The biohazard alarm was most inconvenient for Jeremy. He’d just finished mopping the level 4 hall.
Oh, the day had begun well enough. He’d found he had a forgotten box of Cap’n Crunch stored away that wasn’t too stale; the bus ride was quiet and serene; the security guard was brisk and efficient, and above all else, professional about the cavity search; and to cap it off, that one nice-looking researcher had smiled and waved at him as he started his morning rounds. Too good to last, it had been.
“PROCEED IMMEDIATELY TO THE NEAREST EXIT,” blared an alarming and terse voice over every intercom in the complex. “THIS IS NOT A DRILL. CONTAINMENT BREACH ON LEVEL 4. PROCEED IMMEDIATELY TO THE NEAREST EXIT. THIS IS NOT A DRILL” and so on and so forth, an endless nagging loop ordering you to get going and get your precious organs out before some horrible mix-a-match mutant from belowdecks took a fancy to them on its impromptu holiday.
Third time this week, too.
Jeremy stared at his mop, still damp and virginal, ready to plunge to the next set of unclean floors and purify them with love and a hint of bleach. He looked to the pristine, freshly-filled mop bucket, filled with heady and lethal vapours. And he looked down the hall to the huge reinforced safety door that was even now being dented by hideously strong blows – the steel door he had lovingly and carefully polished not five minutes ago – and something happened inside his head. Nothing snapped, not exactly. It was more like the gentle parting of clouds that lets the sunshine in.
It took two minutes for the misshapen thing that had probably once been some sort of test animal (a dog? A monkey?) to break apart the door and shoulder its way into the hallway. It blinked its bleary eyes in the red glare of the emergency lights, took one stumbling, snarling stride forwards, and then slid in four directions at once on the hastily-mopped floor. It tried to catch itself, but only succeeded with one of its seven legs. The sound of its jaw – and mandibles – hitting the floor was drowned out by the alarm, but the momentary pause between assurances of not-a-drill was just long enough for the sound of Jeremy’s mop handle crunching its skull to ring strangely loud. Especially to Jeremy.
So he stood there – astride his kill, beast vanquished, dragon slain – with his mop in hand. And he looked into that darkened corridor the thing had come from, with its lights cracked and broken, its floor tiles torn up by the read of warped and clubbed feet, its walls coated in unpleasant bodily fluids, and he spoke his first words of the day that were not idle greeting murmurs.
“I’m going to need a bit more,” said Jeremy.
So Jeremy’s first stop was his supply closet. He did some things while he was there, with some of his cleaners and his bleaches; stuff that he needed to wear his heavy-duty gas mask for, the one he used when he was cleaning out testing pens. He also found a new and helpful use for that enormous old leaf blower he’d only pulled out of storage twice (the thing was so huge it had to be back-mounted, for goodness’ sakes). And he very, very, very carefully sharpened his mop’s hilt, which didn’t really work. So he stuck its tip inside the garbage disposal and made do with the resulting jagged metal, at the expense of some really appalling noises.
The whole affair took maybe twenty minutes. By the time Jeremy got back to the door, shuffling in his full hazard suit, there were three other things hanging around it, chewing on their brother’s bits and pieces in an idle sort of way. He wondered if they were the same species, but it was a bit difficult to tell. The eye was drawn inexorably to the teeth and claws – such an awful lot of both – whenever it tried to focus on fine detail.
Jeremy looked at his mop-spear. The things looked at Jeremy. Jeremy looked at the things. The things looked at his mop-spear. Then they casually stood up from where they crouched and began a slow, lurching swagger towards him, spreading out to all sides.
Jeremy dropped his mop and pulled out his leaf blower. The clanging ring of metal on tile brought on a quick, involuntary flinch, a little enough thing, but still there. And that was just enough time for Jeremy to flip the switch and set his blower running, belching out the vaporous results of his combination of bleach and ammonia right into their faces.
Results were promising, since apparently several of the openings on their faces were nostrils. They went down choking and screeching, one so rapidly that it might’ve had two windpipes.
Shoving the bodies into the nearest closet took time, as well as the use of many muscles Jeremy didn’t really possess. When it was through he stretched his back, sighed, walked over to still-waiting mop bucket, and began to clean the floors again. He had a schedule, a routine, a properly laid-out neat-and-tidy formula for his day. And he’d had it interrupted too many times for him to once again quietly shuffle away and wait for the black helicopters to come in and set fire to whoever’s lunchbreak project had eaten a laboratory this time. No, he was going to clean this place properly now, no cowardly, lazy backing out because of a little light fallout or chemical spill or mutagen. And if he did it right he could handle it without any jackboots scuffing up the floors.
