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Chapter 62 – The VomAlex swiftly reversed direction and headed back to the main street in front of the grocery store.
She got there in time to hear half a dozen angry grownups shouting Steve down and insisting he was lying or crazy. Okay, that was what anybody ought to be saying normally, just not right now.
She put her arms out in front of her and ran a big lightning bolt between them as she flew down to the big argument in the street. In her best Terawatt tones, she announced, “Ladies and gentlemen! I am Terawatt! And I am here because there really is a threat to everyone in this town! You have had a secret chemical weapons lab under your town for three or four years now, and this thing has escaped from it!” She pointed at Steve. “That man saw it eat your Doctor Hallen.” She pointed at the janitor. “That man just narrowly avoided being eaten alive just moments ago. It is in this area, and will be looking for groups of people, piles of food, stores of meat or vegetation, or even —”
There were suddenly a couple dozen screams from behind her. She whirled about in mid-air to see tons of panicking people running out of the doors of the movie theater.
“It’s a monster!”
“It’s eating everyone!”
“It got Jerry!”
And right behind them came the thing. It looked like tons and tons of hungry red goo that would eat everything in sight. She shuddered inwardly, because it was pretty horrible. But she was supposed to be the superhero here, so she couldn’t act afraid.
She swooped down another twenty feet and fired off a massive lightning bolt into the front of the thing. It slowed down, but it didn’t stop. The large, burned area on its front was just absorbed by the rest of it as it rolled forward more slowly.
Just as she was going to unleash another big blast at it, a little kid ran right in front of the thing with a pair of toy guns. He ‘shot’ at the thing, yelling, “Kapow! Kapow!” Crud!
Jane screamed, “Danny!”
The blob went right for the kid.
Riley came sprinting in from her left, going right at the blob.
Steve came sprinting in from her right, going right at the kid.
She realized what Riley was holding, so she gave it all she had and heaved on the kid with her telekinesis.
Riley hurled two big bottles of bleach right at the asphalt directly in front of the thing.
The kid was way under a hundred pounds, so he was lifted into the air and backward, just out of the reach of the blob as it rolled forward to eat him.
Steve snatched the kid out of the air and ran for it.
She hit the thing with another massive blast of lightning, just as it hit the bleach. The front couple yards of the thing shuddered, and it retreated. She figured that was probably more from the bleach than from the lightning.
Riley pulled up a big CO2 fire extinguisher and blasted it. The thing recoiled from that, too. He yelled at the crowd, “Bleach! Bleach and cold! Get all the CO2 fire extinguishers and dry ice and bleach you can find!”
Steve handed the kid to a middle-aged man, who hugged the kid hard. Steve insisted to the guy, “The CO2 fire extinguishers at the school! We’ve got to get ’em!”
Riley yelled, “Steve! With me!” He ran a hundred feet back to where he had left a shopping cart, which he had filled with gallons of bleach and CO2 extinguishers and what Alex guessed might be about forty pounds of dry ice in brown paper wrappings.
Steve came running over, even though he was putting himself in real danger by getting so much closer to the monster. He grabbed a gallon of bleach that Riley tossed to him, and began pouring it in an arc in front of the thing and around to his right. Riley had two one-gallon bottles, and he started pouring them out in a matching arc on the left side.
Alex used her telekinesis to yank two more bottles of the bleach out of the shopping cart, and pour it all in the doorway of the movie theater, so the thing couldn’t retreat inside the building. Well, she hoped it wouldn’t. Then she pulled up two more bottles and began pouring bleach on the top of the thing.
Riley lobbed the dry ice onto the top of the goo, and Alex used her telekinesis to press the dry ice against the mass and keep it from falling off to the sides. Each piece of dry ice looked like it was freezing an area of goo about two inches bigger than the dry ice chunk. That meant they needed a heck of a lot more dry ice, or something incredibly cold. Because she didn’t think anybody was going to drive up with ten thousand pounds of dry ice in the nick of time.
