Black Melt

by Indy McDaniel

  Logic and reason seemed to have abandoned Alyx completely as she felt something within her rupture, followed by a powerful gush of fluids squirting from her crotch. In the unlit bedroom, she couldn’t see the fluid very well beyond the slick black coloration of it. That color – drawing forth memories of the wall growth in the lab – was enough to set Alyx off on a non-stop screaming fit. She could hear Gavin saying something to her, but she couldn’t make out the words. She was too overwhelmed with the insanity of her situation to listen to him, but she heard something about hospital. As the pain in her stomach grew worse and she felt a warm wetness creeping up the back of her throat, going to the hospital sounded like the best idea in the history of ideas. She managed a weak nod before rolling onto her side and vomiting a stream of dark oily sick down the side of the bed.

  It’s not food poisoning, a soft voice in the back of Alyx’s head whispered. You are fucked.

  Alyx told the voice to shut the hell up. She could hear Gavin talking, but not to her. His panicked voice was rattling off the address to their apartment complex and she could only assume he was talking to a 911 operator. Alyx wasn’t a fan of hospitals, as a rule, but considering the agony rippling through her stomach, she couldn’t think of anywhere else she wanted to be at the moment.

  “They’re coming, baby,” Gavin told her, placing a hand on her shoulder. “Just hold on. Jesus, you’re burning up.”

  A bead of sweat trickled into Alyx’s eye, but she hardly noticed the stinging discomfort. She blinked it away as another scream was ripped from her throat. She twisted away from Gavin and tried to bring her knees up to her chest, only to have them stopped by the swollen flesh of her gut. Her thighs were sticky with whatever the hell was leaking out of her crotch. There didn’t seem to be any stop to the stuff, either. She could feel it oozing out of her, as if something within her had sprung a terrible leak. When Gavin tried to lift her into a sitting position so he could help her back into her robe, Alyx’s head spun with dizziness. She spewed up another stream of vomit onto herself and promptly passed out.

  * * *

  Alyx came back around to see the blinding whiteness of fluorescent lights shining down on her. She lifted her head slowly to see a flurry of motion around her as men and women in scrubs and stark white lab coats rushed around the room. She was in the hospital, she could see that easily enough. It gave her a small degree of comfort until she looked down the length of her nude form to the swelling mass of her stomach. Her pale skin had taken on an angry red hue. Dark lines were tracing their way through her veins. Most what the fuck pregnancy ever, she thought, crying out as another wave of pain surged over her.

  Alyx’s screams drew the attention of the doctors and nurses. One of the doctors leaned over the bed Alyx lay on, pulling out a pen light to check her pupils. “Miss Kurylenko? This is Doctor Forrester. Can you hear me?”

  “Loud and clear, Doc,” she hissed through clenched teeth. “You’re fixing me, right? You’re gonna fix me?”

  The doctor offered her as reassuring a smile as he could. “We’re going to do our best. You seem to be suffering from an extreme fungal infection. Do you know where you might have come into contact with this infection?”

  I’ve got a pretty good goddamn idea, Alyx thought, but she was hardly going to confess to breaking into a top secret underground lab to steal highly valuable corporate data which she intended to sell off to the highest bidder. Sure, doctor patient confidentiality may have been a thing, but she doubted it went that far. “Bad Rueben,” she forced out. “Or milkshake. Something. Mickey’s Diner-o-rama. Think I could sue?”

  “Most certainly,” Doc Forrester said. “But we’re going to have to get you fixed first.”

  Alyx tried to laugh, but it became a wail of pain that transformed into a seizure. Her body shuddered on the hospital bed as a fresh spray of black vomit sputtered through her clenched teeth. Forrester placed a firm hand on her shoulder to keep her from jerking her way clear off of the bed and onto the floor.

  “Nurse, I need that anti-fungal, stat.”

