It absorbs anything organic and eats it. It may be pretty resistant to electricity and maybe heat, but it definitely hates cold. It isn’t bothered that much by acids or bases, but it doesn’t like bleach. Even worse, there’s also one rampaging loose in an underground lab and it probably ate everyone and everything down there. Grover’s darn lucky he wasn’t the dessert course. Call me ASAP. Finn out.”

*               *               *

Boy, that was a lot of messages and stuff for an hour in a jet.

She speed-dialed Riley. “Terawatt here.”

Riley sounded relieved. “Good to hear from you. I’ve got Clear under an electric blanket in the Hallen clinic, he’s still shivering, and I’m searching for intel. We have the lab sealed for now, but the thing that’s loose up top is a much bigger threat. And the locals may be all bought and paid for, so no help there. I’ve got a witness, Steve Andrews, who just happens to be the town troublemaker so no one’s going to believe him without a lot of backup, and the cops turned him over to his dad, who seems to think Steve needs a couple of years in the big house to straighten him out. No idea what the kid actually did. And he’s going out with the local Miss Wholesome.”

She said, “It looks like he’s been in a few fights.”

“What charges?”

She said, “Assault 3 and assault 4.”

He said, “It sure didn’t look like the local cops I met would let him plea bargain down to lesser charges, so that’s pretty skimpy. That means no weapons, no weapons of opportunity, no pounding innocent victims, or he’d be up on bigger charges.” Riley reeled off an address, which Alex typed into her map app on her phone. “Can you get to his house and keep an eye on him? If he’s not involved in this, someone may decide he’s an excellent fall guy. And if he is involved somehow …”

She said, “Gotcha. Can I drop my bag off at your car first?” She flew down to the rental car over by the Hallen clinic, dropped her bag off, and oriented herself with the phone’s compass app. Then she headed cross-country to Steve’s house.

*               *               *

Riley looked over at Grover’s shape. The kid still looked cold and miserable. Riley thought out loud, “If the goop ate everyone in the clinic and went in search of more organics, where would it go?”

Grover said, “It didn’t go out the front after those teens, so maybe it went out the back. Organics means more than people.”

Riley nodded. That was pretty much what he was thinking. He checked that his Glock was secure in its holster. The Glock was useless against a few tons of flesh-eating cells, but he might need it if he had trouble with the local cops, or even a roving security team from the secret lab, which might be a heck of a lot more ruthless than the local cops. And he picked up a gallon of bleach from the clinic supplies, along with the CO2 fire extinguisher on the wall.

He made sure Grover had his pouch on hand, and he said, “I’m going hunting. If I call you, I’m probably going to need you to run out to the car and haul over to help out. You up to that?”

The electric blanket nodded. Grover said, “As long as nobody bothers to stop an empty car hauling down a road.”

Riley said, “As long as you can lose them for two seconds and stop the car where they can’t see all the car doors, they’ll assume the driver already bailed and ran. Give them time to clear the area, and take off again.”

Grover asked, “Does this mean you weren’t quite as wholesome as you look?”

Riley dryly said, “I went to high school with some guys who weren’t exactly Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy. They bragged a lot. They got caught more from bragging about what they did than from actually getting picked up at the scene of the crime.”

Grover said, “They sound even dumber than me.”

Riley just moved out the back door with his secret weapons. He was really figuring his secret weapon would be his long legs, because he was pretty sure tactical retreats were going to be the order of the day until somebody came up with something that had more stopping power than ‘the magic of Clorox’.

He gulped when he stepped out the back door. Something had dissolved a four-foot-wide path across the back lawn, eating the grass and flowers down to the dirt. He headed off, moving parallel to the dissolved plants, even though he was worried this was way outside his skillset. If the thing was lightning-resistant, like Grover thought, it might even be outside Terawatt’s skillset.

*               *               *

Alex was still two hundred feet in the air and half a block away from the house when she saw the guy sneaking out. Willow had sent her a school picture of Steve Andrews, and he looked pretty handsome in that, but he was totally rocking the whole bad boy look. Especially with the leather jacket. It wasn’t easy to give off that bad boy vibe when you were a blond, blue-eyed, gorgeous guy, but Steve was working it.

