Free The Containment Team by Dan Decker Page B

campus as if he was going to walk the whole way to the lab. It would take us twenty minutes to get that far and I didn’t think the blutom would last that long. Not to mention the possibility that there might be others about. Pete had never given me a straight answer about the number of monsters that had chased him out of the lab.
    “I can drive,” I called out, waving for Pete to come back.
    Out of habit, I moved to open the door for Madelyn until I realized what I was doing and walked around towards the trunk of my car. Once my backpack was inside, I slammed it shut and saw that Madelyn was watching me closely. 
    I could tell by the way she flashed that cursed impish grin of hers that I hadn’t fooled her in the slightest. Her smile was infuriating. I didn’t say anything as I got in the car and started the engine. When we were all inside, I took off, careful to keep from going too fast. I was anxious to get that blutom out of my car and back to the lab but we didn’t need to be pulled over for speeding. The last thing we needed was a cop interrogating us about the weird looking stuff in the box.
    “How close is it to escaping?” I asked. “Or moving to a higher level?”
    “We might make it,” Pete said.
    I cleared my throat, knowing that Pete was likely going to stonewall me but also knowing that I was liable to beat him if he didn’t finally start to give us answers.
    “You didn’t seem as surprised as you should have been to see that blutom was loose in Times Square. Care to tell us what’s going on?”
    Through my rearview mirror, I saw Pete lick his lips. When he didn’t answer I continued to push.
    “Why was the government spending all this time and money researching blutom? Is there a practical application for the stuff?”
    Pete still didn’t answer and was looking more uncomfortable by the minute.
    Madelyn looked back at Pete. “Is there a military application?”
    She asked what I’d been thinking. I hadn’t wanted to come out and accuse Pete of it but even in the dark car and could see the look of guilt on his face.
    It was all I needed.
    “Sheesh, man!” I said. “What are you hoping to accomplish by militarizing the stuff? Has a terrorist gotten hold of the blutom or is this attack in Times Square the government using New York City as a Petri dish?”
    “It’s not what you think. After rats are taken over by the blutom, they develop useful attributes. Increased strength, intelligence, ability to move faster, that sort of thing. We were trying to find a way to isolate what caused the increase so that we could use it to enhance human abilities.”
    “What were you going to do?” I asked. “Reanimate the dead or ask for volunteers to commit suicide?
    “Do you realized how insane this all sounds?” Madelyn spoke at the same time as me. “You were going to kill people to see if you could somehow harness the powers these monsters have when they come back from the dead.”
    Pete gritted his teeth. “We were hoping to find a way to isolate what the blutom was doing without killing the host. The trials were in their infancy. This wasn’t something we were hoping to accomplish in a year or even in five years.” 
    “This is all interesting,” I said, a pit forming in my stomach as I thought about New York. The monsters that I’d seen so far hadn’t demonstrated any increased intelligence, it had been just the opposite. “We’ll have to save all this for later. We need to know what we’re facing tonight. How does their intelligence increase, Slammer? What happens to the rats that have time to let the blutom settle in?”
    “They have the ability to think at a human level.”
    “They become self-aware?” I gripped the steering wheel. “Things aren’t adding up, what aren’t you telling us? Other than a relentless ability to stop coming, those monsters are as dumb as a doorknob.”
    “That’s a temporary condition, eventually, they come out of their cocoon.”
    “I can’t