True Horror Story: Show and Tell Turned Out Sour

My biology class was packed to the brim for the first time since the beginning of the semester. I looked around to see several faces who hadn’t been present for the majority of my lectures, and yet they had all decided to join the class today.

No surprise there. The entire Science Department was abuzz with talk about my special guest.

My brother in law, Nick, worked at NASA. He had volunteered to come and give a talk to inspire the kids. He wanted to share something with them that would excite them, and get them interested in space exploration – just like he had been inspired by Carl Sagan and others like him when he was a kid.

“If we don’t get these kids off their phones and looking into telescopes, who the hell is gonna get us to Mars? This planet isn’t gonna last forever,” Nick was fond of saying.

It was odd to see him standing there at the front of my class, decked out in his NASA blues. I felt an absurd moment of pride thinking about how I was related to him.

Nick brought a vial of something with him and he acted very mysterious about it, keeping it locked in a steel briefcase. It wasn’t immediately clear to me what it was, but after some prodding he revealed that it was never meant to have left the laboratory.

“My boss owes me a favor,” he’d told me before the students came in. “This is a grain of material from an asteroid. It was collected by a Japanese mission which landed on the surface. We got a few pieces from them in a trade.”

“That’s incredible,” I said, eyeing the briefcase. “Can I see?”

“Not yet,” he replied, smiling. “You gotta wait for show and tell, just like the rest of the class.”

Luckily I didn’t have to wait for long, as the bell rang and the last student filed in, looking awkwardly for an empty desk and not finding one.

“Ahem,” I cleared my throat. “Is anybody in this classroom not supposed to be here right now?”

After a few moments of uncomfortable silence, two students and one red-faced teacher stood up, giving up their chairs for those who were actually supposed to be in my class.

“If you have a spare period and you want to stay for the presentation, that’s alright,” I told them, holding back a smile. “But you’ll have to stand at the back if there are no seats left.”

Finally everyone settled in and I presented our guest speaker.

“Alright, class. I told you we’d have a special guest today so let’s get straight into it. This is my brother in law, Nicholas Shaver. He works in the lab at NASA, examining samples from outer space. And he brought something to show us. Take it away, Nick.”

My brother in law stepped forward. The kids became utterly still and silent as he spoke, carrying his ominous, shiny steel briefcase.

“Hello, everyone,” he said, explaining his job and background at NASA.

But nobody was really listening, they all just wanted to know what was in the briefcase. Finally, he began to open it.

“This is a sample from an asteroid that the Japanese Space Agency landed a probe on! Over at NASA, we were desperate to get our hands on this stuff, so that we could examine it. So we actually traded for it! Just like you kids with your Pokemon cards…”

There were a few stifled laughs and he glanced at me awkwardly. I shook my head as discreetly as I could.

“Or, baseball cards, whatever. Magic? Is that still a thing? Anyways, this is what we got for our trade!”

The class was silent again as he pulled out a vial with a couple small grains in it.

“This came from that asteroid, way out in outer space!”

“Whoa,” the class responded mostly in unison again. One or two kids didn’t appear impressed, but most did.

“Is that it?” one boy named Chris asked from the back of the class. “Just looks like you picked up some asphalt off the road.”

Chris had missed most of my lessons so far, and his grades were indicative of this lack of effort. It was also his second time taking Biology 201.

That didn’t stop him from acting like a smart-ass, though.

“What exactly does this have to do with biology, anyways,” he continued. “Seems like you just made up some reason to play astronaut for a day, cause you’re bored of playing teacher.”

My face began to turn red at the remark, but I did my best to stay calm. It was difficult, but I tried not to let this ruin the presentation.

“Chris, if you interrupt our guest one more time you’ll be staying after class for the rest of the week. Do I make myself clear?”

“Whatever, man.”

He put his feet up on his desk and closed his eyes, pretending to go to sleep.

“Feet off the desk.”

He ignored me.

“Now.”

Finally he complied, giving me a death-stare as he did, then dropping his feet to the floor with a loud stomp.

Nick gave me an awkward glance, as if asking if he could continue, while simultaneously asking how I could put up with such nonsense on a daily basis. I nodded my head, feeling exhausted, and told him to continue.

As he explained about the surface of the asteroid, he gave the front row of students the glass tube to examine.

I was nervous as it made its way around the class, slowly moving towards Chris at the back of the room. I couldn’t help but wonder if he would try to do something with it.

The hairs began to stand up on the back of my neck as it got close to him and his eyes peeled open from their pretend-sleep, glancing at the tube as it came within arm’s reach.

Before it was even his turn, he snatched it from the hand of the student in front of him who called out, sounding annoyed.

“Hey, I wasn’t done with it!”

Nick was interrupted again by this outburst and I started marching over towards Chris, feeling my face turning red with anger. Not only that, but I was nervous as hell, wondering what he might do with the priceless specimen.

He turned the glass tube in his hand, spinning the grains around as he examined them. All the while, he pretended to ignore me as I came towards him.

“Man, what a load of bullshit. This is fake,” he said, throwing the glass tube across the room towards the sink.

“NO!” Nick yelled, terrified as the glass tube sailed through the air.

It shattered on contact, despite the heavy duty glass, as it hit the corner of the steel countertop in the worst spot possible. The force of pressure broke it on impact and the minute particles inside fell to the water-slick floor.

Nick ran over to the place where they’d fallen, sifting through the broken glass, getting down on his knees as he picked through the pieces. He looked desperate and on the verge of tears as he rifled through the shards of broken glass, his fingers getting cut on the small pieces.

“Where are they!?” he was yelling, his face pressed up close to the linoleum tiles.

I pulled Chris up by his arm, dragging him towards the door of the class as he protested.

