The crawling amoeba

The white lab-coated head of Army special research supervised storage of the liquid Uranium-Anastol still under development.

"Be very careful with that barrel, gentlemen. Watch your step. The slightest movement may set off a chemical chain-reaction possibly capable of unknown devastation."

“Understood, sir," a soldier hefting a barrel from one side said. Then he whispered to his partner: “Now he tells us!”

The young assistants tread gingerly toward the Dangerous Materials shelves in the top-security storage locker.

The supervisor swept dust from the shelf, then motioned for his assistants to place the barrel on it. He had one last warning:

"And you must ensure that experimental substance does not come into contact with your skin. Not in any manner, or to any degree. Should such occur, the Army cannot promise your life will not suffer in irreversible and horribly disfiguring ways!"

----------

 Two thugs lueked in the shadows night offered. A green-and-white patrol car cruised the downtown boulevard. The two froze in an alley entrance,

Once the police had passed, Gage gripped his underworld revolver and continued inching along the government research facility's red-brick alley wall.

"Eddie, what time is it?"

His seedy accomplice checked the scratched gold watch he'd stolen from a drunken sailor the night before, after he’d slugged him with a lead sap. "Almost midnight."

Gage smirked nastily. "The security guard shifts should be changin' any minute. Then we make our move!"

"Hey, who are you going to sell the stuff to?"

"You mean what country? I don't know who they are. Somebody foreign. Anyway, makes me no never mind. I just want that big cabbage. And anybody willing to fork it over is jake in my book."

Gage had made his criminal reputation one slugfest or shootout at a time, from the tough streets of his misspent teen years to the sorts of dives only men without good character frequented. The unlucky ones were carried out feet first.

The back door opened. Light shined into the black alley.

"'Night, boys. See you tomorrow." A guard touched his cap’s brim as he departed.

The new-shift guard did likewise. "Right. Say hi to the missus."

Then, all was again dark and silent.

"Okay, Eddie. Follow me."

Gage and Eddie had no trouble getting inside. "For a big-deal set-up, they sure don't take no precautions," Eddie whispered.

"The stuff we're after is straight ahead." Gage pointed to the storage locker door marked Do not Enter.

He and Eddie immediately entered and cased the shelves. They were littered with auxiliary equipment. Toward the end was the stored barrel reading Uranium-Anastol.

"Take it down careful-like," Gage instructed. "Don't get that stuff on you. We don't know what it could do."

But Eddie grabbed too quickly. And the barrel full of brownish-yellow, unstable liquid Uranium-Anastol drenched the right side of his face and forearm.

Immediately, the acidic-smelling experimental chemical began to fizz and smoke.

"Gage! Help me!"

"Take off your jacket," Gage hissed. "Don't let the stuff seep through the sleeve!"

Eddie weaved, in his thunder-filled brain’s eye a swirled panorama of lunatic images. He could feel the skin on his face change ... melt...ripple.

Gage half-carried his doubled-over accomplice to their battered sedan.

----------

Once the hoodlums had returned to the rat-trap apartment in which they'd holed up, Gage sat Eddie down on the sagging bed.

"Okay, hold your head up," Gage ordered. "I can't see your face."

The revulsion Eddie saw in Gage's expression made him leap to his feet and rush to the mouse-chewed dresser's mirror.

What he saw flabbergasted him. The side of his face that had been drenched by the liquid looked like dripping wax with protruding blood-red veins. Half of his jaw was now laying against his neck. His mouth, on that right side, was contorted back to the extreme and fixed in open grimace. Undulating gums and jagged teeth were bared in sickening display.

But the worst was his eye. Obscenely enlarged and round, it appeared to bulge nearly out of its socket. Revolting red veins, jaggedly erratic like miniature lightning bolts, stole toward the shockingly blotchy cornea that never stopped rolling crazily.

Eddie gripped the dresser with shaky, sweaty hands. His knuckles were white. He could feel his knees start to buckle.

"Let's see the arm," Gage managed to whisper. He gulped.