  The nurse handed the anti-fungal syringe over to the doctor and he wasted no time injecting Alyx with its contents. She hardly felt the prick of the needle in her arm, but what followed the injection could not be ignored. The pain coursing through her stomach shifted gears in the worst possible way. Alyx’s screams rose to near ear-shattering proportions as her midsection swelled to a greater size. She could hear the creaking of her skin as it stretched far further than it was ever meant to go. Her hands went to her stomach, clutching it tightly as she tried to forcibly push it back to a more normal size. Her mouth fell open, howling out to the doctor to make it stop.

  Alyx’s back arched up from the bed, lifting the weight of her body up with the back of her head and the heels of her feet. Her eyes crossed as whatever was inside her shifted and coiled and surged. She felt a series of pops within her as her internal organs were overwhelmed and crushed to mangled chunks of uselessness. Fresh spurts of dark, chunky sludge gushed from between her legs. “Fuck your fix, Doc!” Alyx screamed, tears flowing down her sweaty cheeks. “Fuck your fucking fix!”

  Alyx’s screams were underscored by the sound of a fleshy zipper coming undone as her skin gave out from the pressure building within her body. Her swollen stomach split open and burst outwards, spraying forth thick splatters of obsidian darkness over the room and everyone in it. Steaming guts and organs poured out of the young woman, piling between her shivering thighs. Alyx’s body slumped limply back onto the bed, fingers hooking into the cavernous wound that her gut had become. The pain of the pressure had faded, leaving in its wake a numbness that was rapidly making its way through her body. She managed to lift her head to look out at what had become of her and in her final moments of life, all she could think of was that growth in the lab. I guess it got out after all, she thought before her head dropped back onto the pillow, her eyes going vacant as the monotone drone of the heart monitor chased her into nothingness.

  Chapter Three

  Pulling at Threads

  FBI Special Agent Nicholas Stark stood outside West End Hospital, surveying the barely contained chaos unfolding before him. He’d been told the incident was a potential terrorist attack involving a biological weapon of some sort. Which meant he couldn’t step foot into the hospital until one of the lab geeks got him a hazmat suit. He’d been waiting for about five minutes so far, with no sign of the geek’s return in sight. He considered boldly marching into the hospital, safety regulations be damned. He could handle the future chewing out he’d get from his superiors. But as tough as he was, he doubted he could withstand the ravages of some biological weapon. So Stark stood his ground and did his best to keep his patience under control.

  That lasted for about another thirty seconds. Stark made his way over to the nearest bespectacled dweeb and wrapped his strong hand around the young man’s thin arm. “Get me a damn suit or I’ll peel yours off your skinny, unconscious body,” he growled to the dweeb. Even behind the protective cover of the hazmat suit’s mask, he could see the fear in the lab tech’s eyes. With a stuttering response that Stark couldn’t quite make out beyond a flurry of ‘right away’ and ‘please, don’t hurt me’, the young man squirmed free of Stark’s grip and made a speedy retreat to a parked Center for Disease Control van near the front of the hospital. Stark chuckled as he watched the little man go. “That never gets old.”

  * * *

  After getting suited up, Stark made his way into the hospital. If anything, the chaos within the building was even worse than what was going on outside. There was a blend of suited up and unsuited individuals. The hospital’s staff and patients would have a long process of quarantine and testing ahead of them. If they were cleared of contamination, they could go home. If not, it meant a whole lot more testing and a whole lot stricter quarantine. Not that any of that was Stark’s concern. He was there to investigate the cause of the incident and determine if it was an intentional terrorist strike or j
ust some horrible accident.

  And in order to do that, he had to find the head of the CDC unit in order to get a full briefing of the situation. He tried to wave down one of the other hazmat suit wearing individuals bustling about the hospital, but they were all too busy to take notice and with the mask on, he found it difficult to level deadly glares on the lab nerds. As tempting as it was to cut straight to the manhandling and threatening of bodily harm, Stark didn’t want to risk tearing his or anyone else’s suit. So instead, he followed the growing chaos. He figured it would lead him to the scene of the incident and – most likely – the CDC official he was looking for.