The thing rolled to one side against the bleach, then rolled to the other, then tried going forward. It really hated the bleach, but it was getting pretty crazed. She figured it was only a matter of time before it just gritted its non-teeth and rolled across some of the bleach to make an escape. And there were still a ton of people standing around watching instead of running away like sane folks.
She yelled, “Please clear the street! Get as far away from this as you can! Go to your homes and get bleach and dry ice and ice cubes and CO2 fire extinguishers! Now!”
The blob tried to roll backward into the theater, so she darted behind it and started blasting at it with lightning bolts. Every bolt burned an area of the outside of it, but if Grover was right, it would just eat those damaged cells and come back for more. Still, if it kept losing some of its own mass every time, then she might be able to wear it down. In like a hundred hours. Maybe.
An empty truck came rushing down the street, honking its horn as it came. Riley just waved it forward.
The driver’s door popped open and Grover’s voice yelled, “I found the tanks of compressed gas!”
Alex zoomed over and found half a dozen big tanks of pressurized gases. Nitrogen, oxygen, a rolling cart that had oxygen and acetylene hooked up to a wicked-looking … Oh. It was an oxy-acetylene torch! She’d seen those in movies.
And wasn’t liquid oxygen supposed to be really dangerous?
She said, “Be careful with that stuff. How’d you get it onto a truck?”
Grover said, “All this stuff was on the safe level, in the workrooms. They had a small forklift thing to move heavy stuff around, and it fits in the elevator.”
She stood on the ground so she could use all her telekinesis, and she lifted each of the tanks out, one by one. She said, “Maybe it doesn’t mind heat, but I bet it wouldn’t like that torch.”
Grover said with what was probably a grin, “That’s what I was figuring.”
She said, “Okay, Riley and Steve are holding it in place with bleach. I’ll try to freeze it on the far side with the nitrogen. You try to burn it up on this side with the acetylene torch. We’ll see who has better luck. And try not to get eaten. It’s pretty fast when it wants to be.”
“So’s Riley,” Grover said.
The tank was too heavy for her to fly around and lift it, too, so she lifted it into the air and ran alongside it to the far side of the goo monster. Riley and Steve were doing a pretty good job of whipsawing it: Steve was in front of it and Riley was behind it, and anytime it tried to get away, the one it moved at would throw more bleach on it to make it back up. But it was still the size of an eighteen-wheeler, and sooner or later, if they did enough damage to it, it would have to try to get away.
She stood as close to the thing as she dared. She floated the tank of nitrogen even closer. And she used her telekinesis to open the valve. Nitrogen under huge pressure jetted out and instantly got freezing cold as it expanded. A wave of cold hit the blob, turning an area the size of a windshield into ice. The blob shuddered, so she started moving the tank around, freezing the entire side of the thing.
It hated the cold, but it didn’t like what was happening on its other sides either, so it couldn’t figure out how to get away.
“Clear to Tera. Acetylene torch is roasting it, but I’m only blackening a couple square yards a minute, and the burned part is only a couple inches deep. It keeps ingesting the burned areas and putting fresh surface area up. At this rate, it’ll take a month to burn all of it.”
“Tera to Clear. Good job. I’ve got an area about five by eight frozen solid, and I’m widening it. But that’s just the outer surface. And I’m going to run out of nitrogen before long.”
“Finn to team. What do we have?”
“Clear to Finn. Two tanks N2. One tank O2. One oxy-acetylene torch rig. One tank CO2. One tank He.”
“Finn to Tera. Use both nitrogen tanks, then the helium, then the CO2. Do not use the oxygen unless we have to, because it could be an explosive hazard, and the last thing we want is to blow this thing into a thousand smaller blobs of goo all over the town.”
Steve angrily yelled, “Are you guys on the phone, or are you fighting a giant glob of red snot?”
Riley yelled back, “We have a communication system so we can work together and not accidentally make things worse.”
Steve complained, “What the hell could be worse than this?”
Riley answered, “How about … the four of us getting killed in a big explosion that flings a thousand handfuls of this thing all over your town?”
Steve paused and then muttered, “Okay. Fine. I just feel stupid fighting a giant man-eating monster with something out of the cleaning products aisle.”