It was a good thing Riley sent her over, because Riley would never have gotten here in time. Okay, Riley would have figured out where Steve was headed and cut him off, because even Alex had a pretty good idea on that.

Steve did the whole sneaking around bit, and got that car, and drove off fast. Not that he was going to be going faster than Alex could go, when he was driving through a small town. And so he was at a nicer house in just a couple of minutes.

Alex waited a few hundred feet up for several minutes, and out came the beauty queen. Jane Martin. Alex had a feeling Jane was probably grounded and was doing the sneak thing, too. But if they were trying to save the town from a goop monster, Alex was totally supporting them. She waited until they got two blocks from Jane’s house before she dropped down in front of the oncoming convertible.

Steve slammed on the brakes, and when the car came to a halt, Alex swooped over it and dropped into the back seat. She didn’t actually sit on the back seat, because she sort of thought maybe it had been used for stuff she didn’t want to really touch.

She said in careful tones, “Steve Andrews and Jane Martin? I am Terawatt.”

Steve groaned. “What is it with these guys? I didn’t do anything wrong, and now I’ve got superheroes attacking me?”

Alex said, “Attacking you? Not hardly. I’m here to help you. The police may not want to believe your story, but I believe it.”

“You haven’t even heard it,” insisted Jane.

Alex said, “I haven’t heard you tell it, but I know your story.” She lied, “Rich Frank believed you, and he was concerned enough to file a threat report with the Department of Homeland Security. Your police force didn’t believe you, but they filed a report covering what you claimed, in case they could use it against you in a court of law later on.”

Steve cursed colorfully. Jane took his arm and complained, “Steve!”

Steve said, “And so what are we supposed to do now, superhero lady?”

“Terawatt. And what I want you to do first is to tell me what you were planning.”

Steve shrugged. “Okay. So first, we were going to call all our friends, or drive by and grab ’em, and warn ’em about this … blob. Then we send them off to warn their friends and relatives and all that. Then I was gonna park Jane someplace safe, and try to track it down and … I dunno. Maybe set fire to it.”

Alex said, “Good.” At their shocked expressions, she added, “But it may be protected from fire, and vulnerable to cold.”

Jane gasped, “You know that much about blob monsters?”

Alex said, “No, but I have studied science. And I have some top-notch scientists I trust to give me top-notch advice on problems like this one. When you’re up against threats like this, your brain is more important than your fists.”

*               *               *

Riley moved swiftly down the concrete back alley. He had lost the thing’s track, which was not good at all. He could even be about to walk right into a goop-shaped trap if he wasn’t careful. But he had already been too late to save what was probably two mechanics at a gas station, given the dropped tools and the uneaten soles off two pairs of shoes. He was walking behind a bar, and he decided he had better check that out. Alcohol counted as an organic chemical, and the place reeked of alcohol. If he could smell it, the thing almost certainly had.

He kicked open the back door and moved in expertly, wielding the fire extinguisher like it was a light machine gun. He carefully checked both sides of the doorway, and then checked overhead, too. Standard building entry protocols had to be modified when dealing with SRI problems. It was one of the things that had kept him and Graham and Gates and the colonel alive in Myrhorod.

He moved through the doorway in front of him and stepped into a dark, seedy bar that smelled of cigarettes and booze.

There was nobody there. Not even a bartender behind the bar. He could see several seats scooted back, or in some cases, tipped over. Bottles of alcohol on tables were tipped over or broken, and there was no sign of any alcohol left in the bottles or spilled on the floor. Cigarettes were gone from ashtrays, and the ashtrays were clean of ashes. Change was left on the tables, and a few other things people wouldn’t have left without, like reading glasses and false teeth and a cheap plastic handbag. The thing had cleaned out the bar.

He checked behind the bar, too. Open bottles of liquor had been knocked off the counter and were on the floor empty, but the sealed bottles were still on the shelves. If Grover was right, and it got bigger every time it ate someone, this was going to be brutal. Riley was not going to want to run into it in a blind alley.