Eddie rolled up his sleeve and gasped. The skin was corroded and greenish. His forearm bulged with pus. His fingers had become long and tipped by talons.

He collapsed to the grimy floor.

Gage stared. "What the devil was that stuff?!"

----------

Helen and her mother were having the same argument they'd had innumerable times.

"If you were a smart girl, you'd walk away and save yourself from a lifetime of heartbreak."

Helen turned away. "I've told you, time and again: Eddie says he's all through with that life. He's turned over a new leaf."

"Ha! I'd like to see that!" Her mother lowered her voice. "And you've got your future to think about. Don't you want a nice family?"

"Of course I do. You'll just have to accept that Eddie will be in it."

The dimly lit apartment was cramped. It was where Helen had grown up. Since she'd met Eddie, she'd found work at a local bar and gotten her own apartment. It wasn't much. But she knew Eddie would soon take her away from all that.

"All I can say is, I'm glad your father isn't here to see this."

"Yes, let's talk about dear old dad. He left us stranded, penniless! And you hold him up as someone to admire?"

"You watch what you say!" Helen's mother crossed herself. "Your father did the best he could."

"Oh, I'm tired of hearing what a misunderstood man he was. Just give me that money and I'll be on my way."

"And what do you need $50.00 for? To pay off his gambling, probably!"

"What I do with it is my business!”

----------

Gage sat alone in the grody apartment. It was illuminated by a bare 40-watt bulb that hung above the rickety, peeling card table.

"This is crazy," the penny-ante hood lamented. Beads of terror-sweat dotted his worry-wrinkled brow. "Just when I'm gettin' on top, this has gotta happen! I was going to ice Too-tall Salvaturi and take over the whole operation."

He leaped to his feet and yelled out the window. "Hey, world! How come you don't give Gage nothin'?!"

At the sound of a front door-knock, he spun. "Whoever ya are, ya better clear out! I don't want no company!"

"It's me, Helen. Open the door. I got Eddie’s $50.00."

"That's the only good news I've gotten, today." Gage let her in.

She looked around the tawdry apartment and sat in one of the unmatched folding chairs. "Where's my Eddie?"

"Never mind that, you said you got the money?"

“It’s for Eddie.”

“Well, he owes it to me, so let’s just cut out the middle man!”

She dug in her purse and handed him the crumpled bills.

He stuffed them in his pocket. Then he had an idea."Now, you wanna see Eddie? He's in there."

Helen entered the bedroom and left the door wide. Gage saw that Eddie's condition had worsened. His entire head was now bloated, grisly, and inhuman. His torso and both arms, too, had become swelled, hideous. And his size had nearly doubled.

Gage also could hear Helen's struggle and terrified screams for help. But he paid them no mind and slammed the bedroom door.

He had an empire to plan.

----------

"Good Lord in Heaven, what happened, here?!"

The stupified morning research team stood in the storage locker's doorway. One assistant spoke. "This is going to set back the entire schedule!"

"Never mind about that!" The head researcher examined the lock. "Of far greater urgency is the fate of the spilled substance and of anyone it might have touched!"

He faced his colleagues. "Gentlemen, this may well mean the entire city is in grave peril!"

An Army security detail arrived. "Geniuses," one soldier muttered. "The Army can't live with 'em, but we can't live without 'em."

The man hefting a rifle beside him agreed. "I say, they're more trouble than they're worth!"

The head researcher overheard them. "I suppose you think I should be digging ditches."

The first soldier stifled a laugh. "That's a hot one: Poindexter getting his hands dirty!"

----------

Gage paced the apartment. He stared at the wide wooden floor-strips. They were stained. A mouse scurried to its corner-hole, having found no food.

"Too-tall Salvaturi is due any minute,” Gage said to himself.  “And he's gonna wanna know where Eddie is."

Eddie was Too-tall Salvaturi's nephew. And Gage knew the aging mob boss planned for Eddie to take over when he went back to Sicily.

From behind the door to the bedroom came a furious pounding.