The fire department came roaring in, and Alex let Riley direct the firemen who had big CO2 blasters. Alex lifted the nitrogen tank and went to work freezing the top side of the thing, while the firemen blasted it on the front and back, and Grover tried to turn it into roast beast on his side.
Riley ran over to the truck and came back with the helium tank balanced on one shoulder. Man, was he strong. And tough. That had to be painful. Alex kept an eye on the nitrogen tank, while she watched him spray freezing cold helium all around the base of the thing, freezing it to the street. Then her nitrogen tank ran out, so she had to go fetch the second tank.
Boy, it would’ve been way more convenient if these tanks had been liquid nitrogen and liquid helium and stuff.
By the time the town started arriving with everyone’s CO2 fire extinguishers and dry ice and ice cubes and everything, the thing was nearly trapped. Alex flew around it, finding all the not-frozen-yet areas that needed attention before it started oozing out through those spots.
* * *
A half hour later, they had used up all the CO2 fire extinguishers, and all the tanks except the oxygen tank and the acetylene torch, which Grover had wheeled back to the truck. But Alex was pretty sure they only had a thin shell frozen over the thing, and that blob had tons of warm matter to thaw all the frozen parts. Plus, it was summer.
“Steve! Gimme a hand here!”
Alex looked over at a man driving a truck and hauling what looked like most of a walk-in freezer behind it.
Steve asked, “Dad? What are you doing? You need that for the store.”
Mr. Andrews said, “I figure the town needs it a heck of a lot more right now. And if you can do this, so can I.”
Riley went into ‘Major Finn’ mode. “Thank you, sir. Major Riley Finn, Department of Homeland Security. We appreciate your assistance, and I’ll personally see about getting you proper restitution for this.”
Mr. Andrews said, “Aw, hell, I was gonna have to replace it in a few years, anyway.”
So Riley and Steve manhandled the refrigerator coils to press against the sides of the thing, while Alex used her telekinesis to hook pieces together and hook up the power to the refrigeration systems. In no time, the coils were humming and making the monster that much colder.
Steve asked, “What the hell are we gonna do with this thing? Dump it in Antarctica?”
Riley said, “If we can freeze it solid, we can haul it out of here and slice off individual pieces to be incinerated in a special high-temp biochemical incinerator. I’d rather not leave it around somewhere it might get loose someday. Or where the madmen who created it might try to recover it someday. Or something even worse.”
Steve complained, “And that’s another thing! Where the hell did this thing come from?”
Alex figured it was time to stick her nose in. “Excuse me, Steve, but the answer to that is not something this town will like. Four years ago, when your town was in financial trouble, a rich consortium offered to help them out in exchange for letting them build a secret underground lab.”
Mr. Andrews angrily said, “What the hell! You mean that thing under the new strip mall isn’t a fancy experimental sewage processing plant?”
A sewage processing plant? Wow, that might even make sense to have underground and stuff. It suddenly occurred to her that the city councilmen involved in this might have been conned instead of getting paid off.
“No, sir,” Alex said. “Your town leaders may have been tricked, but it is a chemical weapons lab. An illegal one that your government knew nothing about. Until Major Finn uncovered it earlier today.”
And before Riley could start blushing and stuff, a helicopter dropped in and landed in the parking lot over by the old diner. Colonel O’Neill clambered out, ducking low to avoid as much of the downdraft as he could. He had Professor Lee with him, and a big, heavy-set, bald guy who had big stars on his shoulders so Alex was pretty sure he was a two-star general.
Alex flew over to them and made sure she had her voice right. “Colonel O’Neill, Professor Lee, General … The threat is temporarily under control, but it’s still not safe. And we’re going to need some technical expertise to get it out of here, because its underside is probably not frozen, and it’s a threat to anything organic it can touch. Although it doesn’t seem to like pressure-treated wood.”
The general said in a deep Texas drawl, “Terawatt? It’s a pleasure to meet you. General George S. Hammond. I take it you’ve already had to put up with Colonel O’Neill some.”
Jack insisted, “I’ve been as charming as ever, sir.”
The general suppressed a small smile and said, “That’s pretty much what I’m afraid of, colonel.”
