A Boring Lockdown

“Are site-wide lockdowns usually this boring?” Luna groaned as she listlessly played Tetris on her smartphone, periodically glancing up at the flashing emergency lights like a schoolgirl checking the classroom clock.
This was the young research assistant’s first such lockdown since she had begun her postgraduate internship, and when the alarm was first sounded it had sent her into a full-blown panic. Had she not been alone at the time, her more experienced colleagues likely would have been successful in keeping her calm and reminded her of the proper procedure from their training drills. Instead, she had desperately tried to force the door open while the LED display on the electronic lock kept flashing LOCKDOWN in all caps. When her RFID card, manual punch code, and brute force all failed to win her her freedom, she had instead ducked underneath a desk to hide, which is where Security Guard Joseph Gromwell had found her when he came to check for any personnel trapped by the lockdown.
That was now a good while ago, and there had been no developments in the situation since.
“No gunshots, no screaming, no explosions, not even an update over the PA,” Luna complained. Once she had recovered from her panic, and her embarrassment over having lost complete executive control to her limbic system like that, tedium and frustration began to build up as the hours ticked by without any indication of danger.
“With all due respect ma’am, a boring lockdown is a good lockdown,” Gromwell insisted, a noticeable edge to his voice. Luna looked up from her phone and saw that Gromwell was still on high alert, vigilantly watching every potential point of entry while clutching his service rifle. Gromwell had about a foot in height and a hundred pounds of muscle on her, years of combat training and experience, and was also decked out in a tactical vest and passive exoskeleton, whereas she had only a skirt and t-shirt underneath her lab coat.
If he didn’t feel safe letting down his guard, then she realized that she probably shouldn’t either.
With a sigh, she turned off her phone and placed it back in her pocket.
“I probably should be trying to conserve the battery anyway,” she said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to come across as disrespectful. You’ve been through a few of these already then, I take it?”
“More than a few ma’am; and none of them were boring,” he lamented. Luna nodded apologetically, nervously clearing her throat.
“Is there something I should be doing besides just sitting here?” she asked as she rubbed the back of her neck.
“No ma'am, you just need to stay where you're safe until they sound the all-clear," Gromwell replied.
Luna glanced over to the lab exit, and wondered if the steel door and magnetic deadbolt that had been so effective at keeping her in would be as effective at keeping whatever was on the other side out.
“Um… do you think maybe I could hold your sidearm until then?”
“Absolutely not,” he said with a roll of his eyes.
“But don’t you think I’d be safer if -”
“Panicky civilians with firearms in a combat situation is a threat multiplier,” he cut her off. “Do you even have any firearm training?”
“No,” she admitted with a reluctant sigh.
“That means you’re just as likely to shoot me or yourself as you are any hostiles, so we’re both safer if I keep the guns,” he announced definitively. “However, it wouldn’t be a complete breach of protocol if I were to lend you my combat knife, so long as you give it back when this is over.”
Luna considered the offer for a moment. She would have preferred a weapon with a much, much longer range than a knife, but she supposed it was better than nothing.
“Alright, thanks,” she agreed. She shrieked and ducked as Gromwell mimed throwing his knife at her. With a smug chuckle, he walked over to her desk and handed it to her hilt-first.
“Try not to be so jumpy, kid. It will get you killed,” he cautioned her with a smile.
“Kid? What happened to ma’am?” she demanded.
“Battlefield demotion for the irresponsible request for use of a firearm,” he replied. “Take good care of that knife, and I might promote you back up to missy.”
Luna scoffed at him, but failed to think of a satisfying comeback. She instead examined the large black knife he had given her. In Gromwell’s hands, there was no doubt that it would be an extremely intimidating armament. In her hands though, she was afraid her small, feminine form contrasted with such a blatantly macho weapon would strike any potential adversaries as comical. Not entirely happy with her defensive prospects, she set the knife down within arm’s reach.
“So, any idea what the monster of the week is this time?” she asked as lightheartedly as she could.
“That’s above both our clearance levels, I’m afraid, but I’ve been told that we’ll know it when we see it,” Gromwell replied. “I do know that the order for a lockdown came from the Processing Wing so… whatever it is, it’s probably new, so no one else will know jackshit either.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Luna groaned under her breath. “But it is just a creature that’s gotten loose, right? Not a psychic contagion, or unknown radiation, or an eldritch horror that kills us with insanity just by existing?”
