Which meant that Steven ran into Septimus when he stopped without warning. Steven started to speak, but the agent put his hand over the one Steven still had on his shoulder and squeezed, hard. Steven took the hint and muted his protest before it made it fully out, only letting out a strangled growl.
In the light from the little flashlight, he could just make out the outline of someone standing in front of a darker rectangle. Belatedly, he recognized it as the side entrance to the main tunnel. The one they had come in, he supposed, although there might have been many too dark to see during their walk. And why was it darker than the tunnel? Were his eyes adjusting? Steven peered around.
The tunnel really was lighter. Because behind them, advancing with sickening speed, was a sheet of luminous green. It covered the entire tunnel - floor, walls, ceiling - and it rippled as it moved.
“Argh.” Steven strangled on his own voice. His throat was too dry to let him talk. “Urgh!”
Septimus finally looked away from the stranger and saw it. “Shit.”
“Run.” A deep voice advised, almost in Steven’s ear. “Use good light now.”
The dimly lit man shoved something cylindrical into Steven’s hands. Septimus pulled out his little pocket sun - Steven made a mental note to ask him about brand, it was a really great light for being so small - and Steven made the discovery that what he’d been given was a big Maglight, which he twisted on and lost no more time taking the advice so generously given.
They ran up the tunnel, past the narrow side entrance that was already looped by massive tendrils of the slime mold.
“Yugo!” Septimus shouted.
“Yo.” The man... not, Steven corrected himself, a human. But a man, nonetheless. Whatever species he was, he loped effortlessly alongside them without stepping fully into the beams of their lights. “Head for river. I show you out.”
The only thing Steven could think as they pounded through the inky tunnel was, ‘I hate being the fucking newb.’ Not that knowing what they would find in the subway would have helped any. What do you fight a behemoth slime mold with, anyway? Flamethrowers? Kill it with fire was always satisfying, even if there was collateral damage. On the other hand, fire in enclosed spaces was generally a Bad Idea. Even if….
“In here!” Their mysterious guide took a sudden left turn into what looked like a crack in the wall. Steven stumbled, and the man caught him. “Light out, now!”
Steven switched off the mag lite and they stood in the gloom, panting. Steven felt a pat on his arm, then a hand grasp his. It tugged, and Steven fought a second of blind panic before he yielded and followed. Septimus was right next to him, Steven knew this because he could smell his cologne and hear him breathing. Their guide, who was now bringing them literally by hand to someplace only he knew, smelled of... seaweed? And good tobacco. Like pipe tobacco. Steven flashed back to his grandfather holding him and rocking on the porch, puffing on a pipe while they watched a thunderstorm.
All three kept creeping forward, none of them speaking by silent and unanimous decision. Their footsteps were loud by comparison, but unavoidable. Steven sneaked a glimpse over his shoulder and could see nothing in the Stygian atmosphere, which was oddly reassuring. Any glow would have been a sign they were caught. Slime molds, evidently, fell for any old trick in the book.
Clinging to the calloused, three-fingered hand, Steven stumbled over rough ground. Loose bricks, it felt like, with square edges. Then the guide lifted his hand up, way up, and Steven got the idea they would have to climb, just as his shins made contact with a low wall. He felt with his free hand, stirring up damp dirt and stringy bits he chose to believe were roots. The guide let go, and Steven scrambled awkwardly up the wall, Septimus grabbing his shoulder and pulling to help. Wondering if this was what it was like to be blind, Steven turned his face toward the cool draft once he was standing again. The pat on his shoulder, and the cool hand taking his again, didn’t even come as a surprise. Septimus grabbing the back of his shirt did, though, until Steven realized they were going to be walking single-file along... something. He could only guess at what was under his feet. The guide took his free hand and lifted it, bringing it in contact with a smooth concrete wall, and moving it slowly forward, until Steven got the idea he was to leave his hand on the wall to keep near it.