Into the dark of Level 4 he walked, mop swirling and back bent.
Some half hour later, Jeremy was starting to consider that his determination might have been misplaced. He’d gone through five more of the things, half his supply of chlorinated gas, and, when he’d turned around to dunk the mop and met the gaze of the fifth beast from six feet away, very nearly his underwear. And he’d only just reached the inner high-security labs, where the big multi-ton titanium door had been torn into nigh-indestructible shreds and dumped about like confetti.
It was very annoying to sweep up.
But now he was past that and moving on and in, further towards the cream of the intellectual crop’s ahead-of-the-curve-and-on-the-ball projects, most of which gently rolled over the cusp of sanity and into somewhere a lot more interesting.
Usually, when Jeremy mopped here, he did it quickly because the security guards – specially trained men and women in complex and sophisticated headgear with extremely small and silvery guns – got suspicious if you lingered, and they weren’t as gentle with their cavity searches as the man out front. He cleaned fast and hard, as perfectly as possible lest he be accused of inefficiency and shot in the foot. But now, he had time. Now, he had a reason to linger and keep an eye out. And now he could see firsthand what all those complicated labs were housing.
Lab 01 was currently being used for “Tyrannosaur Reproduction and Reconstruction,” according to the scotch-taped sheet of paper on the door.
Lab 02, proclaimed a small and official placard on the wall next to it, was dedicated to “Sentient Woodland Development.” Someone had slapped a small sticker depicting a marijuana leaf to it, which Jeremy dutifully removed.
Lab 03 had seventeen separate warning signs surrounding its doorway, all in extremely bright colours and with large, all-caps lettering. Jeremy mopped by it quickly.
Lab 04 had no sign, but its door was four times more reinforced than any of the others and was secured by eight different locking mechanisms, at least three of which didn’t use any alphabet Jeremy could recognize.
It was at this point that he dropped in the nearby restroom to change the water in his mop bucket. Normally he would balk at shoving the water straight down a public restroom’s toilet, but he was in a bit of a hurry. Something growled at him from inside the last stall and he filled the entire place with gas before leaving to a backdrop of thunderous-yet-dwindling coughing.
Something was different. It took him past labs 05-07 (Retroactive Human Cloning, Asymmetrical Vertebrate Theory, and Bioexplosive Products) to realize exactly what that was: there were no sounds anymore. All that made noise was the very, very familiar swish, splash, thud, and slap of his mop at work.
No sirens.
No distant crashes and thuds (which had mostly stayed distant, thankfully).
No returning gunfire.
The last one worried him the most. Maybe the men in the black helicopters had been on a coffee break when the sirens went. Maybe they’d be there in the next few minutes. Maybe he was making up comforting excuses and they were having a tough time of it. But still, the monsters fell over with a little chlorine gas. They weren’t indestructible or anything.
Jeremy shook his head. Floors. What he needed to focus on was floors.
He made it right to the door of lab 08 (Adrenaline Amplification Refining) before something extremely large shoved him to the floor from behind and attempted to remove his spine, sending the mop clattering from his hand. Putrid breath washed over him, followed by a crunch, an explosive hiss, a yelp, and the gentle gust of something less vile but more lethal. Jeremy spun to his feet and ran, thanking luck that he hadn’t attached the leaf blower canister too firmly. The sounds of something thrashing and writhing that was much too large to move that quietly chased him. Then silence again, except for the pitter-patter-thud-thud of his feet and heart.
Then a rustle.
Jeremy entered the very next door he came to without bothering to read it, reasoning that if it wasn’t hanging off its hinges it was probably safe. This brought him face to face with someone else, who was not a monster. Surprised by this, they screamed at each other.
“Oh, it’s you,” said the scientist who had smiled and waved at him that morning. “Thank goodness.” He looked much more dishevelled than he had that morning.
Jeremy’s lungs weren’t working properly, thanks to running in a full suit and gas mask while hyperventilating, and the screaming fit hadn’t helped. So he nodded. Well, his head lurched. It was very similar.
“I thought you were one of those things for a moment. They have a nasty habit of popping up where you least expect them.”
Jeremy’s breath began to sulkily refill his lungs again, in fits and starts. “How they. Do it?”
“Well, for a while I thought they were using the ducts, but we had those replaced last year after the thing with the guinea pigs.”
Jeremy flinched. He remembered that one. It had taken weeks to clean the ceilings.