“To the best of my knowledge, no. Just a Scooby-Doo monster," Gromwell replied, glancing at his watch. “Time for another check-in. Never know, might be some more intel.”
Reaching towards his left shoulder, he pressed the com button on his radio.
“Command, this is Gromwell, checking in. Status remains unchanged. Over,” he reported.
“Copy that,” the staticky voice on the radio acknowledged. It struck Luna as odd, as the commander’s voice had been perfectly clear during the previous check-ins, but she didn’t think too much of it.
“Ah, Valdez is starting to get a bit antsy. She’d like to know if any progress has been made regarding -”
“Her and every other damn egghead. We’re working on it!” the commander cut him off, this time with even more static than before. “We’re currently on our third sweep of the facility and we have yet to find the target, but unless the damn thing can teleport it’s here somewhere. Remain where you are until further notice.”
“Copy that Command. Over and out,” Gromwell said. “Sorry kid. Don’t worry, if this goes on much longer, they’ll start distributing food and water, along with sleeping bags and, ah… portable latrines.”
Luna groaned in disgust. For her entire adult life and all but her earliest childhood, she had yet to attend to her biological necessities in front of a male with whom she was not already on physically intimate terms with. The fact that this male was twice her size and fully armed only made the prospect all the more off-putting.
“If it bothers you, you can use the closet for privacy,” Gromwell suggested. “I, however, can’t leave my post, and I’m afraid I’ll need you to watch my six when it’s my turn.”
“Whatever. Just make sure that’s all I’m watching, or lockdown on no I will report you to HR,” Luna replied firmly. She rose up from her chair and began to pace, hoping to burn off some of her frustration. “We need something to do. Tell me about some of the other lockdowns you’ve been in.”
“That’s above your clearance, kid,” Gromwell replied.
“You mean to tell me that literally every detail of every lockdown you’ve ever been a part of is classified?” she asked with an incredulous scowl.
“What can I say; you have very low clearance,” he replied briskly.
“Oh, come on. You’re telling me that a big, muscle-bound, probably ex-marine like yourself doesn’t have any war stories he’s allowed to tell so he can make himself seem like a big hero to any pretty girls he happens to meet?” she asked, arching her right eyebrow and folding her arms across her chest.
“Don’t see how that applies to our current situation,” he smirked back. Luna scoffed at the unprovoked jab.
“If you’re going to passive-aggressively insult me for no reason, then I will happily spend the rest of this lockdown -”
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Luna and Gromwell both immediately fell silent, instantly turning their attention towards the lab entrance. The knocking had not been loud or demanding, and in any other situation would have seemed perfectly normal, but nonetheless seemed insidiously saturated with malicious intent. Gromwell locked his rifle on the doorway while Luna grabbed the knife off the desk, holding it out in the most defensible posture she could manage with a trembling arm. The gentle, polite knocking repeated.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
“Gromwell to Command, I have an unidentified individual knocking at the door of room 219, the second-floor Psych lab. Do you copy? Over,” Gromwell said quietly over his radio. “Valdez, hide.”
Luna didn’t respond. She stared unblinking at the door, pupils wide, terrified that looking away for even a fraction of a second would mean her demise.
“Valdez, now!”
The deep growl of Gromwell’s voice was enough to snap her out of her trance. She ducked back under the desk, hiding behind the chair as best as she could.
“How can we be sure it’s not just someone who needs help?” she whispered.
“They would have said something by now. All of your guys are too smart of all of my guys are too disciplined to be nick-knocking at a time like this,” he replied, then reached back for his radio. “Gromwell to Command, please confirm receipt of my last transmission. Over.”
Dead quiet filled the space of the expected radio response, until it was broken by another trio of knocks.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
“Are coms being jammed?” Luna asked.
“That’d be the best-case scenario, yeah,” Gromwell replied grimly. “Looks like we’re on our own.”
Knock. Knock. Knock.
“Just be quiet, it won’t know we’re here,” Luna claimed, a claim that was immediately debunked by the sound of giggling on the other side of the door.
“Silly girl, there’s no such thing as quiet,” the strange voice reverberated through the door. “Hearts always beating, blood always flowing, pulse always fleeting and lungs always blowing. You’re noisy, noisy, noisy, noisy. I can be noisy, too.”
Knock. Knock. Knock.
It sounded like multiple tracts of the same voice had been overlaid on top of each other, but slightly out of sync. The voice also had an echoey, watery quality to it, but in spite of that, it was clearly female and oddly familiar. Luna's face twisted into a sullen grimace when she realized where she recognized it from.