Alex managed not to snicker. She kept her Terawatt voice and said, “The colonel’s been extremely helpful, and I owe him several favors as a result.”
Jack replied, “And we owe her a ton of favors, starting with tipping us off that Maggie Walsh was so far away from playing with a full deck that she couldn’t even manage a game of euchre.”
Alex said, “And this may be another Maggie Walsh crisis. I have no idea why anyone would think creating a giant blob of living cells that eats anything it touches could be a good idea, but then she was responsible for the gene splicing at the Desert Research Institute, and she may have been the primary scientific know-how behind Project Galinka.”
The general studied the huge frozen blob with the refrigeration coils strapped around it. “And to think I skipped retirement for messes like this …”
Jack looked up at her and asked, “What do we need to do next?”
She said, “Major Finn has it all under control now, colonel. But there’s another one of these things loose in the underground lab complex, and it apparently ate most of the researchers, too. The DHS needs to kill that thing and investigate that entire complex and find out who’s behind this, because this is almost as disturbing as Project Galinka.”
Jack said, “Thanks, Tera. I’ve got a jet waiting for you at McGuire. Acid Burn has the coordinates, so she can vector you to it, and I warned security there to take good care of you.”
She said, “I appreciate the jet, colonel.” And she took off toward Riley’s car, back near the lab.
As she headed out, she heard Jack say, “So general, let me introduce you to …”
She called Willow as she went and got Acid Burn to hack into the rental car’s systems to unlock the car for her. Once she grabbed her bag and went silvery with it, she flew up to about a thousand feet over the town and called Willow back. “Acid Burn, this is Terawatt again.”
Willow’s AutoTuned voice bubbled worriedly, “Are you okay? Did you get everything? It sounded really, really awful, I mean, giant spider level awful, and did your lightning even stop it? And was it Maggie Walsh? Grover sent me a message he got a hard drive out, so maybe we can find some stuff, but this sounds really, really bad.”
Alex said, “If we hadn’t been searching for Maggie Walsh around here, this would have been a lot worse. I think we got here about three hours too late, but if we’d gotten here three hours from now, the thing would’ve eaten the entire town and it would be three times as big and it would be hunting down the next town to eat.”
Willow said, “Eww. Well, it looks from the non-connecting cell phone calls I’m reading like a lot of people may be missing. Let me get you pointed at McGuire AFB first, and we can talk while you zoom.”
It only took about half an hour at her top speed to get close enough that she could spot the air force base, and then she used Willow’s GPS direction system to lead her right to a brand new Cessna Citation X. This one was even shinier than the one Jack usually used. And when she flew into it, everything looked like it had never been used before. The carpet looked like no one had ever walked on it, and there definitely wasn’t a stain anywhere on it. She wasn’t even sure she ought to step on the carpet or sit in the seats. And this one was different, because it had eight seats instead of six, which probably meant it had a lot less storage area.
The pilot this time was the co-pilot from most of the jaunts she had done with Jack, so she figured the guy was getting a promotion or whatever they called it. He greeted her with a smile, and they took off in the usual ‘Jack wants this done in a hurry’ way.
It took about three hours to fly home, and she spent a lot of that doing the stuff Jack would ask her to do anyway. Willow had designed partially filled-out forms for the SRI auxiliary personnel documents that Jack needed Alex to fill out every time, and with most of the things like codename already filled out — all the stuff like real name and address and things like that were marked with N/A — it was pretty easy to do. Willow’s software even filled in the current day and date and time and GPS coordinates, so about all Alex had to do was get the software started before the Cessna took off, and fill in the other stuff that was specific to the op: why she got involved, why the SRI needed her specific skills this time, and what she did for the SRI during the op. Then she wrote out a full situation report, using a little ‘sitrep guide’ app that Willow had probably written just for her. Okay, it was usually hard to write about what she did without sounding all weird and showoff-y, because every sentence for a while was like ‘I blasted the twenty-ton blob monster with lightning’ and ‘I froze the giant goo monster with freezing-cold nitrogen’ and like that.