  “Doctor Green?” he asked to those he passed along the way. “Anybody know where I can find Doctor Green?”

  The only responses he got were a few waves in the direction he was already heading. Someone really needs to teach these geeks how to interact with people, he thought. They’ve got the social graces of a pack of rabid possums.

  When he spotted the clear plastic sheeting blocking the hallway, Stark figured he’d finally found the right place. Ducking through the sheeting, he was treated to a sight of chaos on a completely different level. There were more patients and doctors, lined up along the wall, while CDC officials in suits busied themselves over them. But the truly startling sight came in the slimy black substance that covered a number of the doctors and nurses. He saw a trail of the sludge leading towards one of the intensive care unit rooms. “Bingo,” he muttered, making his way to the room. His eyes widened as he looked inside. He’d seen the leftovers of bombings of a variety of sorts, but never anything like the contents of the room.

  If it was an explosive of some sort, it hadn’t been terribly effective as far as body count. He only spotted one victim – a short haired woman without a stitch of clothing on. It looked as if she had been at the center of the blast considering her midsection was virtually nonexistent. He glanced into the gaping wound long enough to spot the glistening white of her spinal column before looking away. He had enough gruesome nightmares already. He looked around the rest of the gunk-drenched room and spotted Doctor Green almost immediately. Out of the five people crowding the hospital room, she was the only one not wearing a hazmat suit.

  Stark towered over her five foot, four inch height. Her hair was hidden underneath a hairnet, but a few strands of silky blonde had slipped free. Her wide eyes – a sparkling hazelnut color – were fixed on the tablet in her hands, flicking rapidly over the information displayed there. The rest of her face was almost completely obscured by the face mask covering her mouth. She wore a white lab coat, buttoned closed around her petite frame, beige cargo pants, sneakers, and a pair of latex gloves.

  “Are you nuts, lady?” Stark asked. “Does the phrase biological contamination mean anything to you?”

  Doctor Green looked up from her tablet to Stark. She pulled the face mask down from her mouth. “Probably means more to me than you. Suits just a precaution. Sampled air, flushed out infectious spores. As far as rest of biological material, don’t lick it off walls, should be fine.” Her voice had an odd calmness to it, as if her mind were a thousand miles away. Her delivery was the exact opposite of calm, words flowing one into another at a hellacious pacing.

  “So you’re telling me I put on this idiot monkey suit for nothing?” Stark asked.

  Green shrugged. “Essentially, yes.”

  “Well, what about the rest of the people in suits? Didn’t they get the memo?”

  “Others not as confident about safety as I am,” she answered plainly.

  “Well, sorry, Doc, but I think I’m gonna have to side with the majority on this one.” Stark nodded to the dead woman on the bed. “What happened to her? Someone plant a bomb in her or something?”

  Green shook her head. “No evidence of explosive,” she replied. “Explosive wouldn’t match with what doctor on call said happened.”

  “And that is?”

  “Between gibbering and repeated requests for mouth wash, all I could get out of him was she simply… burst.”

  “Burst? What, like a pipe?”

  “More like balloon by way he described it.”

  Stark’s upper lip curled as he let out a grunt of disgust. “So what makes a person pop like the world’s most grotesque water balloon?”

  “If attending doctor to be believed, fatal side effect of highly aggressive fungal infection,” Green said, looking back to her tablet and making a few notes.

  Stark gave the room and the dead woman on the bed a skeptical look. “A fungal infection can do all this?”

  “Not typically,” Green said, shaking her head. “Why you’re here. Some speculation that whatever this is may have been result of weaponized strain. If so, could be looking at worst outbreak since fungal meningitis one in 2016.”

  “Did she come in alone?”

  “Admission paperwork says no,” Green said. “Although, not been able to find young man who dropped her off.”

  “We got a name on him?” Stark asked. “Either of them?”

