Goo Girls Part Two

Tracee liked this time of night. Most of the staff was gone and the hallways were empty. They remained brightly lit, and the subsequent emptiness gave the whole building a feel of something new and pristine that had yet to open. Or, more in line with Tracee’s dystopian pulp stories she liked, perhaps it was some kind of post-apocalyptic scenario where the building remained waiting and empty, ready for some hero to discover its secrets.

All this she considered while driving a mop down the hallway, adding to the brightness with a wet gleam. Beneath the white rubber cleaning uniform, her body was still pretty good. Since she hit her forties, Tracee found that her skin wasn’t quite as glowing as it had been back in the days when she cruised the local bars. She had been something then. Her hair had always been lustrous and long and dark, wavy in a way that made her look exotic. Now, she kept it cut a little shorter so the gray spots were easier to identify and manage. Now, she skipped the tanning bed, afraid of further damage to her leathery skin. Now, she wasn’t the highlight of a guy’s night when she chose him after a night of bought drinks. Now, she went home with a man who made her feel most like that girl who was gone now, buried under the weight of years.

Tracee snorted to herself, hating the stupid cruelty of it all. Beauty she had used, but she had used it stupidly. Drinks and guys and good times. Those things were fleeting. She’d been too stupid to wield her beauty and give herself a future. Instead, she was pushing a mop in some building whose purpose she barely understood and thinking about her glory days.

Her last stop on the floor was a real pain in the ass. After the containment room was done, she would have a cigarette as a reward and then move up to the second basement. That floor was a lot of locker rooms and open floor plans. An easy clean. Not like this floor with all its nook-and-cranny offices and labs. Tracee’s cleaning suit had no helmet, so she used one from the pegs on the wall, draping it over her head and shoulders. She hated these things. It was like turning the heat and humidity up on just your face and she never secured the thing. The scientists probably knew what they were doing, but all the security bullshit was overkill. Worst case, Tracee might breathe something in that would give her cancer and she might check out a decade earlier than she might have. Would that be so bad? Even Tracee would agree that her best days were behind her.

Tracee grumbled to herself, the weight of the smokes in her front shorts pocket heavier as she thought about how nice it would be to get outside, to breathe night air and nicotine instead of the recycled air in the claustrophobic helmet. She swabbed the floor and focused on that, and not worrying about the rest of the shit. And once work was done, she could go get a drink. Maybe even meet a guy. Maybe one who would be amazed at how pretty she was. How lucky he felt just to be the guy to talk to her.

The back of the mop handle struck the container at full speed, a down ward swing of the mop, the container out of sight behind Tracee. She’d just lost track of where she was, that was all. And those containers are built strong, so surely it was fine. Only the way the handle struck the container, but didn’t quite stop, that had her worried.

She turned slowly to the container and saw the damage. A snarly of cracks that fanned out in a web. That weird green stuff was pressed against that crack. It must have been doing it on purpose, because the cracks were growing, spreading until it was bigger than a quarter and then bigger than the palm of her hand. She needed to get out of there, seal the room, let security know. Instead, she bent toward the spreading cracks, fascinated by the translucent green goo pressing toward her with its strange pseudopod. In a rush, the glass exploded outward. Small shards embedded in her face, but this sting was quickly subsumed by the sensation of the green goo meeting her skin, spreading out until her face was a mask of oily green, her features made anonymous by the ooze flowing over her face. For a moment, Tracee clawed at the stuff, trying to pull it away. Despite the translucence, it was tough and would not tear under her nails. She thought she might die like that, found in the morning in the lab with the goo covering her face, mouth wide but covered. Suffocated.

The mask of green slime on her face trembled as if a single muscle and dove down her throat. She felt the lump fill her mouth and then stretch her throat before settling in her gut. It was a hard lump inside her, but not wholly unpleasant. Where the ooze left a wet sheen on her skin tingled in a way that nearly caused her to giggle, if the whole scene hadn’t been so horrible and inexplicable.

Then, her senses exploded. It was like her mind was suddenly hurtled into a nirvana of pleasure and she gasped before her mind shut down entirely in the wake of the blast.