“Is that… my voice?” she asked meekly. Gromwell nodded slightly, keeping his rifle aimed steadily at the door. Luna stuck her head out from behind the desk to see if she could see what was lurking on the other side of the rectangular, inch-thick porthole, but there was nothing.
“I have two teams of heavy re-enforcements coming in from both sides,” Gromwell bluffed. “Surrender, and no unnecessary harm will come to you.”
Again, there was giggling, but this time in a male voice.
“Silly boy, no one’s coming. I would hear their boots all thumping. For now, it’s just us three – silly boy, silly girl, and silly me!” Gromwell’s distorted voice responded.
Gromwell swallowed nervously, but otherwise maintained his composure.
“This might be a good sign,” he whispered to Luna. “If it’s resorting to these sorts of psychological tactics, that could indicate its physical abilities are limited.”
He knew the creature would have heard that, and waited to see what its response would be.
The lights to the lab went out without warning, leaving the light from the hall as the only real source of illumination. The door’s porthole was gradually occluded by whatever was on the other side slowly sliding in front of it until no light could get through. All Luna and Gromwell could see were the glowing red letters reading LOCKDOWN over the door handle, which began to turn.
“Open,” the voice commanded, this time mimicking neither of them, instead using a guttural, feral tone meant to induce primal fear.
Gromwell raised his rifle up to eye-level so he could use the night-vision on its scope.
“Seriously? Straight to the devil voice? Yeah, you got nothing buddy,” he chuckled derisively. “If you’re so scary, you can open the damn door yourself.”
The thing roared, and banged the door, and turned the handle over and over again as hard and as rapidly as it could, but it remained safely on the other side.
Luna sighed with relief at its obvious failure. Gromwell was right. It couldn’t force its way in. All they had to do was wait it out, and they’d be safe.
But then the LED display on the door lock began to flicker, and then suddenly died like a snuffed candle, plunging the room into complete darkness.
The next thing Luna heard was the door's hinges creaking as it was slowly pushed open.
She slammed her hands over her ears at the deafening noise of Gromwell’s assault rifle as he pumped thirty armour-piercing rounds into whatever was standing in the doorway. When his magazine had finally been exhausted, Luna dared to peak out. Surely the creature couldn’t have survived all of that?
Standing in the beam of light from the hallway, Luna finally saw what was hunting them.
The thing looked like a five-foot-tall mass of frog eggs; a gelatinous, translucent green mucus holding thousands, if not millions, of dark green globules, glistening with a sickly, slimy wet sheen. Its upper half was vaguely humanoid, but the bottom was a mollusk-like pseudo-pod, propelling it forward on a cushion of festering ooze. Though the bullets Gromwell had fired at it had all hit their mark and penetrated it deeply, that hadn’t even slowed it down. Its body was a homogenous thing, with no specialized structures to speak of. Thirty small holes in its chest were nothing.
When Gromwell went to reload, the egg creature lunged at him, tackling him to the ground and engulfing his face into its writhing, quivering mass to suffocate him. Being composed almost entirely of water, its weight was more than enough to pin him down, and it kept his hands enveloped in its own goop so that he couldn’t fight back.
Luna looked on in helpless horror as Gromwell impotently squirmed against his attacker. She was torn between fleeing through the now open door and at least trying to help, but that would have just been suicide, wouldn’t it? If an assault rifle couldn’t take it down, what good would a knife do? But then, what good would running do when she would still likely be locked inside the wing, or at least the facility. It seemed that her options were to be brave and die immediately, or be a coward and die slightly later.
But that's when an idea struck her; the storage closet down the hall didn't have an electronic lock, and wouldn't be off-limits during the lockdown. If her memory of its contents were accurate, then there might be a way for them both to survive after all.
Her shame over her earlier cowardice ratified her resolve, and she knew what she had to do.
“Hey! Slimer!” Luna shouted as she crawled out from under the desk, tantalizingly dangling her access card on its lanyard. “You want out, right? This will unlock every door in the building! Come get it!”
The thing let out a mighty, gurgling roar like a drowning mountain lion, leaping off Gromwell and giving chase to Luna, gliding out into the hallway as quickly as its heavy, slug-like body could maneuver. Luna was faster of course, giving her the time she needed to reach the supply closet. She threw the door open and there, on the second top shelf, was exactly what she was after; large jugs of super-absorbent polymer powder. She grabbed one and sliced through the thin plastic with her knife. She spun around and was confronted by the creature blocking any attempt at escape. Now that she was up close and had better lighting, she could see that each of the myriad of globules within the entity's mass were, in fact, tiny fetuses or embryos, each of them curled up and noticeably convulsing independently from the movements of the main body. It was impossible to say what they were embryos of, since all embryos looked more or less alike at such an early stage, and she frankly didn’t want to know.