  Green pointed a finger at the dead woman. “This one, Alyx Kurylenko. Brought here by Gavin O’Malley.”

  Stark nodded, jumping on the chance to put some distance between himself, the grotesque scene in the hospital room, and the weird doctor in charge of the scene. “Then my first step is finding Gavin O’Malley. Have fun cleaning up the spill on Aisle Nine.” He turned away from Green and began to make his way out of the hospital room, only to be stopped a moment later.

  “Would like to come with you,” Green called out to Stark.

  Stark froze in the doorway and turned back to the doctor. “What for?” he asked.

  “Strong possibility O’Malley may be infected. If so, you’ll need me to make sure he doesn’t contaminate anyone else.”

  “And what if he’s a psycho-crazy terrorist with a habit of shoving explosive fungus into people?”

  Green silently considered the question for a few moments before offering Stark a small, unconcerned shrug. “Assume you’re armed. Fully capable of shooting another human being, if need arises.”

  Stark sighed and turned away. “Fine, you can tag along. But you’re staying in the car.”

  * * *

  Stark felt a good deal more comfortable once he was out of the hazmat suit, but not nearly as comfortable as he could have been thanks to his newfound and unwanted car buddy. Green had changed clothes while Stark had been getting out of the hazmat suit, tossing the outfit she’d been wearing into a burn bag and replacing it with a fresh set of clothing. The behavior had been about as bizarre as he should have expected from her, based on their initial encounter. “So does the CDC make a habit of allowing their employees to imbibe in their supply of medical marijuana, or is it just you, Doctor Green?” he asked, only half-joking.

  Green didn’t shift her eyes away from the passenger side window, which she’d been staring out since getting in the car. “Zoey,” she replied.

  “Huh?”

  “My name. Doctor Green far too formal if we’re working together. What is your first name, Agent Stark?” She finally turned from the window to look at him, the hint of genuine interest in her sparkling blue eyes.

  “Just Stark is fine,” he said, glancing over at her. “And who says we’re working together? Just because I’m allowing you to come with me to ask a potential suspect a few questions does not mean we’re working together.”

  “Are we working against one another then?” Zoey asked. “Seems unlikely, but suppose it could be an option.”

  “We’re working adjacent to one another,” Stark snapped. “What exactly is it that you do for the CDC, Zoey? Aside from making people’s skin crawl, I mean.”

  “Strictly speaking, in the profession of keeping people’s skin from crawling,” she answered. “Specifically, epidemiologist in charge of incident appraisal and containment.”

  “And what exactly does that big mouthful of syllabus actually mean?”

  “In the event of biologica
l outbreak, sent in to determine severity of threat to general population and take steps to minimalize said threat.”

  “Just sounds like more syllables to me, but I think I get the picture,” Stark said. “And how does your working with me help you do that? I’d figure you have more than enough things to do back at the hospital to keep any kind of infection from getting out.”

  “My people well trained and capable of locking down hospital,” Zoey said. “Risk of spreading infection is with Gavin O’Malley, if he’s been contaminated. In which case, my time and efforts best spent accompanying you in order to ensure proper containment protocols maintained. Also, fun.”

  “Fun?”

  Zoey nodded, but didn’t add any further enlightenment on her statement.

  “Anybody ever tell you that you’re a weird chick?” Stark asked.

  “They hardly ever tell me anything else,” she replied, turning to look back out the window.

  * * *

  Parking the car in a vacant spot out in front of the apartment complex where Gavin O’Malley and Alyx Kurlyenko were reported to live, Stark phoned in for whatever records the Bureau had on either of them. The information wasn’t much, but the little bit that was there was enough for Stark to start painting a picture of the two. As far as he was concerned, any vague picture was far better than the explicitly graphic one of Alyx Kurlyenko he already had burned into his head. “Well, I think we can rule this out as an act of terrorism,” he muttered as he scanned through the files. “These two look like a couple of idiot kids playing corporate spies. They’re thieves, not killers.”