Contaminated, was all he could think. The sample infected her.
Harry finally tugged them both to the wall phone, but in his panic he couldn’t dial, or even speak. To his left he spotted the fire alarm.
He leaned across and punched the huge, red button on the wall, and then turned to lean against it as the klaxon horn sounded and a red light began to spin slowly over his head. Sarah was still hanging on to his arm, but had slid to the ground. He looked down at her and saw her body looked strangely misshapen.
Harry was now hyperventilating, but froze in confusion when he saw a long smear of greenish-brown emanating from the legs of her suit as though she was leaking something. He knew that in death, and even in extreme trauma, the bowels and bladder can void, but this stuff looked horrifyingly like the material that had been sent to them in the sample Sarah had been investigating. What had Sarah told him? That it was converting matter.
Looking back at her, he couldn’t see her face anymore. It was as if her head had retreated into her suit.
His arm was numb from her grip before, but now it stung like fire. He looked down and saw that Sarah’s fingers had somehow penetrated the thick rubberized polymer material of his suit sleeve. She had managed to rip open the tough fabric and worm her fingers inside to be against his flesh.
“God no, no, no.” His head throbbed and he began to taste something unpleasant at the back of his throat that was obviously welling up from his stomach.
He turned. “Hurry-yyyyyyy!” His scream was futile but all he had left.
Harry began to weep as he watched what was once his friend and coworker’s suit writhe and palpitate on the floor as though there were small animals fighting within it. The revolting wriggling moved up her arm toward his.
“Stardust,” he whispered, and started to cry.
“Jesus!” Chief science officer Jim Teacher jumped about a foot out of his seat as the klaxon horn sounded.
“Fire drill… now?” he asked his empty office. He grabbed at his phone, calling through to security. He sniffed, not smelling smoke. There’d still be an evacuation, he bet.
Security came back to him quickly.
“Where is it?” Jim asked.
“Alarm initiation point is lab-45, sir.” Jim overheard them conducting a background discussion for a few moments before they came back on the line. “Doesn’t seem to be any thermal warnings, so maybe it’s chemical spill. We’re still calling an evacuation to be safe and heading down now. The fire department has been notified.”
“Okay, I’m on my way.” Jim hung up. Lab-45 — that was where Harry and Sarah were working. He headed for the door.
Under the relentless, blaring alarms, people were filing out to their designated assembly areas, and Jim worked his way back through the tide of people. Lab-45 was an underground unit and in a module separated by several hundred yards of white corridor — good for security and for fighting fires, but bad if you needed to get to it in a hurry.
Jim sprinted now, the horn obliterating all other background noises. He shouldered open the double white doors to the laboratory complex and entered the outer offices. It was now deserted and he slowed to a jog as he counted down the labs getting to 45. Finding it, he entered the outer control room and walked toward the large double-layered, toughened glass of the window. Jim stepped up close.
There was smoke but no fire, nor was there any sign of Harry or Sarah. The once pristine and sterile white room was putrid. He stepped closer and squinted. What he had assumed was smoke seemed to be some sort of speckled, particulate gas, heavier near the floor.
Jim grimaced; revoltingly, there did look to have been some sort of explosion within the hermetically sealed room. The floor and walls were lumped with a greenish-brown matter, and there were even strands of it hanging from the ceiling. He quickly checked a live CCTV feed from the airlock between the rooms and finding that also empty, he pressed the intercom.
“Harry? Sarah?”
He frowned, trying to see around the streaks running down the window and let his eyes run over the room’s interior. He pressed the open mic again.
“Harry, where the hell are you, buddy?”
He pressed himself up closer to the window spotting something. “There you are.”
On the floor in the corner, there were two tangled hazardous material suits but strangely deflated looking. They took ’em off? Why?
Jim moved along the edge of the window, trying to see into every nook and cranny. There was really nowhere for anyone to hide, unless they had forced themselves into one of the small cabinets, which would be impossible for someone like Harry, who was stick-thin but six-three.
Both the inner and outer airlock doors were still sealed, and he damn well didn’t pass them on the way down here. He turned as two security guards entered carrying fire extinguishers.
“Stay back.” He held a hand up in their faces.
“Chem-spill?” One asked and looked past Jim. His lips curled. “Jesus, it’s a freaking mess in there. Is everyone out?”
“I… don’t know.” Jim continued to stare in at the suits, and as he watched, the larger of the two, wriggled slightly.
“Wait.” Jim stared.
The suit’s arm began to move. His brows drew together just as something that looked like a mouse-sized blob of green-brown mud squeezed out. It left the end of the sleeve and continued to slide across the white floor until it came to another mound of the same material, where it promptly merged with it. The larger mass quivered momentarily.
“Oh god, Harry.” Jim’s mouth hung open.
“Harry McManus and Sarah Mantudo.” One of the security guards checked a digital pad. “According to this, they’re still on the base. They must have got past us.”
“No, no they didn’t,” Jim said and put a hand over his mouth feeling his gorge rise. “They never left the room ‒ they’re still in there.”
“What? Where?” The guard turned and squinted.
Jim pointed. “I think, there.”
“That… shit? What the fuck happened to them?”
“Maybe contamination, or some sort of infection.” It was crazy, but Jim knew it was true even as he said it. It was something NASA had war-gamed for decades.
The security man looked disgusted. His face then became smooth. “Protocols, sir.”
Jim took a step back. The room was a fully sealed germ and fungal containment unit. It didn’t have all the modern facilities from the private sector, but there was one thing they didn’t scrimp on.
“I’m recommending immediate sterilization, sir.” The guard’s voice became hard.
“I… I was…” Jim shook his head to clear it. “Yes.” He crossed to a heavy box on the wall, keyed in a code and waited for it to pop open. Inside there was a small pad with a tiny green light and a single button clearly marked: Lab-45 Room Sterilization.
“Goodbye, my friends,” he whispered. He didn’t hesitate and pressed the button.
The room was flooded with gas, momentarily clouding his vision, and then it was ignited. Everything turned a brilliant red, as in seconds temperatures in the room blasted to 1,600 degrees.
“What — the fuck — was that?” the guard said softly, his face shining red from the glow of the window.
Jim turned back, feeling the heat right through the toughened glass. “I don’t know,” Jim said and sat down before he fell down. “But everything that occurred in that lab would have been recorded. So, we goddamn better find out fast.”