Read The Containment Team for Free Online Page B

any of the living. On instinct, I pulled shells out from my bandolier and reloaded. It was frustrating that I was only able to push in five shells. Wishing that I’d made the investment in a longer magazine tube, I assessed our options. There were eight stalls, four showers, and another door on the far side of the room.
    Not a lot of places to go. Perhaps we could hack them into small enough pieces that we could flush them down the toilet, but who was to say that the things could drown? They seemed to defy almost every other natural law. I shuddered involuntarily at the thought of unwittingly creating a bunch of dismembered body parts that would come up out of the toilets so that they could shift into unwitting victims. Franklin Hospital was several blocks over and that would be a great place for them to find wounded to shift into.
    No, that wouldn’t do. We could run again but these things just kept coming. They needed to be contained here.
    In frustration, I stepped back to let the monster sit up, just so I could knock it down again. I noticed as I did so that the skin had taken on a deeper shade of gray. It almost looked green. Also, the skin behind the red mucus over the wound on the neck was now a lighter shade of gray.  
    I eyed the shower stall Madelyn had gone into, telling myself that I was checking to make sure she was okay and not for any other reason. She’d pulled the shower curtain shut but I could see her moving on the other side as she brushed up against it.
    Pete was now working on breaking a leg of the Veronica creature and the Jen one was clinging to his back legs.
    Grabbing the creature below me by the leg, I pulled it over towards Pete. I held out my shotgun, intending to take the shot one-handed but I stopped short of doing so.
    Shaking my head ruefully, I was glad that I’d caught myself in time. It would have been a mistake to shoot one handed. I’d been watching too many bad action movies.
    Instead, I slung my shotgun onto my shoulder and tossed the male creature over into the corner, before sprinting back to Pete. I ripped the monster off his legs and aimed at the creature’s arm before firing.
    I was both sickened and grateful that I was able to remove it with just the one shot. I swung that creature over onto the one I’d just moved into the corner and pummeled them with buckshot until my magazine tube was empty. I reloaded and was about to do it again when I was distracted by a screech from behind and spun to find that Pete had really done a number on his monster.
    Its leg was broken, its chest caved in, and both arms hung limply. Despite all that, it was still thrashing about and Pete was bashing the other leg against the sink.
    It was getting more and more difficult to keep down the microwave chimichangas I’d had for my late dinner. I was surprised that I hadn’t already heaved up the contents of my stomach several times over.
    I started when I realized that this was the Veronica monster. It no longer had a head. Where had the screech come from?
    If it could regrow skin, why not a mouth?
    Approaching cautiously, I looked at the wounded neck and spotted two lips forming in the middle of the skin on the new head, there was also one orange eye that looked at me, the pupil slit narrowing as it did so.   
    “We’re not going to get anywhere with this, Slammer,” I said. “The things keep healing and every piece we hack off just becomes another monster to fight. There has to be a better way.” I hoped that a full monster wouldn’t be able to regrow from just an arm.
    A shard of glass scraped on the tile behind me and I turned to see that both of the monsters I’d just pummeled with buckshot were coming at me yet again. The severed appendages were all headed my way as well. I pulled a shell off my bandolier and loaded it into the magazine tube.
    “You boys should see yourselves.” Madelyn appeared from the shower fully dressed. She bent down to lace her shoe, looking like she’d