How could anyone be so thoughtless and so cruel? So childish and so stupid?

“You’re gonna get expelled for this. This is the last straw, Chris. I can’t believe you just did that.”

He was screaming about abuse and how I was hurting him, despite the fact that I was being very gentle with him. I just ignored him and got ready to open the door to the class, to take him to the principal’s office.

But then I noticed something.

Nick was on the floor, blood dripping from his fingers – but something was happening in that pool of red fluid. It was swirling and moving around, as if being pulled by some invisible force. Like there was a mini hurricane brewing in that concoction of blood and water, tears and tiny space particles.

It looked like that mixture was coming alive, like the primordial ooze at the infancy of life.

“What the hell?” I muttered, looking down at it.

I felt drawn towards it suddenly, letting go of Chris as I stumbled towards the swirling mass.

The red rivulets of blood had turned into amorphous blobs. These began to grow larger and expand, enveloping more blood and debris, growing bigger and bigger, like macrophages or certain types of slime mold.

“Nick, what’s going on?” I whispered, moving towards him, wanting to pull him away from the strange phenomenon.

He didn’t say anything, and the tendrils of swirling red slime began to merge and grow bigger, until it was a quivering, shimmering mass of goo, nearly the size of a basketball. It was slightly oblong, and I realized it looked like a giant, slimy, ostrich egg.

Suddenly the egg-thing reached out with a tendril of slime. Nick jumped to his feet and recoiled backwards as it snapped back into its original shape.

It had tried to reach out and touch him, as if aware of his presence.

Then it began to flatten out and expand again. After a few seconds it was the size of a towel, and then a blanket, as it pooled and expanded, like a volcano discharging lava from deep within its core. But the substance wasn’t coming from beneath the surface, it was multiplying rapidly, growing bigger and bigger like a super-virus out of control, replicating faster and faster.

“What the hell is that thing!?” I screamed, backing away from it.

Now it was blocking the only exit to the room, with Chris trapped on the other side.

“It’s organic,” Nick managed to say.

“We thought it was just space dust. But it must have been in suspended animation up there. Whatever that is, we just woke it up. We watered it and fed it, and we let it out! What the hell was I thinking, bringing it here!?”

The blob was getting larger and larger, creeping outwards insidiously.

Nick pulled his phone from his pocket, then hit a button.

He spoke rapidly into the cell, and I could tell we weren’t getting out of this place in time for dinner. Not today.

The CDC and NASA arrived quickly and worked together, quarantining the school. Despite the lack of windows in my classroom, we could hear the sirens outside. My brother in law was also keeping me updated on what was happening.

Meanwhile, we remained trapped inside the room, blocked off from the exit, as the slimy organism grew larger and larger.

The worst part was that Chris, the terrible student who had broken the vial, was trapped between the door and the rest of the class. The organism had spread quickly outwards, climbing up the door like vines before he could get out.

Now Chris was trapped in the corner of the room, like a kid in a time-out, as the vein-like edges of the red slime spread out towards him, creeping closer and closer.

“I don’t like it, I don’t like it…” he kept repeating, sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, his legs pulled close.

Soon it was just an inch away from him, and reaching out towards him greedily.

Chris jumped to his feet, trying to maintain distance from the alien lifeform.

“Please! Make it stop! I’m sorry!” he was yelling, becoming hysterical as the goo inched closer.

“DON’T LET IT TOUCH ME! DON’T LET IT TOUCH ME!” he began to scream, his words devolving into shrill cries of terror as the red slime began to crawl up onto his shoes, inching vine-like towards his socks as he tried to pull away.

As it touched his skin, he began to melt and blend and change, morphing into something else. Something alien.

The transformation happened over hours, as Nick called his bosses at NASA with increasing desperation.

Meanwhile, the red, veiny slime continued to spread, growing up the walls and onto the ceiling as my students and I retreated further and further into the corner of the classroom.

Chris was no longer recognizable as a human being anymore, his form completely dissolved into the puddle of red slime.

I wondered if he was still in there somewhere, alive in the mixture of expanding red goo.

And then I saw the eyeball, peeking out from the slimy ceiling, and I saw the teeth breaking into a familiar crooked smile.

“You wanted to punish ME? To kick me out of school?”

The voice sounded like it was in agony. Each word was desperate and anguished.

A second later the eyeball was peering out from a different place in the ceiling, looking down at Nick, and speaking in Chris’s voice.

“You did this to me! This is your fault!”

Tendrils of red slime reached down from the ceiling towards my brother in law, pulling him up from the ground effortlessly and enveloping him head first.

His screams were cut short and his kicking legs ceased moving as his body was pulled up into the red, slithering mass, inch by inch.

The entire room was now almost completely covered in the slime, and it quivered and bulged all around us like the peristalsis of some great snake ingesting a meal. Nick’s feet disappeared into the ceiling, as if he’d been pulled into another dimension.

But then his voice spoke from the wall beside me.

“Why did you tell me to come here? You caused this. It was YOU.”

Nick’s voice had merged with Chris and become something else, blending with the darkness of this alien creature, and its growing contempt for us.

“I’ll enjoy devouring you the most,” Chris-Nick said, more teeth appearing on the wall in a crooked smile. “I’m gonna save you for last.”

The red slime is still spreading, inching slowly towards us. Who knows if NASA will come to save us in time, or if they will just leave us here to die.

Maybe a thermonuclear weapon or some napalm will be easier, and they’ll decide to go with that option instead.

My students and I would welcome that, over the ooze which is slowly preparing to ingest us.

So please, if anyone from the government gets a hold of this:

Take us out, by any means necessary.

Before we can become a part of IT.

Before we become its next meal.

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