The lab lights were on when Amber arrived in her corner of the basement level. That was odd. She was usually the first to arrive in the mornings, met by the security guards but few others. She liked being greeted by the darkness of the lab. She would silently whisper, ‘Let there be light,’ and hit the panel to wake the lab for another day of research. She could justify it by telling herself that the cleaning crew simply forgot to shut the lights off behind them last night.

Only when Amber entered her lab, she saw in the containment room that a mop bucket was inside, along with the mop itself, leaning against the wall. And two other details struck her: the glass containing the goo was gone, shattered into a million pieces, and there was a pair of legs peeking out from behind the table where the goo once sat.

She rushed through the security protocols to find her way inside, sure that the door between the rest of the lab and this room was secure. If the goo was sentient, as she suspected, getting free might be its first primitive instinct.

She rounded the table, bits of glass crunching underfoot. Amber knelt beside the woman on the floor, clad in the uniform of the cleaning crew, though covered by the hazmat suit. The helmet was not on and still hung on the rack. It was easy to see, then, that the woman’s skin had turned a very noticeable green, and cords of dark green veins wound under her skin. It was a soft color that tinted her skin, a distinct light green hue that made her somehow more beautiful. Amber reached for her, protected by her own suit and gloved hands, but did not touch her skin before the cleaning woman’s eyes popped open.

Like her skin, her irises were green and bright. Almost glowing. She lifted herself from the ground and climbed to her hands and knees, soft blonde hair falling around her head.

“Are you okay?” Amber asked, the question sounding quite stupid under the circumstances. Clearly she was very much not okay.

“Where am I?” she asked, settling back on her shins. She looked tranquil in that kneeling pose, her striking green eyes fixing Amber where she stood.

Amber had many flaws, but she was neither slow nor stupid. One look at this strangely alluring woman on the ground was enough to tell her that whatever happened with the green ooze, this woman was now part of the experiment. And that was not good.

Amber reached to her, intending to grip her shoulder and help her rise. When her hand drew near, something shifted in the green-tinted woman’s skin. The flesh seemed to melt and gather, reaching out toward Amber’s touch. The young doctor jerked her hand back, taking an involuntary step backward and nearly falling on her ass thanks to impractical heels.

“You need to come with me,” Amber said, doing her best to control the waver in her voice.

“What happened to me?” the woman asked. There was panic in her voice, her impossibly green eyes widening, her mouth drawing down as if she was going to scream. And then, serenity. The panic fled and she looked at Amber with a tranquil and curious gaze.

“Where do you need us to go?”

Us?

“This way,” Amber said, keeping a safe distance from the thing that wore a human’s skin.

Amber was now certain that the goo had not simply disappeared. It was somehow inside this poor woman. The face of panic, that had been the maintenance woman’s true face. This calm exterior and stiff-jointed lifting from the ground belonged to the goo. It influenced her. Controlled her somehow.

Amber ensure that the door leading from her office to the exterior hallway was sealed and would need her card to exit. The thing was safe inside her lab, but now passing through the lock that kept it isolated when it had lived in the jar. That ship, as they say, had sailed. The goo now had a human form. It could open a door as well as Amber could. There would be no way to keep it contained. Instead, Amber hoped to reason with the thing.

And she had so many questions. This was an alien life and it now had an ability to communicate directly with Amber. She would be the first living soul to speak to a creature from another planet. The results were less than what she hoped.

“Please, have a seat,” she said, motioning to a chair in front of her messy desk.

The verdant woman sat and placed her palms flat on her thighs, staring ahead as if it hadn’t quite figured out all the ways the human body could move. Fawn-like, Amber thought.

“I am Dr. Amber Hayes. Who are you?”

The woman blinked and thought. “We do not have a name the way you do or our new friend does.” She smiled. “But she feels very good. And we are making her feel even better.”

“How? What exactly are you doing to her? Can she hear me?”

Amber was surprised when the woman giggled. It was a happy, girlish sound.

“She hears you. But she’s a little busy right now. She’s cumming her brains right out.”

Another giggle.

“You understand sex?”

“We practically are sex,” she chided and giggled again.