She wondered what Riley’s report was going to look like, because he had been out hunting a giant unkillable blob with a gallon of Clorox and a fire extinguisher. That had to sound either really brave or totally crazy.
Then she spent over an hour reading a bunch of documents Willow had downloaded on the risks of explosives, and handling explosives without blowing your arms off, and how understanding about shockwaves was important in demolitions, and like that. And she sent Jack an email talking about what she’d read, and how using telekinesis to put blasting caps in high explosives from thirty feet away had to be safer than doing it with your fingers. She hoped that would be enough and he wouldn’t make her read a ton more of the same kind of stuff, because after a while the files were all saying the same thing and it was getting sort of boring.
* * *
It was only about seven thirty West Coast time when she jumped out of the Cessna about ten miles east of Camp Atron. How could she fly to the other side of the country, fight an unstoppable monster, spend who knew how long freezing it, fly home, and it’s not even eight at night yet? It just seemed so weird.
And she was starving. Okay, she had already eaten nine of her protein bars on the flight home, plus three sandwiches and two Diet Cokes that were in a refrigerator in the little kitchen alcove. But she had burned up a lot of calories. She was really hoping her mom had something excellent for dinner.
As she closed in on Paradise Valley, she popped her tPhone out of her morph and called home. “Terawatt here.”
“Honey? Are you okay?” her mom worried. “There was news footage of you and that Army officer, fighting that thing on the evening news. They called it ‘The Man-eating Blob’.”
Alex said, “Well, it’s a good thing I’m not a man.”
“That’s not funny! We were worried!” her mom fussed. “Maria McClellan said the death toll might be near a hundred by the time the police are done investigating.”
She admitted, “It might be more than that. We think another blob ate a whole secret lab full of scientists.”
Her mom didn’t say anything for long seconds, until she finally sighed, “It scares me that you fight these things, but I guess things would be so much worse if you weren’t out there saving the day.”
“Me and the SRI. Major Finn did the hard work, and he wouldn’t have been able to fly away if the blob decided to eat him.”
Her mom said, “Well, I’ll bet you’re starving.”
“Yep!”
“Then you’ll be happy to hear we’ve got three quarts of your father’s latest curry recipe, and lots of rice, and I made a special Asian salad to go with it.”
Interlude XIThe newest page just posted on Terawatt’s main website by the site webmaster, terafan1:
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“How do I become a hero?”
~ link4evr [first person to ask me on Twitter]
~ qwertyqwirk [first person to ask me in the forums here]
~ JuneJone95 [first person to ask me on Facebook]
———
More than one person has asked me this, and I think this is a really great question. You do not need superpowers to be a hero. There are everyday heroes all around us, and they do NOT get enough attention in the press, or from everyone else. All you need is the morals and the strength to ask the question you already posed.
You can be a hero today. Volunteer at a soup kitchen. Volunteer at your church, if you go to one. Help a neighbor. Join a group that does good works: there are dozens in your hometown, and you only need to ask around. Do you love sports? Well, every local sports group for kids needs organizers, referees, and other volunteers. Or talk to Habitat for Humanity and find a local project you can help on. If you go on the internet, you can find dozens of groups around your town that can use your help.
You can be a hero in the future. Plan so that you can help others. Organize for others. Is there going to be a canned food drive in your town this fall? They need organizers and planners and helpers, even before the food drive starts. Plan to collect for charity at Halloween instead of gathering candy — or along with gathering candy, because I still like candy, too.
You can be a professional hero. Do you want to care for others or help others? People need caregivers and nurses and doctors and pharmacists and everyone else who works at clinics and hospitals and nursing homes. Then there are the Peace Corps and Doctors Without Borders and a dozen other international groups. Do you want to protect others? Your local police department and fire department need more people. Then there’s the National Guard, the Coast Guard, the Army, the Navy, the Marines, and the Air Force. That’s just a short list.
There are lots more options. Think outside the box! Investigative reporters help people. Responsible businessmen help people. Just being a really great boss can help the people who work for you.
People don’t have an everyday need for what I do. People DO have a need every day for the things YOU can do.
– Terawatt