Their progress could best be described as snail-like. Inching through the darkness, fingers on the wall, taking shuffling steps, the three of them kept moving onward for what felt like eternity. Steven’s fingers grew raw from dragging over the wall, and his legs started to shake with every step. He badly wanted to ask something, if they could stop, why they still couldn’t have light, why couldn’t they talk? You never know how much you miss something until you can no longer do it.
“Stop.” The hoarse voice came out of the darkness ahead of him, but Steven still stumbled another step before his brain caught up to his body. The other squeezed his hand slightly, then released it, and Steven stood in the dark, panting for breath.
It was only then that he realized how warm it was, and how little air there was. The cool draft he’d noted earlier was gone, and the sweat on his hand and forehead was just sticky and dripping unchecked. Septimus still gripped his shirt, but their guide was gone into the dark. Steven pressed his eyes closed, then opened them again, dizzy, hoping light would appear magically.
It was a long couple of minutes - Steven felt that it could have been a long time, or perhaps not long at all but seemingly forever - before a creaking sound made him turn his head toward it. There was light, a thin line at first, slowly widening into a crack of golden sunlight that flooded the small area they stood in. The widening stopped.
“Go now.” The voice came from the shadows in the space beyond the light, behind the door. “Quickly!”
Steven started toward the light, and Septimus jerked on his shirt, hard enough that Steven heard a rip. “Watch your step,” the older agent growled.
Steven realized with a cold shock he’d nearly walked right off the narrow ledge and fallen three feet to the floor below them. He took a deep breath of fresh air, his mind clearing quickly, and scrambled down it at the same time Septimus sat on the ledge. Septimus slid down more slowly and was on Steven’s heels as they ran for the light. Steven started to wiggle through the opening, and then stopped, looking into the dark. He still couldn’t see their rescuer.
“Thank you.”
“You are welcome, secret agent man.” The voice sounded amused. “We will meet again.”
Steven finished getting out of the tunnel and as Septimus sucked in his gut, stood and looked around.
“I know where we are!” He’d been there, or close enough, before. “Hey, how’d we get here?”
With a grinding noise, the dark opening in the crumbling stone wall started to close. Septimus dusted off his shirt and grimaced at the missing button he’d just scraped off. “Don’t ask. Well, you can ask all you want. I can’t answer. Not that I don’t wanna, I just can’t.”
“Can I ask you something else?” Steven was taking deep breaths, savoring the warm, sunlit air. It smelled and tasted delicious.
“Ask away. Dunno about answers.” Septimus sat on the grassy slope and looked down at the park. Behind them the old Cincinnati Waterworks building loomed. The warm rosy bricks glowed in the light. Steven sat next to him.
“Are... are we safe here?”
Septimus shrugged. “Who is safe anywhere?” He rolled his head to and fro, visibly working on tight muscles. “But to answer that, yeah, probably. The mold lost us a long time ago. Yugo brought us up the long way, so whatever else was following us probably lost us, too.”
“Oh, um.” Steven contemplated that last in silence for a long moment. “What else?”
“Can’t tell you for sure. Yugo might know, but he can’t take the light.”
Steven looked at Septimus for a while, seeing the lines around the other man’s eyes and the gray hairs sprinkled through his hair. “What is Yugo?”
“Trol
l.”
“Ah.” Steven added that to his mental list of people-not-human races he knew about now. “Um, that body...”
“What body?” Septimus’ lips thinned, and he looked pissed. “Time we got back in there with lights and flamethrowers to even try for recovery, nothing organic’ll be left.”
“Oh, yeah, but... Did it kill him?” Steven left unasked the ‘wouldn’t it have killed us?’
“I didn’t think so, when we were, ah, called in to look for him, overdose was suspected.” Septimus lifted his hands and looked at them, then ran them through his hair. The sweat hadn’t dried yet and left it spiked and messy. “That mold wasn’t right. Wasn’t like that last time it was observed. Which means that this little breather is over and it’s time to make a report.”
He heaved himself to his feet. “Time to pretend nothing happened, kid, nothing at all.”
