You ever play with one of those old-fashioned ball-on-a-stick things when you were a kid? There’d be a wooden ball with a hole, and the goal was to catch it on the stick. Not as exciting as Grand Theft Auto, I know, but for a couple months there, I was obsessed with it. See, whenever I tried to catch the ball, it never worked. I’d focus on the point of that damn stick like a laser beam, and the ball would always bounce off or wobble to the side or miss it altogether. But the second I stopped paying attention? BAM! The little round bastard would slide home like Hank Aaron.
The same was true this past week. I spent seven, brain-sweaty days trying to come up with a way to impress Hotness, and right when I was about to give up – BAM! Dumb luck steps in and solves everything.
It went down like this: I was in the cafeteria, sketching out a way to start a fire that would get the attention of Hotness and the rest of her Black Project 9 crew, then let her see me put it out, when a contamination alarm started blaring.
You should know: there are as many alarms at Area 51 as there are ways to get yourself killed. To make things even more helpful/scary, each type of alarm has a different sound based on whatever the threat is. Fire is an old-fashioned school bell, munitions tests elicit a wailing, crying baby noise, and security breaches cause a wah-wah, European ambulance sound.
But contamination alarms are the worst. There are detection devices all over Dreamland, and whenever they pick up on a foreign, potentially harmful substance, not only does the building get sealed, but these annoying blue strobe lights kick on, and the contamination alarm starts screaming.
And when I say “screaming,” I’m talking eardrum-rupturing, brain-bleeding, stick-a-knitting-needle-in-your-corneas sonic pain. The simple volume of this shit is enough to rattle the fillings out of your teeth.
So I’m in the cafeteria when this fucking sharp-fanged auditory demon of an alarm kicks on. There’s a couple lab coats in line trying to decide between Mexican pizza and grinders, and the blaring is enough to make them curl up on the floor and piss their pants. Other people are running for various emergency exits, which of course have been sealed shut.
But for some reason, I remained pretty calm. I scanned the room for possible culprits, and quickly spotted a low-level research assistant whose arm was covered in a writhing, fluorescent-orange substance. There was an open thermos next to him, so it looked like Mr. Mensa had mistakenly brought his latest biological weapon to the caff instead of his tomato soup. I’m telling you, these nerds might have gone to M.I.T., but that does not make ‘em smart.
Mensa whacked away at his arm with a lunch tray, and the orange shit leaped away, sticking to the back of another lab coat. I guess the slime had teeth or something, cause that guy started squealing like a pig on Easter Sunday. He clawed at it, but the orange goop dropped to the floor and disappeared.
Evidently, this was some kind of self-camouflaging vicious slime. You gotta hand to the military, they have a pretty good imagination when it comes to inventing scary weapons shit.
The no-longer-orange slime leap-frogged through the room, taking little chunks out of random people, and I could see it was clearly headed for the exit. The building might have been locked down, but if this stuff had camouflage, I was betting it could ooze its way through door cracks, too.
So I grabbed a snowball of mashed potatoes from the caff line, and nailed the back of the slime with a killer fastball. Now at least I could see the stuff. But it must not have liked starch, because the goop about-faced from the exit and started leap-frogging toward me. And while it lacked a face, the shit definitely looked pissed.
I didn’t even have time to think. The orange crap leapt for my face, nano-fangs extended, and I scooped a bottle of ketchup from the table, squirting the psycho slime with eight ounces of Hamburger Helper.
They told me later it was the sugar that did it, but as soon as the ketchup hit the crud, it curled in on itself, shook like James Brown, and went to the big Primordial Soup Tureen in the sky.
The annoying blue strobes went off, and I glanced across the room to see Hotness staring right at me. I’ll admit, I got a little carried away by the moment, and lifted the ketchup bottle to my lips for a bad-ass, take-that blow on the barrel. She giggled, but just as I was about to capitalize on the moment, the Haz-Mat jerk-offs came storming in to sequester us all for a nine-hour battery of decontaminating showers.
But I’m pretty confident that I’ve got an in with her now. All I have to do is have four or five well-executed conversations, then --
HOLY SHIT. Just got an email memo from the top brass. It turns out that because of my “clear-headed response” in the caff and “the recommendation of several witnesses,” I’m being transferred to a new janitorial position.
Ladies and gentlemen, you’re looking at the sole clean-up guy for:
Black.
Project.
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