“Give.”
When it spoke, it suddenly seemed like its speech was the aggregate of all of its many spawn speaking in unison with tiny, drowned voices. The monster reached out a viscous hand for the key card, its lack of immediate violence seemingly a promise to let her live if she complied. Instead, she tossed the entire contents of the container onto the creature, aiming for the bullet wounds.
It stumbled backwards, slamming against the wall and howling in agony as the powder began absorbing hundreds of times its mass in water from the abomination’s porous cells. As its chest collapsed the white slush erupted outwards, and its withering trunk gave way beneath it, sending it tumbling to the floor. Luna tossed a second jug of powder on it while it was down, its earsplitting screams failing to earn it any mercy.
In her haste though, Luna had let her key card fall to the floor. Seizing the opportunity, the monster snatched it up in its rapidly desiccating hands and began pulling itself towards the hall exit. It seemed to grow weaker and weaker with every motion, but the slush it was leaking at least provided it with some lubrication. When it reached the door, it struggled to raise its mummified arm up to the card reader. Though it succeeded, its reward for its efforts was only a harsh buzzer and the bright red words ‘ACCESS DENIED’.
“Yeah, I lied. I don’t actually have lockdown override clearance,” Luna taunted. The now pathetic creature wailed in defeat, falling completely to the floor and curling up in a fetal position. There it remained until the security teams finally arrived, locking it into a hermetically sealed container until they could arrange for more suitable long-term accommodations.
***
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Gromwell looked up from his bed to see a smiling Luna standing in the infirmary door.
“You taking visitors?” she asked hopefully.
“Absolutely,” he grinned, putting the after-action report he was working on down on his lap. “They’re just holding me for observation. We’re pretty sure it was only trying to suffocate me, but we haven’t ruled out the possibility that it may have implanted me with some of its eggs.”
Luna pulled up a chair and sat beside him, placing his combat knife by his side.
“There you are, returned in the same condition as lent,” she smiled. “Don’t want you getting in trouble over it. I figure all your issued equipment is a ‘return with this shield or on it’ kind of deal.”
“Nowhere near as bad as losing a firearm, but I’d still catch hell for it. Thanks,” he nodded. “So, that was pretty quick thinking, what you did with the super-absorbent powder. I owe you.”
“That’s nice to hear. I was worried you might have felt a little humiliated over the whole thing, big tough guy like you getting saved by your own damsel,” she taunted gently. “Don’t worry about it. Around here, you’ll probably get a chance to pay me back before too long. Did you ever find out how that thing got loose in the first place?”
“Yeah, they filled me in while I was getting debriefed. Apparently, it can squeeze itself small enough to move through the pipes, and got out through the drain in its holding cell. It's got excellent hearing, so it could avoid coming out when there were people around, and on top of that, it generates some kind of EM field that messes with lights, radios, security cameras, and even the weaker electronic locks when it really wanted to. I'll definitely sleep better knowing it's dried and canned."
“Do they know where it came from?”
“Some wetland in Ontario. They think it lived as an ambush predator, camouflaged as frog eggs and enveloping anything that got too close. How it knows how to talk though, well, I guess that’s your job to figure out.”
“Awesome,” she groaned with a sarcastic roll of her eyes. “Well, if I do get stuck with it, I’ll see if I can get you assigned as my personal guard. You might not do too badly against it if you had a more appropriate weapon. Besides, after my display of ingenuity and heroism, my clearance level is going up. You’ll be free to tell me about all the other times you were a monster-hunting badass, instead of being overpowered by a mound of frog eggs and saved by an untrained civilian half your size.”
“I’d… I’d like that ma’am.”
“I’m ma’am again? Skipped straight over missy?”
“Damn right. I had my first boring lockdown thanks to you.”
Luna smirked proudly, but her expression soured as she began to consider what he had just told her about the creature escaping through a drain. When she had attacked it, she remembered small chunks of it sloughing off, and seemingly still moving of their own volition. She had left the supply closet door open and, now that she thought about it, there had been a drain for a mop bucket inside.
Category:Monsters
Category:The Vesper's Bell