In Which Nothing at All Happens, Very Rapidly
A short ride share later, Steven stood next to the car while Septimus did a walk-around. He had found himself surprised by two things. One was that they hadn’t come far, no more than two or three miles. The other was that Septimus had the ride share app on his phone. Evidently satisfied with the condition of the car - Steven wasn’t sure what the other agent was looking for. Evidence of tampering? Mold fragments? Now that was a scary thought. Septimus clicked the fob and the doors unlocked. Steven climbed in and buckled up, contemplating the nightmares he was going to have after the day he’d had. The hours he’d had. It hadn’t taken that long. The oxygen deprivation left him feeling shaky, even now.
Steven leaned his head back while Septimus pulled onto the street and fell asleep nearly instantly. He didn’t waken nor dream until they were pulled into the underground garage and his shoulder was shaken.
“Hey, there.” Septimus’s voice penetrated his sleep fog. “Time to go make that report.”
“Sorry.” Steven mumbled. He unbuckled. “S’Fritzy here?”
“Not here, here, no. She’s waiting for us though.”
“Ok,” Steven climbed out and shook his head to try and clear it. “I’m coming.”
He was feeling more awake at least by the time they reached the library, which Snirblefritz treated like her office. Steven wasn’t sure she had an office, only since she seemed to be in charge of the whole Cincinnati unit, that didn’t make sense either. He decided that wasn’t a question worth asking, especially when he saw her face and realized she was in no mood for small talk or frivolities.
“Septimus, I should take your badge right this moment,” she snapped, marching toward them. “Tell me why I shouldn’t.”
“You can have it later. Right now, we got a problem.” He didn’t even slow down, striding past her toward the nearest tower of shelves.
Steven met his boss’s eyes. “Ma’am.” He started cautiously.
“Oh, don’t you ma’am me.” She crossed her arms. “What on earth possessed you to go along with him? And don’t tell me you were just following orders. I hired you to not follow orders blindly.”
Steven was spared having to answer by Septimus noisily plunking a handful of map tubes down on the table nearest them. “Come look at this.” He didn’t even look up, just started pulling yellowed paper rolls out of the protective cardboard tube.
Steven obediently followed Fritzy, who was fortunately no longer interested in him as much as she was those maps.
Septimus partially unrolled a couple, then started to unroll one fully, anchoring it to the table with Steven’s hand and a book grabbed from the stack at one end. Steven obediently followed the order to ‘hold this’ and wondered whose research they were disarranging. Then he, too, got distracted by the map. It was old, but not, he thought, antique. The lines criss-crossing it made no sense at first, then as he found the compass rose, and the date, it became clear to him.
“This is the subway design.” He pointed at the neatly written legend.
“Got it in one.” Septimus set another book on the last corner. Fritzy was standing on a chair, leaning far over the table, but with her hands clasped firmly behind her back. “Not the actual, mind, but the projected plan they first wanted to do.”
“This would have been...” Steven tried to imagine it under the city he knew. “Um.”
“Extensive,” Fritzy suggested, pointing at one area. “This is all they built, though, and that much mainly because it was easy to put in where the old canal ran through the city.”
“I always think of Cincinnati as a backwater.” Steven peered at the area she’d pointed out.
“It used to be a rattlin’ town.” Septimus sounded grimly amused. “So this is approximately where we entered today...”
He didn’t touch the paper, just hovered his finger over a small access tunnel drawn jutting at an angle to the main subway. “And then we proceeded south, until we found the mold.”
“Mold?” Fritzy asked. “Mind telling the whole story, rather than just showing me where?”
“I can’t tell you. I still don’t have the foggiest what actually happened down there.” Steven shivered involuntarily. “But someone died down there in the dark.”
“I can’t do a lot better.” Septimus rubbed his eyes with one hand, the other still holding down the edge of the map. “I received a communication this morning with a report of a body under, ah, unusual circumstances in the subway tunnels. The nature of the communication made it clear to me that it fell under our purview, not the police.”