He peeked out the front window of the bar, and the street looked normal. So he moved back to the alleyway and tried to pick up the thing’s trail.

And that was when he found the fenced area that was supposed to have a dozen horses for riding lessons. There was nothing left except the metal of stirrups and bridles and horseshoes. And some poor guy’s shotgun. Firing a shotgun at the thing probably wouldn’t do anything except put a blast of chemicals into the air that would make it come right at you.

If the thing had just eaten twelve horses and a bar full of drunks, how big was it now? He made a fast call to Terawatt, and then one to Grover, and then one to the colonel.

*               *               *

Alex hung up her Terawatt phone and asked Steve, “What’s close to the horses and the bar, that has lots of food for this thing?”

“Food?” Steve asked.

“Your dad’s grocery!” Jane squealed.

*               *               *

Riley was passing one of the back doors into what was probably a grocery, when he heard the scream. He shoved the door open with his shoulder and ran into the back area. He got there just in time to see a reddish mass bigger than a truck go for a janitor who was standing over a mop bucket and was frozen in terror. Riley was much too far away to get in between the guy and the goo. That cut down on his choices.

Riley dived across the floor to get into the position he wanted, and he pulled out his Glock. He waited for the right moment as he slid across the polished floor, and then he fired off two quick shots.

The janitor twitched like he had been shot. But neither round touched him. Both rounds seared between the man’s legs, punching holes in the front and back of the mop bucket. Water full of cleaning products poured out across the floor in both directions.

The bleach-laden water spurted forward and bumped into the hungry mass of the thing. It paused. It twitched. And it backed up, looking for another way to get to the chemical scents that were attracting it.

Riley jumped to his feet, grabbed his gallon bottle of bleach, and lobbed it over the janitor’s head. It hit the floor hard, splitting open along a seam down one side and pouring bleach all over the floor. The hillock of goo quickly retreated.

Riley stepped over the wet, slippery floor and grabbed the guy by the arm. “Get out of here! Get out into the street! Now!”

“Wha … Uh … I …” The guy was shaking in fear. Riley couldn’t blame him. That was one scary blob of goo.

Riley turned the guy to face the street and gave him a push. The guy staggered twice, and then ran for the front doors.

Riley looked around, in case the thing was trying to get at him from behind. But it was gone. He moved through the back of the store. Big bins of produce were completely empty. Shelves of cut meats had nothing on them except ripped plastic wrap and crushed styrofoam trays

It would be even bigger when he caught up to it again. He ran down the back corridor of the store until he found the right aisle, and then he moved.

*               *               *

Alex was flying above Steve’s car, so she heard the gunshots more clearly than he did. She darted forward to nearly run into a frantic janitor who was babbling about a giant monster trying to eat him and some crazy guy shooting at it until it ran away.

She knew the only guy who was likely to be doing that in Downingtown right now.

She pushed open the swinging doors with her telekinesis and flew into the store. She moved up to the ceiling so she could see down most of the aisles. And there was Riley, safe and sound, and dumping stuff into a shopping cart.

Ooh, that was smart.

He looked up at her and yelled out, “It went out the back! I lost it!”

She nodded and flew into the back area. She stayed up high so she wouldn’t get caught by surprise by tons of hungry goo. Those spiders had been bad enough.

There was no sign of anything dangerous, just clear signs that something hungry had eaten everything edible it could get at back here.

She flew out one of the back doors and looked around. There was an ordinary loading dock with gravel for a parking area. She moved farther out, looking for the thing. But it was nowhere in sight. Not good.

She clicked her earjack. “Tera to Finn. No sign out back. I’m going up to search over a wider area.”

“Finn to Tera. Look for anything with a lot of organics. Another grocery. A herd of cattle. A fruit tree. A meeting of people.”

Suddenly there was a deafening noise, as the town air-raid alarm went off, and then the town fire alarm quickly followed.

Riley sighed into his earjack. “Just like that’s going to be.”

“Oh, crud.” And there was no way anyone was going to believe Steve Andrews that there was a giant blobby thing running around eating anyone and anything it could catch … until it swooped down and ate everyone standing in the street.

 
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