“So, it must be the crawlspaces. We’ve got a lot of plumbing down there, and we need it easy-access in case something carrying something nasty breaks. So, big crawlspaces. All it needs is one of the little bastards to open up a whole and whoopsy daisy, they all follow his trail. Fun.”
“What are. They?”
The scientist shrugged. “Not entirely sure. They were under lab 10’s jurisdiction: bioweaponry for use in guerrilla warfare. I guess they’re supposed to track down insurgents and eat them or something? I’m not sure. Our work never really overlapped all that much.”
“What did you work. On?”
“This is lab 09: incredibly delicious fruit.”
Despite his wearing a gas mask, something of Jeremy’s expression must have leaked through.
“Look, it’s more dangerous than it sounds, okay? Some of this fruit is dangerously tasty.”
“How?”
“Well… imagine the consequences of bioengineered fruit that is literally in every way the tastiest thing you’ve ever eaten. It’s cheap to grow and thrives in most climates.”
“Okay.”
“Now, imagine that you find some crippling deficiency in it that say, causes all your bone marrow to wither and dry up after five bites?”
“Does it do that?”
“Version 4.86 did.”
“How far have you gotten?”
“4.87. We think we fixed it.” A crashing noise from the hall made Jeremy flinch.
“It’s all right, you know. We’re probably the safest place we can be.”
“Why?”
“Well, here’s where they went first. Right after they broke up they popped up in here, just as we were laying out batch 4.87 alpha for the test subjects. Must’ve smelled the fruit. So they ate all they could find and left. I’d say they’re looking for more, and here is the one place they’re guaranteed not to find any.”
“They got all of it?”
“All of 4.87 alpha and the test subjects, yes. But not all the fruit. They just got the latest test batches. Most of the rest of it is stashed back in the freezer.”
“It tasty?”
“Oh, very. Well, I mean I suppose so. If I’d tried it personally, I suppose I wouldn’t be in any state to tell you.”
“Would they eat it?”
“Yes, definitely, but they’ve all moved on. I tell you, this is the last place in the building we’d find them now. They could be anywhere.”
Jeremy thought of his broken leaf-blower-cum-chlorine-sprayer as he stared at what looked to be an industrial counter-mounted juicer. So near, and yet so far.
“Do you know what they liked?”
“No. Lab 10 probably had notes on them, but I’m not going in there.”
“Why?”
“The big one’s still there. Couldn’t fit through the door, poor thing, no matter how hard the others tried to help.”
“Big one?”
“Maybe you’d best see for yourself…”
The scientist was halfway out the door before he realized Jeremy wasn’t following.
“It’s perfectly safe,” he said. “Really. Come on.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“It’s just that I don’t have the mop now, and –”
“Don’t worry. Come on.”
Surprisingly, it was.
The doors to lab 10 had not just been ripped off their hinges, they’d been thrown to the ground and broken into as many tiny pieces as possible. And the doorframe looked like it’d been chewed on.
“They were chewing on it,” explained the scientist helpfully. “Couldn’t breach it, though. Not enough for her. Go on, take a peek.”
Jeremy sidled up to the doorway, spent a peculiar three seconds recalling that happy time nearly an hour ago when he really only wanted to mop something and wasn’t hanging around darkened corridors that smelled faintly of dread-inducing mucus, and peeked.
What he saw was…well, he wasn’t sure he had the vocabulary to describe it. Come to think of it, he wasn’t sure anyone had the vocabulary to describe it. Or the words.
So he said: “Oh.” He wished he had his mop with him. Or a fuel-air explosive.
“Amazing, isn’t it? I think most of them were primate-based, but whatever it is, well, that’s another story entirely.”
“Which would be?”
“Haven’t the foggiest. Just don’t get too close. It’s quicker with those…umm…things than it looks.”
“Wouldn’t be hard.” The animal filling most of the room didn’t look quick. Or mobile. Or animate. Jeremy had seen more lively floor stains, although considering some of the spills the labs could produce, that wasn’t saying a lot.
“Where are the notes?” he asked.
“See that laptop behind that, ah, fold of mass right there?”
“No.”
“No, no, there – behind the bits that are sort of bone but not quite. In the corner.”
“Oh.”
“That’s it.”
“How do we get it?”
“We don’t. We sit tight back in 09 and wait for the rescue.”
“Isn’t coming.”
“What? Why?”
“Search me. But no gunfire or anything yet.”
The scientist sighed, a blustery, overloud sound in the stifling dark. “Damn it. Right then, backup plan: you go in and grab it while I make very loud noises over here by smacking the wall and hollering.”
“That’ll work?”