He paused, and Steven felt both of them looking at him. “I’m not going to ask.” He straightened up and folded his arms. “Because right now, I don’t want to know. Really. Do. Not. Want.”
Septimus shook his head and kept talking. “Decimus calling in sick was quite inopportune. So, I asked Steven to accompany me on what should have been little more than a reconnaissance trip.”
“With a dead body at the end of it?” Steven couldn’t help himself, the words just jumped out of his mouth. “Only reconnaissance?”
“The communication also indicated the death was most likely due to an overdose of illicit substances.” Septimus continued, outwardly unperturbed at Steven’s outburst. “The concern was for removal of said body in such a way as to not attract attention.”
“To what, a deadly mold that looks like the Blob?”
Fritzy chuckled. “I take it back. You two should be a team. Snarky debriefings are fun.”
Both men glared at her, and she ignored them, bending over the map again. “Here?” She pointed.
“Right about that. The body was, as Nonus has said repeatedly, encased in a sort of slime mold when we got to it.”
She whistled softly. “Encased in? How big are we talking here?”
“Depends on if you count when it was all hunched over the dead dude sucking his juices out, or stretched thin to cover the whole damn tunnel while it was chasing us.” Steven poked at the map. “To about here, I think, since that’s the only access passage that breaks off on that side.”
“About the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.” Septimus answered with a calm and incongruous simile. “And a lot slower, fortunately.”
She frowned and traced their route on the map. “Where did you get out?”
“Through the sewers.” Septimus answered her.
“Is that what they were?” Steven asked. “It was too dark to see anything, but it didn’t smell like a sewer.”
“Not in current use.” Fritz seemed to know what Septimus was talking about. “Yugo?”
“Yep.”
“Stands to reason, that’s his territory. He tell you about the body, too?”
Septimus shrugged, splaying his hands out. The corner of the map curled up. “Difficult to tell. He puts on a good ol’ boy act, but the communication was... not his usual linguistic style.”
She nodded. They stood there in silent thought for another minute, then she straightened up abruptly. “Well, this is going to have to be handled.”
“With what, flam
ethrowers?” Steven then realized he didn’t care. “I’m not going back down there.”
They both looked at him. Septimus had no expression. Fritzy seemed to be hiding a smirk.
“I’m not.” He crossed his arms.
Flamethrowers are Cool, but Lasers Rock
“You are absolutely not going back down there.” Fritz’s firm tone almost disappointed Steven. “You shouldn’t have been down there in the first place, and Septimus, you will be receiving a written reprimand on your file. Consider this your verbal.” She turned back to Steven, her tone softening. “Steven, you are not fully trained yet. Sorry, but you must complete more than simple orientation before returning to the field. So that means you’re driving the desk until cleared.”
Steven nodded. He’d really been looking forward to returning to all systems normal: status bored. Now that he had it, should he be feeling this disappointed? “I’ll get back to it.”
She nodded, and Steven felt he’d been dismissed. He turned and walked away, hearing her voice behind him as she started talking to Septimus again.
“Now, what I’m thinking we’ll need to do is...” Steven couldn’t make out any more words. He wondered what the plan would be. Flamethrowers seemed like they’d work, but he couldn’t shake the way he’d felt during that dark flight, like he couldn’t breathe. Flames eating up what little oxygen supply there seemed to be would be a bad idea. But surely Septimus and Fritzy knew better than he what they were doing. He wasn’t going to act like the kid Septimus had called him and butt in where he wasn’t wanted and... he pushed open the door to the hallway and headed for the elevators. Maybe Septimus would fill him in later.
Back in the small windowless office, Steven sat down and stared at his dark computer screen for a long moment before pressing the power button. He looked around the room while it booted.
“I should put something up. Motivational posters or crap like that.” His own voice, even pitched at a mutter, echoed off the paint. The computer beeped, and he decided he’d better stop talking to himself before someone caught him.
Lab Gremlins Page 6