"Shut up, in there, Eddie! I'm tryna think!" Gage swiped at the empty bottle that stood on the card table. It smashed against the faded wallpaper.

The front door swung open and in strode Too-tall Salvaturi. As calm as could be.

No pleasantries. "Where's Eddie?"

A way out occurred to Gage. "Oh, he's right in the next room. Go on in. I'm sure he'll be glad to see ya."

Too-tall Salvaturi opened the door. He was yanked in.

Gage watched as a flood of poisonous foam covered the mob titan, drowning out his desperate pleas for mercy.

The growing monster had only the previous evening been Gage’s accomplice. But any sign the thing had once been human was now gone. It was a surging mass that took up nearly half the room. Tentacles slapped the floor. It pulsed, and its hateful red eyes rolled wildly.

The disgusting amoeba reached out through the doorway with a cold and slimy tentacle. It wrapped it about the pathetic hood’s leg. Gage pleaded for mercy, shouted for help as loudly as he could, and strained with all his might to cling to the door jamb. But the amoeba dragged him across the floor and loosed another gush of poisonous foam.

Within moments, Gage was a skeleton.

The amoeba crashed through the window, though its ballooning size kept it from doing so without scraping its sides on the jagged remains of the pane. But if it was aware of the slashes on its bulging mass that oozed sickeningly yellow pus, it gave no sign.

It began a squishy gallumphing toward the research facility, within which were still stored additional barrels of Uranium-Anastol. That supply meant the amoeba's power would be enough to destroy the city.

It was by now the size of a garbage truck. Plate-sized, scowling red eyes glared at the world. Hairy fangs jutted at weird angles from its slobbery maw. Yellow streetlight glare illuminated its slimy-green corpulence.

From its bulging underside, it secreted more poisonous foam. A bubbling wet trail streaked the cement in its wake. Oncoming cars swerved, shrill police sirens erupted, and terrified pedestrians fled.

Within minutes, Army troop trucks roared up.

The veteran colonel commanding the soldiers realized the unnatural amoeba's horrifying ambition. "It's headed to the research facility!

If that thing manages to meet up with the rest of the stored Uranium-Anastol, it'll be too powerful to stop!"

A little girl with a black ponytail broke away from her mother, who cried, "Lisa! No! Come back!"

The distraught parent began to chase after the innocent child, but was pulled back by a policeman. "I can't let you get near that thing, ma'am! It's too dangerous!"

The little girl extended a daisy to the blobbish monstrosity. "I want to be your friend."

Her eyes wide with horror, the mother held her breath.

The amoeba let out what sounded like a furious growl. It gushed poisonous, steaming foam. The innocent girl was knocked off her feet and covered by the toxic ooze.

The mother wailed at the loss of her daughter, burying her anguished sobs in the patrolman's chest.

"Just as I would've bet," a man said, his teeth clenched in anger. "That amoeba isn't human!"

The colonel whirled to his men. "Hit that thing with all you've got!"

But the machine gun fire did not stop the crawling menace.

"Hurry up with that jet," yelled the colonel into his transmitter. "It's zero hour! Time to drop the big one!"

The amoeba broke through the chain-link fence surrounding the facility. The crowd screamed. Ambulance sirens screamed. Red spotlights criss-crossed the black sky.

A woman in the crowd pointed up. "Here they come! At last!"

A trio of fighter jets bore down on the area. One broke formation, zooming in directly over the monstrous amoeba.

"This is it, brother," a policeman muttered to himself.

A grandmother squeezed shut her eyes. "I can't watch!"

"Give 'im one to remember in Hell," a teenager shouted, his defiant fist aloft.

The bomb detonated squarely atop the hideous creature as it crawled mere inches from the facility's brick wall. The entire building was consumed by a mammoth, orange-and-blue conflagration. Shards of window glass rained down on the ground. Bricks crumbled, and twisted metal became white-hot.

The weird, murderous amoeba's high-pitched death-scream could be heard for miles before it exploded into a million smithereens.

Copyright © 2019 David Charles Larson