“It should. Go for it.”
Jeremy hesitated, then leapt forward, the first resounding smack echoing through the empty lab like a gunshot. The results were immediate: the…central…bit of the thing in the room shifted to face it, and its body began to ripple. Strange bits and limbs poured out towards the noise, and Jeremy fancied that it acquired a desperate edge to it.
The laptop’s resting place was an unnerving one, lodged in the corner as it was. Getting there required circling nearly a third of the thing’s bulk a process that took exactly too long for Jeremy’s mental calm. He snatched at it, pulled, realized it was cemented fast, pulled harder, and ripped it loose from the countertop with a sucking sound that brought up unpleasant images from the seedier parts of the internet.
Unfortunately, it was a loud sucking sound. A very loud sucking sound. Though not as loud as the unpleasant noise that lurched through his spinal column and probably qualified as some sort of growl. Either way, it was hard for Jeremy to tell because he was running very quickly again. Then his foot hit the outstretched bit on the floor that looked like a toenail but more like an appendix and everything became much slower. He could count the hairs on its surface as he very slowly tipped over onto it, and the moment when his flailing free hand was clasped in another and yanked forwards was almost a bigger shock than the trip itself.
“Got you,” said the scientist, heaving him briskly from the room. A collection of organs being used as appendages occupied the space he’d nearly fallen on with extreme prejudice. Just looking at them simultaneous made Jeremy feel sick and wish he had more bleach on hand. Or maybe gasoline.
“Mind letting go?” asked the scientist.
Jeremy realized his knuckles were whitening to a degree not seen in living people, and released the laptop with some difficulty.
“Back to 09?” he suggested.
“Yes. I think I heard something a minute ago. Not that I could be sure, with the little bit of distraction we had here.”
Jeremy wondered what sort of thing could survive eating at least half a gallon of mixed bleach and ammonia, then wished he hadn’t because his brain was giving him unhelpfully detailed pictures of the last minute and a half all over again.
“Amazing,” said the scientist.
Jeremy looked up from his cleaning. He’d found an old hand brush under the sink and was taking the chance to relax a little.
“Amazing,” repeated the scientist.
“You just said that,” pointed out Jeremy, helpfully.
“Did I? Well, it is. This entire project…my goodness.” He shook his head in wonderment. “I have to say, never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine that we could be sharing office space with something so ill-thought-out, incompetent, and generally inconceivably stupid. It makes that one project two years ago with the self-cooking farm animals look like a hobnob between Newton and Einstein.”
Jeremy thought about the delicious fruit, but said nothing. Besides, there wasn’t enough airspace for him to squeeze into.
“I mean, really. Use some of the most unpredictable mutagens we have catalogued on selected primates? Well, so far so good. Use their half-melted genetic structures as a chance to introduce DNA from carnivores? All right. Collaborate with the bacterial warfare group upstairs to give them what is essentially permanent rabies? Fine, as long as it’s not airborne. But designing them as a guerrilla strike team/anti-guerrilla infiltrator unit and then forging psychoneurotic links between them and a prototype hivemind made of 02’s castoffs, and well, I can’t see the point one bit.”
“No?”
“Well, it would’ve been so much more sensible to hook it up to some sort of control device. Or if their mindsets are too tortured and horrifying for humans to view directly and stay sane, maybe a computer or something. What I’m saying is that we’re dealing with a project that has suffered some seriously unnecessary over-budget expenditure.”
Jeremy didn’t quite know what to say, so he just nodded. That seemed to work.
“On the plus side, this makes dealing with this whole sorry mess very, very easy.”
“How?”
“Well, we can just kill the controller, of course.”
“It’ll shut them down?”
“No, of course not, the whole hivemind is too poorly set-up for that. But we can give them all damned big headaches and slow them down a lot, and hopefully that’ll stop whatever’s keeping the rescue brigade from us, eh? I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to get the hell out of here.”
Jeremy weighed the chance of reaching the nearest supply closet with nothing but a handbroom and dustpan, and was reluctantly forced to agree. But there was a flaw.
“How do we kill it?”
“Remember all that spare fruit we talked about earlier? The previous batches?”
There was a rather obvious flaw with the plan, in retrospect.
“It has to have a mouth,” complained the scientist. “It’s an impossibility for it not to.”
The thing in lab 10 sat there in mouthless silence. The delicious fruit lay unnoticed at its side.
“It doesn’t have a mouth,” pointed out Jeremy.
“Can’t be. There’s no way for something that big that still moves under its own power to get nutrients other than eating other things!”
“Doesn’t have eyes either. Or proper limbs, or even proper tentacles.”
“The first two aren’t as uncommon as you’d think in here, but the third, I’ll grant you.” The scientist stared disapprovingly at the unsatisfactorily tentacley appendages in question. “Fine. So it won’t eat. Now what?”
Jeremy was thinking again. “We make it eat.”
“I’m sorry?”
Jeremy rubbed his hands thoughtfully and walked back down the quiet hall. “I’m going,” he announced, “to get my mop.”
It was right where he’d dropped it, although something extremely large and ugly had died on top of the handle, its mouth filled with bits of leafblower hull, happily if hideously disproving whatever worries he’d had about the sounds in the dark. At least whatever it was had some sort of recognizable anatomy, if a repulsive one. Jeremy didn’t have to invent new nouns to describe its body, so that was an improvement over its fellow in lab 10 right away.
The preparations took time. There were obstacles.
“I see what you’re planning,” said the scientist as Jeremy stopped the blender, which was truly the finest he’d ever operated, “but even liquefied, I don’t think there’s a way to get the fruit inside it.”
“A needle,” explained Jeremy, as he began to pour the gooified fruit juice into his mop.
The scientist was the one who nodded this time. He looked a bit too ill to open his mouth.
The plan, in theory, was flawless. Dash forwards, stab the beastie, run away and let the natural wonders of science propel a big fat gallon of marrow-rotting fluids directly into whatever it had that resembled something akin to a bloodstream. Then walk out of Level 4 very slowly and dramatically and go have lunch somewhere nice with a few drinks.
The execution was less perfect in practice. In six ways.
First, Jeremy’s fear of tripping again during the procedure grew so strong that he almost stubbed his toe double-checking himself on the creeping, stealthy approach to the meatier portion of the creature’s mass.
Second, it took them thirty minutes to realize that it was dead. In all fairness, it was a very difficult process to begin with, since it had no pulse or lungs. As the scientist said, describing it as “alive” in the first place was stretching already.
Third, the scientist declared that it was entirely possible that it had dropped dead shortly after trying to grab Jeremy during the laptop retrieval.
“They did keep it in a big oxygen-free tank,” he noted. “And it might not have found the outside world conducive to its health. The exertion of going after you earlier might just have been too much.”
“Why didn’t you mention this?”
“It was in a footnote on page 16 of the appendices. You don’t honestly think any of us like advertising our project’s defects, do you? We buried our marrow thing in a backup report to a subreport.”
Fourth, they were only just leaving Level 4 when the lights came back on and all the regular faculty wandered back in, most of whom were confused to their presence and willing and eager to inform Jeremy that he was not even remotely a badass.
“Oh, it was over in an eye-blink,” assured one of the scientist’s colleagues. “It turns out that most of the prototypes couldn’t move faster than a brisk stroll under the best of circumstances, and they prefer to eat each other rather than us. The boys in black took them out in five minutes and we all decided, well, lockdown takes at least another hour to reset at best, why don’t we take the afternoon off? We all went down and had a coffee in town. Really, it was the quickest outbreak since those guinea pigs that –”
“We remember,” said the scientist, testily. “And how’s the lab-10 team holding up? I’d imagine that with these sorts of results, they’re in for quite a drubbing next budget meeting.”
“A drubbing? Punishment? Have you any idea how many applications there are for a this-easily-foilable faux-infestation of hideous abominations? The most inept human alive could take one out, and they grow from spores, no less! I tell you, the special effects people in Hollywood will thank us, and with their wallets to boot. Budget? With a bit of tweaking, this thing just became half our budget.”
Fifth, the scientist couldn’t make it for lunch.
“It’s very sweet of you,” he said to Jeremy, “but I’m already seeing someone. You’re nice, believe me, and if I were free I’d be on it like a shot, but I’m very much committed at the moment.”
“Besides,” he added, “there’s no way I have time to run out and get something now. We need to redo all of batch 4.87 from notes. Maybe go to 4.87b. There’s some alleles we just didn’t have the time to hash out on the last one that really –” and then the conversation had ended, it just took a few more minutes and far more syllables than saying “goodbye” would have.
Sixth, Jeremy’s best mop was now sacrificed for naught, and the – expensive – replacement would be a week in the mail. Till then he would have to use a communal mop, bummed from one of the other janitors. A lamentable fate indeed.
On the other hand, the security cameras had caught footage of some of his cleaning on Level 4 during the lockdown, and he’d persuaded the security staff to give him a copy. It had hit over 1 million views online so far, and that was the sort of recognition money just couldn’t buy.